Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:
Tags like "stupid," "bad at __", "sloppy," and so on, are ways of saying "You're performing badly and I don't know why." Once you move it to "you're performing badly because you have the wrong fingerings," or "you're performing badly because you don't understand what a limit is," it's no longer a vague personal failing but a causal necessity. Anyone who never understood limits will flunk calculus. It's not you, it's the bug.
-celandine13 (Hat-tip to Frank Adamek. In addition, the linked article is so good that I had trouble picking something to put in rationality quotes; in other words, I recommend it.)
Another quote from the same piece, just before that para:
Once you start to think of mistakes as deterministic rather than random, as caused by "bugs" (incorrect understanding or incorrect procedures) rather than random inaccuracy, a curious thing happens.
You stop thinking of people as "stupid."
I really, really like this. Thanks for posting it!
To elucidate the "bug model" a bit, consider "bugs" not in a single piece of software, but in a system. The following is drawn from my professional experience as a sysadmin for large-scale web applications, but I've tried to make it clear:
Suppose that you have a web server; or better yet, a cluster of servers. It's providing some application to users — maybe a wiki, a forum, or a game. Most of the time when a query comes in from a user's browser, the server gives a good response. However, sometimes it gives a bad response — maybe it's unusually slow, or it times out, or it gives an error or an incomplete page instead of what the user was looking for.
It turns out that if you want to fix these sorts of problems, considering them merely to be "flakiness" and stopping there is not enough. You h...
Author used to post here as __, but I think her account's been deleted.
ETA: removed username as I realized this comment kind of frustrates the presumable point of the account deletion in the first place.
...Once upon a time, there was a man who was riding in a horse drawn carriage and traveling to go take care of some affairs; and in the carriage there was also a very big suitcase. He told the driver to of the carriage to drive non-stop and the horse ran extremely fast.
Along the road, there was an old man who saw them and asked, “Sir, you seem anxious, where do you need to go?”
The man in the carriage then replied in a loud voice, “I need to go to the state of Chu.” The old man heard and laughing he smiled and said, “You are going the wrong way. The state of Chu is in the south, how come you are going to to the north?”
“That’s alright,” The man in the carriage then said, “Can you not see? My horse runs very fast.”
“Your horse is great, but your path is incorrect.”
“It’s no problem, my carriage is new, it was made just last month.”
“Your carriage is brand new, but this is not the road one takes to get to Chu.”
“Old Uncle, you don’t know,” and the man in the carriage pointed to the suitcase in the back and said, “In that suitcase there’s alot of money. No matter how long the road is, I am not afraid.”
“You have lots of money, but do not forget, The direction which you are going is wrong. I ca
I always use the metaphor of the fast car to distinguish between intelligence and rationality.
For example, in many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.
--Mencius Moldbug, on belief as attire and conspicuous wrongness.
This reminds me of the following passage from We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver:
But keeping secrets is a discipline. I never use to think of myself as a good liar, but after having had some practice I had adopted the prevaricator's credo that one doesn't so much fabricate a lie as marry it. A successful lie cannot be brought into this world and capriciously abandoned; like any committed relationship it must be maintained, and with far more devotion than the truth, which carries on being carelessly true without any help. By contrast, my lie needed me as much as I needed it, and so demanded the constancy of wedlock: Till death do us part.
Possible additional factor: The truth is frequently boring-- it helps to add some absurdity just to get people's attention. Once you've got people's attention, proof of loyalty can come into play.
If the attacker, whenever he pulls a red ball out of the urn, puts it back and keeps pulling until he gets a blue ball, the Bayesian "rational mind" will conclude that the urn is entirely full of blue balls.
Surely the actual Bayesian rational mind's conclusion is that the attacker will (probably) always show a blue ball, nothing to do with the urn at all.
Solomonoff prior gives nonzero probability to the attacker deceiving us. But humans are not very good at operating with such probabilities precisely.
Could we start that reading with the classic Bayes' Theorem example? Suppose 1% of women have breast cancer, 80% of mammograms on a cancerous woman will detect it, 9.6% on an uncancerous woman will be false positives. Suppose woman A gets a mammogram which indicates cancer. What are the odds she has cancer?
p(A|X) = p(X|A)p(A)/(p(X|A)p(A)+p(X|~A)p(~A)) = 7.8% Hooray?
Now suppose women B, C, D, E, F... Z, AA, AB, AC, AD, etc., the entire patient list getting screened today, all test positive for cancer. Is the probability that woman A has cancer still 7.8%? Bayes' rule, with the priors above, still says "yes"! You need more complicated prior probabilities (e.g. what are the odds that the test equipment is malfunctioning?) before your evidence can tell you what's actually likely to be happening. But those more complicated, more accurate priors would have (very slightly) changed our original p(A|X) as well!
