Rationality Quotes April 2012
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- Do not quote yourself
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB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.
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Comments (858)
— Waiting for God (TV Series)
Is there a point to this quote, besides that this diana character doesn't understand the term 'moral dilemma'?
That the kind of "moral dilemmas" philosophers tend to contemplate, tend to be very different to the kind of dilemmas people encounter in practice.
Dick Teresi, The Undead
-- John McCarthy
T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
T. S. Eliot, The Rock
-Sister Y
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.
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. ;)
-- Pete Seeger, "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy"
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...)
-- Trey Parker, Jewpacabra
(This is at about five minutes fifty seconds into the episode.)
Edit: Related Sequence post.
Andrew Hussie
I hate to downvote Homestuck, but there I go, downvoting it. The typing quirks and chatlog-style layout are too specific to the comic.
Is there a reason all the b's have been replaced by 8's?
Character typing quirk in the original.
— Poe, The Purloined Letter
--Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
-- Bjork
--Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West
That sounds deep, but it has nothing to to with rationality
Not really, for example it is actually pretty clearly connected to fun theory.
Lewis Carroll was religious, and to add to that, he was human.
For that matter, so was Martin Gardner.
These threads would be very sparsely populated if we avoided quoting humans.
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.
Maybe, but the Big World idea causes much more severe damage, judging by the recent discussions here and elsewhere.
T. S. Eliot
Robert Brault
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?
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.)
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?
On specificity and sneaking on connotations; useful for the liberal-minded among us:
-celandine13
What about a "Racist4", someone who assign different moral values to people of different races all other things being equal?
That would be a paleo-nazi. Not many of them around, anymore, and those that are don't get away with much.
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?
You left out one common definition.
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.
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.
Which are generally much harder to observe.
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.)
I think it's more a case same observations, different proposed mechanisms.
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.
Well, Bill Clinton had saner economic policies, but otherwise I would predict that phrase, or something similar, being used against a white politician.
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)?
Well, yes by finding enough "code words" you can make any criticism of Obama racist.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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?
A political opponent of Obama might say:
or
or
edit: or
(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.
Here is another example of my point that one can claim any criticism of Obama is racist if one is sufficiently motivated.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.)
Possibly, I couldn't quite figure out Mixed Nuts' definitions because he seemed to be implicitly assuming that accurate priors were equal over races.
Well they aren't. Nevertheless, I should probably have said something more like:
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
(blink)
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'.)
That's the question I was implicitly asking Oscar.
This is missing Racist4:
Someone whose preferences result in disparate impact.
...and also useful for those among us who don't identify as "liberal-minded."
Where would someone like Steve Sailer fit in this classification?
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.
What evidence leads to this conclusion?
He published his IAT results and he's proposed policies that play to the strengths of blacks.
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.
-C. Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1852.
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
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.
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.
-- 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Barbara Alice Mann
I'm not convinced fairness is inherently valuable.
I don't think that fairness is terminally valuable, but I think it has instrumental value.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
I think that Robert Smith has a much wiser take on this: "The world is neither fair nor unfair"
The world is neither F nor ~F?
“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.Civil wars are bitter because
---Thucydides
Found here.
"An organized mind is a disciplined mind. And a disciplined mind is a powerful mind."
-- Batman (Batman the Brave and the Bold)
So says a man-dressed-like-a-bat.
(That's not a jibe aimed at the quote but rather a reference to this.)
Downvoted because this comment serves only to propagate a mildly-entertaining meme, rather than contributing to the discussion in some way.
-Thomas Huxley
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."
-Biutiful
-- David Henderson on Social Darwinism
G. K. Chesterton
"Reality is the thing that surpises me." - Paraphrase of EY
Also:
Zach Wiener's elegant disproof:
(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.)
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.
“The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance. ”
-St Augustine of Hippo
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
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)
--1943 Disney cartoon
-- Scott Locklin
Cryonics?
Rasmus Eide aka. Armok_GoB.
PS. This is not taken from an LW/OB post.
Everything needs to be taken both seriously and not-seriously. Tepid unreflective semi-seriousness is always a mistake.
-Game of Thrones (TV show)
--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.
--Jonathan Haidt, source
-G. K. Chesterton, The Curse of the Golden Cross
-- Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind
--Samuel Johnson, The Adventurer, #119, December 25, 1753.
-A Weak Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad
-Robert Kurzban, Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind
--Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620) <!-- 1905 (Ellis, R. & Spedding, J., Trans.). London: Routledge. -->
"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
David Pearce
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.
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.
Marvin Minsky
-- Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength
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.
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).
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.
Why was this downvoted?
Sample: men who come to this guy to get stronger, I assume?
Aaron Sloman
Arthur C. Clarke
The trouble is, the most problematic kinds of faith can survive it just fine.
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."
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)
Um, no. He was complaining about attempts to rearrange society from the top down.
(George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf)
(well, we have videogames now, yet... we gotta make them better! more vicseral!)
My old physics professor David Newton (yes, apparently that's the name he was born with) on how to study physics.
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.
--Some AI Koans, collected by ESR
On politics as the mind-killer:
-- Julian Sanchez (the whole post is worth reading)
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".
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.
Dick Teresi, The Undead
You're going to die.
Or maybe not.
Yoshinori Kitase
Context: Aeris dies. (Spoilers!)
I first encountered this in a physics newsgroup, after some crank was taking some toy model way too seriously:
Thaddeus Stout Tom Davidson
(I remembered something like "if you pull them too much, they break down", actually...)
-- Christina Rossetti, Who has seen the Wind?
-- Isuna Hasekura, Spice and Wolf vol. 5 ("servant" is justified by the medieval setting).
Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
— Jack Vance, The Languages of Pao
--Nietzsche
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.
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?
Extremely large numbers.
(among other things)
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.
-George Orwell
Alfred North Whitehead, “An Introduction to Mathematics” (thanks to Terence Tao)
On counter-signaling, how not to do:
-- The Irish Independent, "News In Brief"
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.