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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments or posts from Less Wrong itself or from Overcoming Bias.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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments or posts from Less Wrong itself or from Overcoming Bias.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 wept because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet, then I continued weeping because his foot problem did not actually solve my shoe problem.

-- Noah Brand

I'd prefer if this quote ended with " ... and then I got done weeping and started working on my shoe budget," but oh wells.

I'd prefer if this quote ended with " ... and then I got done weeping and started working on my shoe budget,"

That's really the entire point of the original quote that this quote is making fun of. The difference between the original and this one is that the author of the second has not updated his baseline expectation that he should have shoes, and that something is wrong if he doesn't.

Our baseline expectations determine what we consider a "loss", in the prospect theory sense, so if seeing someone else's problem helps you reset your ... (read more)

2A1987dM13y

Generally speaking, bigger problems tend to be cheaper to solve (i.e. solving them will yield more utilons per dollar); so if there is a painting in a museum that risks being sold, and there are people that risk dying from malaria, the existence of latter is a good indication that worrying about the former isn't the most effective use of a given amount of resources. (“Concentrate on the high-order bits” -- Umesh Vazirani.) But in this particular case, that heuristic doesn't seem to work (unless I'm overestimating the cost of prosthetics).

7Dahlen13y

This. If only people realized that unpleasant facts do not cancel each other out, and pointing out one unpleasant fact in addition to another should never ever make us feel better, because it only leaves us in a worse world than we started out in. Compute the actual utilities. It's such a common and avoidable error.