It's not that Bayesian updating is wrong. It's just that Bayes' theorem never allows you to have a non-zero posterior probability coming from a zero prior, and to make any practical problem tractable everybody ends up implicitly assuming huge swaths of zero prior probability.
Universalism is the reason why common-sense proposals like those of Greg Cochran will never be official policy.
From the Greg Cochran link:
A government with consistent and lasting policies could select for intelligence and achieve striking results in a few centuries, maybe less. But no state ever has, and no existing government seems interested.
It's worth pointing out that at least part of the opposition to government-run eugenics programs is rational distrust that the government will not corrupt the process. If a country started a program of tax breaks for high-IQ people having children, and perhaps higher taxes for low-IQ people having children, a corrupt government would twist its policies and official IQ-testing agency to actually reward, for example, reproduction among people who vote for [whatever the majority party currently is]. It's a similar rationale to the one against literacy tests for voting: sure, maybe illiterate people can't be informed voters, but trusting the government to decide who's too illiterate to vote leads to perverse incentives.
Scientific progress, economic growth and civilization in general are proportional to the number of intelligent people and inversely proportional to the number of not-so-smart people.
That seems a little bit simplistic. How many problems have been caused by smart people attempting to implement plans which seem theoretically sound, but fail catastrophically in practice? The not-so-smart people are not inclined to come up with such plans in the first place. In my view, the people inclined to cause the greatest problems are the smart ones who are certain that they are right, particularly when they have the ability to convince other smart people that they are right, even when the empirical evidence does not seem to support their claims.
While people may not agree with me on this, I find the theory of "rational addiction" within contemporary economics to carry many of the hallmarks of this way of thinking. It is mathematically justified using impressively complex models and selective post-hoc definitions of terms and makes a number of empirically unfalsifiable claims. You would have to be fairly intelligent to be persuaded by the mathematical models in the first place, but that doesn't make it right.
basically, my point is: it is better to have to deal with not-so-smart irrational people than it is to deal with intelligent and persuasive people who are not very rational. The problems caused by the former are lesser in scale.
If there is something really cool and you can't understand why somebody hasn't done it before, it's because you haven't done it yourself.
-- Lion Kimbro, "The Anarchist's Principle"
Being - forgive me - rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.
Albus Dumbledore
Sometimes I check the original and am surprised by how little I actually diverged from Rowling's Dumbledore.
How a game theorist buys a car (on the phone with the dealer):
"Hello, my name is Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. I plan to buy the following car [list the exact model and features] today at five P.M. I am calling all of the dealerships within a fifty-mile radius of my home and I am telling each of them what I am telling you. I will come in and buy the car today at five P.M. from the dealer who gives me the lowest price. I need to have the all-in price, including taxes, dealer prep [I ask them not to prep the car and not charge me for it, since dealer prep is little more than giving you a washed car with plastic covers and paper floormats removed, usually for hundreds of dollars], everything, because I will make out the check to your dealership before I come and will not have another check with me."
From The Predictioneer's Game, page 7.
Other car-buying tips from Bueno de Mesquita, in case you're about to buy a car:
From my limited experience with buying cars, as well as from theoretical considerations, this won't work because you lack the pre-commitment to buy at the price offered. Once they give you a favorable price, you can try to push it even further downwards, possibly by continuing to play the dealerships against each other. So they'll be afraid to offer anything really favorable. (The market for new cars is a confusopoly based on concealing the information about the dealers' exact profit margins for particular car models, which is surprisingly well-guarded insider knowledge. So once you know that a certain price is still profitable for them, it can only be a downward ratchet.)
The problem can be solved by making the process double-blind, i.e. by sending the message anonymously through a credible middleman, who communicates back anonymous offers from all dealers. (The identities of each party are revealed to the other only if the offer is accepted and an advance paid.) Interestingly, in Canada, someone has actually tried to commercialize this idea and opened a website that offers the service for $50 or so (unhaggle.com); I don't know if something similar exists in the U.S. or other countries. (They don't do any sort of bargaining, brokering, deal-hunting, etc. on your behalf -- just the service of double-anonymous communication, along with signaling that your interest is serious because you've paid their fee.) From my limited observations, it works pretty well.
I have personally purchased Toyotas, Hondas, and a Volkswagen this way. Some of my students at NYU have taken up this method and bought cars this way too... They and I have always beat the price quoted on the Internet with this method.
He further claims to have once saved $1,200 over the price quoted on the Internet for a car he negotiated for his daughter, who was 3000 miles away at the time.
