Rationality Quotes October 2012

8 Post author: MBlume 02 October 2012 06:50PM

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  • Do not quote yourself
  • Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB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.

Comments (298)

Comment author: brazil84 28 October 2012 05:19:25PM 3 points [-]

People, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain. Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions, and then again within those twenty-four hours. It's a daily pantomime, one man yielding control to the next: a backstage crowded with old hacks clamoring for their turn in the spotlight. Every week, every day. The angry man hands the baton over to the sulking man, and in turn to the sex addict, the introvert, the conversationalist. Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots.

This is the tragedy of life. Because for a few minutes of every day, every man becomes a genius. Moments of clarity, insight, whatever you want to call them. The clouds part, the planets get in a neat little line, and everything becomes obvious. I should quit smoking, maybe, or here's how I could make a fast million, or such and such is the key to eternal happiness. That's the miserable truth. For a few moments, the secrets of the universe are opened to us. Life is a cheap parlor trick.

But then the genius, the savant, has to hand over the controls to the next guy down the pike, most likely the guy who just wants to eat potato chips, and insight and brilliance and salvation are all entrusted to a moron or a hedonist or a narcoleptic.

The only way out of this mess, of course, is to take steps to ensure that you control the idiots that you become. To take your chain gang, hand in hand, and lead them.


From Memento Mori by Jonathan Nolan

Comment author: [deleted] 26 October 2012 02:29:05PM 3 points [-]

The best description of the scientific method I have ever seen is from a conceptual physics textbook by Hobson. Paraphrasing:

The scientific method involves the dynamic interplay between theory and experiment.

That’s it. Perfect. As a scientist, I don’t come to work on Monday and make an observation, then form a hypothesis on Tuesday, devise an experiment to test some prediction on Wednesday, perform the experiment Thursday, and interpret the result on Friday. On any given day I would be hard pressed to tell you where I am in the process. All of the above, really. It’s a mess. It’s a constant back and forth comparing theoretical expectations to the final arbiter of any dispute: nature. Some people specialize in one aspect of the process, and can spend years chewing on some piece of it. But it is seldom done in isolation.

Meanwhile, science fair projects across the nation—under the advisement of teachers who themselves often do not have personal experience in how science really works—approach their subject in an uncharacteristically formulaic way. Nine times out of ten the effort culminates in a proof that the initial hypothesis was right; as if that were the goal and criterion for success. The rare student is surprised by the data, admitting to a failure of the hypothesis, quickly reconsidering initial assumptions and driving into an unexpected yet rewarding direction (dynamic interplay). That’s the real scientist at work. Too bad the judges (in my experience as a judge) often don’t recognize this apparent failure as the true success.

I can’t pass up the opportunity to share with you the “best” high school science fair project I ever saw (when I was myself a student participant in the fair—and no, it was not my project): “Does light travel through the dark?” Setup: light-tight cardboard box painted black on the inside; flashlight shining through a hole in one end; a peephole in the other end to see if the light made it. Any guesses?

-- Tom Murphy

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 26 October 2012 11:54:17PM 1 point [-]

As a scientist, I don’t come to work on Monday and make an observation, then form a hypothesis on Tuesday, devise an experiment to test some prediction on Wednesday, perform the experiment Thursday, and interpret the result on Friday. On any given day I would be hard pressed to tell you where I am in the process. All of the above, really. It’s a mess.

That is a large part of the reason why we have problems like the file drawer effect and data dredging.

Comment author: chaosmosis 28 October 2012 08:10:19AM 1 point [-]

I don't think that thinking categorically and mechanically would be feasibly productive.

It's a reality that we have to think messily in order to solve problems quickly, even if that efficiency also causes biases.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 28 October 2012 11:25:19PM 1 point [-]

However, we should at least be aware of what the proper way to do it would be.

Comment author: chaosmosis 28 October 2012 11:56:09PM *  0 points [-]

Yeah. But I think there are different levels of propriety, and that is what the quote is getting at. We should mention that the ideal form of science would look very rigid and modular and be without bias. Then, we should talk about how actual science inevitably involves biases and errors, and that these biases to a limited extent are sometimes compensated by increased efficiency. Then, we should talk about how to minimize biases while maximizing the efficiency of our thought processes.

Level One: Ideal

Level Two: Reality

Level Three: Pragmatic Ideal

A class or book on Level Three would be very useful to me and I'm not aware of any. Anyone have suggestions? Less Wrong seems to cover Level One very well and Level Two is obvious to anyone who is a human being but Level Three is what I would really like to work on.

Comment author: Jay_Schweikert 26 October 2012 06:53:10PM 3 points [-]

What would be a better way to teach young children about the nuances of the scientific method? This isn't meant as a snarky reply. I'm reasonably confident that Tom Murphy is onto something here, and I doubt most elementary school science fairs are optimized for conveying scientific principles with as much nuance as possible.

But it's not clear to me what sort of process would be much better, and even upon reading the full post, the closest he comes to addressing this point is "don't interpret failure to prove the hypothesis as failure of the project." Good advice to be sure, but it doesn't really go to the "dynamic interplay" that he characterizes as so important. Maybe instruct that experiments should occur in multiple rounds, and that participants will be judged in large part by how they incorporate results from previous rounds into later ones? That would probably be better, although I imagine you'd start brushing up pretty quickly against basic time and energy constraints -- how many elementary schools would be willing and able to keep students participating in year-long science projects?

That's not to say we shouldn't explore options here, but it might be that, especially for young children, traditional one-off science fairs do a decent enough job of teaching the very basic idea that beliefs are tested by experiment. Maybe that's not so bad, akin to why Mythbusters is a net positive for science.

Comment author: [deleted] 26 October 2012 07:33:53PM *  2 points [-]

Well, doing experiments to test which of several plausible hypotheses is more accurate, rather than those where you can easily guess what's going to happen beforehand, would be a start. (Testing whether light can travel through the dark? Seriously, WTF?)

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 26 October 2012 03:54:45AM 4 points [-]

Sometimes adults don't know what they're talking about.

Frankenweenie

Comment author: PhilGoetz 01 November 2012 08:54:05PM 0 points [-]

The new one, or the original?

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 01 November 2012 09:54:09PM 0 points [-]

Definitely in the new one. I haven't seen the original.

Comment author: atorm 25 October 2012 10:34:19PM 1 point [-]

But mostly there was the knowledge that one day, quite soon, it would be all over. ‘Ah, well, life goes on,’ people say when someone dies. But from the point of view of the person who has just died, it doesn't. It's the universe that goes on. Just as the deceased was getting the hang of everything it's all whisked away, by illness or accident or, in one case, a cucumber. Why this has to be is one of the imponderables of life, in the face of which people either start to pray… or become really, really angry.

Terry Pratchett, The Last Hero

Comment author: lukeprog 25 October 2012 08:15:49PM 4 points [-]

The formalization of knowledge — which includes giving precise definitions — usually comes at the end of the original research in a given field, not at the very beginning. A particularly illuminating example is the concept of number, which was properly defined in the modern sense only after the development of axiomatic set theory in the… twentieth century.

Milan Cirkovic

Comment author: shminux 25 October 2012 08:27:43PM 0 points [-]

So... the formal FAI theory will only be developed after an AI fooms? Makes perfect sense to me... We are all doomed!!

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 25 October 2012 04:05:09PM 1 point [-]

Solve the problem, not the person

Found here.

It seems to be a misquotation of this.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 23 October 2012 12:44:38AM 3 points [-]

We should try to deserve such luck; we may deserve it by exploiting it.

—George Polya, How to Solve It

Comment author: Tenoke 22 October 2012 01:41:53AM *  8 points [-]

"People who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds.”

Jeff Bezos

Comment author: lukeprog 19 October 2012 10:54:24PM 11 points [-]

To say our predictions are no worse than the experts’ is to damn ourselves with some awfully faint praise.

Nate Silver

Comment author: RobinZ 27 October 2012 04:12:32AM 1 point [-]

From the introduction to The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don't, section entitled "The Prediction Solution".

Comment author: gwern 18 October 2012 05:33:06PM 23 points [-]

The late F.W.H. Myers used to tell how he asked a man at a dinner table what he thought would happen to him when he died. The man tried to ignore the question, but on being pressed, replied: "Oh well, I suppose I shall inherit eternal bliss, but I wish you wouldn't talk about such unpleasant subjects."

