Rationality Quotes April 2012

4 Post author: Oscar_Cunningham 03 April 2012 12:42AM

Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:

  • Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately.  (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments.  If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
  • Do not quote yourself
  • Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB
  • No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Comments (858)

Sort By: Controversial
Comment author: Klevador 14 April 2012 06:20:47AM *  0 points [-]

Tom: "Diana, have you ever confronted a moral dilemma?"

Diana: "I have spent my life confronting real dilemmas. I have always found moral dilemmas to be the indulgence of the well-fed middle class."

— Waiting for God (TV Series)

Comment author: tut 16 April 2012 12:22:01PM 4 points [-]

Is there a point to this quote, besides that this diana character doesn't understand the term 'moral dilemma'?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 April 2012 09:21:42PM 2 points [-]

That the kind of "moral dilemmas" philosophers tend to contemplate, tend to be very different to the kind of dilemmas people encounter in practice.

Comment author: Andy_McKenzie 01 April 2012 10:09:05PM 1 point [-]

I adore Western medicine. I trust my doctor with my life. I’m just not sure I trust her with my death. Keep in mind that when it comes to your body and those of your family and who’s dead and who’s alive, who’s conscious and who’s not, your own judgment may be better than anyone else’s.

Dick Teresi, The Undead

Comment author: taelor 02 April 2012 09:02:20AM *  0 points [-]

He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.

-- John McCarthy

Comment author: Will_Newsome 02 April 2012 01:47:30AM *  -2 points [-]

You think me reckless, desperate and mad.
You argue by results, as this world does,
To settle if an act be good or bad.
You defer to the fact. For every life and every act
Consequence of good and evil can be shown.
And as in time results of many deeds are blended
So good and evil in the end become confounded.
It is not in time that my death shall be known;
It is out of time that my decision is taken
If you call that decision
To which my whole being gives entire consent.
I give my life
To the Law of God above the Law of Man.
Those who do not the same
How should they know what I do?

T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

Comment author: Will_Newsome 02 April 2012 01:49:13AM 2 points [-]

In the small circle of pain within the skull
You still shall tramp and tread one endless round
Of thought, to justify your action to yourselves,
Weaving a fiction which unravels as you weave,
Pacing forever in the hell of make-believe
Which never is belief: this is your fate on earth
And we must think no further of you.

T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

Comment author: Will_Newsome 02 April 2012 09:40:56PM 2 points [-]

Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.
Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.

T. S. Eliot, The Rock

Comment author: Grognor 03 April 2012 11:50:17AM 3 points [-]

To a large degree, our values "just happen"—like our brains. When our values conflict—the value of preventing suffering versus the value of preserving the human species—we are tempted to choose the latter because it feels axiomatic to us. But that is a reason to treat it with extra suspicion, not to treat it as axiomatic.

-Sister Y

Comment author: Grognor 05 April 2012 02:36:10AM *  1 point [-]

This quote argues for a position, which is why I think it currently sits ugly at 0 karma after having sat ugly at 1 for a while, but I think, inseparable from the position being argued for, it espouses an important general principle which one should not simply ignore because it can apply to one's preconception; indeed (applying its lesson) that is precisely when we need the principle most.

So while I would have just taken the general principle out from Sister Y's post if it were possible for me to do so (and taken the mediocre three to four karma I would have gotten for it), I'm glad that it was intertwined now, as it shows that yes, you're supposed to apply the principle to even this (substitute anything for "this", of course).

I do sincerely wonder what the world would look like if people could even-handedly apply lessons from quotes. There are many lessons here.

Edit: Actually, looking closely at what the words actually say, I realize it doesn't, by itself, argue for the position that the former value is better than the latter value, but its context is an argument for said thing.

Edit2: If you look at the sort of quote in the original Rationality Quotes posts that were entirely Eliezer's collection, they were mostly of the sort that were likely to make you think about something rather than something that is easy to agree with. A desire to return to that model could be what's motivating the comment you're reading.

Comment author: CronoDAS 13 April 2012 05:50:27PM *  -2 points [-]

Maybe this song won't get downvoted? It's a little more on-topic for LessWrong, even if it does get political at the end. ;)

It was back in 1941.
I was a member of a good platoon.
We were on maneuvers in Lou'siana one night
By the light of the moon.
The Captain told us to ford a river.
That's how it all begun.
We were knee deep in the Big Muddy,
And the big fool said to push on.

The Sergeant said, "Sir, are you sure
This is the best way back to the base?"
"Sergeant, go on, I've forded this river
About a mile above this place.
It'll be a little soggy, but just keep sloggin'.
We'll soon be on dry ground."
We were waist deep in the Big Muddy,
And the big fool said to push on.

The Sergeant said, "Sir, with all this equipment,
No man will be able to swim."
"Sergeant, don't be a Nervous Nelly,"
The Captain said to him.
"All we need is a little determination.
Men, follow me. I'll lead on."
We were neck deep in the Big Muddy,
And the big fool said to push on.

All at once the moon clouded over.
We heard a gurglin' cry.
A few seconds later the Captain's helmet
Was all that floated by.
The Sergeant said, "Turn around, men.
I'm in charge from now on."
And we just made it out of the Big Muddy
With the Captain dead and gone.

We stripped and dived and found his body
Stuck in the old quicksand.
I guess he didn't know that the water was deeper
Then the place he'd once before been.
Another stream had joined the Big Muddy
About a half mile from where we'd gone.
We were lucky to escape from the Big Muddy
When the big fool said to push on.

Now I'm not going to point any moral —
I'll leave that for yourself.
Maybe you're still walking, you're still talking,
You'd like to keep your health.
But every time I read the papers, that old feeling comes on,
We're waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.

Waist deep in the Big Muddy,
The big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy,
The big fool says to push on.
Waist deep, neck deep,
Soon even a tall man will be over his head.
We're waist deep in the Big Muddy,
And the big fool says to push on.

-- Pete Seeger, "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy"

Comment author: CronoDAS 13 April 2012 08:51:55PM 0 points [-]

Quick question: Is this getting downvoted because of the quote or because I talked about downvoting?

(The song itself is a rather amusing lesson in escalation of commitment and sunk cost fallacy, among other things...)

Comment author: arundelo 06 April 2012 01:05:02AM *  2 points [-]

Billings: [...] What do you think, Peters? What are the chances that this "jewpacabra" is real?

Peters: "I'm estimating somewhere around point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one percent.

Billings: (Sighs) We can't afford to take that chance. [...]

-- Trey Parker, Jewpacabra

(This is at about five minutes fifty seconds into the episode.)

Edit: Related Sequence post.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 April 2012 02:57:38PM *  3 points [-]

AG: You know very well the channels of possi8ility at that exact juncture resulted from her decision paths as well as yours.

AG: 8ut even so, when it comes to your key decisions, the possi8ilities are pro8a8ly fewer and more discrete than you have presumed.

AG: Otherwise you would not see results consolidated into those vortices, would you? Possi8ility would resem8le an enormous hazy field of infinitely su8tle variations and micro-choices.

AG: Imagine if at that moment you truly were capa8le of anything, no matter how outlandish, a8surd, or patently fruitless. How would this vast amount of information present itself to you through your senses? What difference would it make in your final decision if all other tri8utaries of whim spilled into the same decaying future? And what would this make of your agency as a hero meant to learn and grow?

AG: Look at it this way. Imagine that over the course of someone's life, they are truly capa8le of every conceiva8le action at any moment, and did indeed take each of those actions in different 8ranching realities. Doesn't a scenario like that deaden a person's agency just as much as one where their fate is decidedly etched in stone as a single path of unavoida8le decisions? Who exactly is that person who can and does take all conceiva8le actions, other than someone perfectly generic, who only appears to have unique predilections and motives when you examine the ar8itrary path they happen to occupy?

Andrew Hussie

Comment author: Bugmaster 01 April 2012 05:55:17PM 6 points [-]

I hate to downvote Homestuck, but there I go, downvoting it. The typing quirks and chatlog-style layout are too specific to the comic.

Comment author: Randaly 01 April 2012 03:53:13PM 7 points [-]

Is there a reason all the b's have been replaced by 8's?

Comment author: David_Gerard 01 April 2012 04:56:21PM 4 points [-]

Character typing quirk in the original.

Comment author: Klevador 14 April 2012 08:20:45AM 0 points [-]

"The material world," continued Dupin, "abounds with very strict analogies to the immaterial; and thus some color of truth has been given to the rhetorical dogma, that metaphor, or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument, as well as to embellish a description. The principle of the vis inertiae, for example, seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is commensurate with this difficulty, than it is, in the latter, that intellects of the vaster capacity, while more forcible, more constant, and more eventful in their movements than those of inferior grade, are yet the less readily moved, and more embarrassed and full of hesitation in the first few steps of their progress.

— Poe, The Purloined Letter

Comment author: gyokuro 10 April 2012 12:49:18AM *  0 points [-]

They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force -- nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.

--Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Comment author: bojangles 27 April 2012 06:49:41PM *  2 points [-]

I stopped being afraid because I read the truth. And that's the scientifical truth which is much better. You shouldn't let poets lie to you.

-- Bjork

Comment author: [deleted] 10 April 2012 07:05:17PM 4 points [-]

One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.

--Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

Comment author: [deleted] 13 April 2012 09:02:00PM 2 points [-]

That sounds deep, but it has nothing to to with rationality

Comment author: [deleted] 14 April 2012 06:27:08AM 1 point [-]

Not really, for example it is actually pretty clearly connected to fun theory.

Comment author: atorm 09 April 2012 02:18:17AM 2 points [-]

There are two worlds: the world that is, and the world that should be. We live in one, and must create the other, if it is ever to be. -paraphrased from Jim Butcher's Turn Coat

Comment author: VKS 03 April 2012 07:32:16AM *  5 points [-]

The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician. At the heart of things science finds only a mad, never-ending quadrille of Mock Turtle Waves and Gryphon Particles. For a moment the waves and particles dance in grotesque, inconceivably complex patterns capable of reflecting on their own absurdity.

  • Martin Gardner, The Annotated Alice
Comment author: dbaupp 05 April 2012 12:24:24AM -1 points [-]

viewed rationally and without illusion

Lewis Carroll was religious, and to add to that, he was human.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 05 April 2012 02:11:07PM 2 points [-]

Lewis Carroll was religious, and to add to that, he was human.

For that matter, so was Martin Gardner.

Comment author: Pavitra 05 April 2012 01:07:36PM 13 points [-]

These threads would be very sparsely populated if we avoided quoting humans.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 April 2012 10:38:05PM 5 points [-]

The heck? Quantum fields are completely lawful and sane. Only the higher levels of organization, i.e. human beings, are bugfuck crazy.

Behold, the Copenhagen Interpretation causes BRAIN DAMAGE.

Comment author: shminux 08 April 2012 06:42:10PM -1 points [-]

Maybe, but the Big World idea causes much more severe damage, judging by the recent discussions here and elsewhere.

Comment author: Thomas 03 April 2012 06:24:39AM 4 points [-]

Memory locations are just wires turned sideways in time.

  • Danny Hillis
Comment author: Will_Newsome 02 April 2012 08:21:11PM 8 points [-]

The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith; and when the ordinary man calls himself a sceptic or an unbeliever, that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination to think anything out to a conclusion.

T. S. Eliot

Comment author: Alicorn 01 April 2012 06:08:56PM 7 points [-]

I was once a skeptic but was converted by the two missionaries on either side of my nose.

Robert Brault

Comment author: Blueberry 01 April 2012 07:41:53PM -1 points [-]

I must be misinterpreting this, because it appears to say "religion is obvious if you just open your eyes." How is that a rationality quote?

Comment author: Ezekiel 01 April 2012 06:35:10PM 4 points [-]

Particularly interesting since I (and, I suspect, others on LW) usually attach positive affect to the word "skeptic", since it seems to us that naivete is the more common error. But of course a Creationist is sceptical of evolution.

(Apparently both spellings are correct. I've learned something today.)

Comment author: Desrtopa 02 April 2012 04:20:55AM 9 points [-]

Am I the only one who didn't realize before reading other comments that he was not claiming to have been converted by his nostrils?

Comment author: MixedNuts 09 April 2012 03:24:07PM *  12 points [-]

On specificity and sneaking on connotations; useful for the liberal-minded among us:

I think, with racism and sexism and 'isms' generally, there's a sort of confusion of terminology.

A "Racist1" is someone, who, like a majority of people in this society, has subconsciously internalized some negative attitudes about minority racial groups. If a Racist1 takes the Implicit Association Test, her score shows she's biased against black people, like the majority of people (of all races) who took the test. Chances are, whether you know it or not, you're a Racist1.

A "Racist2" is someone who's kind of an insensitive jerk about race. The kind of guy who calls Obama the "Food Stamp President." Someone you wouldn't want your sister dating.

A "Racist3" is a neo-Nazi. You can never be quite sure that one day he won't snap and kill someone. He's clearly a social deviant.

People use the word "Racist" for all three things, and I think that's the source of a lot of arguments. When people get accused of being racists, they evade responsibility by saying, "Hey, I'm not a Racist3!" when in fact you were only saying they were Racist1 or Racist2. But some of the responsibility is on the accusers too -- if you say "That Republican's a racist" with the implication of "a jerk" and then backtrack and change the meaning to "vulnerable to unconscious bias", then you're arguing in bad faith. Never mind that some laws and rules which were meant to protect people from Racist3's are in fact deployed against Racist2's.

-celandine13

Comment author: [deleted] 09 April 2012 11:42:14PM 0 points [-]

What about a "Racist4", someone who assign different moral values to people of different races all other things being equal?

Comment author: Strange7 12 April 2012 08:29:26AM 0 points [-]

That would be a paleo-nazi. Not many of them around, anymore, and those that are don't get away with much.

Comment author: Desrtopa 12 April 2012 04:05:36AM *  3 points [-]

Based on a couple interviews I've seen with unabashed Racist3s, I think that they would tend to fulfill that criterion.

Edit: Requesting clarification for downvote?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 April 2012 05:58:20PM 3 points [-]

You left out one common definition.

A "Racist0" is someone who has accurate priors about the behavior of people of different races.

Also I don't see why calling Obama the "Food Stamp President" or otherwise criticizing his economic policy president makes one a jerk, much less a "Racist2" unless one already believes that all criticism of Obama is racist by definition.

Comment author: CronoDAS 13 April 2012 08:27:41AM 1 point [-]

Unfortunately, it seems to me that most of the information that "race" provides is screened off by various things that are only weakly correlated with race, and it also seems to me that our badly-designed hardware doesn't update very well upon learning these things. For example, "X is a college graduate, and is black" doesn't tell you all that much more than "X is a college graduate"; it's probably easier to deal with this by having inaccurate priors than by updating properly.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 14 April 2012 04:23:56AM 3 points [-]

Unfortunately, it seems to me that most of the information that "race" provides is screened off by various things that are only weakly correlated with race,

Which are generally much harder to observe.

