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Rationality Quotes July 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- Do not quote yourself
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB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 (466)
– Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang in Alpha Centauri
I don't understand the quote. Under what definition of "nihilistic" does it make sense?
Wikipedia says:
Often true and valid. Agrees with the quote in that life has no purpose beyond itself - e.g. no supernatural gods.
Doesn't follow, and is false in any case. Unless one argues that all existing or even possible things are senseless and useless. Which would render these two words quite senseless and useless, in my view.
What is meant by 'nihilism' anyway?
I wouldn't use wikipedia to get the gist of a philosophical view. At least to me, I find it to be way off a lot of the time, this time included. Sorry I don't have a clear definition for you right now though.
Don't quite see why this is so down voted.
Minor spoiler alert. (I think you know the drill.)
Game of Thrones (TV series), episode S01E06
(Rational agents should WIN.)
If those four people who downvoted this would enlighten me as to why this is a bad quote, that would be much appreciated.
To the extent honor encodes valid ethical injunctions, ignoring it will cause you to loose in the long run.
Exactly-- compare Protected from Myself to "rationalists should win!".
Would your opinion of the quote change if "fighting dishonorably" were replaced by "violating the Geneva convention"?
Perhaps. I'd say that should depend on the price for failure and how that compares to the violation. But point taken.
I have a general policy of downvoting anything in rot13. No, I'm not going to work to read your comment!
Instead, put your spoiler text in the hover text of a fake url, like this
Syntax:
Ah. I just picked up that technique from MinibearRex up there. I see you said it first, so kudos to you, then. It's a useful trick. I'll remember it.
...incidentally, if it's too much work to click the link, copy-paste the text and click the button, then you might save yourself even more time and effort by just scrolling on without bothering to click the thumbs-down button either. There are friendlier ways to express disapproval, too. But thanks for the advice, I'll try to be less of a bother next time.
This is kind of funny. I learned this trick from Grognor's comment when I saw it in the recent comments section. And then I decided to try it out when I noticed the misspelling, not realizing it was on the same post.
First, it is an appeal to consequences against honor. Worse, it is an appeal to fictional consequences.
Second, honor is not the opposite of rationality. Just making an argument against honor would not automatically be a rationality quote even if it was a good argument.
Third it was encrypted which made me waste more than three times the amount of time reading it that I would have if it was in plain text. When it turned out to be bad this made the disappointment much worse.
Jeez, you guys. You miss the point.
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-- Eliezer Yudkowsky
The point isn't that honour is bad, the point is (much more generally) that rational agents shouldn't follow the Rules and lose anyway, they should WIN. Whether the Rules are the rules of honour, of mainstream science or of traditional rationalism, or whatever, if they don't get you to win, find a way that does. And it's futile to complain about unfairness after you lost, or the guy you were rooting for did.
The only part that appeals to fictional consequences is the additional implication that oftentimes, an ounce of down-to-earth pragmatism beats any amount of lofty ideals if you need to actually achieve concrete goals.
I thought adding that "rational agents should win" reference would make the intended idea clear enough. But I'll take my own advice and just make a mental note to be clearer next time.
I dunno, I think all of that is overstated. I mean, sure, perfectly rational agents will always win, where "win" is defined as "achieving the best possible outcome under the circumstances."
But aspiring rationalists will sometimes lose, and therefore be forced to choose the lesser of two evils, and, in making that choice, may very rationally decide that the pain of not achieving your (stated, proactive) goal is easier to bear than the pain of transgressing your (implicit, background) code of morality.
And if by "win" you mean not "achieve the best possible outcome under the circumstances," but "achieve your stated, proactive goal," then no, rationalists won't and shouldn't always win. Sometimes rationalists will correctly note that the best possible outcome under the circumstances is to suffer a negative consequence in order to uphold an ideal. Sometimes your competitors are significantly more talented and better-equipped than you, and only a little less rational than you, such that you can't outwit your way to an honorable upset victory. If you value winning more than honor, fine, and if you value honor more than winning, fine, but don't prod yourself to cheat simply because you have some misguided sense that rationalists never lose.
