Rationality Quotes August 2013

7 Post author: Vaniver 02 August 2013 08:59PM

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  • Do not quote yourself.
  • Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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

Comments (733)

Comment author: KnaveOfAllTrades 30 August 2013 05:05:33PM *  5 points [-]

Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.

St. Francis of Assisi (allegedly)

Comment author: Benito 28 August 2013 10:36:17AM 3 points [-]

This... theory of female promiscuity has been championed by the anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. Hrdy has described herself as a feminist sociobiologist, and she may take a more than scientific interest in arguing that female primates tend to be "highly competitive... sexually assertive individuals." Then again, male Darwinian may get a certain thrill from saying males are built for lifelong sex-a-thons. Scientific theories spring from many sources. The only question in the end is whether they work.

Robert Wright, The Moral Animal

Comment author: lukeprog 25 August 2013 05:15:29PM *  4 points [-]

It ain’t ignorance [that] causes so much trouble; it’s folks knowing so much that ain’t so.

Josh Billings

(h/t Robin Hanson)

Comment author: Salemicus 25 August 2013 05:08:58PM *  4 points [-]

All experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move...

To follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

Comment author: linkhyrule5 24 August 2013 06:55:11AM *  1 point [-]

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

Comment author: Panic_Lobster 23 August 2013 06:41:20AM *  0 points [-]

Faced with the task of extracting useful future out of our personal pasts, we organisms try to get something for free (or at least at bargain price): to find the laws of the world -- and if there aren't any, to find approximate laws of the world -- anything at all that will give us an edge. From some perspectives it appears utterly remarkable that we organisms get any purchase on nature at all. Is there any deep reason why nature should tip its hand, or reveal its regularities to casual inspection? Any useful future-producer is apt to be something of a trick -- a makeshift system that happens to work, more often than not, a lucky hit on a regularity in the world that can be tracked. Any such lucky anticipators Mother Nature stumbles over are bound to be prized, of course, if they improve an organism's edge.

--Daniel Dennet Consciousness Explained

Comment author: Salemicus 22 August 2013 11:16:10PM 13 points [-]

Finding a good formulation for a problem is often most of the work of solving it... Problem formulation and problem solution are mutually-recursive processes.

David Chapman

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 23 August 2013 06:45:06PM 3 points [-]

See also: "Figuring out what should be your top priority" vs. "Actually working on your current best guess".

Comment author: [deleted] 22 August 2013 08:21:33PM 3 points [-]

Comment author: metastable 21 August 2013 07:42:19PM 4 points [-]

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

Comment author: wedrifid 22 August 2013 02:07:10AM 5 points [-]

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.

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.

Comment author: DanArmak 22 August 2013 10:12:39PM 1 point [-]

More concretely, sometimes software can be simplified and improved at the same time.

Comment author: AndHisHorse 21 August 2013 08:31:21PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: linkhyrule5 21 August 2013 09:32:44PM 4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: shminux 21 August 2013 08:08:44PM *  6 points [-]

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.

Comment author: shminux 21 August 2013 07:41:23PM 8 points [-]

A luxury, once sampled, becomes a necessity. Pace yourself.

Andrew Tobias, My Vast Fortune

Comment author: anonym 21 August 2013 02:25:19AM 4 points [-]

When a concept is inherently approximate, it is a waste of time to try to give it a precise definition.

-- John McCarthy

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 21 August 2013 07:17:45PM 4 points [-]

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.")

Comment author: Kindly 21 August 2013 09:29:58PM 4 points [-]

(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.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 22 August 2013 02:58:04AM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: linkhyrule5 21 August 2013 10:38:37PM 0 points [-]

Just because humans do it doesn't mean it's a good idea.

Comment author: Kindly 21 August 2013 11:31:34PM 1 point [-]

To clarify, I also think all of these are good ideas; not necessarily the best possible, but definitely useful.

Comment author: Salemicus 21 August 2013 10:44:04PM 1 point [-]

It doesn't prove it's a good idea, but it's evidence in its favour.

Comment author: linkhyrule5 21 August 2013 10:51:24PM 0 points [-]

Well, sure. But that doesn't mean it's very strong evidence: I'd expect to see an average human (or nation) do something stupid almost as often as they do something intelligent.

Comment author: Salemicus 22 August 2013 11:01:31PM -1 points [-]

We are obviously starting from very different premises. To me, the fact that lots of people do something is very strong evidence that the behaviour is, at least, not maladaptive, and the burden of proof is very much on the person suggesting that it is. And the more widespread the behaviour, the stronger the burden.

Alternatively, you could just look at the evidence. When legal systems have replaced bright-line rules with 15-factor balancing tests, has that led to better outcomes for society as a whole? Consider in particular the criteria for the Rule of Law. In the mid-20th century, co-incident with high modernism and utilitarianism, these multi-part, multi-factor balancing tests were all the rage. Why are they now held in such disdain?

Comment author: linkhyrule5 22 August 2013 11:19:23PM 0 points [-]

Unfortunately, the fact that lots of people do something may merely be an indication of a very successful meme: consider major religions.

I will certainly grant that having a sharp restriction is better than a 15-factor balancing test, but I'm not arguing for 15-factor balancing tests.

I'd go further, but I've just noticed that I don't really have much evidence for this belief, and I should probably go see how accomplished Chinese universities (which judge purely off the gaokao) are versus American universities first.

Comment author: AndHisHorse 21 August 2013 09:56:03PM 9 points [-]

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).

Comment author: anonym 21 August 2013 02:23:44AM *  12 points [-]

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

Comment author: RichardKennaway 20 August 2013 07:13:19PM -1 points [-]

Man likes complexity. He does not want to take only one step; it is more interesting to look forward to millions of steps. The one who is seeking the truth gets into a maze, and that maze interests him. He wants to go through it a thousand times more. It is just like children. Their whole interest is in running about; they do not want to see the door and go in until they are very tired. So it is with grown-up people. They all say that they are seeking truth, but they like the maze. That is why the mystics made the greatest truths a mystery, to be given only to the few who were ready for them, letting the others play because it was the time for them to play.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

Man loves complexity so much! He makes a thing big and says, 'This is valuable'. If it is simple he says, 'It has no value'. That is why the ancient people, knowing human nature, told a person when he said he wanted spiritual attainment, 'Very well; for ten years go around the temple, walk around it a hundred times in the morning and in the evening. Go to the Ganges, take pitchers full of water during twenty or fifty years, then you will get inspiration'. That is what must be done with people who will not be satisfied with a simple explanation of the truth, who want complexity.

ibid.

Comment author: metastable 20 August 2013 08:34:07PM 6 points [-]

But Naaman was wroth, and went away...And his servants came near, and spake unto him, and said, My father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it? how much rather then, when he saith to thee, Wash, and be clean?

2 Kings 5: 11-13

Comment author: RichardKennaway 20 August 2013 10:27:50PM 1 point [-]

Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

Micah 6: 7-8

Comment author: gwern 01 September 2013 11:03:04PM 2 points [-]

"Not to commit evils,
But to practice all good,
And to keep the heart pure -
This is the teaching of the Buddhas."

--multiple sutras

Comment author: CellBioGuy 20 August 2013 04:19:30AM 0 points [-]

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."

Comment author: Vaniver 20 August 2013 06:25:26AM 4 points [-]
Comment author: shminux 19 August 2013 04:36:20PM *  12 points [-]

If your parents made you practice the flute for 10,000 hours, and it wasn't your thing, you aren't an expert. You're a victim.

The most important skill involved in success is knowing how and when to switch to a game with better odds for you.

Scott Adams

Comment author: Lumifer 19 August 2013 05:47:35PM 13 points [-]

Aka http://demotivators.despair.com/demotivational/stupiditydemotivator.jpg

"Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never win AND never quit are idiots"

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 25 August 2013 08:01:42PM 4 points [-]

From the same website, another LessWrongian wisdom:

The bad news is robots can do your job now. The good news is we're now hiring robot repair technicians. The worse news is we're working on robot-fixing robots- and we do not anticipate any further good news.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 August 2013 04:48:12PM 2 points [-]

This is an incredibly important life skill.

