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Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LessWrong or Overcoming Bias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Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LessWrong or Overcoming Bias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

In Japan, it is widely believed that you don't have direct knowledge of what other people are really thinking (and it's very presumptuous to assume otherwise), and so it is uncommon to describe other people's thoughts directly, such as "He likes ice cream" or "She's angry". Instead, it's far more common to see things like "I heard that he likes ice cream" or "It seems like/It appears to be the case that she is angry" or "She is showing signs of wanting to go to the park."

-- TVTropes

Edit (1/7): I have no particular reason to believe that this is literally true, but either way I think it holds an interesting rationality lesson. Feel free to substitute 'Zorblaxia' for 'Japan' above.

Feel free to substitute 'Zorblaxia' for 'Japan' above.

Have you considered replacing it with "[country]" or similar, then noting at the bottom what page it came from?

2abody9713y

I have to say that's fairly stupid (I'm talking about the claim which the quote is making and generalizing over a whole population; I am not doing argumentum ad hominem here). I've seen many sorts of (fascinated) mythical claims on how the Japanese think/communicate/have sex/you name it differently and they're all ... well, purely mythical. Even if I, for the purposes of this argument, assume that beoShaffer is right about his/her Japanese teacher (and not just imagining or bending traits into supporting his/her pre-defined belief), it's meaningless and does not validate the above claim. Just for the sake of illustration, the simplest explanation for such usages is some linguistic convention (which actually makes sense, since the page from which the quote is sourced is substantially talking about the Japanese Language). Unless someone has some solid proof that it's actually related to thinking rather than some other social/linguistic convention, this is meaningless (and stupid).

5roryokane13y

Specific source: Useful Notes: Japanese Language on TV Tropes