Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:
"If you don't know how to turn off the safety, being unable to fire the gun is the intended result."
If posting things said on lesswrong or OB or from HPMOR aren't in scope, it seems a little odd things said in HPMOR discussion on a forum run by you that doesn't happen to be those two is.
The idea of the rule is to not have this thread be an echo chamber for LessWrong and Yudkowsky quotes. As a sister site, Overcoming Bias falls under the same logic (though I think, given that the origin of LessWrong in OvecomingBias constantly becomes more distant in time, I wouldn't mind that rule getting relaxed for OvercomingBias more recent entries.)
But either way, I haven't seen that many lesswrong members participate in "hpmor/reddit" or that many hpmor/reddit members participate in lesswrong, so I think it makes sense to NOT ban hpmor/reddit quotes from this thread...
As a sister site, Overcoming Bias falls under the same logic (though I think, given that the origin of LessWrong in OvecomingBias constantly becomes more distant in time, I wouldn't mind that rule getting relaxed for OvercomingBias more recent entries.)
We succeeded in getting rid of the Overcoming Bias ban for several months a couple of years ago. Unfortunately someone reverted to an old version and since then it's stuck. Traditions are a nuisance to change.
You're misreading the quote. The intention is on the part of the person who designed the gun, not the person who's trying to fire it.
Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization. We filled that niche because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.
Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: the Coming Machine Intelligence Revolution, chap. 2
Unix was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things.
He senses in his gut that he did the right thing by showing up. As with all gut feelings, only time will tell whether this is pathetic self-delusion.
Neil Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
...My experience as a marriage counselor taught me that for a discussion of a disagreement to be productive, the parties have to have a shared understanding of what is being debated. If a husband thinks a marital debate is about leaving the toliet seat up or not, and the wife thinks it is about why her husband never listens to, appreciates or loves her the way he should, expect fireworks and frustration. If you are in an argument that you think is about government debt and it’s going nowhere, it may be because the person you are debating isn’t really arguing about the current level of government debt. Rather, they are arguing about the size of government.
If you get into a debate that is ostensibly about the level of government debt, try the following tactic (or try it on yourself in your own mind): If your opponent says that government debt is too high and we therefore need to cut public spending, ask whether s/he has EVER favored under ANY economic conditions a nice, fat increase in public spending. If you are debating someone who says that government debt is no big deal and that we should be increasing public spending, ask if s/he has EVER favored under ANY economics conditions a b
I don't think the conclusion follows.
It's entirely consistent to believe that the level of something is too high and has been too high for a long time, yet to not oppose it in principle.
The correct question to detect if that's really their objection is not "have they ever thought that the level is too low"--the correct question is "would they ever under any circumstances think that the level is too low". Of course, you're not going to get as many "no" answers with that as with your original formulation.
“As I looked out into the night sky, across all those infinite stars, it made me realize how insignificant they are."
Peter Cook
Not, perhaps, a rationality quote per se, but a delightful subversion of a harmful commonplace.
Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
H.L. Mencken
"Here are the ten major principles of rapid skill acquisition:
The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast! by Josh Kaufman.
There are those among us - among you, too, I observe - who glorify the wonders of the natural world with a kind of glassy-eyed fanaticism and urge a return to that purer, more innocent state. This testifies to nothing other than the fact that those who recommend the satisfactions of living in harmony with nature have never had to do it. Nature is evil. Nature is conflict, violence, betrayal; worms that crawl through the skin and breed in the gut; thorns that poison; snakes that fight in writhing, heaving masses until all lie dead from one another's poison. From nature we learned to tear the flesh off the bone and suck out the blood - and to enjoy it. Do you want to return to that state? I do not.
...
I have known Nature. I have known Civilization. Civilization is better.
-- Donna Ball (writing as Donna Boyd), The Passion
This is factually false.
What exactly was claimed to be a fact and how do you know it's false?
Primitive life is pretty great if you have low population density
Um. Really? What do you call primitive life, then? Does it include contemporary medicine, for example?
Because the consequences of losing are so terrible, people tend to avoid serious fighting if they can. Being hunted - a far more likely state - is decidedly un-fun.
Do you have data for prevalence in this respect?
As a martial artist and as someone whose been in fear of getting the crap knocked out of them in the past this just doesn't line up with my experience. There's a degree of focus that goes on in fights that largely excluded feelings of excitement, it's not like being on a rollercoaster. At least not for me. Fighting feels more like floating if it can be said to be like anything,I just get incredibly tuned in and a lot stronger than usual.
Admittedly I don't think everyone experiences it like that, some people probably do enjoy it.
Sometimes the most remarkable things seem commonplace. I mean, when you think about it, jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane, it defies the gravity of an entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure, and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something, and you can only breathe because someone built you a really good tin can that has seams tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research, blood, sweat, tears, and lives have gone into the history of air travel, and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies.
But get on any flight in the country, and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about the drinks.
The drinks, people.
--Harry Dresden, Summer Knight, Jim Butcher
Here's the thing about air-travel-related complaints.
Air travel is really unpleasant. Oh sure, it's technologically impressive, but the actual experience is terrible: sitting in a cramped space for hours on end, being in close proximity to so many other people; the pressure changes and the noise; the long, tiring process of arriving for your flight, which often takes longer than the actual flight and is quite stressful; the humiliating and absurd security procedures, which these days look more and more like ways for the government to gratuitously exercise its power...
So we've got this really impressive means of travel, which our society seems to have conspired to make as unpleasant as humanly possible. Ok, maybe it's all excusable and inevitable, just for the sheer amazingness of "ooh, we're FLYING through the AIR and so FAST!" etc. But then, after we pay the airline such impressive amounts of money for this amazing-but-unpleasant convenience, they don't deign to even serve us good drinks?
And what do the drinks have to do with how technologically impressive flight is, anyway? Are the people responsible for the drinks also the people who build, maintain, and fly the planes...
You're using this remarkable set of interacting or interdependent components of interlinked hypertext documents in a global system of interconnected computer networks powered by a flow of electric charge to whine about a rationality quote! How quaint.
That honestly seems like some kind of fallacy, although I can't name it. I mean, sure, take joy in the merely real, that's a good outlook to have; but it's highly analogous to saying something like "Average quality of life has gone up dramatically over the past few centuries, especially for people in major first world countries. You get 50-90 years of extremely good life - eat generally what you want, think and say anything you want, public education; life is incredibly great. But talk to some people, I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about [starving kid in Africa|environmental pollution|dying peacefully of old age|generally any way in which the world is suboptimal]."
That kind of outlook not only doesn't support any kind of progress, or even just utility maximization, it actively paints the very idea of making things even better as presumptuous and evil. It does not serve for something to be merely awe-inspiring; I want more. I want to not just watch a space shuttle launch (which is pretty cool on its own), but also have a drink that tastes better than any other in the world...
I am not qualified to answer this, but it seems to me like this. I am also not saying that this is the only or the greatest problem. Just that it already exists.
Let's start with a naive question: How is it possible that so many people are unemployed and yet there are so many things that should be done but no one (or not nearly enough people) is doing them?
This is typically answered by: Not everything that is useful is also profitable. Some things are not done because it is not possible (or not easy enough for an average person, with all the natural lack of strategy) to make money doing them. All those unemployed people are trying to get some more money; of course they will not choose activities they can't make money from.
But this is not a complete answer. First, there are many non-profitable activities, and yet many people are doing them. So perhaps the causality is not (merely) "can make money -> does the work", but (also, significantly) "does many things -> makes money on average". (Or using the signalling hypothesis: Middle-class people are more likely to do non-protitable activities, because it signals they make enough money to live decently so they do...
I'm certainly cynical, but I see the point complaining about the drinks.
Not all airplane tickets are selled the same price. But basically everybody in the plane get the same share of progress, science, technology and man labour and sweat.
Henceforth how to account for the princing difference ?
The drinks, people.
The Milky-Way galaxy is mind-bogglingly big.
Eh," you say, "100,000 light years in diameter, give or take a few."
Listen, pal: just because you can measure something in light years doesn't mean you truly understand how big it really is.
By the time you carve our galaxy up into units you have actual, personal experience with, you'll have to start using numbers that you won't live long enough to count to.
That's okay. The galaxy doesn't care. In fact, not caring is one of the things it does best.
That, and being really, really, really big.
--Howard Taylor
Our PLANET is mind-numbingly big. If you don’t believe me go to the grand canyon and look down. Did I say go to the grand canyon? Make that HIKE to the grand canyon from yellowstone national park. Still not convinced? ROW across the ocean to china. Bonus points if you can hit Japan without a gps.
So in a twisted sort of sense, the milky-way galaxy is less mind-bogglingly big, because our [or at least my] built-in distance-comprehension hardware shorts out so quickly when attempting to deal with the milky way galaxy we don't really even notice it and so we switch to rigorous numbers which do not have this short-circuiting problem.
Xander: Yep, vampires are real. A lot of 'em live in Sunnydale. Willow 'll fill you in.
Willow: I know it's hard to accept at first.
Oz: Actually, it explains a lot.
One of the stronger examples of Bayesian updating in fiction, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 2, episode 13
Oz: you have prior probabilities for theories A, B, and C; you hear a new theory D that you hadn't previously considered, and you recalculate the influence of previous evidence to see how much credence you should give D.
This seems slightly off both in terms of what (the writer intends us to infer) is going on in Oz's head, and what ought to be going on. First, it seems that Oz may have considered vampires or other supernatural explanations, but dismissed them using the absurdity heuristic, or perhaps what we can call the "Masquerade heuristic" - that's where people who live in a fictional world full of actual vampires and demons and whatnot nevertheless heurise as though they lived in ours. (Aside: Is 'heurise' a reasonable verbing of "use heuristics?") Upon hearing that his friends take the theory seriously (plus perhaps whatever context caused them to make these remarks) he reconsiders without the absurdity penalty.
Second, what should be going on is that Oz has theories A, B, C with probabilities adding up to 1-epsilon, where epsilon is the summed probability of "All those explanations which I haven't had time to explicitly consider as theories"....
"You're like an infant!" Tosco sneered. "Still humming at night about your poor lost momma and the terrible thing men do to their cos? Grow up and face the real world."
"I have," Carlo replied. "I faced it, and now I'm going to change it."
Greg Egan, The Eternal Flame, ch. 38
I wish that I may never think the smiles of the great and powerful a sufficient inducement to turn aside from the straight path of honesty and the convictions of my own mind.
-- David Ricardo
There's more pressure on a vet to get it right. People say "it was god's will" when granny dies, but they get angry when they lose a cow.
What? Putting down pets or livestock isn't that uncommon, whereas people go way out of their way (I seem to recall Robin Hanson mentioning a two-digit percentage of the US GDP, though I can't seem to find it) to prolong human lives long after they're no longer worth living.
When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.
Tyrion Lannister in George R.R. Martin's A Clash of Kings
Most importantly, you are telling the world that anyone saying the same thing is in a risk of losing their tongue, regardless of correctness of the information.
That makes it cheaper for people to argue against the information than to argue for it.
And that increases that chance that people will finally consider him a liar.
The conscientious. - It is more comfortable to follow one's conscience than one's reason: for it offers an excuse and alleviation if what we undertake miscarries--which is why there are always so many conscientious people and so few reasonable ones.
-- Nietzsche
If (as those of us who make a study of ourselves have been led to do) each man, on hearing a wise maxim immediately looked to see how it properly applied to him, he would find that it was not so much a pithy saying as a whiplash applied to the habitual stupidity of his faculty of judgment. But the counsels of Truth and her precepts are taken to apply to the generality of men, never to oneself; we store them up in our memory not in our manners, which is most stupid and unprofitable.
Michel de Montaigne, Essays, "On habit"
Does it actually help?
Yes. One option is to use it as a memorable trigger- "Oh, I'm making mistake X, like the proverb"- and then amend behavior. (This is one of the reasons why it's worth trying to word proverbs as memorably as possible- rhyming helps quite a bit. If your actions you want to jigger, then do not fail to set a trigger! Sometimes it works better than others.)
A superior option is, upon seeing the maxim, to contemplate it fully, and plan out now how it could be avoided in some way, and then practice that offline.
In general, though, de Montaigne is highlighting the general thrust of Less Wrong. Knowing the ways in which people in general make mistakes is most useful to you if you use that knowledge to prevent yourself from making that mistake, and a general mistake people make is to not do that!
On any important topic, we tend to have a dim idea of what we hope to be true, and when an author writes the words we want to read, we tend to fall for it, no matter how shoddy the arguments. Needy readers have an asymptote at illiteracy; if a text doesn't say the one thing they need to read, it might as well be in a foreign language. To be open-minded, you have to recognize, and counteract, your own doxastic hungers.
-Dennett's Law of Needy Readers, Daniel Dennett
This law according to Dennett is an extension of Schank's Law:
Because people understand by finding in their memories the closest possible match to what they are hearing and use that match as the basis of comprehension, any new idea will be treated as a variant of something the listener has already thought of or heard. Agreement with a new idea means a listener has already had a similar thought and well appreciates that the speaker has recognized his idea. Disagreement means the opposite. Really new ideas are incomprehensible. The good news is that for some people, failure to comprehend is the beginning of understanding. For most, of course, it is the beginning of dismissal.
-Roger Schank
any new idea will be treated as a variant of something the listener has already thought of or heard.
From a Bayesian point of view, this is as it must be. People have priors and will assess anything new as a diff (of log-odds) from those priors. Even understanding what you are saying, before considering whether to update towards it, is subject to this. You will always be understood as saying whatever interpretation of your words is the least surprising to your audience.
BTW, this is standard in natural language processing (which is what a lot of Schank's AI work was in). When a sentence is ambiguous, choose the least surprising interpretation, the one containing the least information relative to your current knowledge.
The narrower your audience's priors, the more of a struggle it will be for them to hear you; the narrower your priors, the more you will struggle to hear them.
Having shown how Schank's Law is but an instance of Bayesian inference, I trust you will all find it acceptably unsurprising. :)
There's something here that doesn't make sense... Let's go and poke it with a stick.
The Doctor - Doctor Who
The convention I was taught is that "This... and that" is quoting someone who pauses after 'This', while "This [...] and that" indicates that I elided something. This seems to me both useful and clear.
Extinguished philosophies lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules.
John McCarthy, adapted a line by T.H. Huxley
I'm fine with this quote as long as the conclusion is not "So let's just do science without any philosophy!"
Because usually that just means doing science with unexamined philosophical assumptions while deluding yourself that you're being objective. This goes badly; e.g., Copenhagen interpretation, neurobabble ("Libet experiment proves you have no free will!").
[As the] percentage of the US population carrying cameras everywhere they go, every waking moment of their lives [has gone from "almost none" to "almost all,"] in the last few years, with very little fanfare, we've conclusively settled the questions of flying saucers, lake monsters, ghosts, and Bigfoot.
xkcd explains that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence .
No, it’s absence of evidence if you notice that we have ready access to high-resolution videos of innumerable rare events and elusive animals.
And yet the best footage of UFOs, ghosts, and Bigfoot still consists of some blurry, hazy, shiny, or dark blob smeared somewhere in a couple of frames of a shaky video at the absolute limit of the camera, exactly the same as forty years ago. Which is exactly what you’d expect to see if these were in fact normal things and optical artifacts that are perfectly explainable when they’re actually close enough to see.
The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.
-- Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism
All magic is science! You just don't know what you're doing, so you call it magic! And well, it's... Ridiculous.
Princess Bubblegum in Adventure Time.
People tend to roll their eyes a bit when business school grads like me start saying things about “management is measurement” and so on, but the fact is that a) if you don’t measure something, how are you going to find out whether it’s changed or not? and b) if you don’t want to find out whether something’s changing or not, in what sense can you actually claim to care about it?
When we roll our eyes at business school grads, it isn't because we don't believe in measuring anything. It's the same eyeroll that the 10 O'Clock news gets when they report the newest study linking molasses and cancer, which has nothing to do with my lack of belief in studies about cancer.
Statistically speaking, if you pick up a seashell and don't hold it to your ear, you can probably hear the ocean.
Madmen we are, but not quite on the pattern of those who are shut up in a madhouse. It does not concern any of them to discover what sort of madness afflicts his neighbor, or the previous occupants of his cell; but it matters very much to us. The human mind is less prone to go astray when it gets to know to what extent, and in how many directions, it is itself liable to err, and we can never devote too much time to the study of our aberrations.
Bernard de Fontenelle,1686
Found in book review
It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man’s head, will sometimes act like an obstruction.
— Charles Sanders Peirce
[O]ur moral judgments are less reliable than many would hope, and this has speci fic implications for methodology in normative ethics. Three sources of evidence indicate that our intuitive ethical judgments are less reliable than we might have hoped: a historical record of accepting morally absurd social practices; a scienti c record showing that our intuitive judgments are systematically governed by a host of heuristics, biases, and irrelevant factors; and a philosophical record showing deep, probably unresolvable, inconsistencies in common moral convictions. I argue that this has the following implications for moral theorizing: we should trust intuitions less; we should be especially suspicious of intuitive judgments that t a bias pattern, even when we are intuitively con dent that these judgments are not a simple product of the bias; we should be especially suspicious of intuitions that are part of inconsistent sets of deeply held convictions; and we should evaluate views holistically, thinking of entire classes of judgments that they get right or wrong in broad contexts, rather than dismissing positions on the basis of a small number of intuitive counterexamples.
Nick Beckstead, On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future, University of Rutgers, New Brunswick, 2013, p. 19
We cooperate to compete, and a high level of fellow feeling makes us better able to unite to destroy outsiders.
--Robert Bigelow
It should also be noted that if one doesn't start wishing for a horse, the probability of obtaining one decreases furtherly.
I know this is meant to be a call to action instead of contemplation, but sometimes I've heard it quoted intending : "Be and adult, stop whishing for very-difficoult-to-obtain things", and this is a statement I don't agree with.
At college in 1980, my Government Studies prof also served as Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party of Minnesota (the real one, not the DFL). We clashed over Robert Mugabe, just coming to power in Zimbabwe, he asserting it spelled salvation and I, that it spelled ruin.
I e-mailed him a year or two ago, asking if I could get a retroactive grade increase since my predictions had proven more accurate than his. His explanation was that he truly believed Mugabe was an agrarian reformer whose program of taking land from Whites to give to Blacks would benefit the country; but things just hadn't worked out as hoped.
I didn't bother to send him the famous Heinlein quote about Bad Luck. And I didn't really expect the grade change. But it certainly was satisfying to say "I told you so" 30 years later.
Always drive within your competence, at a speed which is appropriate to the circumstances so that you can stop safely in the distance that you can see to be clear.
In driving, as in life.
This advice really only applies in contexts where the risks of failure substantially outweigh the rewards of success. This isn't true in many contexts; if they're approximately equally balanced, it makes sense to attempt to work slightly above your level of competence in order to improve your skill, and if the rewards of success substantially outweigh the risks of failure it makes sense to be even more risk-loving.
It's very easy for a rich person to become poor: just give all you have away. It's very hard for a poor person to become rich: almost all of them try, and very few succeed.
If people found, on reflection, that being poor was better than being rich, then they would give their wealth away. We don't observe this.
Therefore I believe being rich is better, even without the benefit of personal experience.
Rich can be worse than poor, knowledge can be worse than ignorance, sickness can be better than health, and death can be better than life. But none of these are the way to bet.
It is also worth considering the relevant causal graph. Wealth --> Happiness allows of such exceptions. But what do they look like in terms of the causal graph Wealth --> Happiness <-- Character? If someone can't handle a sudden accession of money, is it the money or their personal failings that should be blamed? If you see a friend in that situation, do you advise them to get rid of their money or learn to handle it better?
Einstein’s theory of relativity suggests that there is no fact of the matter as to when “now” is. Any measurement of time is relative to the perspective of an observer. In other words, if you are traveling very fast, the clocks of others are speeding up from your point of view. You will spend a few years in a spaceship but when you return to earth thousands or millions of years will have passed. Yet it seems odd, to say the least, to discount the well-being of people as their velocity increases. Should we pay less attention to the safety of our spacecraft, and thus the welfare of our astronauts, the faster those vehicles go? If, for instance, we sent off a spacecraft at near the velocity of light, the astronauts would return to earth, hardly aged, millions of years hence. Should we—because of positive discounting—not give them enough fuel to make a safe landing? And if you decline to condemn them to death, how are they different from other “residents” in the distant future?
Tyler Cowen, ‘Caring about the Distant Future: Why it Matters and What it Means’, University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 74, no. 1 (Winter, 2007), p. 10
They are different because when we pack the spaceship with fuel, we control with reasonable certainty whether they make a safe landing or not. As for our millions-of-years descendants, it's very hard to make any statement about us effecting them with >51% confidence (except, "we shouldn't exterminate ourselves").
A lot of what looks like time discounting is really uncertainty discounting.
Check out this diagram for an example of two different worldlines (A and B) without any difference in duration, magnitude or spatial direction of acceleration. The accelerated segments are in red.
The man who first declared that "seeing" was "believing" laid his finger (whether he knew it himself or not) on one of the fundamental follies of humanity. The easiest of all evidence to receive is the evidence that requires no other judgment to decide on it than the judgment of the eye—and it will be, on that account, the evidence which humanity is most ready to credit, as long as humanity lasts.
There's a big difference between performing an action and endorsing the theory that the action is good.
Anna Salamon (paraphrase)
Anna Salamon (paraphrase)
Do we allow quotes from lesswrong users and CFAR instructors now?
A policy that disallows Robin Hanson quotes but permits quotes from Anna Salamon would seem peculiar to me.
...For a few years, I attended a meeting called Animal Behavior Lunch where we discussed new animal behavior articles. All of the meetings consisted of graduate students talking at great length about the flaws of that week’s paper. The professors in attendance knew better but somehow we did not manage to teach this. The students seemed to have a strong bias to criticize. Perhaps they had been told that “critical thinking” is good. They may have never been told that appreciation should come first. I suspect failure to teach graduate students to see clearly th
Roberts, naturally, has substantial interest in avoiding any criticism, and the work of people like Ioannides and the eternal life of the publication bias says that if anything, we are insufficiently critical...
I think we're looking at the wrong kind of criticism. Like, the kind of criticism you can make with almost equal ease of results that will and won't turn out to replicate later.
One of the more useful class discussions I had consciously started with the opposite. The first question was what was good and useful in the week's reading. We proceeded to criticism, but starting with "is there anything useful here?" made the discussion more useful and positive.
Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing.
William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Act 1, Scene 2. I found the quote in The Happiness Hypothesis where this book's author wrote "Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them."
Somebody told me how frightening it was how much topsoil we are losing each year, but I told that story around the campfire and nobody got scared.
Jack Handey
Most times, when a feller's sellin' heaven, he ain't got no heaven to sell.
Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.”
I believe that one's meant to be a Japanese proverb.
...We readily inquire, 'Does he know Greek or Latin?' 'Can he write poetry and prose?' But what matters most is what we put last: 'Has he become better and wiser?' We ought to find out not merely who understands most but who understands best. We work merely to fill the memory, leaving the understanding and the sense of right and wrong empty. Just as birds sometimes go in search of grain, carrying it in their beaks without tasting to stuff it down the beaks of their young, so too do our schoolmasters go foraging for learning in their books and merely lodge it
...Often a person uses some folk proverb to explain a behavioral event even though, on an earlier occasion, this same person used a directly contradictory folk proverb to explain the same type of event. For example, most of us have heard or said, “look before you leap.” Now there’s a useful, straightforward bit of behavioral advice—except that I vaguely remember admonishing on occasion, “he who hesitates is lost.” And “absence makes the heart grow fonder” is a pretty clear prediction of an emotional reaction to environmental events. But then what about “out
To err is human; to really foul things up requires a computer.
-- Bill Vaughan, accidentally anticipating the dangers of UFAI in 1969
You can also turn that around.
To succeed is human; to really make a difference requires a computer.
Suffice to say that AGI is a really big lever.
To admit you were wrong is to declare that you are wiser now than you were before
I can't find the original source for this, but I got it from an image floating around Facebook.
Asked to make a 30-second case for On Constitutional Disobedience — his 2013 book that advocates abolishing the U.S. Constitution — Louis Michael Seidman, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown University Law Center, says:
"There's no good reason why we should be bound by decisions made hundreds of years ago by people who are long dead, knew nothing about modern America, and had moral and political views that no sensible person would hold today."
I think the main thing that can be said to defend keeping the Constitution is simply that it is a Schelling point. We need some way to base our system of laws. What system do you choose? There are arguments for many options, and I'm not saying the Constitution is necessarily the best. But due to what you may perhaps call a historical accident, the Constitution is where we are now. This makes it a Schelling point for all the different options for a system to base our laws on.
There can certainly be no question of malice or premeditation on the part of the computers; they merely do whatever requires the least amount of effort, just as water will inevitably flow downhill and not up. But while water may be easily dammed, it is far more difficult to control all the possible deviations of intelligent machines.
Stanislaw Lem, The Futurological Congress (1971)
The biggest difference between literary fiction set in the future and Science fiction is that literary fictioneers don't really believe in the future. History is merely a spiral of ever widening crap, and we are on the brink of the abyss. Any opinions otherwise must be exterminated.
Instructor in The Guardian comment section
"It's not real science fiction, it's just a ___ in space" is a common and tempting meme, but I'm not sure it holds together when you think about it. Imagine if we were to apply this reasoning to other genres, maybe even to Westerns themselves. "It's not a Western, it's just a romance with horses and cowboys. To be a real Western the Western setting must have some effect on the plot, but a romance can happen in any context. Just replace 'barmaid' with 'minimum wage clerk'" "It's not a police drama, it's a Western, they're just chasing each other using cars instead of horses. You're not exploring the social consequences of the fact that they're in a 21st century police station rather than just a sheriff in the West".
Or do it more narrowly. "Sure, it has some science fiction elements, but most of it is still a Western. The cloning device has social consequences that affect the story, but the spaceships and lasers don't. It could just as easily be a story that has a cloning device but is set in the modern era without any spaceships or lasers."
Actually, I find it hard to think of many stories where spaceships and lasers would have an effe...
Scott Aaronson on optimal philanthropy (quoted somewhat out of context):
...Suppose you had asked yourself, as a teenager, “how should I live my life so as to maximize my impact on reducing the most widespread, obvious forms of human suffering today, like childhood deaths from malaria?” And then set out, as an earnest utilitarian, to implement your answer? What would the result look like?
It seems clear that your life would look nothing at all like Mother Teresa’s, or that of any other traditional “saint.” But it might look a helluva lot like Bill Gates’s. Th
This was well done, and fairly done too, for anything that wins is fair in war, and the greatest victory is the one that takes the fewest blows.
Stranger-Come-Knocking on why rationalists win life-or-death fights in The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie
We live during the hinge of history. Given the scientific and technological discoveries of the last two centuries, the world has never changed as fast. We shall soon have even greater powers to transform, not only our surroundings, but ourselves and our successors. If we act wisely in the next few centuries, humanity will survive its most dangerous and decisive period. Our descendants could, if necessary, go elsewhere, spreading through this galaxy.
Derek Parfit, On What Matters, vol. 2, Oxford, 2011, p. 616
Philosophers, I have said, should study AI. Should AI workers study philosophy? Yes, unless they are content to reinvent the wheel every few days. When AI reinvents a wheel, it is typically square, or at best hexagonal, and can only make a few hundred revolutions before it stops. Philosopher's wheels, on the other hand, are perfect circles, require in principle no lubrication, and can go in at least two directions at once. Clearly a meeting of minds is in order.
I would be happier with this quote if the emphasis were on "think," because impossibility proofs are possible sometimes.
Whatever I have up till now accepted as most true and assured I have gotten either from the senses or through the senses. But from time to time I have found that the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.
-- Rene Descartes, Meditations On First Philosophy
Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.
-- Hippocrates
Demonizing the other is the prelude to the subsequent doing of demonic things to that other.
...I’ll mention what I’ll call the “radio theory” of brains. Imagine that you are a Kalahari Bushman and that you stumble upon a transistor radio in the sand. You might pick it up, twiddle the knobs, and suddenly, to your surprise, hear voices streaming out of this strange little box. If you’re curious and scientifically minded, you might try to understand what is going on. You might pry off the back cover to discover a little nest of wires. Now let’s say you begin a careful, scientific study of what causes the voices. You notice that each time you pull out
If you could damage wires in a certain way and make the voices forget how to pronounce nouns, eliminate their short-term but not long-term memory, damage their color words, and so on, you would have a solid case for the wires doing internal, functional information-processing in causal arrangements which permitted the final output to be permuted in ways that corresponded to perturbing particular causal nodes. In much the same way, a calculator might be thought to be a radio if you are ignorant of its internals, but if you have a hypothesis that the calculator contains a binary half-adder and you can perturb particular transistors and see wrong answers in a way that matches what the half-adder hypothesis predicts for perturbing that transistor, you have shown the answers are generated internally rather than externally. In a world where we can directly monitor a cat's thalamus and reconstruct part of its visual processing field, the radio hypothesis is not just privileging a hypothesis without evidence, it is frantically clinging to a hypothesis with strong contrary evidence in denial of a hypothesis with detailed confirming evidence.
This isn't an ancient pre-scientific text; it was written in 2011. I completely disagree with the claim that:
I’m not asserting that the brain is like a radio—that is, that we’re receptacles picking up signals from elsewhere, and that our neural circuitry needs to be in place to do so—but I am pointing out that it could be true. There is nothing in our current science that rules this out. Knowing as little as we do at this point in history, we must retain concepts like this in the large filing cabinet of ideas that we cannot yet rule in favor of or against.
There's also nothing in our current science that rules out a teapot orbiting the sun. That does not mean a hypothesis with no evidence for it should be elevated to the level of serious discussion.
There is no reason to think the brain could possibly be receiving "marching orders" from elsewhere, and we absolutely should discard this concept and rule firmly against it. And the same goes for any other equally unfounded ideas that this is an allegory for.
ideas always need to be proposed and nurtured as possibilities until evidence weighs in one way or another.
No, because there is an infinity of ideas you could consider. You must wait until evidence weighs sufficiently in favor of some one idea to elevate it above the others, before considering it at all.
I'm not clear whether this morally violates the third rule (some clarification on this would be appreciated), but I liked this quote a lot so here goes.
Economics is a theory of what the world would be like if it were run by System 2.
Michael Vassar
This is a perfect example of the crypto-philosophy of "we're not doing philosophy". Copenhagen is a philosophical interpretation of QM, which makes metaphysical claims about wavefunctions coming into existence and then collapsing. If anything could be called the aphilosophical approach, it would be the Feynman "shut up and calculate" interpretation of QM, but that leads to problems too.
This is not really about MWI versus Copenhagen - it's more of a meta-issue. This is about how scientists sleepwalked themselves into a philosophical theory about QM without fully realizing they were doing philosophy at all.
As far as I can tell the Copenhagen Interpretation basically is a shut-up-and-calculate interpretation. It's an operational theory that is only capable of predicting subjective-ish experimental results, and doesn't make claims about the "contents of reality". That is to say, all its predictions are of the form "if I did [EXPERIMENT] I would observe a result according to [DISTRIBUTION]". Which is somewhat respectable (although what exactly counts as an observation is naturally ill-defined, since the theory doesn't encompass the observer ... (read more)