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Rationality Quotes May 2012
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- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB
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Comments (696)
-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's in WikiQuotes.
Which is a collection of quotes!
One that anyone can edit!(!)
But it gives a source!
One that anyone can check!
THE SOURCE.
(Just going to note that I wholly disapprove of this line of conversation.)
It is not as though I did not try to find a source, damnit. Though on closer inspection I see it highlights some invisible text, so that counts as good evidence it's real.
The full entry for November 8th is shown on pages 120-123 here. The real entry is much longer than that small excerpt would suggest.
Edit: But the quote is there alright. Clear as day (page 123).
-Douglas Hofstadter (posted with gwern's "permission")
I merely said
If anyone was wondering. (So far my prediction is right...)
I'm downvoting the whole karma-discussion, because it's effectively karma-wanking spam that abuses the karma-system, and distorts what actual value karma has in estimating the value of any given quote.
Keep this crap to predictionbook.
-Henry G. Felsen
Why that citation?
Edit: Question answered below.
What's wrong with my citation?
I did some checks and that appears to be said by Darrell Huff. Links below:
http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Miscellaneous_Collections/211181_proper-treatment-will-cure-a-cold-in-seven-days-but-left-to-itself-a-cold-will-hang-on-for-a-week.html
http://www-stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~steele/HoldingPen/Huff/Huff.htm
http://motd.ambians.com/quotes.php/name/linux_medicing/toc_id/1-1-20/s/47
http://www.pithypedia.com/?similarquotes=Proper+treatment+will+cure+a+cold+in+seven+days%2C+but+left+to+itself%2C%3Cbr%2F%3Ea+cold+will+hang+on+for+a+week.
Are you sure it was Henry G. Felsen?
According to Darrell Huff, it was first said by Henry G. Felson:
Huff, Darrell. How to lie with statistics. New York: Norton, 1993.
That answers my question, thanks! In my experience, any citation that does not refer to some printed reference should not be believed - a line saying "as quoted in How to lie with statistics by Darrell Huff" was what I was looking for.
-Hilary Putnam
One quote per post, please.
Edit: Belated thanks!
-Bas van Fraassen
Putnam of all people really should have known better than to use the word 'miracle'.
How do you figure??
There is no dominant conceptual analysis of 'miracle' such that Putnam's sentence has a clear and distinct meaning. (I may be incorrect about this; I do not follow Philosophy of Religion.) Of course, since Putnam was writing to an extremely secular audience (by American standards), 'miracle' is a useful slur that essentially translates to 'WTF is this I don't even'.
-Seneca
In this case, isn't it equally true that no wind is unfavourable?
"The Way is easy for those who have no utility function." -- Marcello Herreshoff
If someone didn't value any world-states more than any others, I'm not sure that a Way would actually exist for them, as they could do nothing to increase the expected utility of future world-states. Thus, it doesn't seem to really make sense to speak of such a Way being easy or hard for them.
Am I missing something?
I think you're over analyzing here, the quote is meant to be absurd.
Whaaa?
Someone explain please. It didn't seem absurd when I read it.
If you don't want anything, it's very easy to get what you want.
However, everyone reading this post is a human, and therefore is almost certain to want many things: to breath, to eat, to sleep in a comfortable place, to have companionship, the list goes on.
I interpreted it similarly to part of this article:
Since you said the quote itself was absurd I thought you were saying the post was an internally flawed strawman meant for the purpose of satire, but you meant something else by that word.
I'm the one who said that. Just to make it clear, I do agree with your first comment: taken literally, the quote doesn't make sense. Do you get it better if I say: "It is easy to achieve your goals if you have no goals"? I concede absurd was possibly a bit too strong here.
Okay, that makes more sense, yeah I see what you mean and agree.
-- Lion Kimbro, "The Anarchist's Principle"
Forgive my stupidity, but I'm not sure I get this one. Should I read it as "[...] it's probably for the same reasons you haven't done it yourself."?
I think it just means "you should do it", which is only sometimes the appropriate response.
--Chinese Tale
That's a very handy assortment of fallacies. Where did you find it?
I first saw the story in "School in Carmarthen", which I would absolutely recommend to everyone, except it's in Russian. I thought there should probably be an English translation of the Chinese tale, so I googled it up by keywords.
The tale is apparently the origin story behind a common Chinese idiom that literally translates as "south house north rut”, and which means acting in a way that defeats one's purpose.
I always use the metaphor of the fast car to distinguish between intelligence and rationality.
They had too much time to talk, if one of them was that fast. Can't help, but this technicality bothers me.
The carriage stopped while the two conversed. Or am I misunderstanding your objection?
Non stop and extremely fast, the story says. Well must be something lost in the translation.
Lost somewhere, I suppose. It seems clear to me that the carriage stopped. Just as it would not have carried on literally non-stop for ten days, 24 hours a day. These details are not stated; they do not need to be. And at the end, the man tells the driver to drive on. If this is an imperfection in the story, it is nothing more than a hyperbolic use of "non-stop", as trifling as the extraneous "to" in the passage you quoted, which does not seem to have held you up.
Even in conventional English, "Non-stop" doesn't necessarily mean without stopping at all. The express train from New Haven to Grand Central, for example, is called express because it doesn't stop between Connecticut and New York City, though there are several stops in Connecticut and one stop in Harlem.
"Non-stop" in context could just mean that they were not stopping in any towns they passed.
It was not said how the old man was travelling, and I doubt the horse was at a literal run. A carriage can go as fast as about 30 miles an hour on a modern road, but even in those conditions you should expect to break your carriage. On ancient roads, depending on condition, the speed limit for going "very fast" in a carriage could easily have been as low as about 10 miles per hour. If the old man was riding on an animal, or walking very fast, then he could have kept up for some time.
We at least know that the carriage wasn't moving at its top speed because at the end of the story the horse sped up.
--Mencius Moldbug, on belief as attire and conspicuous wrongness.
Source.
This reminds me of Baudrillard, I might come back in a few days with a Baudrillard rationality quote.
Also relevant.
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.
And yet he wants a pragmatically motivated society.
A man can dream can't he? Note he isn't advocating nonsense as an organizing tool, much of his wackier thought is precisely around trying to make an organizing tool work as good as nonsense does. Unfortunately I don't think he has succeed since in my opinion neocameralism is unlikely to be implemented and likely to blow up if someone did implement it.
I agree, except that some of my own wacky thought (well, it's hardly original, of course) basically says that nonsense isn't a "bad" at all - not for anyone whom we might reasonably call human. For example, as has been pointed out here, people have in-built hypocritical mechanisms to cope with various kinds of "faith", but if you truly consider that you're doing something "rational" and commonsensically correct, you're left driving at an enormous speed without brakes, and the likely damage might be great enough that no-one should ever aspire to "rational" thinking.
Also:
Even though his prescription may be lacking (here is some criticism to neocameralism: http://unruled.blogspot.com/2008/06/about-fnargocracy.html ), his description and diagnosis of everything wrong with the world is largely correct. Any possble political solution must begin from Moldbug's diagnosis of all the bad things that come with having Universalism as the most dominant ideology/religion the world has ever experienced.
One example of a bad consequence of Universalism is the delay of the Singularity. If you, for example, want to find out why Jews are more intelligent on average than Blacks, the system will NOT support your work and will even ostracize you for being racist, even though that knowledge might one day prove invaluable to understanding intelligence and building an intelligent machine (and also helping the people who are less fortunate at the genetic lottery). The followers of a religion that holds the Equality of Man as primary tenet will be suppressing any scientific inquiry into what makes us different from one another. Universalism is the reason why common-sense proposals like those of Greg Cochran ( http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/03/09/get-smart/ ) will never be official policy. While we don't have the knowledge to create machines of higher intelligence than us, we do know how to create a smarter next generation of human beings. 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. We need more smart people (at least until we can build smarter machines), so that we all may benefit from the products of their minds.
I agree and have for some time, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. Especially this is I think terribly important:
But currently there is nothing remotely approaching an actionable political plan, so I advocated doing what little good one can despite Cryptocalvinism's iron grasp on the minds of a large fraction of mankind. As Moldbug says Universalism has no consistent relation to reality. A truly horrifying description of reality if it is accurate, since existential risk reduction eventually will become entangled with some ideologically charged issue or taboo.
I wish I could be hopeful but my best estimate is that humanity is facing a no win scenario here.
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.
The theory of "rational addiction" seems like an example that for any (consistent) behavior you can find such utility function that this behavior maximizes it. But it does not mean that this is really a human utility function.
For an intelligent and persuasive person it may be a rational (as in: maximizing their utility, such as status or money) choice to produce fashionable nonsense.
