Rationality Quotes August 2013
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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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.
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St. Francis of Assisi (allegedly)
Robert Wright, The Moral Animal
Josh Billings
(h/t Robin Hanson)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses
More of an anti-death quote, but:
"“Must I accept the barren Gift?
-learn death, and lose my Mastery?
Then let them know whose blood and breath
will take the Gift and set them free:
whose is the voice and whose the mind
to set at naught the well-sung Game-
when finned Finality arrives
and calls me by my secret Name.
Not old enough to love as yet,
but old enough to die, indeed-
-the death-fear bites my throat and heart,
fanged cousin to the Pale One's breed.
But past the fear lies life for all-
perhaps for me: and, past my dread,
past loss of Mastery and life,
the Sea shall yet give up Her dead!
.....
So rage, proud Power! Fail again,
and see my blood teach Death to die!”
-- The Silent Lord, Deep Wizardry, Diane Duane
David Chapman
See also: "Figuring out what should be your top priority" vs. "Actually working on your current best guess".
A luxury, once sampled, becomes a necessity. Pace yourself.
Andrew Tobias, My Vast Fortune
The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence.
Fred P. Brooks, No Silver Bullet
This is true, but the connotations need to be applied cautiously. Complexity is necessary, but it is still something to be minimised wherever practical. Things should be as simple as possible but not simpler.
More concretely, sometimes software can be simplified and improved at the same time.
I've always had misgivings about this quote. In my experience about 90% of the code on a large project is an artifact of a poor requirement analysis/architecture/design/implementation. (Sendmail comes to mind.) I have seen 10,000-line packages melting away when a feature is redesigned with more functionality and improved reliability and maintainability.
This isn't necessarily true if the complexity is very intuitive. If it takes ten thousand lines of code to accurately describe the action "jump three feet in the air", then those ten thousand lines of code are describing what a jump is, what to do while in mid-air, what it means to land, and other things that humans may grasp intuitively (assuming that the actor is constructed in a manner similar to a human).
Additionally, there are some complex features which are not specific to the software. We don't need to describe how a particular program receives feedback from the motor and sensors, how it translates the input of its devices, if these features are common to most similar programs - the description of those processes is part of the default, part of the background that we assume along with everything else we don't need to derive from fundamental physics.
In other words, the complexity of software may correspond to a feature which humans may be able to understand as simple - because we have the prior knowledge necessary, courtesy of common nature and nurture. A full description of complexity is necessary if and only if it is surprising to our intuition.
That is, in some sense, his point - a phrase like "jump three feet in the air" does abstract most of the computational essence, making it seem like a trivial problem what it really, really isn't.
The opposite intellectual sin to wanting to derive everything from fundamental physics is holism which makes too much of the fact that everything is ultimately connected to everything else. Sure, but scientific progress is made by finding where the connections are weak enough to allow separate theories.
-- John McCarthy
When a concept is inherently approximate, it is a waste of time to try to give it a precise definition.
-- John McCarthy
Thus, whenever you look in a computer science textbook for an algorithm which only gives approximate results, you will find that the algorithm itself is very vaguely specified, since the result is just an approximation anyway.
(I would have said: "When a concept is inherently fuzzy, it is a waste of time to give it a definition with a sharp membership boundary.")
Thus we merely require citizens to "be responsible adults" before they can vote rather than give a sharp boundary such as 18 years old, college applications tell you "don't write a long, rambling essay" rather than enforce a 500-word limit, and food packaging specifies "sometime in September" for the expiration date.
Sharp membership boundaries are useful to make it easy to test for the concept. Even if the concept is fuzzy and the test is imperfect, this doesn't need to be a waste of time.
Sharp membership boundaries, however, often result in people forgetting the fuzziness of the concept - there are some people who vote without being responsible adults, because they can; an essay can be boring and rambling at 450 words or impressive and concise at 600; and food can be good a bit past its expiration date (it doesn't usually go in the other direction in my experience, presumably because the risk of eating spoiled food vastly outweighs the risk of mistakenly tossing out good food, so expiration dates are the very early estimates).
Though sometimes it's even more useful to acknowledge that the sharp-boundaried concept we're testing for is different from, though perhaps expected to be correlated with in some way, the fuzzy concept we were initially interested in.
That helps us avoid the trap of believing that 17-year-olds aren't responsible adults but 18-year-olds are, or that 550-word essays are long and rambling but 450-word essays aren't, or that food is safe to eat on September 25 but not on September 29. None of that is true, but that's OK; we aren't actually testing for whether voters are responsible adults, essays are long and rambling, or food is expired.
Scott Adams
Aka http://demotivators.despair.com/demotivational/stupiditydemotivator.jpg
"Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never win AND never quit are idiots"
From the same website, another LessWrongian wisdom:
This is an incredibly important life skill.
Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering (1997, PDF)
Le Bovier de Fontenelle
This explains all those urges I get to burn witches, my talent at farming, all my knowledge at hunting and tracking and my outstanding knack for feudal political intrigue.
(Composition is not the relationship to previous minds that education entails. Can someone think of a better one?)
We rest upon the frontal lobes of giants.