--Bertrand Russell (Google Books attributes this to In praise of idleness and other essays, pg 133)

Comment author: RobinZ 19 October 2012 03:40:15AM 0 points [-]

Upvoted for entertainment value, but could someone enlighten me on the rationality value?

Comment author: TimS 19 October 2012 04:01:28AM 7 points [-]

Belief in belief in the wild?

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 18 October 2012 05:19:53AM 2 points [-]

Talking is easy, listening is hard.

Fred de Martines, a pork farmer who does direct marketing

Comment author: Mass_Driver 16 October 2012 06:49:50PM 0 points [-]

We could bemoan these legacies, but it makes more sense to confront them head on, to consider just how we should live not in light of the bodies we wish we had but instead with the ones we are born with, bodies that evolved in the wild, thanks to ancestors who only just barely got away.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_evolution/2012/10/evolution_of_anxiety_humans_were_prey_for_predators_such_as_hyenas_snakes.2.html

Comment author: grendelkhan 15 October 2012 05:40:26PM *  11 points [-]

It's all fine and good to declare that you would have freed your slaves. But it's much more interesting to assume that you wouldn't have and then ask, "Why?"

--Ta-Nehisi Coates, "A Muscular Empathy"

Comment author: novalis 12 October 2012 05:17:43PM 2 points [-]

"Anything that real people do in the world is by definition interesting. By 'interesting', I mean worthy of the kind of investigation that puts curiosity and honesty well before judgment. Judgment may come, but only after you’ve done some work." - Timothy Burke

Comment author: lukeprog 12 October 2012 09:59:48AM 5 points [-]

Learn from science that you must doubt the experts... Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

Richard Feynman

(Partially quoted here, but never given in a Rationality Quotes thread before.)

Comment author: chaosmosis 14 October 2012 01:46:44AM *  0 points [-]

I recently read Surely You're Joking, are there other good Feynman autobiographies, or other scientist autobiographies, that I should check out? I don't want anything that gets too technical, but neither do I want things that are totally descriptive and biographical. I want insights into the overall way that good scientists think, but I also want to avoid specifics and technical concepts insofar as that is possible.

Comment author: BerryPick6 14 October 2012 01:50:22AM 1 point [-]

I think there's a sequel to Surely You're Joking, but I'm not sure what it's called.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 14 October 2012 01:59:15AM 5 points [-]

What Do You Care What Other People Think?

Comment author: RichardKennaway 12 October 2012 08:51:49AM 22 points [-]

“But can’t you just wave your hand and make all the dirt fly away, then?”

“The trouble is getting the magic to understand what dirt is,” said Tiffany, scrubbing hard at a stain. “I heard of a witch over in Escrow who got it wrong and ended up losing the entire floor and her sandals and nearly a toe.”

Mrs. Aching backed away. “I thought you just had to wave your hands about,” she mumbled nervously.

“That works,” said Tiffany, “but only if you wave them about on the floor with a scrubbing brush.”

Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith

Comment author: RobertLumley 11 October 2012 04:27:12PM *  6 points [-]

The moment when someone attaches to a philosophy or a movement, then they assign all the baggage and all the rest of the philosophy that goes with it to you, and when you want to have a conversation they will assert that they already know everything important there is to know about you because of that association.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Atheist or Agnostic?”

Comment author: DanielVarga 10 October 2012 10:49:46PM 16 points [-]

I love uncertainty. In many situations I'd rather try something just to see what happens. I'm the character that gets killed first in every horror movie, but that's fine with me, since life is not generally like a horror movie.

Noah Smith

Comment author: chaosmosis 10 October 2012 07:26:55PM 0 points [-]

Something now appears to you as an error which you used to love as a truth, or as a probability. You cast this opinion aside and imagine that your reason has thereby gained a victory. But perhaps that error was as necessary for you then - for the old "you" (you are always another person) - as all your current "truths" : that "error" being a skin as it were which concealed and veiled from you much that you were not yet permitted to see. Your new life and not your reason has killed that opinion for you: you do not need it any longer, and now it breaks down of its own accord and the irrationality crawls out of it as a worm into the light. When we criticize something it is not something arbitrary and impersonal, it is, at least very often, a proof that there are lively, active forces in us which are growing and need to shed a skin. We deny, and must deny, because something in us wants to live and affirm itself, something which we perhaps do not as yet know or do not as yet see! There is so much in favour of criticism.

Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Comment author: lukeprog 10 October 2012 05:24:05AM 4 points [-]

Everyone takes the limits of [their] own vision for the limits of the world.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Comment author: bbleeker 11 October 2012 08:35:17AM 1 point [-]

That made me think of this:

The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky -
No higher than the soul is high.
Edna St. Vincent Millay

Comment author: Kawoomba 10 October 2012 05:31:46AM 1 point [-]

That follows in a fairly straightforward way from his central theme in his dissertation, The World as Will and Representation, which is that the world is, well, the title spoiled it.

Comment author: shminux 08 October 2012 07:40:28PM 5 points [-]

For purely practical reasons we count one human body as one "person." That makes sense for all sorts of legal and economic purposes. But it sure doesn't feel as if I have only one person in my head. It feels like a conversation between two friends.

Scott Adams

While I don't ever feel that way, I understand that many people have such internal verbal or non-verbal conversations with one or more other "selves". These are also common in fiction, probably in part as a literary device, but also probably as a reflection of the author's mind. Hmm, maybe it is worth a poll.

Comment author: Acidmind 10 October 2012 12:36:13AM 0 points [-]

Sure is a little turbulent with up to fourteen voices all expressing their opinions and viewpoints. Don't know how anyone keeps it under proper control.

Comment author: bbleeker 09 October 2012 11:07:48AM 12 points [-]

Lucky him - his internal persons are friends.

Comment author: Alicorn 06 October 2012 08:29:41PM *  8 points [-]

"...city law states that 'children under the age of twelve must attend school,' but it never said they had to 'attend school' more than once."

Hermione's mouth moved, but no words came out.

"It's funny, I got an A in my Munchkinry course without ever showing up past the first lesson. All the other students failed."

-- Harry Potter and the Natural 20

Comment author: Daniel_Molloy 13 October 2012 11:40:36PM *  3 points [-]

Well, that was a fun way to spend my Saturday. I haven't had a fanfic monopolize my time this much since Friendship Is Optimal.

Best part so far:

"This is ridiculous," Milo muttered to Hermione, his chess partner. "Skill Ranks in Profession (Chessmaster) have no bearing on one's ability to stomp squishy wizards."

"See, the thing is," Hermione said, "I know what all of those words mean in and of themselves, but the way you string them together... it's like someone handed a book of Mad Libs to a Confunded Troll."

"I'm a Confunded Troll, am I?" Milo asked with a slight edge in his voice. "Well you're blind to the story unfolding before your very eyes."

"Blind?" Hermione asked, a dangerous glint entering her eyes. "No, you're just convinced this is some storybook fairytale land where everything happens for a reason. And not a good reason, mind, but a stupid, trite, clichéd reason."

"Not a story," Milo said, placing his pieces on the board, "an adventure. Completely different school of magic."

"Real life does not have adventures!" Hermione said, her voice growing louder. "It has rules, responsible adults, homework, and grades!"

"I think we've more or less exhausted the possibilities of this conversation," Milo said coolly. "Roll for Initiative, bookworm."

Hermione, playing white, naturally won Initiative. She sent one of her Commoners forwards, breaking their naturally defensive spear-wall and leaving her Aristocrats vulnerable to a cavalry charge from Milo's flanking Knights.

"My left and right Clerics cast Wall of Stone and Flame Strike, respectively," Milo declared, "while the Commoners garrison these towers and ready an action to provide covering fire should any white soldiers enter range of their crossbows. The Knights run up to this position," he placed the two horses near Hermione's Clerics to Attack of Opportunity them should they try to cast anything, "and my Aristocrats take a full defence action."

"Er," Hermione said. "You can only move one piece on your turn."

"Oh, we're tracking individual Initiatives? Okay. In that case, Flame Strike. Let's see some Reflex Saves, now, shall we?"

"Why me?" Hermione asked the air dramatically. "Why? What did I ever do to deserve this? You know what? Here. Just take my tag, I forfeit. It's just not worth it. I'll go play with Neville in the corner." Hermione stalked off as Milo clipped Hermione's tag to his robes under his own.