Apparently being a game theory expert does not prevent one from being a badass negotiator.
Why did you guess otherwise?
Typically people describing clever complex schemes involving interacting with many other people do not actually do them. Mesquita has previously tripped some flags for me (publishing few of his predictions), so I had no reason to give him special benefit of the doubt.
Inspired by maia's post:
“When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons, what the hell am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the lemons! I’m gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!”
---Cave Johnson, Portal 2
"When life hands you lemons, make lemonade" = "I have water and sugar and you don't, aren't I awesome"
I say, when life gives you a lemon, wing it right back and add some lemons of your own!
Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, probably not apocryphal (at first, this comment said "possibly apocryphal since I can't find it anywhere except collections of quotes")
"It is indeed true that he [Hume] claims that 'reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.' But a slave, it should not be forgotten, does virtually all the work."
Asked today if the Titanic II could sink, Mr Palmer told reporters: "Of course it will sink if you put a hole in it."
http://www.smh.com.au/business/clive-palmer-plans-to-build-titanic-ii-20120430-1xtrc.html
[Political "gaffe" stories] are completely information-free news events, and they absolutely dominate political news coverage and analysis. It's like asking your doctor if the X-rays show a tumor, and all he'll talk about is how stupid the radiologist's haircut looks. . . . ["Blast"] stories are. . . just as content-free as the "gaffe" stories. But they are popular for the same reason: There's a petty, tribal satisfaction in seeing a member of our team really put the other team in their place. And there's a rush of outrage adrenaline when the other team says something mean about us. So, instead of covering pending legislation or the impact it could have on your life, the news media covers the dick-measuring contest.
-David Wong, 5 Ways to Spot a B.S. Political Story in Under 10 Seconds
I am consistently impressed by the quality of the writing that comes out of Cracked, especially relative to what one might expect given its appearance.
instead of covering pending legislation or the impact it could have on your life
If "impact on your life" is the relevant criterion, then it seems to me Wong should be focusing on the broader mistake of watching the news in the first place. If the average American spent ten minutes caring about e.g. the Trayvon Martin case, then by my calculations that represents roughly a hundred lifetimes lost.
The Disobedi-Ant
The story of the Disobedi-Ant is very short. It refused to believe that its powerful impulses to play instead of work were anything but unique expressions of its very unique self, and it went its merry way, singing, "What I choose to do has nothing to do with what any-ant else chooses to do! What could be more self-evident?"
Coincidentally enough, so went the reasoning of all its colony-mates. In fact, the same refrain was independently invented by every last ant in the colony, and each ant thought it original. It echoed throughout the colony, even with the same melody.
The colony perished.
-Douglas Hofstadter (posted with gwern's "permission")
...The Patrician steepled his hands and looked at Vimes over the top of them.
"Let me give you some advice, Captain," he said.
"Yes, sir?"
"It may help you make some sense of the world."
"Sir."
"I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people," said the man. "You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides. "
He waved his thin hand towards the city and walked over to the window.
"A great rolling sea of evil," he said, almost proprietorially. "Shallower in some places, of course, but deeper, oh, so much deeper in others. But people like you put together little rafts of rules and vaguely good intentions and say, this is the opposite, this will triumph in the end. Amazing!" He slapped Vimes good-naturedly on the back.
"Down there," he said, "are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathesomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, y
The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.
Wikiquotes: Huston Smith Wikipedia: Ralph Washinton Sockman
Only while the island is smaller than half the world :-)
Anyway, I can always measure your shore and get any result I want.
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea...
The word problem may be an insidious form of question-begging. To speak of the Jewish problem is to postulate that the Jews are a problem; it is to predict (and recommend) persecution, plunder, shooting, beheading, rape, and the reading of Dr. Rosenberg's prose. Another disadvantage of fallacious problems is that they bring about solutions that are equally fallacious. Pliny (Book VIII of Natural History) is not satisfied with the observation that dragons attack elephants in the summer; he ventures the hypothesis that they do it in order to drink the elephants' blood, which, as everyone knows, is very cold.
-- Jorge Luis Borges, "Dr. Américo Castro is Alarmed"
Thank you, corrected! Yes, it is a wonderful demolition of Castro's pretentious pronouncements on the Argentine dialect, which contains some of the finest examples of Borges' erudite snark. ("...the doctor appeals to a method that we must either label sophistical, to avoid doubting his intelligence, or naive, to avoid doubting his integrity...")
If the difficulty of a physiological problem is mathematical in essence, ten physiologists ignorant of mathematics will get precisely as far as one physiologist ignorant of mathematics and no further.
