Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:
“Ignorance killed the cat; curiosity was framed!” ― C.J. Cherryh
(not sure if that is who said it originally, but that's the first creditation I found)
Interviewer: How do you answer critics who suggest that your team is playing god here?
Craig Venter: Oh... we're not playing.
...British philosophy is more detailed and piecemeal than that of the Continent; when it allows itself some general principle, it sets to work to prove it inductively by examining its various applications. Thus Hume, after announcing that there is no idea without an antecedent impression, immediately proceeds to consider the following objection: suppose you are seeing two shades of colour which are similar but not identical, and suppose you have never seen a shade of colour intermediate between the two, can you nevertheless imagine such a shade? He does not decide the question, and considers that a decision adverse to his general principle would not be fatal to him, because his principle is not logical but empirical. When--to take a contrast--Leibniz wants to establish his monadology, he argues, roughly, as follows: Whatever is complex must be composed of simple parts; what is simple cannot be extended; therefore everything is composed of parts having no extension. But what is not extended is not matter. Therefore the ultimate constituents of things are not material, and, if not material, then mental. Consequently a table is really a colony of souls.
The difference of method, here, ma
If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience.
-- G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.
Carl Sagan
Knowledge and information are different things. An audiobook takes up more hard disk space than an e-book, but they both convey the same knowledge.
"Comparing information and knowledge is like asking whether the fatness of a pig is more or less green than the designated hitter rule." -- David Guaspari
But I came to realize that I was not a wizard, that "will-power" was not mana, and I was not so much a ghost in the machine, as a machine in the machine.
Yes -- and to me, that's a perfect illustration of why experiments are relevant in the first place! More often than not, the only reason we need experiments is that we're not smart enough. After the experiment has been done, if we've learned anything worth knowing at all, then hopefully we've learned why the experiment wasn't necessary to begin with -- why it wouldn't have made sense for the world to be any other way. But we're too dumb to figure it out ourselves! --Scott Aaronson
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
-- Oscar Wilde
That's excellent advice for writing fiction. Audiences root for charming characters much more than for good ones. Especially useful when your world only contains villains. This is harder in real life, since your opponents can ignore your witty one-liners and emphasize your mass murders.
(This comment brought to you by House Lannister.)
Since I can't be bothered to do real research, I'll just point out that this Yahoo answer says that the quote is spoken by Lord Darlington. Oscar Wilde was a humorist and an entertainer. He makes amusing characters. His characters say amusing things.
Do not read too much into this quote and, without further evidence, I would not attribute this philosophy to Oscar Wilde himself.
(I haven't read Lady Windermere's Fan, where this if from, but this sounds very much like something Lord Henry from The Picture of Dorian Gray would say. And Lord Henry is one of the main causes of the Dorian's fall from grace in this book; he's not exactly a very positive character but certainly an entertainingly cynical one!)
“Males” and “females”. (OK, there are edge cases and stuff, but this doesn't mean the categories aren't meaningful, does it?)
The problem with Internet quotes and statistics is that often times, they’re wrongfully believed to be real.
— Abraham Lincoln
The findings reveal that 20.7% of the studied articles in behavioral economics propose paternalist policy action and that 95.5% of these do not contain any analysis of the cognitive ability of policymakers.
-- Niclas Berggren, source and HT to Tyler Cowen
“I drive an Infiniti. That’s really evil. There are people who just starve to death – that’s all they ever did. There’s people who are like, born and they go ‘Uh, I’m hungry’ then they just die, and that’s all they ever got to do. Meanwhile I’m driving in my car having a great time, and I sleep like a baby.
It’s totally my fault, ’cause I could trade my Infiniti for a [less luxurious] car… and I’d get back like $20,000. And I could save hundreds of people from dying of starvation with that money. And everyday I don’t do it. Everyday I make them die with my car.”
...Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befal himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little fi
And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident [as the destruction of China] had happened.
Now that we are informed of disasters worldwide as soon as they happen, and can give at least money with a few mouse clicks, we can put this prediction to the test. What in fact we see is a very great public response to such disasters as the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.
Paragraphs cost lines, and when each line of paper on average costs five shillings, you use as many of them as you can get away with.
I think it means you're underread within that period, for what it's worth.
The voice in that quote differs from Twain's and sounds neither like a journalist, nor like a river-side-raised gentleman of the time, nor like a Nineteenth Century rural/cosmopolitan fusion written to gently mock both.
The math here is scary. If you spitball the regulatory cost of life for a Westerner, it's around seven million dollars. To a certain extent, I'm pretty sure that that's high because the costs of over-regulating are less salient to regulators than the costs of under-regulating, but taken at face value, that means that, apparently, thirty-five hundred poor African kids are equivalent to one American.
Hilariously, the IPCC got flak from anti-globalization activists for positing a fifteen-to-one ratio in the value of life between developed and developing nations.
I have always thought that one man of tolerable abilities may work great changes, and accomplish great affairs among mankind, if he first forms a good plan, and, cutting off all amusements or other employments that would divert his attention, makes the execution of that same plan his sole study and business.
-- Benjamin Franklin
The sentiment is correct (diligence may be more important than brilliance) but I think "all amusements and other employments" might be too absolute an imperative for most people to even try to live by. Most people will break down if they try to work too hard for too long, and changes of activity can be very important in keeping people fresh.
Playing chess for 5 hours a day does not make chess your "sole study and business" unless you have some disorder forcing you to sleep for 19 hours a day. If you spent the rest of your waking time studying chess, playing practice games, and doing the minimal amount necessary to survive (eating, etc.), THEN chess is your "sole study and business"; otherwise, you spend less than 1/3 your waking life on it, which is less than people spend at a regular full time job (at least in the US).
reinventing the wheel is exactly what allows us to travel 80mph without even feeling it. the original wheel fell apart at about 5mph after 100 yards. now they're rubber, self-healing, last 4000 times longer. whoever intended the phrase "you're reinventing the wheel" to be an insult was an idiot.
That's not what "reinventing the wheel" (when used as an insult) usually means. I guess that the inventor of the tyre was aware of the earlier types of wheel, their advantages, and their shortcomings. Conversely, the people who typically receive this insult don't even bother to research the prior art on whatever they are doing.
To go along with what army1987 said, "reinventing the wheel" isn't going from the wooden wheel to the rubber one. "Reinventing the wheel" is ignoring the rubber wheels that exist and spending months of R&D to make a wooden circle.
For example, trying to write a function to do date calculations, when there's a perfectly good library.
I don't think winners beat the competition because they work harder. And it's not even clear that they win because they have more creativity. The secret, I think, is in understanding what matters.
It's not obvious, and it changes. It changes by culture, by buyer, by product and even by the day of the week. But those that manage to capture the imagination, make sales and grow are doing it by perfecting the things that matter and ignoring the rest.
Both parts are difficult, particularly when you are surrounded by people who insist on fretting about and working on the stuff that makes no difference at all.
perhaps the better advice, then, is "when things aren't working, consider the possibility that it's because your efforts are not going into what matters, rather than assuming it is because you need to work harder on the issues you're already focusing on"
"Silver linings are like finding change in your couch. It's there, but it never amounts to much."
My knee had a slight itch. I reached out my hand and scratched the knee in question. The itch was relieved and I was able to continue with my activities.
When I was a teenager (~15 years ago) I got tired of people going on and on with their awesome storytelling skills with magnificent punchlines. I was never a good storyteller, so I started telling mundane stories. For example, after someone in my group of friends would tell some amazing and entertaining story, I would start my story:
So this one time I got up. I put on some clothes. It turned out I was hungry, so I decided to go to the store. I bought some eggs, bread, and bacon. I paid for it, right? And then I left the store. I got to my apartment building and went up the stairs. I open my door and take the eggs, bacon, and bread out of the grocery bag. After that, I get a pan and start cooking the eggs and bacon, and put the bread in the toaster. After all of this, I put the cooked eggs and bacon on a plate and put some butter on my toast. I then started to eat my breakfast.
And that was it. People would look dumbfounded for a while waiting for a punchline or some amazing happening. When the realized none was coming and I was finished, they would start laughing. Granted, this little joke of mine I would only do if there was a long time of people telling amazing/funny stories.
(nods) In the same spirit: "How many X does it take to change a lightbulb? One."
Though I am fonder of "How many of my political opponents does it take to change a lightbulb? More than one, because they are foolish and stupid."
If cats looked like frogs we’d realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are.
-- Terry Pratchett, "Lords and Ladies"
Here's the context of the quote:
“The thing about elves is they’ve got no . . . begins with m,” Granny snapped her fingers irritably.
“Manners?”
“Hah! Right, but no.”
“Muscle? Mucus? Mystery?”
“No. No. No. Means like . . . seein’ the other person’s point of view.”
Verence tried to see the world from a Granny Weatherwax perspective, and suspicion dawned.
“Empathy?”
“Right. None at all. Even a hunter, a good hunter, can feel for the quarry. That’s what makes ‘em a good hunter. Elves aren’t like that. They’re cruel for fun, and they can’t understand things like mercy. They can’t understand that anything apart from themselves might have feelings. They laugh a lot, especially if they’ve caught a lonely human or a dwarf or a troll. Trolls might be made out of rock, your majesty, but I’m telling you that a troll is your brother compared to elves. In the head, I mean.”
“But why don’t I know all this?”
“Glamour. Elves are beautiful. They’ve got,” she spat the word, “style. Beauty. Grace. That’s what matters. If cats looked like frogs we’d realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That’s what people remember. They remember the glamour. All the rest of it, all the truth of it, becomes . . . old wives’ tales.”
Since Mischa died, I've comforted myself by inventing reasons why it happened. I've been explaining it away ... But that's all bull. There was no reason. It happened and it didn't need to.
-- Erika Moen
M. Mitchell Waldrop on a meeting between physicists and economists at the Santa Fe Institute:
...as the axioms and theorems and proofs marched across the overhead projection screen, the physicists could only be awestruck at [the economists'] mathematical prowess — awestruck and appalled. They had the same objection that [Brian] Arthur and many other economists had been voicing from within the field for years. "They were almost too good," says one young physicist, who remembers shaking his head in disbelief. "lt seemed as though they were dazzling themselves with fancy mathematics, until they really couldn't see the forest for the trees. So much time was being spent on trying to absorb the mathematics that I thought they often weren't looking at what the models were for, and what they did, and whether the underlying assumptions were any good. In a lot of cases, what was required was just some common sense. Maybe if they all had lower IQs, they'd have been making some better models.”
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 see the future. Not in some vague, oracular way. It sees all the future. Clearly. Perfectly. Everything that can possibly come to pass, branching out endlessly from the current moment."
Kvothe raised an eyebrow. "It can, can it?"
"It can," Bast said gravely. "And it is purely, perfectly malicious. This isn't a problem for the most part, as it can't leave the tree. But when someone comes to visit..."
Kvothe's eyes went distant as he nodded to himself. "If it knows the future perfectly," he said slowly, "then it must know exactly how a person will react to anything it says."
Bast nodded. "And it is vicious
The problem with therapy-- include self help and mind hacks-- is its amazing failure rate. People do it for years and come out of it and feel like they understand themselves better but they do not change. If it failed to produce both insights and change it would make sense, but it is almost always one without the other.
Did you teach him wisdom as well as valor, Ned? she wondered. Did you teach him how to kneel? The graveyards of the Seven Kingdoms were full of brave men who had never learned that lesson
-- Catelyn Stark, A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin
Some critics of education have said that examinations are unrealistic; that nobody on the job would ever be evaluated without knowing when the evaluation would be conducted and what would be on the evaluation.
Sure. When Rudy Giuliani took office as mayor of New York, someone told him "On September 11, 2001, terrorists will fly airplanes into the World Trade Center, and you will be judged on how effectively you cope."
...
When you skid on an icy road, nobody will listen when you complain it's unfair because you weren't warned in advance, had no experience with winter driving and had never been taught how to cope with a skid.
-- Steven Dutch
Reductionism is the most natural thing in the world to grasp. It's simply the belief that "a whole can be understood completely if you understand its parts, and the nature of their sum." No one in her left brain could reject reductionism.
Douglas Hofstadter
To understand our civilisation, one must appreciate that the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection — the comparative increase of population and wealth — of those groups that happened to follow them. The unwitting, reluctant, even painful adoption of these practices kept these groups together, increased their access to valuable information of all sorts, and enabled them to be 'fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it' (Genesis 1:28). This process is perhaps the least appreciated facet of human evolution.
-- Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit : The Errors of Socialism (1988), p. 6
It's not the end of the world. Well. I mean, yes, literally it is the end of the world, but moping doesn't help!
Should we add a point to these quote posts, that before posting a quote you should check there is a reference to it's original source or context? Not necessarily to add to the quote, but you should be able to find it if challenged.
wikiquote.org seems fairly diligent at sourcing quotes, but Google doesn't rank it highly in search results compared to all the misattributed, misquoted or just plain made up on the spot nuggets of disinformation that have gone viral and colonized Googlespace lying in wait to catch the unwary (such as apparently myself).
By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analyzing the observations that I have made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics.
M. C. Escher
When a philosophy thus relinquishes its anchor in reality, it risks drifting arbitrarily far from sanity.
Gary Drescher, Good and Real
But a curiosity of my type remains after all the most agreeable of all vices --- sorry, I meant to say: the love of truth has its reward in heaven and even on earth.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Explanations are all based on what makes it into our consciousness, but actions and the feelings happen before we are consciously aware of them—and most of them are the results of nonconscious processes, which will never make it into the explanations. The reality is, listening to people’s explanations of their actions is interesting—and in the case of politicians, entertaining—but often a waste of time. --Michael Gazzaniga
The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes…
— Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”
...[M]uch mistaken thinking about society could be eliminated by the most straightforward application of the pigeonhole principle: you can't fit more pigeons into your pigeon coop than you have holes to put them in. Even if you were telepathic, you could not learn all of what is going on in everybody's head because there is no room to fit all that information in yours. If I could completely scan 1,000 brains and had some machine to copy the contents of those into mine, I could only learn at most about a thousandth of the information stored in those brains, and then only at the cost of forgetting all else I had known. That's a theoretical optimum; any such real-world transfer process, such as reading and writing an e-mail or a book, or tutoring, or using or influencing a market price, will pick up only a small fraction of even the theoretically acquirable knowledge or preferences in the mind(s) at the other end of said process, or if you prefer of the information stored by those brain(s). Of course, one can argue that some kinds of knowledge -- like the kinds you and I know? -- are vastly more important than others, but such a claim is usually more snobbery than fact. Furthermore, a s
You'll probably have more success losslessly compressing two brains than losslessly compressing one.
Yeah, they're on my reading list. My dad used to say that a lot, but I always said the truer version was 'Anything not worth doing is not worth doing well', since he was usually using it about worthless yardwork...
Niels Bohr's maxim that the opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth [is a] profound truth [from which] the profound truth follows that the opposite of a profound truth is not a profound truth at all.
-- The narrator in On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality, by Scott Aaronson
"So now I’m pondering the eternal question of whether the ends justify the means."
"Hmm ... can be either way, depending on the circumstances."
"Precisely. A mathematician would say that stated generally, the problem lacks a solution. Therefore, instead of a clear directive the One in His infinite wisdom had decided to supply us with conscience, which is a rather finicky and unreliable device."
— Kirill Yeskov, The Last Ringbearer, trans. Yisroel Markov
...Not only should you disagree with others, but you should disagree with yourself. Totalitarian thought asks us to consider, much less accept, only one hypothesis at a time. By contrast quantum thought, as I call it -- although it already has a traditional name less recognizable to the modern ear, scholastic thought -- demands that we simultaneoulsy consider often mutually contradictory possibilities. Thinking about and presenting only one side's arguments gives one's thought and prose a false patina of consistency: a fallacy of thought and communications s
“If a man take no thought about what is distant, he will find sorrow near at hand.”
--Confucius
In matters of science, the authority of thousands is not worth the humble reasoning of one single person.
Galileo
"Given the nature of the multiverse, everything that can possibly happen will happen. This includes works of fiction: anything that can be imagined and written about, will be imagined and written about. If every story is being written, then someone, somewhere in the multiverse is writing your story. To them, you are a fictional character. What that means is that the barrier which separates the dimensions from each other is in fact the Fourth Wall."
-- In Flight Gaiden: Playing with Tropes
(Conversely, many fictions are instantiated somewhere,...
(Conversely, many fictions are instantiated somewhere, in some infinitesimal measure. However, I deliberately included logical impossibilities into HPMOR, such as tiling a corridor in pentagrams and having the objects in Dumbledore's room change number without any being added or subtracted, to avoid the story being real anywhere.)
In the library of books of every possible string, close to "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" and "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationalitz" is "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: Logically Consistent Edition." Why is the reality of that books' contents affected by your reticence to manifest that book in our universe?
All that means is that he is aware of the halo effect. People who have enjoyed or learned from his work will give his reasons undue weight as a consequence, even if they don't actually apply to them.
All righty; I run my utility function over everything that exists. On most of the existing things in the modern universe, it outputs 'don't care', like for dirt. However, so long as a person exists anywhere, in this universe or somewhere else, my utility function cares about them. I have no idea what it means for something to exist, or why some things exist more than others; but our universe is so suspiciously simple and regular relative to all imaginable universes that I'm pretty sure that universes with simple laws or uniform laws exist more than universes with complicated laws with lots of exceptions in them, which is why I don't expect to sprout wings and fly away. Supposing that all possible universes 'exist' with some weighting by simplicity or requirement of uniformity, does not make me feel less fundamentally confused about all this; and therefore I'm not sure that it is true, although it does seem very plausible.
Don’t forget.
Always, somewhere,
somebody cares about you.
As long as you simulate him,
you are not valueless.
I care about the future consequences of dirt, but not the dirt itself.
(For the love of Belldandy, you people...)
Evil doesn't worry about not being good
Not sure if this is a "rationality" quote in and of itself; maybe a morality quote?
[Meta] This post doesn't seem to be tagged 'quotes,' making it less convenient to move from it to the other quote threads.
Fiction is a branch of neurology.
-- J. G. Ballard (in a "what I'm working on" essay from 1966.)
To develop mathematics, one must always labor to substitute ideas for calculations.
-- Dirichlet
(Don't have source, but the following paper quotes it : Prolegomena to Any Future Qualitative Physics )
...A principal object of Wald's [statistical decision theory] is then to characterize the class of admissible strategies in mathematical terms, so that any such strategy can be found by carrying out a definite procedure... [Unfortunately] an 'inadmissible' decision may be overwhelmingly preferable to an 'admissible' one, because the criterion of admissibility ignores prior information — even information so cogent that, for example, in major medical... safety decisions, to ignore it would put lives in jeopardy and support a charge of criminal negligence.
...Th
Ignorance is preferable to error and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.
Thomas Jefferson
...Man likes complexity. He does not want to take only one step; it is more interesting to look forward to millions of steps. The one who is seeking the truth gets into a maze, and that maze interests him. He wants to go through it a thousand times more. It is just like children. Their whole interest is in running about; they do not want to see the door and go in until they are very tired. So it is with grown-up people. They all say that they are seeking truth, but they like the maze. That is why the mystics made the greatest truths a mystery, to be given on
A lie, repeated a thousand times, becomes a truth. --Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda
Inside every non-Bayesian, there is a Bayesian struggling to get out.
Dennis Lindley
(I've read plenty of authors who appear to have the intuition that probabilities are epistemic rather than ontological somewhere in the back --or even the front-- of their mind, but appear to be unaware of the extent to which this intuition has been formalised and developed.)
...Suppose we carefully examine an agent who systematically becomes rich [that is, who systematically "wins" on decision problems], and try hard to make ourselves sympathize with the internal rhyme and reason of his algorithm. We try to adopt this strange, foreign viewpoint as though it were our own. And then, after enough work, it all starts to make sense — to visibly reflect new principles appealing in their own right. Would this not be the best of all possible worlds? We could become rich and have a coherent viewpoint on decision theory. If such
David Hume lays out the foundations of decision theory in A Treatise of Human Nature (1740):
...'tis only in two senses, that any affection can be call'd unreasonable. First, when a passion, such as hope or fear, grief or joy, despair or security, is founded on the supposition of the existence of objects which really do not exist. Secondly, when in exerting any passion in action, we chuse means insufficient for the design'd end, and deceive ourselves in our judgment of causes and effects.
...I fear perhaps thou deemest that we fare
An impious road to realms of thought profane;
But 'tis that same religion oftener far
Hath bred the foul impieties of men:
As once at Aulis, the elected chiefs,
Foremost of heroes, Danaan counsellors,
Defiled Diana's altar, virgin queen,
With Agamemnon's daughter, foully slain.
She felt the chaplet round her maiden locks
And fillets, fluttering down on either cheek,
And at the altar marked her grieving sire,
The priests beside him who concealed the knife,
And all the folk in tear
Who taught you that senseless self-chastisement? I give you the money and you take it! People who can't accept a gift have nothing to give themselves. » -De Gankelaar (Karakter 1997)
Nulla è più raro al mondo, che una persona abitualmente sopportabile. -Giacomo Leopardi
(Nothing more rare in the world than a person who is habitually bearable)
Should we add a point to these quote posts, that before posting a quote you should check there is a reference to it's original source or context? Not to add to the quote, but you should be able to find it if challenged.
wikiquote.org seems fairly diligent at sourcing quotes, but Google doesn't rank it highly in search results compared to all the misattributed, misquoted or just plain made up on the spot nuggets of disinformation that have gone viral and colonized Googlespace lying in wait to catch the unwary (such as apparently myself).
Some say (not without a trace of mockery) that the old masters would supposedly forever invest a fraction of their souls in each batch of mithril, and since today there are no souls, but only the ‘objective reality perceived by our senses,’ by definition we have no chance to obtain true mithril.
-Kirill Yeskov, The Last Ringbearer, trans. Yisroel Markov
Alternatively, mithril is aluminum, almost unobtainable in ancient times and thus seen as miraculous. Think about that the next time you crush a soda can.
(belated...)
Incidentally, in many cases modern armor is made of aluminum, because aluminum (being less rigid) can dissipate more energy without failing. A suit of chain mail made of aircraft-grade aluminum would seem downright magical a few centuries ago.
My favorite fantasy is living forever, and one of the things about living forever is all the names you could drop.
However, the facile explanations provided by the left brain interpreter may also enhance the opinion of a person about themselves and produce strong biases which prevent the person from seeing themselves in the light of reality and repeating patterns of behavior which led to past failures. The explanations generated by the left brain interpreter may be balanced by right brain systems which follow the constraints of reality to a closer degree.
I know by experience that I'm not able to endure the presence of a single person for more than three hours. After this period, I lost lucidity, become obfuscated and end up irritated or sunk in a deep depression" -Julio Ramon Ribeyro
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe. --Carl Sagan
Can't speak to any fictional dark lords, but the real-life equivalent seems more prone to deciding that there is an evil, which is true evil, and which is manifest upon the world in the person of those guys over there.
At least, that's what the rhetoric pretty consistently says. Either a given dark-lordish individual is a very good liar or actually believes it, and knowing what we do about ideology and the prevalence of sociopathy I'm inclined to default to the latter.
(I wouldn't say that Oscar Wilde and others with his interaction style particularly resemble dark lords, though.)