Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:
The words "I am..." are potent words; be careful what you hitch them to. The thing you're claiming has a way of reaching back and claiming you.
--A.L. Kitselman
Just explained the Higgs Boson to my friend even though I don't understand it myself. He was very convinced. I bet this is how religions get started.
-Rob DenBleyker
I often tried plays that looked recklessly daring, maybe even silly. But I never tried anything foolish when a game was at stake, only when we were far ahead or far behind. I did it to study how the other team reacted, filing away in my mind any observations for future use.
— Ty Cobb
We find it difficult and disturbing to hold in our minds arguments of the form ‘On the one hand, on the other.’ If we are for capital punishment we want it to be good in all respects, with no serious drawbacks; if we are against it, we want it to be bad in all respects, with no serious advantages. We want the world of facts to dictate to us, virtually, how to act; but this it will never do. We always have to make a choice.
-- Theodore Dalrymple, article in "Library of Law and Liberty".
It's strange that we have many phrases like "on the one/other hand", "pros and cons", and "both sides of the story", then.
...Here is a hand. How do I know? Look closely, asshole, it's clearly a hand.
Look, if you really insist on doubting that here is a hand, or anything else, there's nothing really I can say to convince you otherwise. What the tits would the world even look like if this weren't a hand? What sort of system is your doubt endorsing? After all, you can't just say "It's not true that here is a hand." You have to be endorsing some other picture of the world. [...]
So it turns out when I say things like "Here is a hand" I'm not really making a claim about the world, I'm laying down some rules for discussion. If you doubt there's a hand here, then fuck you and that's all there is to it. We can't really talk about anything now, because we can't even agree on something as simple as a goddamn hand. When we all agree here is a hand, then we can go about discussing our world in meaningful ways. Skepticism just undermines a foundation and replaces it with nothing; it[']s paralyzing. The grounds for such radical skepticism don't exist; it presupposes and relies on the very certainty it tries to undermine.
This is more practical than you realize. There are people who actually believ
If you doubt there is a hand, I'll use it to smush a banana on your face. If you end up looking ridiculous with banana on your face, then there was in fact a hand and my foundation is better than yours. If I end up looking ridiculous trying to grab a banana of doubtful existence with no hands, I promise to admit your foundation is better than mine. If we disagree on what happens, why am I even aware of your existence?
If the "assumption" is so obvious and near-universal, why does Singer go on pompously to announce it.
Possibly for the same sorts of reasons that Eliezer wrote this big long thing to "restore a naïve view of truth", or that Nick Bostrom wrote this big long thing to explain why death is bad ... namely, that people have come up with all kinds of non-obvious, idiosyncratic rationalizations to justify the status-quo of starvation, ignorance, and death; that these rationalizations have, over the centuries, become cached thoughts; and that therefore getting back to "obvious and near-universal" basics is both desirable and nontrivial.
Fun fact: William Lane Craig has rigorously argued that it's best to one-box on Newcomb's problem.
If the rule you followed led you to this of what use was the rule?
— Anton Chigurh
Suppose we find a society which lacks our understanding of human physiology, and that speaks a language just like English, except for one curious family of idioms. When they are tired they talk of being beset by fatigues, of having mental fatigues, muscular fatigues, fatigues in the eyes and fatigues of the the spirit. Their sports lore contains such maxims as 'too many fatigues spoils your aim' and 'five fatigues in the legs are worth ten in the arms'. When we encounter them and tell them of our science, they want to know what fatigues are. They have been puzzling over such questions as whether numerically the same fatigue can come and go and return, whether fatigues have a definite location in matter and space and time, whether fatigues are identical with some physical states or processes or events in their bodies, or are made of some sort of stuff. We can see that they are off to a bad start with these questions, but what should we tell them? One thing we can tell them is that there simply are no such things as fatigues - they have a confused ontology. We can expect them to retort: 'You don't think there are fatigues? Run around the block a few times and you'll know better! There are many things your science might teach us, but the non-existence of fatigues isn't one of them!
--Dan Dennett, Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology
We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled. But how can we be sure our senses are not being deceived at any particular time, or even all the time? Might I just be a brain in a tank somewhere, tricked all my life into believing in the events of this world by some insane computer? And does my life gain or lose meaning based on my reaction to such solipsism?
--- Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7. Activity recorded M.Y. 2302.22467. (TERMINATION OF SPECIMEN ADVISED)
From Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
"Buddhism IS different. It's the followers who aren’t."
Commentary: Reading this made me realize that many religions genuinely are different from each other. Christianity is genuinely different from Judaism, Islam is genuinely different from Christianity, Hinduism is genuinely different from all three. It's religious people who are the same everywhere; not the same as each other, obviously, but drawn from the same distribution. Is this true of atheistic humanists? Of transhumanists? Could you devise an experiment to test whether it was so, would you bet on the results of that experiment? Will they say the same of LessWrongers, someday? And if so, what's the point?
Now that I think on it, though, there might be a case for scientists being drawn from a different distribution, or computer programmers, or for that matter science fiction fans (are those all the same distributions as each other, I wonder?). It's not really hopeless.
Human behavior is economic behavior. The particulars may vary, but competition for limited resources remains a constant.
– CEO Nwabudike Morgan in Alpha Centauri
SMAC is my favorite of the Civilization series for two reasons:
The first is that it's just a very well-made game- it has lots of features and internal mechanics which took Civilization over a decade to catch up to (and still doesn't do as well).
The second is that it starts at slightly-future tech, and proceeds to singularity. I find that way more satisfying than starting at agriculture and proceeding to slightly-future tech, partly because I like sci-fi more than I like history, and partly because it lets you consider more interesting questions.
For example, the seven factions in the game aren't split on racial lines, but on ideological lines: there are seven competing views for how society should be organized and what the future should look like, and each of them has benefits and penalties that are the reasonable consequences of their focuses.
SMAC is deeply flawed for three reasons:
The AI is over a decade old, and so it's difficult to be challenged once you know how the game works. (This was also before they had figured out a good way to hamstring ICS, and so ICS is the dominant yet unfun strategy.)
The multiplayer code is over a decade old, and so not only are the AI difficult to ...
Doing the same thing over and over again in the hopes of eventually getting a different result is, I'm told, one definition of insanity.
It is also, in my experience, an important aspect of physical therapy.
I've never understood that saying. Most real life actions are practically speaking nondeterministic. I've often found it worthwhile to test each course of action 10 times and keep track of what fraction it worked (if the course of action is quick and easy to test).
I never felt I was studying the stupidity of mankind in the third person. I always felt I was studying my own mistakes.
-Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics
(An important lesson, but I wonder if it's wise to teach it in the context of politics. Among other things, I worry that the messages "boo religion!", "yay updating on evidence!", "boo religious conservatives!", "yay pointing out my enemies are inferior to me!", "yay rationality!", "yay my side for being comparatively rational!", &c. will become mixed up and seen as constituting a natural category even if they objectively shouldn't be. (Related.))
Sure. But if I handle snakes to prove they won't bite me because God is real, and they don't bite me -- you do the math.
More seriously, though: the sentiment expressed in the quote is flawed, IMHO. Evidence isn't always symmetrical. Any particular transitional fossil is reasonable evidence for evolution; not finding a particular transitional fossil isn't strong evidence against it. A person perjuring themselves once is strong evidence against their honesty; a person once declining to perjure themselves is not strong evidence in favour of their honesty; et cetera.
I think this might have something to do with the prior, actually: The stronger your prior probability, the less evidence it should take to drastically reduce it.
Edit: Nope, that last conclusion is wrong. Never mind.
A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren't flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.
-Marvin Minsky
Thinking of your brain (and yourself) like an instrument to played might be useful for instrumental rationality.
It seems like the author is defying the common usage without a reason here. The common usage of edible is "safe to eat", or more precisely "able to be eaten without killing you", and I don't see what use redefining it to mean "able to be swallowed" is. It just seems like a trite, definitional argument that is primarily about status.
I agree with the sense of your comment but wish to nitpick - I think "nontoxic" means you can eat it without it killing you. Crayons fit this definition, but are not properly called "edible"; many flowers can be eaten without killing you but "edible flowers" are the ones you might actually want to eat on purpose. "Edible" is narrower.
Of course 'edible' does literally mean 'can be eaten', and equally of course, it is normally interpreted as 'fit to be eaten'. That's why paleohacks writes it that way. It's a joke!
(Similarly "legible" instead of "readable", although "readable" seems to be increasingly accepted these days.)
Something "illegible" cannot have its component characters distinguished or identified. Something that is merely "unreadable" might just have ridiculously convoluted syntax or something.
Indeed. Given people like Monsieur Mangetout or disorders like pica, it's hard to see why we would even bother using the word 'edible' if it didn't mean fit to be eaten.
Religion begins by being taken for granted; after a time, it is elaborately proved; at last comes a time (the present) when the whole effort is to induce people to let it alone.