Norbert Wiener
Speaking as someone who is neither the OP nor Norbert Wiener, I think even the task of posing an adequate mathematical model should not be taken for granted. Thousands of physiologists looked at Drosophila segments and tiger stripes before Turing, thousands of ecologists looked at niche differentiation before Tilman, thousands of geneticists looked at the geological spread of genes before Fisher and Kolmogorov, etc. In all these cases, the solution doesn't require math beyond an undergraduate level.
Also, concern over an exact solution is somewhat misplaced given that the greater parts of the error are going to come from the mismatch between model and reality and from imperfect parameter estimates.
if you can’t explain how to simulate your theory on a computer, chances are excellent that the reason is that your theory makes no sense!
Is it fair to say you're enjoying the controversy you've started?
Thiel: I don't enjoy being contrarian.
Yes you do. *laughs*
Thiel: No, I think it is much more important to be right than to be contrarian.
--Peter Thiel, on 60 Minutes
“Smart people learn from their mistakes. But the real sharp ones learn from the mistakes of others.”
― Brandon Mull, Fablehaven
Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?
-Kurt Vonnegut
If rational thought is useful at all, then it must be maintained as a practice. Parents must teach it to their children, teachers must teach it to their students, and people must respect each other for their rationality. If the practice of rational thought is not to be lost, some group of people, at least, will have to maintain it.
Oh, and Paul Graham again from the same piece:
When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get the wrong answers on tests. But when people are bad at open-mindedness they don't know it.
"In war you will generally find that the enemy has at any time three courses of action open to him. Of those three, he will invariably choose the fourth." —Helmuth Von Moltke
(quoted in "Capturing the Potential of Outlier Ideas in the Intelligence Community", via Bruce Schneier)
There is a corollary of the Law of Fives in Discordianism, as follows: Whenever you think that there are only two possibilities (X, or else Y), there are in fact at least five: X; Y; X and Y; neither X nor Y; and J, something you hadn't thought of before.
The atmosphere of political parties, whether in France or England, is not congenial to the formation of an impartial judgment. A Minister, who is in the thick of a tough parliamentary struggle, must use whatever arguments he can to defend his cause without inquiring too closely whether they are good, bad, or indifferent. However good they may be, they will probably not convince his political opponents, and they can scarcely be so bad as not to carry some sort of conviction to the minds of those who are predisposed to support him.
Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt
[Instrumentalism about science] has a long and rather sorry philosophical history: most contemporary philosophers of science regard it as fairly conclusively refuted. But I think it’s easier to see what’s wrong with it just by noticing that real science just isn’t like this. According to instrumentalism, palaeontologists talk about dinosaurs so they can understand fossils, astrophysicists talk about stars so they can understand photoplates, virologists talk about viruses so they can understand NMR instruments, and particle physicists talk about the Higgs Boson so they can understand the LHC. In each case, it’s quite clear that instrumentalism is the wrong way around. Science is not “about” experiments; science is about the world, and experiments are part of its toolkit.
If you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.
Paul Graham “What You’ll Wish You’d Known” http://paulgraham.com/hs.html
I don't think we can get much more specific without starting to be mistaken.
Paul Graham, "Is It Worth Being Wise?" http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html
My function is to raise the possibility, 'Hey, you know, some of this stuff might be bullshit.'
-- Robert Anton Wilson
Contrarians of LW, if you want to be successful, please don't follow this strategy. Chances are that many people have raised the same possibility before, and anyway raising possibilities isn't Bayesian evidence, so you'll just get ignored. Instead, try to prove that the stuff is bullshit. This way, if you're right, others will learn something, and if you're wrong, you will have learned something.
For what it's worth, some context:
JW: To what extent do you think you've become a part of the New Age movement? The stalls in the atrium tonight seemed to be concerned with a lot of New Age material, and to an extent the way you've been talking about Virtual Realities and mind expansion you seem to be almost a forerunner of the movement.
RAW: The Berkeley mob once called Leary and me "the counter-culture of the counter-culture." I'm some kind of antibody in the New Age movement. My function is to raise the possibility, "Hey, you know, some of this stuff might be bullshit."
— http://media.hyperreal.org/zines/est/intervs/raw.html
Wilson had a tendency to come across as a skeptic among mystics and a mystic among skeptics.
It is not seeing things as they are to think first of a Briareus with a hundred hands, and then call every man a cripple for only having two. It is not seeing things as they are to start with a vision of Argus with his hundred eyes, and then jeer at every man with two eyes as if he had only one. And it is not seeing things as they are to imagine a demigod of infinite mental clarity, who may or may not appear in the latter days of the earth, and then to see all men as idiots.