"One down," he smirked. "Four hundred to go."

"Blimey," said one of Milo's Clerics. "I don't think you quite understand how this works, do you?"

"Holy Crap! You can talk?"

Comment author: Jay_Schweikert 09 October 2012 03:36:59PM 14 points [-]

This is a clever little exchange, and I'm generally all about munchkinry as a rationalist's tool. But as a lawyer, this specific example bothers me because it relies on and reinforces a common misunderstanding about law -- the idea that courts interpret legal documents by giving words a strict or literal meaning, rather than their ordinary meaning. The maxim that "all text must be interpreted in context" is so widespread in the law as to be a cliche, but law in fiction rarely acknowledges this concept.

So in the example above, courts would never say "well, you did 'attend' this school on one occasion, and the law doesn't say you have to 'attend' more than once, so yeah, you're off the hook." They would say "sorry, but the clear meaning of 'attend school' in this context is 'regular attendance,' because everyone who isn't specifically trying to munchkin the system understands that these words refer to that concept." Lawyers and judges actually understand the notion of words not having fixed meanings better than is generally understood.

Comment author: [deleted] 10 October 2012 09:14:10AM 2 points [-]

In Italy, IIRC, some kind of rule explicitly specifies the maximum number of days, and the maximum number of consecutive days, a school child can be absent (except for health reason). Otherwise, would going to school four days a week count as “attending”? Natural language's fuzziness is a feature in normal usage, but a bug if you have a law and you need to decide how to handle borderline cases.

Comment author: Alicorn 09 October 2012 04:20:10PM 4 points [-]

Yes, but the setting in question is a D&D universe and many things work differently, rules-in-general most certainly included.

Comment author: Jay_Schweikert 09 October 2012 04:24:58PM 2 points [-]

Ah, fair enough. I suppose the title of the work and the idea of an actual course on Munchkinry should have been clues about the setting.

Comment author: thomblake 09 October 2012 04:24:02PM 5 points [-]

rules-in-general most certainly included.

Well, a great many D&D players / DMs would argue that Jay_Schweikert's explanation applies equally well to the rules of role-playing games.

Comment author: chaosmosis 13 October 2012 11:46:09PM 2 points [-]

Not the fun ones.

Comment author: Alejandro1 06 October 2012 03:35:52PM 16 points [-]

I prefer this sort of distant, reductionist, structural approach to analysing the race because there's little reason to believe in the validity of the implicit theories or "models" lurking behind pundits' gut judgments. When I heard Mr Romney's 47% comments, I thought "Oooh, he's toast!" and then I stopped myself and acknowledged that I actually have no rational basis for believing that his remarks would in the final analysis hurt Mr Romney at all. What percentage of undecided or weakly-decided swing-state voters ever caught wind of Mr Romney's embarrassing chat? I didn't know! Of those who became aware of it, how many cared? I didn't know! So why did I think "Oooh, he's toast!" Because I am human, and I make most judgments and decisions on the basis of crackpot hunches, the underlying logic of which is almost completely inscrutable to me.

--Will Wilkinson

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 October 2012 06:43:05PM 5 points [-]

That comment did move Intrade shares by around 10 percentage points, I think, though I'm only going on personal before-and-after comparisons. The good Will may have picked the wrong time to criticize his instincts.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 October 2012 11:34:38PM 6 points [-]

That comment did move Intrade shares by around 10 percentage points,

So? That just means that some of the people who trade on intrade also made the mistake Will alludes to.

Comment author: PlacidPlatypus 12 October 2012 12:53:36AM 1 point [-]

Nate Silver's model also moved toward Obama, so it's probably reflecting something real to some extent.

Comment author: Alejandro1 12 October 2012 01:38:38AM 2 points [-]

But the gains have been already cancelled by Romney's better performance in the first debate. You could spin this in two ways. One one hand, you could argue that the "47%" comment did move the polls, and that ceteris paribus it would have reduced significantly Romney's chances of winning. On the other hand, you could say that ceteris should not be expected to be paribus; polls are expected to shift back and forth, and regress to the mean (where "the mean" is dictated by the fundamentals--incumbency, state of the economy, etc), and that if 47% and the debate hadn't happened, other similar things would have.

Comment author: PlacidPlatypus 12 October 2012 04:28:14PM 0 points [-]

Silver's model already at least attempts to account for fundamentals and reversion to the mean, though. You could argue that the model still puts too much weight on polls over fundamentals, but I don't see a strong reason to prefer that over the first interpretation of just taking it at face value.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 October 2012 02:25:20AM -1 points [-]

Has there been any analysis of how accurate Silver's predictions have been in the past?

Comment author: Alejandro1 13 October 2012 02:54:22AM 3 points [-]

He basically jumped to fame when he predicted the result of many of the Obama-Clinton primaries far more accurately than the pundits. He then got right 49 out of 50 states in Obama-McCain (missing only Indiana, where Obama won by 1%). He also predicted correctly all the Senate races in 2008 and all but one in 2010. In the House in 2010 the GOP picked just 8 seats more than his average forecast, which was well within his 95% confidence interval. (All info taken from Wikipedia.) I do not know of any systematic comparison between his accuracy and that of other analysts, but I would be surprised if there was someone better.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 13 October 2012 04:01:52AM 1 point [-]

Silver makes and changes his predictions throughout the campaign season. Which predictions is this referring to?

Comment author: Alejandro1 13 October 2012 04:03:17AM 4 points [-]

The ones on the eve of election day.

Comment author: Bruno_Coelho 06 October 2012 02:11:31PM 1 point [-]

We are 'naturally' in ideology, our natural sight is ideological.

-- Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies

Comment author: Patrick 06 October 2012 10:31:21AM 5 points [-]

The belief that one can find out something about real things by speculation alone is one of the most long-lived delusions in human thought. It is the spirit of antiscience which is always trying to lead men away from the study of reality to the spinning of fanciful theories out of their own minds. It is the spirit which every one of us (whether he is engaged in scientific investigation or in deciding how to use his vote in an election) must cast out of his own mind. Mastery of the art of thought is only the beginning of the task of understanding reality. Without the correct facts it can only lead us into error.

-- Robert H. Thouless, Straight and Crooked Thinking

Comment author: Mestroyer 06 October 2012 09:27:41AM *  6 points [-]

Why, I wonder, didn't he say something like: 'Great Scott, the ontological argument seems to be plausible. But isn't it too good to be true that a grand truth about the cosmos should follow from a mere word game?

...

My own feeling, to the contrary, would have been an automatic, deep suspicion of any line of reasoning that reached such a significant conclusion without feeding in a single piece of data from the real world.

--Richard Dawkins on the ontological argument for theism, from The God Delusion, pages 81-82.

Comment author: Larks 06 October 2012 04:18:19PM 2 points [-]

That sounds like the sort of thing you'd say if you'd never heard of mathematics.

Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden 09 October 2012 02:59:49PM 1 point [-]

Do people who've never heard of mathematics often say such things?

Comment author: gwern 06 October 2012 06:38:22PM 5 points [-]

And that sounds like the sort of thing you might say if you were unaware of countless examples of analytic-synthetic distinction in actually applying math (say, which geometry do you live in right now? And what axioms did you deduce it from, exactly?).

Comment author: PhilGoetz 01 November 2012 09:04:34PM 2 points [-]

He has a point. It isn't obvious that Dawkins' objection doesn't apply to math. The ontological argument probably has more real-world assumptions used in it than does arithmetic.

Comment author: gwern 06 October 2012 12:49:25AM *  15 points [-]

Despite the difficulty of exact Bayesian inference in complex mathematical models, the essence of Bayesian reasoning is frequently used in everyday life. One example has been immortalized in the words of Sherlock Holmes to his friend Dr. Watson: “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” (Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four, 1890, Ch. 6). This reasoning is actually a consequence of Bayesian belief updating, as expressed in Equation 4.4. Let me re-state it this way: “How often have I said to you that when p(D|θ_i ) = 0 for all i!=j, then, no matter how small the prior p(θ_j ) > 0 is, the posterior p(θ_j |D) must equal one.” Somehow it sounds better the way Holmes said it.

--Kruschke 2010, Doing Bayesian Data Analysis, pg56-57

Comment author: PhilGoetz 01 November 2012 09:07:50PM 5 points [-]

It always irritates me slightly that Holmes says "whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth", when multiple incompatible hypotheses will remain.

