Taboo dry -- does that mean “containing little water” or “containing little liquid water”?

And glass is a slowly flowing liquid.

"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."

Huh? That doesn't seem strange at all. It's the first place I would have guessed - based on it being really extreme, really big and really cold.

I guess I can't get so much of "truth is strange, update!" kick out of this one as intended...

Interesting. But those words are still used to promote. Impossible for me to say whether they are used that way less now than before... I guess I will take Sailer's word for it?

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.

This quote hides a subtle equivocation, which it relies on to jump from "you have X" to "you do not have X" without us noticing.

If I have a map I can look at it, draw marks on it and make plans. I can also tear it to pieces and analyse it with a mass spectrometer without it damaging the territory. Make the map I start with more accurate and I can draw on it in more detail and make more accurate analysis. Make the map nearly perfect and I can get nearly perfect information from the map without destroying breaking anything in the territory. Moving from 'nearly perfect' to 'perfect' does not mean "Oh, actually you don't have one territory and also one map. You only have this one territory".

As a practical example consider a map of a bank I am considering robbing. I could have blueprint of the building layout. I could have detailed photographs. Or I could have a perfect to-scale clone of the building accurate in every detail. That 'map' sounds rather useful to me.

Imprecision is not the only purpose of a map.

Such as set theory?

OTOH it could be that the "you" in the above knows little to nothing about computer simulation.

For example a moderately competent evolutionary virologist might have theory about how viruses spread genes across species, but have only a passing knowledge of LaTeX and absolutely no idea how to use bio-sim software.

Or worse, CAN explain, but their explanation demonstrates that lack of knowledge.

Heh, I bet he was being coy. In my experience, people who can't get any enjoyment out of wearing a clown suit (or, indeed, a scary uniform) - and aren't somewhat, well, autistic - actively avoid saying contrarian things; it's more or less social autopilot.

But why?

Or that both of them (to reference a previous Rationality Quotes entry on arguments) are wrong.

source?

Or that you've made an invalid inference.

In general, science is only boring when you don't understand it.

Even people who love science often regard areas other than their field of expertise as dull. In reality, I suspect that if they took the time to better understand those "dull" specialties they'd find them fascinating as well.

Heh... now I'm feeling nostalgic about Prof Lewin's freshman physics lectures.
Haven't thought about them in years.

...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.

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.

I don't see how this brutality was lacking when humans were more religiously observant. Furthermore, the quote seems to argue for religion.

Meaning the conclusion and the conclusion's reasoning are both wrong.

Yes, before anyone pitches in with that observation, M.M. would surely quote the above with some glee. I'm confident that he'd refrain from posting the essay's ending, though:

Mr Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was a good caricature of the hedonistic Utopia, the kind of thing that seemed possible and even imminent before Hitler appeared, but it had no relation to the actual future. [1] What we are moving towards at this moment is something more like the Spanish Inquisition, and probably far worse, thanks to the radio and the secret police. There is very little chance of escaping it unless we can reinstate the belief in human brotherhood without the need for a ‘next world’ to give it meaning. It is this that leads innocent people like the Dean of Canterbury to imagine that they have discovered true Christianity in Soviet Russia. No doubt they are only the dupes of propaganda, but what makes them so willing to be deceived is their knowledge that the Kingdom of Heaven has somehow got to be brought on to the surface of the earth. We have not to be the children of God, even though the God of the Prayer Book no longer exists.

The very people who have dynamited our civilization have sometimes been aware of this, Marx's famous saying that ‘religion is the opium of the people’ is habitually wrenched out of its context and given a meaning subtly but appreciably different from the one he gave it. Marx did not say, at any rate in that place, that religion is merely a dope handed out from above; he said that it is something the people create for themselves to supply a need that he recognized to be a real one. ‘Religion is the sigh of the soul in a soulless world. Religion is the opium of the people.’ What is he saying except that man does not live by bread alone, that hatred is not enough, that a world worth living in cannot be founded on ‘realism’ and machine-guns? If he had foreseen how great his intellectual influence would be, perhaps he would have said it more often and more loudly.

[1] Okay, that's the one bit Orwell got wrong... maybe. Industrial murder did mark everything forever, though.

Vimes has the right of it here, I think. They are just people, they are just doing what people do. And even if what people do isn't always as good as it could be, it is far from being as bad as it could be. Mankind is inherently good at a level greater than can be explained by chance alone, p<.05.

I really like this passage, and Vetinari in general, but I downvoted your quote simply because it's too long. It would be better if you could somehow condense it into a single paragraph.

Alinsky is interesting to me because it seems like he was one of the first to notice a new, likely to be effective method of social change - and he used up all the effectiveness of the technique.

I wouldn't expect non-violent protest (in America) to be capable of that kind of social change in the future, because those in power have learned how to deal with it effectively (mass arrest for minor infractions and an absolute refusal to engage in political grandstanding). By this point, mass protests are quite ineffective at creating social change here in the US (consider the relatively pointlessness of the Occupy movement)

I'm sure there are other examples of techniques of social change becoming totally ineffective as authorities learned how to respond better, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.

I'd also like to mention that the American Right's treatment of Alinsky is really depressing. Just one random quote: "Alinsky got what he wanted in the form of 90% illegitimacy rates among American blacks and poverty wholly dominated by single mothers."

Really? A guy who taught little people how to stand up for themselves in ruthless tribal politics... somehow single-handedly (or with his evil college student henchmen) caused a complicated social problem that existed since Segregation's end - instead of, I dunno, making communities more unified and more conscious of the war that is life (like trade unions become with good non-dogmatic leadership)?

(Another stunning lie: "Alinsky’s entire adult life was devoted to destroying capitalism in America — an economic system he considered to be oppressive and unjust."

He talked of working within the system and changing it slowly and patiently all the time - for moral as well as tactical reasons. "Those who enshrine the poor or Have-Nots are as guilty as other dogmatists and just as dangerous", he wrote. And: "The political panaceas of the past[2], such as the revolutions in Russia and China, have become the same old stuff under a different name... We have permitted a suicidal situation to unfold wherein revolution and communism have become one. These pages are committed to splitting this political atom, separating this exclusive identification of communism with revolution."

"Let us in the name of radical pragmatism not forget that in our system with all its repressions we can still speak out and denounce the administration, attack its policies, work to build an opposition political base. True, there is government harassment, but there still is that relative freedom to fight. I can attack my government, try to organize to change it. That's more than I can do in Moscow, Peking, or Havana. Remember the reaction of the Red Guard to the "cultural revolution" and the fate of the Chinese college students.[1] Just a few of the violent episodes of bombings or a courtroom shootout that we have experienced here would have resulted in a sweeping purge and mass executions in Russia, China, or Cuba. Let's keep some perspective.")

Sadly, even M.M. chimed in when that hysteria was at its peak around the 2008 elections, with Obama's supposed methodological connection to the evil treasonous commie terrorist trumpeted everywhere on the "fringe" websites. And that's the kind of people most likely to boast of their reasoning and objectivity online?

Mencius also blasted the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) who used Gandhi's nonviolent tactics to attack the very literal Ku Klux Klan rule in Mississippi during the so-called Freedom Summer, risking life and limb, and a small part of whose members formed the semi-violent terrorist group Weather Underground a decade later.

[1] Yep, the "Cultural Revolution" was less a government-initiated purge in the image of 1937 than it was a little civil war between two slightly different factions of zealots.

2] For a brilliant example of this madness dressed as conservatism, just look at this idiot. He took Alinsky's sardonic reference to those revolutions' hype as "panaceas" as a sign of approval!

America, Fuck Yeah.

P.S. To be fair, here's a voice of sanity from some libertarian dude, who has the misfortune of posting at a site that even Moldbug rightly called a useless dump.

Relatedly, if we don't want to think about a situation, we frequently convince ourselves that we're powerless to change it.

Less relatedly, I am growing increasingly aware of the gulf between what is implied by talking about "people" in the first person plural, and talking about "people" in the third person plural.

Oh lawd!

After organizing FIGHT (an acronym for Freedom, Independence [subsequently Integration], God, Honor, Today) in Rochester, New York,[9] Alinsky once threatened to stage a "fart in" to disrupt the sensibilities of the city's establishment at a Rochester Philharmonic concert. FIGHT members were to consume large quantities of baked beans after which, according to author Nicholas von Hoffman, "FIGHT's increasingly gaseous music-loving members would hie themselves to the concert hall where they would sit expelling gaseous vapors with such noisy velocity as to compete with the woodwinds."[10] Satisfied with the reaction to his threat, Alinsky would later threaten a "piss in" at Chicago O'Hare Airport. Alinsky planned to arrange for large numbers of well dressed African Americans to occupy the urinals and toilets at O'Hare for as long as it took to bring the city to the bargaining table. According to Alinsky, once again the threat alone was sufficient to produce results.[10] Conceding that his tactics were "absurd," the community activist rejected the contention that they were frivolous, arguing "[w]hat oppressed person doesn't want, literally or figuratively, to shit on his oppressors? [At the Rochester Philharmonic] was the closest chance they'd have. Such tactics aren't just cute; they can be useful in driving your opponent up the wall. Very often the most ridiculous tactic can prove the most effective."

Now just imagine what Anonymous could've done today with him around!

Alinsky planned to arrange for large numbers of well dressed African Americans to occupy the urinals and toilets at O'Hare for as long as it took to bring the city to the bargaining table.

I weakly suspect that this was in fact the inspiration for /b/'s infamous "Pool's Closed" raids.

If people feel they don’t have the power to change a situation, they stop thinking about it.

Interpreted as a conditional statement this is almost certainly false (I completed a degree in political science even though half-way through I understood that me trying to achieve "positive change" was hopeless). What do you think he means? How could we test such a claim?

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.

Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have. The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action or tactic is outside the experience of the people, it results in confusion, fear, and retreat. [...] The third rule is: Whenever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

Dear people who are "difficulty with everyday tasks" crazy and not "world-changing genius" crazy: we got ripped off.

Upvoted because the idea is good, although I think that a lot of people have already pointed out the irony of "be a rebel by buying our mass-produced product!" slogans in general. (Tangent: In Stross's "Jennifer Morgue" this irony is used as part of a demonic summoning ritual to zombiefy people.)

Which is why you shouldn't dismiss Jesus's face on a toast as pareidolia.

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.

If you feel the need to put the quote in rot13 to avoid spoilers, it's probably not worth posting at all (I don't think that this quote spoils anything significant about the plot in any case.)

Haha, it's hard not to feel a twitch of self-righteous liberal superiority upon reading Burke's words. Even though none of us is really "liberal" in this regard - privately almost none of us value freedom of opinion more than spreading one's own opinions; we're just bound by a prisoner's dilemma in this regard. Our age is more polite and hypocritical about it, though.

What is the intended extension of "political stupidity" in this quote? (Intended by you in quoting it; I can hardly demand that you engage in telepathy.)

As badass as this bit of Klingon mythology may be, I'm not sure I see the relevance to rationalism. If I understand correctly, then what was considered "more trouble than they were worth" were the actual, really existing gods themselves, and not the Klingons' belief in imagined gods.

Ah, but goals and desires are different things.

Because instead of pissing them off you get to terrify them?

Puting whenever you think in terms of fights don't do a good job. People come rapid with ferocious comments.

And if both contestants think they can win, this maxim gets to be right 100% of the time!

If you have a result with a p value of p<0.05, the universe could be kidding you up to 5% of the time. You can reduce the probability that the universe is kidding you with bigger samples, but you never get it to 0%.

Having bought/leased a few new and used cars over the years, I immediately think of a number of issues with this, mainly because this trips their "we don't do it this way, so we would rather not deal with you at all" defense. This reduces the number of dealers willing to engage severely. Probably is still OK in a big city, but not where there are only 2 or 3 dealerships of each kind around. There are other issues, as well:

• Bypassing the salesperson and getting to talk to the manager directly is not easy, as it upsets their internal balance of fairness. The difference is several hundred dollars.

• The exact model may not be available unless it's common, and the wait time might be more than you are prepared to handle. Though the dealers do share the inventory and exchange cars, they are less likely to bother if they know that the other place will get the same request.

• They are not likely to give you the best deal possible, because they are not invested in the sale (use sunk cost to your advantage)

• They are not likely to believe that you will do as you say, because why should they? There is nothing for you to lose by changing your mind. In fact, once you have all the offers, you ought to first consider what to do next, not blindly follow through on the promise.

• This approach, while seemingly neutral, comes across as hostile, because it's so impersonal. This has extra cost in human interactions.

• "Searching online" is no substitute to kicking the tires for most people. The last two cars I leased I found on dealers' lots after driving around (way after I researched the hell out of it online), and they were not the ones I thought I would get.

• And the last one: were this so easy, the various online car selling outfits, like autobytel would do so much better.

So, while this strategy is possibly better than the default of driving around the lots and talking to the salespeople, it is far from the best way 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 take he does not discuss whether he actually ever did that.

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.

Not many people are required to take cooking classes, hardly any goes through 20 years after graduating without ever needing to cook, and there are lots people “proud” of not learning foreign languages. And playing music is higher-status than doing maths.

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.