-G.K. Chesterton
"Almost certainly, there is something wrong with you if you don't think things you don't dare say out loud."
When scientists discuss papers:
"I don't think this inference is entirely reasonable. If you're using several non-independent variables you're liable to accumulate more error than your model accounts for."
When scientists discuss grants:
"A guy who worked at the NSF once told me if we light a candle inside this jackal skull, the funders will smile upon our hopes."
"I'll get the altar!"
~ Zach Weiner, SMBC #2559
“No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.”
"Well it's alright for you, Confucius, living in 5th Century feudal China. Between all the documentation I have to go through at work, and all the blogs I'm following while pretending to work, and all the textbooks I have to get through before my next assignment deadline, I don't have time to read!"
Proper treatment will cure a cold in seven days, but left to itself a cold will hang on for a week.
I did some checks and that appears to be said by Darrell Huff...Are you sure it was Henry G. Felsen?
According to Darrell Huff, it was first said by Henry G. Felson:
As Henry G. Felson, a humorist and no medical authority, pointed out quite a while ago, proper treatment will cure a cold in seven days, but left to itself a cold will hang on for a week.
Huff, Darrell. How to lie with statistics. New York: Norton, 1993.
His mind refused to accept a simple inference from simple facts, which were patent to all the world. The very simplicity of the conclusion was of itself enough to make him reject it, for he had an elective affinity for everything that was intricate. He was a prey to intellectual over-subtlety.
Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt
Are you better off than you were one year ago, one month ago, or one week ago?
-Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek
Has anyone tried to put Ferriss's 4-Hour Workweek plan into practice? If so, did it make you better off than you were a month ago?
EDIT: Ferriss recommends (among other things) that readers invent and market a simple product that can be sold online and manufactured in China, yielding a steady income stream that requires little or no ongoing attention. There are dozens of anecdotes on his website and in his book that basically say "I heard that idea, I tried it, it worked, and now I'm richer and happier." These anecdotes (if true) indicate that the plan is workable for at least some people. What I don't see in these anecdotes is people who say "I really didn't think of myself as an entrepreneur, but I forced myself to slog through the exercises anyway, and then it worked for me!"
So, I'm trying to elicit that latter, more dramatic kind of anecdote from LWers. It would help me decide if most of the value in Ferriss's advice lies in simply reminding born entrepreneurs that they're allowed to execute a simple plan, or if Ferriss's advice can also enable intelligent introverts with no particular grasp of the business world to cast off the shackles of office employment.
[S]top whining and start hacking.
-- Paul Graham
(Arguably a decent philosophy of life, if a bit harshly expressed for my taste.)
People are happy to judge each other according to what they think of as standards, while thinking their own particular case is, well… particular. It’s different for you because you have reasons, everybody else just has excuses.
--Hazel, Tales of MU
Scientific Realism is the only philosophy that doesn't make the success of science a miracle.
I claim that the success of current scientific theories is no miracle. It is not even surprising to the scientific (Darwinist) mind. For any scientific theory is born into a life of fierce competition, a jungle red in tooth and claw. Only the successful theories survive — the ones which in fact latched on to actual regularities in nature.
...The Imaginary Mongoose
Mr R. G. Knowles, on being asked what he considered to be the best story he had ever heard, instanced the following: —
An inquisitive gentleman, riding in a carriage in one of the London tube railways, noticed that a man opposite him carried upon his knees a small black box of somewhat peculiar construction. The inquisitive one eyed it furtively for a brief while, then, unable to restrain his curiosity, he leaned forward and remarked: —
"You seem to take great care of that box, sir. May I ask what it contains?"
"Certainly. It contains a mongoose," was the reply.
"Oh, indeed!" exclaimed the other, his curiosity still unsatisfied. "A mongoose! And pray, what is it for?"
"Well, the fact is," explained the owner of the box, lowering his voice, "I have got a friend who has got delirium tremens, and he fancies he sees snakes. Now, the mongoose, you know, kills snakes, so I am taking it to him."
"—Dear me!" cried the surprised recipient of this piece of information. "But—but" — here he thought hard for several seconds — "but surely you do not want a real mongoose to kill imaginary snakes!
Every plane crash makes the next one less likely; every bank crash makes the next one more probable.
It takes a very clever human to come up with a genuinely funny joke about goodness, but any human can be trained to act as if goodness were funny.
-- C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (from memory -- I may have the exact phrasing wrong).
You can replace "goodness" in this sentence with almost anything that tends to get flippantly rejected without thought.
Good memory. The original reads:
Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny.
Not sure if finding something funny in the context of a joke necessarily leads to one not taking it seriously in other contexts. [E.g. when xkcd and smbc make science jokes I don't think my belief in the science they are referencing diminishes.]
