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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments or posts from Less Wrong itself or from Overcoming Bias.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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments or posts from Less Wrong itself or from Overcoming Bias.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 can't help but wonder if they really expect, in 50 years time, that we will live in a world of strictly hetrosexual marriages.

Here are a few things that have at one time or another been considered "obviously inevitable":

The spread of enlightened dictatorship on the Prussian model.
The spread of eugenics.
The control of the world economy by "rational" central planners.

My point is that you appear to be overestimating how well you can predict the future.

What are they possibly hoping to achieve?

I don't think you really believe this argument. In particular if the success of something you opposed seemed inevitable, you'd still oppose it.

Maybe that reasoning isn't the best way to decide to actively do a thing, but it surely counts towards the cessation of resistance to a thing.

What I think is happening is that you support the "inevitable" outcome but are getting frustrated that the opposition just won't go away like they're "supposed" to.

In particular if the success of something you opposed seemed inevitable, you'd still oppose it.

Oppose in the sense of "actively work to stop it" or oppose in the sense of, "if asked about it, note that one dislikes it"? I dislike the increase of surveillance over the decades but look: Sensors get cheaper year by year. Computation gets cheaper year by year. I'm not happy to see more surveillance, but I see it as so close to inevitable, due to the dropping costs of the enabling technologies, that actively opposing it is a waste of t... (read more)