EDIT: Anyone care to comment on the downvotes?
Upvoted. It's maybe not obvious from the quote alone, but in context, "honor" doesn't mean abstaining from deceit or manipulation -- it means following the largely impractical "rules" of dueling, when the bottom line is just who kills the other man.
I like the quote, though really there's no particular reason to put it in rot13.
Minor point: The character's name is spelled Oebaa
...huh. Well wow. I'm going to remember that trick, that's clever. I had no idea you could do that here.
Also, noted, and fixed.
Another Goethe quote, whilst on that tack; seems appropriate for disciples of GS.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There's one (okay, more like 1.6) major problem with that quote, everything else being otherwise good:
The implicitly absolute categorization of "love" as "ideal", and the likewise-implicit (sneaky?) connotation that love is not as real as it is ideal or marriage as ideal as it is real.
Love is a very real thing. There are very real, natural, empirically-observable and testable things happening for whatever someone identifies as "love". However, further discussion is problematic, as "love" has become such a wide-reaching symbol that it becomes almost essential to specify just what interpretation, definition or sub-element of "love" we're talking about in most contexts if ambiguity is to be avoided.
The Last Psychiatrist, at http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/11/judge_beats_his_daughter_for_b.html
Dr Frank Mandel from Suspiria by Dario Argento
"'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.
--Seneca
Don't know about that. He who has everyone else in his power sounds rather powerful too.
Ey who has everyone else in eir power has everyone else in the power of someone ey doesn't have control over.
Too many not-words in one sentence for me I'm afraid.
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.
In that case, most powerful is she who has herself in her own power, plus the greatest number of other people.
(I opt for Eliezer's coin flip method of gender-neutral pronoun usage, by the way.)
From Paleohacks.
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.
You and Alicorn are confusing denotation and connotation here. "Edible" simply means "able to be eaten"; it is used instead of "eatable", because the latter is for some reason not considered a "standard" or "legitimate" word. As such, it possesses exactly the same semantics as "eatable" would; in fact, a sufficiently supercilious English teacher will correct you to "edible" if you say "eatable". (Similarly "legible" instead of "readable", although "readable" seems to be increasingly accepted these days.)
Yes, it's true that people only usually apply the word to a more restricted subset of things than those which won't kill the eater; but such a behavioral tendency should not be confused with the actual semantics of the word.
The sense of the quote is exactly the same as if it had been:
In this case, it would hardly be legitimate to complain that "can be eaten" means "safe to be eaten". The fact is that the phrase is ambiguous, and the quote is a play on that ambiguity. Likewise in its original form, with "edible".
You've just provided a reasonable first-approximation analysis of wit!
Upvoted for this.
To claim that the actual semantics of a word can be defined by anything other than the behavioural tendencies of its users is, at best, highly controversial. Whatever you or I may think, "irregardless" just is a (near) synonym for "regardless" and, to judge from my own experience (and the majority of comments from native speakers on the thread) "edible" actually means "safe to eat" (although, as Alicorn says, it's a little bit more complicated than that).
Words mean exactly what people use them to mean - there is no higher authority (in English, at least, there isn't even a plausible candidate for a higher authority).
On the contrary, it's trivially true. If semantics depended exclusively on behavior patterns, then novel thoughts would not be expressible. The meaning of the word "yellow" does not logically depend solely on which yellow objects in the universe accidentally happen to have been labeled "yellow" by humans. It is entirely possible that, sitting on a planet somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy, is a yellow glekdoftx. Under the negation-of-my-theory (I'll try not to strawman you by saying "under your theory"), that would be impossible, because, due to the fact that humans have never previously described a glekdoftx as "yellow", the extension of that term does not include any glekdoftxes. Examples like this should suffice to demonstrate that semantic information does not just contain information about verbal behavior; it also contains information about logical relationships.
Guess what: I agree! Here, indeed, is my proof of this fact:
See how easy that was? And yet, here I am, dealing with a combinatorial explosion of hostile comments (and even downvotes), all because I dared to make a mildly nontrivial, ever-so-slightly inferentially distant point!
Insert exclamation of frustration here.
Yes, that thought is in my cache too. It doesn't address my point, which is more subtle.
It's reasonable to play with the expected meanings - but playing with the expected meanings in this case seems inconsistent with applying the label "Rationality Quote."
The quote is isomorphic to "Don't eat poisonous things - and some things are poisonous." That quote won't get upvotes if posted as a Rationality Quote - why should its equivalent?
I don't see the equivalence.
But remember, I'm not defending the quote as a Rationality Quote. I'm only defending the quote against the charge of inappropriate word choice.
The standard definition of edible is fit to be eaten, not "able to be eaten".
Nonetheless, the sentiment "You can do X, but only once" seems broadly useful.
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.
Apart from the hilarious joke, this quote makes the point that "will kill you" is not actually the same as impossible to eat, which more generally generally points out that impossible is often used in place of "really bad idea."
I read edible as a synonym for eatable. Poisonous mushrooms: edible. rocks, not edible. That's how that word is attatched in my head. I assume you read it as non-poisonous/fit to eat so it feels like a crass and overt redefinition. If the guy who wrote that reads that word the same way I assume you do it's a really cheap joke. If he doesn't the quote makes a lot of sense.
I take "All mushrooms are edible. But some of them you can eat only once." to be a useful warning, hopefully made more memorable by being framed as a joke.
-- Thomas Sowell
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".
In the US at least the murder rates today are comparable to those of the 1960s only because of advances in trauma medicine.
I've no idea of the data's provenance, but this table claims aggravated assault rates of 86/100,000 in 1960, 440/100,000 in 1993, and 252/100,000 in 2010 if I've got my math right. Murder rates are 5.08/100,000, 9.51/100,000, and 4.77/100,000 respectively. So the decline in murder since 1993 has outpaced the decline in assault (it also rose less steeply between '60 and '93), and trauma medicine's a plausible cause, but both declines are quite real: I wouldn't say the comparison to the 1960s is valid only because of medical improvements.
In any case, 1960 was more like fifty years ago. The per-100,000 aggravated assault rate in 1980 was just under 300 -- substantially over the 2010 numbers.
Interesting. Where did you find this fact? Are there others like it there?
Murder and Medicine: The Lethality of Criminal Assault 1960-1999
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.
Indeed, this seems to be an area where the legal system opts for a consequentialist approach; no surprise, then, that you would find it weird.
Um, I thought consequentialism was about evaluating the goodness of a course of action based on its probable consequences. If all it amounts to is hindsight then it's not much use for making ethical decisions about future actions. But I think that would be a straw man.
If you apply that crazy approach to consequentialism then I should be allowed to stand on a roof heaving bricks out into the street, and I'm not doing anything wrong unless and until one of them actually hits somebody.
Consequentialism is about deriving the ethical value of actions from their consequences. If someone thinks that the badness of an action is not determined until the consequences are known (like the police in Alicorn's example, or more to the pont the legal system they represent), then, necessarily, they are applying consequentialist moral intuitions, and not deontological moral intuitions.
No one said anything about "all it amounts to" being "hindsight". Your second paragraph is a straw man. While it is true that if someone believes that, they must be a consequentialist, it does not follow that a consequentialist must necessarily believe that.
I did say that it would be a straw man version of consequentialism. But I think I misunderstood what you were saying, or at least where your emphasis was, so I was kind of talking past you there :(
Thankfully in other areas the law is not concerned only with the contingent consequences of actions in general. Conspiracy to commit a crime is a crime. Attempted murder is a crime. Blackmail is a crime even if the victim refuses to be bullied and the blackmailer doesn't follow through on their threat. Kidnapping isn't considered to be babysitting if the victim is released unharmed.
So yeah. I think anyone could find it a little weird with or without calling it consequentialist.
It makes sense as an interrogation tactic, at any rate. If you're going for a confession and the person is distraught (either by what they did or by getting caught doing what they did) then it's a variation on "confess now or you'll get a worse sentence" with the added bonus that the timeline on the "confess" is both out of the interrogator's hands and it doesn't seem artifiical to the suspect.
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.
-- Bill Bryson
I think this is a bad principle to try to uphold. It means you have to understand the motivations behind all your principles, rather than just knowing that they are good principles. Which may be valuable for a small class of philosophers, but it's wasted effort for the general population.
Kij Johnson, "The Man Who Bridged the Mist"
nominated for this year's Hugo
-- Thomas Sowell
Retracted, because it's a duplicate.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
That sounds incredibly deep. (By which I mean it is bullshit.)
Not necessarily deep; a couple of concrete interpretations:
There is often much hidden wisdom in interpretation of aphorisms, which perhaps explains my preference for the poetic turn of phrase.
No, there are intentionally vague deep sounding comments to which wisdom can be associated. You've just given multiple meanings to the same words. Those other meanings may be useful but the words themselves are nonsense.
That pretty much describes any proposition. If you wish, substitute the word 'noise' for the word 'symbol, then the paragraph describes an utterance.
There is a good resource on semiotics here.
No it doesn't. Not all propositions are intentionally vague and deep sounding.
Were I inclined to substitute in 'noise' it would be as a contrast to 'signal'.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
This is an excellent quote and belongs at the top level.
(I downvoted it here because the point you are trying to make by replying with it is approximately backwards. An intended insult which would make more sense as a compliment.)
And there you have it: symbols (or strings of symbols) have different sense in different contexts.
One of the contexts in which I found this aphorism insightful, was in certain interpretations of quantum physics.
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?"
Upvoted for correct usage of a technical term. :-)
My favourite technical term out of all the technical terms!
I think it is intended to mean "If you want to accomplish impractical things, work on practical subtasks."
I don't see what's wrong with that.
That's an excellent quote. Let's find an impressive external source who says that and quote them!
Or, failing that, pick an impressive external source and ask them to write back to you saying that, so you can subsequently quote it attributed to "Impressive Source (private communication)"
Excellent idea. I used to do this on certain assignments at times.
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.
Rational politician:
Dilbert blog
– Chairman Sheng-ji Yang in Alpha Centauri
-- Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Essays on Mind and Matter"
This argument may have influenced my thoughts several years later.
I love the Alpha Centauri quotes, the game probably infected me with lost of the memes that made LW appealing. For the longest time I couldn't see any virtue or weirdtopia in the Yang's Human Hive society, but I eventually came to saw the dystopian possibilities of it are no greater than that those of the other factions. Also in the context of the difficulty of a positive singularity (transcendence in the game) it has pragmatic arguments in its favour.
Susan: Oh that's just --
Death of Rats: WHAT DO YOU MEAN, 'JUST'?
--Terry Pratchett, Hogfather, tweaked for greater generality
In the original, Susan finishes her line with "an old story", but by having DoR cut her off she could just as easily have said "chemistry" or "data" or something like that.
Great quote, especially the last line should be emphasised. Awesome audio of Yang quotes. The comments are also surprisingly entertaining and interesting especially consider this is on YouTube.
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"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
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!"
Moral significance is not a fact about morally significant humans. It's a fact about the other humans who view them as morally significant.
Our brains' moral reasoning doesn't know about, or depend on, the chemical implementations of morally significant humans' bodies. Therefore there are no moral questions about chemistry, including human biochemistry.
The original quote is correct: DNA should not be held sacred; DNA-related therapy is a tool like any biological or medical procedure. It has no moral status, and should not be assigned qualities like sacredness. Only specific applications of tools have moral status.
As I said, morality is in the eye of the beholder; one might therefore think it's possible to assign moral status to anything one wishes. However, assigning moral status to tools, methods, nonspecific operations, generally leads to repugnant conclusions and/or contradictions. Some people nevertheless say certain tools are immoral in their eyes. Other people value e.g. logical consistency higher than moral instincts. It's a matter of choice.
I suspect that, if I propose to drip an unknown liquid into your eyes, you will find the question of its chemistry very morally significant indeed.
Since our morality is embedded in, and arises from, physics, the moral questions are indeed at some level about chemistry even if the current black-box reasoning we use has no idea how to deal with information expressed in chemical terms. When we fully understand morality, we will be able to take apart the high-level reasoning that our brains implement into reasoning about the moral significance of individual atoms.
As I said: "Only specific applications of tools have moral status." The action of dripping liquid into my eyes has moral status. The chemical formula of the liquid, whatever it may be, does not. The only chemistry really relevant to morality is the chemistry of our brains that assign moral status to other things.
I know other formulations of "what is morally significant" are possible and sometimes seem useful, but they also seem to lead to the conclusion that everything is morally significant - e.g. assigning moral value to entire universe-states - which does away with the useful concept of some smaller thing being morally significant vs. amoral.
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.
– Commissioner Pravin Lal in Alpha Centauri
I'm sorry I had to downvote this because I just read Popper. Biblical creationism and moral theory is a remarkably simple and coherent guide to our natural experience. It certainly isn't the Bible's accuracy or utility for designing working stuff that makes it so popular.
If you think creationism is a simple explanation for existence, you don't really have a great grasp on Occam's Razor. Saying "God did it" sounds nice and simple in English words. But it's one heck of a lot more complicated if you actually want to simulate that happening.
– Bill Maher, Real Time with Bill Maher, 6/8/2012
video article
Why does this have 12 upvotes? The fact that this is slightly funny and for our "side" doesn't make it good logic. We've no reason to think snakebites and deities ought to be correlated at all. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence and all that. This ought to be below the visibility threshold.
But if you do think that snakebites and deities are correlated, then the correlation has to run both ways.
I didn't upvote since it's more politics than rationality, but there is a useful lesson there.
(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.
It is promised that "these signs will follow those who believe". So if they do bite you, then God is still real, but you didn't have enough faith.
Just doing this.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(re-posted on request.)
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.
But if you torture them too long, they will confess falsehoods.
Interesting that you should prefer 'they', referring to the plural data; some versions of the aphorism also use this form - in retrospect, I prefer this form.
Torturing data is a common problem in my field (geophysics). With large but sparse datasets, data can be manipulated to mean almost anything. Normal procedure: first make a reasonable model for the given context; then make a measureable prediction based upon your model; then collect an appropriate dataset by 'tuning' your measuring apparatus to the model; then process your data in a standard way. In the case that that your model is not necessarily wrong; then make another measureable prediction based upon your model; collect another dataset by an independent experimental method; then ...
Even when following this procedure, models are often later found to be wildly erroneous; in other words, all of the experimental support for your model was dreamt up.
What I was thinking about when typing that was indeed a model by some geophysicists. They had found some kind of correlation between some function of solar activity and some function of seismic activity, but those functions were so unnatural-looking that I couldn't help thinking they tweaked the crap out of everything before getting a strong-enough result.
-- Thomas Sowell
— Epimenides the Cretan
Depending on the speaker, this quote has the potential for reinforcing substantial status quo bias, since taking it serious would dramatically reduce the frequency of truly attempting to speak truth to power. In other words, the quote seems tailor-made for justifying a generalized counter-argument to all speak-truth-to-power actions.
Susan B. Anthony
That is not always true.
Mortification of the flesh is at least a mixed case. Delicious kinky endorphins.
— Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
Arthur Schopenhauer
If that's how it works, then I suspect paranoia is the same thing, but with fear instead of desire.
Walter Isaacson, Einstein (quoting Aaron Bernstein's People's Books on Natural Science)
Peter Singer
--"The Exposed Nest", Robert Frost; I googled some interpretation & discussions of it after reading, and was surprised to see I seem to be the only person to take it as a discussion of ethics.
–John Stuart Mill
--From the introduction of Frederic Bastiat's "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen".
From Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
"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
Wasn't a temporary moratorium called on smac quotes recently? I have to admit this was one of my favourites from it though.
Oops. I didn't see anything about a moratorium.
Ah. I see what my mistake was now. It was just a recommendation by AngryParsley. It wasn't anything official. As I'm still something of a newbie here, I figured it was said by someone with a bit more clout.
--John Stuart Mill (1854).
"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).
— Philosophy Bro summarizing Wittgenstein's "On Certainty". (I'm not sure the summary is very true to the original but it's interesting nonetheless.)
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?
In grade school, I recall there being more than one occasion when I slapped a friend in the back of the head for such instructional purposes when he became too solipsistic. (this wouldn't disprove solipsism, of course, but it would imply a "masochistic solipsism", and it turned out he strongly preferred realism over that)
In hindsight I wonder why he remained such a steadfast friend, and now I wonder whether, if I had ever had a banana handy, that would have been the last straw.
People who are experiencing scepticism should have bananas smushed in their faces, is what you're saying? And apparently that's worth 12 upvotes.
I've got a worse one: people who are experiencing skepticism should have their children taken away, forcibly stabbed with a syringe needle, injected with chemicals chosen by the government, and returned only if they will allow an institution they hate to keep stuffing their kids with chemicals.
Edit: Wait, that is controversial? Huh. Is LW unusually opposed to mandatory vaccination or am I wrong about the mainstream?
...where did that come from?
Anti-vaccers.
-Chinese proverb
-Marvin Minsky
Thinking of your brain (and yourself) like an instrument to played might be useful for instrumental rationality.
– CEO Nwabudike Morgan in Alpha Centauri
Another amusing one from Alpha Centauri:
-- RStevens
--Steve Pavlina
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.
If LW-rationality goes mainstream, it's followers will then be drawn from the same distribution.
I don't his comment about Buddhist people being not different is even true. They are, for example, on the average, less violent than Muslims. They're simply not different to the extent he expected them to be.
I don't think that the claim is really supported by the observations that he made in the article.
In Buddhism lying isn't as bad as it is in Christanity. Using violence is more accepted in Christian culture than in Buddnism. As a result the followers do act differently. They are less likely to use violence against him but more likely to lie to him.
Why do you think that people are the same everywhere? And what do you mean with "the same"?
How much of this difference can actually be attributed to the followers attempting to obey religious precepts, and how much is simply floating in the sea of cultural memes in the parts of the world where Buddhism and Christianity respectively happen to be common? Would you expect practicing Christians in Japan, Korea, China, or India (and who are ethnically Japanese, Korean, etc.) behave more like your model of "Buddhists" or "Christians"?
Religion is more than obeying general precepts. During the time my Catholic grandmother was in school she wanted to read some book. Before reading it she asked her priest to allow her to read it because it was on the Catholic census. Following the religion seriously and not reading anything that's on the census has an effect that goes beyond the general precepts.
A lot of Buddhists are vegetarians. A lot of Buddhists mediate. Those practices have effects.
Your question assumes that people in Japan can be either "Christians" or "Buddhists" but can't be both. Even when the Chrisitans in Malta pray to Allah you can't be Muslim and a Christian at the same time. There no similar problem with being a Zen Buddhist and being Christian at the same time.
I think that there a correlation but I'm not sure about the extend to which Far East Christians resemble Western Christians. Making a decision to convert to Christianity when you live in China has a lot of apsects that don't exist when someone who lives in a Christian town simply decides to stay Christian.
I'm not sure I understand your response. Let me restate what I was getting at above, in responding to this assertion:
This claim makes a prediction regarding the rates of lying and violence among "followers" of Buddhism and Christianity. But what counts as a data point for or against this claim depends on what could be meant by "the followers" of these religions. Two possible interpretations:
For instance, I consider myself an atheist, but I was raised in a Christian family and live in a society where Christianity is the predominant religious influence. I have read the Gospels (and most of the rest of the Bible); by contrast I have not read the Qur'an, the Tripitaka, the Vedas, or the Talmud. I don't pray, attend church, or listen to the teachings of priests or pastors.
By interpretation 1, I am not a Christian; and whether I happen to lie or do violence would not count for or against the claim above. (It would also not count regarding Buddhism; although I've done Zen meditation more recently than I've done Christian worship ...) By interpretation 2, my cultural background counts me as a Christian; and my tendencies to lie or do violence would count for or against the claim above.
So, I'm asking: What would count as evidence for or against the claim regarding the rate of lying and violence among Christians and Buddhists?
I don't think you understand what Buddhism happen to be. If I go into something rumored to be a Buddhist monastry and ask the inhibatans whether they attempt to live according to the precepts of Buddhism there a fairly good chance that the answer is no.
Attempting stuff means having attachment to it. Buddhism is about moving beyond such attachments.
What's my empiric claim?
log(Time spent in Buddhist rituals + X /Time spent in Christian rituals +X) correlates with log(Rate of lying Y / Rate of being violent + Y)
The formula is only supposed to give a general idea. There probably a better way to express the idea.
That's evidence that the religion does not change people too much.
Which might be a good thing. Religious cults do change people. An average Scientologist does not behave the same way as an average Christian. You could measure the influence of the religion by measuring how the distribution of personalities changes.
On the other hand, let's not reverse stupidity here. Changing personality is generally a bad thing, but that is not necessary, just very probable.
It's also evidence that religion may change people in the same way regardless of details.
<pseudo-math> You could define equivalence relations on the set of religious people (RP) and the set of atheistic humanists (AH). In most cases, the people in the sets only interact with (or at least influenced by) other members of the same or similar sets. Turn these interactions into operations on members of the set (a,b in RP, a*b = "a makes b feel awkward/scared/unhappy around a" or maybe something based on social relationships between members). These operations would create new "people" whose characteristics are similar to that of the person who has been molded by the defined social interaction(s).
Starting from a certain subset of RP, these operations could possibly generate the entire set of members (i.e a*b = c in RP, where c has the equivalent disposition as someone who has interacted with b under some applicable equivalence relation). Do the same for AH (using the same equivalence relation), and compare the structures. Under different types of interactions between members, this could reveal some interesting group-theoretical properties. Maybe there is a generating set for RP and not for AH if we keep the equivalence relations from getting too specific. </pseudo-math>
I guess what I'm getting at is that the structural elements of a certain set of people could tell us something about the distribution that the set was pulled from, or even invalidate the need to look at the distribution at all. Maybe the structure is even more important; these sets could pull from the same distribution, but the ideologies that formed these sets could result in drastically different results from operations (social interactions or relationships) between members of the set. Or we could see if only the generating members of the set were pulled from the same distribution, but the social interactions between them created a set member not from the original distribution, resulting in the set having to pull from that distribution also.
Anyway, this is probably not coherent or useful at all, but if nothing else it did lead me to the work of Harrison White on mathematical sociology:
This was particularly interesting:
-Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics
-- 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.
No, those phrases exist to help patch the flaw in human reasoning the parent describes. In fact it would be strange that we had those phrases and the corresponding flaw didn't exist.
-Rob DenBleyker
I'm betting on psychotic episodes. Any way to settle it?
Induce psychotic episodes in some people, explain Higgs boson to others, compare outcome religiosity.
Now I'm reminded of when my mother phoned me asking me “what's about this God particle they've found and everyone's talking about? does it prove that God exist, or that God doesn't exist?” and I told her not to mind journalists as they don't understand a thing and they're just trying to sell newspapers, and to look at the cover picture on my Facebook profile instead. (It shows the Lagrangian of the Standard Model before symmetry breaking.) She was a bit disappointed by that. ;-)
Ha! I was in a checkout at the mall and pulled up a science blog to see the developments on the Higgs-Boson. When I heard the 99.9999% proof I literally could not hold in my verbal amazement. Well no one around me (mother, sister, scared check-out girl) had the slightest clue what it was about and explaining only led to resentment and confusion (despite using an apologetic light tone i.e. leaving out the "God Particle" association.)
--A.L. Kitselman
Eric Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth
– James Baldwin
The obscure language was likely due to the political context of the original; try substituting 'identified' for 'faced'.
Or acknowledged, or accepted. I don't see facing an issue as obscure language, but this is a good aphorism. Upvoted.
Niccolo Machiavelli
As well they should.
Stephen Jay Gould
Albert Einstein
(Quoted here but not in any LW quotes thread.)
--Dan Dennett, Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology
That's one of my favorite Dennett passages. A similarly great anthropological metaphor is his tale of the forest god Feenoman and the "Feenomanologists" who study this religion. I have not been able to find it online, but it is in the essay "Two approaches to mental images", in the same book.