Comment author: [deleted] 16 August 2013 04:00:48AM *  5 points [-]

All too often people report on past and present applications [of computers], which is good, but not on the topic whose purpose is to sensitize you to future possibilities you might exploit. It is hard to get people to aggressively think about how things in their own area might be done differently. I have some times wondered whether it might be better if I asked people to apply computers to other areas of application than their own narrow speciality; perhaps they would be less inhibited there!

Since the purpose, as stated above, is to get the reader to think more carefully on the awkward topics of machines “thinking” and their vision of their personal future, you the reader should take your own opinions and try first to express them clearly, and then examine them with counter arguments, back and forth, until you are fairly clear as to what you believe and why you believe it. It is none of the author’s business in this matter what you believe, but it is the author’s business to get you to think and articulate your position clearly. For readers of the book I suggest instead of reading the next pages you stop and discuss with yourself, or possibly friends, these nasty problems; the surer you are of one side the more you should probably argue the other side!

Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering (1997, PDF)

Comment author: lukeprog 16 August 2013 03:15:48AM 4 points [-]

An educated mind is, as it were, composed of all the minds of preceding ages.

Le Bovier de Fontenelle

Comment author: wedrifid 16 August 2013 06:51:01AM *  7 points [-]

An educated mind is, as it were, composed of all the minds of preceding ages.

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?)

Comment author: DanArmak 16 August 2013 07:35:48PM 7 points [-]

We rest upon the frontal lobes of giants.

Comment author: Kawoomba 16 August 2013 06:55:40AM 8 points [-]

Derivation.

Comment author: wedrifid 16 August 2013 07:52:24AM 0 points [-]

Much better.

Comment author: Document 16 August 2013 03:30:04AM *  0 points [-]

Is that a praise of educated minds, or a caution against too readily classifying a mind as educated?

(Possibly related: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ul/for_progress_to_be_by_accumulation_and_not_by/)

Comment author: RichardKennaway 16 August 2013 10:28:06AM 0 points [-]

From the description of him on Wikipedia, I am certain it is the former, although the bone wedrifid picks with "composed" is symptomatic of where he falls short of his contemporary, Voltaire. He was a most refined, civilised, intelligent, and educated writer, very popular among the intellectual class, and achieved memberships of distinguished academic societies, but his strength, a great one indeed, was in writing well on what was already known, and he created little that was new. Voltaire's name lives to this day, but Fontenelle's, while important in his time, does not.

Scholarship is indeed a virtue, but Fontenelle's was not in service of a higher goal.

Comment author: lukeprog 16 August 2013 04:32:38AM 3 points [-]

I read it as expressing the same view as The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship.

Comment author: Panic_Lobster 14 August 2013 06:28:36AM 15 points [-]

Karl Popper used to begin his lecture course on the philosophy of science by asking the students simply to 'observe'. Then he would wait in silence for one of them to ask what they were supposed to observe. [...] So he would explain to them that scientific observation is impossible without pre-existing knowledge about what to look at, what to look for, how to look, and how to interpret what one sees. And he would explain that, therefore, theory has to come first. It has to be conjectured, not derived.

David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

Comment author: Daniel_Burfoot 22 August 2013 09:40:49PM *  0 points [-]

Hmm, this point seems more Kuhnian than Popperian. Maybe Deutsch got the two confused.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 20 August 2013 07:17:34PM 0 points [-]
Comment author: Bugmaster 14 August 2013 08:53:42PM 6 points [-]

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.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 15 August 2013 02:20:35PM 2 points [-]

I'm pretty sure I had this very exercise in a creative-writing class somewhere in school.

Comment author: Estarlio 15 August 2013 12:23:06AM 7 points [-]

And, while you were writing, someone would provide the wanted answer ;)

Comment author: rule_and_line 14 August 2013 10:36:08PM *  3 points [-]

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:

  • Feeling tricked and asking myself "What was the point of that?"
  • Feeling accomplished and waiting for the next instruction.
Comment author: Bugmaster 14 August 2013 11:27:40PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 August 2013 02:58:15PM *  -2 points [-]

You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10-12 to 1 against.

Ernest Rutherford

Comment author: DanArmak 16 August 2013 07:41:25PM 2 points [-]

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

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

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

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

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

Comment author: [deleted] 16 August 2013 11:06:02PM 1 point [-]

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

Comment author: DanArmak 17 August 2013 12:21:51PM 1 point [-]

In addition to gwern's reply, if you read it as 10-to-1 to 12-to-1 odds, or even 1012-to-1 odds, and not 10^12-to-1 odds, then obviously there are lots of physical theories that deal with events that are less likely than 1/1012. And lots of experiments whose outcome people are more than 1012-to-1 sure about, and they are right to be so sure.

You quoted the most ridiculous figure, that of 10-to-1 or 12-to-1. I'm quite legitimately more than 12-to-1 sure about some things in physics, and I'm not even a physicist! The Wikipedia talk quote makes the point that all three possible quotes are to be found on the internet.

Comment author: gwern 17 August 2013 12:06:26AM *  2 points [-]

It's ridiculous if taken literally as a universal prior or bound, because it's very easy to contrive situations in which refusing to give probabilities below 1/10^12 lets you be dutch-booked or otherwise screw up - for example, log2(10^12) is 40, so if I flip a fair coin 50 times, say, and ask you to bet on every possible sequence.... (Or simply consider how many operations your CPU does every minute, and consider being asked "what are the odds your CPU will screw up an operation this minute?" You would be in the strange situation of believing that your computer is doomed even as it continues to run fine.)

But it's much more reasonable if you consider it as applying only to high-level theories or conclusions of long arguments which have not been highly mechanized; I discuss this in http://www.gwern.net/The%20Existential%20Risk%20of%20Mathematical%20Error and see particularly the link to "Probing the Improbable".

Comment author: [deleted] 18 August 2013 03:33:30AM 2 points [-]

But it's much more reasonable if you consider it as applying only to high-level theories

Yes, that's how I read it. Obviously it doesn't literally mean you can't be very sure about anything; the message is that science is wrong very often and you shouldn't bet too much on the latest theory. So even if it's a complete misquote, it's a nice thought.

Comment author: gwern 12 August 2013 12:26:53AM 6 points [-]
...Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.

--Delmore Schwartz, "Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day"; quoted by Mike Darwin on the GRG ML

Comment author: ChristianKl 11 August 2013 12:12:35PM *  2 points [-]

Science becomes an extra-neural extension of the human nervous system. We might expect the structure of the nervous system to throw some light on the structure of science; and, vice versa, the structure of science might elucidate the working of the human nervous system.

--Alfred Korzybski Science and Sanity Page 376 (1933)

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 11 August 2013 05:54:18PM 1 point [-]

Interesting, if indeed it is true. I'm not sure how this is supposed to be a rationality quote though.

Comment author: ChristianKl 11 August 2013 11:47:04PM 0 points [-]

It a quote about thinking about how to think. It not the standard way of thinking around here but thinking interesting thoughts about thinking encourages rationality.