For example, "X is a college graduate, and is black" doesn't tell you all that much more than "X is a college graduate"

Um, Affirmative Action. Also tail ends of distributions.

Comment author: grendelkhan 15 April 2012 03:04:24PM 1 point [-]

Um, Affirmative Action. Also tail ends of distributions.

I was under the impression that AA applied to college admissions, and that college graduation is still entirely contingent on one's performance. (Though I've heard tell that legacy students both get an AA-sized bump to admissions and tend to be graded on a much less harsh scale.)

Additionally, it seems that there's a lot of 'different justification, same conclusion' with regards to claims about black people. For instance, "black people are inherently stupid and lazy" becomes "black people don't have to meet the same standards for education". The actual example I saw was that people subconsciously don't like to hire black people (the Chicago resume study) because they present a risk of an EEOC lawsuit. (The annual risk of being involved in an EEOC lawsuit is on the order of one in a million.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 April 2012 10:32:30PM 2 points [-]

Additionally, it seems that there's a lot of 'different justification, same conclusion' with regards to claims about black people.

I think it's more a case same observations, different proposed mechanisms.

Comment author: TimS 09 April 2012 06:10:45PM *  1 point [-]

I'm honestly confused. You don't see why calling Obama a "Food Stamp President" is different from criticizing his economic policy?

I guess I would not predict that particular phrase being leveled against Hillary or Bill Clinton - even from people who disagreed with their economic policies for the same reasons they disagree with Obama's economic policies.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 April 2012 06:59:16PM 1 point [-]

I guess I would not predict that particular phrase being leveled against Hillary or Bill Clinton - even from people who disagreed with their economic policies for the same reasons they disagree with Obama's economic policies.

Well, Bill Clinton had saner economic policies, but otherwise I would predict that phrase, or something similar, being used against a white politician.

Comment author: TimS 09 April 2012 08:08:40PM 1 point [-]

You haven't answered my question:

Given the way that public welfare codes for both "lazy" and "black" in the United States, do you think that "Food Stamp President" has the same implications as some other critique of Obama's economic policies (in terms of whether the speaker intended to invoke Obama's race and whether the speaker judges Obama differently than some other politician with substantially identical positions)?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 April 2012 12:14:44AM 3 points [-]

Well, yes by finding enough "code words" you can make any criticism of Obama racist.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 10 April 2012 01:03:18AM 1 point [-]

Yes, that's certainly true.

I'm really curious now, though. What's your opinion about the intended connotations of the phrase "food stamp President"? Do you think it's intended primarily as a way of describing Obama's economic policies? His commitment to preventing hunger? His fondness for individual welfare programs? Something else?

Or, if you think the intention varies depending on the user, what connotations do you think Gingrich intended to evoke with it?

Or, if you're unwilling to speculate as to Gingrich's motives, what connotations do you think it evokes in a typical resident of, say, Utah or North Dakota?

Comment author: RobinZ 10 April 2012 04:17:49PM -1 points [-]

That seems improbable. To pick the first example I Googled off of the Atlantic webside: Chart of the Day: Obama's Epic Failure on Judicial Nominees contains some substantive criticism of Obama - can you show me where it contains "code words" of this kind?

Comment author: TheOtherDave 10 April 2012 05:37:20PM 5 points [-]

It's not an improbable claim so much as a nigh-unfalsifiable claim.

I mean, imagine the following conversation between two hypothetical people, arbitrarily labelled RZ and EN here:
EN: By finding enough "code words" you can make any criticism of Obama racist.
RZ: What about this criticism?
EN: By declaring "epic", "confirmation mess", and "death blow" to be racist "code words", you can make that criticism racist.
RZ: But "epic", "confirmation mess", and "death blow" aren't racist code words!
EN: Right. Neither is "food stamps".

Of course, one way forward from this point is to taboo "code word" -- for example, to predict that an IAT would find stronger associations between "food stamps" and black people than between "epic" and black people, but would not find stronger associations between "food stamps" and white people than between "epic" and white people.

Comment author: RobinZ 10 April 2012 07:12:26PM -1 points [-]

I think "nigh-unfalsifiable" is unfair in general when it comes to the use of code words, but I'm not familiar with the facts of the particular case under discussion.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 10 April 2012 07:22:11PM 0 points [-]

I agree in the general case.

In fact, I fully expect that (for example) an IAT would find stronger associations between "food stamps" and black people than between "epic" and black people, but would not find stronger associations between "food stamps" and white people than between "epic" and white people, and if I did not find that result I would have to seriously rethink my belief that "food stamps" is a dog-whistle in the particular case under discussion; it's not unfalsifiable at all.

But I can't figure out any way to falsify the claim that "by finding enough 'code words' you can make any criticism of Obama racist," nor even the implied related claim that it's equally easy to do so for all texts. Especially in the context of this discussion, where the experimental test isn't actually available. All Eugene_Nier has to do is claim that arbitrarily selected words in the article you cite are equally racially charged, and claim -- perhaps even sincerely -- to detect no difference between the connotations of different words.

Comment author: Random832 10 April 2012 08:18:35PM 4 points [-]

"public welfare codes for both "lazy" and "black" in the United States"

Taking your word on that, what "other critique of Obama's economic policies" are you imagining that would not have the same implications, unless you mean one that ignores public welfare entirely in favor of focusing on some other economic issue instead?

Comment author: TimS 11 April 2012 12:53:16AM *  1 point [-]

A political opponent of Obama might say:

Basic economics says that what you pay for, you get more of. Therefore, when you extend long-term unemployment benefits, you get more long-term unemployment.

or

The current tax rate is too far to the right on the Laffer curve

or

The health insurance purchase mandate is unprecedented, UnAmerican, and unConstitutional

edit: or

People who pay no net income tax (because of low income and earned income tax credits) are drains on American society

(end edit)

without me thinking that the political opponent was intending to invoke Obama's race in some way. None of these are actual quotes, but I think they are coherent assertions that disagree with Obama's economic or legal philosophy. Edit: I feel confident I could find actual quote of equivalent content.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 April 2012 04:31:57AM -1 points [-]

Here is another example of my point that one can claim any criticism of Obama is racist if one is sufficiently motivated.

Comment author: Random832 11 April 2012 12:54:44PM 1 point [-]

Of course, none of the ones you suggested are actually about public welfare, in the sense of the government providing supplemental income for people who are unable to get jobs to provide themselves adequate income. So what we have is not a code word, but rather a code issue.

Except the first one, but with how you framed it as "public welfare codes for..." I don't see how that one wouldn't have the same connotations.

Comment author: TimS 11 April 2012 01:14:41PM *  0 points [-]

Tl;dr: You have a good point, but we seem to be stuck with the historical context.


Unemployment benefits might qualify as public welfare. More tenuously, the various health insurance subsidies and expansions of Medicaid (government health insurance for the very poor) contained in "Obamacare."

But your point is well taken. The well has been poisoned by political talking points from the 1980s (e.g. welfare queen and the response from the left). I'll agree that there's no good reason for us to be trapped in the context from the past, but politicians have not tried very hard to escape that trap.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 April 2012 03:33:12AM 0 points [-]

The term "welfare president" has the advantage of not having a huge inferential distance (how many people know what a Laffer curve is?) and working as a soundbite.

