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- Do not quote yourself
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB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)
-Aaron Haspel
There's no context in the source, so: WTF?
He is using "mind" in a broader sense than people usually do with the phrase "change your mind".
A reasonable interpretation could be "changing one of your beliefs doesn't automatically change your other related beliefs, your aliefs, your habits and your behavioral triggers". But "changing your mind" could also mean "changing anything about your mind, such as a personality trait or even a mood".
For instance, becoming intellectually convinced that sexual jealousy is a bad idea does not purge you of experiencing any.
Ah. So not only is he using "mind" unusually, he's also using "opinion" unusually. And "change" idiomatically.
Well then, it's trivial!
Another example: Learning that an opinion of yours was wrong does not destroy all the broken cognitive processes that generated the wrong opinion in the first place.
I think people are seriously underestimating the value of this quote, but then again of course I do; I'm the one who posted it.
Eben Moglen, on how to change the world
I don't think Moglen always knew exactly what he was doing.
And I've never heard of him, so perhaps he didn't change the world either.
One of the defence team of Phil Zimmermann in the PGP case. General counsel of the Free Software Foundation and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center. Mostly responsible for the changes between version 2 and version 3 of the GNU General Public License.
I'm not sure any of that counts as changing the world, but it does seem like he's had some impact.
I assume this message is intended as some sort of irony? (Just because the message as a straight statement seems wrong and not in fitting to what your world saving attitudes seem to be.)
A lot more people have heard of Michael Jordan than have heard of Norman Borlaug. Yet Borlaug is one of the few humans on the planet who can be personally credited with saving millions of lives. Who one has heard of is not likely to be highly correlated with what impact people have had.
(I did perform a quick Google check after writing the comment and before posting it, just to make sure.)
Somewhat ironically, I actually have heard of Moglen for what he's really famous for, but I thought the quote was from Elon Musk (for whom, it should be said, the quote would be much truer - so far). I was surprised you hadn't heard of him, so I checked Wikipedia and then realized my mistake.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=G2VHf5vpBy8#!
Moglen on what the world needs -- in particular, for young people to have full access to computer hardware and software so that they can innovate, and privacy so that people can reboot their lives. I'm not sure whether this is giddy idealism or reasonable and important.
In the context of the youtube link where the quote is from, he is saying what he learned from working under Thurgood Marshall - a man who probably did change the world.
Furthermore, what he is saying seems trivially true; the thing you need to know to change the world is how to get the change that you want. Knowing which things you need to know doesn't imply that you know those things!
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.
E. T. Jaynes "Probability Theory, The Logic of Science"
An anecdote concerning von Neumann, here told by Halmos.
It's "Jaynes."
Fixed. Thanks.
I recall a math teacher in high school explaining that often, in the course of doing a proof, one simply gets stuck and doesn't know where to go next, and a good thing to do at that point is to switch to working backwards from the conclusion in the general direction of the premise; sometimes the two paths can be made to meet in the middle. Usually this results in a step the two paths join involving doing something completely mystifying, like dividing both sides of an equation by the square root of .78pi.
"Of course, someone is bound to ask why you did that," he continued. "So you look at them completely deadpan and reply 'Isn't it obvious?'"
I have forgotten everything I learned in that class. I remember that anecdote, though.
IIRC there was an xkcd about that, but I don't remember enough of it to search for it.
EDIT: It was the alt test of 759.
Is 759 the one you are thinking of? The alt-text seems to be relevant.
Yes.
Note that xkcd 759 is about something subtly different: you work from both ends and then, when they don't meet in the middle, try to write the "solution" in such a way that whoever's marking it won't notice the jump.
I know someone who did that in an International Mathematical Olympiad. (He used an advanced variant of the technique, where you arrange for the jump to occur between two pages of your solution.) He got 6/7 for that solution, and the mark he lost was for something else. (Which was in fact correct, but you will appreciate that no one was inclined to complain about it.)
Does anyone have a link to an ebook of this book?
libgen.info has a variety of versions.
Thank you! Looking forward to reading.
Honestly, I think PT:TLoS is probably best for those who already understand Bayesian statistics to a fair degree (and remember their calculus). I'm currently inching my way through Sivia's 2006 Data Analysis: A Bayesian Tutorial and hoping I'll do better with that than Jaynes.
I'd agree, with the exception that chapters one and five (and maybe other sections) are great for just about anybody to get a qualitative understanding of Jaynes-style bayesian epistemology.