My Holmes says, "When you have eliminated the possible, you must expand your conception of what is possible."

Comment author: thomblake 09 October 2012 08:22:02PM *  19 points [-]

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains is often more improbable than your having made a mistake in one of your impossibility proofs.

-Steven Kaas (via)

Comment author: khafra 09 October 2012 07:13:02PM *  1 point [-]

Of course, an infitesimal prior dominating the posterior pdf might also be a hint that your model needs adjustment.

Comment author: pragmatist 06 October 2012 07:35:07AM *  2 points [-]

You have an inequality symbol missing at the end of the quote (between i and j). That made it slightly difficult for me to parse it on my first read-through ("Why does it say 'for all i, j' when the only index in the expression is 'i'?").

Comment author: WingedViper 09 October 2012 01:52:37PM 1 point [-]

I don't know if you know, but just in case you (or someone else) don't: There is no inequality symbol on the computer keyboard, so he used a typical programmer's inequality symbol which is "!=". So yes, it is not easily readable (i! is a bad combination...) but totally correct.

Comment author: [deleted] 10 October 2012 12:53:56PM *  2 points [-]

(i! is a bad combination...)

The way to handle that is whitespace: i != 0. (I once was teased by my tendency to put whitespace in computer code around all operators which would be spaced in typeset mathematical formulas.)

EDIT: I also use italics for variables, boldface for vectors, etc. when handwriting. Whenever I get a new pen I immediately check whether it's practical to do boldface with it.

Comment author: Dan_Moore 09 October 2012 02:29:23PM 2 points [-]

A space between variable & operator would help.

Comment author: pragmatist 09 October 2012 02:20:38PM *  3 points [-]

The symbol wasn't there when I wrote my comment. It was edited in afterwards.

Comment author: DSimon 05 October 2012 03:19:44AM *  0 points [-]

[The people of my kingdom] rely on me. I can't imagine what might happen to them if I was gone. But after my brush with death at the hands of the Lich, I realized something: I'm not going to live forever, Finn. I would if I could. But modern science just isn't there yet. So I engineered a replacement who can live forever.

-- Princess Bubblegum

Comment author: RichardKennaway 05 October 2012 10:44:37AM 11 points [-]

The graveyards are full of indispensable people.

Attributed to Charles De Gaulle.

Comment author: AspiringRationalist 04 October 2012 06:59:56PM *  24 points [-]

To succeed in a domain that violates your intuitions, you need to be able to turn them off the way a pilot does when flying through clouds. You need to do what you know intellectually to be right, even though it feels wrong.

-- Paul Graham

Comment author: DaFranker 04 October 2012 07:04:27PM *  1 point [-]

Thanks. That article (link) is very relevant to me after a discussion I just had on LW. Good advice, too, as far as I can tell.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 October 2012 06:22:14PM *  0 points [-]

The only truly lost cause is that which has been abandoned / Being able to accept defeat is part of winning / But if I must die, it is better to die fighting

-Mägo de Oz

Comment author: wedrifid 04 October 2012 07:35:02PM *  8 points [-]

The only truly lost cause is that which has been abandoned

Not only is this false, I would make the counter claim "There can be causes that have been abandoned that are less 'lost' than other causes that have not been abandoned."

Let's contrive an example: If everyone abandoned the cause 'prevent global warming over the time scale of 30 years' it would still be less of a lost cause than the cause "raise this child with faith in God such that she is accepted into eternal life in heaven" even though there may be several people diligently and actively working toward said cause.

As a rule of thumb, the word "Truly" in a claim constitutes the announcement "This claim probably relies on No True Scottsman".

Comment author: [deleted] 04 October 2012 10:05:27PM *  1 point [-]

A general rebuttal: Having a misunderstanding of the territory may cause you to formulate a goal that cannot be realized. However, a rational agent may well work to maximize his utility by approximating the resolution of the goal - decreasing the distance as much as possible between the territory and the goal-state. Not working towards the goal does not maximize utility.

Comment author: [deleted] 05 October 2012 07:06:19PM 1 point [-]

Utility functions aren't necessarily monotonic.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 October 2012 09:21:20PM *  0 points [-]

Let's contrive an example: If everyone abandoned the cause 'prevent global warming over the time scale of 30 years' it would still be less of a lost cause than the cause "raise this child with faith in God such that she is accepted into eternal life in heaven" even though there may be several people diligently and actively working toward said cause.

First, you haven't supported your first statement at all - if everyone stopped trying to prevent global warming, what is the probability of successfully preventing global warming? Global warming could be averted by events such as a supervolcano or comet impact, but "preventing global warming" is a subgoal of "preserve the environment" or "reduce existential risk" so such disasters would not really count as accomplishing the task.

Second, if your mission is to raise a child that is accepted into heaven, it could be successful if somebody creates an AI which simulates the Christian God and uploads dead people into simulated realities in engineered basement universes or something.

Comment author: wedrifid 04 October 2012 10:01:47PM *  -1 points [-]

First, you haven't supported your first statement at all - if everyone stopped trying to prevent global warming, what is the probability of successfully preventing global warming? Global warming could be averted by events such as a supervolcano or comet impact

I didn't support the first statement at all because it didn't need supporting. In fact, I chose a goal that is extremely unlikely to succeed so that it couldn't be claimed that the selected 'cause' was too redundant a cause to be meaningful. The reason the first statement needs little support is because the alternative includes the subgoal of making an omnipotent being exist, rewriting history such that He created the universe and all that is in it and causing an entirely new 'heavenly' reality to come into being. You yourself provided two ways that make 'prevent global warming' less of a lost cause than that of making God exist, have always existed and be the cause of all that is. (The capitalisation of 'God' indicating reference to the specific god that did those things, not some computer that someone wants to call a 'god'). If you want another example that is less destructive, just try "someone builds an FAI and the FAI fixes global warming as a side effect"---that is at least possible within the laws of physics, even if it is rather difficult.

but "preventing global warming" is a subgoal of "preserve the environment" or "reduce existential risk" so such disasters would not really count as accomplishing the task.

Prevention of global warming could be adopted as a cause due to it being instrumentally useful in achieving some other goal. That doesn't mean it isn't a cause or that achieving the goal doesn't mean the goal is achieved. Ultimately all causes could be declared to be the mere subgoals of another goal, right up to an ultimate cause of "maximise expected utility".

Second, if your mission is to raise a child that is accepted into heaven, it could be successful if somebody creates an AI which simulates the Christian God and uploads dead people into simulated realities in engineered basement universes or something.

If I asked the believers in question whether a simulation of an upload of their dead child is what their goal is they would disagree. Causes being abandoned and substituted for other more practical goals is a boon for those adjusting their strategic priorities but still means the original cause is lost.

The quote "The only truly lost cause is that which has been abandoned" is simply denotatively false even though it can be expected to be the kind of things people may use to be inspirational. The kind of quotes that I like to see are those that manage to be actually correct while also being insightful or inspirational.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 October 2012 10:29:30PM *  -1 points [-]

I agree with you that a cause does not become "truly lost" simply because you abandon it - you might just get lucky and have your goal state realized by some unforseeable process. So yes, the quote is strictly denotationally false. But "we might get lucky and see our goal realized through dumb luck even after we've given up" is not a really valuable heuristic to have. "shut up and do the impossible" is a valuable heuristic, and that's what I got from the quote, reading between the lines.

Comment author: wedrifid 04 October 2012 11:04:07PM *  2 points [-]

reading between the lines.

Quotes that have to have to have the meaning of the words redacted and replaced with another meaning from your own cached wisdom that is actually a sane message are not rationalists quotes. They belong on the bottom of posters in some corporate office, not here.

There are billions upon billions of statements people of made, millions of which can be shaped as quotable sound bites. Among those there are still countless thousands which are both correct and contain an insightful message. We just don't need to scrape the bottom of the barrel and quote anything that triggers an applause light for a desired virtue regardless of whether it actually makes sense.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 October 2012 11:22:28PM *  0 points [-]

Point taken. Its not raising the level of discourse on Less Wrong or this quote thread - its just a fun quote that pattern matches to approved Less Wrong virtues, as you say. I'm defending the quote mostly because your first reply seemed kinda uncharitable.