Comment author: JackLight 11 August 2013 08:20:05PM 0 points [-]

In sense that you should be searching for the truth in both directions

Comment author: taelor 11 August 2013 06:30:55AM *  3 points [-]

Except when physically constrained, a person is least free or dignified when under the threat of punishment. We should expect that the literatures of freedom and dignity would oppose punitive techniques, but in fact they have acted to preserve them. A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment. Some ways of doing so are maladaptive or neurotic, as in the so­ called 'Freudian dynamisms'. Other ways include avoid­ing situations in which punished behaviour is likely to occur and doing things which are incompatible with punished behaviour. Other people may take similar steps to reduce the likelihood that a person will be punished, but the literatures of freedom and dignity object to this as leading only to automatic goodness. Under punitive contingencies a person appears to be free to behave well and to deserve credit when he does so. Non-punitive con­tingencies generate the same behaviour, but a person cannot then be said to be free, and the contingencies de­serve the credit when he behaves well. Little or nothing remains for autonomous man to do and receive credit for doing. He does not engage in moral struggle and therefore has no chance to be a moral hero or credited with inner virtues. But our task is not to encourage moral struggle or to build or demonstrate inner virtues. It is to make life less punishing and in doing so to release for more reinforcing activities the time and energy consumed in the avoidance of punishment. Up to a point the litera­tures of freedom and dignity have played a part in the slow and erratic alleviation of aversive features of the human environment, including the aversive features used in intentional control. But they have formulated the task in such a way that they cannot now accept the fact that all control is exerted by the environment and proceed to the design of better environments rather than of better men.

-- B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity

Comment author: wedrifid 12 August 2013 10:29:30AM 5 points [-]

Except when physically constrained, a person is least free or dignified when under the threat of punishment.

Very close. I'd perhaps suggest that a person is less dignified when desperately seeking a reward that certainly isn't going to come.

Comment author: philh 10 August 2013 11:48:06PM 15 points [-]

"But think how small he is," said the Black Panther, who would have spoiled Mowgli if he had had his own way. "How can his little head carry all thy long talk?"

"Is there anything in the jungle too little to be killed? No. That is why I teach him these things, and that is why I hit him, very softly, when he forgets."

Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

Comment author: iDante 10 August 2013 10:10:52PM 10 points [-]

To the layman, the philosopher, or the classical physicist, a statement of the form "this particle doesn't have a well-defined position" (or momentum, or x-component of spin angular momentum, or whatever) sounds vague, incompetent, or (worst of all) profound. It is none of these. But its precise meaning is, I think, almost impossible to convey to anyone who has not studied quantum mechanics in some depth.

Comment author: DanArmak 16 August 2013 07:50:04PM 2 points [-]

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?

Comment author: pragmatist 16 August 2013 08:48:20PM *  14 points [-]

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.

Comment author: DanArmak 16 August 2013 10:40:47PM 4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 August 2013 07:17:38AM 6 points [-]

It is fashionable in the US to talk about people who are on welfare and don’t work. That is not precisely true. Yes, there are people on welfare who neither have a regular job nor look for one. But what might not be understood is that these people are working: they are navigating the labyrinthine bureaucracy and making sure they meet all the guidelines to keep the money flowing. That is work. It is just not productive work. It is a work that is the result of perverse incentives.

Sarah Hoyt

Comment author: [deleted] 10 August 2013 01:32:24AM 5 points [-]

The world is a lot simpler than the human mind can comprehend. The mind endlessly manufactures meanings and reflects with other minds, ignoring reality. Or maybe it enhances it. Not very clear on that part, I'm human as well.

Comment author: Rukifellth 10 August 2013 03:35:45AM 1 point [-]

I found this to be slightly unsettling when I realized it, though we may be talking about different things.

Comment author: simplicio 09 August 2013 06:16:58PM *  0 points [-]

David Chapman thinks that using LW-style Bayesianism as a theory of epistemology (as opposed to just probability) lumps together too many types of uncertainty; to wit:

Here is an off-the-top-of-my-head list of types:

  • inherent effective randomness, due to dynamical chaos

  • physical inaccessibility of phenomena

  • time-varying phenomena (so samples are drawn from different distributions)

  • sensing/measurement error

  • model/abstraction error

  • one’s own cognitive/computational limitations

I think he is correct, and LWers are overselling Bayesianism as a solution to too many problems (at the very least, without having shown it to be).

Comment author: gwern 09 August 2013 08:19:58PM *  9 points [-]

I do not see why any of Chapman's examples cannot be given appropriate distributions and modeled in a Bayesian analysis just like anything else:

Dynamical chaos? Very statistically modelable, in fact, you can't really deal with it at all without statistics, in areas like weather forecasting.

Inaccessibility? Very modelable; just a case of missing data & imputation. (I'm told that handling issues like censoring, truncation, rounding, or intervaling are considered one of the strengths of fully Bayesian methods and a good reason for using stuff like JAGS; in contrast, whenever I've tried to deal with one of those issues using regular maximum-likelihood approaches it has been... painful.)

Time-varying? Well, there's only a huge section of statistics devoted to the topic of time-series and forecasts...

Sensing/measurement error? Trivial, in fact, one of the best cases for statistical adjustment (see psychometrics) and arguably dealing with measurement error is the origin of modern statistics (the first instances of least-squared coming from Gauss and other astronomers dealing with errors in astronomical measurement, and of course Laplace applied Bayesian methods to astronomy as well).

Model/abstraction error? See everything under the heading of 'model checking' and things like model-averaging; local favorite Bayesian statistician Andrew Gelman is very active in this area, no doubt he would be quite surprised to learn that he is misapplying Bayesian methods in that area.

One’s own cognitive/computational limitations? Not just beautifully handled by Bayesian methods + decision theory, but the former is actually offering insight into the former, for example "Burn-in, bias, and the rationality of anchoring".

Comment author: RichardKennaway 12 August 2013 08:28:35AM *  3 points [-]

Expanding further on my previous reply, I believe that the claimed (by Gelman and Shalizi) non-Bayesian nature of model-checking is wrong: the truth is that everything that goes under the name of model-checking works, to the extent that it does, so far as it approximates the underlying Bayesian structure. It is not called Bayesian, because it is not an actual, numerical use of Bayes theorem, and the reason we are not doing that is because we do not know how: in practice we cannot work with universal priors.

So Bayesian ideas are applicable to the problem of model/abstraction error, but we cannot apply them numerically. In fact, that is pretty much what model/abstraction error means -- if we did have numbers, they would be part of the model. Model checking is what we do when we cannot calculate any further with numerical probabilities.

Cf. my analogy here with understanding thermodynamics.

I believe that would be Eliezer's response to Gelman and Shalizi. I would not expect them to be convinced though. Shalizi would probably dismiss the idea as moonshine and absurdity.

ETA: Eliezer on the subject:

So if a mind is arriving at true beliefs, and we assume that the second law of thermodynamics has not been violated, that mind must be doing something at least vaguely Bayesian - at least one process with a sort-of Bayesian structure somewhere - or it couldn't possibly work.

ETA: Why is the grandparent at -4? David Chapman and simplicio may be wrong about this, but neither are saying anything stupid, or so much thrashed out in the past as to not merit further words.

Comment author: ESRogs 11 August 2013 06:01:00PM 0 points [-]

the former is actually offering insight into the former

Judging by the abstract I assume you meant to write, the latter is offering insight into the former?

Comment author: RichardKennaway 10 August 2013 12:51:10PM *  7 points [-]

Agreed about chaos, missing data, time series, and noise, but I think the next is off the mark:

Model/abstraction error? See everything under the heading of 'model checking' and things like model-averaging; local favorite Bayesian statistician Andrew Gelman is very active in this area, no doubt he would be quite surprised to learn that he is misapplying Bayesian methods in that area.

He might be surprised to be described as applying Bayesian methods at all in that area. Model checking, in his view, is an essential part of "Bayesian data analysis", but it is not itself carried out by Bayesian methods. The strictly Bayesian part -- that is, the application of Bayes' theorem -- ends with the computation of the posterior distribution of the model parameters given the priors and the data. Model-checking must (he says) be undertaken by other means because the truth may not be in the support of the prior, a situation in which the strict Bayesian is lost. From "Philosophy and the practice of Bayesian statistics", by Gelman and Shalizi (my emphasis):

In contrast, Bayesian statistics or “inverse probability”—starting with a prior distribution, getting data, and moving to the posterior distribution—is associated with an inductive approach of learning about the general from particulars. Rather than testing and attempted falsification, learning proceeds more smoothly: an accretion of evidence is summarized by a posterior distribution, and scientific process is associated with the rise and fall in the posterior probabilities of various models .... We think most of this received view of Bayesian inference is wrong.

...

To reiterate, it is hard to claim that the prior distributions used in applied work represent statisticians’ states of knowledge and belief before examining their data, if only because most statisticians do not believe their models are true, so their prior degree of belief in all of Θ is not 1 but 0.

If anyone's itching to say "what about universal priors?", Gelman and Shalizi say that in practice there is no such thing. The idealised picture of Bayesian practice, in which the prior density is non-zero everywhere, and successive models come into favour or pass out of favour by nothing more than updating from data by Bayes theorem, is, they say, unworkable.

The main point where we disagree with many Bayesians is that we do not see Bayesian methods as generally useful for giving the posterior probability that a model is true, or the probability for preferring model A over model B, or whatever.

They liken the process to Kuhnian paradigm-shifting:

In some way, Kuhn’s distinction between normal and revolutionary science is analogous to the distinction between learning within a Bayesian model, and checking the model as preparation to discard or expand it.

but find Popperian hypothetico-deductivism a closer fit:

In our hypothetico-deductive view of data analysis, we build a statistical model out of available parts and drive it as far as it can take us, and then a little farther. When the model breaks down, we dissect it and figure out what went wrong. For Bayesian models, the most useful way of figuring out how the model breaks down is through posterior predictive checks, creating simulations of the data and comparing them to the actual data. The comparison can often be done visually; see Gelman et al. (2003, ch. 6) for a range of examples. Once we have an idea about where the problem lies, we can tinker with the model, or perhaps try a radically new design. Either way, we are using deductive reasoning as a tool to get the most out of a model, and we test the model—it is falsifiable, and when it is consequentially falsified, we alter or abandon it.

For Gelman and Shalizi, model checking is an essential part of Bayesian practice, not because it is a Bayesian process but because it is a necessarily non-Bayesian supplement to the strictly Bayesian part: Bayesian data analysis cannot proceed by Bayes alone. Bayes proposes; model-checking disposes.

I'm not a statistician and do not wish to take a view on this. But I believe I have accurately stated their view. The paper contains some references to other statisticians who, they says are more in favour of universal Bayesianism, but I have not read them.

Comment author: gwern 03 March 2015 11:20:52PM *  3 points [-]

Model-checking must (he says) be undertaken by other means because the truth may not be in the support of the prior, a situation in which the strict Bayesian is lost.

Loath as I am to disagree with Gelman & Shalizi, I'm not convinced that the sort of model-checking they advocate such as posterior p-values are fundamentally and in principle non-Bayesian, rather than practical problems. I mostly agree with "Posterior predictive checks can and should be Bayesian: Comment on Gelman and Shalizi,'Philosophy and the practice of Bayesian statistics'", Kruschke 2013 - I don't see why that sort of procedure cannot be subsumed with more flexible and general models in an ensemble approach, and poor fits of particular parametric models found automatically and posterior shifted to more complex but better fitting models. If we fit one model and find that it is a bad model, then the root problem was that we were only looking at one model when we knew that there were many other models but out of laziness or limited computations we discarded them all. You might say that when we do an informal posterior predictive check, what we are doing is a Bayesian model comparison of one or two explicit models with the models generated by a large multi-layer network of sigmoids (specifically <80 billion of them)... If you're running into problems because your model-space is too narrow - expand it! Models should be able to grow (this is a common feature of Bayesian nonparametrics).

This may be hard in practice, but then it's just another example of how we must compromise our ideals because of our limits, not a fundamental limitation on a theory or paradigm.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 August 2013 05:34:26AM *  -1 points [-]

One’s own cognitive/computational limitations? Not just beautifully handled by Bayesian methods + decision theory,

Unless there's been an enormous breakthrough in the past 2 years, I believe this is still a major unsolved problem. Also decision theory is about cooperating with other agents, not overcoming cognitive limitations.

Comment author: simplicio 09 August 2013 09:40:49PM -1 points [-]

Note that I was speaking of "Bayesianism" as practiced on LW, not of Bayesian statistics the academic field. I do not believe these are the same.

I believe Chapman is writing a more detailed critique of what he sees here; I will be sure to link you to it when it comes.

Comment author: gwern 09 August 2013 09:56:37PM -1 points [-]

Note that I was speaking of "Bayesianism" as practiced on LW, not of Bayesian statistics the academic field. I do not believe these are the same.

I think that's absurd if that's what he really means. Just because we are not daily posting new research papers employing model-averaging or non-parametric Bayesian statistics does not mean that we do not think those techniques are useful and incorporated in our epistemology or that we would consider the standard answers correct, and this argument can be applied to any area of knowledge that LWers might draw upon or consider correct. If we criticize p-values as a form of building knowledge, is that not a part of 'Bayesian epistemology' because we are drawing arguments from Jaynes or Ioannidis and did not invent them ab initio?

'Your physics can't deal with modeling subatomic interactions, and so sadly your entire epistemology is erroneous.' '??? There's a huge and extremely successful area of physics devoted to that, and I have no freaking idea what you are talking about. Are you really as ignorant and superficial as you sound like, in listing as a weakness something which is actually a major strength of the physics viewpoint?' 'Oh, but I meant physics as practiced on LessWrong! Clearly that other physics is simply not relevant. Come back when LW has built its own LHC and replicated all the standard results in the field, and then I'll admit that particle physics as practiced on LW is the same thing as particle physics the academic field, because otherwise I refuse to believe they can be the same.'

Comment author: [deleted] 09 August 2013 11:58:13PM 6 points [-]

I think you're not being charitable again. Consider the difference between physics as practiced by quantum woo mystics, and physics as practiced by physicists or even engineers. I think that simplicio is referring to a similar (though less striking) tendency for the representative LWer to quasi-religiously misapply and oversell probability theory (which may or may not be the case, but should be argued with something other than uncharitable ridicule).

Comment author: simplicio 09 August 2013 10:02:23PM 0 points [-]

I think you may be extrapolating much too far from the quote I posted. Also, my statistics level is well below both yours and Chapman's so I am not a good interlocutor for you.

Comment author: gwern 09 August 2013 10:10:00PM 0 points [-]

I think you may be extrapolating much too far from the quote I posted.

I don't think I am. It's a very simple quote: "here is a list of n items Bayesian statistics and hence epistemology cannot handle; therefore, it cannot be right." And it's dead wrong because all n items are handled just fine.

Comment author: [deleted] 09 August 2013 11:50:19PM 4 points [-]

I think you are being uncharitable. The list was of different types of uncertainty that Bayesians treat as the same, with a side of skepticism that they should be handled the same, not things you can't model with bayesian epistemology.

The question is not whether Bayes can handle those different types of uncertainty, it's whether they should be handled by a unified probability theory.

I think the position that we shouldn't (or don't yet) have a unified uncertainty model is wrong, but I don't think it's so stupid as to be worth getting heated about and being uncivil.

Comment author: [deleted] 10 August 2013 02:50:21PM *  0 points [-]

I think the position that we shouldn't (or don't yet) have a unified uncertainty model is wrong

Did somebody solve the problem of logical uncertainty while I wasn't looking?

but I don't think it's so stupid as to be worth getting heated about and being uncivil.

I disagree that Gwern is being uncivil. I don't think Chapman has any ground to criticize LW-style epistemology when he's made it abundantly clear he has no idea what it is supposed to be. (Indeed, that's his principal criticism: the people he's talked to about it tell him different things.)

It'd be like if Berkeley asked a bunch of Weierstrass' first students about their "supposed" fix for infinitesimals. Because the students hadn't completely grasped it yet, they gave Berkeley a rope, a rubber hose, and a burlap sack instead of giving him the elephant. Then Berkeley goes and writes a sequel to the Analyst disparaging this "new Calculus" for being incoherent.

