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

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

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

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.

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 cut away. Religious belief, in the form in which we had known it, had to be abandoned. By the nineteenth century it was already in essence a lie, a semi-conscious device for keeping the rich rich and the poor poor. The poor were to be contented with their poverty, because it would all be made up to them in the world beyound the grave, usually pictured as something mid-way between Kew gardens and a jeweller's shop. Ten thousand a year for me, two pounds a week for you, but we are all the children of God. And through the whole fabric of capitalist society there ran a similar lie, which it was absolutely necessary to rip out.

Consequently there was a long period during which nearly every thinking man was in some sense a rebel, and usually a quite irresponsible rebel. Literature was largely the literature of revolt or of disintegration. Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Stendhal, Samuel Butler, Ibsen, Zola, Flaubert, Shaw, Joyce — in one way or another they are all of them destroyers, wreckers, saboteurs. For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire.

It is as though in the space of ten years we had slid back into the Stone Age. Human types supposedly extinct for centuries, the dancing dervish, the robber chieftain, the Grand Inquisitor, have suddenly reappeared, not as inmates of lunatic asylums, but as the masters of the world. Mechanization and a collective economy seemingly aren't enough. By themselves they lead merely to the nightmare we are now enduring: endless war and endless underfeeding for the sake of war, slave populations toiling behind barbed wire, women dragged shrieking to the block, cork-lined cellars where the executioner blows your brains out from behind. So it appears that amputation of the soul isn't just a simple surgical job, like having your appendix out. The wound has a tendency to go septic.

Notes on the Way

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 about how well one's goals are being achieved, accurate beliefs need not be disappointing.

-Jonathan Baron

"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.

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

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 tend to see the world is intimately linked to how we see and define ourselves in relation to the world. Thus, we have a vested interest in maintaining consistency because our own identity is at risk.

--- Brian Authur, The Nature of Technology

"Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."

"Nothing matters at all. Might as well be nice to people. (Hand out your chuckles while you can.)"

• A Softer World. I've always loved that webcomic, as sappy as it is.

(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?)"

"The Internet made us all into cyborgs with access to a whole world of information to back up whatever stupid thing we believe that day. (The Racist Computer Wore Tennis Shoes)"

"Everyone wants someone they can bring home to mom. I need someone to distract my mom while I raid the medicine cabinet. (Someone who thinks suggested dosages are quaint.)" - that's not a rationality quote, but it's how my boyfriend thinks and operates.

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

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.

"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"

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 danmaku at all. Therefore, in a world without rules, danmaku is nonsense.

-- Marisa Kirisame, in her Grimoire

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

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 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

When somebody picks my pocket, I'm not gonna be chasing them down so I can figure out whether he feels like he's a thief deep down in his heart. I'm going to be chasing him down so I can get my wallet back.

-- illdoc1 on YouTube

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!"

"Of course not," was the reply. "This is only an imaginary mongoose."

— Kilmore Free Press; Kilmore, Victoria, Australia; 14 December 1916.

A version of this story is found in Aleister Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice, and a paraphrase is quoted in Robert Anton Wilson's Masks of the Illuminati, attributed to a fictionalized Crowley; that version may be found here.

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

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 first time. This Richard Price, who is fascinating. Here is the sermon Burke was complaining about.

The fact is that political stupidity is a special kind of stupidity, not well correlated with intelligence, or with other varieties of stupidity.

--John Derbyshire, source

Relevant.

[S]top whining and start hacking.

-- Paul Graham

(Arguably a decent philosophy of life, if a bit harshly expressed for my taste.)

Scientific Realism is the only philosophy that doesn't make the success of science a miracle.

-Hilary Putnam

pattern recognition is a valuable aid to anyone navigating the chaos of the real world, their denials they engage in such nefarious human-like activity to the contrary notwithstanding.

--Heartiste (the blogger formerly known as Roissy), on useful stereotypes. Source.

"Our gods are dead. Ancient Klingon warriors slew them a millenia ago; they were more trouble than they were worth."

• Lt. Cmdr. Worf, regarding Klingon beliefs

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

“No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.”

• Confucius

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

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.

http://xkcd.com/1050/

My function is to raise the possibility, 'Hey, you know, some of this stuff might be bullshit.'

-- Robert Anton Wilson

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

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")

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.

Walter Lewin

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...

• Antoine de Saint Exupery

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"

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

Source.

"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)

We're even wrong about which mistakes we're making.

-Carl Winfeld

"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."

-Alan Carter, Pluralism and Projectivism

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"

Saying "what kind of an idiot doesn't know about the Yellowstone supervolcano" is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time.

xkcd

Every plane crash makes the next one less likely; every bank crash makes the next one more probable.

Nassim Taleb

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

"If God gives you lemons, you find a new God."

-- Powerthirst 2: Re-Domination

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

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, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no. I'm sorry if this offends you,'' he added, patting the captain's shoulder, "but you fellows really need us."

"Yes, sir?" said Vimes quietly.

"Oh, yes. We're the only ones who know how to make things work. You see, the only thing the good people are good at is overthrowing the bad people. And you're good at that, I'll grant you. But the trouble is that it's the only thing you're good at. One day it's the ringing of the bells and the casting down of the evil tyrant, and the next it's everyone sitting around complaining that ever since the tyrant was overthrown no-one's been taking out the trash. Because the bad people know how to plan. It's part of the specification, you might say. Every evil tyrant has a plan to rule the world. The good people don't seem to have the knack."

"Maybe. But you're wrong about the rest!" said Vimes. "It's just because people are afraid, and alone-" He paused. It sounded pretty hollow, even to him.

He shrugged. "They're just people," he said. "They're just doing what people do. Sir."

Lord Vetinari gave him a friendly smile. "Of course, of course," he said. "You have to believe that, I appreciate. Otherwise you'd go quite mad. Otherwise you'd think you're standing on a feather-thin bridge over the vaults of Hell. Otherwise existence would be a dark agony and the only hope would be that there is no life after death. I quite understand."

(...)

After a while he made a few pencil annotations to the paper in front of him and looked up.

"I said," he said, "that you may go."

Vimes paused at the door.

"Do you believe all that, sir?" he said. "About the endless evil and the sheer blackness?"

"Indeed, indeed," said the Patrician, turning over the page. "It is the only logical conclusion."

"But you get out of bed every morning, sir?"

"Hmm? Yes? What is your point?"

"I'd just like to know why, sir."

"Oh, do go away, Vimes. There's a good fellow."

-- Terry Pratchett, "Guards! Guards!"

I really like the character of Lord Vetinari. He's like a more successful version of Quirrell from HPMOR who decided that it's okay to have cynical beliefs but idealistic aims.

Those who wish to appear wise among fools, among the wise seem foolish.

Quintilian

The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.

Wikiquotes: Huston Smith Wikipedia: Ralph Washinton Sockman

Are you better off than you were one year ago, one month ago, or one week ago?

-Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek

"Almost certainly, there is something wrong with you if you don't think things you don't dare say out loud."

~Paul Graham

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

[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

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!

-- Scott Aaronson

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.

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.

-Jonathan Baron

[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.

David Wallace

Proper treatment will cure a cold in seven days, but left to itself a cold will hang on for a week.

-Henry G. Felsen

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

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

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.

Source.