Rationality Quotes August 2013
Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
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Comments (733)
-- Dennis Monokroussos
It's probably a much more accurate feeling than the opposite one, though...
If I understand why I did something, I want to believe ...
That is an interesting observation. For my part I do not experience horror in those circumstances, merely curiosity and uncertainty.
It depends on the context, in particular, whether the situation is one where you "must" have a good reason for your actions. Your reaction is appropriate for most ordinary situations; his is appropriate for the context he's talking about (doing a different movement than than the one you intended in a chess game) and other high stakes situations (blurting an answer you know is wrong in an examination, saying/doing something awkward on a date, making a risky movement driving your car…)
I experience horrible feelings when I humiliate myself or put myself at risk. This phenomenon seems to occur independently of whether I have a good causal model for why I did those things.
I think it may depend a lot on how well the action fits into your schema for reasonable behavior.
I have mild OCD. Its manifestations are usually unnoticeable to other people, and generally don't interfere with the ordinary function of my life, but occasionally lead to my engaging in behaviors that no ordinary person would consider worthwhile. The single most extreme manifestation, which still stands out in my memory, was a time when I was playing a video game, and saved my game file, then, doubting my own memory that I had saved it, did it again... and again... and again... until I had saved at least seven times, each time convinced that I couldn't yet be sure I had saved it "enough."
Afterwards, I was horrified at my own actions, because what I had just done was too obviously crazy to just handwave away.
It is not July. It is August.
Fixed! The perils of copy/paste.
Saw this under "latest rationality quotes" and was like "man, I'm really missing the context as to how this is a rationality quote."
"If it July, I desire to believe it is July. If it is August, I desire to believe it is August..."
If the Romans had been more willing to rename months they were unwilling to keep in their original places, we might have a much saner calendar.
If people in the 1500 years since the Romans had been more willing to rename months...
Now you've got me thinking about the minimum level of rationality/processing power necessary to determine the month accurately...
-Thomas Jefferson
One who possesses a maximum-entropy prior is further from the truth than one who possesses an inductive prior riddled with many specific falsehoods and errors. Or more to the point, someone who endorses knowing nothing as a desirable state for fear of accepting falsehoods is further from the truth than somebody who believes many things, some of them false, but tries to pay attention and go on learning.
How about "If you know nothing and are willing to learn, you're closer to the truth than someone who's attached to falsehoods"? Even then, I suppose you'd need to throw in something about the speed of learning.
-LessWrong Community
-- Norwegian folktale.
I don't understand this rationality quote. Is it about fighting akrasia? Self-hacking to effectively saving money? It clearly describes a method that wouldn't actually work, and it could work as humour, but what does it mean as a rationality tale?
I thought the way he deceived his conscious mind, and never learned, was interesting.
It's interesting to view this story from source-code-swap Prisoner's Dilemma / Timeless Decision Theory perspective. This can be a perfect epigraph in an article dedicated to it.
In the context of LW, I took it as an amusing critique of the whole idea of rewarding yourself for behaviours you want to do more .
It could be used as an effective "How to create an Ugh Field and undermine all future self-discipline attempts" instruction manual. It isn't a rationality tale. It is confusing that 40 people evidently consider it to be one. (But only a little bit confusing. I usually expect non-rationalist quotes that would be accepted as jokes or inspirational quotes elsewhere to get around 10 upvotes in this thread regardless of merit. That means I'm surprised about the degree of positive reception.)
It's either a cautionary tale about the dangers of deceiving yourself, or a humorous look at the impossibility of actually doing so.
It's a cautionary tale about Norwegian food.
Betcha it'd work. I'm going to set a piece of candy in front of me, work for half an hour, and then put it back, at least once a day for a week.
Unknown
This could be studied empirically.
Difficult. The "distance" is metaphorical, and this probably doesn't apply when there's an easy, unambiguous, generally accepted metric. Without that, how do we do the study?
Still, if you have a way, it could be interesting.
If there is no easy, unambiguous generally accepted metric, that would seem to imply that everyone is a poor judge of distance - making the quote trivially true.
Or thinks he's got better leverage than you.
The chance of averaging exactly 3.5 would be a hell of a lot smaller. The chance of averaging between 3.45 and 3.55 would be larger, though.
