Rationality Quotes January 2013

katydee

Happy New Year! Here's the latest and greatest installment of rationality quotes. Remember:

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Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LessWrong or Overcoming Bias
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please

Happy New Year! Here's the latest and greatest installment of rationality quotes. Remember:

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Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LessWrong or Overcoming Bias
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please

We cannot dismiss conscious analytic thinking by saying that heuristics will get a “close enough” answer 98 percent of the time, because the 2 percent of the instances where heuristics lead us seriously astray may be critical to our lives.

Keith E. Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought

For instance, you need analytical thinking to design your heuristics. Let your heuristics build new heuristics and a 2% failure rate compounded will give you a 50% failure rate in a few tens of generations.