--John Stuart Mill (1854).
However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.
-- Clay Shirky
From the same page:
if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. [...] And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is
This gives me a new perspective on human insanity, or more positively, on how much relatively low-hanging fruit is out there.
I begin with the assumption that suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad. I think most people will agree about this, although one may reach the same view by different routes. I shall not argue for this view. People can hold all sorts of eccentric positions, and perhaps from some of them it would not follow that death by starvation is in itself bad. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to refute such positions, and so for brevity I will henceforth take this assumption as accepted. Those who disagree need read no further.
Peter Singer
"A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week."
General Patton
Obviously not true in all cases, but good advice for folks that have trouble getting things done despite being extremely intelligent (which this community has more than its fair share of).
Why do you insist that the human genetic code is "sacred" or "taboo"? It is a chemical process and nothing more. For that matter—we—are chemical processes and nothing more. If you deny yourself a useful tool simply because it reminds you uncomfortably of your mortality, you have uselessly and pointlessly crippled yourself.
– Chairman Sheng-ji Yang in Alpha Centauri
For that matter—we—are chemical processes and nothing more.
While this is in some sense true, it doesn't add up to normality; it is an excuse for avoiding the actual moral issues. Humans are chemical processes; humans are morally significant; therefore at least some chemical processes have moral significance even if we don't, currently, understand how it arises, and you cannot dismiss a moral question by saying "Chemistry!" any more than you can do so by saying "God says so!"
I don't think it's an excuse - it's an aside from the rest of the quote. If you take out that sentence, the quote still makes sense. I think the moral question (from a consequentialist point of view, at least) is put aside when he assumes (accurately, in my opinion) that the tool is "useful". It's usefulness to humans is all that matters, which is his point.
"It is every citizen's final duty to step into the Tanks, and become one with all the people."
-- Recycling Tanks, Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, Alpha Centauri
Many difficulties which nature throws our way, may be smoothed away by the exercise of intelligence.
--Titus Livius
Reality is the ultimate arbiter of truth. If your thoughts, beliefs, and actions aren't aligned with truth, your results will suffer.
--Steve Pavlina
Or, because running into heavy objects is a good intuition pump:
Reality is what trips you up when you run around with your eyes closed.
I think this was in a book by James P. Hogan, but a bit of Googling only reveals one or two other people quoting it but not remembering where it came from.
I'd like to propose a new guideline for rationality quotes:
I enjoy the Alpha Centauri quotes, but I think posting 5 of them at once is going a bit overboard. It dominates the conversation. I'm fine with them all getting posted eventually. If they're good quotes, they can wait a couple months.
And here we tinker with metal, to try to give it a kind of life, and suffer those who would scoff at our efforts. But who's to say that, if intelligence had evolved in some other form in past millennia, the ancestors of these beings would not now scoff at the idea of intelligence residing within meat?
--Prime Function Aki Zeta-5, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
Rational politician:
It certainly isn't the government's job to educate voters. Our system is designed to make candidates compete for votes, and the most effective way to compete is by appealing to emotion and ignorance. The last thing a politician wants is to be labeled professorial. That's the same as boring.
Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.
John Ioannidis Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
...Likewise people have their rituals in argument evaluation. Philosophers like to set out the premises in an orderly numbered fashion, and tend to regard this as making an argument clear. Whether or not it actually does so depends; unless the argument is being made from scratch, this procedure involves rearrangement and interpretation, so whether it actually does make things more clear, in terms of increasing understanding, seems to vary considerably. But it still feels like you are bringing order and clarity to a disordered muddle, so you find people who will swear by it, even though it's not difficult to find cases where it clearly introduced a distortion. There's an argument to be made -- it would, of course, be controversial among those who engage in this kind of practice -- that such people are taking the ritual itself to be a kind of clarity, by sympathetic magic, and are taking arguments in this form to be better arguments simply because they conform to ritual expectation. It may even have good practical results, if so; a ritual might well put one in the right state of mind for a certain kind of work, and there's no reason to think that philosophical thinking doesn't sometim
In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause -- it is seen. The others unfold in succession -- they are not seen: it is well for us, if they are foreseen. Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference -- the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen, and also of those which it is necessary to foresee. Now this difference is enormous, for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favourable, the ultimate consequences are fatal, and the converse. Hence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good, which will be followed by a great evil to come, while the true economist pursues a great good to come, -- at the risk of a small present evil.
In fact, it is the same in the science of health, arts, and in that of morals. It often happens, that the sweeter the first fruit of a habit is, the more bitter are the consequences. Take, for example, debauchery, idleness, prodigality. When, therefore, a man absorbed in the effect which is seen has not yet learned to discern those which are not seen, he gives way to fatal habits, not only by inclination, but by calculation.
--From the introduction of Frederic Bastiat's "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen".
...there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from ... the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.
Niccolo Machiavelli
Intellectuals may like to think of themselves as people who "speak truth to power" but too often they are people who speak lies to gain power.
"Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist." Academician Prokhor Zakharov, Alpha Centauri
Scientific theories are judged by the coherence they lend to our natural experience and the simplicity with which they do so.”
– Commissioner Pravin Lal in Alpha Centauri
Never do anything on principle alone. If the principle of the thing is the only reason to do it, don't.
-- Bill Bryson
Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area - crime, education, housing, race relations - the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.
Without having a date on the quote, it's hard to know exactly which three decades he's referring to, but we certainly seem to be in a better position regarding crime, housing and race relations than three decades ago. Education, probably not so much. This sounds to me like just a meta-contrarian longing for a return to the imagined "good old days".
Without having a date on the quote, it's hard to know exactly which three decades he's referring to,
He published that in 1993, which was about at the historic peak of violent crime in the US since 1960. The situation has improved a lot since then, but through the decades of 1960-1990, things looked pretty grim.
Crime.
In the US at least the murder rates today are comparable to those of the 1960s only because of advances in trauma medicine.
Another important reason is that Americans have in the meantime embraced a lifestyle that would have struck earlier generations as incredibly paranoid siege mentality. (But which is completely understandable given the realities of the crime wave in the second half of the 20th century.)
Yet another reason is, of course, the draconian toughening of law enforcement and criminal penalties.
I wouldn't call the present U.S. system "absurdly lenient." The system is bungling, inefficient, and operating under numerous absurd rules and perverse incentives imposed by ideology and politics. At the same time, it tries to compensate for this, wherever possible, by ever harsher and more pitiless severity. It also increasingly operates with the mentality and tactics of an armed force subduing a hostile population, severed from all normal human social relations.
The end result is a dysfunctional system, unable to reduce crime to a reasonable level and unable to ensure a tolerable level of public safety -- but if you're unlucky enough to attract its attention, guilty or innocent, "absurd leniency" is most definitely not what awaits you.
Murder and Medicine: The Lethality of Criminal Assault 1960-1999
Despite the proliferation of increasingly dangerous weapons and the very large increase in rates of serious criminal assault, since 1960, the lethality of such assault in the United States has dropped dramatically. This paradox has barely been studied and needs to be examined using national time-series data. Starting from the basic view that homicides are aggravated assaults with the outcome of the victim’s death, we assembled evidence from national data sources to show that the principal explanation of the downward trend in lethality involves parallel developments in medical technology and related medical support services that have suppressed the homicide rate compared to what it would be had such progress not been made.We argue that research into the causes and deterrability of homicide would benefit from a “lethality perspective” that focuses on serious assaults, only a small proportion of which end in death.
To be clear there are other possible explanations for why violent assault as recorded has become less lethal, I just think this one is by far the most plausible.
I always think it's weird on cop shows and the like where an assaulter is in custody, the victim is in the hospital, and someone says "If he dies, you're in big trouble!". The criminal has already done whatever he did, and now somehow the severity of that doing rests with the competence of doctors.
Are you assuming that Thomas Sowell is defending, say, racial discrimination? If so, then you'd be wrong. He's talking about things like affirmative action which are intended to help disadvantaged groups, but which he contends have had the exact opposite effect.
If you meant something else, then please say it instead of assuming that it's obvious.
totally overlooking that [Thomas Sowell is] an American
He also happens to be black, if that's relevant.
......’Twas a nest full of young birds on the ground
The cutter-bar had just gone champing over
(Miraculously without tasting flesh)
And left defenseless to the heat and light.
...The way the nest-full every time we stirred
Stood up to us as to a mother-bird
Whose coming home has been too long deferred,
Made me ask would the mother-bird return
And care for them in such a change of scene
And might our meddling make her more afraid?
That was a thing we could not wait to learn.
We saw the risk we took in doing good,
But dared not spare to do the best we could
Though harm sh
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
[H]ow you get to Carnegie Hall is you sell out Town Hall twice in a year, and now you sell enough tickets to do a show at Carnegie Hall.
-- Louis C.K.
Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy.
Stephen Jay Gould
In the case of any person whose judgement is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself...the fallacy of what was fallacious.
–John Stuart Mill
Every argument must start from some unargued (because commonly accepted) assumptions. This is both logically necessary (as with axioms) and crucial for brevity of the argument. Since many truths are entangled, explaining all assumptions would eventually lead to listing a lot of our knowledge from many domains, and including many other arguments.
Anything can be an instrument, Chigurh said. Small things. Things you wouldnt even notice. They pass from hand to hand. People dont pay attention. And then one day there's an accounting. And after that nothing is the same. Well, you say. It's just a coin. For instance. Nothing special there. What could that be an instrument of? You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? Well, it's just a coin. Yes. That's true. Is it?
— Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
It's worth remembering, especially for people who are interested in meta-ethics, that often you can skip the confusion and jump ahead to Rough Consensus and Running Code. On rare occasions this will come back to bite you, but usually not (and if it does, you can jump back to the beginning).
...We are accustomed to thinking of evolution in a biological context, but modern evolutionary theory views evolution as something much more general. Evolution is an algorithm; it is an all-purpose formula for innovation, a formula that, through its special brand of trial and error, creates new designs and solves difficult problems. Evolution can perform its tricks not just in the "substrate" of DNA, but in any system that has the right information processing and information-storage characteristics. In short, evolution s simple recipe of "diff
A perennial favourite: "If you torture the data enough, they will confess."
Often attributed to Ronald Coase, however this version was likely: "If you torture the data long enough, nature will confess" - perhaps implying a confession of truth. Another version, attributed to Paolo Magrassi: "If you torture the data enough, it will confess anything" - perhaps implying a confession of falsehood.
Personally, I find the ambiguous version of greater interest.
After a while, Kit noticed that a large part of the pattern that made a bridge or a tower was built entirely out of people.
Kij Johnson, "The Man Who Bridged the Mist"
nominated for this year's Hugo
It may be expecting too much to expect most intellectuals to have common sense, when their whole life is based on their being uncommon -- that is, saying things that are different from what everyone else is saying. There is only so much genuine originality in anyone. After that, being uncommon means indulging in pointless eccentricities or clever attempts to mock or shock.
Retracted, because it's a duplicate.
Men show their characters in nothing more clearly than in what they think laughable.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(re-posted on request.)
Reframed with more standard pronouns: if I have everyone else in my power, but not myself, then everyone else is in the power of someone I don't control.
Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.
– James Baldwin
The obscure language was likely due to the political context of the original; try substituting 'identified' for 'faced'.
Posted to wrong month, moved.
An excerpt from Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss. Boxing is not safe.
...The innkeeper looked up. "I have to admit I don't see the trouble," he said apologetically. "I've seen monsters, Bast. The Cthaeh falls short of that."
"That was the wrong word for me to use, Reshi," Bast admitted. "But I can't think of a better one. If there was a word that meant poisonous and hateful and contagious, I'd use that."
Bast drew a deep breath and leaned forward in his chair. "Reshi, the Cthaeh can
Another Goethe quote, whilst on that tack; seems appropriate for disciples of GS.
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Wise men store up knowledge, but the mouth of a fool invites ruin.
-Proverbs 10:14
If you want to learn why you think whatever it is you think, strip away existing context and force it into a new one and see what happens.
The Last Psychiatrist, at http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/11/judge_beats_his_daughter_for_b.html
"'Whereof one cannot speak thereof be silent,' the seventh and final proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, is to me the most beautiful but also the most errant. 'Whereof one cannot speak thereof write books, and music, and invent new and better terminology through mathematics and science,' something like that, is how I would put it. Or, if one is not predisposed to some such productivity, '. . . thereof look steadfastly and directly into it forever.'"
-- Daniel Kolak, comment on a post by Gordon Cornwall.
I predict that if we were to poll professional economists a century from now about who is the intellectual founder of the discipline [economics], I say we'd get a majority responding by naming Charles Darwin, not Adam Smith.
Robert H. Frank, 2011 September 12, speaking on Russ Roberts' EconTalk podcast. The rest of the quote can be found near 14:11 in the transcript. Robert H Frank was talking a lot about his book The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good.
If you wish to advance into the infinite, explore the finite in all directions.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If you wish to advance into the infinite, explore the finite in all directions.
That sounds incredibly deep. (By which I mean it is bullshit.)
For some reason, this thread reminds me of this Simpsons quote:
"The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies, and in the end, isn't that the real truth?"
Bad luck isn't brought by broken mirrors, but by broken minds.
Dr Frank Mandel from Suspiria by Dario Argento
Minor spoiler alert. (I think you know the drill.)
Nsgre Oebaa jvaf n qhry:
Ynql Neela: "Lbh qba'g svtug jvgu ubabe!"
Oebaa: "Ab."
Oebaa fzvyrf naq cbvagf gb gur zna ur whfg qrsrngrq.
"Ur qvq."
Game of Thrones (TV series), episode S01E06
(Rational agents should WIN.)
...There is no mutually exclusive 'is – ought' distinction. The only mutually exclusive alternative to 'is' is 'is not'. This means that 'ought' either needs to find a comfortable home in the realm of 'is', or needs to be tossed into the realm of 'is not'.
A person comes to me and says, "Alonzo, you ought to do X."
I answer, "Prove it."
That person then says, "Well, as you know, an 'ought' statement cannot be derived from any set of 'is' statements . . . .”
"You can stop right there," I say. "We're done. You have just told
If our society seems more nihilistic than that of previous eras, perhaps this is simply a sign of our maturity as a sentient species. As our collective consciousness expands beyond a crucial point, we are at last ready to accept life's fundamental truth: that life's only purpose is life itself.
– Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang in Alpha Centauri
This is a bad framing of the issue. Murder (for humans) is not, properly speaking, right or wrong. Saying that it is will do for casual conversation but let's make things precise. The term "murder" also presupposes wrong-ness, so I'll replace it with 'killing'.
Moral judgments (right/wrong) are descriptions given by people to actions. Killing may be wrong in my eyes, and separately in your eyes; it is not wrong or right in itself. This is true whether 'killing' stands here for a very specific case we are discussing, or whether we are making a generalization over some or all cases of actual or possible killing. (In the latter case, we will be implying some generalization such as 'most/all/typical/... cases of killing are wrong in X's eyes'.)
We can also generalize over the person doing the moral judgment. For instance, if most/all/typical/... people think a case of killing is morally wrong, I can simply say that "it is wrong" without making explicit who does or doesn't agree with this judgment. This, as I noted above, is what we typically do in conversation - and it's OK, but only as long as everyone understands and agrees on who is said to (dis)approve of the action in question!
Finally, all that I have said isn't necessarily incorrect even if you believe in objective moral truth. In that case you can view it as a definition of the words 'morally right/wrong'. We can talk about people's moral opinions even if there is a separate Objective Moral Truth that not all people agree with. We should just be clear when we're talking about truth, and when about opinions.
However, I believe there is no such thing as objective moral truth. This isn't just because there's no evidence for it (which is true); the very concept seems to me to be confused. You say:
Science starts with assumptions, and fundamental observations, that are about the objective world it describes. Morals start with assumptions and observations about human moral judgments. These judgments are the functions of human brains, which of course exist objectively. The morals you deduce from these assumptions are an objective fact - but they are a fact about human brains! That's what you deduced them from! They are not a fact about e.g. the action of killing in itself.
Imagine an alien that doesn't think killing kittens is morally wrong. It can do so without any compunctions. This is of course its subjective view. However, some humans think killing kittens is generally morally wrong, no matter who does it (as long as it's an intelligent being that makes choice about its actions).
In a universe with aliens and kittens but no humans, would an alien killing kittens be morally right or wrong? My answer: this is a wrong question; a correct question about morality is e.g. "do humans think that xxx is wrong", and there is no morality without reference to some agents (human or otherwise) doing the moral judging. Your answer is, presumably, that it is as right or as wrong as it is in our universe. (Are moral truths like logical truths? Or contingent on physical law?)
You think there are objective moral facts. Are they logical facts, like mathematical truths? Or are they physical facts, contingent on physical law and our actual universe, out there to be discovered?
In the latter case at least you have to say what physical evidence causes you to believe they exist.
And what does it mean for an objective moral truth to exist? If it's a logical truth, and my morals are different, does that mean my behavior is irrational in some sense? If it's a physical truth, and my morals are different, does that mean I will make wrong predictions about physical facts I don't know yet?
If I gave you an oracle for logical truths, and an oracle for physical facts, could you in principle deduce all moral truths? How?
"Murder" presupposes "moral wrong", that's just what the word means. I certainly agree that "killing" - any particular instance of killing, as well as killing in general - is not in itself right or wrong; it is only right or wrong in the eyes of some people. Most people in any given society agree about most killings, which creates a consensus useful for many purposes, which all adds up to normality.
So you admit that there are two different kinds of objective facts. Given that there are two different kinds, why can't there be more?