Ah, yeah - chapter 5 is pretty good. (I recently inserted a long quote from it into my Death Note essay.)
Jaynes begins it with a caution that this is an upper undergrad to graduate level text, not knowing a great deal of probability in the first place, I stopped reading and picked up a more elementary text. What do you think are the core pre-reqs to reading Jaynes?
I have no idea - I'll tell you when I manage to satisfy them!
I think PT:TLoS is probably best for those who understand frequentist statistics to a fair degree. He spends a whole load of the book arguing against them, so it helps to know what he's talking about (contrary to his recommendation that knowing no frequentist statistics will help). The Bayesian stuff he builds from the ground up, calculus is all that's needed to follow it.
Eric Barker
How does this account for the use of humor in mocking outgroup members?
It doesn't.
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.
-Vincent Baker
No. If I want something to exist I'll offer a reward or plain and simple pay someone to build it.
Perhaps by "it", he meant money.
Doubtful. Money already exists, but it doesn't exist my pocket.
Dean Ing, The Ransom of Black Stealth One
Exactly. Buying things is far more practical, harnessing the power of specialization and comparative advantage. Building the thing yourself is almost always the incorrect decision. Build it yourself if you are good at building that kind of thing and, more importantly, suck at doing other things that provide more (fungible) value.
Or if you enjoy the process of building it. Or if the process of building it will help you relax or something so that you'll be able to do more things-that-provide-more-value later. Or if you're trying to impress someone. Or any other of the reason people have hobbies. (Also, “suck” suggests a much lower threshold than there actually is, especially in times of unemployment and recession. Telling people who have to cook because they can't afford eating at restaurants twice a day that they “suck” at making money sounds bad to me.)
Those are all reasons to build things. But not the subject of the context.
Closely related principle: Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately.
If what you want is difficult to explain, it might be as easy to do it yourself.
Razib Khan
-- John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman
Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs
The other day a client sent me a new sighting of a bug I'd been stalking for a while. The new info allowed me to trap it between two repository revisions, flush it out of the diffs and stomp on the sucker. It did briefly feel kind of primal.
George Pólya
Duplicate of this. (Well, close enough that the monicker should apply.)
Serves me right for lazily typing o instead of ó in the search field.
...actually, it's recent enough that I probably copied it down hastily and then forgot where it came from.
Pearl S. Buck
Related.
Upvoted for the "related".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I12H7khht7o&feature=player_embedded
Video by Fallon, a scientist who found out that he was a sociopath-- he says it doesn't bother him that everyone he knew said he was bad at connecting emotionally, but he does seem motivated to work on changing.
I really wish we had brain scans of this guy at 19 and at 25. I want to see which areas were developed!
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.)
Anger is pretty easy, too. All I have to do is remember a time I was wronged and focus on the injustice of it. Not very fun, though.
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.
Yes. It's not an unusual ability to have. It can take a long time and concerted effort to develop desired control over one's own feelings but it is worth it.
Yes.
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.)
I read it more charitably, as being isomorphic to Schopenhauer's "A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills." The idea is that you are feeling something and not something else, and regardless of what you are feeling you can and should do right.
Paul Graham, What You'll Wish You'd Known
Also true of, say, OCD.
Bit of a tangent, but something from that essay always bothered me.
Paul Graham
Robert Cialdini, Influence
...and "Influence" goes onto my "to read" list.
It doesn't seem to me that Vincent-as-described-by-Cialdini is someone with a passion for waiting at tables; especially not the sort that could also be described as a "passion for service". If anything, he has a passion for exploiting customers, or something of the kind. I would expect someone with a genuine passion for table-waiting -- should such a person exist -- to be as reluctant to mislead customers as, say, someone with a passion for science would be to spend their life working for a partisan think tank putting out deliberately misleading white papers on controversial topics.
(To forestall political arguments: I am not implying that all think tanks are partisan, nor that all white papers put out by partisan think tanks are deliberately misleading.)
This speech was really something special. Thanks for posting it. My favorite sections:
And:
Great stuff.
Phil Plait, Don't Be A Dick (around 23:30)
Voted up for the link to the video, which is a good explanation for why dumping hostility on people is not an effective method of convincing them.
Andrew Vickers, What Is A P-Value, Anyway?
-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.
-- 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.
Where is that from? I think I'd like to read it.
That particular quote is from Susan Blackmore's book Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think about the Brain, Free Will, and What It Means to Be Human, the book is divided into specific interviews with philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists. Great read.
Though I think that the point of quote is something that imbue most of his work.
Thanks!
In addition to what Wix said, if you'd like a deeper elaboration of his point the book to read is "Freedom Evolves". (There are very similar passages there--I thought that was the source before seeing Wix's response). This is the book that really sold compatibilism to me, changing my view of it from "hmm, interesting argument, but isn't it a bit of a cop-out?" to "wow, free will makes much more sense viewed this way".
Thanks! It's being delivered to my Kindle right now.
Precisely what I currently think, except with a little more emphasis and more colorful words.
Guess I'll have to look at that book.
Interesting reaction. I shall admit that even though Eliezer's free will sequence was intellectually convincing to me, it did not change my alief that free will just isn't there and isn't even a useful allusion. So this is going on my reading list.
What? You are clearly anticipating as if you have control over your actions, or you would not have attempted to type that comment.
(assuming you are acting approximately like a decision maker. Only agents need to anticipate as if they have free will)
No, it just happened. You're underestimating the degree to which people can have different aliefs.
Why?
Defining yourself down to nothing reduces your willingness to engage with the larger world. Mote-person doesn't care so much about the loss of a handful of pocket change, a court case, a car, a limb, but that sort of stuff adds up.
Appeal to consequences?
yes?
Last I checked that was a fallacy...
I mean what about truth of the matter? Accuracy? Is there no difference between possible definitions in how well they carve reality, or how deep an understanding they reflect?
Or is it that anything goes, and we can define it however we please and might as well choose whatever is most beneficial.
Not a fallacy when designing.
Identity is not a feature of the world to be understood. It is a feature of a cognitive system to be designed.
I suppose you could ask empirical questions about what form identity actually takes in the human mind, but Strange's comment is referring to instrumental usefulness of a design.
Spot the fallacy in:
It's appeal to consequences, after all. Ooh, or better yet, spot the fallacy in:
Unless you expect some factual, objective truth to arise about how one should define oneself, it seems fair game for defining in the most beneficial way. It's physics all the way down, so I don't see a factual reason not to define yourself down to nothing, nor do I see a factual reason to do so.
Why yes, when I ask who I am, I am indeed interested in objective truth, or whatever objective truth of the matter may or may not exist. What the relation actually is, between our sense of self, and the-stuff-out-there-in-reality. I don't understand why this seems so outlandish.
If identity really were up for grabs like that, then that just seems to me to mean that there really ain't no such critter in the first place, no natural joint of reality at which it would make most sense to carve. In that case that would be what I'd want to believe, rather than invent some illusion that's pleasing or supposedly beneficial.
It might be more fruitful to ask instead "How is my sens of self generated? - Whatever that may be" and "What work do the self preform - might there an evolutionary advantage for an organism to have a self?"
Because if you don't you'll fail to see what is doing all the thinking, you can't strip a car of all it's parts and still expect it to run, if you do, you're left with saying "nothing is making the wheels turn".
When I read the opening line I guessed he was going to go in the opposite direction - as Paul Graham probably would have.
I can see uses to both ways of simplifying one's relationship with the rest of the universe.
How would Paul Graham approach it?
http://paulgraham.com/identity.html
I now want to make up bumper stickers that read "What Would Paul Graham Do?"
Granted, I want to do other things that preclude doing so even more.
Looking briefly at a few sites specializing in custom bumper stickers, I estimate you could probably make and pay for some in half an hour to an hour. Do you want to do those other things that badly?
You know, it's actually a really good question.
I think what's true here, now that I'm considering it for more than five seconds, is that I don't actually want to do this at all, I just think it's a funny idea and wanted to share it, and I chose "I want to X" as a conventional way of framing the idea... a habit I should perhaps replace with "It would be funny to X" in the spirit of not misrepresenting my state to no purpose.
Yes, I figured as much. :)
This is only tangentially related, but:
It's probably really important to notice when you feel a desire to signal affiliation with someone or something by purchasing paraphernalia or, e.g., getting a bumper sticker. Wanting to signal that you like something generally means that your identity has expanded to include that thing. This, of course, can be both a symptom and a cause of bias (although it isn't necessarily so). See also all this stuff. Or, more concisely: "I want to buy a bumper sticker/t-shirt/pinup calendar/whatever" should sound an alarm and prompt some introspection.
(I'm not trying to imply that you have a bias towards Paul Graham, just making a general statement.)
Yeah, I agree with (at least the core of) this.
Of course, that's why you what to identify with Paul Graham.
Aren't Graham and Dennett talking about different things entirely? Dennett is trying to help us understand better how materialism is compatible with having free will and a conscious self; his prescription here is to avoid a common pitfall, that of dismissing all "upwards" processing of perception and all "downwards" action-starting signals as "mechanical computing, not part of the self" and locating the Cartesian self at the zero-extension intersection of these two processes. It is better to think of the self as extended in both directions. When Graham says "keep your identity small", he is talking about a different sense of "identity" and "small", roughly "do not describe yourself with labels because you might become overly invested in them and lose objectivity and perspective".
-Eric Hoffer
That may be Deep Wisdom but it's surface nonsense. Propaganda contains many untruths that people end up honestly believing in. The quote effectively says "propaganda is useless if only one is brave enough to believe what they know (how?) is really true". This is simply wrong.
I think the idea is that propaganda provides an easy answer, but doesn't really prevent anyone from doing research to find the harder answer. A more detailed example here.
Upvoted for the link to that story.
Except people don't have the time to research every statement they hear.
Of course not every statement!
Assuming widespread literacy and other educational prerequisites for industrialization, two or three hours per citizen per month poking at the justifications behind the reigning political party's most central claims, including (but certainly not limited to) seeking out and asking reasonable questions of those who already disagree with such claims, would be enough to utterly shred most historical propaganda efforts by sheer weight of numbers. If even half the people who attended one of Hitler's rallies thought afterwards "Those were some pretty strong claims; I should go find some Jewish spokesperson to hear the other side of the story" and then made a reasonable effort to do so, do you think things would have gone the same way?
But they also often accept statements they should doubt based on the information they already have. Motivated thinking is there, it just needs an official voice that reassures them that they will be in majority even if they are actually wrong.
As mentioned in this post, I think you're underestimating how many of our ideas come from the group.
It definitely isn't nonsense, because I know it is literally false.
Agreed.
-Eric Hoffer
-Charles Babbage
On the other hand:
A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.
Alexander Pope
I'd heard that quote before, but this was the first time I recognized the referent for Mount Stupid.
Only if you're using a consistent estimator. (Yes, that's a frequentist concept, but the same sorts of problems show up in a Bayesian context once you try to learn nonparametric models...)
-Roger Bacon
"Rich people plan for three generations. Poor people plan for Saturday night." -- Gloria Steinem
The rest of her quotes are pretty good, too.
-- 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.
Yes, politicians flip-flop, and they take heat for it. And religious organizations do revise their doctrines from time to time.
But they don't like to admit it. This shows itself most clearly in schisms, where it's obvious at least one party has changed it stance, yet both present the other side as the schismatic one (splitters).
Thus even though they have changed, they do not "update"--or they do, but then they retcon it to make it look like they've always done things this way. (Call it "backdating," not updating.) This is what the superstates do in 1984.
Coming up with real examples is trivial. Just find a group that has ever had a schism. That's basically every group you've heard of. Ones that come to mind: Marxists, libertarians, Christians, the Chinese Communist Party. Triggering issues for the above groups include the nature of revolution, the relationship between rights and welfare, the Trinity, the role of the state in the economy...
How many scientific papers contain the lines: "In the past the authors of this papers were wrong about X, but they changed their opinion because of Y"?
None, because journals are really careful about proof-reading.
Do you mean:
1) Because journals are really careful about proof-reading and there are no errors in journal articles?
2) Because journals are really careful about proof-reading, they delete every sentence where a scientist says that "I've been wrong in the past"?
3) Some other way in which careful proof-reading removes the possibility that "I've been wrong in the past" appears in a journal article?
It was grammar nitpicking. "The authors where wrong".
I had guessed it must be something like that, but I failed to see the typo in the grandparent and changed my mind to the parent being some different joke I didn't get or something. (I've retracted the downvote to the parent.)
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.
No, but your "hodge-podge of inaccurate 2D maps", while still imperfect, is more accurate than relying on a single 2-D map - which is the point I took from the original quote.
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.
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.
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.
found here
--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.
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.
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.
Patrick McKenzie, the guy who gets instrumental rationality on the gut level.
More from the same source:
Obviously I need to figure out how to start charging for my website!
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.
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.
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.)
Crashplan does.
FFS, how can people misremember who they voted for in an election with only two plausible candidates?
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'.
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.
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.)
George Carlin
-William M. Briggs
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, 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.
William S. Burroughs
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.
Thomas Hardy
-The Catholic Encyclopedia
Philosophy Bro
Upvoted for introducing me to one of the funniest blogs I've ever seen. The ironic writing style is brilliant: