Rationality Quotes February 2013

arundelo

Another monthly installment of the rationality quotes thread. The usual rules apply:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted 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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments or posts from Less Wrong itself or from Overcoming Bias.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Another monthly installment of the rationality quotes thread. The usual rules apply:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted 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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments or posts from Less Wrong itself or from Overcoming Bias.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

I'd expect a given person's perceptions of politicians' level of corruption or incompetence or any other negative adjective you can think of to depend almost entirely on party affiliation

Very few people argued that Cato was corrupt. Even those who disagreed with him mostly didn't.

As anyone who's ever moderated a large forum can tell you, playing with incentives works almost embarrassingly well and quickly compared to working on sympathy or respect for authority.

I do have experience with moderating a large forum and I still believe in not trying to corrupt people. You want people that are open for rational discouse and who changes their position when you bring them arguments to change their opinions even in the absence of giving them incentives to switch their position.

You want people that are open for rational discouse and who changes their position when you bring them arguments to change their opinions even in the absence of giving them incentives to switch their position.

Be sure to let us know when you find such people. One of the main conceits of this site is that rationalists should win. If it's possible to get ahead by not being a rationalist (even temporarily), people are going to do that. Ultimately, I think what the original quote from Friedman boils down to is the old adage that you should try to fix the system rather than blame the people in it.

14Nornagest13y

I'd say that setting up incentives so that people within a system do culturally useful things out of their own self-interest is about as close to an opposite of corrupting people as we're likely to find.