Rationality Quotes January 2013
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- Do not quote yourself
- Do not quote comments/posts on LessWrong or Overcoming Bias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
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Comments (604)
-Bryant Walker Smith
Considering there are working prototypes of such cars driving around right now ...
EDIT: Damn, ninja'd by Luke.
But we've had self-driving cars for multiple years now...
-- Penn Jilette.
Why?
If I encounter a being approximately equivalent to God - (almost) all-knowing, benevolent etc. - and it tells me to do something, why the hell should I refuse? If Omega told you something was the best choice according to your preferences - presumably as part of a larger game - why wouldn't you try and achieve that?
My best guess is that Mr. Jilette is confused regarding morality.
Because most people who are convinced by their pet moral principle to kill kids are utterly wrong.
You're saying that if a Friendly superintellligence told you something was the right thing to do - however you define right - then you would trust your own judgement over theirs?
Acting the other way around would be trusting my judgement that the AI is friendly.
In any case, I would expect a superintelligence, friendly or not, to be able to convince me to kill my child, or do whatever.
Yes. Yes it would. Do you consider it so inconceivable that it might be the best course of action to kill one child that it outweighs any possible evidence of Friendliness?
And so, logically, could God. Apparently FAIs don't arbitrarily reprogram people. Who knew?
?!
If you believe in an immensely powerful being that isn't moral, then you don't believe in "God". You believe in Cthulhu.
It's hardly fair to describe this tiny modicum of doubt as atheism, even in the umbrella sense that covers agnosticism.
--Thomas Sowell
Dupe.
Thank you!
(Source: Dennettations)
Is there a reason you're quoting this, or are you just being humeorous?
I thought it was quite Witty.
-Dwight K. Schrute
"Study everything, join nothing"
Atribution?
--Mencius Moldbug, here
I can't overemphasise how much I agree with this quote as a heuristic.
As I noted in my other comment, he redefined the terms underdog/overdog to be based on poteriors, not priors, effectively rendering them redundant (and useless as a heuristic).
Most of the time, priors and posteriors match. If you expect the posterior to differ from your prior in a specific direction, then change your prior.
And thus, you should expect 99% of underdogs to lose and 99% of overdogs to win. If all you know is that a dog won, you should be 99% confident the dog was an overdog. If the standard narrative reports the underdog winning, that doesn't make the narrative impossible, but puts a burden of implausibility on it.
I consider this an uncharitable reading, I've read the article twice and I still understood him much as Konkvistador and Athrelon have.
I suppose this is a hilariously obvious thing to say, but I wonder how much leftism Marcion Mugwump has actually read. We're completely honest about the whole power-seizing thing. It's not some secret truth.
(Okay, some non-Marxist traditions like anarchism have that whole "people vs. power" thing. But they're confused.)
Ehm... what?
Yes but as a friend reminded me recently, saying obvious things can be necessary.
The heuristic is great, but that article is horrible, even for Moldbug.
How is it great? How would you use this "heuristic"?
-Lucca, Chrono Trigger
- Mark T. Conrad, "Thus Spake Bart: On Nietzche and the Virtues of Being Bad", The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'Oh of Homer
That's not a bad essay (BTW, essays should be in quote marks, and the book itself, The Simpsons and Philosophy, in italics), but I don't think the quote is very interesting in isolation without any of the examples or comparisons.
Edited, thanks for the style correction.
I suspect you're probably right that more examples makes this more interesting, given the lack of upvotes. In fact, I probably found the quote relevant mostly because it more or less summed up the experience of my OWN life at the time I read it years ago.
I spent much of my youth being contrarian for contradiction's sake, and thinking myself to be revolutionary or somehow different from those who just joined the cliques and conformed, or blindly followed their parents, or any other authority.
When I realized that defining myself against social norms, or my parents, or society was really fundamentally no different from blind conformity, only then was I free to figure out who I really was and wanted to be. Probably related: this quote.
--Randall Munroe, "Death Rates"
-- Tloewald on HN, commenting on Aaron Swartz's suicide.
--Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
-Pirkei Avot (5:15)
Deep wisdom indeed. Some people believe the wrong things, and some believe the right things, some people believe both, some people believe neither.
Randall Munroe
This is a duplicate.
And to think, I was just getting on to post this quote myself!
David Brin
People in Star Wars don't really have political beliefs in any meaningful sense. The Star Wars universe is actual about a struggle between Good and Evil instead of being a struggle between two political factions.
Citizens of the US got angry after 2001. The US became a lot more evil in response to torturing people and commits war crimes such as attacking people who try to rescue injured people with drones.
SMBC comics: a metaphor for deathism.
While I am a fan of SMBC, in this case he's not doing existentialism justice (or not understanding existentialism). Existentialism is not the same thing as deathism. Existentialism is about finding meaning and responsibility in an absurd existence. While mortality is certainly absurd, biological immortality will not make existential issues go away. In fact, I suspect it will make them stronger..
edit: on the other hand, "existentialist hokey-pokey" is both funny and right on the mark!
I don't see how this strip can be considered to be about existentialism.
EDIT: Actually, I'm no longer sure what the strip is about. It obviously starts with Camus' absurdism, but then switches from his anti-nihilist argument against suicide in an absurd world to a potential critique of... what? nihilism? absurdism? as a means of resolving the cognitive dissonance of having a finite lifespan while wanting to live forever... Or does it? Zack Weiner can be convoluted at times.
[Meta]
I don't see why the parent was downvoted.
Is it seriously being downvoted just because it called to attention an inference that was not obvious, but seemed obvious to some who had studied a certain topic X?
Not my downvote. But if you don't know enough about existentialism to recognize Camus is a central early figure, then you don't know enough about existentialism to comment about whether a particular philosophical point invokes existentialism accurately.
If we replaced "Camus" with "J.S. Mill" and "existentialism" with "consequentialism," the error might be clearer.
In short, it isn't an error to miss the reference, but it is an error to challenge someone who explains the reference. (And currently, the karma for the two posts by shminux correctly reflect this difference - with the challenge voted much lower)
Errh... does not follow.
I care about the central early figures of any topic about as much as I care about the size of the computer monitor used by the person who contributed the most to the reddit codebase.
(edit: To throw in an example, I spent several months in the dark a while back doing bayesian inference while completely missing references to / quotes from Thomas Bayes. Yes, literally, that bad. So forgive me if I wouldn't have caught your reference to consequentialism if you hadn't explicitly stated that as what "J.S. Mill" was linked to.)
The later explanation (in response to said "challenge") was necessary for me to understand why someone was talking about existentialism at all in the first place, so the first comment definitely did not make the reference any more obvious or explained (to me, two-place) than it was beforehand.
The "challenge" is actually not obvious to me either. When I re-read the comment, I see someone mentioning that they're missing the information that says "This strip is about existentialism".
If any statement of the form "X is not obvious to me" is considered a challenge to those for whom it is obvious, then I would argue that the agents doing this considering have missed the point of the inferential distance articles. To go meta, this previous sentence is what I would consider a challenge.
I think this is a mistake, and a missed chance to practice the virtue of scholarship. Lesswrong could use much more scholarship, not less, in my opinion. The history of the field often gives more to think about than the modern state of the field.
Progress does not obey the Markov property.
[Obligatory disclaimer: This is not a challenge.]
I honestly don't see how or why.
I already have a rather huge list of things I want to do scholarship with, and I don't see any use I could have for knowledge about the persons behind these things I want to study. Knowing a name for the purposes of searching for more articles written under this name is useful, knowing a name to know the rate of accuracy of predictions made by this name is useful, and often the "central early figures" in a field will coincide with at least one of these or some other criteria for scholarly interest.
I hear Galileo is also a central early figure for something related to stars or stellar motion or heliocentrism or something. Something about stellar bodies, probably. This seems entirely screened off (so as to make knowledge about Galileo useless to me) by other knowledge I have from other sources about other things, like newtonian physics and relativity and other cool things.
