Rationality Quotes June 2012
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- Do not quote yourself
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB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.
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Comments (413)
-Eric Hoffer
-Philippe Petit. On the idea of walking rope in between the World Trade Center towers.
It's not impossible for sure now. If he thought it was impossible when they were actually in existence then he doesn't remotely understand the word. That is beyond even a "Shut up and do the impossible!" misuse.
I don't understand. Are you saying it wasn't impossible enough?
He actually did it in 1974. It took nearly six years of planning. In order to practice for the walk between the World Trade Center towers he first did tightrope walks between the towers of the Notre Dame and then the Sydney Harbor Bridge. All of these were of course illegal. In WTC case, he had to sneak in, tie the ropes between the towers without anyone knowing and walked between the towers without any harness for nearly 45 mins at that height with the wind and everything. For the complete details, watch the documentary 'Man on Wire'. I think it was as impossible as it got in his line of work.
How on earth could you not understand? If this is sincere incomprehension then all I can do is point to google: define.
Yes. This quote is an example of nothing more than how to be confused about words and speak hyperbole for the sake of bravado.
If you have to ask whether something is "impossible enough" you have already answered your question.
Your sentence wasn't clear enough.
About your gripe with use of the word impossible: it's a quote. Most of the quotes are like applause-lights. Everybody who read that quote understood the intent and meaning. Philippe Petit didn't employ the literal meaning of impossible. But the literal meaning of 'impossible' is rarely used in colloquial contexts. Even in 'Shut up and do the impossible', the absolute literal meaning is not employed. Because if the literal meaning is used, then by definition you can't do it, ever. So the only thing left is the degree of impossibility. You say that the task was too doable to be considered 'impossible' under your standards. Fine. Just mentally replace 'impossible' in that sentence with 'really goddamn hard that no one's done before and everyone would call me crazy if I told them I'm going to do it' and you'd read it the way most people would read it. The spirit of the quote would still survive.
Yes, it's an applause light. It isn't one that made me applaud. It isn't a rationalist quote. It doesn't belong here.
No. I instead choose to mentally replace the quote entirely with a better one and oppose this one. Even Nike's "Just Do It" is strictly superior as rationalist quote, despite being somewhat lacking in actionable detail.
I am forced to disagree; a quote about conquering the (colloquially) impossible with sufficient thought and planning is very appropriate for this site.
Have you seen Google's definitions yourself? Because 2. does seem to match what Stabilizer means.
Robert Anton Wilson, from an interview
"Most people have a wrong map, therefore we should use multiple maps" doesn't follow. Reversed stupidity isn't intelligence, and in this case Aristotle appears to have been right all along.
If I'm out charting the oceans, I'd probably need to use multiple maps because the curvature of the Earth makes it difficult to accurately project it onto a single 2D surface, but I do that purely for the convenience of not having to navigate with a spherical map. I don't mistake my hodge-podge of inaccurate 2D maps for the reality of the 3D globe.
If you're favoring hedgehogs over foxes, you're disagreeing with luminaries like Robin Hanson and billionaire investors like Charlie Munger. There is, in fact, far more than one globe--the one my parents had marked out the USSR, whereas ones sold today do not; and on the territory itself you won't see those lines and colorings at all.
Some recent quotes post here had something along the lines of "the only perfect map is a 1 to 1 correspondence with everything in the territory, and it's perfectly useless."
Isn't “convenience” also the reason not to use the territory itself as a map in the first place? You know, knowing quantum field theory and general relativity isn't going to give you many insights about (say) English grammar or evolutionary psychology.
I agree with Wilson's conclusions, though the quote is too short to tell if I reached this conclusion in the same way as he did.