I mean, a quote I posted last month "If at first you don't succeed, switch to power tools" got voted up to +14, and nobody said "Actually that is incorrect, there are situations where switching to power tools won't help at all LOL."

Comment author: wedrifid 04 October 2012 11:46:35PM *  0 points [-]

I mean, a quote I posted last month "If at first you don't succeed, switch to power tools" got voted up to +14

Perhaps the difference in reception (and certainly the difference in my reception) is that this example barely even pretends to be a rationalist quote. It's more a macho-engineer joke. The quote here on the other hand does pretend to be rationalist---giving advice and making declarations about optimal decision making. This means it triggers my 'bullshit' detectors. It is a claim being made for reasons completely independent of whether it is actually true or not. This means that while I don't see why the power tools joke managed to get to +14 in a rationalists quote thread rather than, say +5, it isn't going to outrage me to see it upvoted significantly.

, and nobody said "Actually that is incorrect, there are situations where switching to power tools won't help at all LOL."

Note that ancestor quote about causes made an absolute claim about the nature of reality whereas the power tools thing just offers a problem solving heuristic that works sometimes. There difference is significant (to some, including myself).

Comment author: [deleted] 04 October 2012 11:50:46PM 2 points [-]

Fair enough. I will shut up now.

Comment author: DaFranker 04 October 2012 06:31:45PM *  0 points [-]

That sounds like a Dark Wizard giving you a free pass to ignore the Sunk Cost Fallacy or something. Better come up with something that'll make us also consider the win potential of a cause, and whether it would actually be better for a cause to be "lost" or abandoned, if we don't want to fall prey to the trap.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 October 2012 07:26:36PM 2 points [-]

Good point. Edited to include the rest of the verse from the song. To me it says "shut up and do the impossible"

Comment author: DaFranker 04 October 2012 07:29:23PM 1 point [-]

That's much better.

Comment author: Nisan 04 October 2012 05:12:23PM *  2 points [-]

Trinity: "You always told me to stay off the freeway." Morpheus: "Yes, that's true." Trinity: "You said it was suicide." Morpheus: "Then let us hope that I was wrong."

The Matrix Reloaded

Comment author: chaosmosis 13 October 2012 11:49:20PM 3 points [-]

I think you must have made a mistake. This film doesn't exist.

Comment author: BerryPick6 14 October 2012 12:01:04AM 2 points [-]

Hypothetical quotes are the best kind of quotes...

Comment author: Hawisher 04 October 2012 02:02:52PM 1 point [-]

"A car with a broken engine cannot drive backward at 200 mph, even if the engine is really really broken."

--Eliezer

Comment author: Fyrius 04 October 2012 03:33:11PM *  3 points [-]

Good quote, of course, but it's against one of the rules:

  • Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB
Comment author: DaFranker 04 October 2012 05:23:18PM 4 points [-]

Out of curiosity, does that rule extend to, say, material originally posted on Yudkowsky's personal site and later re-used or quoted as a source in a LW/OB article/post/comment? Is that a gray area?

Comment author: thomblake 04 October 2012 05:31:50PM 2 points [-]

Is that a gray area?

Yes. It's also slightly gray to post quotes from other prominent Lesswrongians.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 October 2012 10:24:27PM 2 points [-]

Yes. It's also slightly gray to post quotes from other prominent Lesswrongians.

When did this rule come about? As recently as six months ago it was considered normal to quote EY as long as it wasn't from LW.

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 06 October 2012 06:15:58AM 2 points [-]

I figured the intent of the rule was "don't turn quotes threads into LW ingroup circlejerks", so the idea's to not do any quotes from e.g. the people in the "Top contributors" sidebar, no matter where they showed up. Do other people have other interpretations for the rule?

Comment author: thomblake 05 October 2012 02:05:47PM 2 points [-]

I'm surprised by this. I never noticed this "considered normal".

When did this rule come about?

I'm pretty sure gray areas aren't rules. The actual non-gray rule is listed in the OP.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 October 2012 11:54:35PM 0 points [-]

I'm surprised by this. I never noticed this "considered normal".

Well, Yudkowsky was one of the top authors for 2011.

Comment author: DaFranker 04 October 2012 06:05:08PM 1 point [-]

Hmm. So we're weighing badass-ness (as in wedrifid's comment (sister to this one)) against the "don't post quotes that are already part of the general LessWrong gestalt" (in whatever capacity that exists) valuation, in such cases?

Comment author: wedrifid 04 October 2012 05:51:44PM 3 points [-]

Yes. It's also slightly gray to post quotes from other prominent Lesswrongians.

Where I make my 'slightly gray' evaluation based on whether the quote is sufficiently baddass to make it worth stretching the spirit of the thread. Sometimes they are. It's when the quotes aren't even all that good that I'd discourage it.

Comment author: Hawisher 04 October 2012 05:12:26PM 0 points [-]

tch. Should've caught that.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 04 October 2012 08:59:02AM *  5 points [-]

The mind has its illusions as the sense of sight; and in the same manner as feeling corrects the latter, reflection and calculation correct the former.

Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace, "A Philosophical Essay On Probabilities", quoted here. (Hat tip.)

Comment author: arundelo 04 October 2012 12:39:22AM 9 points [-]

People tend to be way more helpful than one expects, especially Americans, museum workers, librarians and musicians. I think of it as one of the world's cool hidden features.

-- mme_n_b

Comment author: biased_tracer 03 October 2012 08:33:43PM 8 points [-]

[W]hen one hasn't gone wrong, it's often because one hasn't the chance.

Émile Zola

Comment author: tut 03 October 2012 04:14:28PM 2 points [-]

If goods don't cross borders, armies will.

Frédéric Bastiat.

Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden 09 October 2012 02:16:23PM 1 point [-]

good fences make good neighbours

Traditional Aphorism

Comment author: Tuna-Fish 08 October 2012 09:17:25AM 4 points [-]

Prior to WW2, Germany was the biggest trading partner of France.

Comment author: dlthomas 09 October 2012 10:05:59PM 4 points [-]

Irrelevant. The quote is not "If goods do cross borders, armies won't."

Comment author: gwern 09 October 2012 09:33:29PM 2 points [-]

And of course, one of the historical peaks of globalization and European integration was reached in 1914.

Comment author: [deleted] 09 October 2012 09:39:16PM *  0 points [-]

Yeah, but at least with respect to Germany, that was on the basis of the treaty of Versailles. History doesn't offer lots of clean examples of anything, but this is a very dirty example of 'trade, then war'.

Comment author: gwern 09 October 2012 09:59:57PM 1 point [-]

The Great War, pre-Versailles, was a dirty example of 'trade, then war'? I would have said it was a fantastic example, much better than pointing to French-German integration post-Versailles and pre-WWII...

Comment author: [deleted] 09 October 2012 10:03:49PM *  3 points [-]

Ah, I got my date wrong for the end of WWI, and so misinterpreted your comment. This is terribly embarrassing. You're quite right (now that I look it up) that this is a very good example of 'trade then war'.

ETA: Though now I suppose my complaint should be 'If no trade, then war' isn't contradicted by cases of 'trade, then war'. It would be contradicted by cases of 'no trade, no war'.

Comment author: gwern 09 October 2012 10:32:53PM 0 points [-]

Though now I suppose my complaint should be 'If no trade, then war' isn't contradicted by cases of 'trade, then war'. It would be contradicted by cases of 'no trade, no war'.

True, logically it could just be the case that both trade and no trade lead to war... I think most people would interpret claims more meaningfully, however, in which case trade and war is useful to have examples of.

Comment author: [deleted] 10 October 2012 01:37:34AM 1 point [-]

'No trade then war' could well be an informative causal claim, or a reliable generalization even if its also sometimes true that war follows trade as well.

Comment author: Alejandro1 09 October 2012 08:48:57PM 0 points [-]

Conversely, I doubt there is much trading between Bhutan and Tuvalu, and I don't expect them to fight anytime soon.

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 10 October 2012 11:32:13PM 3 points [-]

It is hard for both goods and armies to cross nonexistent borders. That doesn't say anything about what happens between nations that do share a border.

Comment author: Alejandro1 10 October 2012 11:57:55PM 2 points [-]

I thought the quote's intent was more general, and that the border didn't need to be a physical one that both countries shared. E.g., if Spain and Britain were prohibiting all trade between them, Bastiat would probably expect them to fight soon.

