Rationality Quotes June 2012

OpenThreadGuy

Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself
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No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

To a first approximation, all biologists believe in evolution.

Hm. I'm not sure how many biologists there are, but my guess is this allows for uncertainty on the order of a million biologists. Is the situation really that bad? I would have guessed that at least to a third approximation all biologists believe in evolution.

Are you reading "to a first approximation" as "to one significant figure"? I thought it meant something like "using the lowest order function which is an accurate fit to the data". So, to a first approximation, pi is roughly 22/7, and to a first approximation, the distance to Earth's horizon in kilometers is 3.57 times the square root of the height above sea level in meters.

To say that "to a first approximation, all biologists believe in evolution" is, by this definition, to say that the fraction of biologists that d... (read more)

1arundelo14y

Yes, but my "nth approximation" module only has settings for "zeroth" and "first".

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