Using several maps at once teaches you that your map can be wrong, and how to compare maps and find the best one. The more you use a map, the more you become attached to it, and the less inclined you are to experiment with other maps, or even to question whether your map is correct. This is all fine if your map is perfectly accurate, but in our flawed reality there is no such thing. And while there are no maps which state "This map is incorrect in all circumstances", there are many which state "This map is correct in all circumstances"; you risk the Happy Death Spiral if you use one of the latter. (I should hope most of your maps state "This map is probably correct in these specific areas, and it may make predictions in other areas but those are less likely to be correct".) Having several contradictory maps can be useful; it teaches you that no map is perfect.
This seems unfair. I have a map; it reperesents what I think the universe is like. Certainty it is not perfect, but if I thought a different one was better I would adopt it. There is a distinction between "this is correct" and "I don't know how to pick something more correct".
It depends what kind of maps. Multiple consistent maps are clearly a good thing (like switching from geometry to coordinates and back). Multiple inconsistent ad-hoc maps can be good if you have a way to choose which one to use when.
Wilson doesn't say which he means, I think he's guilty of imprecision.
Or you could always just average your inconsistent maps together, or choose the median value. Should work better than choosing a map at random.
Or accept that each map is relevant to a different area, and don't try to apply a map to a part of the territory that it wasn't designed for.
And if you frequently need to use areas of the territory which are covered by no maps or where several maps give contradictory results, get better maps.
Basically, keep around a meta-map that keeps track of which maps are good models of which parts of the territory.
Yeah, that should work.
--Hejitz et.al.
What's the significance of this?
Intestinal bacteria have an effect on the nervous system: they affect how we think and how we feel and how our mind develops. This is pretty recent science written by scientists about the function of our mind (or murine minds, at least). That makes it an interesting rationality quote, in my opinion.
It's interesting, all right, but I think it would likely be better received as a standalone Discussion post (ideally with some more context and expansion). The rationality quotes threads tend to be more for quotes directly about rationality or bias than quotes indirectly contributing to our potential understanding of the same.
I think it could make a pretty interesting Discussion post, and would pair well with some discussion of how becoming a cyborg supposedly makes you less empathic.
Serious question: is the cyborg part a joke? I can't tell around here.
Fair question! I phrased it a little flippantly, but it was a sincere sentiment - I've heard somewhere or other that receiving a prosthetic limb results in a decrease in empathy, something to do with becoming detached from the physical world, and this ties in intriguingly with the scifi trope about cyborging being dehumanizing.
Really? If true, then that is fascinating... Can you link to any of the recent research, though?
EDIT: by popular demand. I'll be moving this to a discussion instead.
EDIT: the discussion thread is here
As in the attribution, I'm quoting from: Hejitz et.al.: Normal gut microbiota modulates brain development and behavior, 2011.
Here is a review paper.
See also the current special section of science magazine, or google scholar.
Here's the abstract from The Relationship Between Intestinal Microbiota and the Central Nervous System in Normal Gastrointestinal Function and Disease00346-1/abstract):
Here are results from an RCT on humans with chronic fatigue syndrome
George Carlin
Eben Moglen, on how to change the world
When it comes to big things I don't think that you often know beforehand exactly how to get it. As you progress you learn more and it makes often sense to change course. A lot of startups have to pivot to find their way to change the world.
-Charles Kingsley
Judge Learned Hand
I like the quote, but I don't see how it relates to rationality.
There are people in the real world who think that having a good enough decision-making process for making moral decisions (like deciding the right result in litigation) ensures a morally upright decision.
Up to this point, decision-making procedures have always been implemented by humans, so the quality of the decision-making process is not enough to ensure that a morally upright decision will be made. The better guarantee of morally upright decision-making is morally upright decision-makers.
I like Judge Learned Hand, but I think this particular quote is just Deep Wisdom. Living in a pleasant society requires both good laws and good people. There is very little substantive content in LH's oratory. He could just as easily have made the opposite point:
Eric Barker
How does this account for the use of humor in mocking outgroup members?
It doesn't.