Studying history is interesting, studying the history of some things is also interesting, but the central early figures of some field are only nodes in a history, and relevant to me proportionally to their relevance to the parts of said history that carry information useful for me to remember after having already propagated the effects of this through my belief network.
Once I've done updates on my model based on what happened historically, I usually prefer forgetting the specifics of the history, as I tend to remember that I already learned about this history anyway (which means I won't learn it again, count it again, and break my mind even more later on).
So... I don't see where knowledge about the people comes in, or why it's a good opportunity to learn more. Am I cheating by already having a list of things to study and a large collection of papers to read?
To rephrase, if the information gained by knowing the history of something can be screened off by a more compact or abstract model, I prefer the latter.
That's fine if you are trying to do economics with your time. But it sounded to me from the comment that you didn't care as well. Actually the economics is nontrivial here, because different bits of the brain engage with the formal material vs the historic context.
I think an argument for learning a field (even a formal/mathematical field) as a living process evolving through time, rather than the current snapshot really deserves a separate top level post, not a thread reply.
My personal experience trying to learn math the historic way and the snapshot way is that I vastly prefer the former. Perhaps I don't have a young, mathematically inclined brain. History provides context for notational and conceptual choices, good examples, standard motivating problems that propelled the field forward, lessons about dead ends and stubborn old men, and suggests a theory of concepts as organically evolving and dying, rather than static. Knowledge rooted in historic context is much less brittle.
For example, I wrote a paper with someone about what a "confounder" is. * People have been using that word probably for 70 years without a clear idea of what it means, and the concept behind it for maybe 250 more (http://jech.bmj.com/content/65/4/297.full.pdf+html). In the course of writing the paper we went through maybe half a dozen historic definitions people actually put forth (in textbooks and such), all but one of them "wrong." Probably our paper is not the last word on this. Actually "confounder" as a concept is mostly dying, to be replaced by "confounding" (much clearer, oddly). Even if we agree that our paper happens to be the latest on the subject, how much would you gain by reading it, and ignoring the rest? What if you read one of the earlier "wrong" definitions and nothing else?
You can't screen off, because history does not obey the Markov property.
Maybe more to think, but less value to the mastery the field, at least in the natural sciences (philosophy isn't one). You can safely delay learning about the history of discovery of electromagnetism, or linear algebra, or the periodic table until after you master the concepts. Apparently in philosophy it's somehow the other way around, you have to learn the whole history first. What a drag.
It quotes Camus, the father of existentialism. It quotes from "The Myth of Sisyphus," one of the founding texts of existentialism. The invitation to live and create in the desert (e.g. invitation to find your own meaning, responsibility, and personal integrity without a God or without objective meaning in the world) is the existential answer to the desert of nihilism. Frankly, I am not sure how you can think the strip is about anything else. What do you think existentialism is?
A more accurate pithy summary of existentialism is this: "When they realized they were in a desert, they built water condensators out of sand."
"Beyond the reach of God" is existential.
SMBC has also featured a bunch of other strips about existentialism, leading me to suspect he has studied it in some capacity. Notably, here, here, here, here and here.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1595#comic
That's relativism, not existentialism. I mean he's trying to entertain, not be a reliable source about anything. Like wikipedia :).
Yeah, the third one I linked too isn't really existentialism either now that I think about it...
Cheney Bros v. Doris Silk Corporation, New York Circuit Court of Appeals, Second Circuit
--Thomas Sowell
-- Jonathan Haidt
--Scott Derrickson
-- Steve Smith, American Dad!, season 1, episode 7 "Deacon Stan, Jesus Man", on the applicability of this axiom.
Scott Derrickson is indifferent. How do I know this? I know because Scott Derrickson's skin cells are part of Scott Derrickson, and Scott Derrickson's skin cells are indifferent.
-- someone on Usenet replying to someone deriding Kurzweil
In general, though, that argument is the Galileo gambit and not a very good argument.
