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- Do not quote yourself
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB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)
-- Isuna Hasekura, Spice and Wolf vol. 5 ("servant" is justified by the medieval setting).
I think the quote should start with, "he WHO knows...".
I don't get it.
Short explanation: the person that knows why a thing must be done is generally the person who decides what must be done. Application to rationality: instrumental rationality is a method that serves goals. The part that values and the part that implements are distinct. (Also, you can see the separation of terminal and instrumental values.)
And explains why businessmen keep more of the money than the random techies they hire.
Would "servant" not otherwise be justified?
It's fairly benign, but looks a little archaic -- not so archaic that it'd have to be medieval, though. The rest of the phrasing is fairly modern, or I'd probably have assumed it was a quote from anywhere from the Enlightenment up to the Edwardian period. It has the ring of something a Victorian aphorist might say.
-- Christina Rossetti, Who has seen the Wind?
Interestingly enough, this is my friend's parents response when asked why they believe in an invisible god. I suppose they haven't considered that the leaves and trees may be messed up enough to shake of their own accord.
Interesting.
It is rather unlikely that Christina Rossetti intended this to be a rationalist quote in a sense we would identify with. I do read it as an argument for scientific realism and belief in the implied invisible, but it seems likely that she was merely being poetic or that she was making a pro-religion argument, given her background. Of course the beauty of this system is that if someone quotes this to you as an argument for God (or anything), you can ask them what the leaves and trees are for their wind and thus get at their true argument.
Furthermore, the context in which I first read it is the video game Braid, juvpu cerfragrq vg va gur pbagrkg bs gur chefhvg bs fpvrapr. I would highly recommend this game, by the way.
I love that game, it's been a while since I played it though.
Marvin Minsky
Paul Dirac
Excellent quote.
Andrew Hussie
Is there a reason all the b's have been replaced by 8's?
Character typing quirk in the original.
The typing quirks actually serve a purpose in the comic. Almost all communication among the characters takes place through chat logs, so the system provides a handy way to visually distinguish who's speaking. They also reinforce each character's personality and thematic associations - for example, the character quoted above (Aranea) is associated with spiders, arachnids in general, and the zodiac sign of Scorpio.
Unfortunately, all that is irrelevant in the context of a Rationality Quote.
<nitpick> The character in question is named Vriska. You're thinking of Aradia. </nitpick>
<nitpick> Actually, he's not -- the quote comes from Vriska's recently introduced pre-Scratch ancestor, who's got a similar but not identical typing style. </nitpick>
You're right, never mind. Still internalizing the new set of ancestors.
I hate to downvote Homestuck, but there I go, downvoting it. The typing quirks and chatlog-style layout are too specific to the comic.
Every time someone mentions Homestuck I resist (until now) posting this image macro.
I spent a few minutes reading Homestuck from the beginning, but it did not grab me at all. Is there a better place to start, or is it probably just not my cup of tea?
(Speaking of webcomics, I have a similar question about Dresden Codak.)
It starts pretty slow. Most of the really impressive bits, to my taste, don't start happening until well into act 4, but that's a few thousand (mostly single-panel, but still) pages of story to go through; unless you have a great deal of free time, I wouldn't hold it against you if you decided it's not for you by the end of act 2. Alternately, you might consider reading act 5.1 and going back if you like it; that's a largely independent and much more compressed storyline, although you'll lose some of the impact if you don't have the referents in the earlier parts of the story to compare against. You'll need to front-load a lot of tolerance for idiosyncratic typing that way, though.
Which brings me to quotes like MHD's: for quotation out of context, I would definitely have edited out the typing quirks (or ed8ed, if we're being cute). The quirks are more about characterization than content, and some of the characters are almost unreadable without a lot of practice.
Dresden Codak, incidentally, doesn't have this excuse. If you've read a couple dozen pages of that and didn't like it, you're probably not going to like the rest.
I've never been sure exactly where and how to get into the Dresden Codak storyline; but the one-offs like Caveman Science and the epistemological RPG are some of my favorite things on the internet.
The first real "storyline" Dresden Codak comic can be found here, That said, a lot of people I've spoken with simply don't like the Dresden Codak storyline in any form, and prefer the funny one-offs to any of the continuity-oriented comics.
I disagree with Nornagest: I think the best place to start is at the beginning. They pretty much had me at "fetch modus", I was hooked from then on. A lot of really inspirational things start to happen later on, f.ex. the Flash animation "[S] WV: Ascend", but it might be difficult to comprehend without reading the earlier parts.
I would also advise starting at the beginning because I'm starting to grow dissatisfied with the double-meta-reacharaound tack that the comic is taking now... The earlier chapters had a much more coherent story, IMO.
Arthur C. Clarke
-- Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind
Robert Brault
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.)
I'd call creatonists "evolution deniers" before I'd call them "evolution skeptics", but I suppose they'd do the same to me with God...
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?
LW's standards for rationality quotes vary, but in any case this does allow for the reading of endorsing allowing perceived evidence to override pre-existing beliefs, if one ignores the standard connotations of "skeptic" and "missionary".
I guess, but that seems like a strange interpretation seeing as the speaker says he's no longer "a skeptic" in general.
The point of rationality isn't to better argue against beliefs you consider wrong but to change your existing beliefs to be more correct.
That's a good reminder but I'm not sure how it applies here.
A quote that calls the holder of a potentially wrong belief a "skeptic" rather than a "believer" is more useful since it makes you more likely to identify with him.
Also judging from his other quotes I'm pretty sure that's not what he meant...
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?
Barbara Alice Mann
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.)
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?
That is indeed possible if F is incoherent or has no referent. The assertion seems equivalent to "There's no such thing as fairness".
I'm confused because it was Eliezer who taught me this.
EDIT: I'm now resisting the temptation to tell Eliezer to "read the sequences".
Original parent says, "The world is neither fair nor unfair", meaning, "The world is neither deliberately fair nor deliberately unfair", and my comment was meant to be interpreted as replying, "Of course the world is unfair - if it's not fair, it must be unfair - and it doesn't matter that it's accidental rather than deliberate." Also to counteract the deep wisdom aura that "The world is neither fair nor unfair" gets from counterintuitively violating the (F \/ ~F) axiom schema.
It matters hugely that it's not deliberately unfair. People get themselves into really awful psychological holes - in particular the lasting and highly destructive stain of bitterness - by noting that the world is not fair, and going on to adopt a mindset that it is deliberately unfair.
It matters a lot (to those who are vulnerable to the particular kind of irrational bitterness in question) that the universe is not deliberately unfair.
I took Eliezer's "it doesn't matter" to be the more specific claim "it does not matter to the question of whether the universe is unfair whether the unfairness present is deliberate or not-deliberate".
No, that fairness isn't a characteristic you can measure of the world. There's such a thing as fairness when it comes to eg dividing a cake between children.
Unfair is the opposite of fair, not the logical complement. The moon is neither happy nor sad.
You are confusing "fairness" and egalitarianism. While everyone has their own definition of "fairness", it feels obvious to me that, even if you're correct about the cost of imposing reasonable egalitarianism being too high in any given situation, this does not absolve us from seeking some palliative measures to protect those left worst off by that situation. Reducing first the suffering of those who suffer most is an ok partial definition of fairness for me.
Despite (or due to, I'm too sleepy to figure it out) considering myself an egalitarian, I would prefer a world where the most achieving 10% get 200 units of income (and the top 10% of them get 1000), the least achieving 10% get 2 units and everyone else gets 5-15 units (1 unit supporting the lifestyle of today's European blue-collar worker) to a world where the bottom 10% get 0.2 units and everyone else gets 25-50. Isn't that more or less the point of charity (aside from signaling)?
I didn't say this. Actually, I'd consider it somewhat incoherent in the context of my argument: if imposing reasonable egalitarianism (whatever "reasonable" is) was too costly to be sustainable, it seems unlikely that we'd have developed intuitions calling for it.
On the other hand, I suppose one possible scenario where that'd make sense would be if some of the emotional architecture driving our sense of equity evolved in the context of band-level societies, and if that architecture turned out to scale poorly -- but that's rather speculative, somewhat at odds with my sense of history, and in any case irrelevant to the point I was trying to make in the grandparent.
Anyway, don't read too much into it. My point was about the relationship between the world and its mathematics and our anthropomorphic intuitions; I wasn't trying to make any sweeping generalizations about our behavior towards each other, except in the rather limited context of game theory and its various cultural consequences. I certainly wasn't trying to make any prescriptive statements about how charitable we should be.
Some of the local Right are likely to claim that we developed them just for the purpose of signaling, and that they're the worst thing EVAH when applied to reality. ;)
(Please don't take this as a political attack, guys, my debate with you is philosophical. I just need a signifier for you.)
Do people typically say "life isn't fair" about situations that people could choose to change?
Don't they usually say it about situations that they could choose to change, to people who don't have the choice?
I agree, it's usually used as an excuse not to try to change things.
Exactly. In my experience the people who say "life isn't fair" are the main reason that it still isn't.
How did you develop a sufficiently powerful causal model of "life" to establish this claim with such confidence?
i mean that in almost all of the situations where I've heard that phrase used, it was used by someone who was being unfair and who couldn't be bothered to make a real excuse.
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.
Could you give an example of such a situation where the cost of achieving "fairness" is indeed too high for you? Because I have a hunch that we differ not so much in our assessment of costs but in our notions of "fairness". Oh, and what is "Serious consideration"? Is a young man thinking of what route he should set his life upon and wanting to increase "fairness" doing more or less serious consideration than an adult thinking whether to give $500 to charity?
I don't remember exactly what I imagined, but it was something like this:
Actually, I'd say that it could be a case where justice can assert itself... the boss is, barring unusual circumstances, going to lose out on a skilled worker and that could impact his business.
(I mean, presumably the overly high cost of achieving fairness in that case would be passing a law telling employers how to make hiring decisions... but that idiot of a boss would benefit from such a law if the heuristics in it were good; now he's free to shoot himself in the foot!)
Bob is telling Alice that life isn't fair. Bob is Alice's friend; he is not the boss. Bob seems like he has Alice's interests in mind, since it is unlikely that Alice "doing something about it" would be worth it (such as confronting the boss, suing the company, picketing on the street outside the building, etc...). She is probably better off just continuing her job search. This is independent of whether or not Alice's decision is best for society as a whole.
Oh, that makes sense.
Current example: A friend of mine telling her very intelligent son that he has to do boring schoolwork because life isn't fair.
It occurs to me to ask her whether a good gifted and talented program is available.
Hmm? I know I'm no-one to tell you those things and it might sound odd coming from a stranger, but... please try persuading her to attend to the kid's special needs somehow. Ideally, I believe, he should be learning what he loves plus things useful in any career like logic and social skills, with moderate challenge and in the company of like-minded peers... but really, any improvement over either the boredom of standard "education" or the strain of a Japanese-style cram school would be fine. It pains me to see smart children burning out, because it happened to me too.
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.
Is this really about fairness? Seems like different people agree that fairness is a good thing, but use different definitions of fairness. Or perhaps the word fairness is often used to mean "applause lights of my group".
For someone fairness means "everyone has food to eat", for another fairness means "everyone pays for their own food". Then proponents of one definition accuse the others of not being fair -- the debate is framed as if the problem is not different definitions of fairness, but rather our group caring about fairness and the other group ignoring fairness; which of course means that we are morally right and they are morally wrong.
IDK, but I have heard people refer to fairness in similar situations, so I am merely adopting their usage.
I agree. To a large degree the near universal preference for "fairness" in humans is illusory, because people mean mutually contradictory things by it.
I believe "fairness" can be given a fairly rigorous definition (I have in mind people like Rawls), but the second you get explicit about it, people stop agreeing that it is such a good thing (and therefore, it loses its moral force as a human universal).
G. K. Chesterton
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.)
This quote seems relevant:
G. H. Hardy, upon receiving a letter containing mathematical formulae from Ramanujan
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.
Depends on the infinity. Ordinal infinities change when you add one to them.
If we're restricting ourselves to actual published fiction, I present Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. The protagonist's parents are a mountain and a washing machine, it gets weirder from there, and the whole thing is played completely straight.
Depends on which end you add one at. :-)
(I mention this not because I think there's any danger Ezekiel doesn't know it, but just because it might pique someone's curiosity.)
Indeed, I posted this quote partially out of annoyance at a certain type of analysis I kept seeing in the MoR threads. Namely, person X benefited from the way event Y turned out; therefore, person X was behind event Y. After all, thinking like this about real life will quickly turn one into a tin-foil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist.
Yes but in real life the major players don't have the ability to time travel, read minds, become invisible, manipulate probability etcetera, these make complex plans far more plausible than they would be in the real world. (That and conservation of detail.)
Which is exactly what MoR tells us to do to analyze it, is it not?
That's still not a reason for assuming everyone is running perfect gambit roulettes.
"Reality is the thing that surpises me." - Paraphrase of EY
Also:
I was originally going to post that one, but decided to go with Chesterton's version since it better explains what is meant. (At the expense of loosing some of the snappiness.)
Dick Teresi, The Undead
Dick Teresi, The Undead
You're going to die.
Or maybe not.
I like the first video, but I wish it ended at 4:20. It reminds me a lot of Ecclesiastes, which is a refreshingly honest essay about the meaning of life, with the moral "and therefore you should do what God wants you to do" tacked on at the end by an anonymous editor.
-George Orwell
Mad Men, "My Old Kentucky Home"
Another good one from Don Draper:
T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
Correct me if I'm wrong, but does this seem like an affirmation of religious morality and denouncement of consequentialism? I'm failing to see the rationality here.
Rationality in: Recognition of timeless/timeful distinction (Law of God, Law of Man), Emphasizing timeless effects even when they're heavily discountable, Pointing out that history tends to make fools of the temporally good, Touching on the touchy theme of consent, Proposing arguments about when it is or is not justified to take-into-account or ignore the arguments of others who seem to be acting in good faith.
Also, even a simple counter-affirmation to local ideology is itself useful if it's sufficiently eloquently-stated.
(Pretty drunk, apologies for any errors.)
You mean the part where you equate 'timeless' considerations with the Law of God?
That's definitely not an error. Have you read much T. S. Eliot? He was obsessed with the timeful/timeless local/global distinction. Read Four Quartets.
I wasn't trying to imply you misrepresented T.S.Eliot's obsession. Just that you make an error in advocating it as an example of a "Rationality Quote". Because it's drivel.
0_o
/sigh...
Wait, it explicitly says that his decision (if you call that "decision" to which his whole being gives entire consent) to give his life to the Law of God should (and is to) be taken timelessly ("out of time"). ...I don't see how that's not clear. Most of the time when people complain about equivocation/syncretism it's because the (alleged) meaning is implicit or hidden one layer down, but that's not the case here.
Conditional on the existence of a Law of God (and the sort of god in whom Eliot believed) that's not so very unreasonable. It's worth distinguishing between "irrational" and "rational but based on prior assumptions I find very improbable".
(None the less, I don't think there's much rationality in the lines Will_Newsome quoted, though it does gesticulate in the general direction of an important difficulty with consequentialism: a given action has a lot of consequences and sorting out the net effect is difficult-to-impossible; so we have to make do with a bunch of heuristic approximations to consequentialism. I'll still take that over a bunch of heuristic approximations to the law of a probably-nonexistent god, any day.)
What is the empirical difference between a person who is temporally vs timelessly good?
T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
“The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance. ”
-St Augustine of Hippo
Augustine has obviously never tried to learn something which requires complicated movement, or at least he didn't try it as an adult.
"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
It took me years to learn not to feel afraid due to a perceived status threat when I was having a hard time figuring something out.
A good way to make it hard for me to learn something is to tell me that how quickly I understand it is an indicator of my intellectual aptitude.
Interesting article about a study on this effect:
This seems like a more complicated explanation than the data supports. It seems simpler, and equally justified, to say that praising effort leads to more effort, which is a good thing on tasks where more effort yields greater success.
I would be interested to see a variation on this study where the second-round problems were engineered to require breaking of established first-round mental sets in order to solve them. What effect does praising effort after the first round have in this case?
Perhaps it leads to more effort, which may be counterproductive for those sorts of problems, and thereby lead to less success than emphasizing intelligence. Or, perhaps not. I'm not making a confident prediction here, but I'd consider a praising-effort-yields-greater-success result more surprising (and thus more informative) in that scenario than the original one.
I agree that the data doesn't really distinguish this explanation from the effect John Maxwell described, mainly I just linked it because the circumstances seemed reminiscent and I thought he might find it interesting. Its worth noting though that these aren't competing explanations: your interpretation focuses on explaining the success of the "effort" group, and the other focuses on the failure of the "intelligence" group.
To help decide which hypothesis accounts for most of the difference, there should really have been a control group that was just told "well done" or something. Whichever group diverged the most from the control, that group would be the one where the choice of praise had the greatest effect.
I've seen this study cited a lot; it's extremely relevant to smart self- and other-improvement. But there are various possible interpretations of the results, besides what the authors came up with... Also, how much has this study been replicated?
I'd like to see a top-level post about it.
Dupe
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.
-A Weak Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad
-- John McCarthy
Repeat
I'm starting to feel it was a mistake to have so many of those threads instead of a single one.
A single thread would have been of unmanageable size.
In what sense unmanageable? What would it make harder to do that is easy to do now?
It seems to me the current setup makes it harder to know if you're posting a repeat, or to display a list of all top quotes.
Also, I think it leads to more barrel-scraping this way; it seems to me that for the most part we ran out of the really great quotes and now often things get posted that have no special rationality lesson, but instead appeal to the tastes and specific beliefs common in our particular community.
Unmanageable because the site software doesn't show more than 500 (top-level?) comments, and because large numbers of comments load more slowly.
There's a way to find top-voted quotes-- Best of Rationality Quotes 2009/2010 (Warning: 750kB page, 774 quotes). This could be considered a hint about the quantity problem.
There is another one for 2011.
As for dupes, the search on the site is adequate for finding them-- what's needed is a recommendation on the quotes page for people to check before posting.
I think the quotes continue to be somewhat interesting, but it's not so much that there are no great ones left (though I was surprised to discover recently that "Nature to be commanded must be obeyed" hadn't been listed) as that they tend to keep hitting the same points.
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.
I find it highly unlikely that this is the whole story. Surely the police are not licensed to investigate a car based solely on its vanity plate and where it was parked...
You are probably right that more information drew police attention to the car, but "near the border" gets one most of the way to legally justified. In the 1970s, the US Supreme Court explicitly approved a permanent checkpoint approximately 50 miles north of the Mexican border.
Well that's a rather depressing piece of law...
Johan Liebert, Monster
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...)
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.
On politics as the mind-killer:
-- Julian Sanchez (the whole post is worth reading)
Does anyone know the exact quote to which he is referring here?
I think it's this but I'm not sure:
Given that they supposedly drowned people for discussing irrational numbers that seems false.
Tell that to Socrates.
We've reached the point where the weather is political, and so are third person pronouns.
T. S. Eliot
-Biutiful
T. S. Eliot, The Rock
-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."
Chris Bucholz
Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Can you please explain this, slowly and carefully? It sounds plausible, and I'm trying to improve my understanding of space-time / 4-D thinking.
Ponder only the one dimensional time for now. At every point of time, you have only this moment and nothing more. But with the memories, you have same previous moments cached. Stored somewhere "orthogonal" to the timeline.
I've heard it here: http://edge.org/conversation/a-universe-of-self-replicating-code
On a site even better than this and quite unpopular on this site, also. Read or watch Dyson there. As many others.
-Robert Kurzban, Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind
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.
-Sister Y
-G. K. Chesterton, The Curse of the Golden Cross
The ghost of Parnell is Far, the presentation to the Queen is Near?
Perhaps. I had thought of the quote in the context of a distinction between epistemic/Bayesian probability and physical possibility or probability. For us (though perhaps not for Father Brown) the ghost story is physically impossible, it contradicts the basic laws of reality, while the presentation story does not. (In terms of the MWI we might say that there is a branch of the wavefunction where Gladstone offered the Queen a cigar, but none where a ghost appeared to him.) However, we might very well be justified in assigning the ghost story a higher epistemic probability, because we have more underlying uncertainty about (to use your words) Far concepts like the possibility of ghosts than about Near ones like how Gladstone would have behaved in front of the Queen.
I seem to instinctively assign the ghost story a lower probability. The lesson of the quote might still be valid, can you come up with an example that would work for me?
-- Douglas Adams. The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988) p.169
Yes, exactly the same idea. Partial versions of your quote have been posted twice in LW already, and might have inspired me to post the Chesterton prior version, but I liked seeing the context for the Adams one that you provide.
Out of context, the quote makes much less sense; the specific example illustrates the point much better than the abstract description does.
Just for fun, which of the following extremely improbable events do you think is more likely to happen first:
1) The winning Mega Millions jackpot combination is 1-2-3-4-5-6 (Note that there are 175,711,536 possible combinations, and drawings are held twice a week.)
2) The Pope makes a public statement announcing his conversion to Islam (and isn't joking).
Assuming that the 123456 winning must occur by legit random drawing (not a prank or a bug of some kind that is biased towards such a simple result) then I'd go for the Pope story as ]more likely to happen any given day in the present. After all, there have been historically many examples of highly ranked members of groups who sincerely defect to opposing groups, starting with St. Paul. But I confess I'm not very sure about this, and I'm too sleepy to think about the problem rigorously.
In the form you posed the question ("which is more likely to happen first") it is much more difficult to answer because I'd have to evaluate how likely are institutions such as the lottery and the Catholic Church to persist in their current form for centuries or millennia.
Good point.
1-2-3-4-5-6 is a Schelling point for overt tampering with a lottery. That makes it considerably more likely to be reported as the outcome to a lottery, even if it's not more likely to be the outcome of a stochastic method of selecting numbers.
After seeing quite a few examples, I've recently become very sensitive to comparisons of an abstract idea of something with an objective something, as if they were on equal footing. Your question explicitly says the Pope conversion is a legitimate non-shenanigans event, while not making the same claim of the lottery result. Was that intentional?
I don't think that's true. If you were going to tamper with the lottery, isn't your most likely motive that you want to win it? Why, then, set it up in such a way that you have to share the prize with the thousands of other people who play those numbers?
I specified "overt tampering" rather than "covert tampering". If you wanted to choose a result that would draw suspicion, 1-2-3-4-5-6 strikes me as the most obvious candidate.
It'd be even more fun if you replaced "1-2-3-4-5-6" with "14-17-26-51-55-36". (Whenever I play lotteries I always choose combinations like 1-2-3-4-5-6, and I love to see the shocked faces of the people I tell, tell them that it's no less likely than any other combination but it's at least easier to remember, and see their perplexed faces for the couple seconds it takes them to realize I'm right. Someone told me that if such a combination ever won they'd immediately think of me. (Now that I think about it, choosing a Schelling point does have the disadvantage that should I win, I'd have to split the jackpot with more people, but I don't think that's ever gonna happen anyway.))
Dunno how you would count the (overwhelmingly likely) case where both Mega Millions and the papacy cease to exist without either of those events happening first, but let's pretend you said "more likely to happen in the next 10 years"... Event 1 ought to happen 0.6 times per million years in average; I dunno about the probability per unit time for Event 2, but it's likely about two orders of magnitude larger.
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, 1856
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.
Yes. There is a difference between speaking imprecisely because we don't know (yet) how to express it better, and speaking things unrelated to reality. The former is worth doing, because a good approximation can be better than nothing, and it can help us to avoid worse approximations.
Well, but what it that is meant by metaphysics? I've heard the word many times, seen its use, and I still don't know what I'm supposed to do with it.
Ok, so now I've read the Wikipedia article, and now I'm unconvinced that when people use the term they mean what it says they mean. I know at least some people who definitely used "metaphysical" in the sense of "spiritual". What do you mean by metaphysics?
Also unconvinced that it has any reason to be thought of as a single subject. I get the impression that the only reason these topics are together is that they feel "big".
But I will grant you that given Wiki's definition of metaphysics, there is no reason to think that it is in principle incapable of providing useful works. I revise my position to state that arguments should not be dismissed because they are metaphysical, but rather because they are bad. Furthermore, I suspect that "metaphysics" is just a bad category, and should, as much as possible, be expunged from one's thinking.
-- Scott Locklin
-- C. S. Lewis
-Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy (1961)
"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.)