Comment author: grendelkhan 15 April 2012 09:25:03PM 0 points [-]

Has anyone ever claimed that any criticism of Obama is racist by definition? I only ever see this claim from people who want to raise the bar for racism above what they've been accused of. It's not like targeting welfare to play on racism is a completely outlandish claim--I hope you're familiar with Lee Atwater's very famous description of the Southern Strategy:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 April 2012 10:38:50PM 1 point [-]

Has anyone ever claimed that any criticism of Obama is racist by definition?

No, they just declare each individual instance 'racist' no matter how tenuous the argument. The rather ludicrous attempts to dismiss the Tea Party as 'racist' being the most prominent example.

Comment author: Oligopsony 11 April 2012 05:06:11AM 0 points [-]

A "Racist0" is someone who has accurate priors about the behavior of people of different races.

That's the R2 way of phrasing R{1,2}, like "race traitor" is the R3 way of phrasing R1 or celandine's phrasings are from an R1 perspective. (Not saying you are a jerk; just trying to separate out precisely such connotative differences from these useful clusters/concentric rings in peoplespace.)

(N.B. that if this definition wasn't question-begging and/or indexical it would imply that iff accurate priors are equal over races then the genuinely colorblind are racists.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 April 2012 06:46:08AM 2 points [-]

That's the R2 way of phrasing R{1,2}, like "race traitor" is the R3 way of phrasing R1 or celandine's phrasings are from an R1 perspective. (Not saying you are a jerk; just trying to separate out precisely such connotative differences from these useful clusters/concentric rings in peoplespace.)

Possibly, I couldn't quite figure out Mixed Nuts' definitions because he seemed to be implicitly assuming that accurate priors were equal over races.

(N.B. that if this definition wasn't question-begging and/or indexical it would imply that iff accurate priors are equal over races then the genuinely colorblind are racists.)

Well they aren't. Nevertheless, I should probably have said something more like:

A "Racist0" is someone who rationally believes that priors aren't equal over races.

Comment author: Crouching_Badger 24 April 2012 05:45:51PM -1 points [-]

Apart from race, isn't this a problem with English or language in general? We use the same words for varying degrees of a certain notion, and people cherry pick the definitions that they want to cogitate for response. If I call someone a conservative, is it a compliment or an insult? That depends on both of our perceptions of the word conservative as well as our outlook on ourselves as political beings; however, beyond that, I could mean to say that the person is fiscally conservative, but as the current conservative candidates are showing conservatism to be far-right extremism, the person may think, "Hey! I'm not one of those guys."

I think if someone wants to argue with you, you'd be hard-pressed to speak eloquently enough to provide an impenetrable phrase that does not open itself to a spectrum of interpretation.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 24 April 2012 10:49:16PM *  0 points [-]

Sure. "Conservative" isn't a fixed political position. Quite often, it's a claim about one's political position: that it stands for some historical good or tradition. A "conservative" in Russia might look back to the good old days of Stalin whereas a "conservative" in the U.S. would not appreciate the comparison. It's also a flag color; your "fiscal conservative" may merely not want to wave a flag of the same color as Rick Santorum's.

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 09 April 2012 06:31:28PM 1 point [-]

Surely one of the definitions of "racist" should contain something about thinking that some races are better than others. Or is that covered under "neo-Nazi"?

Comment author: thomblake 10 April 2012 07:34:13PM *  3 points [-]

I'm pretty sure that's covered under Racist1. Note the word "negative".

Though it's odd that Racist1 specifically refers to "minorities". The entire suite seems to miss folks that favor a "minority" race.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 April 2012 07:41:11PM 4 points [-]

Depends on what you mean by "better". There's a difference between taking the data on race and IQ seriously, and wanting to commit genocide.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 09 April 2012 08:17:07PM 1 point [-]

(blink)

Can you unpack the relationship here between some available meaning of "better" and wanting to commit genocide?

Comment author: wedrifid 09 April 2012 09:02:41PM 2 points [-]

Can you unpack the relationship here between some available meaning of "better" and wanting to commit genocide?

Most obvious plausible available meaning for 'better' that fits: "Most satisfies my average utilitarian values".

(Yes, most brands of simple utilitarianism reduce to psychopathy - but since people still advocate them we can consider the meaning at least 'available'.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 April 2012 08:40:02PM 3 points [-]

Can you unpack the relationship here between some available meaning of "better" and wanting to commit genocide?

That's the question I was implicitly asking Oscar.

Comment author: CaveJohnson 24 April 2012 04:19:21PM *  4 points [-]

This is missing Racist4:

Someone whose preferences result in disparate impact.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 09 April 2012 04:22:36PM 3 points [-]

...and also useful for those among us who don't identify as "liberal-minded."

Comment author: cousin_it 12 April 2012 09:18:03AM 6 points [-]

Where would someone like Steve Sailer fit in this classification?

Comment author: GLaDOS 24 April 2012 04:16:10PM *  3 points [-]

Indeed as strange as it might sound (but not to those who know what he usually blogs about) Steve Sailer seems to genuinely like black people more than average and I wouldn't be surprised at all if a test showed he wasn't biased against them or was less biased than the average white American.

He also dosen't seem like racist2 from the vast majority of his writing, painting him as racist3 is plain absurd.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 24 April 2012 04:26:25PM 0 points [-]

Steve Sailer seems to genuinely like black people more than average

What evidence leads to this conclusion?

Comment author: Vaniver 24 April 2012 04:46:13PM 4 points [-]

He published his IAT results and he's proposed policies that play to the strengths of blacks.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 24 April 2012 05:46:10PM 1 point [-]

Historically, proposing policies that are set to help the specific strengths of a minority group are not generally indicative of actually positive feelings about those groups.

Comment author: Stabilizer 06 April 2012 01:33:18AM 3 points [-]

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

-C. Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1852.

Comment author: scav 03 April 2012 07:53:33AM 6 points [-]

Clearly, Bem’s psychic could bankrupt all casinos on the planet before anybody realized what was going on. This analysis leaves us with two possibilities. The first possibility is that, for whatever reason, the psi effects are not operative in casinos, but they are operative in psychological experiments on erotic pictures. The second possibility is that the psi effects are either nonexistent, or else so small that they cannot overcome the house advantage. Note that in the latter case, all of Bem’s experiments overestimate the effect.

Returning to Laplace’s Principle, we feel that the above reasons motivate us to assign our prior belief in precognition a number very close to zero.

Why Psychologists Must Change the Way They Analyze Their Data: The Case of Psi

Eric–Jan Wagenmakers, Ruud Wetzels, Denny Borsboom, & Han van der Maas

Comment author: FiftyTwo 03 April 2012 09:40:35PM 4 points [-]

I don't see why the first hypothesis should necessarily be rejected out of hand. If the supposed mechanism is unconscious then having it react to erotic pictures and not particular casino objects seems perfectly plausible. Obviously the real explanation might be that the data wasn't strong enough to prove the claim, but we shouldn't allow the low status of "psi theories" to distort our judgement.

Comment author: scav 04 April 2012 08:12:28AM 1 point [-]

One good thing about Bayesian reasoning is that assigning a prior belief very close to zero isn't rejecting the hypothesis out of hand. The posterior belief will be updated by evidence (if any can be found). And even if you start with a high prior probability and update it with Bem's evidence for precognition, you would soon have a posterior probability much closer to zero than your prior :)

BTW there is no supposed mechanism for precognition. Just calling it "unconscious" doesn't render it any more plausible that we have a sense that would be super useful if only it even worked well enough to be measured, and yet unlike all our other senses, it hasn't been acted on by natural selection to improve. Sounds like special pleading to me.