-- Scenes From A Multiverse
This works equally well as an argument against utilitarianism, which I'm guessing may be your intent.
Nah, it's just a cheap shot at the theists.
EDIT: not sure about the source, but the way it's edited ...
I have no idea what people mean when they say they are against utilitarianism. My current interpretation is that they don't think people should be VNM-rational, and I haven't seen a cogent argument supporting this. Why isn't this quote just establishing that the utility of babies is high?
I find these criticisms by Vladimir_M to be really superb.
A bounded utility function that places a lot of value on signaling/being "a good person" and desirable associate, getting some "warm glow" and "mostly doing the (deontologically) right thing" seems like a pretty good approximation.
Well, Alicorn is a deontologist.
In any case, as an ultafinitist you should know the problems with the VNM theorem.
I also have no idea what people mean when they say they are deontologists. I've read Alicorn's Deontology for Consequentialists and I still really have no idea. My current interpretation is that a deontologist will make a decision that makes everything worse if it upholds some moral principle, which just seems like obviously a bad idea to me. I think it's reasonable to argue that deontology and virtue ethics describe heuristics for carrying out moral decisions in practice, but heuristics are heuristics because they break down, and I don't see a reasonable way to judge which heuristics to use that isn't consequentialist / utilitarian.
Then again, it's quite likely that my understanding of these terms doesn't agree with their colloquial use, in which case I need to find a better word for what I mean by consequentialist / utilitarian. Maybe I should stick to "VNM-rational."
I also didn't claim to be an ultrafinitist, although I have ultrafinitist sympathies. I haven't worked through the proof of the VNM theorem yet in enough detail to understand how infinitary it is (although I intend to).
Taboo "make everything worse".
At the very least I find it interesting how rarely an analogous objection against VNM-utiliterians with different utility functions is raised. It's almost as if many of the "VNM-utiliterians" around here don't care what it means to "make everything worse" as long as one avoids doing it, and avoids doing it following the mathematically correct decision theory.
Well the continuity axiom in the statement certainly seems dubious from an ultafinitist point of view.
Have worse consequences for everybody, where "everybody" means present and future agents to which we assign moral value. For example, a sufficiently crazy deontologist might want to kill all such agents in the name of some sacred moral principle.
Rarely? Isn't this exactly what we're talking about when we talk about paperclip maximizers?
When I asked you to taboo "makes everything worse", I meant taboo "worse" not taboo "everything".
You want me to say something like "worse with respect to some utility function" and you want to respond with something like "a VNM-rational agent with a different utility function has the same property." I didn't claim that I reject deontologists but accept VNM-rational agents even if they have different utility functions from me. I'm just trying to explain that my current understanding of deontology makes it seem like a bad idea to me, which is why I don't think it's accurate. Are you trying to correct my understanding of deontology or are you agreeing with it but disagreeing that it's a bad idea?
A sufficiently crazy consequentialist might want to kill all such agents because he's scared of what the voices in his head might otherwise do. Your argument is not an argument at all.
And if the sacred moral principle leads to the deontologist killing everyone, that is a pretty terrible moral principle. Usually they're not like that. Usually the "don't kill people if you can help it" moral principle tends to be ranked pretty high up there to prevent things like this from happening.
Nelson Goodman
-The mayor, in "do the right thing"
I think the bigger problem is that people mostly disagree on what the right thing to do is.
I still find it useful to play it back in my head to remind myself to actually think whether what I'm doing is right "nyan, always do the right thing".
I think that we agree on enough that if people "did the right thing" it would be better than the current situation, if not perfect.
In fairness, people aren't great at deciding what the right thing is, but I still agree with you; most people are not wrong about most things. For example, boycotts would work. So well.
OTOH, every abortion clinic would be bombed before the week was out; terrorist attacks would probably go up generally, as would revenge killings. You could argue those would have positive net impacts (since terrorists would presumably stop once their demands are met? I think?) but it's certainly not one-sided.
That's not at all clear.
