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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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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Procrastination and The Extended Will 2009
-- 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.
Calvin
This phrase was explicitly in my mind back when I was generalizing the "notice confusion" skill.
When you were what?
Rationality 101 ;^)
The chance of averaging exactly 3.5 would be a hell of a lot smaller. The chance of averaging between 3.45 and 3.55 would be larger, though.
Your chance of averaging 3.5 to two significant figures seems quite high indeed, though.
Turkish proverb
http://pbfcomics.com/72/
-- Dennis Monokroussos
It's probably a much more accurate feeling than the opposite one, though...
That is an interesting observation. For my part I do not experience horror in those circumstances, merely curiosity and uncertainty.
I think it may depend a lot on how well the action fits into your schema for reasonable behavior.
I have mild OCD. Its manifestations are usually unnoticeable to other people, and generally don't interfere with the ordinary function of my life, but occasionally lead to my engaging in behaviors that no ordinary person would consider worthwhile. The single most extreme manifestation, which still stands out in my memory, was a time when I was playing a video game, and saved my game file, then, doubting my own memory that I had saved it, did it again... and again... and again... until I had saved at least seven times, each time convinced that I couldn't yet be sure I had saved it "enough."
Afterwards, I was horrified at my own actions, because what I had just done was too obviously crazy to just handwave away.
I used to do that a lot. I still have to fight the urge to save repeatedly when nothing has changed.
My obsessive compulsions are mostly mental though so it has had so little an impact on my interactions with others that I don't think it counts as a disorder.
--Professor Farnsworth, Futurama.
The threat of massive perfectly symmetrical violence, on the other hand...
Such a threat can also be effective for asymmetrical violence -- no matter which way the asymmetry goes.
-- Norwegian folktale.
I don't understand this rationality quote. Is it about fighting akrasia? Self-hacking to effectively saving money? It clearly describes a method that wouldn't actually work, and it could work as humour, but what does it mean as a rationality tale?
It's a cautionary tale about Norwegian food.
It explains lutefisk.
Obviously, that's why they were all above average!
No, seriously, lutefisk is peasant food. Rich urban types eat smalahovve.
It's either a cautionary tale about the dangers of deceiving yourself, or a humorous look at the impossibility of actually doing so.
Betcha it'd work. I'm going to set a piece of candy in front of me, work for half an hour, and then put it back, at least once a day for a week.
I sometimes find that telling my Inner Lazy that it can decide—after I've done the first one—between whether to continue a series of tasks or to stop and be Lazy gets me to do the whole series of tasks. Despite having noticed explicitly that in practice this 'decision delay strategy' leads to the whole series getting done, it still works, and rather seems like tricking my Inner Lazy to transition into/hand the reins over to into my Inner Agent.
Accountability check!
Did you do it? How'd it go?
Did it once, binge-ate the candy a few hours later, bought more candy, binge-ate it again. Trying again in two weeks (or going to the doctor if still prone to binging).
In the context of LW, I took it as an amusing critique of the whole idea of rewarding yourself for behaviours you want to do more .
I took it to be about the hidden complexity of wishes: people often say they want to have more money left at the end of the month when what they actually mean is that they want to have more money left at the end of the month without making themselves miserable in the process, and the easiest solution to the former needn't be at all a solution to the latter.
It could be used as an effective "How to create an Ugh Field and undermine all future self-discipline attempts" instruction manual. It isn't a rationality tale. It is confusing that 40 people evidently consider it to be one. (But only a little bit confusing. I usually expect non-rationalist quotes that would be accepted as jokes or inspirational quotes elsewhere to get around 10 upvotes in this thread regardless of merit. That means I'm surprised about the degree of positive reception.)
I don't think you are correct.
The miser knows each time he will not get the reward, and that he will save on food and drink. That is the real reward, and the rest is a kabuki play he puts on for less-important impulses, to temporarily allow him to restrain them in service of his larger goal. The end pleasure of savings will provide strong positive reinforcement.
This could probably be empirically tested, to see if it is true and would work as a technique. I can imagine a test where someone is promised candy, and anticipates it while acting to fulfill a task, and then is rewarded instead with a dollar. Do they learn disappointment, or does the greater pleasure of money outweigh the candy? This is predicated on the idea that they would prefer the money, of course - you would need to tinker with amounts before the experiment might give useful results.
Also, don't forget his pleasure at successfully tricking himself. ;-)
That's one way it could play out. It feels like this thinking also allows for it to work, because one might feel good about what got done by means of the trick, which would positively reinforce being tricked. I think the matter isn't clear cut.
It's interesting to view this story from source-code-swap Prisoner's Dilemma / Timeless Decision Theory perspective. This can be a perfect epigraph in an article dedicated to it.
Ariel Castro (according to The Onion)
"So let's split the difference and say I should have stopped at two."
-- 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.
-Unknown
-- Paraphrase of joke by Marcus Brigstocke
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.
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.
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.
Unknown
This could be studied empirically.
Difficult. The "distance" is metaphorical, and this probably doesn't apply when there's an easy, unambiguous, generally accepted metric. Without that, how do we do the study?
Still, if you have a way, it could be interesting.
-Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
On the other hand, the book doesn't give a citation, and searching for the exact text of the question turns up only that passage. Not sure what to make of that.
Ross & Sicoly (1979). Egocentric Biases in Availability and Attribution.
In the study, the spouses actually estimated their contributions by making a slash mark on a line segment which had endpoints labelled "primarily wife" and "primarily husband". The experimenters set it up this way, rather than asking for numerical percentages, for ethical reasons. In pilot testing using percentages, they "found that subjects were able to remember the percentages they recorded and that postquestionnaire comparisons of percentages provided a strong source of conflict between the spouses." (p. 325)
Harry Potter and the Confirmed Critical, Chapter 6
-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).
Fate/stay night
Slightly off-topic, but I keep seeing Fate/Stay night referenced on here, is it particularly 'rationalist' or do people just like it as entertainment?
It's not an especially rational piece of work as such, although it has its moments, but it is one of the more detailed examinations of heroic responsibility and the associated cultural expectations in fiction (if you can get past the sometimes shaky translation). Your mileage might vary, but I see echoes of it whenever Eliezer writes about saving the world.
He just needs to get Saber to say it. Saber often tells people, in a bluntly matter-of-fact way, that they're making a mistake. Rin knows this. If Shiro said it, though, she'd think it was some kind of dominance thing and get mad.
(Maybe I'm over-analyzing this.)
Reynolds' law
Status markers frequently indicate unusual access to resources as well as or even instead of character traits.
Subsidizing status markers dilutes them by making them less common.
How would you tell which factor is more important in the dilution of a status marker?
See also: Credential Inflation
Bakemonogatari
In Bakemonogatari, the main characters often encounter spirits that only interact with specific people under specific conditions, although the effects they have are real (and would manifest to another's eyes as inexplicable paranormal phenomena). As such it's more a request about shoring up inconsistencies in sense perception, than it is about inconsistencies in belief.
'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?”'
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.”
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.
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.
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:
Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book
George Bernard Shaw
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 ;)
"Life is about creating yourself" still might be problematic because the emphasis is still on what sort of person you are.
Peter Greer
-- GLaDOS from Portal 2
If you cast out all the easy strategies that don't actually work as non-'solutions', then sure, in what remains among the set of solutions, the best is often the easiest, though not easy. I can think of much harder ways to save the world and I'm not trying any of them.
David Chapman
See also: "Figuring out what should be your top priority" vs. "Actually working on your current best guess".
Stephen Jay Gould
There was only one Ramanujan; and we are all well-aware of Gould's views on intelligence here, I presume.
they are not well known to me
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.)
It is worth pointing out that Ramanujan, while poor, was still a Brahmin.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
-- Tillaume, The Alloy of Law
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
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:
Peter Greer
-Robert Downey Jr.
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.
True, but possibly dangerously close to "There is no virtue in following other people or in cultivating followers".
Not true. Trivially, if A is definitively wrong, then ~A is definitively right. Popperian falsification is trumped by Bayes' Theorem.
Note: This means that you cannot be definitively wrong, not that you can be definitively right.
Jack Handey
So good even dead people want to drink it.
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?
Anton Lavey, The Satanic Bible, The Book of Satan II
-Thomas Jefferson
One who possesses a maximum-entropy prior is further from the truth than one who possesses an inductive prior riddled with many specific falsehoods and errors. Or more to the point, someone who endorses knowing nothing as a desirable state for fear of accepting falsehoods is further from the truth than somebody who believes many things, some of them false, but tries to pay attention and go on learning.
How about "If you know nothing and are willing to learn, you're closer to the truth than someone who's attached to falsehoods"? Even then, I suppose you'd need to throw in something about the speed of learning.
