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- Do not quote yourself
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB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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--Teller (source)
--Randal Munroe, A Mole of Moles
It's called "show, don't tell".
Did Munroe add that? It's incorrect. There are lots of situations in which it's reasonable to calculate while throwing away an occasional factor of 2.2.
Yeah, but the way he shows that the Avogadro number is approximately one trillion trillion is still hilarious (though it does work).
-Franz Kafka (quoted in Joy of Clojure)
-Antonio Machado
Translation:
--Michael Lewis' profile of Barack Obama
Possibly also explaining this trend in the world of academia.
I'm assuming many are already aware of this, but he's talking about decision fatigue here.
Somebody should start a sister site, Less Culpable. It might be More Useful.
I disagree. We're obligated to do things to the best of our ability based on the knowledge we have. If those decisions have bad outcomes, that doesn't mean our actions weren't justified. Otherwise, you displace moral judgement from the here and now into inaccessible ideas about what will have turned out to be the case.
No, we're obligated to make sure we have enough knowledge and to gather more knowledge if we don't. If you believe that you don't have the time and/or resources to do this, that's also a decision with moral consequences.
In other words, it's not enough to merely try to make the correct decision.
The possibility that more information will change your recommended course of action is one that has to be weighed against the costs of acquiring more information, not a moral imperative. One can always find oneself in a situation where the evidence is stacked to deceive one. That doesn't mean that before you put on your socks in the morning you ought to perform an exhaustive check to make sure that your sock drawer hasn't been rigged to blow up the White House when opened.
You use only the resources you have, including your judgement, including your metajudgement.
I guess there is a slight ambiguity in the way Nicholas Humphrey uses the word 'right' in the sentence: "none of this would give you a right to administer the poison". I doubt he is making a moral statement. What he is pointing out is that your beliefs will have to be judged by reality. Your beliefs do not affect the fact that what you are administering is poison.
In fact, he points out that having incorrect beliefs might make you morally less culpable. But it doesn't make you right.
What does having a 'right' mean in this context? Is Humphrey trying to say that other observers who know that the vial contains poison aren't obliged to allow the confused parent to administer the poison? I suppose that would be a reasonable point to make. If he is only talking in the sense of degree of blame assigned to the confused parent then his claim is more ethically questionable.
This seems like a "definition of right" quote rather than a moral statement. I'd rather just say "being certain that poison is good for your child makes you subjectively right, but not objectively right, to administer it." Or if those terms are already being used for something else, we can make up new words.
Then of course we might ask, for example: when determining if criminal action is appropriate, does it matter whether the criminal had a subjective but not an objective right to commit the crime? And that would be an interesting question. In absence of a context, it's pointless to discuss which of two things should be called "right".
Eric Schwitzgebel
what is left are the data points that align with your narrative about yourself.
Indeed, which together with the quote implies "you" = "your narrative about yourself". See also Dennett's "The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity".
Can we just agree that English doesn't have a working definition for "self", and that different definitions are helpful in different contexts? I don't think there's anything profound in proposing definitions for words that fuzzy.
-- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (extended edition)
What Faramir says contains wisdom but so do Frodo's words. The enemy is trying to destroy the world with some kind of epic high fantasy apocalypse. Frodo does not terminally value the death (heh) of specific foot soldiers. They may be noble and virtuous and their deaths a tragic waste. But Frodo has something to protect and also has baddass allies who return from the (mostly) dead with a wardrobe change. But he doesn't have enough power to give himself a batman-like self-handicap of using non-lethal force. Killing those who get in his way (but lamenting the necessity) is the right thing for him to do and so yes, people would do well not to hinder him.
Agreed. Though of course, I don't really see Faramir as disagreeing -- it was, after all, the Rangers of Ithilien who ambushed the Haradrim and killed the soldier they're talking about.
I'm a little bit proud that I don't know who all these people are.
I'd ding you for having confessed to being proud of your ignorance, except that what you confessed ignorance of was not, technically speaking, a fact.
I'm never quite sure what to think about being proud of not knowing a fact. On one hand, knowledge itself almost certainly has positive value, even if that value is very small. On the other hand, making the effort to acquire very low-usefulness knowledge generally has negative expected utility, so I can understand prioritized a particular body of knowledge as "not worth it."