Comment author: chaosmosis 18 April 2012 05:29:45PM *  8 points [-]

"When I was young I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn."

-- Farenheit 451

I'll be sticking around a while, although I'm not doing too well right now (check the HPMOR discussion thread for those of you interested in viewing the carnage, it's beautiful). It's not really a rationality problem, but I need to learn how to deal with other people who have big egos, because apparently only two or three people received my comments the way I meant them to come across. Plus, I like the idea of losing so much karma in one day and then eventually earning it all back and being recognized as a super rationalist. Gaining the legitimate approval of a group who now have a lot against me will be a decent challenge.

Also I doubt that I would be able to resist commenting even if I wanted to. That's probably mostly it.

Comment author: wedrifid 18 April 2012 07:10:23PM 2 points [-]

It's not really a rationality problem, but I need to learn how to deal with other people who have big egos, because apparently only two or three people received my comments the way I meant them to come across.

It is what we would call an "instrumental rationality" problem. And one of the most important ones at that. Right up there with learning how to deal with our own big egos... which you seem to be taking steps towards now!

Comment author: thomblake 18 April 2012 06:06:15PM *  8 points [-]

Plus, I like the idea of losing so much karma in one day and then eventually earning it all back

This discussion is off-topic for the "Rationality Quotes" thread, but...

If you're interested in an easy way to gain karma, you might want to try an experimental method I've been kicking around:

Take an article from Wikipedia on a bias that we don't have an article about yet. Wikipedia has a list of cognitive biases. Write a top-level post about that bias, with appropriate use of references. Write it in a similar style to Eliezer's more straightforward posts on a bias, examples first.

My prediction is that such an article, if well-written, should gain about +40 votes; about +80 if it contains useful actionable material.

Comment author: chaosmosis 18 April 2012 06:18:30PM *  1 point [-]

No, I want this to be harder than that. It needs to be a drawn out and painful and embarrassing process.

Maybe I'll eventually write something like that. Not yet.

Comment author: David_Gerard 18 April 2012 11:23:28PM 5 points [-]

One day I will write "How to karmawhore with LessWrong comments" if I can work out how to do it in such a way that it won't get -5000 within an hour.

Comment author: Alicorn 01 April 2012 06:09:23PM 27 points [-]

Westerners are fond of the saying ‘Life isn’t fair.’ Then, they end in snide triumphant: ‘So get used to it!’
What a cruel, sadistic notion to revel in! What a terrible, patriarchal response to a child’s budding sense of ethics. Announce to an Iroquois, ‘Life isn’t fair,’ and her response will be: ‘Then make it fair!’

Barbara Alice Mann

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 02 April 2012 05:51:00AM *  4 points [-]

I'm not convinced fairness is inherently valuable.

  • Envy is an unpleasant emotion that should probably be eliminated.
  • I like being part of egalitarian social groups, but I don't think status inequality has to follow inevitably from material inequality.
Comment author: ciphergoth 02 April 2012 07:35:21AM 7 points [-]

I don't think that fairness is terminally valuable, but I think it has instrumental value.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 02 April 2012 09:45:47AM 13 points [-]

The automatic pursuit of fairness might lead to perverse incentives. I have in mind some (non-genetically related) family in Mexico who don't bother saving money for the future because their extended family and neighbours would expect them to pay for food and gifts if they happen to acquire "extra" cash. Perhaps this "Western" patriarchal peculiarity has some merit after all.

Comment author: Nornagest 02 April 2012 10:03:01AM *  1 point [-]

One wonders whether food and gifts translate into status more or less effectively than whatever they might buy to that end in "Western" society would. Scare quotes because most of Mexico isn't much more or less Western than the US, all things considered.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 02 April 2012 10:19:01AM 1 point [-]

Yeah, the scare quotes are because I dislike the use of "Western" to mean English-speaking cultures rather than the Greek-Latin-Arabic influenced cultures.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 01 April 2012 08:44:32PM *  37 points [-]

I agree with the necessity of making life more fair, and disagree with the connotational noble Pocahontas lecturing a sadistic western patriarch. (Note: the last three words are taken from the quote.)

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 02 April 2012 02:18:02AM 5 points [-]

Do people typically say "life isn't fair" about situations that people could choose to change?

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 02 April 2012 09:48:39AM *  9 points [-]

Do people typically say "life isn't fair" about situations that people could choose to change?

Introspection tells me this statement usually gets trotted out when the cost of achieving fairness is too high to warrant serious consideration.

EDIT: Whoops, I just realised that my imagination only outputted situations involving adults. When imagining situations involving children I get the opposite of my original claim.

Comment author: Alicorn 01 April 2012 09:54:15PM 11 points [-]

I didn't think I could remove the quote from that attitude about it very effectively without butchering it. I did lop off a subsequent sentence that made it worse.

Comment author: Nornagest 01 April 2012 10:59:04PM *  21 points [-]

Agree that that looks an awful lot like an abuse of the noble savage meme. Barbara Alice Mann appears to be an anthropologist and a Seneca, so that's at least two points where she should really know better -- then again, there's a long and more than somewhat suspect history of anthropologists using their research to make didactic points about Western society. (Margaret Mead, for example.)

Not sure I entirely agree re: fairness. "Life's not fair" seems to me to succinctly express the very important point that natural law and the fundamentals of game theory are invariant relative to egalitarian intuitions. This can't be changed, only worked around, and a response of "so make it fair" seems to dilute that point by implying that any failure of egalitarianism might ideally be traced to some corresponding failure of morality or foresight.

Comment author: ciphergoth 02 April 2012 07:36:02AM 2 points [-]

I think that Robert Smith has a much wiser take on this: "The world is neither fair nor unfair"

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 April 2012 12:42:56AM 1 point [-]

The world is neither F nor ~F?

Comment author: [deleted] 05 April 2012 10:51:38PM *  -1 points [-]

“The world is fair” = world.fairness > 0
“The world is unfair” = world.fairness < 0
“The world is neither fair nor unfair” = world.fairness == 0, or something like this.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 07 April 2012 03:25:35PM *  2 points [-]

Civil wars are bitter because

People make their recollections fit with their suffering.

---Thucydides

Found here.

Comment author: pleeppleep 04 April 2012 03:41:52AM 6 points [-]

"An organized mind is a disciplined mind. And a disciplined mind is a powerful mind."

-- Batman (Batman the Brave and the Bold)

Comment author: Arran_Stirton 04 April 2012 07:07:46AM 0 points [-]

So says a man-dressed-like-a-bat.

(That's not a jibe aimed at the quote but rather a reference to this.)

Comment author: Pavitra 05 April 2012 01:01:11PM 3 points [-]

Downvoted because this comment serves only to propagate a mildly-entertaining meme, rather than contributing to the discussion in some way.

Comment author: J_Taylor 02 April 2012 11:59:04PM 0 points [-]

The chess board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just and patient. We also know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.

-Thomas Huxley

Comment author: Will_Newsome 03 April 2012 12:56:06AM *  3 points [-]

I've traditionally gone with: the board is the space of/for potentially-live hypotheses/arguments/considerations, pieces are facts/observations/common-knowledge-arguments, moves are new arguments, the rules are the rules of epistemology. This lets you bring in other metaphors: ideally your pieces (facts/common-knowledge-arguments) should be overprotected (supported by other facts/common-knowledge-arguments); you should watch out for zwichenzugs (arguments that redeem other arguments that it would otherwise be justified to ignore); tactics/combinations (good arguments or combinations of arguments) flow from strategy/positioning (taking care in advance to marshal your arguments); controlling the center (the key factual issues/hypotheses at stake) is important; tactics (good arguments) often require the coordination of functionally diverse pieces (facts/common-knowledge-arguments), and so on.