Unclear. Some people have very bad ideas about what constitutes the right thing and their impact might not be canceled out.
Funny, I was thinking for the last few days or weeks of "Do the right thing!" as a sort of summary of deontology. It's all very well if you know what the right thing is. Another classic expression is "Let justice be done though the heavens may fall" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_justitia_ruat_caelum), apparently most famously said by the English Jurist Lord Mansfield when reversing the conviction of John Wilkes for libel while, it seems, riots and demonstrations were going on in the streets (my very brief research indicates he did not say it in the case that outlawed slavery in the British homeland long before even the British abolished elsewhere -- though a book on that case is titled "Though the Heavens may fall" -- the fact that he made that remark and that decision just made it too tempting to conflate them).
Some examples in the Bible pointedly illustrate "do the right thing" (in the sense of whatever God says is right -- though in this case, "right" clearly isn't in any conflict with "the Heavens"). I.e. Abraham: Sacrifice your son to me (ha ha just kidding/testing you), or Joshua "Run around the walls of Jericho blowing horns and the walls will fall down". These are extreme cases of "Right is right, never mind how you'd imagine it would turn out -- with hour tiny human mind).
Personally, since I am not an Objectivist, or a fundamentalist, or one who talks with God, I don't fully trust any set of rules I may currently have as to what "is right", though I trust them enough to get through most days. Nor am I a perfect consequentialist since I don't perfectly trust my ability to predict outcomes.
An awful lot of examples given to justify consequentialism are extremely contrived, like "ticking bomb" scenarios to justify torture. Unfortunately many of us have seen these scenarios all too often in fiction (e.g. "24"), where they are quite common because they furnish such exciting plot points. Then they are on a battlefield in the real world which does not follow scriptwriter logic, and they imagine they are living such a heroic moment, which gets them to do something wrong and stupid.
In my opinion the best course is some of both. If I find myself, say, as a policeman, thinking that by shooting this guy though it really isn't self-defence but I can sell it as such, I will rid the world of a bad actor who'd probably kill two people, then I suspect the best course is to fall back on the manual which says I'm not justified in shooting him in this situation. Similarly if I think by this or that unethical action I'll increase the chance of the right person being elected to some important office On the other hand, if on some occasion I believe that by lying I will prevent some calamity then I might lie. There is no guarantee that we'll get it right, and we'll have to face the consequences if we're wrong.
The worst thing, I think, is to think we've figured it all out and know exactly how to be get it right all the time.
-- Groucho Marx
I'm not sure that's great advice. It will result in you trying to try to live forever. The only way to live forever or die trying is to intend to live forever.
South Park, Se 16 ep 4, "Jewpacabra"
note: edited for concision. script
This is a duplicate. You probably checked and didn't find it because for some reason Google doesn't know about it.
Even though this quote is focusing on religion, I think it applies to any beliefs people have that they think are "harmless" but greatly influence how they treat others. In short, since no person is an island, we have a duty to critically examine the beliefs we have that influence how we treat others.
-- Larry Wall
--Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell (discussing the differences between the "intentional object" of a belief and the thing-in-the-world inspiring that belief)
He's talking about God here, right?
In large part, yes. This passage is in Dennett's chapter on "Belief in Belief," and he has an aside on the next page describing how to "turn an atheist into a theist by just fooling around with words" -- namely, that "if 'God' were just the name of whatever it is that produced all creatures great and small, then God might turn out to be the process of evolution by natural selection."
But I think there's also a more general rationality point about keeping track of the map-territory distinction when it comes to abstract concepts, and about ensuring that we're not confusing ourselves or others by how we use words.
-- thedaveoflife
Where there's smoke, there's a chemical reaction of some kind. Unless it's really someone blowing off steam.
--John Derbyshire
Wile this is all very inspiring, is it true? Yes, truth in and of itself is something that many people value, but what this quote is claiming is that there are a class of people (that he calls "dissidents") that specifically value this above and beyond anything else. It seems a lot more likely to me that truth is something that all or most people value to one extent or another, and as such, sometimes if the conditions are right people will sacrifice stuff to achieve it, just like for any other thing they value.