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
I've been looking up some American people (radical activists/left-wing theorists/etc) whom I knew little about but felt surprised about how they're a byword and evil incarnate to every right-wing blogger out there. I don't have any political or moral judgment about what I've read in regards to those (or at least let's pretend that I don't), but incidentally I found a nice quote:
If people feel they don’t have the power to change a situation, they stop thinking about it.
Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals
And here's some rather... more spicy stuff from him:
...The seventh rule of the ethics of means and ends is that generally success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics. The judgment of history leans heavily on the outcome of success or failure; it spells the difference between the traitor and the patriotic hero. There can be no such thing as a successful traitor, for if one succeeds he becomes a founding father.
The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.
In this world laws are written for the lofty aim of "the common good" and then acted out in life on the basis of the common greed. In this world irrationality clings to man like his shadow so that the right things get done for the wrong reasons—afterwards, we dredge up the right reasons for justification. It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral; a world where "reconciliation" means that when one side gets the power and the other side gets reconciled to it, then we have reconciliation
I really like summarizing to make sure I get things right. Watch as I prove it!
When dealing with real world morality and goal seeking behavior we seem forced to stare in the face the following facts:
We are very biased.
We could be more rational
Our rationality isn't particularly good at morality.
Complicating this are the following:
Heuristics generally work. How much rationality do you need to out compete moral and procedural heuristics?
Just how rational can we get. Can low IQ people become much more rational, or are we forced to believe in a cognitive and rationality based elite?
Should we trust moral reasoning or heuristics at all?
I've seen the following conclusions drawn so far by people who take bias seriously: (There may be more, this is what I've encountered. Also the first two are just jokes I couldn't resist)
Lovecraftian: The world is ruled by evil Gods beyond imagination. I have seen too much! Go back into the warm milkbath of ignorance! Chew your cud you cows and never think of the slaughter to come!
Existientialism: Everything sucks forever but let's not kill ourselves because it's better to push a rock up a mountain or something. We can never know an
"Our gods are dead. Ancient Klingon warriors slew them a millenia ago; they were more trouble than they were worth."
I was thinking in terms of moral realism and appropriate ambition rather than atheism or epistemology. The right response to a tyrannical or dangerous deity is to find a way to get rid of it if possible, rather than coming up with reasons why it's not really so bad.
I can state very positively why it was that, after having twice refused to utilise General Gordon's services, I yielded on being pressed a third time by Lord Granville. I believed that at the time I stood alone in hesitating to employ General Gordon... With this array of opinion against me, I mistrusted my own judgement. I did not yield because I hesitated to stand up against the storm of public opinion. I gave a reluctant assent, in reality against my own judgement and inclination, because I thought that, as everybody differed from me, I must be wrong. I also thought I might be unconsciously prejudiced against General Gordon from the fact that his habits of thought and modes of action in dealing with public affairs differed widely from mine. In yielding, I made a mistake which I shall never cease to regret.
Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
-- Anais Nin
With perfect knowledge there would be no mystery left about the real world. But that is not what "sense of wonder and mystery" refers to. It describes an emotion, not a state of knowledge. There's no reason for it to die.
You can't stop looking for flaws even after you've found all of them, otherwise you might miss one.
Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexpected_hanging_paradox
It's weird how proud people are of not learning math when the same arguments apply to learning to play music, cook, or speak a foreign language.
I think that the relevant distinction is "is it really horribly unpleasant and I make no progress no matter how long I spend and I don't find correct output aesthetically pleasing."
"Weird" is a statement about your understanding of people's pride, not a statement about people's pride.
Something a not-especially-mathsy friend of mine said a while back:
It makes me sad when I see or hear people say 'algebra and trig are pointless, you never use them in real life'.
Because what this says to me is 'I make life more difficult for myself because I don't understand how to make it simpler'.
It has been my experience that most problems in life are caused by a lack of information...When two friends get mad at each other, they usually do it because they lack information about each other's feelings. Americans lack information about Librarian control of their government. The people who pass this book on the shelf and don't buy it lack information about how wonderful, exciting, and useful it is.
-- Alcatraz Smedry in Alcatraz versus the Evil Librarians, by Brandon Sanderson.
I can tell how old I am because I can remember a day long ago when journalists would describe a book as "provocative" and "controversial" to whet readers' interest in the book. Today, the words "provocative" and "controversial" have become code for Move Along, Nothing to See Here.
--Steve Sailer, commenting on cultural changes and words
From Terry Pratchett´s Unseen Academicals (very minor/not significant spoilers):
‘You had to find the truth for yourself. That is how we all find the truth.’