The subskills that I use to play chess overlap a lot with the subskills I use to discover truth. E.g., the subskill of thinking "if I move here, then he moves there, then I move there, then he moves there, ..." and thinking through the best possible arguments at each point rather than just giving up or assuming he'll do something I'd find useful, i.e. avoiding motivated stopping and motivated continuation, is a subskill I use constantly and find very important. I constantly see people only thinking one or two moves (arguments) ahead, and in the absence of objective feedback this leads to them repeatedly being overconfident in bad moves (bad arguments) that only seem good if you're not very experienced at chess (argumentation in the epistemic sense).

Oh, a rationality quote: Bill Hartson: "Chess doesn't make sane people crazy; it keeps crazy people sane."

And Bobby Fischer: "My opponents make good moves too. Sometimes I don't take these things into consideration."

Comment author: Stabilizer 02 April 2012 08:39:55PM *  8 points [-]

Uxbal: I don't want to die, Bea. I'm afraid to leave the children on their own... I can't.
Bea: You think you take care of the children Uxbal. Don't be naive. The universe takes care of them.
Uxbal: Yes... but the universe doesn't pay the rent.

-Biutiful

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 April 2012 09:55:07PM 8 points [-]

So the interesting and substantive question is not whether one thinks the fit will survive and thrive better than the unfit. They will. The interesting question is what the rules are that determine what is "fit."

-- David Henderson on Social Darwinism

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 01 April 2012 07:40:33PM 18 points [-]

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

G. K. Chesterton

Comment author: BlazeOrangeDeer 02 April 2012 05:59:01AM 0 points [-]

"Reality is the thing that surpises me." - Paraphrase of EY

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 04 April 2012 05:57:08AM 1 point [-]

Also:

Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make sense.

Comment author: Ezekiel 01 April 2012 11:27:00PM 8 points [-]

Zach Wiener's elegant disproof:

Think of the strangest thing that's true. Okay. Now add a monkey dressed as Hitler.

(Although to be fair, it's possible that the disproof fails because "think of the strangest thing that's true" is impossible for a human brain.)

Comment author: Blueberry 02 April 2012 07:44:37AM 13 points [-]

It also fails in the case where the strangest thing that's true is an infinite number of monkeys dressed as Hitler. Then adding one doesn't change it.

More to the point, the comparison is more about typical fiction, rather than ad hoc fictional scenarios. There are very few fictional works with monkeys dressed as Hitler.

Comment author: Spurlock 02 April 2012 04:44:28AM 15 points [-]

“The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance. ”

-St Augustine of Hippo

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 29 April 2012 01:31:51PM 4 points [-]

In recent years, I've come to think of myself as something of a magician, and my specialty is pulling the wool over my own eyes.

--Kip W

Comment author: Vulture 28 April 2012 03:04:31AM 4 points [-]

Human beings have been designed by evolution to be good pattern matchers, and to trust the patterns they find; as a corollary their intuition about probability is abysmal. Lotteries and Las Vegas wouldn't function if it weren't so.

-Mark Rosenfelder (http://zompist.com/chance.htm)

Comment author: HonoreDB 16 April 2012 03:26:14PM 8 points [-]

That's right, Emotion. Go ahead, put Reason out of the way! That's great! Fine! ...for Hitler.

--1943 Disney cartoon

Comment author: CronoDAS 04 April 2012 01:17:03AM 8 points [-]

Any “technology” which claims miraculous benefits on a timescale longer than it takes to achieve tenure and retire is vaporware, and should not be taken seriously.

-- Scott Locklin

Comment author: DSimon 05 April 2012 08:51:04AM 2 points [-]

Cryonics?

Comment author: jsbennett86 03 April 2012 02:17:07AM *  13 points [-]

But when we have these irrational beliefs, these culturally coded assumptions, running so deep within our community and movement, how do we actually change that? How do we get people to further question themselves when they’ve already become convinced that they’re a rational person, a skeptic, and have moved on from irrationality, cognitive distortion and bias?

Well I think what we need to do is to change the fundamental structure and values of skepticism. We need to build our community and movement around slightly different premises.

As it has stood in the past, skepticism has been predicated on a belief in the power of the empirical and rational. It has been based on the premise that there is an empirical truth, and that it is knowable, and that certain tools and strategies like science and logic will allow us to reach that truth. In short, the “old guard” skepticism was based on a veneration of the rational. But the veneration of certain techniques or certain philosophies creates the problematic possibility of choosing to consider certain conclusions or beliefs to BE empirical and rational and above criticism, particularly beliefs derived from the “right” tools, and even more dangerously, to consider oneself “rational”.

...

I believe that in order to be able to question our own beliefs as well as we question those of others, we need to restructure skepticism around awareness of human limitation, irrationality and flaws. Rather than venerating the rational, and aspiring to become some kind of superhuman fully rational vulcan minds, we need to instead create a more human skepticism, built around understanding how belief operates, how we draw conclusions, and how we can cope with the human limitations. I believe we need to remove the focus from aspiring towards ridding ourselves of the irrational, and instead move the focus towards understanding how this irrationality operates and why we believe all the crazy things we believe. We need to position as our primary aspiration not the achievement of a perfect comprehending mind, but instead an ability to maintain constant hesitation and doubt, to always always ALWAYS second-guess our positions and understand that they’re being created through a flawed mind, from flawed perceptions.

Science and reason are excellent tools to allow us to cope with being crazy, irrational human beings, but it CANNOT allow us to transcend that. The instant we begin to believe that we have become A Skeptic, A Rational Person, that is when we’ve fucked up, that is when we stop practicing skepticism, stop keeping an eye out for our mistakes, and begin to imagine our irrational perceptions as perfect rational conclusions. It’s only by building a skepticism based on the practice of doubt, rather than the state of Skeptic, that we’ll truly be able to be move on from our assumptions.

Comment author: [deleted] 02 April 2012 06:37:29PM 9 points [-]

All fiction needs to be taken both seriusly and not seriously.

Seriously because even the silliest of art can change minds.

Not seriously because no matter the delusions of the author, or the tone of the work, it's still fiction; entertainment, simulated on an human brain.

Rasmus Eide aka. Armok_GoB.

PS. This is not taken from an LW/OB post.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 02 April 2012 08:45:17PM 1 point [-]

Everything needs to be taken both seriously and not-seriously. Tepid unreflective semi-seriousness is always a mistake.

Comment author: Bugmaster 05 April 2012 05:48:37AM *  14 points [-]

-- So... if they've got armor on, it's a battle !
-- And who told you that ?
-- A knight...
-- How'd you know he was a knight ?
-- Well... that's 'cause... he'd got armor on ?
-- You don't have to be a knight to buy armor. Any idiot can buy armor.
-- How do you know ?
-- 'Cause I sold armor.

-Game of Thrones (TV show)

Comment author: Bill_McGrath 16 April 2012 09:58:03AM 5 points [-]

Using an elementary accounting text and with the help of an accountant friend, I began. For me, a composer, accounting had always been the symbol of ultimate boredom. But a surprise awaited me: Accounting is just a simple, practical tool for measuring resources, so as to better allocate and use them. In fact, I quickly realized that basic accounting concepts had a utility far beyond finance. Resources are almost always limited; one must constantly weigh costs and benefits to make enlightened decisions.