Beatrice the Biologist
The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance. Robert R. Coveyou, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
It's not easy to find rap lyrics that are appropriate to be posted here. Here's an attempt.
-- John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement.
-Woody Allen EDIT: Fixed formatting.
Formatting is broken. Great quote, though.
David Wong, 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person. Published in Cracked.com
I wish my 17-year-old self had read that article.
For Instance It Makes You Write With Odd Capitalization.
It a misleading claim. Studying of how parents influence their kids generally conclude that "being" of the parent is more important than what they specifically do with the kids.
From the article:
The author of the article doesn't seem to understand that there such a thing as good listening. If a girl tell you about some problem in her life it can be more effective to empathize with the girl than to go and solve the problem.
If something says "It's what's on the inside that matters!" a much better response would be ask: What makes you think that your inside is so much better than the inside of other people?
This article greatly annoyed me because of how it tells people to do the correct practical things (Develop skills! Be persistent and grind! Help people!) yet gives atrocious and shallow reasons for it - and then Wong says how if people criticize him they haven't heard the message. No, David, you can give people correct directions and still be a huge jerk promoting an awful worldview!
He basically shows NO understanding of what makes one attractive to people (especially romantically) and what gives you a feeling of self-worth and self-respect. What you "are" does in fact matter - both to yourself and to others! - outside of your actions; they just reveal and signal your qualities. If you don't do anything good, it's a sign of something being broken about you, but just mechanically bartering some product of your labour for friendship, affection and status cannot work - if your life is in a rut, it's because of some deeper issues and you've got to resolve those first and foremost.
This masochistic imperative to "Work harder and quit whining" might sound all serious and mature, but does not in fact has the power to make you a "better person"; rather, you'll know you've changed for the better when you can achieve more stuff and don't feel miserable.
I wanted to write a short comment illustrating how this article might be the mirror opposite of some unfortunate ideas in the "Seduction community" - it's "forget all else and GIVE to people, to obtain affection and self-worth" versus "forget all else and TAKE from people, to obtain affection and self-worth" - and how, for a self-actualized person, needs, one's own and others', should dictate the taking and giving, not some primitive framework of barter or conquest - but I predictably got too lazy to extend it :)
I've taken a crack at what's wrong with that article.
The problem is, there's so much wrong with it from so many different angles that it's rather a large topic.
Yep :). I was doing a more charitable reading than the article really deserves, to be honest. It carried over from the method of political debate I am attempting these days - accept the opponent's premises (e.g. far-right ideas that they proudly call "thoughtcrime"), then show how either a modus-tollens inference from them is instrumentally/ethically preferrable, or how they just have nothing to do with the opponent being an insufferable jerk.
100% true. I often shudder when I think how miserable I could've got if I hadn't watched this at a low point in my life.
Actually the article says enough different and somewhat contradictory things that it supports multiple readings, or to put it less charitably, it's contradictory in a way that leads people to pick the bits which are most emotionally salient to them and then get angry at each other for misreading the article.
The title is "6 Harsh Truths That Will Improve Your Life"-- by implication, anyone's life. Then Wong says, "this will improve your life unless it's awesome in all respects". Then he pulls back to "this is directed at people with a particular false view of the universe".
My complaint about the article is that it has the same problem as most self-help advice. When you read it, it sounds intelligent, you nod your head, it makes sense. You might even think to yourself "Yeah, I'm going to really change now!"
But as everyone whose tried to improve himself knows, it's difficult to change your behavior (and thoughts) on a basis consistent enough to really make a long-lasting difference.
Dr. Seuss
-- P. W. Bridgman, ‘‘The Struggle for Intellectual Integrity’’
-- Kyubey (Puella Magi Madoka Magica)
I was rereading HP Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu lately, and the quote from the Necronomicon jumped out at me as a very good explanation of exactly why cryonics is such a good idea.