In that world, I think Berkeley's the one being uncivil.

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 09 August 2013 08:24:21PM 6 points [-]

gwern, I am curious. You do a lot of practical data analysis. How often do you use non-Bayesian methods?

Comment author: gwern 09 August 2013 08:41:32PM 8 points [-]

Pretty frequently (if you'll pardon the pun). Almost all papers are written using non-Bayesian methods, people expect results in non-Bayesian terms, etc.

Besides that: I decided years ago (~2009) that as appealing as Bayesian approaches were to me, I should study 'normal' statistics & data analysis first - so I understood them and why I didn't want to use them before I began studying Bayesian statistics. I didn't want to wind up in a situation where I was some sort of Bayesian fanatic who could tell you how to do a Bayesian analysis but couldn't explain what was wrong with the regular approach or why Bayesian approaches were better!

(I think I'm going to be switching gears relatively soon, though: I'm working with a track coach on modeling triple-jumping performance, and the smallness of the data suggests it'll be a natural fit for a multilevel model using informative priors, which I'll want to read Gelman's textbook on, and that should be a good jumping off point.)

Comment author: linkhyrule5 10 August 2013 01:49:53AM 1 point [-]

Random question - if you were to recommend a textbook or two, from frequentist and Bayesian analysis both, to a random interested undergraduate...

(As you might guess, not a hypothetical, unfortunately.)

Comment author: itaibn0 09 August 2013 06:29:25PM 13 points [-]

I believe you are posting this in the wrong thread.

Comment author: AlexanderD 08 August 2013 05:24:50AM *  4 points [-]

What the Great Learning teaches is: to illustrate illustrious virtue; to renovate the people; and to rest in the highest excellence.
The point where to rest being known, the object of pursuit is then determined; and, that being determined, a calm unperturbedness may be attained to.
To that calmness there will succeed a tranquil repose. In that repose there may be careful deliberation, and that deliberation will be followed by the attainment of the desired end.
The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the world, first ordered well their own States.
Wishing to order well their States, they first regulated their families.
Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons.
Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts.
Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts.
Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost of their knowledge.
Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.
Things being investigated, knowledge became complete.
Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere.
Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified.
Their hearts being rectified, their persons were cultivated.
Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated.
Their families being regulated, their States were rightly governed.
Their States being rightly governed, the entire world was at peace.
From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides.
It cannot be, when the root is neglected, that what should spring from it will be well ordered.
It never has been the case that what was of great importance has been slightly cared for, and, at the same time, that what was of slight importance has been greatly cared for.

-The Great Learning, one of the Four Books and Five Classics of Confucian thought.

Comment author: Decius 07 August 2013 05:54:11PM 3 points [-]

I see small examples everywhere I look; they're just too specific to point the way to a general solution.

James Portnow/Daniel Floyd

Comment author: hairyfigment 06 August 2013 06:11:11PM 5 points [-]

How do you know that it will bring out his genius, Graff? It's never given you what you needed before. You've only had near-misses and flameouts. Is this how Mazer Rackham was trained? Actually, why isn't Mazer Rackham in charge of this training? What qualifications do you have that make you so sure your technique is the perfect recipe to make the ultimate military genius?

-- Will Wildman, analysis of Ender's Game

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 06 August 2013 03:49:17PM 26 points [-]

He took literally five seconds for something I'd spent two weeks on, which I guess is what being an expert means

-- Graduate student of our group, recognising a level above his own in a weekly progress report

Comment author: linkhyrule5 06 August 2013 07:41:07PM 8 points [-]

Now I'm curious about the context...

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 07 August 2013 04:34:34PM 6 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 05 August 2013 08:24:08PM *  16 points [-]

Old man: Gotcha! So you do collect answers after all!

Eye: But of course! Everybody does! You need answers to base decisions on. Decisions that lead to actions. We wouldn't do much of anything, if we were always indecisive!

All I am saying is that I see no point in treasuring them! That's all!

Once you see that an answer is not serving its question properly anymore, it should be tossed away. It's just their natural life cycle. They usually kick and scream, raising one hell of a ruckus when we ask them to leave. Especially when they have been with us for a long time.

You see, too many actions have been based on those answers. Too much work and energy invested in them. They feel so important, so full of themselves. They will answer to no one. Not even to their initial question!

What's the point if a wrong answer will stop you from returning to the right question. Although sometimes people have no questions to return to... which is usually why they defend them, with such strong conviction.

That's exactly why I am extra cautious with all these big ol' answers that have been lying around, long before we came along. They bully their way into our collection without being invited by any questions of our own. We accept them just because they have satisfied the questions of so many before us... seeking the questions which fits them instead...

My favorite kind of answers are those that my questions give birth to. Questions that I managed to keep safe long enough to do so. These baby answers might seem insignificant in comparison at first, but they are of a much better quality.

Comment author: RowanE 06 August 2013 02:00:32PM 4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Polina 05 August 2013 11:47:45AM *  15 points [-]

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

George Bernard Shaw

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 08 August 2013 02:09:46AM 4 points [-]

"Life is about creating yourself" still might be problematic because the emphasis is still on what sort of person you are.

Comment author: Swimmer963 08 August 2013 02:31:18AM 0 points [-]

As opposed to what? I would guess maybe a better concept is what you're able to get done...

Comment author: Vaniver 08 August 2013 02:51:21AM 2 points [-]

I think the implied contrast is between "creating yourself" and "what you do" or the less pretty but more precise "doing your actions." The first implies a smaller, more rigid set than the last, which is perhaps not the correct way to perceive life.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 05 August 2013 02:57:10PM 10 points [-]

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.

Comment author: ChristianKl 06 August 2013 11:46:03PM 4 points [-]

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 ;)

Comment author: Polina 06 August 2013 07:48:15AM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: CronoDAS 05 August 2013 06:33:38AM *  0 points [-]

Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.

-- Iain M. Banks

Comment author: RobertLumley 07 August 2013 02:46:48PM 1 point [-]

This seems like a poor strategy by simply considering temper tantrums, let alone all of the other holes in this. (The first half of the comment though, I can at least appreciate.)

Comment author: Document 07 August 2013 02:57:44AM *  -1 points [-]

I, too, support the cause of opposing every such cause.

Comment author: Randy_M 06 August 2013 09:32:06PM 3 points [-]

Is that both, or either or? Because if it is either or it may include such attrocities as going to bed on time and eating vegetables. If it is both, it seems to imply killing those not as beloved by children may be acceptable.

Comment author: Lumifer 06 August 2013 06:19:43PM 4 points [-]

I wonder if people here realize how anti-utilitarianism this quote is :-)

Comment author: wedrifid 07 August 2013 06:44:39AM *  -1 points [-]

I wonder if people here realize how anti-utilitarianism this quote is :-)

You seem to be implying that people here should care about things being anti-utilitarianism. They shouldn't. Utilitarianism refers to a group of largely abhorrent and arbitrary value systems.

It is also contrary to virtually all consequentialist value systems of the kind actually held by people here or extrapolatable from humans. All consequentialist systems that match the quote's criteria for not being 'Fucked' are abhorrent.

Comment author: Lumifer 07 August 2013 04:13:25PM 2 points [-]

It is also anti-consequentialism.

It is not. "Murder and children crying" here are not means to an end, they are consequences as well. Maybe not intended consequences, maybe side effects ("collateral damage"), but still consequences.

I see no self-contradiction in a consequentialist approach which just declares certain consequences (e.g. "murder and children crying") be be unacceptable.

Comment author: Lukas_Gloor 08 August 2013 07:18:46PM *  0 points [-]

Your point is perfectly valid, I think. Every action-guiding set of principles is ultimately all about consequences. Deontologies can be "consequentialized", i.e. expressed only through a maximization (or minimization) rule of some goal-function, by a mere semantic transformation. The reason why this is rarely done is, I suspect, because people get confused by words, and perhaps also because consequentializing some deontologies makes it more obvious that the goals are arbitrary or silly.

The traditional distinction between consequentialism and non-consequentialism does not come down to the former only counting consequences -- both do! The difference is rather about what sort of consequences count. Deontology also counts how consequences are brought about, that becomes part of the "consequences" that matter, part of whatever you're trying to minimize. "Me murdering someone" gets a different weight than "someone else murdering someone", which in turn gets a different weight from "letting someone else die through 'natural causes' when it could be easily prevented".

And sometimes it gets even weirder, the doctrine of double effect for instance draws a morally significant line between a harmful consequence being necessary for the execution of your (well-intended) aim, or a "mere" foreseen -- but still necessary(!) -- side-effect of it. So sometimes certain intentions, when acted upon, are flagged with negative value as well.

And as you note below, deontologies sometimes attribute infinite negative value to certain consequences.

Comment author: wedrifid 07 August 2013 04:54:06PM *  0 points [-]

I see no self-contradiction in a consequentialist approach which just declares certain consequences (e.g. "murder and children crying") be be unacceptable.

Pardon me. I left off the technical qualifier for the sake of terseness. I have previously observed that all deontologial value systems can be emulated by (suitably contrived) consequentialist value systems and vice-versa so I certainly don't intend to imply that it is impossible to construct a consequentialist morality implementing this particular injunction. Edited to fix.

It is also contrary to virtually all consequentialist value systems of the kind actually held by people here or extrapolatable from humans. All consequentialist systems that match this criteria are abhorrent.

Comment author: AndHisHorse 07 August 2013 04:47:22PM 1 point [-]

There is nothing about consequentialism which distinguishes means from ends. Anything that happens is an "end" of the series of actions which produced it, even if it is not a terminal step, even if it is not intended.

When wedrifid says that the quote is "anti-consequentialism", they are saying that it refuses to weigh all of the consequences - including the good ones. The negativity of children made to cry does not obliterate the positivity of children prevented from crying, but rather must be weighed against it, to produce a sum which can be negative or positive.

To declare a consequence "unacceptable" is to say that you refuse to be consequentialist where that particular outcome is involved; you are saying that such a consequence crashes your computation of value, as if it were infinitely negative and demanded some other method of valuation, which did not use such finicky things as numbers.

But even if there is a value which is negative, and 3^^^3 times greater in magnitude than any other value, positive or negative, its negation will always be of equal and opposite value, allowing things to be weighed against each other once again. In this example, a murder might be worth -3^^^3 utilons - but preventing two murders by committing one results in a net sum of +3^^^3 utilons.

The only possible world in which one could reject every possible cause which ends in murder or children crying is one in which it is conveniently impossible for such a cause to lead to positive consequences which outweigh the negative ones. And frankly, the world we live in is not so convenient as to divide itself perfectly into positive and negative acts in such a way.

Comment author: Lumifer 07 August 2013 05:16:35PM *  2 points [-]

There is nothing about consequentialism which distinguishes means from ends.

Wikipedia: Consequentialism is the class of normative ethical theories holding that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for any judgment about the rightness of that conduct. ... Consequentialism is usually distinguished from deontological ethics (or deontology), in that deontology derives the rightness or wrongness of one's conduct from the character of the behaviour itself rather than the outcomes of the conduct.

The "character of the behaviour" is means.

To declare a consequence "unacceptable" is to say that you refuse to be consequentialist where that particular outcome is involved; you are saying that such a consequence crashes your computation of value

Consequentialism does not demand "computation of value". It only says that what matters it outcomes, it does not require that the outcomes be comparable or summable. I don't see that saying that certain outcomes are unacceptable, full stop (= have negative infinity value) contradicts consequentialism.

Comment author: AndHisHorse 07 August 2013 05:41:07PM 0 points [-]

You have a point, there are means and ends. I was using the term "means" as synonymous with "methods used to achieve instrumental ends", which I realize was vague and misleading. I suppose it would be better to say that consequentialism does not concern itself with means at all, and rather considers every outcome, including those which are the result of means, to be an end.

As for your other point, I'm afraid that I find it rather odd. Consequentialism does not need to be implemented as having implicitly summable values, much as rational assessment does not require the computation of exact probabilities, but any moral system must be able to implement comparisons of some kind. Even the simplest deontologies must be able to distinguish "good" from "bad" moral actions, even if all "good" actions are equal, and all "bad" actions likewise.

Without the ability to compare outcomes, there is no way to compare the goodness of choices and select a good plan of action, regardless of how one defines "good". And if a given outcome has infinitely negative value, than its negation must have infinitely positive value - which means that the negation is just as desirable as the original outcome is undesirable.

Comment author: Document 06 August 2013 06:21:24PM 0 points [-]

"Murder and children crying" aren't allowed to have negative weight in a utility function?

Comment author: Lumifer 06 August 2013 06:26:51PM 1 point [-]

It's not about weight, it's about an absolute, discontinuous, hard limit -- regardless of how many utilons you can pile up on the other end of the scale.

Comment author: Bayeslisk 06 August 2013 08:22:28PM 2 points [-]

Well, no. It's against the promise of how many utilons you can pile up on the other arm of the scale, which may well not pay off at all. I'm reminded of a post here at some point whose gist was "if your model tells you that your chances of being wrong are 3^^^3:1 against, it is more likely that your model is wrong than that you are right."

Comment author: AndHisHorse 06 August 2013 08:34:21PM 1 point [-]

Yes, but the quote in no way concerns itself with the probability that such a plan will go wrong; rather, it explicitly includes even those with a wide margin of error, including "every" plan which ends in murder and children crying.

Comment author: Decius 07 August 2013 05:55:42PM 2 points [-]

If your plan ends in murder and children crying, what happens if your plan goes wrong?

Comment author: Document 10 August 2013 02:55:05AM 1 point [-]

The murder and children crying fail to occur in the intended quantity?

Comment author: linkhyrule5 10 August 2013 01:53:42AM 1 point [-]

If your plan requires you to get into a car with your family, what happens if you crash?

Comment author: SaidAchmiz 10 August 2013 02:24:07AM 1 point [-]

Well, getting into a car with your family is not inherently bad, so it's not a very good parallel... but if your overall point is that "expected value calculations do not retroactively lose mathematical validity because the world turned out a certain way", then that's definitely true.

I think that the "what if it all goes wrong" sort of comment is meant to trigger the response of "oh god... it was all for nothing! Nothing!!!". Which is silly, of course. We murdered all those people and made those children cry for the expected value of the plan. Complaining that the expected value of an action is not equal to the actual value of the outcome is a pretty elementary mistake.

Comment author: Decius 10 August 2013 02:19:05AM 0 points [-]

The features of my plan which mitigate the result of the plan going wrong kick in, and the damage is mitigated. I don't go on vacation, despite the nonrefundable expenses incurred. The plan didn't end in death and sadness, even if a particular implementation did.

When the plan ends in murder and children crying, every failure of the plan results in a worse outcome.

Comment author: wedrifid 10 August 2013 02:27:54AM *  0 points [-]

When the plan ends in murder and children crying, every failure of the plan results in a worse outcome.

This does not seem to follow. Failure of the plan could easily involve failure to cause the murder or crying to happen for a start. Then there is the consideration that an unspecified failure has completely undefined behaviour. Anything could happen, from extinction or species-wide endless torture to the outright creation of a utopia.

Comment author: Bayeslisk 06 August 2013 08:36:22PM 1 point [-]

It's not a matter of "the plan might go wrong", it's a matter of "the plan might be wrong", and the universal part comes from "no, really, yours too, because you aren't remotely special."

Comment author: linkhyrule5 10 August 2013 01:54:35AM 0 points [-]
Comment author: Bayeslisk 10 August 2013 05:47:42AM 1 point [-]

Sounds about right to me.

Comment author: Bayeslisk 06 August 2013 04:58:01PM 5 points [-]

As much as I love Banks, this sounds like a massive set of applause lights, complete with sparkling Catherine wheels. Sometimes, you have to do shitty things to improve the world, and sometimes the shitty things are really shitty, because we're not smart enough to find a better option fast enough to avoid the awful things resulting from not improving at all. "The perfect must not be the enemy of the good" and so on.

Comment author: Lumifer 06 August 2013 06:24:42PM 6 points [-]

Sometimes, you have to do shitty things to improve the world

And sometimes you do shitty things because you think they will improve the world, but hey, even though the road to hell is very well-paved already, there's always a place for another cobblestone...

The heuristic of this quote is that it is a firewall against a runaway utility function. If you convince yourself that something will generate gazillions of utilons, you'd be willing to pay a very high price to reach this, even though your estimates might be in error. This heuristic puts a cap on the price.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 August 2013 01:27:28AM 0 points [-]

The problem is that there are better heuristics out there. Look up "just war theory" for starters.

Comment author: Bayeslisk 06 August 2013 07:32:06PM *  6 points [-]

It's good as an exhortation to build a Schelling fence, but without that sentiment, it's pretty hollow. Reading the context, though, I agree with you: it's a reminder that feeling really sure about something and being willing to sacrifice a lot of you and other (possibly unwilling) people to create a putative utopia probably means you're wrong.

"Sorrow be damned, and all your plans. Fuck the faithful, fuck the committed, the dedicated, the true believers; fuck all the sure and certain people prepared to maim and kill whoever got in their way; fuck every cause that ended in murder and a child screaming. She turned and ran..."

(As an aside, I now have the perfect line for if I ever become an evil mastermind and someone quotes that at me: "But you see, murder and children screaming is only the beginning!")

Comment author: [deleted] 06 August 2013 10:40:54AM 1 point [-]

That's kind-of a good point, but I seriously doubt that that quote would be that effective in making people get it who don't already.

Comment author: katydee 05 August 2013 12:58:12PM 4 points [-]

This seems better-suited for MoreEmotional than LessWrong.

Comment author: David_Gerard 05 August 2013 08:55:22PM 4 points [-]

I think this is a useful heuristic because humans are just not good at calculating this stuff. Ethical Injunctions suggests that you do in fact check with your emotions when the numbers say something novel. (This is why I'm sceptical about deciding on numbers pulled out of your arse rather than pulling the decision directly out of your arse.)

Comment author: katydee 06 August 2013 02:43:53AM 2 points [-]

I don't think Banks even believed that, though. Several of his books certainly seem to be evidence to the contrary.

Comment author: wedrifid 05 August 2013 12:21:51PM 8 points [-]

Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.

I suppose I somewhat appreciate the sentiment. I note that labelling the killing 'murder' has already amounted to significant discretion. Killings that are approved of get to be labelled something nicer sounding.

Comment author: KnaveOfAllTrades 05 August 2013 12:00:56PM *  6 points [-]

Does this pay rent in policy changes? It seems probable that existing policy positions will already determine the contexts in which we might choose to apply this quote, so that the quote will only be generating the appearance of additional evidential weight, but will in fact result in double-counting if we use its applicability as evidence for or against a proposal, because we already chose to use the quote because we disagreed with the porposal. For example: 'This imperialist intervention is wrong—Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.' Is the latter clause doing any work?

(First version of this comment:

Does this pay rent in suggested policies? It feels like under all plausible interpretations, it's at best 'I'm so righteous!' and possibly other things.)

Comment author: wedrifid 05 August 2013 12:20:07PM 8 points [-]

Does this pay rent in suggested policies?

Yes. It rules out all sorts of policies, including good ones. It likely rules out murdering Hitler to prevent a war, especially if that requires killing guards in order to get to him.

Comment author: KnaveOfAllTrades 05 August 2013 12:31:16PM *  3 points [-]

Upvoted; wording was bad. Edited.

Comment author: wedrifid 05 August 2013 01:12:51PM 3 points [-]

Upvoted; wording was bad. Edited.

I agree entirely with your new wording. This quote seems to be the sort of claim to bring out conditionally against causes we oppose but conveniently ignore when we support the cause.

Comment deleted 05 August 2013 09:57:20AM [-]
Comment author: CronoDAS 06 August 2013 12:04:20AM 1 point [-]

Fixed, thanks.

Comment author: MinibearRex 05 August 2013 05:23:38AM 25 points [-]

He wasn't certain what he expected to find, which, in his experience, was generally a good enough reason to investigate something.

Harry Potter and the Confirmed Critical, Chapter 6

Comment author: Paulovsk 06 August 2013 08:38:42PM 2 points [-]

Can you give a link to this story? It is surprisingly difficult to find.

Comment author: gwern 02 September 2013 12:27:26AM 2 points [-]

If you put the quote into quotation marks and search Google, it's the fifth hit.

Comment author: Paulovsk 04 September 2013 04:40:15AM 1 point [-]

thank you. This was a 'duh!' moment; I haven't realized it was the 2nd book of the Natural 20.

Comment author: AndHisHorse 06 August 2013 08:47:06PM *  7 points [-]

It is the second book in the series Harry Potter and the Natural 20, which can be found here.

Comment author: [deleted] 05 August 2013 03:04:37AM *  18 points [-]

From Jacques Vallee, Messengers of Deception...

'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?”'

Comment author: MixedNuts 11 August 2013 06:30:14PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 14 August 2013 09:08:16PM 4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Estarlio 05 August 2013 02:53:40PM *  12 points [-]

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.”

  • “Silver Blaze” (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Comment author: gothgirl420666 04 August 2013 10:29:14PM *  8 points [-]

I like it when I hear philosophy in rap songs (or any kind of music, really) that I can actually fully agree with:

I never had belief in Christ, cus in the pictures he was white

Same color as the judge that gave my hood repeated life

Sentences for little shit, church I wasn't feeling it

Why the preacher tell us everything gon be alright?

Knew what it was for, still I felt that it was wrong

Till I heard Chef call himself God in the song

And it all made sense, cus you can't do shit

But look inside the mirror once it all goes wrong

You fix your own problems, tame your own conscience

All that holy water shit is nothing short of nonsense

Not denying Christ, I'm just denying niggas options

Cus prayer never moved my Grandmama out of Compton

I prayed for my cousin, but them niggas still shot him

Invest in a gun, cause them niggas still got them

And won't shit stop em from popping you in broad day

Hope that choir pew bulletproof or you gon' pay

-- Vince Staples, "Versace Rap"

Comment author: David_Gerard 05 August 2013 08:59:07PM 4 points [-]
Comment author: gothgirl420666 05 August 2013 10:19:07PM 5 points [-]

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.

Comment author: snafoo 04 August 2013 05:51:26PM 31 points [-]

When the axe came into the woods, many of the trees said, "At least the handle is one of us.

Turkish proverb

Comment author: monsterzero 05 August 2013 03:28:45AM 9 points [-]
Comment author: snafoo 04 August 2013 05:50:23PM 13 points [-]

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Stephen Jay Gould

Comment author: gwern 04 August 2013 10:55:10PM 7 points [-]

There was only one Ramanujan; and we are all well-aware of Gould's views on intelligence here, I presume.

Comment author: [deleted] 05 August 2013 05:35:20PM 4 points [-]

There was only one Ramanujan

In what reference class?

Comment author: gwern 05 August 2013 07:45:55PM *  11 points [-]

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.)

Comment author: private_messaging 05 September 2013 12:09:17AM *  0 points [-]

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.

It would naively seem that an IQ of 160 or more is 5 SDs from 85 , but 4SDs from the 100 , so the rarity would be 1/3,483,046 vs 1/31,560 , for a huge ratio of 110 times prevalence of extreme genius between the populations.

Except that this is not how it works when the IQ of 100 population has been selected from the other and subsequently has lower variance. Nor is it how Flynn effect worked. Because, of course, the standard deviation is not going to remain constant.

Comment author: gwern 12 August 2013 06:30:22PM 5 points [-]

pg169-171, Kanigel's 1991 The Man Who Knew Infinity:

It wasn't the first time a letter had launched the career of a famous mathematician. Indeed, as the mathematician Louis J. Mordell would later insist, "It is really an easy matter for anyone who has done brilliant mathematical work to bring himself to the attention of the mathematical world, no matter how obscure or unknown he is or how insignificant a position he occupies. All he need do is to send an account of his results to a leading authority," as Jacobi had in writing Legendre on elliptic functions, or as Hermite had in writing Jacobi on number theory.

And yet, if Mordell was right-if "it is really an easy matter" - why had Gauss spurned Abel? Carl Friedrich Gauss was the premier mathematician of his time, and, perhaps, of all time. The Norwegian Niels Henrik Abel, just twenty-two at the time he wrote Gauss, had proved that some equations of the fifth degree (like x^5 + 3x^4 + ... = 0) could never be solved algebraically. That was a real coup, especially since leading mathematicians had for years sought a general solution that, Abel now showed, didn't exist. Yet when he sent his proof to Gauss, the man history records as "the Prince of Mathematics" tossed it aside without reading it. "Here," one account has him saying, dismissing Abel's paper as the work of a crank, "is another of those monstrosities."

. Then, too, if "it is really an easy matter," why had Ramanujan's brilliance failed to cast an equal spell on Baker and Hobson, the other two Cambridge mathematicians to whom he had written?...The other Cambridge mathematician, a Senior Wrangler, was E. W. Hobson, who was in his late fifties when he heard from Ramanujan and more eminent even than Baker. His high forehead, prominent mustache, and striking eyes helped make him, in Hardy's words, "a distinguished and conspicuous figure" around Cambridge. But he was remembered, too, as a dull lecturer, and after he died his most important book was described in words like "systematic," "exhaustive," and "comprehensive," never in language suggesting great imagination or flair. "An old stick-in-the-mud," someone once called him.

...Of course, Ramanujan's fate had always hung on a knife edge, and it had never taken more than the slightest want of imagination, the briefest hesitancy, to tip the balance against him. Only the most stubborn persistence on the part of his friend Rajagopalachari had gained him the sympathy of Ramachandra Rao. And Hardy himself was put off by Ramanujan's letter before he was won over by it. The cards are stacked, against any original mind, and perhaps properly so. After all, many who claim the mantle of "new and original" are indeed new, and original - but not better. So, in a sense, it should be neither surprising nor reason for any but the mildest rebuke that Hobson and Baker said no. Nor should it be surprising that no one: in India had made much of Ramanujan's work. Hardy was perhaps England's premier mathematician, the beneficiary of the finest education, in touch with the latest mathematical thought and, to boot, an expert in several fields Ramanujan plowed .... And yet a day with Ramanujan's theorems had left him bewildered. I had never seen anything in the least like them before. Like the Indians, Hardy did not know what to make of Ramanujan's work. Like them, he doubted his own judgment of it. Indeed, it is not just that he discerned genius in Ramanujan that redounds to his credit today; it is that he battered down his own wall of skepticism to do so. That Ramanujan was Indian probably didn't taint him in Hardy's eyes.

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.

Comment author: Swimmer963 11 August 2013 01:00:20AM 1 point [-]

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.

Isn't the average IQ 100 by definition?

Comment author: gwern 11 August 2013 03:22:38AM 5 points [-]

Yes - but whose average?

Comment author: Swimmer963 11 August 2013 04:41:43AM *  2 points [-]

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?

Comment author: ESRogs 11 August 2013 06:22:06AM *  5 points [-]

What data does the number 70-80 actually come from?

Presumably from this list.

Comment author: HonoreDB 07 August 2013 02:06:48PM 8 points [-]

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.

Comment author: gwern 11 August 2013 04:54:13PM *  11 points [-]

Oppenheimer's conjugate was jailed or executed for attempted murder, instead of being threatened with academic probation.

A gross exaggeration; execution was never in the cards for a poisoned apple which was never eaten.

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.

Likewise. Goedel didn't go crazy until long after he was famous, and so your conjugate is in no way showing 'privilege'.

Newton and Turing's conjugates were murdered as teenagers on suspicion of homosexuality.

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'.

I have to make these stories up because if you're poor and at all weird, flawed, or unlucky your story is rarely recorded.

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.

Comment author: HonoreDB 15 August 2013 07:00:51PM 7 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Vaniver 03 September 2013 07:20:52PM -1 points [-]

Do you really think the existence of oppression is a figment of Marxist ideology?

The specific oppressions you led off with: yes.

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)

I thought we were talking about Oppenheimer and Cambridge? It looks like if Oppenheimer hadn't had rich parents who lobbied on his behalf, he might have gotten probation instead of not. Given his instability, that might have pushed him into a self-destructive spiral, or maybe he just would have progressed a little slower through the system. So, yes, jumping from "the university is unhappy" to "the state hangs you" is a gross exaggeration. (Universities are used to graduate students being under a ton of stress, and so do cut them slack; the response to Oppenheimer of "we think you need to go on vacation, for everyone's safety" was 'normal'.)

Comment author: HonoreDB 03 September 2013 11:58:44PM 2 points [-]

<snark>"Oppenheimer wasn't privileged, he was only treated slightly better than the average Cambridge student."</snark>

I'm sorry, I never really rigorously defined the counter-factuals we were playing with, but the fact that Oppenheimer was in a context where attempted murder didn't sink his career is surely relevant to the overall question of whether there are Einsteins in sweatshops.

Comment author: Vaniver 04 September 2013 11:50:09AM 2 points [-]

the fact that Oppenheimer was in a context where attempted murder didn't sink his career is surely relevant to the overall question of whether there are Einsteins in sweatshops.

I don't see the relevance, because to me "Einsteins in sweatshops" means "Einsteins that don't make it to <Cambridge>", for some Cambridge equivalent. If Ramanujan had died three years earlier, and thus not completed his PhD, he would still be in the history books. I mean, take Galois as an example: repeatedly imprisoned for political radicalism under a monarchy, and dies in a duel at age 20. Certainly someone ruined by circumstances--and yet we still know about him and his mathematical work.

In general, these counterfactuals are useful for exhibiting your theory but not proving your theory. Either we have the same background assumptions- and so the counterfactuals look reasonable to both of us- or we disagree on background assumptions, and the counterfactual is only weakly useful at identifying where the disagreement is.

Comment author: gwern 03 September 2013 06:24:01PM 3 points [-]

Do you really think the existence of oppression is a figment of Marxist ideology?

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!

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.

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.

Even if the mean mathematical ability in Indians were innately low (I'm quite skeptical there)

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.

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.

The talent can manifest as early as arithmetic, which is taught to a great many poor people, I am given to understand.

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.

Really? Then I'm sure you could name three examples.

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

Sorry, I can only read what you wrote. If you meant he lacked tact, you shouldn't have brought up insanity.

Ramanujan was more politic than your average mathematician.

Really? Because his mathematician peers were completely exasperated at him. What, exactly, was he politic about?

Comment author: hairyfigment 04 September 2013 01:38:35AM 1 point [-]

He claimed that there were outright historic geniuses laboring in the fields.

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.

Comment author: HonoreDB 04 September 2013 12:16:04AM *  4 points [-]

the effects of poverty & oppression on means & tails

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.

The talent can manifest as early as arithmetic, which is taught to a great many poor people, I am given to understand.

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...

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.

Really? Then I'm sure you could name three examples.

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

Sorry, I can only read what you wrote. If you meant he lacked tact, you shouldn't have brought up insanity.

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.

Really? Because his mathematician peers were completely exasperated at him. What, exactly, was he politic about?

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.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 11 August 2013 05:50:39PM *  6 points [-]

...and we have Epicurus who was a slave.

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).

Comment author: gwern 12 August 2013 03:14:40PM 5 points [-]

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.