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Rationality Quotes August 2012
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Comments (426)
-Kirill Yeskov, The Last Ringbearer, trans. Yisroel Markov
-- Nick Szabo
What about compression?
Do you mean lossy or lossless compression? If you mean lossy compression then that is precisely Szabo's point.
On the other hand, if you mean lossless, then if you had some way to losslessly compress a brain, this would only work if you were the only one with this compression scheme, since otherwise other people would apply it to their own brains and use the freed space to store more information.
-- Nick Szabo
-- In Flight Gaiden: Playing with Tropes
(Conversely, many fictions are instantiated somewhere, in some infinitesimal measure. However, I deliberately included logical impossibilities into HPMOR, such as tiling a corridor in pentagons and having the objects in Dumbledore's room change number without any being added or subtracted, to avoid the story being real anywhere.)
Huh. And here I thought that space was just negatively curved in there, with the corridor shaped in such a way that it looks normal (not that hard to imagine), and just used this to tile the floor. Such disappointment...
This was part of a thing, too, in my head, where Harry (or, I guess, the reader) slowly realizes that Hogwarts, rather than having no geometry, has a highly local geometry. I was even starting to look for that as a thematic thing, perhaps an echo of some moral lesson, somehow.
And this isn't even the sort of thing you can write fanfics about. :¬(
Could you explain why you did that?
As regards the pentagons, I kinda assumed the pentagons weren't regular, equiangular pentagons - you could tile a floor in tiles that were shaped like a square with a triangle on top! Or the pentagons could be different sizes and shapes.
The problem with using such logical impossibilities is you have to make sure they're really impossible. For example, tiling a corridor with pentagons is completely viable in non-euclidean space. So, sorry to break it to you, but it there's a multiverse your story is real in it.
I'm curious though, is there anything in there that would even count as this level of logically impossible? Can anyone remember one?
Anyway, I've decided that, when not talking about mathematics, real, exist, happen, etc. are deictic terms which specifically refer to the particular universe the speaker is in. Using real to apply to everything in Tegmark's multiverse fails Egan's Law IMO. See also: the last chapter of Good and Real.
Of course, universes including stories extremely similar to HPMOR except that the corridor is tiled in hexagons etc. do ‘exist’ ‘somewhere’. (EDIT: hadn't notice the same point had been made before. OK, I'll never again reply to comments in “Top Comments” without reading already existing replies first -- if I remember not to.)
Tiling the wall with impossible geometry seems reasonable, but from what I recall about the objects in Dumbledore's room, all the story said was that Hermione kept losing track. Not sure whether artist intent trumps reader interpretation, but at first glance it seems far more likely to me that magic was causing Hermione to be confused than that magic was causing mathematical impossibilities.
And they aren't even regular pentagons! So, it's all real then...
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?
It is a different story then, so the original HpMor would still not be nonfiction in another universe. For all we know, the existance of a corridor tiled with pentagons is in fact an important plot point and removing it would utterly destroy the structure of upcoming chapters.
Nnnot really. The Time-Turner, certainly, but that doesn't make the story uninstantiable. Making a logical impossibility a basic plot premise... sounds like quite an interesting challenge, but that would be a different story.
A spell that lets you get a number of objects that is an integer such that it's larger than some other integer but smaller than it's successor, used to hide something.
This idea (the integer, not the spell) is the premise of the short story The Secret Number by Igor Teper.
And SCP-033. And related concepts in Dark Integers by Greg Egan. And probably a bunch of other places. I'm surprised I couldn't find a TVtropes page on it.
Absolutely; I hope he doesn't think that writing a story about X increases the measure of X. But then why else would he introduce these "impossibilities"?
Because it's funny?
Fiction is a branch of neurology.
-- J. G. Ballard (in a "what I'm working on" essay from 1966.)
Noam Chomsky
Ballard does note later in the same essay "Neurology is a branch of fiction."
I am a strange loop and so can you!
http://xkcd.com/435/
-- [Edit: Probably not] Albert Einstein
Genii seem to create problems. They prevent some in the process, and solve others, but that's not what they're in for: it's not nearly as fun.
David Hume lays out the foundations of decision theory in A Treatise of Human Nature (1740):
This seems to omit the possibility of akrasia.
-- The narrator in On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality, by Scott Aaronson
Reminds me of this.
I would remark that truth is conserved, but profundity isn't. If you have two meaningful statements - that is, two statements with truth conditions, so that reality can be either like or unlike the statement - and they are opposites, then at most one of them can be true. On the other hand, things that invoke deep-sounding words can often be negated, and sound equally profound at the end of it.
In other words, Bohr's maxim seems so blatantly awful that I am mostly minded to chalk it up as another case of, "I wish famous quantum physicists knew even a little bit about epistemology-with-math".
I seem to recall E.T. Jaynes pointing out some obscure passages by Bohr which (according to him) showed that he wasn't that clueless about epistemology, but only about which kind of language to use to talk about it, so that everyone else misunderstood him. (I'll post the ref if I find it. EDIT: here it is¹.)
For example, if this maxim actually means what TheOtherDave says it means, then it is a very good thought expressed in a very bad way.
I don't really know what "profound" means here, but I usually take Bohr's maxim as a way of pointing out that when I encounter two statements, both of which seem true (e.g., they seem to support verified predictions about observations), which seem like opposites of one another, I have discovered a fault line in my thinking... either a case where I'm switching back and forth between two different and incompatible techniques for mapping English-language statements to predictions about observations, or a case for which my understanding of what it means for statements to be opposites is inadequate, or something else along those lines.
Mapping epistemological fault lines may not be profound, but I find it a useful thing to attend to. At the very least, I find it useful to be very careful about reasoning casually in proximity to them.
Lucrecius, De rerum natura
How do you make newlines work inside quotes? The formatting when I made this comment is bad.
This is the same as if you wrote it without the greater-than sign then added a greater-than sign to the beginning of each line.
(If you want a line break without a paragraph break, end a line with two spaces.)
Roz Kaveny
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)
[Meta] This post doesn't seem to be tagged 'quotes,' making it less convenient to move from it to the other quote threads.
--rickest on IRC
Clever-sounding and wrong is perhaps the worst combination in a rationality quote.
Jeff Atwood
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.
One obvious caveat is when the cost of finding, linking/registering and learning-to-use the library is greater than the cost of writing + debugging a function that suits your needs (of course, subject to the planning fallacy when doing estimates beforehand). More pronounced when the language/API/environment in question is one you're less fluent/comfortable with.
In this optic, "reinventing the wheel" should be further restricted to when an irrational decision was taken to do something with less expected utility - cost than simply using the existing version(s).
That's why I chose the example of date calculations specifically. In practice, anyone who tries to write one of those from scratch will get it wrong in lots of different ways all at once.
Yes. It's a good example. I was more or less making a point against a strawman (made of expected inference), rather than trying to oppose your specific statements; I just felt it was too easy for someone not intimate with the headaches of date functions to mistake this for a general assertion that any rewriting of existing good libraries is a Bad Thing.
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.
Thomas Jefferson
Yudkowsky, Timeless Decision Theory
Galileo
Almost always false.
It depends on whether or not the thousands are scientists. I'll trust one scientist over a billion sages.
I wouldn't, though I would trust a thousand scientists over a billion sages.
It would depend on the subject. Do we control for time period and the relative background knowledge of their culture in general?
If the basis of the position of the thousands -is- their authority, then the reason of one wins. If the basis of their position is reason, as opposed to authority, then you don't arrive at that quote.
OTOH, thousands would be less likely to all make the same mistake than one single person -- were it not for information cascades.
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)
It does not! It does not! It does not! ... continued here
-- Oscar Wilde
I like it, but what's it got to do with rationality?
To me at least, it captures the notion of how the perceived Truth/Falsity of a belief rest solely in our categorization of it as 'tribal' or 'non-tribal': weird or normal. Normal beliefs are true, weird beliefs are false.
We believe our friends more readily than experts.
It is absurd to divide people into charming or tedious. People either have familiar worldviews or unfamiliar worldviews.
It is absurd to divide people into familiar worldviews or unfamiliar worldviews. People either have closer environmental causality or farther environmental causality.
(anyone care to formalize the recursive tower?)
It's absurd to divide people into two categories and expect those two categories to be meaningful in more than a few contexts.
What about good vs bad humans?
Or humans who create paperclips versus those who don't?
I thought I just said that.
“Males” and “females”. (OK, there are edge cases and stuff, but this doesn't mean the categories aren't meaningful, does it?)
It is absurd to divide people. They tend to die if you do that.
And many charming people are also bad.
I don't know that you can really classify people as X or ¬X. I mean, have you not seen individuals be X in certain situations and ¬X in other situations?
&c.
Thank you, Professor Quirrell.
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.)
The scary thing is how often it does work in real life. (Except that in real life charm is more than just witty one-liners.
Douglas Hofstadter
The interesting thing is that Hofstadter doesn't seem to argue here that reductionism is true but that it's a powerful meme that easily gets into people brain.
ADBOC. Literally, that's true (but tautologous), but it suggests that understanding the nature of their sum is simple, which it isn't. Knowing the Standard Model gives hardly any insight into sociology, even though societies are made of elementary particles.
-- The dullest blog in the world
Why do I find that funny?
...I don't really get why this is a rationality quote...
Sometimes proceeding past obstacles is very straightforward.
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:
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."
-- The comments to that entry.
When I stumbled on that blog some years ago, it impressed me so much that I started trying to write and think in the same style.
— Abraham Lincoln
Hazrat Inayat Khan.
An excerpt from Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss. Boxing is not safe.
I thought Chronicler's reply to this was excellent, however. Omniscience does not necessitate omnipotence.
I mean, the UFAI in our world would have an easy time of killing everything. But in their world it's different.
EDIT: Except that maybe we can be smart and stop the UFAI from killing everything even in our world, see my above comment.
Hah, I actually quoted much of that same passage on IRC in the same boxing vein! Although as presented the scenario does have some problems:
--Confucius
-- A Softer World
-- Dirichlet
(Don't have source, but the following paper quotes it : Prolegomena to Any Future Qualitative Physics )
--Herbert Simon (quoted by Pat Langley)
Including artificial intelligence? ;-)
The Chesterton version looks like it was designed to poke the older (and in my opinion better) advice from Lord Chesterfield:
Or, rephrased as Simon did:
I strongly recommend his letters to his son. They contain quite a bit of great advice- as well as politics and health and so on. As it was private advice given to an heir, most of it is fully sound.
(In fact, it's been a while. I probably ought to find my copy and give it another read.)
Ah, I was gonna mention this. Didn't know it was from Chesterfield.
I think there'd be more musicians (a good thing IMO) if more people took Chesterton's advice.
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...
A favorite of mine, but according to Wikiquote G.K. Chesterton said it first, in chapter 14 of What's Wrong With The World:
I like Simon's version better: it flows without the awkward pause for the comma.
Yep, it seems that often epigrams are made more epigrammatic by the open-source process of people misquoting them. I went looking up what I thought was another example of this, but Wiktionary calls it "[l]ikely traditional" (though the only other citation is roughly contemporary with Maslow).
Memetics in action - survival of the most epigrammatic!
-- Hermann Hesse, Demian
-- Niclas Berggren, source and HT to Tyler Cowen
Sounds like a job for...Will_Newsome!
EDIT: Why the downvotes? This seems like a fairly obvious case of researchers going insufficiently meta.
META MAN! willnewsomecuresmetaproblemsasfastashecan META MAN!
-- Catelyn Stark, A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin
Louis C.K.
-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
I was expecting the attribution to be to Mark Twain. I wonder if their style seems similar on account of being old, or if there's more to it.
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.
Though the voice isn't, the sentiment seems similar to something Twain would say. Though I'd expect a little more cynicism from him.
Why do some people so revile our passive feelings, and so venerate hypocrisy?
Because it helps coerce others into doing things that benefit us and reduces how much force is exercised upon us while trading off the minimal amount of altruistic action necessary. There wouldn't (usually) be much point having altruistic principles and publicly reviling them.
That's quite a theory. It's like the old fashioned elitist theory that hypocrisy is necessary to keep the hoi polloi in line, except apparently applied to everyone.
Or not? Do you think you are made more useful to yourself and others by reviling your feelings and being hypocritical about your values?
The standard one. I was stating the obvious, not being controversial.
I never said I did so. (And where did this 'useful to others' thing come in? That's certainly not something I'd try to argue for. The primary point of the hypocrisy is to reduce the amount that you actually spend helping others, for a given level of professed ideals.)
Sorry, I wasn't getting what you were saying.
People are hypocritical to send the signal that they are more altruistic than they are? I suppose some do. Do you really think most people are consciously hypocritical on this score?
I've wondered as much about a lot of peculiar social behavior, particularly the profession of certain beliefs - are most people consciously lying, and I just don't get the joke? Are the various crazy ideas people seem to have, where they seem to fail on epistemic grounds, just me mistaking what they consider instrumentally rational lies for epistemic mistakes?
Wedrifid is not ignorant enough to think that most people are consciously hypocritical. Being consciously hypocritical is very difficult. It requires a lot of coordination, a good memory and decent to excellent acting skills. But as you may have heard, "Sincerity is the thing; once you can fake that you've got it made." Evolution baked this lesson into us. The beliefs we profess and the principles we act by overlap but they are not the same.
If you want to read up further on this go to social and cognitive psychology. The primary insights for me were that people are not unitary agents; they're collections of modules who occasionally work at cross purposes, signalling is realy freaking important, and that in line with far/near or construal theory holding a belief and acting on it are not the same thing.
I can't recommend a single book to get the whole of this, or even most of it across, but The Mating Mind and The Red Queen's Race are both good and relevant. I can't remember which one repeats Lewontin's Fallacy. Don't dump it purely based on one brainfart.
And thanks for the reference to Lewontin's Fallacy - I didn't know there was a name for that. The Race FAQ at the site is very interesting.
Would that be ignorant? I'm not sure. Certainly, there are sharks. Like you, I'd tend to think that most people aren't sharks, but I consider the population of sharks an open question, and wouldn't consider someone necessarily ignorant if they thought there were more sharks than I did.
Dennett talks about the collection of modules as well. I consider it an open question as to how much one is aware of the different modules at the same time. I've had strange experiences where people seem to be acting according to one idea, but when a contradictory fact is pointed out, they also seemed quite aware of that as well. Doublethink is a real thing.
— Kirill Yeskov, The Last Ringbearer, trans. Yisroel Markov
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).
— Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”
-- G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
M. C. Escher
Carl Sagan
I think this is just a misuse of the word "information". If the bits aren't equal value, clearly they do not have the same amount of information.
— Nick Szabo, quoted elsewhere in this post. Fight!
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
I now have coffee on my monitor.
-- http://www.misfile.com/?date=2012-08-10
Hah! One of my favorite authors fishing out relevant quotes on one of my favorite topics out of one of my favorite webcomics. I smell the oncoming affective death spiral.
I guess this is the time to draw the sword and cut the beliefs with full intent, is it?
-- Terry Pratchett, "Lords and Ladies"
I don't get it. (Anyway, the antecedent is so implausible I have trouble evaluating the counterfactual. Is that supposed to be the point, à la “if my grandma had wheels”?)
Here's the context of the quote:
--Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy
I often find that I'm not well read enough or perhaps not smart enough to decipher the intricate language of these eminent philosophers. I'd like to know is Russell talking about something akin to scientific empiricism? Can someone enlighten me? From my shallow understanding though, it seems like what he is saying is almost common sense when it comes to building knowledge or beliefs about a problem domain.
The idea that one should not philosophize keeping close contact with empirical facts, instead of basing a long chain of arguments on abstract "logical" principles like Leibniz's, may be almost common sense now, but it wasn't in the early modern period of which Russell was talking about. And when Russell wrote this (1940s) he was old enough to remember that these kind of arguments were still prevalent in his youth (1880s-1890s) among absolute idealists like Bradley, as he describes in "Our Knowledge of the External World" (follow the link and do a Ctrl-F search for Bradley). So it did not seem to him a way of thinking that was so ancient and outdated as to be not worth arguing against.
ETA: I meant, "The idea that one should philosophize keeping...", without not, obviously.
Ah very good, in that context it makes perfect sense.
“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)
-- 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.
I've heard this a lot, but it sounds a bit too convenient to me. When external (or internal) circumstances have forced me to spend lots of time on one specific, not particularly entertaining task, I've found that I actually become more interested and enthusiastic about that thing. For example, when I had to play chess for like 5 hours a day for a week once, or when I went on holiday and came back to 5000 anki reviews, or when I was on a maths camp that started every day with a problem set that took over 4 hours.
Re "breaking down": if you mean they'll have a breakdown of will and be unable to continue working, that's an easy problem to solve - just hire someone to watch you and whip you whenever your productivity declines. And/Or chew nicotine gum when at your most productive. Or something. If you mean some other kind of breakdown, that does sound like something to be cautious of, but I think the correct response isn't to surrender eighty percent of your productivity, but to increase the amount of discomfort you can endure, maybe through some sort of hormesis training.
Generalizing from one example much? Maybe there are some people who are most efficient when they do 10 different things an hour a day each, other people who are most efficient when they do the same thing 10 hours a day, and other people still who are most efficient in intermediate circumstances.
Agreed; most people, me included, would probably be more productive if they interleaved productive tasks than if they did productive tasks in big blocks of time. I was just saying that in my experience, when I'm forced to do some unpleasant task a lot, after a while it's not as unpleasant as I initially expected. I'm pretty cognitively atypical, so you're right that other people are likely not the same.
(This is of course a completely different claim than what the great-grandparent sorta implied and which I mostly argued against, which is that "Most people will break down if they try to work too hard for too long" means we shouldn't work very much, rather than trying to set things up so that we don't break down (through hormesis or precommitment or whatever). At least if we're optimizing for productivity rather than pleasantness.)
Here's a vaguely-related paper (I've only read the abstract):
My very tentative guess is that for most people, there is substantial room to increase diligence. However, at the very top of the spectrum trying to work harder just causes each individual hour to be less efficient. Also note that diligence != hours worked, I am often more productive in a 7 hour work day than an 11 hour work day if the 7-hour one was better-planned.
However I am still pretty uncertain about this. I am pretty near the top end of the spectrum for diligence and trying to see if I can hack it a bit higher without getting burn-out or decreased efficiency.
In my model this strategy decreases productivity for some tasks; especially those which require thinking. Fear of punishment brings "fight or flight" reaction, both of these options are harmful for thinking.
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).
I think that both you and Mr. Franklin are correct.
To wreak great changes one must stay focused and work diligently on one's goal. One needn't eliminate all pleasures from life, but I think you'll find that very, very few people can have a serious hobby and a world changing vocation.
Most of us of "tolerable" abilities cannot maintain the kind of focus and purity of dedication required. That is why the world changes as little as it does. If everyone, as an example who was to the right of center on the IQ curve could make great changes etc., then "great" would be redefined upwards (if most people could run a 10 second 100 meter, Mr. Bolt would only be a little special).
Further more...Oooohh...shiny....
It's possible that what Franklin meant by "amusements" didn't include leisure: in his time, when education was not as widespread, a gentleman might have described learning a second language as an "amusement".
Except when when the great change requires a leap of understanding. Regardless of how diligently she works, the person who is blind in a particular area will never make the necessary transcendental leap that creates new understanding.
I have experienced this, working in a room full of brilliant people for a period of months. It took the transcendental leap of understanding by someone outside the group to present the elegantly-simple solution to the apparently intractable problem.
So, while many problems will fall to persistence and diligence, some problems require at least momentary transcendental brilliance ... or at least a favorable error. Hmm, this says something about the need for experimentation as well. Never underestimate the power of, "Huh, that's funny. It's not supposed to do that ..."
Brian
Interviewer: How do you answer critics who suggest that your team is playing god here?
Craig Venter: Oh... we're not playing.
E.T. Jaynes, from page 409 of PT: LoS.
You mean such as 'rational'.
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.)
Thomas Jefferson
I wonder how we could empirically test this. We could see who makes more accurate predictions, but people without beliefs about something won't make predictions at all. That should probably count as a victory for wrong people, so long as they do better than chance.
We could also test how quickly people learn the correct theory. In both cases, I expect you'd see some truly deep errors which are worse than ignorance, but that on the whole people in error will do quite a lot better. Bad theories still often make good predictions, and it seems like it would be very hard, if not impossible, to explain a correct theory of physics to someone who has literally no beliefs about physics.
I'd put my money on people in error over the ignorant.
-- Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit : The Errors of Socialism (1988), p. 6
M. Mitchell Waldrop on a meeting between physicists and economists at the Santa Fe Institute:
-- Steven Dutch
-- The Last Psychiatrist
Is it our bias towards optimism? (And is that bias there because pessimists take fewer risks, and therefore don't succeed at much and therefore get eliminated from the gene pool?)
I heard (on a PRI podcast, I think) a brain scientist give an interpretation of the brain as a collection of agents, with consciousness as an interpreting layer that invents reasons for our actions after we've actually done them. There's evidence of this post-fact interpretation - and while I suspect this is only part of the story, it does give a hint that our conscious mind is limited in its ability to actually change our behavior.)
Still, people do sometimes give up alcohol and other drugs, and keep new resolutions. I've stuck to my daily exercise for 22 days straight. These feel like conscious decisions (though I may be fooling myself) but where my conscious will is battling different intentions, from different parts of my mind.
Apologies if that's rambling or nonsensical. I'm a bit tired (because every day I consciously decide to sleep early and every day I fail to do it) and I haven't done my 23rd day's exercise yet. Which I'll do now.
Not sure if this is a "rationality" quote in and of itself; maybe a morality quote?
Gary Drescher, Good and Real
Ta-nehisi Coates
-- Erika Moen
I wonder how common it is for people to agentize accidents. I don't do that, but, annoyingly, lots of people around me do.
-Seth Godin
A common piece of advice from pro Magic: the Gathering plays is "focus on what matters." The advice is mostly useless to many people though because the pros have made it to that level precisely because they know what matters to begin with.
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"
That's a much better advice than Godin's near-tautology.
Could you add the link if it was a blog post, or name the book if the source was a book?
Done.