(Full disclosure: I myself have not signed up for cryonics. But I intend to sign up as soon as I can arrange to move to a place where it is available.)
The quote is simply this:
So strange that this quote hasn't already been memed to death in support of cryonics.
It featured prominently in last year's Solstice.
In retrospect, I don't think I have a good reason for not coming to that.
Er... logical fallacy of fictional evidence, maybe? I wince every time somebody cites Terminator in a discussion of AI. It doesn't matter if the conclusion is right or wrong, I still wince because it's not a valid argument.
-Alfie Kohn, "Punished By Rewards"
-- Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
-Jobe Wilkins (Whateley Academy)
-- Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
lanyard
Wasn't that poem sarcastic anyway? Until the last stanza, the poem says how the roads were really identical in all particulars -- and in the last stanza the narrator admits that he will be describing this choice falsely in the future.
That's not how I read it. There's no particular difference between the two roads, so far as Frost can tell at the point of divergence, but they're still different roads and lead by different routes to different places, and he expects that years from now he'll look back and see (or guess?) that it did indeed make a big difference which one he took.
Silas Dogood
I'd have thought from observation that quite a lot of human club is just about discussing the rules of human club, excess meta and all. Philosophy in daily practice being best considered a cultural activity, something humans do to impress other humans.
Orson Scott Card, The Lost Gate
-- Penn Jilette
Disagree about the fashion.
-- Ricardo, publicly saying "oops" in his restrained Victorian fashion, in his essay "On Machinery".
--Wendy Cope, He Tells Her from the series ‘Differences of Opinion’
— Gregory Wheeler, "Formal Epistemology"
Jimmy the rational hypnotist on priming and implicit memory:
John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding
-- 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.
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).
I don't care whether it's actually true or not; either way it still holds an interesting rationality lesson and that's why I posted it.
With all respect that I'm generically required to give, I don't care whether you care or not. The argument I made was handling what you posted/quoted, neither you as a person nor your motives to posting.
Agreed. Pop-whorfianism is usually silly.
Have you considered replacing it with "[country]" or similar, then noting at the bottom what page it came from?
-- Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
Éowyn explaining to Aragorn why she was skilled with a blade. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, the 2002 movie.
Person 1: "I don't understand how my brain works. But my brain is what I rely on to understand how things work." Person 2: "Is that a problem?" Person 1: "I'm not sure how to tell."
-Today's xkcd
-Paul Graham
-- Tim Kreider, The Quiet Ones
Since this has got 22 upvotes I must ask: What makes this a rationality quote?
I don't know the circumstances, but I would have tried to make eye contact and just blatantly stare at them for minutes straight, maybe even hamming it up with a look of slight unhinged interest. They would have become more uncomfortable and might have started being anxious that a stranger is eavesdropping on them, causing them to want to be more discrete, depending on their disposition. I've actually tried this before, and it seems to sometimes work if they can see you staring at them. Give a subtle, slight grin, like you might be sexually turned on. If you won't see them again then it's worth a try.
"This is how it sometimes works", I would have said. Anything more starts to sound uncomfortably close to "the lurkers support me in email."
http://www.exmormon.org/whylft18.htm
--Rory Miller
-- Greg Egan, "Border Guards".
(a few verbal tics were removed by me; the censorship was already present in the version I heard)
Sympathetic, but ultimately, we die OF diseases. And the years we do have are more or less valuable depending on their quality.
Physicians should maximize QALYs, and extending lifespan is only one way to do it.
— Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language
-- Steven Brust, spoken by Vlad, in Iorich
Seems to describe well the founder of this forum. I wonder if this quote resonates with a certain personal experience of yours.
-http://writebadlywell.blogspot.com/2010/05/write-yourself-into-corner.html
I would argue that the lesson is that when something valuable is at stake, we should focus on the simplest available solutions to the puzzles we face, rather than on ways to demonstrate our intelligence to ourselves or others.
Story ... too awesome ... not to upvote ...
not sure why its rational, though.
I think this is an updating of the cliché from serial adventure stories for boys, where an instalment would end with a cliffhanger, the hero facing certain death. The following instalment would resolve the matter by saying "With one bound, Jack was free." Whether those exact words were ever written is unclear from Google, but it's a well-known form of lazy plotting. If it isn't already on TVTropes, now's your chance.
Wouldn't that fall under "Cliffhanger Copout"?
Did you just create that redlink? That's not the standard procedure for introducing new tropes, and if someone did do a writeup on it, it would probably end up getting deleted. New tropes are supposed to be introduced as proposals on the YKTTW (You Know That Thing Where) in order to build consensus that they're legitimate tropes that aren't already covered, and gather enough examples for a proper launch. You could add it as a proposal there, but the title is unlikely to fly under the current naming policy.
Pages launched from cold starts occasionally stick around (my first page contribution from back when I was a newcomer and hadn't learned the ropes is still around despite my own attempts to get it cutlisted,) but bypassing the YKTTW is frowned upon if not actually forbidden.
I didn't make any edits to TVTropes -- the page that it looks like I'm linking to doesn't actually exist. But I wasn't aware of YKTTW.
ETA: Neither is their 404 handler, that turns URLs for nonexistent pages into invitations to create them. As a troper yourself, maybe you could suggest to TVTropes that they change it?
If you're referring to what I think you are, that's more of a feature than a bug, since works pages don't need to go through the YKTTW. We get a lot more new works pages than new trope pages, so as long as the mechanics for creating either are the same, it helps to keep the process streamlined to avoid too much inconvenience.
I believe that Cliffhanger Copout refers to the same thing. The Harlan Ellison example in particular is worth reading.
Speaking of writing yourself into a corner...
According to TV Tropes, there was one show, "Sledge Hammer", which ended its first season with the main character setting off a nuclear bomb while trying to defuse it. They didn't expect to be renewed for a second season, so when they were, they had a problem. This is what they did:
Previously on Sledge Hammer:
[scene of nuclear explosion]
Tonight's episode takes place five years before that fateful explosion.
There's so many different ways that story couldn't possibly be true...
(EDIT: Ooh, turns out that the Superman Radio program was the one that pulled off the "Clan of the Fiery Cross" punch against the KKK.)
osewalrus
A possible partial solution to this problem.
(If you wonder where "two hundred and forty-two miles" shortening of the river came from, it was the straightening of its original meandering path to improve navigation)
--Freefall
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Caveat: this is not at all how the majority of the religious people that I know would use the word "faith". In fact, this passage turned out to be one of the earliest helps in bringing me to think critically about and ultimately discard my religious worldview.
Sounds like Lewis's confusion would have been substatially cleared up by distinguishing between belief and alief, and then he would not have had to perpetrate such abuses on commonly used words.
To be fair, the philosopher Tamar Gendler only coined the term in 2008.
Upvoted. I actually had a remarkably similar experience reading Lewis. Throughout college I had been undergoing a gradual transformation from "real" Christian to liberal Protestant to deist, and I ended up reading Lewis because he seemed to be the only person I could find who was firmly committed to Christianity and yet seemed willing to discuss the kind of questions I was having. Reading Mere Christianity was basically the event that let me give Christianity/theism one last look over and say "well said, but that is enough for me to know it is time to move on."
-Bas van Fraassen, The Scientific Image
-Buttercup Dew (@NationalistPony)
Never in my life did I expect to find myself upvoting a comment quoting My Nationalist Pony.
The Last Psychiatrist (http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/10/how_not_to_prevent_military_su.html)
Keith E. Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought
--Michael Huemer
The Third Doctor
Vannevar Bush
--Sir Francis Galton
-
Partial dupe.
-G. K. Chesterton
"I've never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive."
-- Randall Munroe, in http://what-if.xkcd.com/30/ (What-if xkcd, Interplanetary Cessna)
I don't think change can be planned. It can only be recognized.
jad abumrad, a video about the development of Radio Lab and the amount of fear involved in doing original work