"...I always rejoice to hear of your being still employ'd in experimental Researches into Nature, and of the Success you meet with. The rapid Progress true Science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the Height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the Power of Man over Matter. We may perhaps learn to deprive large Masses of their Gravity, and give them absolute Levity, for the sake of easy Transport. Agriculture may diminish its Labor and double its Produce; all Diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, not excepting even that of Old Age, and our Lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian Standard. O that moral Science were in as fair a way of Improvement, that Men would cease to be Wolves to one another, and that human Beings would at length learn what they now improperly call Humanity!"
-- Benjamin Franklin, Letter to Joseph Priestley, 8 Feb 1780
Primarily, I had the Arabic-speaking philosophical alchemists in mind, but there are others. If there is significant interest, then I will elaborate further.
Okay, 2 comments and 3 upvotes is good enough for a quick comment but not a discussion post.
By the "hard core of transhumanism" I mean the belief that humans could use reason to obtain knowledge of the natural world that we can use in order to develop technologies that will allow us to cure sickness, eliminate the need to labor, and extend our lifespans to greater-than-human levels and that we should do these things.
During the Islamic Golden Age, many thinkers combined Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism with knowledge from indigenous craft traditions into a form of alchemy that was refined using logic and laboratory experimentation (Jābir ibn Hayyān is probably the most famous of these thinkers). These philosophers and technologists believed that their theoretical system would allow them to perform transmutation of matter (turn one element into another) unlocking the ability to create almost any "machine" or medicine imaginable. This was thought to allow them to create al ixir (elixir) of Al Khidr fame which, in principle, could extend human life indefinitely and cure any kind of disease. Also of great interest was the attainment of takwin, which is artificial, l...
Not that I know of, but you would think they would have since they were familiar with how badly you could end up screwing yourself dealing with Jinn even though they would do exactly what you tell them to (literally). There are a great many Arabic texts that historians of science have yet to take a look at. Who knows, maybe we'll luck out and find the solution to the FAI problem in some library in Turkey.
We've made really decent progress in only two hundred and thirty-odd years. We're ahead of schedule.
“Stupider” for a time might not have been a real word, but it certainly points where it’s supposed to. The other day my sister used the word “deoffensify”. It’s not a real word, but that didn’t make it any less effective. Communication doesn’t care about the “realness” of language, nor does it often care about the exact dictionary definitions. Words change through every possible variable, even time. One of the great challenges of communication has always been making sure words mean the same thing to you and your audience.
Or, as the Language Log puts it:
The first thing to say is that the only possible way to settle a question of grammar or style is to look at relevant evidence. I suppose there really are people who believe the rules of grammar come down from some authority on high, an authority that has no connection with the people who speak and write English; but those people have got to be deranged.
False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing
--Joseph de Maistre, Les soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, Ch. I
To my way of thinking, it's quite possible for me to be fully responsible for a chain of events (for example, if they would not have occurred if not for my action, and I was aware of the likelihood of them occurring given my action, and no external forces constrained my choice so as to preclude acting differently) and for other people upstream and downstream of me to also be fully responsible for that chain of events. This is no more contradictory than my belief that object A is to the left of object B from one perspective and simultaneously to the right of object A from another. Responsibility is not some mysterious fluid out there in the world that gets portioned out to individuals, it's an attribute that we assign to entities in a mental and/or social model.
You seem to be claiming that models wherein total responsibility for an event is conserved across the entire known causal chain are superior to mental models where it isn't, but I don't quite see why i ought to believe that.
The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.
-- Neil DeGrasse Tyson
T-Rex: Our bodies are amazing things! Check it, everyone!
We use our mouths to talk. We invent, remember and teach entire languages with which to do the talking! And if that fails, we can talk with our hands. We build planes and boats and cars and spaceships, all by either using our bodies directly, or by using instruments invented by our bodies. We compose beautiful music and tell amazing stories, all with our bodies, these fleshy bags with spooky skeletons inside.
And yet, if we have a severe enough peanut allergy, we can be killed in seconds by a friggin' legume. And hey, 70% of our planet is water, but what happens if we spend too much time in it? We drown. Game over, man!
I used to make fun of Green Lantern for being vulnerable to the color yellow. Then I choked on my orange juice one morning and nearly suffocated.
"It's easy to think of yourself as being quite a nice person so long as you live on your own and are the only witness to yourself."
"All logic texts are divided into two parts. In the first part, on deductive logic, the fallacies are explained; in the second part, on inductive logic, they are committed."
--Morris Raphael Cohen, quoted by Cohen in "The Earth Is Round (p < 0.05)"
"Are you trying to tell me that there are sixteen million practicing wizards on Earth?" "Sixteen million four hundred and--" Dairine paused to consider the condition the world was in. "Well it's not anywhere near enough! Make them all wizards."
--Diane Duane, High Wizardry
"Hope always feels like it's made up of a set of reasons: when it's just sufficient sleep and a few auspicious hormones."
(Perhaps this individual quote is insightful (I can't tell), but this sort of causal analysis leads to basic confusions of levels of organization more often than it leads to insight.)
Society changes when we change what we're embarrassed about.
In just fifty years, we've made it shameful to be publicly racist.
In just ten years, someone who professes to not know how to use the internet is seen as a fool.
The question, then, is how long before we will be ashamed at being uninformed, at spouting pseudoscience, at believing thin propaganda? How long before it's unacceptable to take something at face value? How long before you can do your job without understanding the state of the art?
Does access to information change the expectation that if you can know, you will know?
We can argue that this will never happen, that it's human nature to be easily led in the wrong direction and to be willfully ignorant. The thing is, there are lots of things that used to be human nature, but due to culture and technology, no longer are.
-Seth Godin
Wait, Google says nobody's posted this joke on LessWrong before?
...
A philosopher, a scientist, and a mathematician are travelling through Scotland, gazing out the window of the train, when they see a sheep.
"Ah," says the philosopher, "I see that Scottish sheep are black."
"Well," says the scientist, "at least we see that some Scottish sheep are black."
"No," says the mathematician, "we merely know that there exists at least one sheep in Scotland which is black on at least one side."
"Actually," says the stage magician, "we merely know that there exists something in Scotland which appears to be a sheep which is black on at least one side when viewed from this spot."
When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.
Ayn Rand
-So what do you think happens after we die?
-The acids and lifeforms living inside your body eat their way out, while local detritivores eat their way in. Why?
-No, no, no, what happens to you?
-Oh, you guys mean the soul.
-Exactly.
-Is that in the body?
-Yes!
-The acids and lifeforms eat their way out, while local detritivores eat their way in.
If you want to know how decent people can support evil, find a mirror.
Mencius Moldbug, A gentle introduction to Unqualified Reservations (part 2) (yay reflection!)
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
To be a good diagnostician, a physician needs to acquire a large set of labels for diseases, each of which binds an idea of the illness and its symptoms, possible antecedents and causes, possible developments and consequences, and possible interventions to cure or mitigate the illness. Learning medicine consists in part of learning the language of medicine. A deeper understanding of judgments and choices also requires a richer vocabulary than is available in everyday language. The availability of a diagnostic label for [the] bias... makes it easier to anticipate, recognize and understand.
-Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
"I don't know if we've sufficiently analyzed the situation if we're thinking storming Azkaban is a solution."
My philosophy is that it's okay to be imperfect, but not so imperfect that other people notice.
"When all you have is a powered-up Patronus, every problem looks like storming Azkaban is the answer"?
Some environments are worse than irregular. Robin Hogarth described "wicked" environments, in which professionals are likely to learn the wrong lessons from experience. He borrows from Lewis Thomas the example of a physician in the early twentieth century who often had intuitions about patients who were about to develop typhoid. Unfortunately, he tested his hunch by palpating the patient's tongue, without washing his hands between patients. When patient after patient became ill, the physician developed a sense of clinical infallibility. His predictions were accurate--but not because he was exercising professional intuition!
--Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow
The reason you can't rigidly separate positive from normative economics is that you can't rigidly separate claims of fact from claims of value in general. Human language is too laden with thick concepts that mix the two. The claim that someone is a "slut" or a "bitch", for example, melds together factual claims about a woman's behavior with a lot of deeply embedded normative concepts about what constitutes appropriate behavior for a woman. The claim that financial markets are "efficient" is both an effort to describe their operation and a way of valorizing them. The idea of a "recession" or "full employment" or "potential output" all embed certain ideas about what would constitute a normal arrangement of human economic activity (...) You could try to rigorously purge your descriptions of the economy of anything that vaguely smells of a thick moral concept, but you'd find yourself operating with an impoverished vocubulary unable to describe human affairs in any kind of reasonable way.
I found that very poignant, but I'm not sure I agree with his final claim. I think he's committing the usual mistake of claiming impossible what seems hard.
Is it even hard? JFDI, or as we might say here, shut up and do the impossible. Is "efficient" a tendentious word? Taboo it. Is discussion being confused by mixing normative and positive concepts? DDTT.
The quote smells like rationalising to me.
But even as light is opposed by darkness, science and reason have their enemies. Superstition and belief in magic are as old as man himself; for the intransigence of facts and our limitations in controlling them can be powerfully hard to take. Add to this the reflection that we are in an age when it is popular to distrust whatever is seen as the established view or the Establishment, and it is no wonder that anti-rational attitudes and doctrines are mustering so much support. Still, we can understand what encourages the anti-rationalist turn without losing our zeal for opposing it. A current Continuing Education catalogue offers a course description, under the heading "Philosophy", that typifies the dark view at its darkest: "Children of science that we are, we have based our cultural patterns on logic, on the cognitive, on the verifiable. But more and more there has crept into current research and study the haunting suggestion that there are other kinds of knowledge unfathomable by our cognition, other ways of knowing beyond the limits of our logic, which are deserving of our serious attention." Now "knowledge unfathomable by our cognition" is simply incoherent, as attention to the words makes clear. Moreover, all that creeps is not gold. One wonders how many students enrolled.
-- W. V. O. Quine
When it comes to rare probabilities, our mind is not designed to get things quite right. For the residents of a planet that may be exposed to events no one has yet experienced, that is not good news.
--Daniel Kahneman, *Thinking, fast and slow*
"One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority'. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.)"
-Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World
The world is paved with good intentions; the road to Hell has bad epistemology mixed in.
"I've never ever felt wise," Derk said frankly. "But I suppose it is a tempation, to stare into distance and make people think you are."
"It's humbug," said the dragon. "It's also stupid. It stops you learning more."
Diana Wynne Jones, Dark Lord of Derkholm
The demons told me that there is a hell for the sentimental and the pedantic. They are abandoned in an endless palace, more empty than full, and windowless. The condemned walk about as if searching for something, and, as we might expect, they soon begin to say that the greatest torment consists in not participating in the vision of God, that moral suffering is worse than physical suffering, and so on. Then the demons hurl them into the sea of fire, from where no one will ever take them out.
Adolfo Bioy Casares (my translation)
'Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like, guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting "Gotcha". It wouldn't have made any difference if they hadn't eaten it.'
'Why not?'
'Because if you're dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end.'
-- Douglas Adams
The condemned walk about as if searching for something, and, as we might expect, they soon begin to say that the greatest torment consists in not participating in the vision of God, that moral suffering is worse than physical suffering, and so on
Why don't they just play tag with each other? Sounds like it would be fun.
Related to Schelling fences on slippery slopes:
If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.
— Thomas De Quincey
THE WAY WE BREAK THINGS DOWN AND DESCRIBE THEM ARE NOT NECESSARILY HELPFUL TO UNDERSTANDING HOW TO CONSTRUCT THEM.
