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- Do not quote yourself
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB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)
On lost purposes:
-- Tanya Khovanova
-- Terry Pratchett (on Nation)
--Razib Khan, The Erasmus Path in Science
-- James L. Sutter
-- Will Wilkinson
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"
(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!
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.
Cicero, De Natura Deorum
"I must die. But must I die bawling?"
Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act. - George Orwell
--Marie Curie
Given that she died from overexposure to radiation, I'm not sure how seriously I can take this.
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.
So the science gets done, and you make a neat quote, for the people who are still alive.
--Nicolás Gómez Dávila, source
I liked the quote, once I figured out how all the negatives interacted with each other.
Too true.
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.)
Tycho
Slava Akhmechet see also Enso and the rest
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.
Deadpool
--Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science #51
-Charles Kingsley
Explain?
It paraphrases the bottom line of the metaethics sequence - or what I took to be the bottom line of those posts, anyway. Namely, that one can have values and a naturalistic worldview at the same time.
So, having values is moral theism? The choice of words seems suspect.
I'd say "moral atheism" is being used as an idiomatic expression; a set of more than one word with a meaning that's gestalt to its individual components. One of the synonyms for "atheism" is "godlessness", so by analogy "moral atheism" would just mean "morality-lessness".
We have a word for "morality-lessness", and it is amorality, which coincidentally works more naturally in your analogy: If morality is analogous to theism, then a-morality is analogous to a-theism.
I hope you understand my trouble with the use of an idiom that implicitly equates morality with theism. (Well, amorality with atheism, which is more the problem.)
(sorry about all the edits, this was written horribly.)
Judge Learned Hand
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:
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.
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.)
--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.
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
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.
--Eugene Gendlin
Philosophy Bro
There's something deep here. Meanings aren't just in your head... but whose head are they in anyway?
Upvoted for introducing me to one of the funniest blogs I've ever seen. The ironic writing style is brilliant:
-The Catholic Encyclopedia
What makes that one most interesting is its source.
Yes, an interesting question is how may readers will update their opinion of the Catholic church based on this.
I was not surprised by this, because I know many Catholics honestly try to be rational... of course only within the limits given by the Church.
They would have absolutely no problem with Bayesian updating; the only problem would be the Solomonoff prior. If you replace it by "the Catholic Church is always right" prior, you are free to update rationally on everything else and remain a good Catholic.
This is why Catholics don't have a problem to accept e.g. evolution, as long as someone can provide an explanation how evolution can be compatible with "the Catholic Church is always right". (A possible explanation could be e.g. that God created the first life forms; that evolution is a consequence of physical laws created by God, therefore any result of evolution is still indirectly created by God; and that humans are somehow an exception to this process, because even if their bodies are a result of evolution, they also have an immaterial soul created directly by God.)
I don't believe theists would have any problem with Solomonoff prior. Some ten-state two-symbol machine with a blank tape can be a God for all we could ever know, and then it could create us within it's machine and do what ever it wants (and the souls could be just the indices it keeps on us).
You know who actually has problem with Solomonoff prior? People who understand it.
Isn't this the wrong question? We'd want to know what proportion of ten-state two-symbol machines with blank tapes turned out to be gods.
In so far as that's what we want, Catholicism still falls to being a huge conjunction of propositions.
Do we? I would think we would want to know what proportion of universes are created by ten-state two-symbol machines that are gods as opposed to ten-state two-symbol machines that are not gods.
That was implied by "proportion".
One short god will suffice if laws of physics require substantially larger program. And for all we know they do.
edit: Also, there's only what, 20^10 = about 10 trillion possible ten state two symbol machines? Maybe 9 old British billions after you eliminate non-universal machines. That's less than the data in physical constants we haven't derived.
I suspect that if the source was a less unexpected one, say Albert Einstein or Carl Sagan, the quote would seem obvious and uninteresting to LWers and its karma score would be less than half what it is.
This makes perfect sense in terms of Bayesian reasoning. Unexpected evidence is much more powerful evidence that your model is defective.
If your model of the world predicted that the Catholic Church would never say this, well... your model is wrong in at leas that respect.
Well, I would have upvoted such a quote no matter who it was by.
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.
Wrong input > no input? I'm not so sure.
If the wrongness is so blatant that it's easy to tell which parts of the input are likely wrong and disregard them...
