Rationality Quotes September 2012
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Comments (1088)
Well, his point only makes any sense when applied to the metaphor since a better answer to the question
is:
"where would Sisyphus get a robot in the middle of Hades?"
Edit: come to think of it, this also works with the metaphor for human struggle.
I thought the correct answer would be, "No time for programming, too busy pushing a boulder."
Though, since the whole thing was a punishment, I have no idea what the punishment for not doing his punishment would be. Can't find it specified anywhere.
I don't think he's punished for disobeying, I think he's compelled to act. He can think about doing something else, he can want to do something else, he can decide to do something else ... but what he does is push the boulder.
The version I like the best is that Sisyphus keeps pushing the boulder voluntarily, because he's too proud to admit that, despite all his cleverness, there's something he can't do. (Specifically, get the boulder to stay at the top of the mountain).
My favorite version is similar. Each day he tries to push the boulder a little higher, and as the boulder starts to slide back, he mentally notes his improvement before racing the boulder down to the bottom with a smile on his face.
Because he gets a little stronger and a little more skilled every day, and he knows that one day he'll succeed.
In the M. Night version: his improvements are an asymptote - and Sisyphus didn't pay enough attention in calculus class to realize that the limit is just below the peak.
Or maybe the limit is the peak. He still won't reach it.
In some versions he's harassed by harpies until he gets back to boulder-pushing. But RobinZ's version is better.
Borrowing one of Hephaestus', perhaps?
Now someone just has to write a book entitled "The Rationality of Sisyphus", give it a really pretentious-sounding philosophical blurb, and then fill it with Grand Theft Robot.
Answer: Because the Greek gods are vindictive as fuck, and will fuck you over twice as hard when they find out that you wriggled out of it the first time.
Who was the guy who tried to bargain the gods into giving him immortality, only to get screwed because he hadn't thought to ask for youth and health as well? He ended up being a shriveled crab like thing in a jar.
My highschool english teacher thought this fable showed that you should be careful what you wished for. I thought it showed that trying to compel those with great power through contract was a great way to get yourself fucked good an hard. Don't think you can fuck with people a lot more powerful than you are and get away with it.
EDIT: The myth was of Tithonus. A goddess Eos was keeping him as a lover, and tried to bargain with Zeus for his immortality, without asking for eternal youth too. Ooops.
I'm no expert, but that seems to be the moral of a lot of Greek myths.
-- Linus Pauling
Citation for this was hard; the closest I got was Etzioni's 1962 The Hard Way to Peace, pg 110. There's also a version in the 1998 Linus Pauling on peace: a scientist speaks out on humanism and world survival : writings and talks by Linus Pauling; this version goes
John Perry, introduction to Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self
He bought the present ox along with the future ox. He could have just bought the present ox, or at least a shorter interval of one. This is known as "renting".
“A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.” ― Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey
Solzhenitsyn
If only it were a line. Or even a vague boundary between clearly defined good and clearly defined evil. Or if good and evil were objectively verifiable notions.
You don't think even a vague boundary can be found? To me it seems pretty self-evident by looking at extremes; e.g., torturing puppies all day is obviously worse than playing with puppies all day.
By no means am I secure in my metaethics (i.e., I may not be able to tell you in exquisite detail WHY the former is wrong). But even if you reduced my metaethics down to "whatever simplicio likes or doesn't like," I'd still be happy to persecute the puppy-torturers and happy to call them evil.
— Steven Kaas
Er... actually the genie is offering at most two rounds of feedback.
Sorry about the pedantry, it's just that as a professional specialist in genies I have a tendency to notice that sort of thing.
... which one wish, carefully phrased, could also provide.
you can't wish for more wishes
"I wish for the result of the hypothetical nth wish I would make if I was allowed to make n wishes in the limit as n went to infinity each time believing that the next wish would be my only one and all previous wishes would be reversed, or if that limit does not exist, pick n = busy beaver function of Graham's number."
Charles Kettering
Ken Wilber
--G.K. Chesterton, "The Duel of Dr. Hirsch"
Lol, my professor would give a 100% to anyone who answered every exam question wrong. There were a couple people who pulled it off, but most scored 0<10.
I'm assuming a multiple-choice exam, and invalid answers don't count as 'wrong' for that purpose?
Otherwise I can easily miss the entire exam with "Tau is exactly six." or "The battle of Thermopylae" repeated for every answer. Even if the valid answers are [A;B;C;D].