Derivation.
David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
Did Karl Popper populate his class with particularly unimaginative students ? If someone asked me to "observe", I'd fill an entire notebook with observations in less than an hour -- and that's even without getting up from my chair.
I'm pretty sure I had this very exercise in a creative-writing class somewhere in school.
And, while you were writing, someone would provide the wanted answer ;)
That's an interesting prediction. Have you tried it? Can you predict what you'd do after filling the notebook?
In my imagination, I'd probably wind up in one of two states:
I have never tried it myself in a structured setting, such as a classroom; but I do sometimes notice things, and then ask myself, "What is going on here ? Why does this thing behave in the way that it does ?". Sometimes I think about it for a while, figure out what sounds like a good answer, then go on with my day. Sometimes I shrug and forget about it. Sometimes -- very rarely -- I'm interested enough to launch a more thorough investigation. I imagine that if I set myself an actual goal to "observe" stuff, I'd notice a lot more stuff, and spend much more time on investigating it.
You say that, in such a situation, you could end up "feeling tricked", but this assumes that the teacher who told you to "observe" is being dishonest: he's not interested in your observations, he's just interested in pushing his favorite philosophy onto you. This may or may not be the case with Karl Popper, but observations are valuable (and, IMO, fun) regardless.
--Delmore Schwartz, "Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day"; quoted by Mike Darwin on the GRG ML
--Alfred Korzybski Science and Sanity Page 376 (1933)
Interesting, if indeed it is true. I'm not sure how this is supposed to be a rationality quote though.
Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book
-- B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity
Very close. I'd perhaps suggest that a person is less dignified when desperately seeking a reward that certainly isn't going to come.
I haven't studied quantum mechanics in any depth at all. The meaning I, as a layman, derive from this statement is: in the formal QM system a particle has no property labelled "position". There is perhaps an emergent property called position, but it is not fundamental and is not always well defined, just like there are no ice-cream atoms. Is this wrong?
Yes, it's wrong. In the QM formalism position is a fundamental property. However, the way physical properties work is very different from classical mechanics (CM). In CM, a property is basically a function that maps physical states to real numbers. So the x-component of momentum, for instance, is a function that takes a state as input and spits out a number as output, and that number is the value of the property for that state. Same state, same number, always. This is what it means for a property to have a well-defined value for every state.
In QM, physical properties are more complicated -- they're linear operators, if you want a mathematically exact treatment. But here's an attempt at an intuitive explanation: There are some special quantum states (called eigenstates) for which physical properties behave pretty much like they do in CM. If the particle is in one of those states, then the property takes the state as input and basically just spits out a number. Whenever the particle is in that state, you get the same number. For those states, the property does have a well-defined value.
But the problem in QM is that those are not the only states there are. There are other states as well. These states are linear combinations of the eigenstates, i.e. they correspond to sums of eigenstates (states in QM are basically just vectors, so you can sum them together). These linear combinations are not themselves eigenstates. When you input them into the property, it spits out multiple numbers, not just one. In fact it spits out all the numbers corresponding to each of the eigenstates that are summed together to form our linear combination state. So if A and B are eigenstates for which the property in question spits out numbers a and b respectively, then for the combined state A + B, the property will spit out both a and b -- two numbers, not just one.
So the property isn't just a simple function from states to numbers; for some states you end up with more than one number. And which of those numbers do you see when you make a measurement? Well, that depends on your interpretation. In collapse theories, for instance, you see one of the numbers chosen at random. In MWI, the world branches and each one of those numbers is seen on a separate branch. So there's the sense in which properties aren't well-defined in QM -- properties don't associate a unique number with every physical state. This is all pretty hand-wavey, I realize, but Griffiths is right. If you really want an understanding of what's going on, then you need to study QM in some depth.
Also, I should say that in MWI there is something to your claim that the position of a particle is emergent and not fundamental, but this is not so much because of the nature of the property. It's because particles themselves are emergent and non-fundamental in MWI. The universal wavefunction is fundamental.
Thanks for the detailed explanation! Now I have more fun words to remember without actually understanding :-)
Seriously, thanks for taking the time to explain that.
Sarah Hoyt
I found this to be slightly unsettling when I realized it, though we may be talking about different things.
-The Great Learning, one of the Four Books and Five Classics of Confucian thought.
I see small examples everywhere I look; they're just too specific to point the way to a general solution.
James Portnow/Daniel Floyd
-- Graduate student of our group, recognising a level above his own in a weekly progress report
Now I'm curious about the context...
It wasn't very interesting - some issue of how to make one piece of software talk to the code you'd just written and then store the output somewhere else. Not physics, just infrastructure. But the recognition of the levels was interesting, I thought. Although I do believe "literally five seconds" is likely an exaggeration.
-- Will Wildman, analysis of Ender's Game
This is good, although when I read the comic I find myself interpreting Eye as valuing curiosity for curiosity's sake alone,in direct opposition to valuing truth, which I can't really get behind and leads to me siding with the old man.
George Bernard Shaw
"Life is about creating yourself" still might be problematic because the emphasis is still on what sort of person you are.
I agree with the thought, but I find the attribution implausible. "Finding yourself" sounds like modern pop-psych, not a phrase that GBS would ever have written. Google doesn't turn up a source.
Google nGram suggests that "Finding yourself" wasn't a phrase that was really in use before the 1960 albeit there a short uptick in 1940. Given that you need some time for criticism and Shaw died in 1950, I think it's quite clear that this quote is to modern for him. Although maybe post-modern is a more fitting word?
The timeframe seems to correspond with the rise of post-modern thought. If you suddenly start deconstructing everything you need to find yourself again ;)
I think you are right that it is difficult to find the exact source. I came upon this quotation in the book Up where the author quoted Bernard Shaw. Google gave me http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/5217.George_Bernard_Shaw, but no article or play was indicated as a source of this quote.
Harry Potter and the Confirmed Critical, Chapter 6
Can you give a link to this story? It is surprisingly difficult to find.
If you put the quote into quotation marks and search Google, it's the fifth hit.
thank you. This was a 'duh!' moment; I haven't realized it was the 2nd book of the Natural 20.
It is the second book in the series Harry Potter and the Natural 20, which can be found here.
'Then he posed a question that, obvious as it seems, had not really occurred to me: “What makes you think that UFOs are a scientific problem?”
I replied with something to the effect that a problem was only scientific in the way it was approached, but he would have none of that, and he began lecturing me. First, he said, science had certain rules. For example, it has to assume that the phenomena it is observing is natural in origin rather than artificial and possibly biased. Now the UFO phenomenon could be controlled by alien beings. “If it is,” added the Major, “then the study of it doesn’t belong to science. It belongs to Intelligence.” Meaning counterespionage. And that, he pointed out, was his domain. *
“Now, in the field of counterespionage, the rules are completely different.” He drew a simple diagram in my notebook. “You are a scientist. In science there is no concept of the ‘price’ of information. Suppose I gave you 95 per cent of the data concerning a phenomenon. You’re happy because you know 95 per cent of the phenomenon. Not so in intelligence. If I get 95 per cent of the data, I know that this is the ‘cheap’ part of the information. I still need the other 5 percent, but I will have to pay a much higher price to get it. You see, Hitler had 95 per cent of the information about the landing in Normandy. But he had the wrong 95 percent!”
“Are you saying that the UFO data we us to compile statistics and to find patterns with computers are useless?” I asked. “Might we be spinning our magnetic tapes endlessly discovering spurious laws?”
“It all depends on how the team on the other side thinks. If they know what they’re doing, there will be so many cutouts between you and them that you won’t have the slightest chance of tracing your way to the truth. Not by following up sightings and throwing them into a computer. They will keep feeding you the information they want you to process. What is the only source of data about the UFO phenomenon? It is the UFOs themselves!”
Some things were beginning to make a lot of sense. “If you’re right, what can I do? It seems that research on the phenomenon is hopeless, then. I might as well dump my computer into a river.”
“Not necessarily, but you should try a different approach. First you should work entirely outside of the organized UFO groups; they are infiltrated by the same official agencies they are trying to influence, and they propagate any rumour anyone wants to have circulated. In Intelligence circles, people like that are historical necessities. We call them ‘useful idiots’. When you’ve worked long enough for Uncle Sam, you know he is involved in a lot of strange things. The data these groups get is biased at the source, but they play a useful role.
“Second, you should look for the irrational, the bizarre, the elements that do not fit...Have you ever felt that you were getting close to something that didn’t seem to fit any rational pattern yet gave you a strong impression that it was significant?”'
If UFOs are controlled by a non-human intelligence, assuming they'll behave like human schemes is as pointless as assuming they'll behave like natural phenomena. But of course the premise is false and the Major's approach is correct.
A creature that can build a spaceship is probably closer to oe that can build a plane than it is to a rock at least, you have to start somewhere.
Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”
Turkish proverb
http://pbfcomics.com/72/
Ariel Castro (according to The Onion)
Is this just supposed to be a demonstration of irrationality? Can some one unpack this?
A demonstration of the gray fallacy. The opinions of Ariel Castro are not equidistant from the truth with those of the rest of society, and we don't find the truth by finding a middle ground between his claims and those of everybody else.
I don't know how this happened. My comment was supposed to be a reply to:
Ah. I read that one as a reference to the tendency to let tribal affiliation trump realistic evaluation of outcomes.
"So let's split the difference and say I should have stopped at two."
I like it when I hear philosophy in rap songs (or any kind of music, really) that I can actually fully agree with:
-- Vince Staples, "Versace Rap"
It's quite sad that Tupac Shakur is the focus of so many conspiracy theories, because he was quite the sceptic about wasting your time on this stuff when there was real work to do making the world better.
I always thought it was interesting that Tupac got all the conspiracy theories while Biggie got none, despite the fact that Biggie released an album called Ready to Die, died, then two weeks later released an album called Life After Death. It's probably because Tupac's music appeals more to hippie types who are into this kind of stuff.
Stephen Jay Gould
There was only one Ramanujan; and we are all well-aware of Gould's views on intelligence here, I presume.
In what reference class?