It would seem that the difference of opinion here originates in the definition of further. Someone who knows nothing is further (in the information-theoretic sense) from the truth than someone who believes a falsehood, assuming that the falsehood has at least some basis in reality (even if only an accidental relation), because they must flip more bits of their belief (or lack thereof) to arrive at something resembling truth. On the other hand, in the limited, human, psychological sense, they are closer, because they have no attachments to relinquish, and they will not object to having their state of ignorance lifted from them, as one who believes in falsehoods might object to having their state of delusion destroyed.
To me "filled with falsehoods and errors" translates into more falsehoods than "some". Though I agree its not a very good quote within the context of LW.
A luxury, once sampled, becomes a necessity. Pace yourself.
Andrew Tobias, My Vast Fortune
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.
James Wilson
Counter-quote.
Only loosely. The insightful part of the grandparent quote is the third sentence, which complements the moral-greyness issue quite well.
misattributed often to Plato
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
Dollars are floppy. It's nice to have a relatively rigid bookmark. I've used tissues and such as bookmarks in the past but they're unsatisfactory. Of course, that was back when I still read books in dead tree format.
I'm reminded of a picture I saw on Facebook of a doorstop still in its original packaging used as a doorstop.
My bookmark is prettier than the dollar.
My bookmark is made of two prices of fridge-magnet material. It can be closed around a few pages and the magnetism holds it in place, preventing it from falling out.
Plus dollars in my country are exclusively coins, the smallest note is $5.
-Abstract, Material priming: The influence of mundane physical objects on situational construal and competitive behavioral choice (via Yvain)
It would seem that most of the responders are hopelessly literal....
I find it hard to come up with a deeper meaning for the original statement, so yeah.
Besides, it's not hard to come up with a deeper meaning behind what the responders are saying; in pointing out that an object specifically designed as a bookmark makes a better bookmark than a dollar bill, they're making a statement about more than just dollar bills and bookmarks, but about specialization in general.
"We don't automatically reflect on most things we do, even when spending money. Even lifelong practices can be shown as absurd with a moment's consideration from the right angle. In fact, we're so irrational that we'll pay a dollar for a bookmark!"
A decision with an aesthetic benefit is not irrational. You are misusing "irrational".
(Or was this sarcasm?)
--Delmore Schwartz, "Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day"; quoted by Mike Darwin on the GRG ML
Sarah Hoyt
St. Francis of Assisi (allegedly)
Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering (1997, PDF)
-- Will Wildman, analysis of Ender's Game
Josh Billings
(h/t Robin Hanson)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses
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
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 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.
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).
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?)
Derivation.
We rest upon the frontal lobes of giants.
-The Great Learning, one of the Four Books and Five Classics of Confucian thought.
-Ledaal Kes (Exalted Aspect Book: Air)
Eric Raymond
Empirically, heaping scorn on everyone and seeing who sticks around leads to lots of time wasted on flame wars.
Straw man. The grandparent explicitly made the scorn conditional, not 'on everyone'.
Eric Raymond isn't suggesting that. Why are you?
Here's my thought process upon reading this. (Initially, I assumed “git 'er done” meant something like ‘women are unimportant except as sex objects, and I misread “unwilling” as “willing”.)
(Anyway, if an adult woman complains because you called her a girl, the course of action that leaves you the most time to get stuff done is apologizing, not doing that again, and getting back to work, not endlessly whining about how ridiculous the PC crowd are.)
In the thread, there were at least a couple of examples of high-verbal-abuse programming cultures (Apple and Linux) which get significant amounts of useful work done, and I think there were more.
I don't believe that scorn just gets dumped on people who don't have a git'r'done attitude-- there have certainly been flame wars about the best programming language and operating systems, and no doubt about other legitimate differences of opinion.
Still, I'm wondering about successful programming environments which enforce courtesy rules. The only one I can think of is dreamwidth from its self-description. Running a livejournal clone isn't nothing, but it also isn't as much as inventing new products. Any others?
The courtesy rules at LW are pretty strict. I don't know whether things are different at CFAR and MIRI, but does insufficient scorn interfere with things getting done?
It is not July. It is August.
Saw this under "latest rationality quotes" and was like "man, I'm really missing the context as to how this is a rationality quote."
"If it July, I desire to believe it is July. If it is August, I desire to believe it is August..."
If the Romans had been more willing to rename months they were unwilling to keep in their original places, we might have a much saner calendar.
If people in the 1500 years since the Romans had been more willing to rename months...
Robert Wright, The Moral Animal
-- 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 see small examples everywhere I look; they're just too specific to point the way to a general solution.
James Portnow/Daniel Floyd