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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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.

That sounds like a ridiculous thing to say and I can't really steelman it.

Do you have a reliable source for this quote? The Wikipedia talk page for the Rutherford article contains this exchange:

Now that we have dealt with the statistics quote, let's move on to the next quote, which is purportedly: You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 1012 to 1. The number 1012 seems oddly precise, although the cited collection of quotes supports it, and yesterday editor 134.225.100.110 changed it to 10-12, which was reverted a few hours later by Gadfium. I suggest that what he really said was not 1012 (one thousand and twelve), and not 10-12 (ten to twelve), but rather 1012 (ten to the twelfth), which seems a much more likely thing for a physicist to say. A brief Google search turned up evidence for all 3 hypotheses (!), all in what appear to be not very reliable quote collections. Can anyone find a more reliable source, such as a book about Rutherford, to check what he actually did say? Dirac66 (talk) 19:35, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

I reverted because the source given didn't support the change. Now that you've raised the matter, I see that all three variants do appear in Google, and I agree finding an authoritative version is desirable

The quote itself, while still on the page, references this site which is an unsourced quote collection.

OK, maybe the quote isn't legit, but after all quite a lot of our favorite quotes are misquotations—that's not the point. It's an interesting thought even if no Nobel laureate ever said it. Is it ridiculous? It makes a lot of sense to me.