I love truth. It's such a wonderful thing. It makes you sane, helps you make better, more effective decisions and it irks all the right people. -Aaron Clarey aka "Captain Capitalism"
Jack Parsons
I think this quote is like a paraphrase of, "a sense that something more is possible." Imagine if someone invented a drug that gave chimpanzees the highest human levels of rationality at random intervals, for a total of about a half hour per day. They'd be pretty much like humans, only physically stronger.
EDIT: Downvoted? My comment is negative about humans, but it's hopeful. Human nature is pretty squalid, but there is plenty of opportunity for improvement. (Imagine if we could get the median human to the point where they're operating with clarity twice as much as they are now. Or for that matter, imagine myself.)
When you choose technology, you have to ignore what other people are doing, and consider only what will work the best. -Paul Graham
Unless your technology will be required to interact with the technology other people are using, which is most of the time. "What will work best" often depends heavily on "what other people are doing".
No, at that point you still only consider what will work the best. It's a nitpick, but "what will work the best when others do this" is a different question to "what are the other people doing".
Absolutely. What I mean is that they are incompatible. In the common case, it's impossible to simultaneously "consider what will work best" and "ignore what other people are doing". Figuring out what will work best requires paying attention to what other people are doing.
One of the things that other people do is to build standard parts. If one has an unlimited budget, one can ignore them, and build everything in a project from optimized custom parts. This is rare.
I find myself doing the latter via reference to the former.
Laurell K. Hamilton
A quote I find useful when considering both rationalizing, and the differences of relative perspective.
George Pólya
On lost purposes:
-- Tanya Khovanova
"I must die. But must I die bawling?"
William S. Burroughs
My immediate reaction was "No, my knowledge of what is going on starts out superficial and relative, but it sure doesn't stay that way". (I object to the "only").
-Aaron Haspel
There's no context in the source, so: WTF?
"Rich people plan for three generations. Poor people plan for Saturday night." -- Gloria Steinem
The rest of her quotes are pretty good, too.
Here's what I don't like about that quote: It doesn't tell me which way the causation goes (or if it's feedback, or a lurking variable, or a coincidence). Does being rich make you plan better? Or does planning better make you rich?
-William M. Briggs
It's possible that the strategy of only judging those who break the anti-judgment norm is the optimal one. Kind of like how most people only condone violence against those who break the anti-violence norm.
Most people condone violence for a lot more reasons than that.
A good example would be using violence to prevent or punish theft.
Some people solve this by stretching the meaning of "violence" to include theft... but if one follows this path, the word becomes increasingly unrelated to its original meaning.
Generally, it seems like a good heuristics to define a set of "forbidden behavior", with the exception that some kinds of "forbidden behavior" are allowed as a response to someone else's "forbidden behavior". This can help reduce the amount of "forbidden behavior" in society.
The only problem is that the definition of the "forbidden behavior" is arbitrary. It reflects the values of some part of the society, but some people will disagree and suggest changes to the definition. The proponents of given definition will then come with rationalizations why their definition is correct and the other one is not.
I guess it's the same with "judgement". The proponents of non-judgement usually have a set of exceptions: behaviors so bad that it is allowed to judge them. (Being judgemental, that is judging things not belonging to this set of exceptions, is usually one of them.) They just don't want to admit that this set is arbitrary, based on their values.
I was with you until you said the choice of forbidden behaviors was arbitrary.
No, it's not arbitrary; indeed, it's remarkably consistent across societies. Societies differ on their approaches to law, but in almost every society, randomly assaulting strangers is not allowed. Societies differ on their ideas on sex, but in almost every society, parents are forbidden from having sex with their children. Societies differ on their systems of property, in almost every society, it's forbidden to grab food out of other people's hands.
There are obviously a lot of biological and cultural reasons for the rules people choose, and rule systems do differ, so we have to decide which to use (is gay sex allowed? is abortion legal? etc.). But they're clearly not arbitrary; even the most radically different societies agree on a lot of things.