--Alan Belkin From the Stock Market to Music, via the Theory of Evolution

This was just the first bit that stood out as LW-relevant; he also briefly mentions cognitive bias and touches on the possible benefits of cognitive science to the arts.

Comment author: [deleted] 16 April 2012 05:49:36AM 10 points [-]

The fundamental rule of political analysis from the point of psychology is, follow the sacredness, and around it is a ring of motivated ignorance.

--Jonathan Haidt, source

Comment author: Alejandro1 03 April 2012 05:01:58PM 17 points [-]

‘I’m exactly in the position of the man who said, ‘I can believe the impossible, but not the improbable.’’

‘That’s what you call a paradox, isn’t it?’ asked the other.

‘It’s what I call common sense, properly understood,’ replied Father Brown. ’It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don’t understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it’s only incredible.

-G. K. Chesterton, The Curse of the Golden Cross

Comment author: dvasya 01 April 2012 04:01:25PM 17 points [-]

Our minds contain processes that enable us to solve problems we consider difficult. "Intelligence" is our name for whichever of those processes we don't yet understand.

Some people dislike this "definition" because its meaning is doomed to keep changing as we learn more about psychology. But in my view that's exactly how it ought to be, because the very concept of intelligence is like a stage magician's trick. Like the concept of "the unexplored regions of Africa," it disappears as soon as we discover it.

-- Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind

Comment author: spqr0a1 05 April 2012 11:44:50PM *  6 points [-]

To prize every thing according to its real use ought to be the aim of a rational being. There are few things which can much conduce to happiness, and, therefore, few things to be ardently desired. He that looks upon the business and bustle of the world, with the philosophy with which Socrates surveyed the fair at Athens, will turn away at last with his exclamation, 'How many things are here which I do not want'.

--Samuel Johnson, The Adventurer, #119, December 25, 1753.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 02 April 2012 05:54:48AM 6 points [-]

Seek knowledge, even as far as China.

-A Weak Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad

Comment author: Stephanie_Cunnane 03 April 2012 07:51:19AM 13 points [-]

In short, and I can't emphasize this strongly enough, a fundamental issue that any theory of psychology ultimately has to face is that brains are useful. They guide behavior. Any brain that didn't cause its owner to do useful--in the evolutionary sense--things, didn't cause reproduction.

-Robert Kurzban, Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind

Comment author: gwern 07 April 2012 05:47:58PM 7 points [-]

"The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion draws all things else to support and agree with it.

And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects or despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusion may remain inviolate."

--Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620) <!-- 1905 (Ellis, R. & Spedding, J., Trans.). London: Routledge. -->

Comment author: Spurlock 02 April 2012 04:45:14AM 22 points [-]

"Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad‘Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson"

Frank Herbert, Dune

Comment author: FiftyTwo 03 April 2012 09:31:53PM 15 points [-]

I know a lot of scientists as well as laymen are scornful of philosophy - perhaps understandably so. Reading academic philosophy journals often makes my heart sink too. But without exception, we all share philosophical background assumptions and presuppositions. The penalty of _not _ doing philosophy isn't to transcend it, but simply to give bad philosophical arguments a free pass.

David Pearce

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 04 April 2012 09:57:59AM 5 points [-]

This is analogous to my main worry as someone who considers himself a part of the anti-metaphysical tradition (like Hume, the Logical Positivists, and to an extent Less Wrongers): what if by avoiding metaphysics I am simply doing bad metaphysics.

Comment author: VKS 04 April 2012 10:43:59AM *  1 point [-]

As an experiment, replace 'metaphysics' and 'metaphysical' with 'theology' and 'theological' or 'spirituality' and 'spiritual'. Then the confusion is obvious.

Unless I don't understand what you mean by metaphysics, and just have all those terms bunched up in my head for no reason, which is also possible.

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 01 April 2012 02:07:43PM 15 points [-]

You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.

Marvin Minsky

Comment author: [deleted] 18 April 2012 12:44:24PM 8 points [-]

A weak man is not as happy as that same man would be if he were strong. This reality is offensive to some people who would like the intellectual or spiritual to take precedence. It is instructive to see what happens to these very people as their squat strength goes up.

-- Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength

Comment author: Incorrect 22 April 2012 06:49:00AM 0 points [-]

He's ignoring that people might not like how larger muscles look.

And personally (though I don't care much) I would only care about practical athletic ability, not weight lifting.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 April 2012 10:59:38AM *  1 point [-]

He's ignoring that people might not like how larger muscles look.

I guess the relation between muscle mass and physical attractiveness is non-monotonic, so a marginal increase in muscle mass would make some people look marginally better and other people look marginally worse. (I suspect the median Internet user is in the former group, though.)

ETA: Judging from the picture on Wikipedia, Rippetoe himself looks like someone who would look better if he lost some weight (but I'm a heterosexual male, so my judgement might be inaccurate).

Comment author: Nornagest 22 April 2012 06:37:02AM 3 points [-]

Hmm. This sort of thing seems plausible, but I wonder how much of it is strength-specific? I've heard of eudaimonic effects for exercise in general (not necessarily strength training) and for mastering any new skill, and I doubt he's filtering those out properly.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 April 2012 01:17:16PM 0 points [-]

Why was this downvoted?

Comment author: Manfred 22 April 2012 05:21:14AM 5 points [-]

Sample: men who come to this guy to get stronger, I assume?

Comment author: lukeprog 15 April 2012 01:30:09PM 8 points [-]

Every intelligent ghost must contain a machine.

Aaron Sloman

Comment author: A4FB53AC 01 April 2012 03:48:12PM *  26 points [-]

A faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.

Arthur C. Clarke

Comment author: Multiheaded 04 April 2012 12:59:14PM 9 points [-]

The trouble is, the most problematic kinds of faith can survive it just fine.

Comment author: gwern 07 April 2012 08:48:11PM 6 points [-]

Which leads us to today's Umeshism: "Why are existing religions so troublesome? Because they're all false, the only ones that exist are so dangerous that they can survive the truth."

Comment author: Multiheaded 07 April 2012 09:05:53PM *  0 points [-]

I'm not sure if I can really call myself Gnostic, but if I can, mine's neither troublesome*, nor does it make any claims inconsistent with a sufficiently strong simulation hypothesis.

-* (when e.g. Voegelin was complaining about "Gnostic" ideas of rearranging society, he was 1) obviously excluding any transformation he approved of, perhaps considering it "natural" and not dangerous meddling, and 2) blaming a fairly universal kind of radicalism correlated with all monotheistic or quasi-monotheistic worldviews; he's essentially privileging the hypothesis to vent about personality types he dislikes, and conservatives should really look at these things more objectively for the sake of their own values)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 April 2012 07:14:48AM 2 points [-]

when e.g. Voegelin was complaining about "Gnostic" ideas of rearranging society, he was 1) obviously excluding any transformation he approved of, perhaps considering it "natural" and not dangerous meddling

Um, no. He was complaining about attempts to rearrange society from the top down.

Comment author: Multiheaded 06 April 2012 08:20:31PM *  18 points [-]

[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades.

However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarized version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time," Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.

(George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf)

(well, we have videogames now, yet... we gotta make them better! more vicseral!)

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 02 April 2012 05:39:48AM *  10 points [-]

Don't kid yourself, just because you got the correct numerical answer to a problem is not justification that you understand the physics of the problem. You must understand all the logical steps in arriving at that solution or you have gained nothing, right answer or not.