I chose Ramanujan as my example because mathematics is extremely meritocratic, as proven by how he went from poor/middle-class Indian on the verge of starving to England on the strength of his correspondence & papers. If there really were countless such people, we would see many many examples of starving farmers banging out some impressive proofs and achieving levels of fame somewhat comparable to Einstein; hence the reference class of peasant-Einsteins must be very small since we see so few people using sheer brainpower to become famous like Ramanujan.
(Or we could simply point out that with average IQs in the 70s and 80s, average mathematician IQs closer to 140s - or 4 standard deviations away, even in a population of billions we still would only expect a small handful of Ramanujans - consistent with the evidence. Gould, of course, being a Marxist who denies any intelligence, would not agree.)
pg169-171, Kanigel's 1991 The Man Who Knew Infinity:
Personally, having finished reading the book, I think Kanigel is wrong to think there is so much contingency here. He paints a vivid picture of why Ramanujan had failed out of school, lost his scholarships, and had difficulties publishing, and why two Cambridge mathematicians might mostly ignore his letter: Ramanujan's stubborn refusal to study non-mathematical topics and refusal to provide reasonably rigorous proofs. His life could have been much easier if he had been less eccentric and prideful. That despite all his self-inflicted problems he was brought to Cambridge anyway is a testimony to how talent will out.
Isn't the average IQ 100 by definition?
Yes - but whose average?
Presumably the people who write the IQ test, based on whatever population sample they use to calibrate it. Is the point that the average IQ in India is 70-80, as opposed to the average in the US? (This could be technically true on an IQ test written in the US, without being meaningful, or it could be actually true because of nutrition or whatever). What data does the number 70-80 actually come from?
Presumably from this list.
I think it can be illustrative, as a counter to the spotlight effect, to look at the personalities of math/science outliers who come from privileged backgrounds, and imagine them being born into poverty. Oppenheimer's conjugate was jailed or executed for attempted murder, instead of being threatened with academic probation. Gödel's conjugate added a postscript to his proof warning that the British Royal Family were possible Nazi collaborators, which got it binned, which convinced him that all British mathematicians were in on the conspiracy. Newton and Turing's conjugates were murdered as teenagers on suspicion of homosexuality. I have to make these stories up because if you're poor and at all weird, flawed, or unlucky your story is rarely recorded.
A gross exaggeration; execution was never in the cards for a poisoned apple which was never eaten.
Likewise. Goedel didn't go crazy until long after he was famous, and so your conjugate is in no way showing 'privilege'.
Likewise. You have some strange Whiggish conception of history where all periods were ones where gays would be lynched; Turing would not have been lynched anymore than President Buchanan would have, because so many upper-class Englishmen were notorious practicing gays and their boarding schools Sodoms and Gomorrahs. To remember the context of Turing's homosexuality conviction, this was in the same period where highly-placed gay Englishman after gay Englishman was turning out to be Soviet moles (see the Cambridge Five and how the bisexual Kim Philby nearly became head of MI6!) EDIT: pg137-144 of the Ramanujan book I've been quoting discusses the extensive homosexuality at Cambridge and its elite, and how tolerance of homosexuality ebbed and flowed, with the close of the Victorian age being particularly intolerant.
The right conjugate for Newton, by the way, reads 'and his heretical Christian views were discovered, he was fired from Cambridge - like his successor as Lucasian Professor - and died a martyr'.
The problem is, we have these stories. We have Ramanujan who by his own testimony was on the verge of starvation - and if that is not poor, then you are not using the word as I understand it - and we have William Shakespeare (no aristocrat he), and we have Epicurus who was a slave. There is no censorship of poor and middle-class Einsteins. And this is exactly what we would expect when we consider what it takes to be a genius like Einstein, to be gifted in multiple ways, to be far out on multiple distributions (giving us a highly skewed distribution of accomplishment, see the Lotka curve): we would expect a handful of outliers who come from populations with low means, and otherwise our lists to be dominated by outliers from populations with higher means, without any appeal to Marxian oppression or discrimination necessary.
Do you really think the existence of oppression is a figment of Marxist ideology? If being poor didn't make it harder to become a famous mathematician given innate ability, I'm not sure "poverty" would be a coherent concept. If you're poor, you don't just have to be far out on multiple distributions, you also have to be at the mean or above in several more (health, willpower, various kinds of luck). Ramanujan barely made it over the finish line before dying of malnutrition.
Even if the mean mathematical ability in Indians were innately low (I'm quite skeptical there), that would itself imply a context containing more censoring factors for any potential Einsteins...to become a mathematician, you have to, at minimum, be aware that higher math exists, that you're unusually good at it by world standards, and being a mathematician at that level is a viable way to support your family.
On your specific objections to my conjugates...I'm fairly confident that confessing to poisoning someone else's food usually gets you incarcerated, and occasionally gets you killed (think feudal society or mob-ridden areas), and is at least a career-limiting move if you don't start from a privileged position. Hardly a gross exaggeration. Goedel didn't become clinically paranoid until later, but he was always the sort of person who would thoughtlessly insult an important gatekeeper's government, which is part of what I was getting at; Ramanujan was more politic than your average mathematician. I actually was thinking of making Newton's conjugate be into Hindu mysticism instead of Christian but that seemed too elaborate.