An interesting corollary of the efficient market hypothesis is that, neglecting overhead due to things like brokerage fees and assuming trades are not large enough to move the market, it should be just as difficult to lose money trading securities as it is to make money.
-L. A. Rollins, Lucifer's Lexicon: An Updated Abridgment
-Robin Hanson, Human Enhancement
I feel like Hanson's admittedly insightful "signaling" hammer has him treating everything as a nail.
Your contrarian stance against a high-status member of this community makes you seem formidable and savvy. Would you like to be allies with me? If yes, then the next time I go foraging I will bring you back extra fruit.
I agree in principle but I think this particular topic is fairly nailoid in nature.
I'd say it's such a broad subject that there have to be some screws in there as well. I think Hanson has too much faith in the ability of evolved systems to function in a radically changed environment. Even if signaling dominates the evolutionary origins of our brain, it's not advisable to just label everything we do now as directed towards signaling, any more than sex is always directed towards reproduction. You have to get into the nitty gritty of how our minds carry out the signaling. Conspiracy theorists don't signal effectively, though you can probably relate their behavior back to mechanisms originally directed towards, or at least compatible with, signaling.
Also, an ability to switch between clear "near" thinking and fluffy "far" thinking presupposes a rational decision maker to implement the switch. I'm not sure Hanson pays enough attention to how, when, and for what reasons we do this.
I think he's mischaracterizing the issue.
Beliefs serve multiple functions. One is modeling accuracy, another is signaling. It's not whether the environment is harsh or easy, it's which function you need. There are many harsh environments where what you need is the signaling function, and not the modeling function.
Anonymous
Not always, since:
Des McHale
In other words, the average of a distribution is not necessarily the most probable value.
In other words: expect Lady Mode, not Lady Mean.
Don't expect her, either. In Russian Roulette, the mode is that you don't die, and indeed that's the outcome for most people who play it. You should, however, expect that there's a very large chance of instadeath, and if you were to play a bunch of games in a row, that (relatively uncommon) outcome would almost certainly kill you.
(A similar principle applies to things like stock market index funds: the mode doesn't matter when all you care about is the sum of the stocks.)
The real lesson is this: always expect Lady PDF.
Not to be a bore but it does say "Lady Average" not "Sir or Madam Average".
In my high school health class, for weeks the teacher touted the upcoming event: "Breast and Testicle Day!"
When the anticipated day came, it was of course the day when all the boys go off to one room to learn about testicular self-examination, and all the girls go off to another to learn about breast self-examination. So, in fact, no student actually experienced Breast and Testicle Day.
Much to their chagrin, I'm assuming.
Rather: chagrin and relief.
"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his candle at mine, receives light without darkening me. No one possesses the less of an idea, because every other possesses the whole of it." - Jefferson
But many people do benefit greatly from hoarding or controlling the distribution of scarce information. If you make your living off slavery instead, then of course you can be generous with knowledge.
Or if, say, you run a university.
If you do not hoard your ideas, and neither do I, then we can both benefit from the ideas of the other. If I can access the ideas of a hundred other people at the cost of sharing my own ideas, then I profit; no matter how smart I am, a hundred other people working the same problem are going to be able to produce at least some ideas that I did not think of. (This is a benefit of free/open source software; it has been shown experimentally to work pretty well in the right circumstances).
-- Aristosophy (again)
--Game of Thrones, Season 2.
Reminds me of Patton:
I especially like the way he calls the enemy "the other poor bastard". And not, say, "the bastard".
Also effort, expertise, and insider information on one of the most powerful Houses around. And magic powers.
The following quotes were heavily upvoted, but then turned out to be made by a Will Newsome sockpuppet who edited the quote afterward. The original comments have been banned. The quotes are as follows:
— Aristosophy
— Aristosophy
If anyone objects to this policy response, please PM me so as to not feed the troll.
Defection too far. Ban Will.
Will is a cute troll.
Hmm, after observing it a few times on various forums I'm starting to consider that having a known, benign resident troll might keep away more destructive ones. No idea how it works but it doesn't seem that far-fetched given all the strange territoriality-like phenomena occasionally encountered in the oddest places.
I've heard this claimed.
This behavior isn't cute.
This would be somewhat in fitting with findings in Cialdini. One defector kept around and visibly punished or otherwise looking low status is effective at preventing that kind of behavior. (If not Cialdini, then Greene. Probably both.)
Edited how?
If I remember correctly the second quote was edited to be something along the lines of "will_newsome is awesome."
I do find some of Will Newsome's contributions interesting. OTOH, this behaviour is pretty fucked up. (I was wondering how hard it would be to implement a software feature to show the edit history of comments.)
-- Tim Kreider
The interesting part is the phrase "which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays." If we can anticipate what the morality of the future would be, should we try to live by it now?
Not if it's actually the same morality, but depends on technology. For example, strong prohibitions on promiscuity are very sensible in a world without cheap and effective contraceptives. Anyone who tried to live by 2012 sexual standards in 1912 would soon find they couldn't feed their large horde of kids. Likewise, if robots are doing all the work, fine; but right now if you just redistribute all money, no work gets done.
Lack of technology was not the reason condoms weren't as widely available in 1912.
Right idea, not a great example. People used to have lots more kids then now, most dying in childhood. Majority of women of childbearing age (gay or straight) were married and having children as often as their body allowed, so promiscuity would not have changed much. Maybe a minor correction for male infertility and sexual boredom in a standard marriage.
You seem to have rather a different idea of what I meant by "2012 standards". Even now we do not really approve of married people sleeping around. We do, however, approve of people not getting married until age 25 or 30 or so, but sleeping with whoever they like before that. Try that pattern without contraception.
Strong norms against promiscuity out of wedlock still made sense though, since having lots of children without a committed partner to help care for them would usually have been impractical.
How do you envision living by this model now working?
That is, suppose I were to embrace the notion that having enough resources to live a comfortable life (where money can stand in as a proxy for other resources) is something everyone ought to be guaranteed.
What ought I do differently than I'm currently doing?
If you are a consequentialist, you should think about the consequences of such decision.
For example, imagine a civilization where an average person has to work nine hours to produce enough food to survive. Now the pharaoh makes a new law saying that (a) all produced food has to be distribute equally among all citizens, and (b) no one can be compelled to work more than eight hours; you can work as a volunteer, but all your produced food is redistributed equally.
What would happen is such situation? In my opinion, this would be a mass Prisoners' Dilemma where people would gradually stop cooperating (because the additional hour of work gives them epsilon benefits) and start being hungry. There would be no legal solution; people would try to make some food in their free time illegally, but the unlucky ones would simply starve and die.
The law would seem great in far mode, but its near mode consequences would be horrible. Of course, if the pharaoh is not completely insane, he would revoke the law; but there would be a lot of suffering meanwhile.
If people had "a basic human right to have enough money without having to work", situation could progress similarly. It depends on many things -- for example how much of the working people's money would you have to redistribute to non-working ones, and how much could they keep. Assuming that one's basic human right is to have $500 a month, but if you work, you can keep $3000 a month, some people could still prefer to work. But there is no guarantee it would work long-term. For example there would be a positive feedback loop -- the more people are non-working, the more votes politicians can gain by promising to increase their "basic human right income", the higher are taxes, and the smaller incentives to work. Also, it could work for the starting generation, but corrupt the next generation... imagine yourself as a high school student knowing that you will never ever have to work; how much effort would an average student give to studying, instead of e.g. internet browsing, Playstation gaming, or disco and sex? Years later, the same student will be unable to keep a job that requires education.
Also, if less people have to work, the more work is not done. For example, it will take more time to find a cure for cancer. How would you like a society where no one has to work, but if you become sick, you can't find a doctor? Yes, there would be some doctors, but not enough for the whole population, and most of them would have less education and less experience than today. You would have to pay them a lot of money, because they would be rare, and because most of the money you pay them would be paid back to state as tax, so even everything you have could be not enough motivating for them.
Not if the morality you anticipate coming into favour is something you disagree with. If it's something you agree with, it's already yours, and predicting it is just a way of avoiding arguing for it.
One of these things is not like the others.
In Jasay's terminology, the first is a liberty (a relation between a person and an act) and the rest are rights {relations between two or more persons (at least one rightholder and one obligor) and an act}. I find this distnction useful for thinking more clearly about these kinds of topics. Your mileage may vary.
"Possibly the best statistical graph ever drawn" http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters
Charles Handy describing the Vietnam-era measurement policies of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara
--George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
I'm surprised at how often I have to inform people of this... I have mild scoliosis, and so I usually prefer sitting down and kicking up my feet, usually with my work in hand. Coming from a family who appreciates backbreaking work is rough when the hard work is even harder and the pain longer-lasting... which would be slightly more bearable if the aforementioned family did not see reading MYSTERIOUS TEXTS on a Kindle and using computers for MYSTERIOUS PURPOSES as signs of laziness and devotion to silly frivolities.
I have a sneaking suspicion that this is not a very new situation.
I think the quote could be trimmed to its last couple sentences and still maintain the relevant point..
I disagree, in fact. That books strengthen the mind is baldly asserted, not supported, by this quote - the rationality point I see in it is related to comparative advantage.
Oh, totally. But I prefer the full version; it's really a beautifully written passage.
Alexander Grothendieck
I remember being very much afraid of all those things as a child. I'm getting better now.
...screw it, I'm not growing up.
Unfortunately, doing bad shows is not only a route to doing good shows.
"If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for 10 years plant trees. If your plan is for 100 years educate children" - Confucius
...If your plan is for eternity, invent FAI?
"Nontrivial measure or it didn't happen." -- Aristosophy
(Who's Kate Evans? Do we know her? Aristosophy seems to have rather a lot of good quotes.)
*cough*
"I made my walled garden safe against intruders and now it's just a walled wall." -- Aristosophy
Is that you? That's ingenious.
For more rational flavor:
This should be the summary for entangled truths:
how to seem and be deep:
Dark Arts:
More Dark arts:
Luminosity:
No, I'm not her. I don't know who she is, but her Twitter is indeed glorious. (And Google Reader won't let me subscribe to it the way I'm subscribed to other Twitters, rar.)
She's got to be from here, here's learning biases can hurt people:
Cryonics:
I'm starting to think this is someone I used to know from tvtropes.
"In a society in which the narrow pursuit of material self-interest is the norm, the shift to an ethical stance is more radical than many people realize. In comparison with the needs of people starving in Somalia, the desire to sample the wines of the leading French vineyards pales into insignificance. Judged against the suffering of immobilized rabbits having shampoos dripped into their eyes, a better shampoo becomes an unworthy goal. An ethical approach to life does not forbid having fun or enjoying food and wine, but it changes our sense of priorities. The effort and expense put into buying fashionable clothes, the endless search for more and more refined gastronomic pleasures, the astonishing additional expense that marks out the prestige car market in cars from the market in cars for people who just want a reliable means to getting from A to B, all these become disproportionate to people who can shift perspective long enough to take themselves, at least for a time, out of the spotlight. If a higher ethical consciousness spreads, it will utterly change the society in which we live." -- Peter Singer
As it is probably intended, the more reminders like this I read, the more ethical I should become. As it actually works, the more of this I read, the less I become interested in ethics. Maybe I am extraordinarily selfish and this effect doesn't happen to most, but it should be at least considered that constant preaching of moral duties can have counterproductive results.
I suspect it's because authors of "ethical remainders" are usually very bad at understanding human nature.
What they essentially do is associate "ethical" with "unpleasant", because as long as you have some pleasure, you are obviously not ethical enough; you could do better by giving up some more pleasure, and it's bad that you refuse to do so. The attention is drawn away from good things you are really doing, to the hypothetical good things you are not doing.
But humans are usually driven by small incentives, by short-term feelings. The best thing our rationality can do is better align these short-term feelings with out long-term goals, so we actually feel happy when contributing to our long-term goals. And how exactly are these "ethical remainders" contributing to the process? Mostly by undercutting your short-term ethical motivators, by always reminding you that what you did was not enough, therefore you don't deserve the feelings of satisfaction. Gradually they turn these motivators off, and you no longer feel like doing anything ethical, because they convinced you (your "elephant") that you can't.
Ethics without understanding human nature is just a pile of horseshit. Of course that does not prevent other people from admiring those who speak it.
xkcd reference.
Not to mention the remarks of Mark Twain on a fundraiser he attended once:
It might be worth taking a look at Karen Horney's work. She was an early psychoanalyst who wrote that if a child is abused, neglected, or has normal developmental stages overly interfered with, they are at risk of concluding that just being a human being isn't good enough, and will invent inhuman standards for themselves.
I'm working on understanding the implications (how do you get living as a human being right? :-/ ), but I think she was on to something.
I'm not at all convinced that this is the case. After all, the shampoos are being designed to be less painful, and you don't need to test on ten thousand rabbits. Considering the distribution of the shampoos, this may save suffering even if you regard human and rabbit suffering as equal in disutility.
(Simon Blackburn, Truth)
The pithiest definition of Blackburn's minimalism I've read is in his review of Nagel's The Last Word:
It is followed by an even pithier response to how Nagel refutes relativism (pointing that our first-order conviction that 2+2=4 or that murder is wrong is more certain than any relativist doubts) and thinks that this establishes a quasi-Platonic absolutism as the only alternative:
-- Kaiki Deishū, Episode 7 of Nisemonogatari.
"Junior", FIRE JOE MORGAN
-- Iain McKay et al., An Anarchist FAQ, section C.7.3
Matt Ridley, in The Origins of Virtue
Imām al-Ḥaddād (trans. Moṣṭafā al-Badawī), "The Sublime Treasures: Answers to Sufi Questions"
Reminds me of Moore's "here is a hand" paradox (or one man's modus tollens is another's modus ponens).
--Kate Evans on Twitter
Don't we all choose for ourselves on which side to drive? There's usually nobody else ready to grab the wheel away from you...
Subway ad: "146 people were hit by trains in 2011. 47 were killed."
Guy on Subway: "That tells me getting hit by a train ain't that dangerous."
This reminds me of how I felt when I learned that a third of the passengers of the Hindenburg survived. Went something like this, if I recall:
Actually, according to Wikipedia, only 35 out of the 97 people aboard were killed. Not enough to kill even 50% of them.
Wait, 32% probability of dying “ain't that dangerous”? Are you f***ing kidding me?
If I expect to be hit by a train, I certainly don't expect a ~68% survival chance. Not intuitively, anyways.
I'm guessing that even if you survive, your quality of life is going to take a hit. Accounting for this will probably bring our intuitive expectation of harm closer to the actual harm.
Bill Clinton
Chesterton doesn't understand the emotion because he doesn't know enough about psychology, not because emotions are deep sacred mysteries we must worship.
Or better, arational.
That is an incredible term. Going to use it all the time.
Ernest Hemingway
Excellent. A shortcut to nobility. One day of being as despicable as I can practically manage and I'm all set.
Could you unpack that for me?
Sure. The book is a sort of resource for learning the programming language Scheme, where the authors will present an illustrative piece of code and discuss different aspects of its behavior in the form of a question-and-answer dialogue with the reader.
In this case, the authors are discussing how to perform numerical comparisons using only a simple set of basic procedures, and they've come up with a method that has a subtle error. The lines above encourage the reader to figure out if and why it's an error.
With computers, it's really easy to just have a half-baked idea, twiddle some bits, and watch things change, but sometimes the surface appearance of a change is not the whole story. Remembering to "think first, then try" helps me maintain the right discipline for really understanding what's going on in complex systems. Thinking first about my mental model of a situation prompts questions like this:
It's harder psychologically (and maybe too late) to ask those questions in retrospect if you try first, and then think, and if you skip asking them, then you'll suffer later.
You know, I've seen a lot on here about how programming relates to thinking relates to rationality. I wonder if it'd be worth trying and where/how I might get started.
It's certainly at least worth trying, since among things to learn it may be both unusually instructive and unusually useful. Here's the big list of LW recommendations.
Michael Welfare, quoted in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us." - Sagan
EDIT: Quote above is from the movie.
Verbatim from the comic:
I personally think that Watchmen is a fantastic study* on all the different ways people react to that realisation.
("Study" in the artistic sense rather than the scientific.)
-- xkcd 667
Douglas Hubbard, How to Measure Anything
--Kate Evans on Twitter
I was ready to applaud the wise contrarianism here, but I'm having trouble coming up with actual examples... marriage, maybe?
I don't know if this is what she was thinking of but church is what I thought of when I read it.
"If at first you don't succeed, switch to power tools." -- The Red Green Show
Douglas Hubbard, How to Measure Anything
Edward Tufte, "Beautiful Evidence"
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
-L. A. Rollins, Lucifer's Lexicon: An Updated Abridgment
Pierre Proudhon, to Karl Marx
-- Jianzhi Sengcan
Edit: Since I'm not Will Newsome (yet!) I will clarify. There are several useful points in this but I think the key one is the virtue of keeping one's identity small. Speaking it out loud is a sort of primer, meditation or prayer before approaching difficult or emotional subjects has for me proven a useful ritual for avoiding motivated cognition.
-- GoodDamon (this may skirt the edge of the rules, since it's a person reacting to a sequence post, but a person who's not a member of LW.)
— Michael Kirkbride / Vivec, "The Thirty Six Lessons of Vivec", Morrowind.
Am I the only one who thinks we should stop using the word "simple" for Occam's Razor / Solomonoff's Whatever? In 99% of use-cases by actual humans, it doesn't mean Solomonoff induction, so it's confusing.
-- W.H. Press et al., Numerical Recipes, Sec. 15.1
-- Bryan Caplan
-Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the snark
John Mayer
-- Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
Baruch Spinoza Ethics
G. K. Chesterton, "The Absence of Mr Glass"
Note: this was put in the mouth of the straw? atheist. It's still correct.
-- William Thurston
-- Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise
-- Dienekes Pontikos, Citizen Genetics
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine.
But other hearts in other lands are beating,
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.
My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
-Lloyd Stone
obviously he never visited the British Isles :D
Michael Lewis, Moneyball, ch. 4 ("Field of Ignorance")
— Robert A. Heinlein
I think that quote is much too broad with the modifier "might." If you should procrastinate based on a possibility of improved odds, I doubt you would ever do anything. At least a reasonable degree of probability should be required.
Not to mention that the natural inclination of most people toward procrastination means that they should be distrustful of feelings that delaying will be beneficial; it's entirely likely that they are misjudging how likely the improvement really is.
That's not, of course, to say that we should always do everything as soon as possible, but I think that to the extent that we read the plain meaning from this quote, it's significantly over-broad and not particularly helpful.
CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Michael Lewis, Moneyball, Chapter Ten, "Anatomy of an Undervalued Pitcher".
--Oliver Sacks regarding patients suffering from "developmental agnosia" who first learned to use their hands as adults.
Marcus Aurelius
(Baruch Spinoza)
-William of Ockham
Albert Einstein (maybe)
Cf. this and this.
Jon Skeet
They Might Be Giants
Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good For You
(His book argues that pop culture is increasing intelligence, not dumbing it down. He argues that plot complexity has increased and that keeping track of large storylines is now much more common place, and that these skills manifest themselves in increased social intelligence (and this in turn might manifest itself in overall intelligence, I'm not sure). Here, he's specifically discussing video games and the internet.)
I highly recommend the book, it's interesting in terms of cognitive science as well as cultural and social analysis. I thought it sounded only mildly interesting when I first picked it up, but now I'm thinking more along the lines that it's extremely interesting. At least give it a try, because it's difficult to describe what makes it so good.
Tenzin Gyatso, 14. Dalai Lama
That's intriguing, but it also sounds like a case of non-apples.
Well, it is a necessary step to find other fruits.
--Zhuangzi, being a trendy metacontrarian post-rationalist in the 4th century BC
Luther Sloan to Juilian Bashir in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, “Inquisition”, written by Bradley Thompson and David Weddle, created by Rick Berman and Michael Piller
Presuming that Starfleet Medical has limited enrollment, and that if he hadn't lied, a superior candidate would have enrolled, then that superior candidate would have saved those hundreds or thousands, and then a few more.
He was lying about having had gene therapy. He was a superior candidate by virtue of same but it would have kept him out because Starfleet is anti-gene-therapy-ist. (At least I assume so - I remember the character had the therapy and had to hide it, but not whether it came out in that episode or something else did.)
That is much more justifiable than the standard case of lying on applications.
I can imagine Star Robin Hanson writing an angry blog post about what this implies about Starfleet's priorities.
Have you seen any Star Trek? Star Robin Hanson would have a lot of angry posts to write.
There was a (flimsy) historical reason - there had been wars about "augments" in the past; the anti-augments won (somehow), determined the war was about "people setting themselves above their fellow humans", and discouraged more people augmenting themselves/their children in this way by (ineffectively) making it a net negative.
From "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character
I've heard it said that "Trivial" is a mathematics professor's proof by intimidation.
The view, I think, is that anything you can prove immediately off the top of your head is trivial. No matter how much you have to know. So, sometimes you get conditional trivialities, like "this is trivial if you know this and that, but I don't know how to get this and that from somesuch...".
-- G.K. Chesterton
I cannot tell if this is rationality or anti-rationality:
Steve Ballmer
I'd saying telling an interviewer you have sufficient confidence in your product to not need a backup plan is rational, actually not having one isn't.
I'm reminded of a quote in Lords of Finance (which I finished yesterday) which went something like 'Only a fool asks a central banker about the currency and expects an honest answer'. Since confidence is what keeps banks and currencies going...
See, if instead of "I'm not paid to have doubts." he said "I am paid to address all doubts before a product is released", that would have made more sense.
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Ambrose Bierce