Rationality Quotes August 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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Ditto, and downvoting b1shop's response since the quote did not mention any particular economic theory. Busts caused by widespread bad investments aren't necessarily the problem, the widespread bad investments are the problem. Blaming the bust in these cases may be shooting the messenger.

Thats not to say all busts are largely caused by widespread bad investments, or anything about why these bad investments happen. It is however very clear in hindsight that many boom-phase investments are crazy.

Ditto, and downvoting b1shop's response since the quote did not mention any particular economic theory.

I wouldn't recommend downvoting b1shop's response (I didn't), because they are correct that the basic reading of the quote relies on particular economic assumptions. There are economic theories that put the fault in the bust- if things were intelligently managed, you could keep the bubble inflated at just the right amount to prevent it from popping or inflating further, and never have to deal with the bust.

For example, look at this graph that Krugman p... (read more)

8Rob Bensinger13y

I'm not downvoting Eugine, because Vaniver's interpretation is interesting. But I am upvoting b1shop, because the quotation does sound like Austrianism on a bumper sticker. So it applause-lights a false fringe theory associated with an anti-empirical intellectual community, in addition to plausibly generating specific false beliefs about economics and/or ethics if taken on its face. (Busts, or more generally human misery, are the reason 'distortions' and 'not making sense' are a bad thing in the first place; economies aren't primarily maps.) It's interesting and revealing in subtle ways, but misleading in banal and obvious ways.

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Rationality Quotes August 2013

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