Of course, he also implicitly meant the quote to apply to cases where the lack of trade was due to restrictions, not to distance and lack of interest like in my counterexample.

Comment author: MinibearRex 05 October 2012 05:40:44AM 4 points [-]

Libertarian quote, or rationality quote?

Comment author: wedrifid 05 October 2012 08:04:58AM *  0 points [-]

Libertarian quote, or rationality quote?

A libertarian would assert that it is both. (Most others would probably agree with claim or at least with the implied instrumental rationality related message.)

Comment author: MinibearRex 07 October 2012 03:38:20AM 9 points [-]

I happen to agree with the quote; I just don't think it's particularly a quote about rationality. Just because a quote is correct doesn't mean that it's a quote about how to go about acquiring correct beliefs, or (in general) accomplish your goals. The fact that HIV is a retrovirus that employs an enzyme called reverse transcriptase to copy its genetic code into the host cell is useful information for a biologist or a biochemist, because it helps them to accomplish their goals. But it is rather unhelpful for someone looking for a way to accomplish goals in general.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 October 2012 04:07:44PM 18 points [-]

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man misunderstand correlation versus causation.

cogentanalysis

Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden 08 October 2012 01:59:25PM 1 point [-]

This sounds like it ought to mean something, but every time I try to think what it might be I fail. Is it just clever?

Comment author: [deleted] 08 October 2012 04:54:18PM *  0 points [-]

Going to bed early and getting up early is no guarantee of health, wealth, or wisdom. Plus it's clever.

Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden 08 October 2012 05:37:59PM 2 points [-]

But it might cause it. Or it might not. If there's a correlation then that's interesting, surely? There's no smoke without a misunderstanding of causality.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 October 2012 06:54:43PM 1 point [-]

Sure, she's slightly sacrificing accuracy on the altar of cleverness by not phrasing it "might make a man etc etc."

Comment author: Aurora 03 October 2012 03:44:51PM 0 points [-]

The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. Because, if you can do that, you can do anything. -Waking life (2001)

Comment author: scav 04 October 2012 02:55:39PM 3 points [-]

I'm not convinced about the infinite possibilities of my dreams. Pretty sure large parts of my brain are not functioning as well during REM sleep as they are while I'm awake. For example, I don't think I can read in my dreams, or write computer programs. So possibly the things I can dream about are only a subset of the things I can think about while awake.

And that's leaving aside my heuristic judgement about all non-rigorous uses of the word "infinite".

Comment author: mfb 04 October 2012 06:06:25PM 1 point [-]

Daydreaming? I think we should not take "dream" to literal here.

"Infinite" is problematic, indeed. I think there is just a finite number of dreams of finite length.

Comment author: scav 05 October 2012 08:37:45AM 2 points [-]

I think it's OK to take "dreams" literally when contrasted in the same sentence with "waking". I'll give the writer the benefit of the doubt along one axis: either they were expressing insightless nonsense clearly, or they are not great at communicating their brilliant insights ;)

Comment author: Aurora 05 October 2012 02:21:32AM 2 points [-]

Take "infinite" as you would take the recursiveness of language, there is a set of finite words or particles from which you can just "create" infinite combinations.

About the numer of dreams, do you reckon there is something like a pool of dreams we use one by one until it's empty?

Comment author: Hawisher 11 October 2012 05:50:05AM 1 point [-]

But that's just not true. There is a finite limit to the length of text that can be produced. Evaluate a Busy Beaver function at Graham's Number.

Now take the aforementioned maximum text length in characters. Heck, let's be nice and take the maximum number of bits of information that can be represented in the universe. Raise that number to the power of itself. Now raise that number to the power of itself. You're not even CLOSE to the number you got in the first paragraph. We're quite a long way from infinity.

Comment author: mfb 09 October 2012 05:13:41PM 0 points [-]

To get an infinite set of texts with a finite set of characters, you need texts of infinite length. I think it is similar for dreams - the set of possible experiences is finite, and dreams have a finite sequence of experiences.

The pool of possible dreams is so large that we will never hit any limit - and even if (which would require experienced lifetimes of 10^whatever years), we would have forgotten earlier dreams long ago.

Comment author: AlanCrowe 09 October 2012 06:05:32PM 1 point [-]

You get an infinite set of texts with a finite set of characters and texts of finite length merely by letting the lengths be unbounded. Proof: Consider the set of characters {a}, which has but a single character. We are restricted to the following texts: a, aa, aaa, aaaa, aaaaa,... We nevertheless spot an obvious bijection to the positive integers. (Just count the 'a's) So there are infinitely many texts.

Comment author: mfb 10 October 2012 10:37:24AM 2 points [-]

Sorry, I was a bit unprecise. "You need texts without size limit" would be correct. The issue is: Your memory (and probably lifetime) is finite. Even if you convert the whole observable universe to your extended memory.

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 09 October 2012 08:49:10PM *  1 point [-]

But outside an infinitesimally small subset, so tiny that any attempt to express it as a fraction would just give you zero, you couldn't appreciate any of the texts within a human lifetime, even if you managed to get clever and extend the lifetime to the heat death of the universe.

I do wonder about a culture running out of ideas, high concepts, that sort of thing. Dreams can be long and messy, so the permutation space of the limited-by-finite-lifespan-of-physically-embodied-agents set of dreams is still huge. Good ideas, on the other hand, are often things you can distill to a short sentence in ordinary language. You can describe an interesting idea in ten common words. Let's say it takes a day on average to evaluate whether any one idea is good or not and that there are ten thousand common words. There are 10000^10 = 1e40 such sentences, a small minority of which will describe coherent ideas.

It's seems quite physically possible to have a civilization last several millions of years. This would give the civilization a total of 1e10 days. That's 1e30 ideas to think about each day. A good galactic civilization should be able to colonize all of the Milky Way, giving it something in the excess of 1e10 stars to build habitats around. An average Dyson sphere built around a star populated by 1e20 people gets a population density of around 500 people per square kilometer, around the same density as in the Netherlands.

So all you'd need is a Dutch galactic supercivilization spanning some millions of years and really, really obsessed with word permutations to utterly exhaust the ideas expressible in ten common words. Anything interesting they won't have thought reasonably carefully about will be literally inexpressible in ten words, unless you start expanding the language with new words.

And compared to sets of strings with unbounded length, there is nothing particularly outlandish about those numbers. Science routinely handles far larger orders of magnitude of both time and space.

Comment author: Kawoomba 11 October 2012 06:37:47AM 0 points [-]

So all you'd need is a Dutch galactic supercivilization spanning some millions of years

Quite the caveat.

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 11 October 2012 07:25:50AM 1 point [-]

That's just if we're operating in a 1950s future paradigm, where you need to do everything with regular humans running around and occasionally colonizing neighboring solar systems when things get crowded.

If we're allowed to do a bit of virtualization, then things get more interesting. We could get things a bit more compact if we take a few centuries at the start of the project to develop solid brain emulation technology to ease those pesky problems of needing lots of living space, sleep, and eventually devolving into stone-age cannibalism with mystery cults around permuting ten word sentences. Estimating the computation involved in human cognition is tricky, but 1 exaflops is floating around. Say that a well-engineered and focused emulated mind can evaluate one permutation in an average 1e4 seconds, a bit less than three hours, since it doesn't have to worry that much about maintaining a society.

So that means the exhaustion process would require 1e18 * 1e4 * 1e40 = 1e62 computation steps. A kilogram of Drexlerian nanocomputers appears to be able to do something around 1e25 flops.

So if you were in a big hurry and wanted all simple new ideas ruined in just 300 years, you could just grab Jupiter, turn all of it into drextech computronium, and fill it with your loyal EM programs. A technologically advanced Kardashev II civilization might end up having exhausted a lot of simple ideaspace after a single millennia of hanging around in a single solar system.

Comment author: DaFranker 04 October 2012 06:12:27PM *  0 points [-]

Indeed, it seems difficult to dream of the Kloopezur, infinite meta-minds whose n-dimensional point-thoughts are individual configuration frames in spacetime arrangements of relative velocities of all particles in our current universe, who have long solved the meta-problem of solving infinite problems with finite resources.

It seems particularly difficult to dream about the infinite lives of an infinity of Kloopezur.

Comment author: Fyrius 04 October 2012 01:07:20PM 12 points [-]

It's always "you can do anything" and never "you can do more than you currently believe you're capable of" with these motivational quotes.