I don't have enough data about behaviors in different cultures, but I suspect they are rather different. (I wish I had better data, such as a big table with cultures in columns, behaviors in rows, and specific norms in the cells.)
Of course it depends on how many details do we specify about the behavior. The more generally we speak, the more similar results will we get. For example if I ask "is it OK to have sex with anyone anytime, or is it regulated by some rules?", then yes, probably everywhere it is regulated. The more specific questions will show more disagreement, such as "is it OK for a woman to marry a man from a lower social class?" or "is it OK if a king marries his own sister?" or "if someone is dissatisfied with their sexual partner, is it OK to find another one?" (this question may have different answers for men and women).
Also it will depend on the behavior; some behaviors would have obvious disadvantages, such as anyone randomly attacking anyone... though it may be considered OK if a person from a higher class randomly attacks a person from a lower class, or if the attacked person is a member of a different tribe.
I guess there is a lot of mindkilling and disinformation involved in this topic, because if someone is a proponent of a given social norm, it benefits them to claim (truly or falsely) that all societies have the same norm; and if someone is an opponent, it benefits them to claim (truly or falsely) that some other societies have it differently. Even this strategy may be different in different cultures: some cultures may prefer to signal that they have universal values, other cultures may prefer to signal that they are different (read: better) than their neighbors.
I'm sure that's right.
And my point wasn't to claim that there is no variation in moral values between societies; that's obviously untrue.
My main objection was to the word arbitrary; no, they're not arbitrary, they have causes in our culture and evolutionary history and some of these causes even rise to the level of justifications.
Who says that a society's moral values don't have causes? The issue is whether those causes are historically contingent (colloquailly, whether history could have happened in a way that different moral positions were adopted in a particular time and place).
Alternatively, can I suggest you taboo the word justification? The way I understand the term, saying moral positions are justified is contradicted by the proliferation of contradictory moral positions throughout time. (But I'm out of the mainstream in this community because I'm a moral anti-realist)
Would you apply the same logic to physical propositions? Would you claim that, for example, saying that astronomical positions are justified is contradicted by the proliferation of contradictory astronomical positions throughout time?
No, the only things that follows logically is that not being judgemental is something that you can't teach someone else directly without judging yourself.
The zen monk that sits in his monastery can be happy and accepting of everyone who visits him.
Explaining what it means to not passing judgment to someone who never experienced it is like telling a blind person about the colors of the rainbow. If you talk about something being blue they don't mean what you are talking about.
If you ask the zen monk to teach you how to be nonjudgmental he might tell you that he's got nothing to teach. He tell you that you can sit down when you want. Relax a bit.
After an hour you ask him impatiently: "Why can't you help me?" He answers: "I have nothing to teach to you."
Then you wait another two hours. He asks you: "Have you learnt something?" You say: "Yes". You go home a bit less judgmental than when you were at the beginning.
It doesn't follow, from the fact that passing judgment on someone else's act of passing judgment on people is itself an act of passing judgment on people, that it is impossible not to pass judgment on people.
I'm also not quite clear on whether "passing judgment on" is denotatively the same or different from "judging." (I understand the connotative differences.)
All that said, for my own part, I want to be judged. I want to be judged in certain ways and not in others, certainly, and the possibility of being judged in ways I reject can cause me unhappiness, and I might even say "don't judge me!" as shorthand for "don't apply the particular decision procedure you're applying to judgments of me!" or as a non-truth-preserving way of expressing "your judgment of me upsets me!", but if everyone I knew were to give up having judgments of me at all, or to give up expressing them, that would be a net loss for me.
Brett Evill
The best similar cultural-relativity-based deduction I've read, as introduced by Wikipedia:
Why the national customs of Britain should apply in India? :-)
Because Britain has a national custom saying that they do.
You can refrain from passing judgment yourself, but allow others to pass judgement.
For example, rocks are not judgmental.
-Vincent Baker
No. If I want something to exist I'll offer a reward or plain and simple pay someone to build it.
Dean Ing, The Ransom of Black Stealth One
I read the quote as "make it (exist)!", instead of "create it". But whether that's what was meant or not, I think that to the basic idea, it doesn't matter all that much whether you cause it to exist directly or via someone else.
As an addition: when I come up with something cool that I wish existed, my first step is to google around if someone else has ever invented it and sells it. : ) Twice so far the answer has been yes.
I can't afford to pay someone to do cognitive science, so I'd better try to do it myself.
--Marie Curie
Given that she died from overexposure to radiation, I'm not sure how seriously I can take this.
So the science gets done, and you make a neat quote, for the people who are still alive.
Well, now people who are in the know can avoid fear by knowing to avoid doing the stuff that she did. It's mostly the people who believe that radiation is dangerously little understood to whom it seems scary.
Of course, I'd have to say the quote is still incorrect. If I understand that I'm a prisoner of war who's going to be tortured to make my superiors want to ransom me more, I'm damn well going to be afraid.
But I still find "Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less" awfully uplifting.
(I read it for the worldbuilding...)
That is the exact same justification, to the word, that I give for reading it.
It's a good reason!
Cicero, De Natura Deorum
-- John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman
Thomas Hardy
Pretty sure most people would pick hallucinations over blindness. Easier to correct for.
Well, I would, but “pretty sure most people” sounds like blatant generalizing from one example to me.
Hallucinations are easier to correct for?
Hm.
So, I start out with an input channel whose average throughput rate is T1, and whose reliability is R1.
Case 1, I reduce that throughput to T2.
Case 2, I reduce the reliability to R2.
A lot seems to depend on T2/T1 and R2/R1.
From what I've gathered from talking to blind people, I'd estimate that T2/T1 in this case is ~.1. That is, sighted people have approximately an order of magnitude more input available to them than blind people. (This varies based on context, of course, but people have some control over their context in practice.)
Hallucinations vary. If I take as my example the week I was in the ICU after my stroke, I'd estimate that R2/R1 is ~.1. That is, any given input was about ten times more likely to not actually correlate to what another observer would see than it usually is.
Both of these estimates are, of course, pulled out of my ass. I mention them only to get some precision around the hypothetical, not as an assertion about what blindness and hallucination are like in the real world. If you prefer other estimates, that's fine.
Given those estimates... hm.
Both of them suck.
I think I would probably choose hallucination, in practice.
I think I would probably be better off choosing blindness.
False information is definitely more damaging than non-information, because in the best case scenario you ignore the false information. In less-than-best-case scenarios, you fail to ignore the false information and are actively misled.
Suppose there are 10 boxes, one of which contains cash.
If you could open the boxes and see which one had cash, you'd be in great shape. But if you can't, you obviously should prefer leaving all the boxes closed (blindness), rather than somehow seeing cash in box #7 even when it isn't there.
I think the only reason people would be tempted to choose hallucination is that hallucinations in real life are usually relatively mild and often correctible, whereas blindness can be total and intractable with present technology. So given the choice between schizophrenia and blindness, I probably would choose schizophrenia, because schizophrenia is treatable.
One reason I would be tempted to choose hallucination over blindness is that hallucinations feel like knowledge, and blindness feels like lack of knowledge, and I'm more comfortable with the feeling of knowledge than I am with the feeling of the lack of knowledge.
Margaret Fuller, intoxicated by Transcendentalism, said, "I accept the universe," and Thomas Carlyle, told of the remark, supposedly said, "Gad, she’d better."
Slava Akhmechet see also Enso and the rest
-- Albert Einstein
Any fool can also make a simple theory to describe anything, provided he is willing to hide dis-confirming evidence under the rug.
-- Terry Pratchett (on Nation)
Patrick McKenzie, the guy who gets instrumental rationality on the gut level.
More from the same source:
-- James L. Sutter
Paul Graham, What You'll Wish You'd Known
Bit of a tangent, but something from that essay always bothered me.
Paul Graham
Robert Cialdini, Influence
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (HT Cafe Hayek.)
A reasonable start, but quite insufficient for the long run. Sixpence savings on twenty pounds income is not going to insulate you from disaster, not even with nineteenth-century money.
A disaster is an abrupt fall in income or abrupt increase in expenditures, so it falls under the general claim.
In fact, it may not even outpace inflation, much less the opportunity cost of the interest-free rate.
Inflation in England in this period was, as far as I know, remarkably low and <1%, even experiencing periods of apparent deflation. (Whether it beat Roman Egypt Sixpence compounding might go a decent way. See also Gregory Clark, Farewell to Alms:
I would have thought that, having decided to invest X amount of money per unit time, what matters for beating inflation is the interest you can get on it, not the size of X. Sixpence will fail as savings because it's 0.021% of your annual income, not because of inflation; even if you assumed the value of money was perfectly stable, it would take you a long time to build up any sort of reserve at that speed.
Seek not to follow in the footsteps of men of old; seek what they sought. -Matsuo Basho, poet (1644-1694)
Seems like a good way to think of the "seek to succeed, not to be rational" idea.
-Eric Hoffer
Andrew Vickers, What Is A P-Value, Anyway?
--Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science #51
-- Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP Keynote Address
I don't think that the idea that politicians don't change their position has much basis in reality. There are a lot of people who complain about politicians flip-flopping.
When a politician speaks publically, he usually doesn't speak about his personal decision but about a position that's a consensus of the group for which the politician speaks. He might personally disagree with the position and try to change the consensus internally. It's still his role to be responsible for the position of the group to which he belongs. In the end the voter cares about what the group of politicians do. What laws do they enact? Those laws are compromises and the politicians stand for the compromise even when they personally disagree with parts of it.
A scientist isn't supposed to be responsible for the way his experiments turn out.
And if you take something like the Second Vatican Council there's even change of positions in religion.
Phil Plait, Don't Be A Dick (around 23:30)
The former is the most powerful method I know of for the latter. As elspood mentioned, it obviously isn't the victims in particular that will be persuaded.
Pearl S. Buck
Related.
What in the actual fuck? This is the exact opposite of what is rational: "Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken belief, and seek to feel fully that emotion which fits the facts. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm. Evaluate your beliefs first and then arrive at your emotions. Let yourself say: “If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool.” Beware lest you become attached to beliefs you may not want."
Emotions are generally considered instinctive, not deliberated. You could argue that anything instinctive should be thrown out until you have a chance to verify that it serves a purpose, but brains are not usually that cooperative. Knowing you have an emotion which you do not want (I get angry when people prove that I am wrong about something which I have invested a lot of time thinking about), and being able to destroy it are two different things. If you are able to act in accordance to your best plan instead of following instincts at all times, and run error correction routines to control the damage of an unwanted emotion on your beliefs you are doing something rational.
The latter half of the quote is fine, but the first half is completely wrong and is the opposite message of what rationality says.
You seem to be suffering from is-ought confusion. Yes, it would be nice to eliminate the irrational emotion, but this isn't always possible or requires too much effort to be worthwhile.
How's this instead?
Technically false. Consider adding an extra word in there to indicate scope. Even "the" between "make water" would do. (Making an unspecified amount of water is far easier than irrigating a field from a nearby river.)
Yes I can. Speak for yourself (Buck).
Really? Are you sure you're not just making yourself believe you feel something you do not?
I'm sure. Certain feelings are easier to excite than others, but still. All it takes is imagination.
A fun exercise is try out paranoia. Go walk down a street and imagine everyone you meet is a spy/out to get you/something of that sort. It works.
(Disclaimer: I do not know if the above is safe to actually try for everyone out there.)
I'm not sure it would work for me, knowing that (e.g.) setting my watch five minutes early doesn't work to make me hurry up more even though it does work for many people I know.
On the other hand, I can trigger the impostor syndrome or similar paranoid thoughts in myself by muling over certain memories and letting the availability heuristic make them have much more weight than they should.
The distinction may be between setting up the preconditions for a feeling (which has some chance of working) and trying to make a feeling happen directly (which I think doesn't work).
Well, what works for someone may not work for someone else. (Heck, what works for me at certain times doesn't work for me at other times.)
Making a feelings happen directly isn't easy. It's a skill. Given the demographic on this website there a good chance that a lot of the readers can't control their feelings. Most of the people here are skilled at rationality but not that skilled at emotional matters.
It's a bad idea to generalise your own inability to control your feelings to other people.
Can you describe the process of making feelings happen directly?
Directly is a tricky word. In some sense you aren't doing things directly when you follow a step by step process.
If you however want a step by step process I can give it to you (but please don't complain that it's not direct enough):
1) You decide which emotion you want to feel.
2) You search in your mind for an experience when you felt the emotion in the past.
3) You visualize the experience.
4) In case that you see yourself inside your mental image, see the image as if you are seeing it through your own eyes.
5) If the image is black and white, make it colored.
6) Make the image bigger.
7) Locate the emotion inside your body.
8) Increase the size of the emotion.
9) Get it moving.
10) Give it a color.
11) Increase movement and size as long as you want.
That's the way of doing it I learned at day two of an NLP seminar.
I'm not actually sure of what you mean by 'directly' here. Which of the following does 'setting up the preconditions' include:
a) changing breathing patterns etc b) focusing thought on particular events etc. c) rationalising consciously about your emotional state d) thinking something like 'calm down, DavidAgain calm down calm down'
I doubt many people can simply turn a powerful emotion on or off, although I wouldn't rule it out. I read (can't find link now...) about a game where the interface was based on stuff like level of 'arousal' (in the general sense of excitement), which you had to fine tune to get a ball to levitate to a certain level or whatever. I'd be surprised if someone played that a lot with high motivation and didn't start to be able to jump directly to the desired emotional state without intermediary positions. And being able to do so obviously has major advantages in some more common situations (e.g. being genuinely remorseful or angry when those responses will get the best response from someone else and they're good at reading faked emotion, or controlling panic when the panic-response will get you killed)
This game sounds awesome, I am going to try and search for it so I can test this.
Looks like there are a few pc input devices on the market that read brain activity in some way. The example game above sounds like this Star Wars toy.
A while (i.e. about a decade) ago, I read about a variant of Tetris with a heart rate monitor in which the faster your heart rate was the faster the pieces would fall.
Upvoted for the "related".
E. T. Jaynes "Probability Theory, The Logic of Science"
This is also why I don't trust poets who claim that their works spring to them automatically from the Muse. Yes, it would be very impressive if that were so; but how do I know you didn't actually slave over revisions of that poem for weeks?
Razib Khan
--Razib Khan, The Erasmus Path in Science
-- Will Wilkinson
I'm curious as to the algorithm that flagged this as a rationality quote.
Well, mostly it was just me having... uhm... an episode, but the idea of getting something you want by giving away something you'd like to get rid of - and being on the lookout for an opportunity to do so - is indeed quite rational. It's just that there are few such excellent opportunities in daily life, and the "getting rid" part often has delayed costs that come back to you later. Like the delivery guy calling the police.
Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act. - George Orwell
--Nicolás Gómez Dávila, source
Too true.
I liked the quote, once I figured out how all the negatives interacted with each other.
Tycho
Deadpool
It seems to make the same point as the Parable of the Dagger.
(I.e.: logic games are fun and all, but don't expect things to work that way in the real world. Or: it's valuable to know the difference between intelligent thinking and smart-assery.)
--Eugene Gendlin
Philosophy Bro
Upvoted for introducing me to one of the funniest blogs I've ever seen. The ironic writing style is brilliant: