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Rationality Quotes July 2012
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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 think "more nihilistic" is only meant to imply the progression of philosophical thought away from the dogmas of what "the purpose of life" was, which was for awhile, very broadly generalized, a progression from religion to nihilism.
I also think nihilistic was chosen because it is a trope that is is much more present in the cultural vernacular than other, more more philosophically precise words, like absurdist, which would be more accurate.
If I look at the Wikipedia one-line definition again, that seems to match:
...a sensible move away from religious, traditional values...
...which is branded by religionists as leading to thinking "existence is senseless and useless", although that's both empirically and logically wrong. This part is the 'meaning' of 'nihilism' in the vernacular, as you say.
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.
In that same wikipedia article, follow the link to Moral Nihilism to learn
If morality is not objective, than moral propositions do not have true-or-falseness about them, and all the discussions about morality are vapid.
What Chang means is he gets to make it up as he goes along because 1) it is not wrong to make it up as he goes along because in nihilism, nothing is "wrong," and 2) there isn't a "right" either.
Its possible a slightly warm-and-fuzzier Chang would choose Moral Relativism which is Moral Nihilism's more conventional 2nd cousin. But Nihilism makes for a much better story, it is stark and even the word sounds ominous.
It seems very obvious and uncontroversial to me that morality is not objective. (Yay typical mind fallacy!) Morality is, or arises from, a description of human actions, judgements and thoughts. Aliens who behaved completely differently should be said to have different morals.
It's not clear to me why someone would even think to argue for objective (=universally correct and unique) morals unless motivated by religion or tradition.
Of course, it's also clear to me that our subjective morals add up to normality. For instance murder is generally morally wrong. Of course that should be read to say it's wrong in our eyes! Of course things are not right or wrong in themselves; value judgements, including moral values, are passed by observers who have values/preferences/moral theories.
It seems to me that nihilism, if it is commonly understood to mean this, should be accepted by pretty much any materialist. This doesn't seem to be the case. What am I missing? What are the reasons to think there's something in nature (or in logic, perhaps) that should be identified as "objective morals"?
If I said "Murder is NOT wrong for humans, it is just a matter of personal choice" and you said "no you are wrong, murder is wrong for humans" I would conclude you are a moral realist, not a nihilist. I made a moral statement and you told me I was wrong. You seem to believe that that moral statement is either true or false no matter who says it, that "I think I'll murder Dan" is not just a subjective choice like "I think I'll read a Neil Gaiman book tonight" might be.
But you also characterize morality as a description of human actions. If I say "I notice that murder is said to be wrong by many people but is practiced by some non-trivial minority of humans, there fore, since I observe it is part of the human moral landscape, I will pick a kid at random in the mall and shoot him." and you say "no, you shouldn't" then you are probably a moral realist. You apparently think that the proposition I proposed has a truth or falseness to it that exists outside yourself, and you are expressing to me that this statement I made is false.
My moral nihilism which I have abandoned perhaps a week ago arose from my comparing the quality of moral facts and fact finding to the quality of scientific facts and fact finding. Science seemed developed through an objective process: you had to test the world to see if statements about the world were true or false. Whereas morality seemed to come entirely from intuitions and introspection. "you shouldn't kill random kids in the mall." "You should recycle." Blah blah blah where is even the test? In my case I was a nihilist in that I thought there was no sensible way to declare a moral statement to be a "fact" rather than a choice, but I was totally willing to kill reflecting my choices (i.e., kill someone who threatened me or my friends or my family). So I had what I thought was a de facto morality that I thought could not be justified as "fact" in the same way that engineering and physics textbooks could be justified.
Upon being reminded of "the problem of induction" I remembered that scientific facts are deduced from ASSUMPTIONS. We just do a pretty good job if aligning with reality is your standard. So the feature that any moral conclusions I was going to reach would necessarily be deduced from assumptions was not enough to relegate them to mere choices.
It could be that we are nowhere near as good at figuring out what the moral facts are as we are at figuring out what the scientific facts are. But 3000 years ago, we weren't very good at scientific facts either, and that presumably didn't stop them from being facts, we just didn't know much about them yet.
So maybe morality CAN'T be known as well as science, or maybe it can, we just haven't figure it out yet.
But to be a proper nihilist, you need to accept that murder is not wrong (it is not right either). Are you down with that?
Don't quite see why this is so down voted.
Me either. This is one of my favorites. But that's why I posted it. :-)
Because for certain concepts, this is an lesswrong is an echo chamber. Unfortunately, the idea that lesswrong is NOT an echo chamber is another one of those concepts So I will retract this comment.
Duplicate.
You double posted this quote and, while this came first, the other has a meaningful reply on it.
Whoops. You're right. I meant to grab another one. I'll delete this, thanks.
– CEO Nwabudike Morgan in Alpha Centauri
I find it troubling how much I want to upvote you just beause you're quoting SMAC.
I recently rediscovered it and realized how many quotes fit into LW memes. And apparently there was an expansion too. I never knew that until about a month ago.
I finally wikipediaed this and see you are talking about a Sid Meier video game. I played Civilization once for about an hour (where I was amazed when my 10 year old consultant on the game told me I was an idiot for going democratic, that I would have had a much better military if I'd gone communist and then built a statue of liberty, or something like that). I have spent countless hours on Railroad Tycoon back before Steve Jobs got fired.
Do I want to get SMAC and risk ruining my life? Perhaps have myself lashed to a mast before I try it?
Is SMAC addictive?
My experience of the single-player game was that it was fun, but the AI was sufficiently stupid that (a) it was trivial to beat unless I was extremely unlucky in the first twenty years or so, and (b) it rewarded tedious amounts of micromanaging. There are various "play with one hand tied behind your back" style variants that can extend the fun for a little while, but that sort of thing only goes so far.
So, no, it wasn't especially addictive... I played it a lot for a little while, played it a little for a longer while, and haven't looked at it in years.
I never got into the multiplayer version, but can see where it might be a lot more addictive.
SMAC is the crown jewel of the series, if you ask me. The expansion, Alien Crossfire is almost impossible to find legally though, and adds a lot to the game.
Is it addictive? I don't know, largely because it's difficult to specify what is "addictive" and what isn't. The best answer I can give you is yes, in bursts. I'll play it for eight hours in a row one day and then not touch it for a month.
I got the original SMAC and SMAX in one set on Amazon a few years ago.
A quick google reveals it's still available. Less than $5.
That's good. I heard somewhere it was really rare. Guess it's not.
Yes.
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 play against in a fun manner, other people are difficult to play against for frustrating technical reasons.
The factions are tremendously unbalanced. While this is a neat statement about social organization- no, fundamentalism is a worse idea than an open society, unless you want to rule over a world of ash- it makes it a somewhat worse game, because single or multiplayer games are tainted by the tier rankings. Similarly, in single-player games you are always playing with the same seven factions, unlike in Civ games where you're able to play with a varied host (and as many or as few opponents as you want).
It is worthwhile to see the whole tech tree a few times; it is worthwhile to learn how the game works; it is possible to nod contentedly and walk away from SMAC, saying "I am done and this was a good experience."
It's also possible to play it for hundreds of hours (I certainly did), and it's the sort of game that I dust off every few years to play a game of. I would recommend playing it, but I would also recommend lashing yourself to a mast if there's something else you need to get done.
This is making me feel old. Me and a few college mates had a SMAC multiplayer game running for the better part of a year. If someone told me now that I could have a multiplayer game experience by taking my turn, zipping up the game file and emailing it to the next person in the cycle, I would laugh in their face.
Alien crossfire added 7 more civilizations, two of which are even more imbalanced than University. Which I wasn't sure was possible.
Right- I tended to play SMAC instead of SMACX because of the balance issues (or, at least, play it with just the original 7 because it did add new buildings and secret projects) and the new 7 had weird divisions. The Corporation and the University seem like natural divides- but, say, the Angels were just odd ("We're super hackers!" "Wouldn't that make sense for a gang inside another civilization, rather than a full civilization?").
It's also worth noting that the game allows for creating custom factions... the faction definitions are just parameters in a text file. So one can self-medicate the balance issues if desired.
Yeah, I tend to agree. My favorite mix is playing as University, with the Gaians, Peacekeepers, Cybernetic, Planet Cult, and Believers, with one of the progenitor factions to make things interesting.
Yes to all of those questions.
Another amusing one from Alpha Centauri:
This actually seems wrong. Clicking "retry" seems to map to "make the same attempt, in the same way, and hope things go better". It's worth trying once or twice, but eventually you have to update towards the possibility that the strategy you're trying is fundamentally flawed, that it will never work, abort, and come at things from a completely different angle.
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.
If you really did the same thing in the same environment and expected a different result it would be insane, realistically I never expect the world to respond to my actions the same way twice so that saying holds about as much weight as any other truism.
Well, there will always be a difference in the readings on the clocks on the wall for each try, it is hard for one person to do the same thing 10 times simultaneously.
So if you allow the "except for things you didn't think could possibly matter, or were unaware of" to remain implicit, do you get a better feeling about it?
Right, which is why sometimes you need help -- sometimes a domain expert tells you that yes, you might naively think that, having tried the same thing 25 times, you can reasonably give up, but that's not true in this case because of these biological mechanisms.
In lieu of (and in most cases in precedence over) biological mechanisms I would take testimony from the expert that, for example, "30 of the 50 people I have seen learn this took 30 or more attempts and I don't know of a better way to try than what you are doing".
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've just been doing a 750 piece jigsaw puzzle with the kids while on vacation. I can't tell you how many pieces didn't fit until about the 7th time I tried them.
Anybody who thinks doing a 750 piece jigsaw puzzle has nothing to do with the philosophy of science or engineering either has not done a 750 piece jigsaw puzzle, or has not done science or engineering, or is not thinking optimally.
I think like everything in practical truth, theory is quite different from reality. It is the philosopher's noble task to narrow that difference, even as improvements in practice widen it faster than it can ever be narrowed.
– Chairman Sheng-ji Yang in 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!"
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.
In-game, Yang does view it as an excuse, though, because he's more or less a totalitarian, nihilistic sociopath.
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.
Right. Which is the same as the point I was originally making: At least one chemical process has moral significance.
That's true. It seems I've been arguing past you or at a strawman. Sorry.
Lineage has been considered sacred since before it was known what chemicals made it up - think royal families, horror at the idea of racial intermixing, etc. And I don't see why that should change because we know what it's made of - for other reasons maybe, but not that.
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.
Technically, he just said SQUEAK. Which is even more general.
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.
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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-- Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Essays on Mind and Matter"
This argument may have influenced my thoughts several years later.
"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
– Commissioner Pravin Lal in Alpha Centauri
Eloquent!
What.
I can see how that second sentence is a bit confusing. FWIW, my interpretation is "Our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature delicately balance on our observations." But in retrospect, I agree it is better without that sentence.
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.
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.
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.
Nonetheless, the sentiment "You can do X, but only once" seems broadly useful.
Can you explain how so? This does not seem obvious to me. It seems broadly true, but not broadly useful. (And I'm not really sure what you mean by useful anyway.)
My model of Eliezer says: "You can launch AGI, but only once."
I think I get it. If you have a big weapon of doom that will ruin everything, it's not useless; you can use it when you're absolutely desperate. So options that sound completely stupid are worth looking at when you need a last resort.
Just because you can do something doesn't mean the price for doing it is acceptable.
Just because the price for doing something is your own death (or consignment to non-volatile ROM) doesn't mean the price is unacceptable.
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!
I don't think I'm confusing the two, I'm saying the connotation is what's important when the connotation is what is almost always used. And I'm not claiming that the quote is wrong, just that it's not really a rationality quote.
Unfortunately, this sentence itself seems to betray some confusion: "connotation" is not a kind of alternative definition; hence it makes no sense to say that "the connotation is what is almost always used". Rather, both denotation and connotation are always present whenever a word is used. "Connotation" refers to implications a word has outside of its meaning. For example, the words "copulate" and "fuck" have the same meaning (denotation), but differing connotations.
The crucial difference is that, while changing the denotation of a word (or getting it wrong) can change the truth-value of a statement, merely changing the connotation never can. Instead, it merely changes the register, signaling-value, or "appropriateness" of the statement. A scientist, in the ordinary course of affairs, might report having observed two lizards copulating; but it would be rather shocking to read in a scientific paper about lizards fucking, and one virtually never does. However, if a scientist ever were to write such a thing, the complaint would not be that they had claimed something false; it would be merely that they had made an inappropriate choice of language.
A lot of verbal humor results from using "inappropriate" connotations. The "edible" quote is an example of this, in fact. The listener understands that the sentence is true but still "off" in some way. Using an inappropriate connotation is not a misuse of the word, otherwise the humor wouldn't work (or at least, it wouldn't work in the same way -- there are other forms of verbal humor which do involve incorrect usage).
Well, I agree about that -- but that doesn't really seem to have been the main thrust of your comment. Your claim seemed to be that the quotee had redefined the word "edible"; and this is what I am disputing.
This is a silly argument.
The standard definition of edible is fit to be eaten, not "able to be eaten".
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.
I've seen a distinction being made between “legible” applying to typography etc. and “readable” applying to grammar etc., so that a über-complicated technical text typeset in LaTeX would be legible but not readable, and a story for children written in an awful handwriting would be readable but not legible.
Something "illegible" cannot have its component characters distinguished or identified. Something that is merely "unreadable" might just have ridiculously convoluted syntax or something.
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.
I'm advisedly ignoring the original context, but I'm curious about the idea that your behavioral tendencies in particular (and mine) with respect to the usage of "irregardless" don't affect the actual semantics of the word. At best, it seems that "irregardless" both is and is not a synonym for "regardless"... as well as both being and not being an antonym of it.
Unless only some usages count? Perhaps there's some kind of mechanism for extrapolating coherent semantics from the jumble of conflicting usages. Is it simple majoritarianism?
Sure. It's really an amusing play on words more than a rationality quote.
Similarly:
The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries
I don't really see the point of either of these quotes.
Edit: Fixed. Thanks.
Because Markdown renumbers numbered lists for you (making it easier for you to re-order them). Prevent it with a backslash before the period:
Reminds me of advice to people who want to know if they can sue someone: You can always sue. You just can't always expect to win.
Rational politician:
Dilbert blog
I don't see the implied link between
... and
The fact that appealing to emotion works to get elected doesn't mean that elected politicians have any incentive one way or the other towards educating voters.
That's the point. They have no incentive one way or another, so it's not their job. The quote doesn't say it's their job not to, just that it isn't their job.
Peter Singer
Reminds me a little of Avicenna.
– Bill Maher, Real Time with Bill Maher, 6/8/2012
video article
(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.
Hm, I thought that reasoning argued against your own non-serious first paragraph rather than what Bill said. If the idea is "if God is real (and won't let snakes bite me), then they won't bite me", then being bitten shows that the first part is false, but not being bitten doesn't say anything about the first part being true or false.
Or if you don't want to get hung up on formal logic, then it's valid but very weak evidence, like a hypothesis not being falsified in a test.
What Bill Maher said was that if a person claims that ~Bite is significant evidence for God, they must admit that Bite is significant evidence for ~God. I'm saying I don't think that's accurate.
The sentiment that one should update on the evidence is obviously great, but I think we should keep an eye on the maths.
Right. Sensitivity does not equal specificity. Maher makes the mistake of assuming the rate of false positives and false negatives for the 'snakebite test for god' are equal. The transitional fossil test for evolution and the perjury test for honesty both have high false negative rates and low false positive rates.
Strictly speaking, the bible says of Jesus's followers "they will pick up serpents." It doesn't say "they will pick up serpents and not get bitten."
Of course, it does also say they can drink deadly poison without being harmed.
As it happens, I am related to and share my last name with this guy.
Seems like this calls for either preventative antidotes and something to prove or a serious selective breeding program!
-- Brandon Watson
Clarity is subjective. By reformatting something into a familiar pattern, it can easily become clearer to them, but muddier to someone else.
But yes, sometimes, such systems don't do anyone any real good.
--Steve Pavlina
Or, because running into heavy objects is a good intuition pump:
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.
Haven't followed Steve since about 2008. What has he been up to? Is he still newageous?
I haven't looked into his new material in around a year, now, and even then I was focused on his old stuff (I found him through researching Uberman, I think). I believe the answer is "even more than he was then." That quote is from his 2009 book.
Yes, he is. Steve's idea of truth differs a bit from the lesswrong consensus.
--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.)
I'm reminded of a propositional logic class that spent some time discussing "Everybody loves my baby, but my baby don't love nobody but me."
Rephrased using an honest coin.
(I rolled my die just once because the latter two pronouns are anaphors that refer back to the first, and this statement doesn't only apply to genderqueer people. :) )
--Titus Livius
— Ty Cobb
-- RStevens
— Philosophy Bro summarizing Wittgenstein's "On Certainty". (I'm not sure the summary is very true to the original but it's interesting nonetheless.)
It's a reasonably accurate translation of the spirit of the original into colorful English.
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?
— Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
--- the character Chigurh, from the same novel and author.
It's almost like a koan for me - thinking about what in my history I have lost on a coin toss is a great jumping point into more introspection.
--The Ones Who Walk Toward Acre
-- 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.
Not wanting to take a principle to heart is not the same thing as denying that's the way things work, though. I think most people acknowledge (or at least give lip service) that being able to be objective is virtuous and often important. Even the ones who are rubbish at actually being so in real life.
And of course it's entirely possible to be blatantly one-sided about capital punishment, but still want to hear both sides of the story when your kids are having an argument.
And of course it's also entirely possible to realise you should be objective, even if that's more difficult and disturbing and less satisfying. You can just grit your teeth and tell your need for one-sidedness to shut up and let you think properly.
True, though we're still treating objectivity as fairness in arguments rather than even-handedness in truth inquiries. All these phrases refer to two sides, not more.
Because in an argument between their kids, people haven't already made up their minds.
These phrases are mainly used in near mode, or when trying to induce near mode. The phenomenon described in the quote is a feature (or bug) of far mode.
"'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.
This misses the point that Wittgenstein made. Inventing better terminology doesn't help you if you don't have any information in the first place.
Something might have happened before the big bang. The big bang erased all information about what happened before the big bang. Therefore we shouldn't speak about what happened before the big bang.
Gods might exist or might not exist. We don't have any evidence to decide whether they exist. Therefore we should stop speaking about gods.
To come to a question that more central to this community: We have no way to decide through the scientific method whether the Many Worlds Hypothesis is true. According to Wittgenstein we should therefore be silent.
Inventing new terminology doesn't help with those issues.
I'm by no means an expert on this, but I was under the impression that Wittgenstein meant that language was an insufficient tool to express the "things we must pass over in silence", e.g. metaphysics, religion, ethics etc., but that he nevertheless believed that these were the only things worth talking about. My understanding was that he believed that language is only good for dealing with the world of hard facts and the natural sciences and, while we cannot use it to express certain things, some of these things might be "shown" by different means, in line with his comment that the unwritten part of the tractatus was the most important part.
This conclusion from one of hist lectures largely sums up how I would understand his view of many of the "things we must pass over in silence".
This is largely the way I have been led to interpret it through reading other people's interpretations and it is probably wrong, but I thought that I'd try and express it here, because I do have a strong desire to expand my knowledge of Wittgensteinian philosophy. One thing which I do think is quite likely though, is that Wittgenstein would consider any written "interpretation" of his work to ultimately be "nonsense" insofar as any written part of it is concerned.
IIRC, in "On Certainty" in particular, Wittgenstein had a lot to say about the role of language and how it is not primarily a mechanism for evaluating the truth-value of propositions but rather a mechanism for getting people to do things. In particular, I think he dismisses the entire enterprise of Cartesian doubt as just a game we play with language; arguing that statements like "There exists an external reality" and "There exists no external reality" simply don't mean anything.
So I'd be surprised if he were on board with language as a particularly useful tool for hard facts or natural sciences, either.
Admittedly, it's been like 20 years since I read it, and it's a decidedly gnomic book to begin with, and I'm no kind of expert on Wittgenstein. So take it with a pound of salt.
The Tractatus is a product of what is called the early or first Wittgenstein, while "On Certainty" belongs to his latter stage. By that time he had repudiated the emphasis of the Tractatus on logical correspondence with facts and switched to speaking of language games and practical uses. In both phases his position on "unspeakable" things like ethics and metaphysics was similar (roughly the one Danfly summarizes at the beginning of the parent quote).
–John Stuart Mill
Susan B. Anthony
That is not always true.
--Prime Function Aki Zeta-5, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
@Konkvistador you will enjoy They're Made Out Of Meat
I prefer the original version.
From Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
--A.L. Kitselman
See also Paul Graham's essay Keep Your Identity Small, on the same subject.
--John Stuart Mill (1854).
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.
Interesting, and I would happily bet against that prediction.
-- Thomas Sowell
Retracted, because it's a duplicate.
duplicate
Link to the original.
--Dr. Samuel Johnson; "The Life of Cowley", Lives of the English Poets (1781)
-- Thomas Sowell
-- Thomas Sowell
Downvoted for several obvious reasons. Seriously, just fucking THINK of the quote in this context a little bit!
Can you expand on what additional information you believe you're providing when you "explain" a downvote in this way, rather than just downvoting silently?
From where I sit the "explanation" seems purely an attempt to shame Viliam_Bur in public, and by extension to shame anyone who might agree with that quote or think it at all compelling. Is that what you have in mind?
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.
Oh, sorry! I did indeed assume just that (and some things about the general racial supremacist attitude of Western societies before decolonization, etc), while totally overlooking that he's an American and that they indeed have that curious issue. In fact... yeah, not to defend my brashness or anything, but mentioning "race relations" in that context so off-handedly is indeed bound to make people think of one as a Segregationist or something!
He also happens to be black, if that's relevant.
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.
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.
-- Bill Bryson
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.
-Marvin Minsky
Thinking of your brain (and yourself) like an instrument to played might be useful for instrumental rationality.
-- Louis C.K.
-- Clay Shirky