Comment author: Aurora 05 October 2012 02:32:31AM 0 points [-]

"more than you currently believe you're capable of" is any-thing.

Comment author: wedrifid 05 October 2012 08:10:12AM *  3 points [-]

"more than you currently believe you're capable of" is any-thing.

No, it is "not less than one thing that is not in the set of things that you believe you are capable of". "Anything" includes "more than you currently believe you're capable of" but the reverse isn't true.

To make it tangible, someone who believes they wouldn't be able to get a date with a particular prospective mate when they in fact could and also believes they can not fly at faster than the speed of light is capable of doing more than they believe they are capable of but it still isn't correct to tell them "you can do anything". Because they in fact cannot fly faster than the speed of light.

Comment author: Fyrius 06 October 2012 08:44:36AM 3 points [-]

Right. More concisely put: If you do so-and-so, it may expand the set of things you can attain, but it won't remove all limitations.

Comment author: J_Taylor 03 October 2012 03:43:31AM *  23 points [-]

Will Smith don't gotta cuss in his raps to sell his records;

well I do, so fuck him and fuck you too!

--Eminem, "The Real Slim Shady"

Eminem seeks his comparative advantage and avoids self-handicapping.

Comment author: BerryPick6 03 October 2012 02:28:16PM 3 points [-]

I wonder how many other Rationality Quotes we can find in rap lyrics...

Comment author: J_Taylor 05 October 2012 03:05:04AM 0 points [-]

There is an Ice-T quote here.

Comment author: chaosmosis 03 October 2012 03:14:29AM 6 points [-]

No, correlation does not imply causation, but it sure as hell provides a hint.

A good article on Slate.com by Daniel Engber

Comment author: arundelo 04 October 2012 12:46:48AM 23 points [-]

This thread needs a mention of this saying: "Correlation correlates with causation because causation causes correlation." (I don't know if anyone knows who came up with this.)

Comment author: Alejandro1 03 October 2012 02:17:47PM 23 points [-]

xkcd said it better:

Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.

Comment author: bbleeker 03 October 2012 11:14:29AM 0 points [-]

Upvoted for the quote, I didn't read the article.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 03 October 2012 08:30:50AM *  5 points [-]

I found the article rather confused. He begins by criticising the slogan as over-used, but by the end says that we do need to distinguish correlation from causation and the problem with the slogan is that it's just a slogan. His history of the idea ends in the 1940s, and he appears completely unaware of the work that has been done on this issue by Judea Pearl and others over the last twenty years -- unaware that there is indeed more, much more, than just a slogan. Even the basic idea of performing interventions to detect causality is missing. The same superficiality applies to the other issue he covers, of distinguishing statistical significance from importance.

I'd post a comment at the Slate article to that effect, but the comment button doesn't seem to do anything.

ETA: Googling /correlation causation/ doesn't easily bring the modern work to light either. The first hit is the Wikipedia article on the slogan, which actually does have a reference to Pearl, but only in passing. Second is the xkcd about correlation waggling its eyebrows suggestively, third is another superficial article on stats.org, fourth is a link to the Slate article, and fifth is the Slate article itself. Further down is RationalWiki's take on it, which briefly mentions interventions as the way to detect causality but I think not prominently enough. One has to get to the Wikipedia page on causality to find the meat of the matter.

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 03 October 2012 10:29:32AM 0 points [-]

Also, isn't your ETA something we can fix? The search term "what does imply causation" (and variations thereof) clearly isn't subject to a lot of competition. I'm half-tempted to do it myself.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 03 October 2012 11:09:20AM 1 point [-]

Also, isn't your ETA something we can fix?

Someone (preferably an expert) could work on the Wiki article, and LessWrong already has a lot of stuff on Pearl-style causal reasoning, but beyond that, it's a matter of the reception of these ideas in the statistical community, which is up to them, and I don't know anything about anyway. Do we have any statisticians here (IlyaShpitser?) who can say what the current state of things is? Is modern causal analysis routinely practiced in statistical enquiries? Is it taught to undergraduates in statistics, or do statistics courses go no further on the subject than the randomised controlled trial?

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 04 October 2012 05:32:43PM *  2 points [-]

Good questions. The history of causality in statistics is very complicated (partly due to the attitudes of big names like Fisher). There was one point not too long ago when people could not publish causality research in statistics journals as it was considered a "separate magisterium" (!). People who had something interesting to say about causality in statistics journals had to recast it as missing data problems.

All that is changing -- somewhat. There were many many talks on causality at JSM this year, and the trend is set to continue. The set of people who is aware of what the g-formula is, or ignorability is, for example, is certainly much larger than 20 years ago.

As for what "proper causal analysis" is -- there is some controversy here, and unsurprisingly the causal inference field splits up into camps (counterfactual vs not, graphs vs not, untestable assumptions vs not, etc.) It's a bit like (http://xkcd.com/1095/).

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 03 October 2012 12:19:36PM 0 points [-]

(see here)

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 03 October 2012 10:02:06AM 5 points [-]

I have a lot of sympathy for the article, though I agree it's not very focused. In my experience, "correlation does not imply causation" is mostly used as some sort of magical talisman in discussion, wheeled out by people who don't really understand it in the hope that it may do something.

I've been considering writing a discussion post on similar rhetorical talismans, but I'm not sure how on-topic it would end up being.

Comment author: RobinZ 03 October 2012 04:40:52PM 2 points [-]

I would like to see an article which advised you on how you could:

  1. Recognize when you are using such a talisman, and/or
  2. Induce thought in someone else using such a talisman.
Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 03 October 2012 04:46:27PM 1 point [-]

I think I have a pretty good idea of when I'm doing it. It's a similar sensation to guessing the teacher's password; that 'I don't really understand this, but I'm going to try it anyway to see if it works' feeling.

Comment author: chaosmosis 03 October 2012 02:25:29PM -1 points [-]

This is my view as well.

Comment author: ZoneSeek 03 October 2012 02:20:37AM 6 points [-]

We keep the wheel turning slowly and smoothly. Some anonymous Corpsman put it into words a long time ago: "When in doubt, delay the big ones and speed the little ones.''

--Frank Herbert, The Tactful Saboteur

A good heuristic. Barack Obama limits his wardrobe choices, Feynman decides to just always order chocolate ice cream for dessert. Leaves more time and energy for important stuff.

Comment author: Plubbingworth 11 October 2012 05:41:14AM 1 point [-]

When I was a kid, removing my niggling and nagging choices, distractions, and petty inabilites sounded grand. It kinda backfired at first because I started over-planning the details of my daily activities, like ya do. And anything I actually took an interest in, to quell my confusion and streamline my time, drew people towards me for my arcane skills.

Is there any honor in hiding your abilities (when it's not your job) so people don't ask for help with simple stuff?

I was... uh... the family IT guy. My dad still needs the computer's power button pointed out to him.

Comment author: CCC 11 October 2012 07:14:59AM 2 points [-]

Place a notebook next to the computer. When you tell someone how to do something, tell them to write it down, every step, in the notebook. Tell them to write it down so that they will be able to understand it later. Next time they ask you the same question, refer them to the notebook. If this fails to help, consider insisting on some minor cost (such as 'buy me a chocolate' - nothing expensive, more an irritant than anything else, merely a cost for the sake of having a cost) for reiterating anything that has been written in the notebook.

It may or may not help, but if it doesn't help, then at least you'll get a certain amount of chocolate out of it.

Comment author: Plubbingworth 11 October 2012 07:59:26AM *  0 points [-]

I used to do step-by-step instructions and those XKCD diagrams (all of which were promptly torn down for being "dern confusicating", but I'll try all that. Thanks.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 03 October 2012 01:22:57AM 19 points [-]

The truth is out there, but so are the lies.

-Dana Scully, The X-Files, Season 1, Episode 17

Comment author: taelor 03 October 2012 01:39:31AM 20 points [-]

The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.

--Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

Comment author: wedrifid 03 October 2012 11:23:44AM 6 points [-]

The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.

Pretty sure the lies are out there too. I think I prefer Scully.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 03 October 2012 11:31:31AM 8 points [-]

The quote can be said to mean that reality ("out there") doesn't lie -- falsehoods are in the map, not in the territory. But truth is what corresponds to reality...