A fair point. But then you're no better off than with not having that part of the input at all.
Depends on if you're hallucinating everything or your vision has at least some bearing in the real world. I mean, I'd rather see spiders crawling on everything than be blind, since I could still see what they were crawling on.
Some things (for instance, eating) would definitely be more enjoyable while blind rather than while hallucinating spiders.
Not 100% sure they would be for me: I'm not arachnophobic at all. (I would be willing to eat a spider for five dollars, if I was sure this couldn't cause be to get sick.)
Laurell K. Hamilton
A quote I find useful when considering both rationalizing, and the differences of relative perspective.
Huh. Their victims decide, rather than everyone they affect deciding?
I don't think I agree.
I can't see how but that both the victims, and everyone else they affect, deciding. That doesn't mean they'll all come to the same conclusion, of course.
I'm pretty sure that's where politics comes from, personally...
Edited to add: I do not mean to imply that if one group decides X, another Y, and a third Z, that it necessarily means that any of them are wrong.
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").
-William M. Briggs
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.
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
You can refrain from passing judgment yourself, but allow others to pass judgement.
For example, rocks are not judgmental.
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.
The statement in the quote does not seem to follow, assuming that you have the choice of simply not saying anything. Passing judgement suggests that you actuallly have to let someone else know what you think. On the subject of the value of judgement, it is hard to understand why people are so averse to being judged. Whether someone is being kind or malicious by telling you what they honestly think of your actions it still gives you better information to make future choices.
Is it any harder to understand than why some people experience as a negative stimulus being told they have a fatal illness, or stepping on a scale and discovering they weigh more than they'd like, or being told that there are termites in their walls?
No harder, because it's the same phenomenon.
But it's a phenomenon that we as rationalists should resist. If I am dying, or fat, or living with termites, I want to know---after all, there may be something I can do about it.
Absolutely agreed.
George Carlin
Patrick McKenzie, the guy who gets instrumental rationality on the gut level.
More from the same source:
FFS, how can people misremember who they voted for in an election with only two plausible candidates?
Wrong question. I'd say people who voted for the other guy remember, but aren't so eager to respond to surveys.
A large number of them may have not voted at all, but remember themselves doing so.
I suspect, with no data to back me up, that is those who were ambivalent when they stepped into the polling booth that genuinely misremember. Others know they voted for the other guy, but want to be seen as one of the 'winners'.
Or the survey he's referring to is biased. Seems hard for it not to be... did they knock on doors all across the country? If it's based on mail or telephone responses, are people who voted for Obama more likely to respond to those?
Or, he's misquoting the survey. If you were testing the hypothesis that people misremember voting for the winner, wouldn't you sample a smaller area than the whole country, and then compare your results with the vote count from that area? Why would an experiment like that ever get a number meant to be compared with the whole country's votes?
I suspect, with no data to back me up, that the latter class contains many more people than the former. (If I were that ambivalent, I wouldn't vote for either major candidate at random; I would either vote for a minor candidate, or not vote at all. But I guess not everybody is like me.)
There are many U.S. elections I have voted in where there were two candidates for an office and I couldn't tell you which one I voted for. Admittedly, no cases involving Presidential candidates; I'm usually pretty sure who I'm voting for in those cases.
Obviously I need to figure out how to start charging for my website!
Probably won't work very well. If you can program, you can make some money writing some useful software. You can write an app to make it easier for people to perform double blind experiments on their medications for example. People in general only pay for something they directly use.
I will sing the praises of git and vim, but I didn't pay any money for them. He says extract a commitment, not necessarily a monetary commitment; I read half a book before I started using git, and vim took a lot of practice. So you could use more specialized terminology or something like that. git and vim are both very well-spoken of, and I probably wouldn't have bothered to learn them if they weren't. But I also don't bother to spend money on things that don't have a good reputation, if I haven't had experience with them already. So, either way, requiring a commitment from the user turns away a lot of them.
(I've never read your website)
I wonder if a donate button at the end of each article, tied with a question along the lines of "How valuable was the article you just read?", would be effective. (You could even set it up so that you can track the amount donated by article, and use that to guide future research- I'm not sure how effective that would be, since that depends on how many alternatives you have to pick from in considering new research topics.)
Well, I do have donation stuff setup; last week I moved the Paypal button from the very bottom, post footnotes (where the Bitcoin address remains), to the left sidebar, to see if that would help. (So far it hasn't.)
A rating widget is a good idea; I'm messing around with some but I'm not seeing any really good ones hosted by third-parties (static site, remember).
I am completely undisciplined and I do this stuff as the whim takes me. A month ago I didn't expect to learn how to do meta-analyses and run a DNB meta-analysis and 2 weeks ago I wasn't expecting to do an iodine meta-analysis either; the day before Kiba hired me to write a Silk Road article, I wasn't expecting that either...
There's also a competition effect here. With thousands of free blogs, people don't want to pay for yours or mine. They'll just navigate to someone else's, even if it isn't quite as brilliantly insightful.
Indeed, that's a problem. I like to think my content is pretty unique - no other site is as good a resource on dual n-back, no other site is as good a resource on modafinil, etc. - but that doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy old world.
A way to make real money is to sell to businesses. Do you have any content or service a 100+ person company might want?
Not that I've thought of so far.
Well, you have the ability to write articles of exceptionally high quality. They are concise, easy to read, very thoroughly researched, and always offer paths to learn more or elaborate on points of interest.
These sorts of reports are highly valuable to companies and I think you would be incredibly valuable as a knowledge consultant. Think Lisbeth Salander for technical subjects.
I do value your research and writings. I was thinking about offering to buy you a laptop because it sounded like you had an old POS that was hampering said research and writings, but then I decided that would be too weird.
I did have a POS, but in July 2010 I finally bit the bullet and bought a new Dell Studio 17 laptop that has since worked well for me. (The hard drive died a few months ago and I had to replace it, almost simultaneously with my external backup drive dying, which was very stressful, but Dell doesn't make the hard drives, so I write that off as an isolated incident.)
Ah, then I only need to buy you a 2-year backblaze subscription, that's far cheaper.
Backblaze sounds great, but they don't have a Linux client.
Crashplan does.
tarsnap it is, then.
Tarsnap is cool - I like Colin's blog and stuff like scrypt. (The latter was relevant to one of my crypto essays.)
For the record: khafra actually did donate to me and wasn't just cheap signaling. Well done!
Wow. Great stuff khafra. I hereby grant you some portion of the respect granted to gwern for his nootropics research!
I've had the impression that you've been selling yourself short for quite some time.
Maybe you can start by following Patrick's example and offering some of the choice data you collect and analyze to the people subscribing to your mailing list. You can also figure out who might be interested in the information you collect (a cool project in itself), and how much it would be worth to them.
Margaret Fuller, intoxicated by Transcendentalism, said, "I accept the universe," and Thomas Carlyle, told of the remark, supposedly said, "Gad, she’d better."
This depends on what is meant by "accept the universe". Does this mean that you're ready to deal with reality, or that you accept the way the universe currently is and aren't going to try to make it better?
Given Carlyle's general attitude towards Fuller, I suspect what he meant was that it's a good thing for the universe that Fuller accepts it, for otherwise the results might be bad for the universe.
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.
--Alan Alda, in an interview at The Colbert Report, telling the story that gave rise to The Flame Challenge. It has been mentioned on LW before, but I thought it was worth posting it here as a perfect illustration of a Teacher's Password.
found here
Robert Anton Wilson, from an interview
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.
I think he means that people choose not to think about any map but their favorite one ("their way of looking at reality is the only sane way of viewing the world"), to the point where they can't estimate the conditional probability P(E|a) of the evidence given not-A.
The link with Aristotle seems weak. But the problem obviously makes it harder to use "the logic of probability," as Korzybski called it, and Wilson well knew that Korzybski contrasted probability with classical "Aristotelian" logic. (Note that K wrote before the Bayesian school of thought really took off, so we should expect some imprecision and even wrong turns from him.)
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.
"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.
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.
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."
Note that Google Maps can be described as "a hodge-podge of different maps"; a satellite map and a street map (and sometimes a 3D map if you use Google Earth), and using that hodge-podge is indeed more convenient than using one representation that tries to combine them all.
I know that you didn't mean hodge-podge in the same sense (you were talking of 3D-> 2D), but I think that Google Maps is a good illustration of how having different views of the same reality is useful.