DSimon comments on Rationality Quotes March 2012 - Less Wrong
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Comments (525)
If it's too deep to be understandable without explanation, and you don't think it's feasible to explain it here, then why did you put the quote up in the first place?
Heterogeneous audience and asymmetric costs/benefits to reading it: people who don't get it aren't harmed much by its presence, the few people who do get it should benefit quite a bit.
Shouldn't a good pithy saying work in the opposite way ? The people who don't get it walk away enlightened (or, at least, filled with curiosity regarding the topic), while the ones in the know are unharmed.
What's the point of telling the chosen few something which they already know ?
It's something that you could have derived if you'd thought to but didn't, like Bayes' rule. Once it's pointed out you immediately see why it's true and gain a fair bit of insight, but first you have to understand basic algebra. It's basically like clichés like "be the change you want to see in the world" but on a higher level; most normal people don't have enough knowledge to correctly interpret "be the change you want to see in the world", and most smart people don't have enough knowledge to correctly interpret "interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with your soul", but the few who do should benefit a lot.
In that case I'm voting down your quote, because, not being one of the Elect, I see no particular meaning in it. But if you wrote some sort of a Sequence on the topic, I might vote it up.