Comment author: RichardKennaway 03 October 2012 01:16:34PM 15 points [-]

Other people's maps are part of my territory.

Comment author: DanArmak 03 October 2012 10:04:49PM 1 point [-]

This point is also relevant to Eliezer's post on truth as correspondance. A belief can start unentangled with reality, but once people talk about it, the belief itself becomes part of the territory.

Comment author: wedrifid 03 October 2012 09:51:49PM 1 point [-]

Yes, this.

Other people's expressions of verbal symbols that are not even part of their map are also part of the territory.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 October 2012 09:42:09PM 5 points [-]

Quibble: "Your" territory?

Comment author: palladias 02 October 2012 07:52:35PM *  27 points [-]

“You’re saying I’ll get used to being a warlock, or whatever it is that I am.”
“You’ve always been what you are. That’s not new. What you’ll get used to is knowing it.”

Jem and Tessa, Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare

Comment author: Athrelon 02 October 2012 05:58:56PM 20 points [-]

It is easier to love humanity than to love one's neighbor.

--Eric Hoffer, on Near/Far

Comment author: RichardKennaway 02 October 2012 07:47:40PM 9 points [-]

I love mankind. It's people I can't stand!

Linus van Pelt

Comment author: MixedNuts 02 October 2012 06:09:59PM 31 points [-]

Invertible fact alert!

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.

  • Men In Black

It's a lot easier to hate Creationists than to hate my landlady.

Comment author: dspeyer 03 October 2012 05:52:44AM 10 points [-]

It is easier to control how you relate to a theoretical group than a concrete individual. If you believe it is proper to hate Creationists, you can do so with little difficulty. If you change your mind and think it is better to pity them, you can do that.

But if you landlady has actually helped or hurt you, and you know a strong emotional response isn't actually called for, you're going to have a very hard time not liking or hating her.

Comment author: [deleted] 02 October 2012 06:29:25PM *  12 points [-]

Mad libs:

It is a lot easier to <strong emotion> <vaguely defined group> than to <same strong emotion> <actual acquaintance>.

Comment author: MixedNuts 02 October 2012 06:37:20PM 1 point [-]

And sometimes it's true with s/easier/harder/. ("feel compassion for".) Hence invertibility.

Comment author: [deleted] 02 October 2012 09:59:01PM 4 points [-]

Well, yes, but the invertibility is conditional.

Compassion is easier with a concrete person for a target. As is... idk. There's probably some (respect? romantic love? Loyalty?).

Hate is easier with a diffuse target. As is, say, idolizing love, disgust, contempt, superiority, etc.

The invertibility isn't in that you can flip "harder" to "easier" and then have it make just as much sense. You have to change the emotion too, which signifies that there is a categorization of emotions: useful!

If you insist that this is invertible wisdom, then I must say you are misapplying the heuristic.

Comment author: prase 04 October 2012 07:00:36PM 11 points [-]

Hate is easier with a diffuse target.

Depends. A klansman may find it easy to hate "niggers" but much harder to hate his black neighbour. A literary critic who values her tolerance may it find difficult to hate an abstract group but can passionately hate her mother-in-law. I am not sure whether the difference stems from there being two different types of hate, or only from different causes of the same sort of hate.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 03 October 2012 11:02:18AM 9 points [-]

It is easier to <far-mode emotion> <vaguely defined group> than to <same far-mode emotion> <specific person>.

It is harder to <near-mode emotion> <vaguely defined group> than to <same near-mode emotion> <specific person>.

Comment author: prase 04 October 2012 06:46:31PM *  -1 points [-]

Isn't the <far-mode emotion> actually a <signalled emotion> and the <near-mode emotion> an <actual emotion>?

Comment author: chaosmosis 03 October 2012 03:35:35AM 2 points [-]

I don't think hate is necessarily easier with a diffuse target. People hold personal grudges well. There's also the fact that there are sometimes legitimate reasons to hate specific people, but there are basically never legitimate reasons to hate entire groups of people.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 03 October 2012 04:03:02AM 1 point [-]

there are sometimes legitimate reasons to hate specific people, but there are basically never legitimate reasons to hate entire groups of people

Can you summarize your understanding of legitimate reasons for hate?
I'm not asking for examples, but rather for the principles that those examples would exemplify.

Comment author: chaosmosis 03 October 2012 04:50:39AM *  0 points [-]

Semi-legitimate might be a better descriptor. If someone destroyed me or the ones I loved out of spite and took pleasure in it, I would probably hate them and probably feel that my hate was legitimate. If I went through any traumatic experience like torture or rape, I would probably come out of that with some hate.

I'm an egoist, not a utilitarian (I have strong utilitarian preferences though). That probably has implications for this as well.

Comment author: Alejandro1 02 October 2012 03:24:10PM 24 points [-]

And who shows greater reverence for mystery, the scientist who devotes himself to discovering it step by step, always ready to submit to facts, and always aware that even his boldest achievement will never be more than a stepping-stone for those who come after him, or the mystic who is free to maintain anything because he need not fear any test?

Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies

Comment author: BlazeOrangeDeer 02 October 2012 08:04:52AM *  15 points [-]

From the stories I expected the world to be sad

And it was.

And I expected it to be wonderful.

It was.

I just didn't expect it to be so big.

-- xkcd: Click and Drag

Comment author: Stabilizer 02 October 2012 06:46:48AM 28 points [-]

Curiosity was framed. Avoid it at your peril. The cat's not even sick. If you don't know how it works, find out. If you're not sure if it will work, try it. If it doesn't make sense, play with it until it does. If it's not broken, break it. If it might not be true, find out. And most of all, if someone says it is none of your business, prove them wrong.

-Seth Godin

Comment author: wedrifid 03 October 2012 11:21:26AM 17 points [-]

And most of all, if someone says it is none of your business, prove them wrong.

I'm going to adopt at different social strategy and not be the obnoxiously nosy guy with no boundaries. Some things I'm curious about really aren't my business and actively seeking to uncover information that people try to keep secret is usually a personal (and often legal) violation. The terms 'industrial espionage' and 'stalking' both spring to mind.

Curiosity didn't kill the cat. The redneck with the gun killed it for tresspassing.

Comment author: Plubbingworth 06 October 2012 04:14:13PM *  0 points [-]

As I was growing up around here, I discovered that there are certain curiosities which are always welcomed in this redneck sort of area. They include such lovely questions as;

  • "What church do you go to?"

  • 1. "You root for the home sport team, right?" 2. "...Do you follow sport at all?" 3. "Why not?!" (They progress like this the more you answer "No")

  • "Politics? Politics? Politics? Politics? Politics? Politics? POLITICS?"

Any curiosity more complex than this is usually just there to serve these three topics.

But if you answer correctly (cough) these questions three, it's basically like using the Konami Code or something. Just in case you're ever in the South.

Comment author: [deleted] 06 October 2012 04:25:59PM *  0 points [-]

(They progress like this the more you answer "No")

Now I'm curious about how the progression continues. (In Italy, I am asked what football (soccer) team I support all the time, but when I say “I used to support Juventus, but I haven't actually followed football in years” they usually leave it at that, and when they do ask me why and I say stuff like “I just don't enjoy it anymore” they never progress any further.)

Comment author: Plubbingworth 06 October 2012 04:48:36PM 1 point [-]

Usually I try to give similar answers that halt the line of conversation.

"I've never cared for sports, I shouldn't play for health reasons, it's not interesting to me, I don't understand the point, I've got other things to do, my dog was killed by a rogue football and I've never been the same since that fateful day", etc.

I've never actually answered "No" to the question "Why not?!", but I feel as though I should try, now...

So, I've never really let it progress beyond that point. As a kid, I did that with both religion and politics, by giving noncommittal answers.

Comment author: DanArmak 02 October 2012 06:07:00PM *  25 points [-]

If it doesn't make sense, play with it until it does. If it's not broken, break it.

Spoken like a true cat.

Comment author: katydee 02 October 2012 05:59:24AM *  7 points [-]

To think only of winning is sickness. To think only of using the martial arts is sickness. To think only of demonstrating the results of one's training is sickness, as is thinking only of making an attack or waiting for one. To think in a fixated way only of expelling such sickness is also sickness. Whatever remains absolutely in the mind should be considered sickness. As these various sicknesses are all present in the mind, you must put your mind in order and expel them.

Yagyu Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword (translated by William Scott Wilson).