True. I guess it's just that the consequences of such actions can often lead to a large amount of negative utility according to my own utility function, which I like to think of as more universalist than egoist. But people who are selfish, rational and intelligent can, of course, cause severe problems (according to the utility functions of others at least). This, I gather, is fairly well understood. That's probably why those characteristics describe the greater proportion of Hollywood villains.
Hollywood villains are gifted people who pathologically neglect their self-deception. With enough self-deception, everyone can be a hero of their own story. I would guess most authors of fashionable nonsense kind of believe what they say. This is why opposing them would be too complicated for a Hollywood script.
My impression is that we aren't terribly good yet at understanding how traits which involve many genes play out, whether political correctness is involved or not.
Very true. I think most HBD proponents are somewhat overconfident of their conclusions (though most of them seem more likely than not). But what I think he was getting at is that we would have great difficulty acknowledging if it was so and that any scientist that wanted to study this is in a very rough spot.
Unlike say promotion of the concept of human caused climate change which has the support of at least the educated classes, it may be impossible for our society to assimilate such information. It seems more likely that they would rather discredit genetics as a whole or perhaps psychometry or claim the scientists are faking this information because of nefarious motives. This suggest there exists a set of scientific knowledge that our society is unwilling or incapable of assimilating and using in a manner one would expect from a sane civilization.
We don't know what we don't know, we do know we simply refuse to know some things. How strong might our refusal be for some elements of the set? What if we end up killing our civilization because of such a failure? Or just waste lives?
I don't know if you could get away with studying the sort of thing you're describing if you framed it as "people who are good at IQ tests" or "people who have notable achievements", rather than aiming directly at ethnic/racial differences. After all, the genes and environment are expressed in individuals.
It's conceivable but unlikely that the human race is at risk because that one question isn't addressed.
I think I didn't do a good job of writing the previous post. I was trying to say that regardless what the truth is on that one question (and I am uncertain on it, more so than a few months ago), it demonstrates there are questions we as a society can't deal with.
I wasn't saying that not understanding the genetic basis of intelligence is a civilization killer (I didn't mention species extinction, though that is possible as well), which in itself is plausible if various people warning about dysgenics are correct, but that future such questions may be.
I argued that since reality is entangled and our ideology has no consistent relationship with reality we will keep hitting on more and more questions of this kind (ones that our society can't assimilate) and that knowing the answer to some such questions may turn out to be important for future survival.
A good hypothetical example is a very good theory on the sociology of groups or ethics that makes usable testable predictions, perhaps providing a new perspective on politics, religion and ideology or challenging our interpretation of history. It would be directly relevant to FAI yet it would make some predictions that people will refuse to believe because of tribal affiliation or because it is emotionally too straining.
I think this statement is too strong. Our ideology doesn't have a 100% consistent relationship with reality, true, but that's not the same as 0%.
What, sort of like Hari Seldon's psychohistory ? Regardless of whether our society can absorb it or not, is such a thing even possible ? It may well be that group behavior is ultimately so chaotic that predicting it with that level of fidelity will always be computationally prohibitive (unless someone builds an Oracle AI, that is). I'm not claiming that this is the case (since I'm not a sociologist), but I do think you're setting the bar rather high.
That hasn't stopped us from doing incredible feats of artificial selection using phenotype alone. You can work faster and better the more you understand a system on the genetic level, but it's hardly necessary.
More quotes by Mencius Moldbug:
They are all from the article A Reservationist Epistemology
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.
This reminds me of the following passage from We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver:
-- 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.
I doubt I can do much to prove a lot of the 'core' concepts of rationality, but I can do a lot to point people towards it and shake up their belief that there isn't such a proof.
For what it's worth, some context:
— 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.
-- Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan
-- Paul Graham
(Arguably a decent philosophy of life, if a bit harshly expressed for my taste.)
Might be a better phrasing? It also accounts for doing good things even if you can't solve the current problem.
So long as it doesn't lead to "We have to do something; X is something; ergo, we must X!"
True, but very few things are less effective than whining.
True. Perhaps:
"If you can find it" invites beliefs. Do something effective, or pick a different topic.
Actually, while whining rarely accomplishes anything, a lot of things anti-accomplish something, i.e., they make the problem worse.
The "stop whining" part is the harsh part; the "start hacking" part is beautiful.
Hey, I can hack and whine at the same time!
Attempting this just reallocates all whining to being about inability to start hacking.
-- 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:
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.]
The bit about "trained to act as if" is very astute. The same training can be applied to overvaluing things with little or no apparent value.
-- Anais Nin
This misses the point. There shouldn't be any mystery left. And that'll be okay.
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
-Kurt Vonnegut
Then you can commit suicide without worries.
Or try to vary life among other dimensions than (un)"examined"; most people do feel they live lifes worth living, after all.
(In general, I'm not sure we should be advocating suicide in all but the most extreme cases.)
And Socrates didn't use this argument about the hemlock, so it looks like he found the examined life worthwhile.
I'm pretty sure Plato was quoting Socrates.
Or at least claimed to be...
David Wallace
This criticism of instrumentalism only works in so far as instrumentalism is descriptive, rather than prescriptive.
-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.)
-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.
I have, and yes it made me much better off (although I wouldn't really describe it as a "plan", since its more "meta" than I think of "plans" as being.)
Some more anecdotal evidence.
Cool! So, what was your pre-4HWW lifestyle like, and how did it change?
Paul Graham, "Is It Worth Being Wise?" http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html
Noticing this moment is important!
Of course, we shouldn't stop when we notice this. We should keep getting more specific, and we should begin testing whether we are mistaken.
More accurately, we should test more specific things, then become more specific. First make the test, then update the beliefs.
I think we're splitting unnecessary hairs here; obviously we shouldn't update our belief to something more specific than we can justify. At the same time, we want to formulate hypotheses in advance of the tests, and test whether these hypotheses are mistaken or worthy of promotion to belief, which to me seems a perfectly reasonable interpretation of what shokwave wrote.
Paul Graham “What You’ll Wish You’d Known” http://paulgraham.com/hs.html
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence!
Just because you are choosing between two theories, doesn't mean one of them is right.
Almost the same as the one Eliezer used here
The quote in that link makes a good point: If one gives you an excuse to be lazy, then you might be privileging the hypothesis; it could be that it was only raised to the level of attention so that you can avoid work. Thus, the lazy choice really does get a big hit to its prior probability for being lazy.
But it's still false that the other one is probably right. In general, if a human is choosing between two theories, they're both probably insanely wrong. For rationalists, you can charitably drop "insanely" from that description.
http://www.smh.com.au/business/clive-palmer-plans-to-build-titanic-ii-20120430-1xtrc.html
Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt
Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt
Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt
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.
No, you can only get an answer up to the limit imposed by the fact that the coastline is actually composed of atoms. The fact that a coastline looks like a fractal is misleading. It makes us forget that just like everything else it's fundamentally discrete.
This has always bugged me as a case of especially sloppy extrapolation.
Of course you can't really measure on an atomic scale anyway because you can't decide which atoms are part of the coast and which are floating in the sea. The fuzziness of the "coastline" definition makes measurement meaningless on scales even larger than single atoms and molecules, probably. So you're right, and we can't measure it arbitrarily large. It's just wordplay at that point.
The island of knowledge is composed of atoms? The shoreline of wonder is not a fractal?
Perhaps it's composed of atomic memes ?
And assuming an arbitrarily large world, as the area of the island increases, the ratio of shoreline to area decreases, no? Not sure what that means in terms of the metaphor, though...
Eventually the island's population can't fit all at once on the shore, and so not everyone can gather new wonder.
Well, shoot.
A short shoreline of wonder is a good sign that the island of knowledge is small.
"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
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
-- Jorge Luis Borges, "Dr. Américo Castro is Alarmed"
(Pliny, not Plinty.)
The article is not about antisemitism, by the way. It's about one Dr. Castro's alarm over a "linguistic disorder in Buenos Aires" — i.e. a putative decline in the quality of Argentinian Spanish usage.
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...")
-- illdoc1 on YouTube
Great video, too.
"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!"
― Brandon Mull, Fablehaven
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game
-G.K. Chesterton
Related: this slide
"If God gives you lemons, you find a new God."
-- Powerthirst 2: Re-Domination
If you liked Powerthirst, there's a similar thing called "SHOWER PRODUCTS FOR MEN" on youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUjh4DE8FZA
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
I like lemons...
When life gives you lemons, be sure to say Thank-you politely.
— Steven Kaas
Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes
When life gives you lemons, lemon canon.