HULK EXPLAINS WHY WE SHOULD STOP IT WITH THE HERO JOURNEY SHIT
Whether a mathematical proposition is true or not is indeed independent of physics. But the proof of such a proposition is a matter of physics only. There is no such thing as abstractly proving something, just as there is no such thing as abstractly knowing something. Mathematical truth is absolutely necessary and transcendent, but all knowledge is generated by physical processes, and its scope and limitations are conditioned by the laws of nature.
-David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity.
I don't think Deutsch means that mathematical proofs are all inductive. I think he means that proofs are constructed and checked on physical computing devices like brains or GPGPUs; and that because of that mathematical knowledge is not in a different ontological category than empirical knowledge.
Had no idea so much strategy was possible in Rock, Paper, Scissors? The rules of the game itself may be simple, but the human mind is not.
It's the Face of Boe. I'm absolutely certain about this, absolutely positive. Of course I'll probably turn out to be incorrect
Sam Hughes, talking about the first season finale of Doctor Who, differentiating between the subjective feeling of certainty and the actual probability estimate.
We have not succeeded in answering all our problems.
The answers we have found only serve
to raise a whole set of new questions.
In some ways we feel we are as confused as ever,
but we believe we are confused on a higher level
and about more important things.
-Posted outside the mathematics reading room, Tromsø University
From the homepage of Kim C. Border
Now let's talk about efficient market theory, a wonderful economic doctrine that had a long vogue in spite of the experience of Berkshire Hathaway. In fact, one of the economists who won--he shared a Nobel Prize--and as he looked at Berkshire Hathaway year after year, which people would throw in his face as saying maybe the market isn't quite as efficient as you think, he said, "Well, it's a two-sigma event." And then he said we were a three-sigma event. And then he said we were a four-sigma event. And he finally got up to six sigmas--better to add a sigma than change a theory, just because the evidence comes in differently. [Laughter] And, of course, when this share of a Nobel Prize went into money management himself, he sank like a stone.
I'm surprised by how consistently misinterpreted the EMH is, even by people with the widest possible perspective on markets and economics. The EMH practically requires that some people make money by trading, because that's the mechanism which causes the market to become efficient. The EMH should really be understood to mean that as more and more money is leached out of the market by speculators, prices become better and better approximations to real net present values.
The reality is actually scarier than that if there was a big conspiracy run by an Inner Party of evil but brilliant know-it-alls, like O’Brien in “1984″ or Mustapha Mond in “Brave New World.” The reality is that nobody in charge knows much about what is going on.
--Steve Sailer, here
For one thing, people are not very often written out of existence.
Or ... are they?
May the best of your todays, be the worst of your tomorrows
[Taking the lyrics literally, the whole thing is a pretty sweet transhumanist anthem.]
"Sir Isaac Newton, renowned inventor of the milled-edge coin and the catflap!"
"The what?" said Richard.
"The catflap! A device of the utmost cunning, perspicuity and invention. It is a door within a door, you see, a ..."
"Yes," said Richard, "there was also the small matter of gravity."
"Gravity," said Dirk with a slightly dismissed shrug, "yes, there was that as well, I suppose. Though that, of course, was merely a discovery. It was there to be discovered." ...
"You see?" he said dropping his cigarette butt, "They even keep it on at weekends. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later. But the catflap ... ah, there is a very different matter. Invention, pure creative invention. It is a door within a door, you see."
-Douglas Adams
That could just mean we're no good at solving mysteries that involve magic.
Also, I think there is a selection effect in so far as there are solved mysteries where the solution was magic; however, you'd probably argue that they were not solved correctly using no other evidence than that the solutions involved magic.
It depends what you mean by magic. Nowadays we communicate by bouncing invisible light off the sky, which would sure as hell qualify as "magic" to someone six hundred years ago.
The issue is that "magic", in the sense that I take Minchin to be using it, isn't a solution at all. No matter what the explanation is, once you've actually got it, it's not "magic" any more; it's "electrons" or "distortion of spacetime" or "computers" or whatever, the distinction being that we have equations for all of those things.
Take the witch trials, for example - to the best of my extremely limited knowledge, most witch trials involved very poorly-defined ideas about what a witch was capable of or what the signs of a witch were. If they had known how the accused were supposed to be screwing with reality, they wouldn't have called them "witches", but "scientists" or "politicians" or "guys with swords".
Admittedly all of those can have the same blank curiosity-stopping power as "magic" to some people, but "magic" almost always does. Which is why, once you've solved the mystery, it turns out to be Not Magic.
When reading, you win if you learn, not if you convince yourself that you know something the author does not know.
This has 6 karma points, so I'm left curious about whether people have anything in mind about what real intellectuals shouldn't know.
My father was a psychologist and a lifelong student of human behavior, and when I brought him my report card he often used to say: “This tells me something about you, something about your teacher, and something about myself.
Running any enterprise the size of Google or Goldman Sachs requires trading off many competing factors. To make the tradeoff, someone has to keep all that information in their head at once. There's no other way to balance competing demands; if you keep only part of the information in your head, your decision will be biased towards the part that you've loaded into your brain. If you try to spread decision making across multiple people, the decisions will be biased towards the part that the person who screams the loudest can hold in his head (which is usually a smaller subset than optimal; it takes mental effort to scream loudly).
The Princess Bride:
Man in Black: Inhale this, but do not touch.
Vizzini: [sniffs] I smell nothing.
Man in Black: What you do not smell is called iocane powder. It is odorless, tasteless, dissolves instantly in liquid, and is among the more deadlier poisons known to man.
[He puts the goblets behind his back and puts the poison into one of the goblets, then sets them down in front of him]
Man in Black: All right. Where is the poison? The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both drink, and find out who is right... and who is dead.
[Vizzini stalls, then eventually chooses the glass in front of the man in black. They both drink, and Vizzini dies.]
Buttercup: And to think, all that time it was your cup that was poisoned.
Man in Black: They were both poisoned. I spent the last few years building up an immunity to iocane powder.
...Man in Black: All right. Where is the poison? The battle of wits has begun.
Vizzini: But it's so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy's? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool. You would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.
Man in Black: You've made your decision then?
Vizzini: Not remotely! Because iocane comes from Australia, as everyone knows! And Australia is entirely peopled with criminals. And criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you.
Man in Black: Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
Vizzini: And you must have suspected I would have known the powder's origin, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.
Man in Black: You're just stalling now.
Vizzini: You'd like to think that, wouldn't you?! You've beaten my giant, which
I don't agree that Vizzini is trying to reason in logical absolutes. He talks like he is, but he doesn't necessarily believe the things he's saying.
Man in Black: You're trying to trick me into giving away something. It won't work.
Vizzini: It has worked! You've given everything away! I know where the poison is!
My interpretation is that he really is trying to trick the man.
Later he distracts the man and swaps the glasses around; then he pretends to choose his own glass. He makes sure the man drinks first. I think he's reasoning/hoping that the man would not deliberately drink from the poisoned cup. So when the man does drink he believes his chosen cup is safe. If the man had been unwilling to drink, Vizzini would have assumed that he now held the poisoned glass, and perhaps resorted to treachery.
He's overconfident, but he's not a complete fool.
(I don't have strong confidence in this analysis, because he's a minor character in a movie.)
Said by a pub manager I know to someone who came into his pub selling lucky white heather:
"I'm running a business turning over half a million pounds a year, and you're selling lucky heather door to door. Doesn't seem to work, does it?"
To a Frenchman like M. Renan, intelligence does not mean a quickness of wit, a ready dexterity in handling ideas, or even a ready accessibility to ideas. It implies those, of course, but it does not mean them; and one should perhaps say in passing that it does not mean the pert and ignorant cleverness that current vulgar usage has associated with the word. Again it is our common day-to-day experience that gives us the best possible assistance in establishing the necessary differentiations. We have all seen men who were quick witted, accessible to ideas and handy with their management of them, whom we should yet hesitate to call intelligent; we are conscious that the term does not quite fit. The word sends us back to a phrase of Plato. The person of intelligence is the one who always tends to "see things as they are," the one who never permits his view of them to be directed by convention, by the hope of advantage, or by an irrational and arbitrary authoritarianism. He allows the current of his consciousness to flow in perfect freedom over any object that may be presented to it, uncontrolled by prejudice, prepossession or formula; and thus we may say that there are certain integrities at the root of intelligence which give it somewhat the aspect of a moral as well as an intellectual attribute.
Albert Jay Nock, The Theory of Education in the United States
On the mind projection fallacy:
Mankind are (sic) always predisposed to believe that any subjective feeling, not otherwise accounted for, is a revelation of some objective reality.
-John Stuart Mill
So when somebody else asks for your help, in the form of charity or taxes, or because they need you to help them move a refrigerator, you can cite all sorts of reasons for not helping ("I think you're lying about needing help" or "I don't care" or "I'm too tied up with my own problems"), but the one thing you can't say is, "Why should you need help? I've never gotten help!" Not unless you're either shamefully oblivious, or a lying asshole.
In truth we know that the wind is its blowing. Similarly the stream is the running of water. And so, too, I am what I am doing. I am not an agent but a hive of activity. If you were to lift off the lid, you would find something more like a compost heap than the kind of architectural structure that anatomists and psychologists like to imagine.
---Tim Ingold, “Clearing the Ground"
The origin of all science is in the desire to know causes; and the origin of all false science and imposture is in the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.
-William Hazlitt, attacking phrenology.
Most of world history is a clash of mental illnesses.
-- Evan V Symon, Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_19669_the-5-saddest-attempts-to-take-over-country.html
Not completely serious, but think of it in relation to the sanity waterline...
Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
Winston Churchill
By studying the masters, not their pupils.
-- Niels Henrik Abel, on how he developed his mathematical ability.
"A full tour through the modern critics of the competitive organization of society would be a truly exhausting trip. It would include the drama, the novel, the churches, the academies, the lesser intellectual establishments, the socialists and communists and Fabians and a swarm of other dissenters. One is reminded of Schumpeter’s remark that the Japanese earthquake of 1924 had a remarkable aspect: it was not blamed on capitalism. Suddenly one realizes how impoverished our society would be in its indignation, as well as in its food, without capitalism."
--George F. Stigler, "Economics or Ethics?"
How extremely stupid [I] not to have thought of that.
Thomas Henry Huxley - about Darwin's theory of evolution
Meh. That's just hindsight bias.
All truths are easy to understand when they are revealed; what's hard is to find them out.
Galileo Galilei (translated by me)
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.
-Douglas Adams
“It's the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions.”
― Cory Doctorow, For The Win
I interpret this to mean that often times questions are overlooked because the possibility of them being true seems absurd. Similar to the Sherlock Holmes saying, “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
When you've eliminated the impossible, if whatever's left is sufficiently improbable, you probable haven't considered a wide enough space of candidate possibilities.
...There is a spookier possibility. Suppose it is easy to send messages to the past, but that forward causality also holds (i.e. past events determine the future). In one way of reasoning about it, a message sent to the past will "alter" the entire history following its receipt, including the event that sent it, and thus the message itself. Thus altered, the message will change the past in a different way, and so on, until some "equilibrium" is reached--the simplest being the situation where no message at all is sent. Time travel may thus
All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.
Friedrich Nietzsche, foreseeing the CEV-problem? (Just kidding, of course)
If a sufficient number of people who wanted to stop war really did gather together, they would first of all begin by making war upon those who disagreed with them. And it is still more certain that they would make war on people who also want to stop wars but in another way. -G.I. Gurdjieff
Here's my advice: If you meet an economist, ask him to adjust your spine so you no longer get the common cold. Then ask him for some specific investment tips and do exactly what he recommends. Let me know which one works out best.
quintopia: i made jan 1 be Hypothesis Day. instead of making resolutions, you make hypotheses that you want resolved by the end of the year and write them down so you can evaluate them at the end of the year
Quintopia on #lesswrong.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are sometimes right."
-Winston Churchill
God was a dream of good government.
