Here's another installment of rationality quotes. 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
-- Lou Scheffer
(Most recent example from my own life that springs to mind: "It seems incredibly improbable that any Turing machine of size 100 could encode a complete solution to the halting problem for all Turing machines of size up to almost 100... oh. Nevermind.")
Pretty sure that also happens in fields other than the hard sciences. For example, it is said that converts to a religion are usually much more fervent than people who grew up with it (though there's an obvious selection bias).
(The advanced, dark-artsy version of this is claiming with a straight face to never have believed A in the first place, and hope the listener trusts what you're saying now more than their memory of what you said earlier, and if it doesn't work, claim they had misunderstood you. My maternal grandpa always tries to use that on my father, and almost always fails, but if he does that I guess it's because it does work on other people.)