Rationality Quotes October 2012
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- Do not quote yourself
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB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.
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Comments (298)
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
-- Tom Murphy
That is a large part of the reason why we have problems like the file drawer effect and data dredging.
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.
However, we should at least be aware of what the proper way to do it would be.
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.
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.
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?)
Frankenweenie
The new one, or the original?
Definitely in the new one. I haven't seen the original.
Terry Pratchett, The Last Hero
Milan Cirkovic
So... the formal FAI theory will only be developed after an AI fooms? Makes perfect sense to me... We are all doomed!!
Found here.
It seems to be a misquotation of this.
—George Polya, How to Solve It
Jeff Bezos
Nate Silver
From the introduction to The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don't, section entitled "The Prediction Solution".
--Bertrand Russell (Google Books attributes this to In praise of idleness and other essays, pg 133)
Upvoted for entertainment value, but could someone enlighten me on the rationality value?
Belief in belief in the wild?
Fred de Martines, a pork farmer who does direct marketing
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
--Ta-Nehisi Coates, "A Muscular Empathy"
"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
Richard Feynman
(Partially quoted here, but never given in a Rationality Quotes thread before.)
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.
I think there's a sequel to Surely You're Joking, but I'm not sure what it's called.
What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith
Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Atheist or Agnostic?”
Noah Smith
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Arthur Schopenhauer
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
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.
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.
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.
Lucky him - his internal persons are friends.
-- Harry Potter and the Natural 20
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 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.
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.
Yes, but the setting in question is a D&D universe and many things work differently, rules-in-general most certainly included.
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.
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.
Not the fun ones.
--Will Wilkinson
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.
So? That just means that some of the people who trade on intrade also made the mistake Will alludes to.
Nate Silver's model also moved toward Obama, so it's probably reflecting something real to some extent.
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.
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.
Has there been any analysis of how accurate Silver's predictions have been in the past?
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.
Silver makes and changes his predictions throughout the campaign season. Which predictions is this referring to?
The ones on the eve of election day.
-- Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies
-- Robert H. Thouless, Straight and Crooked Thinking
...
--Richard Dawkins on the ontological argument for theism, from The God Delusion, pages 81-82.
That sounds like the sort of thing you'd say if you'd never heard of mathematics.
Do people who've never heard of mathematics often say such things?
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?).
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.
--Kruschke 2010, Doing Bayesian Data Analysis, pg56-57
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."
-Steven Kaas (via)
Of course, an infitesimal prior dominating the posterior pdf might also be a hint that your model needs adjustment.
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'?").
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.
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.
A space between variable & operator would help.
The symbol wasn't there when I wrote my comment. It was edited in afterwards.
-- Princess Bubblegum
Attributed to Charles De Gaulle.
-- Paul Graham
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.
-Mägo de Oz
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".
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.
Utility functions aren't necessarily monotonic.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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).
Fair enough. I will shut up now.
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.
Good point. Edited to include the rest of the verse from the song. To me it says "shut up and do the impossible"
That's much better.
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
I think you must have made a mistake. This film doesn't exist.
Hypothetical quotes are the best kind of quotes...
"A car with a broken engine cannot drive backward at 200 mph, even if the engine is really really broken."
--Eliezer
Good quote, of course, but it's against one of the rules:
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?
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.
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?
I'm surprised by this. I never noticed this "considered normal".
I'm pretty sure gray areas aren't rules. The actual non-gray rule is listed in the OP.
Well, Yudkowsky was one of the top authors for 2011.
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?
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.
tch. Should've caught that.
Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace, "A Philosophical Essay On Probabilities", quoted here. (Hat tip.)
-- mme_n_b
Émile Zola
Frédéric Bastiat.
Traditional Aphorism
Prior to WW2, Germany was the biggest trading partner of France.
Irrelevant. The quote is not "If goods do cross borders, armies won't."
And of course, one of the historical peaks of globalization and European integration was reached in 1914.
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'.
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...
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'.
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.
'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.
Conversely, I doubt there is much trading between Bhutan and Tuvalu, and I don't expect them to fight anytime soon.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
cogentanalysis
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?
Going to bed early and getting up early is no guarantee of health, wealth, or wisdom. Plus it's clever.
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.
Sure, she's slightly sacrificing accuracy on the altar of cleverness by not phrasing it "might make a man etc etc."
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)
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".
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.
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 ;)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Quite the caveat.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
--Eminem, "The Real Slim Shady"
Eminem seeks his comparative advantage and avoids self-handicapping.
I wonder how many other Rationality Quotes we can find in rap lyrics...
There is an Ice-T quote here.
A good article on Slate.com by Daniel Engber
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.)
xkcd said it better:
Upvoted for the quote, I didn't read the article.
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.
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.
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?
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/).
(see here)
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.
I would like to see an article which advised you on how you could:
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.
This is my view as well.
--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.
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.
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.
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.
-Dana Scully, The X-Files, Season 1, Episode 17
--Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
Pretty sure the lies are out there too. I think I prefer Scully.
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...
Other people's maps are part of my territory.
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.
Yes, this.
Other people's expressions of verbal symbols that are not even part of their map are also part of the territory.
Quibble: "Your" territory?
Jem and Tessa, Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare
--Eric Hoffer, on Near/Far
Linus van Pelt
Invertible fact alert!
It's a lot easier to hate Creationists than to hate my landlady.
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.
Mad libs:
It is a lot easier to <strong emotion> <vaguely defined group> than to <same strong emotion> <actual acquaintance>.
And sometimes it's true with s/easier/harder/. ("feel compassion for".) Hence invertibility.
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.
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.
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>.
Isn't the <far-mode emotion> actually a <signalled emotion> and the <near-mode emotion> an <actual emotion>?
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.
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.
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.
Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies
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
-Seth Godin
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Spoken like a true cat.
Yagyu Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword (translated by William Scott Wilson).