Rationality Quotes July 2013

Vaniver

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

What has a baby which does not understand speech "heard before", that it can form variations on? Evolution is fine, but you do need a theory of abiogenesis, or in this case aontogenesis - knowledge-from-nothing-ness, in the vernacular.

While I agree with TheOtherDave's point, I'm not sure it's necessary. A baby doesn't understand new sounds the first time it hears them, but may understand them the hundredth time it's heard them- at which point it does have quite a bit of experience, both of hearing those noises in some situations and not hearing those noises in other situations. Then, once they've learned the general skill of acquiring words, they can correctly learn words quickly, sometimes even after hearing a single use- but that's drawing on their previous experience in learning thousands of words.

7TheOtherDave13y

Babies are not clean slates; there exist innate behaviors. We can get into a theoretical discussion of where these behaviors came from if you like, but I don't need a theoretical justification to observe that babies do in fact do things they haven't been taught to do.