‘And if the truth is terrible?’
‘I think you know the answer to that one, Nutt’ said the voice of Ladyship.
‘The answer is that, terrible or not, it is still the truth,’ said Nutt.
‘And then?’ said her voice, like a teacher encouraging a promising pupil.
‘And then the truth can be changed’ said Nutt.
It is not merely that a stock of true beliefs is vastly more likely to be helpful than a stock of false ones, but that the policy of aiming for the truth, of having and trying to satisfy a general (de dicto) desire for the truth—what we might simply call "critical inquiry"—is the best doxastic policy around. Anything else, as Charles Peirce correctly insists, lead to "a rapid deterioration of intellectual vigor."—Richard Joyce, The Myth of Morality (2001) p. 179.
You know, I once read an interesting book which said that, uh, most people lost in the wilds, they, they die of shame. Yeah, see, they die of shame. 'What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?' And so they sit there and they... die. Because they didn't do the one thing that would save their lives. Thinking.
- David Mamet
Downloading the book, pg236, you forgot one interesting detail:
...One of the many baffling mysteries concerns who survives and who doesn't. "It's not who you'd predict, either," Hill, who has studied the survival rates of different demographic groups, told me. "Sometimes the one who survives is an inexperienced female hiker, while the experienced hunter gives up and dies in one night, even when it's not that cold. The category that has one of the highest survival rates is children six and under, the very people we're most concerned about." Despite the fact that small children lose body heat faster than adults, they often survive in the same conditions better than experienced hunters, better than physically fit hikers, better than former members of the military or skilled sailors. And yet one of the groups with the poorest survival rates is children ages seven to twelve. Clearly, those youngest children have a deep secret that trumps knowledge and experience.
Scientists do not know exactly what that secret is, but the answer may lie in basic childhood traits. At that age, the brain has not yet developed certain abilities. For example, small children do not create t
Spider: The point is, the only real tools we have are our eyes and our heads. It's not the act of seeing with our own eyes alone; it's correctly comprehending what we see.
Channon: Treating life as an autopsy.
Spider: Got it. Laying open the guts of the world and sniffing the entrails, that's what we do.
-- Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan
"Nothing matters at all. Might as well be nice to people. (Hand out your chuckles while you can.)"
(Mouse over a strip to see its last sentence.)
Also:
"You were my everything. Which, upon reflection, was probably the problem."
"Overreaction: Any reaction to something that doesn't affect me."
"Civilization is the ability to distinguish what you like from what you like watching pornography of. (And anyway, why were you going through my computer?)"
"...
If a student says “I find physics boring and dull”, it simply means only one thing: that they had a bad teacher. Any good teacher can turn physics into something absolutely spectacular.
We will find the key to our liberation only when we accept that what we once did to survive is now destroying us.
- Laura van Dernoot Lipsky
The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and this would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.
-- American Gods by Neil Gaiman.
Yet more of St. George:
......I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed œsophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man. The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period — twenty years, perhaps — during which he did not notice it.
It was absolutely necessary that the soul should be
...I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed œsophagus.
I find that hard to believe. I would expect even a wasp to notice this.
All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case, the problem is that man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species. It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game
The privilege of knowing how, painfully, to frame answerable questions, answers which will lead him to more insights and better questions, as far as his mind can manage and his own life lasts. It is what he wants more than anything in the world, always has.
The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats by James Tiptree
"Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."
"Truth," she thought. "As terrible as death. But harder to find."
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
On Fun Theory; by a great, drunken Master of that conspiracy:
...It seems that by placing danmaku under the spellcard rule, the rule limits the freedom of the user, but that isn't true. To be unrestricted means to be able to do anything. On the contrary, that means the immediate pursuit of the best, which in turn destroys variation. If one were free, they need to pursue only "the most efficient, the most effective." For danmaku, that would be one with no gaps, or the fastest and largest attacks possible. That kind of attack can't be described as d
It is somewhat remarkable that this reverend divine should be so earnest for setting up new churches and so perfectly indifferent concerning the doctrine which may be taught in them. His zeal is of a curious character. It is not for the propagation of his own opinions, but of any opinions. It is not for the diffusion of truth, but for the spreading of contradiction. Let the noble teachers but dissent, it is no matter from whom or from what.
Edmund Burke on Richard Price, in "Reflections on the Revolution in France" which I am reading for the f...
A paradox is simply an error out of control; i.e. one that has trapped so many unwary minds that it has gone public, become institutionalized in our literature, and taught as truth.
-E.T. Jaynes
The discovery of truth is prevented most effectively, not by false appearances which mislead into error, nor directly by weakness of reasoning powers, but by pre-conceived opinion, by prejudice, which as a pseudo a priori stands in the path of truth and is then like a contrary wind driving a ship away from land, so that sail and rudder labour in vain.
We, humans, use a frame of reference constructed from integrated sets of assumptions, expectations and experiences. Everything is perceived on the basis of this framework. The framework becomes self-confirming because, whenever we can, we tend to impose it on experiences and events, creating incidents and relationships that conform to it. And we tend to ignore, misperceive, or deny events that do not fit it. As a consequence, it generally leads us to what we are looking for. This frame of reference is not easily altered or dismantled, because the way we te...
"I was thirsty—no, I was dying. I was parched like the plains of Antarctica. Can you believe that? That Antarctica is drier than any other place on Earth? You wouldn't think so, but I've always believed the truth is strange, so I accepted it right away."
--Chapter One, "The Coin", by Muphrid; see also "Joy in the Merely Real"
Rephrasing:
Can you believe that? That glass is a liquid? You wouldn't think so, but I've always believed the truth is strange, so I accepted it right away.
"A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
http://www.inspiration-oasis.com/eleanor-roosevelt-quotes.html
Our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
You know, I once read an interesting book which said that, uh, most people lost in the wilds, they, they die of shame. Yeah, see, they die of shame. 'What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?' And so they sit there and they... die. Because they didn't do the one thing that would save their lives. Thinking.
- David Mamet
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
--Apple's “Think Different” campaign
Dear people who are "difficulty with everyday tasks" crazy and not "world-changing genius" crazy: we got ripped off.
...Often, the happiness that results from irrationally formed beliefs goes along with irrationally formed goals. For example, people who think that they are universally liked often have the goal of being liked by everyone. Although it is surely rational to want to be liked, it is, for most people, hopeless to try to be liked by everyone. A balanced, rational view of how things actually are needs to be combined with a balanced, realistic view of how they ought to be, if we are not to be disappointed. If one's goals are as rationally formed as one's beliefs ab
Life's battles don't always go to the stronger or faster man. But sooner or later the man who wins, is the man who thinks he can.
Vince Lombardi
I learned that failure is by and large due to not accepting and successfully dealing with the realities of life, and that achieving success is simply a matter of accepting and successfully dealing with all my realities.
-Ray Dalio, Principles
Another quote from the same piece, just before that para:
I really, really like this. Thanks for posting it!
To elucidate the "bug model" a bit, consider "bugs" not in a single piece of software, but in a system. The following is drawn from my professional experience as a sysadmin for large-scale web applications, but I've tried to make it clear:
Suppose that you have a web server; or better yet, a cluster of servers. It's providing some application to users — maybe a wiki, a forum, or a game. Most of the time when a query comes in from a user's browser, the server gives a good response. However, sometimes it gives a bad response — maybe it's unusually slow, or it times out, or it gives an error or an incomplete page instead of what the user was looking for.
It turns out that if you want to fix these sorts of problems, considering them merely to be "flakiness" and stopping there is not enough. You have to actually find out where the errors are coming from. "Flaky web server" is an aggregate property, not a simple one; specifically, it is the sum of all the different sources of error, slowness, and other badness — the disk contention; the database queries against un-indexed tables; the slowly failing NIC; the excess load from the web spider that's copying the main page ten times a second looking for updates; the design choice of retrying failed transactions repeatedly, thus causing overload to make itself worse.
There is some fact of the matter about which error sources are causing more failures than others, too. If 1% of failed queries are caused by a failing NIC, but 90% are caused by transactions timing out due to slow database queries to an overloaded MySQL instance, then swapping the NIC out is not going to help much. And two flaky websites may be flaky for completely unrelated reasons.
Talking about how flaky or reliable a web server is lets you compare two web servers side-by-side and decide which one is preferable. But by itself it doesn't let you fix anything. You can't just point at the better web server and tell the worse one, "Why can't you be more like your sister?" — or rather, you can, but it doesn't work. The differences between the two do matter, but you have to know which differences matter in order to actually change things.
To bring the analogy back to human cognitive behavior: yes, you can probably measure which of two people is "more rational" than the other, or even "more intelligent". But if someone wants to become more rational, they can't do it by just trying to imitate an exemplary rational person — they have to actually diagnose what kinds of not-rational they are being, and find ways to correct them. There is no royal road to rationality; you have to actually struggle with (or work around) the specific bugs you have.
I agree with the general thrust of the essay (that broad, fuzzy labels like "bad at" are more useful if reduced to specific bug descriptions,) but I'll note that being aware of the specific bugs that cause people to make the mistakes they're making does not stop me from thinking of peopl... (read more)