I'm perfectly happy to accept the existence of oppression, but I see no need to make up ways in which the oppression might be even more awful than one had previously thought. Isn't it enough that peasants live shorter lives, are deprived of stuff, can be abused by the wealthy, etc? Why do we need to make up additional ways in which they might be opppressed? Gould comes off here as engaging in a horns effect: not only is oppression bad in the obvious concrete well-verified ways, it's the Worst Thing In The World and so it's also oppressing Einsteins!
Not what Gould hyperbolically claimed. He didn't say that 'at the margin, there may be someone who was slightly better than your average mathematician but who failed to get tenure thanks to some lingering disadvantages from his childhood'. He claimed that there were outright historic geniuses laboring in the fields. I regard this as completely ludicrous due both to the effects of poverty & oppression on means & tails and due to the pretty effective meritocratic mechanisms in even a backwater like India.
It absolutely is. Don't confuse the fact that there are quite a few brilliant Indians in absolute numbers with a statement about the mean - with a population of ~1.3 billion people, that's just proving the point.
The talent can manifest as early as arithmetic, which is taught to a great many poor people, I am given to understand.
Really? Then I'm sure you could name three examples.
Sorry, I can only read what you wrote. If you meant he lacked tact, you shouldn't have brought up insanity.
Really? Because his mathematician peers were completely exasperated at him. What, exactly, was he politic about?
Wait, what are you saying here? That there aren't any Einsteins in sweatshops in part because their innate mathematical ability got stunted by malnutrition and lack of education? That seems like basically conceding the point, unless we're arguing about whether there should be a program to give a battery of genius tests to every poor adult in India.
Not all of them, I don't think. And then you have to have a talent that manifests early, have someone in your community who knows that a kid with a talent for arithmetic might have a talent for higher math, knows that a talent for higher math can lead to a way to support your family, expects that you'll be given a chance to prove yourself, gives a shit, has a way of getting you tested...
Just going off Google, here: People being incarcerated for unsuccessful attempts to poison someone: http://digitaljournal.com/article/346684 http://charlotte.news14.com/content/headlines/628564/teen-arrested-for-trying-to-poison-mother-s-coffee/ http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=85968
Person being killed for suspected unsuccessful attempt to poison someone: http://zeenews.india.com/news/bihar/man-lynched-for-trying-to-poison-hand-pump_869197.html
I was trying to elegantly combine the Incident with the Debilitating Paranoia and the Incident with the Telling The Citizenship Judge That Nazis Could Easily Take Over The United States. Clearly didn't completely come across.
He was politic enough to overcome Vast Cultural Differences enough to get somewhat integrated into an insular community. I hang out with mathematicians a lot; my stereotype of them is that they tend not to be good at that.
And this part seems entirely plausible. American slaves had no opportunity to become famous mathematicians unless they escaped, or chanced to have an implausibly benevolent Dumbledore of an owner.
Gould makes a much stronger claim, and I attach little probability to the part about the present day. But even there, you're ignoring one or two good points about the actions of famous mathematicians. Demanding citations for 'trying to kill people can ruin your life' seems frankly bizarre.
I don't think Epicurus was a slave. He did admit slaves to his school though, which is not something that was typical for his time. Perhaps you are referring to the Stoic, Epictetus, who definitely was a slave (although, white-collar).
Whups, you're right. Some of the Greek philosophers' names are so easy to confuse (I still confuse Xenophanes and Xenophon). Well, Epictetus was still important, if not as important as Epicurus.
I think a better term might be 'meritocratic', and not 'democratic'. Unless mathematicians vote on mathematics?
Well, it is also democratic in the sense that what convinces the mathematical community is what matters, and there's no 'President of Mathematics' or 'Academie de la Mathematique' laying down the rules, but yes, 'meritocratic' is closer to what I meant.
Was extremely democratic. Do we know this is still true?
"The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Productivity of American Mathematicians" comes to mind as an interesting recent natural experiment where the floodgate of Russian mathematical talent was unleashed after the collapse of the USSR and many of them successfully rose in America despite academic math being a zero-sum game; consistent with meritocracy.
At the outlier level, I think so -- see e.g. Perelman. At the normal professor-of-mathematics level, probably not.
It is worth pointing out that Ramanujan, while poor, was still a Brahmin.
Being a Brahmin does not put rice on the table. Again, he was on the brink of starving, he says; this screens off any group considerations - we know he was very poor.
It screens off any wealth considerations, with the exception of his education (which is midlly relevant). It has a big impact on the question of average IQ and ancestry, though. Brahmin average IQ is probably north of 100,* and so a first-rank mathematician coming from a Brahmin family of any wealth level is not as surprising as a first-rank mathematician coming from a Dalit family.
So we still need to explain the absence (as far as I know) of first rate Dalit mathematicians. Gould argues that they're there, and we're missing them; the hereditarian argues that they're not there. One way to distinguish between the two is to evaluate the counterfactual statement "if they were there, they wouldn't be missed," and while Ramanujan is evidence for that statement it's weakened because of the potential impact of caste prejudice / barriers.
(It seems like the example of China might be better; it seems that young clever people have had the opportunity to escape sweatshops and cotton fields and enter the imperial service / university system for quite some time. Again, though, this is confounded by Han IQ being probably slightly north of 100, and so may not generalize beyond Northeast Asia and Europe.)
*Unfortunately, there is very little solid research on Indian IQ by caste.
You'd need to examine the IQ of the poorer Brahmins, though, before you could say it's not surprising; otherwise if the poor Brahmins have the same IQs as equally poor Dalits, then it ought to be equally surprising.
But Ramanujan is evidence against the Great Filters of nationality and poverty, which ought to be much bigger filters against possible Einsteins than caste.
Yes, but I'm not very familiar with the background of major Chinese figures (eg. I just looked him up now and while I had assumed Confucius was a minor aristocrat, apparently he was actually the son of an army officer and "is said to have worked as a shepherd, cowherd, clerk, and a book-keeper."); plus, you'd want to look at the post-Tang major Chinese figures, but that will exclude most major Chinese figures period like all the major philosophers - looking up the Chinese philosophy table in Murray's Human Accomplishment, like the first 10 are all pre-examination (and Murray comments of one of them, " it was Zhu Xi who was responsible for making Mencius as well known as he is today, by including Mencius’s work as part of “The Four Books” that became the central texts for both primary education and the civil service examinations").
And not just that, but he had more education than the poorest Indians, and probably more than the second poorest. And got his hands on a math textbook, which was probably pretty low probability.
My bet is that there aren't a lot of geniuses doing stoop labor, especially in traditional peasant situations, but there are some who would have been geniuses if they'd had enough food when young and some education.
Even the poorest Indians (or Chinese, for that matter) will sacrifice to put their children through school. Ramanujan's initial education does not seem to have been too extraordinary, before his gifts became manifest (he scored first in exams, and that was how he was able to go to a well-regarded high school; pg25).
Actually, we know how he got his initial textbooks, which was in a way which emphasizes his poverty; pg26-27:
So just as well he was being lent and awarded all his books, because certainly at age 11 as a poor Indian it's hard to see how he could afford expensive rare math or English books...
A rather tautological comment: yes, if we removed all the factors preventing people from being X, then presumably more people would be X...
Okay, maybe there aren't other examples quite as good as him, but a few of these people surely come close.
Yes, but I'm not sure all of the populations working in cotton fields and sweatshops had such a low average IQ. (And Gould just said “people”, not “innumerable people” or something like that.)
Most of those people either seem to come from middle-class or better backgrounds, fall well below Einstein, or both (I mean, Eliezer Yudkowsky?)
Doesn't your observation that most successful autodidacts come from financially stable backgrounds SUPPORT the hypothesis that intelligent individuals from low-income backgrounds are prevented from becoming successful?
With the facts you've highlighted, two conclusions may be drawn: either most poor people are stupid, or the aforementioned "starving farmers" don't have the time or the resources to educate themselves or "[bang] out some impressive proofs," on account of the whole "I'm starving and need to grow some food" thing. I don't see how such people would be able to afford books to learn from or time to spend reading them.
No, it doesn't; see my other comment. I was criticizing the list as a bizarre selection which did not include anyone remotely like Einstein.
How did Ramanujan afford books?
The answer to the autodidact point is to point out that once one has proven one's Einstein-level talent, one is integrated into the meritocratic system and no longer considered an autodidact.
I haven't heard that before. Do you have a source?
Besides his letter to Hardy, Wikipedia cites The Man Who Knew Infinity (on Libgen; it also quotes the 'half starving' passage), where the cited section reads:
From his letter to G.H. Hardy:
Googling the text finds it quoted a bunch of places.
Wow, thanks!
You presume too much, the only thing I remember about Gould's views is that they are controversial.
they are not well known to me
Thanks
A proactive interest in the latter would seem to lead to extensive instrumental interest in the former. Finding things (such as convolutions in brains or genes) that are indicative of potentially valuable talent is the kind of thing that helps make efficient use of it.
I suspect, actually, that Gould would not view "find the geniuses and get them out of the fields" as a reasonable solution to the problem he poses. What he wants is for there to be no stoop labour in the first place, whether for geniuses or the terminally mediocre. The geniuses are just a way to illustrate the problem.
There are surprisingly few MRI machines or DNA sequencers in cotton fields and sweatshops. Paraphrasing the original quote from Stephen Jay Gould: The problem is not how good we are at detecting talent; it's where we even bother to look for it.
You need neither MRI machines nor DNA sequencers to detect intelligence. IQ test perform much better at detecting intelligence.
Yes; at this point with only 3 SNPs linked to intelligence, it's a joke to say that 'poor people aren't being sequenced and this is why we aren't detecting hidden gems'.
Yes, but that wasn't the point of my post; I was replying to:
An MRI machine was an example of a device that could detect convolutions ins brains; a DNA sequencer was an example of a device that could detect genes. My point generalized to "it doesn't matter how good you are at testing for <X indicator of a desired trait>, if you don't apply the test." If we look at IQ tests instead, then (again) it doesn't matter how accurately a properly-administered IQ test detects intelligence, if you don't bother properly administering IQ tests to people in cotton fields, sweatshops, or other places where you don't feel like looking because they aren't "under the lamppost", as it were.
In a country like China there's quite a bit of testing in school. I think it's quite plausible that there are people who went through the Chinese school system working in Chinese sweatshops and cotton fields.
Is there IQ test properly designed and administered, or does the test-as-given have hidden correlations with things other than IQ?
That's a hard problem, with no reasonable way to measure it in in a large population in sight, or even direction of the relationship taken into account. Ideally you'd take a bunch of kids and look at their brains and then see how they grew up and see whether you could find anything that altered the distribution in similar cases - but ....
Well, you see the problem? It's a sort of twiddling your thumbs style studying, rather than addressing more immediate problems that might do something at a reasonable price/timeline.
misattributed often to Plato
Calvin
This phrase was explicitly in my mind back when I was generalizing the "notice confusion" skill.
When you were what?
Rationality 101 ;^)
Peter Greer
The other way to look at that is the other agent doing basic induction.
It is. That doesn't mean the results are good.
Peter Greer
The problem is doubtless exacerbated when those paying for the service and those receiving it live in different time periods.
Rewarding those who tell great stories is hardly limited to non-profits. Hollywood of course does this as well it should. Fund raising for new ventures does this a lot, raising money for many sorts of investment at the retail level is largely an effort of telling good stories not particularly supported by statistical fact.
Which isn't to say that this is not a problem for non-profits, but rather that non-profits might do well to see how other industries deal with this phenomenon.
At least in investing the people listening to the stories eventually find out whether their investment went sour.
-- Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto
I concur in the general case. But I would suggest the people complaining work in computers. I'm a Unix sysadmin; my job description is to automate myself out of existence. Checklist=shell script=JOB DONE, NEXT TASK TO ELIMINATE.
It turns out, thankfully, that work expands to fill the sysadmins available. Because even in the future, nothing works. I fully expect to be able to work to 100 if I want to.
Procrastination and The Extended Will 2009
Am I missing something? Why is this quote so popular? Is there something more to it than "you can do harder sums with a pencil and paper than you can in your head"? Or, I guess "writing stuff down is sometimes useful".
Pencil and paper is far more reliable than your native memory, and also gives you a way to work on more than seven or so objects at once. Either one would expand your capabilities significantly. Taken together they're huge, at least when you're working with things that natural selection hasn't optimized you for (i.e. yes for abstract math; not so much for facial recognition).
Jack Handey
So good even dead people want to drink it.
(Reference.)
John C Wright
Is there a name for the fallacy of claiming to be an expert on the specific contents of other people's subconsciouses?
This sounds like it implies that both things must be true. It seems to me that either would be sufficient to justify someone saying they believe nothing.
-Unknown
It's funny, but you really shouldn't be learning life lessons from Tetris.
If Tetris has taught me anything, it's the history of the Soviet Union.
-- Paraphrase of joke by Marcus Brigstocke
To be fair there are quite a few people who nowadays listen to electronic music, take drugs that are pills and who spend a lot of time in dark rooms.
That's the joke.
We can reformulate Tetris as follows: challenges keep appearing (at a fixed rate), and must be solved at the same rate; we cannot let too many unsolved challenges pile up, or we will be overwhelmed and lose the game.
And todays challenges can be used to remedy yesterdays failures.
So Tetris is really an anti-procrastination learning tool? Hmmm, wonder why that doesn't sound right….
But the challenge rate is not fixed. It increases at higher levels. So the lesson seems rather hollow: At some point, if you are successful at solving challenges, the rate at which new ones appear becomes too high for you.
Just like life. The reward for succeeding at a challenge is always a new, bigger challenge.
At which point you die, for lack of intelligence.
Actually a fairly good metaphor for x-risk, surprisingly.
Of course, it's a lot easier to make a Tetris-optimizer than a Friendly AI...
I thought Tetris had been proven to always eventually produce an unclearable block sequence.
Only if there is a possibility of a sufficiently large run of S and Z pieces. In many implementations there is not.
It was either that or risk some people playing without stop until their bodies died in the real world.
...thus becoming useful object lessons to the rest of the species, and reducing our average susceptibility to reward systems with low variability. Not quite seeing the problem here.
-Gloria Steinem
I read that as "looking for the right person to fall in love with". Then the sense is "be the right person for someone else". But that achieves a different goal entirely, since it doesn't make the other person right for you.
There are many cases where you want a different person right for the task.
Romantic partners (inherently), trading and working partners (allowing you to specialize in your comparative advantage), deputies and office-holders (allowing you to deputize), soldiers (allowing you to send someone else to their death to win the war).
I assume the original intent of the quote was about romantic partners, where it means, "Instead of searching so hard, make sure to prioritize being awesome for its own sake."
I was trying to repurpose it to express that action is better than preparing for something to fall into place more generally, and I think it's appealed to people.
I originally read it as being about politics. We keep thinking that somewhere there's a candidate worth voting for, and then things will be ok, but instead we should be trying to become the worthy candidates, even if only for local office. Or perhaps toward improving the world generally. Instead of deciding whether to pay Yudkowsky or Bostrom to work on existential risk, we should try applying our own talents. Similar to "[T]he phrase 'Someone ought to do something' was not, by itself, a helpful one. People who used it never added the rider 'and that someone is me'."
Skimming Gloria Steinem's biography, I am more confident in this reading.
How isn't "looking for" or "searching hard" action?
-- Stanislaw Lem, White Death
(as far as I know, this sweet short story never have been translated into English; I translated this passage myself from my Russian copy, so I will be glad if someone corrects my mistakes)
Not quite seeing the applicability as a rationality quote; but in "it's bed" you should drop the apostrophe.
I'd say it's highlighting the human fallacy to try to ignore and escape from bad news. Instead of facing this prophecy, they just destroyed the ship that delivered it to them and told themselves they were safe.
Actually, prophesy was about the ship; the spaceship crashed into Aragena, their planet, and then curious inhabitants looked inside (and found nothing dangerous). After that came the messenger of their King and told them that they all are doomed.
And they indeed were.
I imagine there's an implied "and then the Reapers came" or something.
-- Tillaume, The Alloy of Law
— Robert Fripp
-Robert Downey Jr.
This works as a rationalization growing from the conclusion that others should be "on your team". If on well-calibrated assessment you yourself are not "on your team", others probably shouldn't be either, in which case projecting confidence amounts to deceit.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the quote, but this seems to wither if you have something to protect. If I'm having surgery, I don't really want the team of expert surgeons listening to my suggestions. I shouldn't be on my team because I'm not qualified. Highly qualified people should be so that my team will win (and I get to live).
Expert surgeons tend to think that more problems should be solved via surgery than doctors who aren't surgeons. Before getting surgery you should always talk with a doctor who knows something about the kind of illness you are having who isn't a surgeon.
After the operation is done doctors will ask you if everything is alright with you. If you try to understand what the operation involved you will give your doctor answers that are likely to be more informative than if you just try to place all responsibility onto another person.
Especially if you feel something that's not normal for the type of operation that you get, it important to be confident that you perceive something that's worth bringing to the attention of your doctor.
Having had big operations (one with 8 weeks of hospitalisation and one with 3 weeks) myself I think not taking enough for myself in those context was one of the worst decisions I made in my life. But then I was young and stupid about how the world works at the time.
Well, I think the thrust of the quote had more to do with being confident in your own projects. But I'll try to do an answer to your point because I think it's important to recognise the limitations of domain specialists - some of whom just aren't very good at their jobs.
If you're not on your team of expert surgeons, you're gonna be screwed if they're not actually as expert as you might think they were. There's a bit in What Do You Care What Other People Think? Where Feynman is talking about his first wife's hospitalisation - and how he had done some reading around the area and come up with the idea that it might be TB - and didn't push for the idea because he thought that the doctors knew what they were doing.
[Feynman moves onto less likely possibilities]
[Gets convinced to lie to her that it's Hodgkins - lie falls through]
=====================
Point being, disinvolving yourself from decisions is not a no-risk choice, and specialists aren't necessarily wise just because they've sat through the classes and crammed some sort of knowledge into their heads to get a degree. Assigning trust is a difficult subject.
There's a book called The Speed of Trust - and that's pretty much what you give up in being involved in complex decisions where you're not a specialist and where the specialists are actually really good at their jobs - a bit of speed.
Only if you're not the one with the responsibility to do something to protect it. I don't know the context of the quote, other than apparently being from an interview (with the actor, not any character he has played), but I read it as being about your own efforts to accomplish something. In such matters, you are the first person on your team, and you won't get any others on board by telling them you're not sure this is a good idea. Once you've made the decision that you are going to go for it, you have to then go for it, not sit around wondering if it's the right decision. If you're not acting on a decision, you didn't make it.
I think it's good to be well-calibrated.
It is usually best to be socially confident while making well-calibrated predictions of success. The two are only slightly related and Downey is definitely talking about the social kind of confidence.
I think it's best to be well-calibrated, use that to choose your team as one that's going to succeed, and then to be confident.
"[W]hen you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." -- Sherlock Holmes
Agree with sibling qualifications, though note that I find this extremely useful as a Finding Lost Stuff heuristic, and by using it as a motto, have significantly decreased my instantiation of the literal streetlight effect.
Technically true. Some notable 'improbable' things that remain are the chance that you screwed up your thinking or measuring somewhere or that you are hallucinating. (I agree denotatively but are wary about the connotations.)
"When you have updated on the evidence, whatever is the most probable, however socially unnacceptable, must be believed."
"When you have updated on the evidence, whatever is the most probable, must be believed, even if it is uncontroversial, mundane, and doesn't make startling conversation at parties."
Duplicate (although correctly attributed this time).
There are no happy endings. Endings are the saddest part, So just give me a happy middle And a very happy start.
-Shel Silverstein
But but peak/end rule!
-Steven Spielberg