Rationality Quotes November 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Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB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.

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Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB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

This is true in theory, but do you think it's an accurate description of our real world?

(Nuclear power is potentially great, but with a bit more patience and care, we could stretch our non-nuclear resources quite a bit further, which would have given us more time to build stable(r) political systems.)

I think you set a false dichotomy here - we can generate relatively safe nuclear power (thorium reactors) without existential risk, and without creating the byproducts necessary to create nuclear weapons. This is not an argument against the root comment, however.

3Nominull14y

No, I was responding to the "no one in their right mind" bit. It seems to me that when you are in your right mind is precisely the time to build artifacts that could destroy your civilization, and it doesn't seem to me that you could conclude from building such artifacts that you are not in your right mind. Rather, I think there's other evidence that humanity can't be trusted with e.g. nuclear weaponry, and this suggests that we should not build it. lukeprog's quote seems to me to be of the form "Humanity can't be trusted with nuclear weapons, yet builds them anyway, so it must be crazy, so it can't be trusted with nuclear weapons."

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Rationality Quotes November 2012

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Rationality Quotes November 2012

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