My old physics professor David Newton (yes, apparently that's the name he was born with) on how to study physics.

Comment author: BlazeOrangeDeer 02 April 2012 05:57:41AM 2 points [-]

My physics teacher is always sure to clarify which parts of a problem are physics and which are math. Physics is usually the part that allows you to set up the math.

Comment author: gwern 07 April 2012 07:30:53PM 7 points [-]

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

--Some AI Koans, collected by ESR

Comment author: Alejandro1 02 April 2012 07:08:33PM 21 points [-]

On politics as the mind-killer:

We’re at the point where people are morally certain about the empirical facts of what happened between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman on the basis of their general political worldviews. This isn’t exactly surprising—we are tribal creatures who like master narratives—but it feels as though it’s gotten more pronounced recently, and it’s almost certainly making us all stupider.

-- Julian Sanchez (the whole post is worth reading)

Comment author: MixedNuts 04 April 2012 04:30:51PM 1 point [-]

Wait, is there any actual disagreement about what happened? I'm reading older Julian Sanchez posts, but the only point of disagreement seems to be "Once Zimmerman confronted Martin with a gun, did Martin try to disarm him before getting shot?". None of what I've read considers the question relevant; they base their judgements on already known facts such as "someone shot someone else then was let free rather than have a judge decide whether it counted as self-defense".

Comment author: TimS 10 April 2012 12:01:06AM 4 points [-]

There's substantial disagreement about the facts. For example, someone was heard yelling for help, but no one agrees whether that was Zimmerman or Martin.

I can talk about Stand-Your-Ground laws and their apparent effect in this case, but I don't want to drone on.

Comment author: Andy_McKenzie 01 April 2012 10:10:38PM 42 points [-]

A few years into this book, I was diagnosed as diabetic and received a questionnaire in the mail. The insurance carrier stated that diabetics often suffer from depression and it was worried about me. One of the questions was “Do you think about death?” Yes, I do. “How often?” the company wanted to know. “Yearly? Monthly? Weekly? Daily?” And if daily, how many times per day? I dutifully wrote in, “About 70 times per day.” The next time I saw my internist, she told me the insurer had recommended psychotherapy for my severe depression. I explained to her why I thought about death all day—merely an occupational hazard—and she suggested getting therapy nonetheless. I thought, fine, it might help with the research.

The therapist found me tragically undepressed, and I asked her if she could help me design a new life that would maximize the few years that I had left. After all, one should have a different life strategy at sixty than at twenty. She asked why I thought I was going to die and why I had such a great fear of death. I said, I am going to die. It’s not a fear; it’s a reality. There must be some behavior that could be contraindicated for a man my age but other normally dangerous behavior that takes advantage of the fact that I am risking fewer years at sixty or sixty-five years of age than I was at twenty or twenty-five (such as crimes that carry a life sentence, crushing at age twenty but less so at age sixty-five). Surely psychology must have something to say on the topic. Turns out, according to my therapist, it does not. There was therapy for those with terminal illness, for the bereaved, for the about-to-be-bereaved, for professionals who dealt with terminal patients, and so on, but there was nothing for people who were simply aware that their life would come to a natural end. It would seem to me that this is a large, untapped market. The therapist advised me not to think about death.

Dick Teresi, The Undead

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 02 April 2012 06:02:54AM 3 points [-]
Comment author: Pavitra 05 April 2012 12:59:38PM 11 points [-]

In the real world things are very different. You just need to look around you. Nobody wants to die that way. People die of disease and accident. Death comes suddenly and there is no notion of good or bad. It leaves, not a dramatic feeling but great emptiness. When you lose someone you loved very much you feel this big empty space and think, 'If I had known this was coming I would have done things differently.'

Yoshinori Kitase

Comment author: gwern 07 April 2012 08:39:20PM *  1 point [-]

Context: Aeris dies. (Spoilers!)

Comment author: [deleted] 02 April 2012 05:13:52PM *  11 points [-]

I first encountered this in a physics newsgroup, after some crank was taking some toy model way too seriously:

Analogies are like ropes; they tie things together pretty well, but you won't get very far if you try to push them.

Thaddeus Stout Tom Davidson

(I remembered something like "if you pull them too much, they break down", actually...)

Comment author: tgb 01 April 2012 01:30:37PM *  11 points [-]

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.

-- Christina Rossetti, Who has seen the Wind?

Comment author: Kutta 01 April 2012 01:00:30PM *  11 points [-]

He who knows how to do something is the servant of he who knows why that thing must be done.

-- Isuna Hasekura, Spice and Wolf vol. 5 ("servant" is justified by the medieval setting).

Comment author: Elithrion 03 April 2012 01:38:31AM *  23 points [-]

"What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?" This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table. Richard continued, "What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself."

Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Comment author: Klevador 14 April 2012 04:48:48AM *  12 points [-]

Any collocation of persons, no matter how numerous, how scant, how even their homogeneity, how firmly they profess common doctrine, will presently reveal themselves to consist of smaller groups espousing variant versions of the common creed; and these sub-groups will manifest sub-sub-groups, and so to the final limit of the single individual, and even in this single person conflicting tendencies will express themselves.

— Jack Vance, The Languages of Pao

Comment author: [deleted] 12 April 2012 07:39:12AM 14 points [-]

The most fundamental form of human stupidity is forgetting what we were trying to do in the first place

--Nietzsche

Comment author: VKS 04 April 2012 10:23:55AM 32 points [-]

Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste. Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark, "Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think," surprise you?

  • Richard Hamming
Comment author: [deleted] 04 April 2012 08:19:04PM 0 points [-]

It would surprise me, since no one could ever give me an example. I'm not sure what kind of evidence could give me good reason to think that there are thoughts that I cannot think.

Comment author: MixedNuts 04 April 2012 04:06:45PM 3 points [-]

Because thoughts don't behave much like perceptions at all, so that wouldn't occur to us or convince us much once we hear it. Are there any thoughtlike things we don't get but can indirectly manipulate?

Comment author: VKS 04 April 2012 04:17:21PM *  9 points [-]

Extremely large numbers.

(among other things)

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 April 2012 08:10:47PM 25 points [-]

It surprises people like Greg Egan, and they're not entirely stupid, because brains are Turing complete modulo the finite memory - there's no analogue of that for visible wavelengths.

Comment author: Vaniver 01 April 2012 11:20:25PM 16 points [-]

For those who feel deeply about contemporary politics, certain topics have become so infected by considerations of prestige that a genuinely rational approach to them is almost impossible.

-George Orwell

Comment author: Rhwawn 06 April 2012 07:54:30PM 17 points [-]

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and, in effect, increases the mental power of the race.

Alfred North Whitehead, “An Introduction to Mathematics” (thanks to Terence Tao)

Comment author: Yvain 02 April 2012 12:55:42PM 36 points [-]

On counter-signaling, how not to do:

US police investigated a parked car with a personalized plate reading "SMUGLER". They found the vehicle, packed with 24 lb (11 kg) of narcotics, parked near the Canadian border at a hotel named "The Smugglers' Inn." Police believed the trafficker thought that being so obvious would deter the authorities.

-- The Irish Independent, "News In Brief"

Comment author: Alejandro1 02 April 2012 07:06:46PM *  9 points [-]

Maybe the guy had been reading too much Edgar Allan Poe? As a child, I loved "The Purloined Letter" and tried to play that trick on my sister - taking something from her and hiding it "in plain sight". Of course, she found it immediately.

ETA: it was a girl, not a guy.