Of course, pride is really about signaling, so it makes sense to look at what sort of signal one's pride is sending. If someone seems particularly knowledgeable about a low-status topic, such as celebrity gossip, I judge them negatively for it. I assume most people do this, though with different lists of which topics are low-status (or am I just projecting?).
Ultimately, I think the questions to consider are: 1. As an individual, does prideful ignorance of a topic you consider not worthwhile send a signal you want to send, and 2. As a community, is this the sort of signal we want to encourage?
downvoted. You're saying you don't know anything about the context provided by a story that is apparently of interest to (at least) several readers here, and you're proud of not sharing the context. Doesn't seem like something to crow about without first finding out if the content is frivolous.
No I wasn't. I could give you an analysis of likely outcomes of a battle between Mirkwood and Lorien archers depending on terrain. It isn't often that my knowledge of utterly useless details of fantasy stories is outclassed. I may as well enjoy the experience.
Hastie & Dawes, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World, pp. 67-8.
Related:
Dawes, in JUU:HB p. 392.
Experience trumps brilliance.
— Thomas Sowell
This belief seems to me very convenient for the brilliant, implying that they got where they are by hard work and properly deserve everything they have. Of course brilliant people also have to put in hard work, but their return on investment is much higher than many other contenders who may have put in even more work for lower total returns. Just-world hypothesis; life is not this fair. And while I do go about preaching the virtue of Hufflepuff, I also go about saying that people should try to Huffle where they have comparative advantage.
My reading of the quote is that empiricism is superior to rationalism (the old philosophical schools, not the sort we discuss here). If I have a proof that my bridge will hold a thousand pounds, and it breaks under a hundred, then the experiment trumps the proof.
By "proof", do you mean experimental evidence, or armchair rationalization?
A correct mathematical proof based on an experimentally verified model of bridges and seemingly obvious assumptions about your particular bridge.
That doesn't sound like the sort of thing a rationalist (in the sense Vaniver was using) would care for at all.
In practical terms, though, experience does frequently trump brilliance. This does not mean this is a good thing to have happened, only that it does. Experience makes one more likely to be good at competition.
Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.
-- Thomas Edison
A true genius would do nothing and then steal the results of other people's inspiration and perspiration.
OWAIT
Lacking sufficient inspiration, I shall reduce my perspiration until recommended ratio is met.
Have you considered LSD, for the inspiration? I mean, if the sources don't matter, just the ratio...
I haven't, but the suggestion seems overwhelmingly problematic to me. I don't have any personal experience with LSD, but I don't think it would be of great help in my present problem.
However, we could test this. If you have LSD and would like to try your hand at solving it, please let me know. I must say, though, I doubt you would find it to be an interesting problem in the first place.
Sorry, the only research I've heard of was about technical matters and implied it only worked for the person who had been thinking deeply about it.
Unfortunately, this will produce only a very small quantity of genius.
Yes, but it's the best you can do sometimes. And the excess sweat would otherwise be wasted.
Not necessarily. You can always apply your excess perspiration to someone else's excess inspiration (and then claim 99% of any resultant profits - assuming that you provide all the perspiration, of course).
Anecdotally, I seem to observe more excess inspiration than excess perspiration, so I don't think that excess inspiration will be hard to find.
Hmm. Corollary:
Lacking sufficient perspiration, I shall reduce my inspiration until recommended ratio is met.
Eh. Doesn't sound quite as awesome.
No, it doesn't, but might be almost equally wise. Just as it doesn't make sense to keep working hard without something worth working hard on, it probably doesn't make sense to keep trying to come up with brilliant ideas if you're already so awash in brilliant ideas that you can't implement them all.
Caveat 1: If you can find better inspiration into which to direct your limited supply of perspiration, and don't further deplete your capacity for perspiration in the process, it may still be a good idea to go for more inspiration.
Caveat 2: If you have a good way to sell your excess inspiration or buy more perspiration, and you have a strong comparative advantage in inspiration, you may want to do that, but selling inspiration is hard, as is buying good quality perspiration.
I think that Caveat #1 is extremely important here. Considering the amount of perspiration needed to turn inspiration into genius, it's probably best to spend a bit of extra time searching for the best possible inspiration to which to direct your available supply of perspiration.
-- G. K. Chesterton, "The Appetite of Tyranny", arguing against pretending to be wise
The international equivalent is not a police and justice system, it's vigilante justice. Doing nothing is not much worse than killing the attacker, being killed by the attacker's friends who believe the victim had started it, and starting a vendetta. How do you arrest a state? Ask the UN for permission to carpet-bomb it?
Under the assumption that a lesser power is unable to punish injustice done by a greater power, the three possible alternatives at any level of power are "Injustice is dealt with by a greater power", "Injustice is dealt with by peers", and "Injustice is dealt with by nobody". The first system sounds nice, except that infinite regression is impossible, and so eventually you end up at the greatest level of power, choosing between systems two and three. In that case, system two seems preferable, "vigilante" connotations notwithstanding.
Two WAITWs don't make a right.
In this quotation, Chesterton writes against people who compare war to vigilante justice. But his argument is not that this is a poor comparison, but that instead the analogy doesn't go far enough. So, he compounds the error of his opponents with an error of his own.
There's also some scenario slippage -- in the peacenik argument, the citizen "avenges" himself, but by the time Chesterton gets to him, the dead man was just "standing there within reach of the hatchet." That alone gives you a hint about you what kind of hearing the accused is likely to get in Chesterton's court.
--Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
-- Mark Schone
A customer-facing skills course I went on, many years ago, used the word "tape" to describe pervasive habits of speech.
James Stephens
Is bravery a mental state (or something) that conquers fear, or is it bravery to conquer fear (e.g. because you're curious)?
What testable predictions does this make and have they been tested? The typical interactions of various emotions with each other is something we should be able to find out but I'm not sure if the message of the quote is supposed to be anything to do with making a claim about reality.
Purely anecdotal: I was a lot more frightened of spiders before I got a book about them out of the library and read it. They are pretty interesting little creatures. Mind you, I live where there are no actually dangerous ones.
Speculation: To the extent that a lot of fear is fear of the unknown, and curiosity attracts us to the unknown so we can know more of it, I can see how curiosity would help reduce fear.
Testable prediction: someone who reports a fear of something they don't know much about will report less fear of it after they can be encouraged to express and follow up some amount of curiosity about it. It's conditional on such curiosity actually existing. Possibly extreme phobias shut off any attempts to discuss or think about the object of fear.
Curiosity probably even helps with well-founded fears of things like bears, hydrofluoric acid or blue-glowing bits of metal. I'm content not to conquer well-founded fears I think.
Another anecdote: I was much less bothered by thunder (admittedly, I was distressed rather than panicked) when I found out that there were people who made a hobby of recording thunder. This caused me to listen to it rather than just be upset by the loud noise.
Richard Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response
Well they're maybe a little more admirable than some other types of worker. Let's not go overboard here.
Yet a policymaker for science must either be a scientist (ish), or a Pointy-Haired Boss.
Plenty of dogberts get in on the action as well.
Greg Egan, Diaspora
Yagyu Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword (translated by William Scott Wilson).
Commentary: I see this in the martial/kinesthetic context as acting without conscious censorship of your action, using the skills you have leaned through conscious censorship; and similarly in a LW context of approaching questions in Near Mode, without consciously adjusting for bias.
-Seth Godin
Spoken like a true cat.
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.
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
Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies
--Eric Hoffer, on Near/Far
Invertible fact alert!
It's a lot easier to hate Creationists than to hate my landlady.
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.
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.
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>?
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 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.
Linus van Pelt
Jem and Tessa, Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare
-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.
Quibble: "Your" territory?
Yes, this.
Other people's expressions of verbal symbols that are not even part of their map are also part of the 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.
--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.
A good article on Slate.com by Daniel Engber
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.
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.
This is my view as well.
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.
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?
(see here)
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/).
Upvoted for the quote, I didn't read the article.
xkcd said it better:
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.)
--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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 ;)
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."
Frédéric Bastiat.
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.
Prior to WW2, Germany was the biggest trading partner of France.
Émile Zola
-- mme_n_b
Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace, "A Philosophical Essay On Probabilities", quoted here. (Hat tip.)
"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:
tch. Should've caught that.
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.
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.
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?
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'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.
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?
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
-Mägo de Oz
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.
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".
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.
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.
-- 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.
-- Princess Bubblegum
Attributed to Charles De Gaulle.
--Kruschke 2010, Doing Bayesian Data Analysis, pg56-57
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'?").
...
--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.
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?).
-- Robert H. Thouless, Straight and Crooked Thinking
-- Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies
--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.
-- Harry Potter and the Natural 20
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.
Lucky him - his internal persons are friends.