-Morpheus, Deus Ex
Yes, I know, generalization from fictional evidence and the dangers thereof, etc. . . I think it a genuine insight, though. Just remember that humans are (almost) never motivated by just one thing.
..."In practice replacing digital computers with an alternative computing paradigm is a risky proposition. Alternative computing architectures, such as parallel digital computers have not tended to be commercially viable, because Moore's Law has consistently enabled conventional von Neumann architectures to render alternatives unnecessary. Besides Moore's Law, digital computing also benefits from mature tools and expertise for optimizing performance at all levels of the system: process technology, fundamental circuits, layout and algorithms. Many engine
I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.
-- G.B. Shaw, "Man and Superman"
Shaw evinces a really weird, teleological view of evolution in that play, but in doing so expresses some remarkable and remarkably early (1903) transhumanist sentiments.
I love that quote, but if it carries a rationality lesson, I fail to see it. Seems more like an appeal to the tastes of the audience here.
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ ” Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’ ” “But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master -- that’s all.”
-Charles Dodgeson(Lewis Carrol), Through the Looking Glass
"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it" - Abraham Lincoln's words in his February 26, 1860, Cooper Union Address
If right makes might, is the might you see right? Since blight and spite can also make might, is it safe to sight might and think it right?
Now, an application for Bayes' Theorem that rhymes!! Sweet Jesus!
I love it! How about in response: Since blight and spite can make might, its just not polite by citing might to assume that there's right, the probabilities fight between spite, blight and right so might given blight and might given spite must be subtracted from causes for might if the order's not right!
[it's] Strange that tradition should not show more interest in the past.
-- the character Sherkaner Underhill, from A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge.
If people believe traditions are valuable, they should anticipate that searching the past for more traditions is valuable. But we don't see that; we see most past traditions (paradoxically!) rejected with "things are different now".
Karl Popper used to begin his lecture course on the philosophy of science by asking the students simply to 'observe'. Then he would wait in silence for one of them to ask what they were supposed to observe. [...] So he would explain to them that scientific observation is impossible without pre-existing knowledge about what to look at, what to look for, how to look, and how to interpret what one sees. And he would explain that, therefore, theory has to come first. It has to be conjectured, not derived.
David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
I'm still trying to decide whether going off to live in the metaphorical colonies orbiting the moon is to be considered a bad thing or a really awesome idea.
It really depends how many catgirls I'm allowed to bring.
When you see an infinite regress, consider a clever quining.
Politics is the art of the possible. Sometimes I’m tempted to say that political philosophy is the science of the impossible.
There’s no such thing as the unknown– only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood.
-Captain Kirk
Quetzalcoatl frowned more deeply. Finally he said, "Miguel, tell me how this fight started." "Fernandez wishes to kill me and enslave my family." "Why should he want to do that?" "Because he is evil," Miguel said. "How do you know he is evil?" "Because," Miguel pointed out logically, "he wishes to kill me and enslave my family."
— Henry Kuttner, Or Else
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
Ernest Hemingway
When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.” “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.
1 Corinthians 15:54-57
(I like this quote, as long as it's shamelessly presented without context of the last line: "But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." )
K for your information, asshole, I have seen a lion. And not one of your crap ass queen of the jungle homoerotic pussy-cat lions. A real lion, with fangs and horns and wings and shit. Don't pull your fucking wierd ass african voodoo hypnosis crap on me when you don't even know wtf you're talking about.
-Anonymous
"Do you believe in revolution
Do you believe that everything will change
Policemen to people
And rats to pretty women
Do you think they will remake
Barracks to bar-rooms
Yperit to Coca-Cola
And truncheons to guitars?
Oh-oh, my naive
It will never be like that
Oh-oh, my naive
Life is like it is
Do you think that ever
Inferiority complexes will change to smiles
Petržalka to Manhattan
And dirty factories to hotels
Do you think they will elevate
Your idols to gods
That you will never have to
Bathe your sorrow with alcohol?
Oh-oh, my naive...
Do you think that suddenly
Everyone...
Science knows it doesn't know everything; otherwise, it'd stop.
Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules: