Rationality Quotes September 2012

Jayson_Virissimo

Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Well, I'm not even sure whether Boudrillard's quote is grammatically well-formed, so there's that. Then again, postmodernist texts tend to be imbued with near-poetical and mystical qualities. Much like Zen koans, they're more about exemplifying a particular mind-posture and way of thinking than they are about straightforward argumentation. I think it's unfair to expect LessWrongers to be familiar with such texts.

Oh. So this quote is difficult to read, then? More difficult than the Nietzsche one? I guess inferential gaps must be coming into play here. I'm having a difficult time trying to not-understand it, trying to emphasize with your viewpoint. I'm having a difficult time believing that you couldn't understand the quote, honestly.

I feel like you're generalizing too much about post modernism. I like lots of it, and don't think that it's mystical oriented. I would say rather that it packs a lot of information into a small amount of words through the clever use of ... (read more)