Reynolds' law
See also: Credential Inflation
Status markers frequently indicate unusual access to resources as well as or even instead of character traits.
Subsidizing status markers dilutes them by making them less common.
How would you tell which factor is more important in the dilution of a status marker?
Eric Raymond
Empirically, heaping scorn on everyone and seeing who sticks around leads to lots of time wasted on flame wars.
While the more socially enlightened attitudes lead to very effective and high signal-to-noise conflict handling, as can be observed on Tumblr and MetaFilter?
Eric Raymond isn't suggesting that. Why are you?
Straw man. The grandparent explicitly made the scorn conditional, not 'on everyone'.
A relevant example:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/linus-torvalds-defends-his-right-to-shame-linux-kernel-developers/
Linux kernel seems to me a quite well-managed operation (of herding cats, too!) that doesn't waste lots of time on flame wars.
I don't follow kernel development much. Recently, a colleague pointed me to the rdrand instruction. I was curious about Linux kernel support for it, and I found this thread: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1173350
Notice that Linus spends a bunch of time (a) flaming people and (b) being wrong about how crypto works (even though the issue was not relevant to the patch).
Is this typical of the linux-kernel mailing list? I decided to look at the latest hundred messages. I saw some minor rudeness, but nothing at that level. Of course, none of these messages were from Linus. But I didn't have to go back more than a few days to find Linus saying things like, "some ass-wipe inside the android team." Imagine if you were that Android developer, and you were reading that email? Would that make you want to work on Linux? Or would that make you want to go find a project where the leader doesn't shit on people?
Here's a revealing quote from one recent message from Linus: "Otherwise I'll have to start shouting at people again." Notice that Linus perceives shouting as a punishment. He's right to do so, as that's how people take it. Sure, "don't get offended", "git 'er done", etc -- but realistically, developers are human and don't necessarily have time to do a bunch of CBT so that they can brush off insults.
Some people, I guess, can continue to be productive after their project leader insults them. The rest either have periodic drops in productivity, or choose to work on projects which are run by people willing to act professionally.
tl;dr: Would you put up with a boss who frequently called you an idiot in public?
Here's my thought process upon reading this. (Initially, I assumed “git 'er done” meant something like ‘women are unimportant except as sex objects, and I misread “unwilling” as “willing”.)
(Anyway, if an adult woman complains because you called her a girl, the course of action that leaves you the most time to get stuff done is apologizing, not doing that again, and getting back to work, not endlessly whining about how ridiculous the PC crowd are.)
Not necessarily, it might just encourage further frivolous complaints.
As opposed to feeding trolls, which is widely known to be extremely effective in making them shut up?
In the context the group you position here as 'trolls' are described as frivolous complainers. You advocate apologising and complying. Eugine is correct in pointing out that this can represent a perverse incentive (both in theory and in often observed practice).
The courtesy rules at LW are pretty strict. I don't know whether things are different at CFAR and MIRI, but does insufficient scorn interfere with things getting done?
We use the karma system for that.
LW uses a karma system. I assume that CFAR and MIRI include a lot of in person and private conversation which isn't subject to a karma system.
How do you think the effectiveness of cultures which have karma + courtesy compares to cultures which permit flaming?
James Wilson
Counter-quote.
Only loosely. The insightful part of the grandparent quote is the third sentence, which complements the moral-greyness issue quite well.
I think it is only slightly insightful, at best. It's a gross simplification of how most people experience, and actually (under-the-hood) perform, moral calculations, and it simplifies away most of the interesting stuff.
Anton Lavey, The Satanic Bible, The Book of Satan II
Isn't it better to examine a falsehood to discover why it was so popular and appealing before throwing it away?
Only if they won't let you throw it away.
Then, to continue the metaphor, we should study it by telescope from afar, not as a present and influential entity in our own sphere of existence, but rather a distant body, informative but impotent, the object of curiosity rather than devotion.
Fate/stay night
He just needs to get Saber to say it. Saber often tells people, in a bluntly matter-of-fact way, that they're making a mistake. Rin knows this. If Shiro said it, though, she'd think it was some kind of dominance thing and get mad.
(Maybe I'm over-analyzing this.)
Slightly off-topic, but I keep seeing Fate/Stay night referenced on here, is it particularly 'rationalist' or do people just like it as entertainment?
It has some elements that stand out in terms of rationalist virtue, and many others which don't.
I found it to be very much a mixed bag, but the things it did well, I thought it did exceptionally well.
Bakemonogatari
--Professor Farnsworth, Futurama.
The threat of massive perfectly symmetrical violence, on the other hand...
Such a threat can also be effective for asymmetrical violence -- no matter which way the asymmetry goes.
True, but possibly dangerously close to "There is no virtue in following other people or in cultivating followers".
Not true. Trivially, if A is definitively wrong, then ~A is definitively right. Popperian falsification is trumped by Bayes' Theorem.
Note: This means that you cannot be definitively wrong, not that you can be definitively right.
-- GLaDOS from Portal 2
If you define best as easiest.
Alternatively, if you define solution such that any two given solutions are equally acceptable with respect to the original problem.
I see it as more of a "rather than sorting projects by revenue, make sure to sort them by profit," combined with "in cases where revenue is concave and cost linear, which happen frequently, the lowest cost project is probably going to be the highest profit."
That plus "beware inflated revenue estimates, especially for have-it-all type plans". Cost estimates are often much more accurate.
If best is defined as easiest, then the "usually" within the quote is entirely superfluous. "If" statements are logically exception-less, and the Law of Conserved Conversation (That i've just made up) means that "usually" implies exceptions. Otherwise it would be excluded from the quote. So I say, pedantically, "duh. but you're missing the point a bit, aren't you mate?"
I like to think of the principle as a kind of Occam's for action. Don't take elaborate actions to produce some solution that is otherwise trivially easy to produce.
You may want to read something about pragmatics, starting with e.g. the section on conversational implicatures in Chapter 1 of CGEL.
(Your made-up law sounds related to these.)
Huh. The Maxim of Relation does sound very much like what I was trying to go for.
If you cast out all the easy strategies that don't actually work as non-'solutions', then sure, in what remains among the set of solutions, the best is often the easiest, though not easy. I can think of much harder ways to save the world and I'm not trying any of them.
Covril, The Wheel of Time
Is that true (for trees or people)?
Edit: For one example, this person currently linked in the sidebar isn't sure.
If this quote were about people improving through adversity I wouldn't have posted it (I also read that article). But I think it's true for arguments. The last sentence does a better job of fitting the character than illuminating the point so I could have left it out.
Do arguments themselves "improve", rather than simply being right or wrong?
Maybe, since arguments have component parts that can be individually right or wrong; or maybe not, since chains of reasoning rely on every single link; or maybe, since my argument improves (along with my beliefs) as I toss out and replace the old one.
Come to think of it, if "trees grow roots most strongly when wind blows through them" because the trees with weak roots can't survive in those conditions then this would make a very bad metaphor for people.
No, it's probably accurate as stated. I don't know about trees as such, but if you try to start vegetable seedlings indoors and then transfer them outside, they'll often die in the first major wind; the solution is to get the air around them moving while they're still indoors (as with a fan), which causes them to devote resources to growing stronger root systems and stems.
-- Tillaume, The Alloy of Law
-Robert Downey Jr.
I think it's good to be well-calibrated.
It is usually best to be socially confident while making well-calibrated predictions of success. The two are only slightly related and Downey is definitely talking about the social kind of confidence.
Good point. I'm still not sure I like his framing of social interactions as getting people on "your" team (which I may be partly biased in by the source of the quote), but the objection in my initial post isn't a good one.
I think it's best to be well-calibrated, use that to choose your team as one that's going to succeed, and then to be confident.
A somewhat similar sentiment: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2o3/rationality_quotes_september_2010/2kol
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the quote, but this seems to wither if you have something to protect. If I'm having surgery, I don't really want the team of expert surgeons listening to my suggestions. I shouldn't be on my team because I'm not qualified. Highly qualified people should be so that my team will win (and I get to live).
Only if you're not the one with the responsibility to do something to protect it. I don't know the context of the quote, other than apparently being from an interview (with the actor, not any character he has played), but I read it as being about your own efforts to accomplish something. In such matters, you are the first person on your team, and you won't get any others on board by telling them you're not sure this is a good idea. Once you've made the decision that you are going to go for it, you have to then go for it, not sit around wondering if it's the right decision. If you're not acting on a decision, you didn't make it.
-Gloria Steinem
Completely putting teamwork aside, most major contributions to humanity were achieved by standing on the shoulders of those who came before.
You still have to be the right person to be the right person in a team....?
But you don't have to be perfect to be the right person in a team, and you don't have to be "the" right person to be an asset to a team. People with low self-confidence plus low social confidence (plus possibly moralistic ideas about self-reliance) will try to self-improve through their own efforts rather than seeking help, regardless of how much less effective it is, believing they're not worth someone else's attention yet, or being afraid of owing someone, or whatever; quotes like Steinem's reinforce that.
...Maybe. I don't have any actual sources, so I could be totally wrong. Still, I'm not sure I like the focus on "being" rather than doing things.
Who said anything about being perfect?
And if you're an asset, you sound prettymuch like the right person to me.
To me the clause "be the right person" sounds very much active/action-based.
I read that as "looking for the right person to fall in love with". Then the sense is "be the right person for someone else". But that achieves a different goal entirely, since it doesn't make the other person right for you.
There are many cases where you want a different person right for the task.
Romantic partners (inherently), trading and working partners (allowing you to specialize in your comparative advantage), deputies and office-holders (allowing you to deputize), soldiers (allowing you to send someone else to their death to win the war).
I assume the original intent of the quote was about romantic partners, where it means, "Instead of searching so hard, make sure to prioritize being awesome for its own sake."
I was trying to repurpose it to express that action is better than preparing for something to fall into place more generally, and I think it's appealed to people.
How isn't "looking for" or "searching hard" action?
I originally read it as being about politics. We keep thinking that somewhere there's a candidate worth voting for, and then things will be ok, but instead we should be trying to become the worthy candidates, even if only for local office. Or perhaps toward improving the world generally. Instead of deciding whether to pay Yudkowsky or Bostrom to work on existential risk, we should try applying our own talents. Similar to "[T]he phrase 'Someone ought to do something' was not, by itself, a helpful one. People who used it never added the rider 'and that someone is me'."
Skimming Gloria Steinem's biography, I am more confident in this reading.
-Steven Spielberg
Dollars are floppy. It's nice to have a relatively rigid bookmark. I've used tissues and such as bookmarks in the past but they're unsatisfactory. Of course, that was back when I still read books in dead tree format.
-Abstract, Material priming: The influence of mundane physical objects on situational construal and competitive behavioral choice (via Yvain)
My bookmark is prettier than the dollar.
It will fall out. Apart from that, money isn't particularly clean and (especially if considering US currency) not particularly pretty either. I expect people to find a bookmark far more aesthetically pleasing than a note.
How is this a rationality quote? It is rationality-neutral at best.
"Because the dollar is dirty" is one of those pained, stretched explanations people come up with to explain why they do what they do, not the actual reason (even in some small part) the bookmark was invented and became popular.
The question wasn't "Why was the bookmark invented?". If it was, I might have, for example, tried to determine the first time someone used a bookmark (or when it became popular). Then I could have told you precisely how many dollars in present value that dollar would have been worth. That is, moving the goalposts in this way has made your quote worse, not better.
Not even is some small part? That's absurd. Can you not empathise in even a small part with the aesthetic aversion many people have to contaminating things with used currency?
My bookmark is made of two prices of fridge-magnet material. It can be closed around a few pages and the magnetism holds it in place, preventing it from falling out.
Plus dollars in my country are exclusively coins, the smallest note is $5.
It would seem that most of the responders are hopelessly literal....
I find it hard to come up with a deeper meaning for the original statement, so yeah.
Besides, it's not hard to come up with a deeper meaning behind what the responders are saying; in pointing out that an object specifically designed as a bookmark makes a better bookmark than a dollar bill, they're making a statement about more than just dollar bills and bookmarks, but about specialization in general.
"We don't automatically reflect on most things we do, even when spending money. Even lifelong practices can be shown as absurd with a moment's consideration from the right angle. In fact, we're so irrational that we'll pay a dollar for a bookmark!"
A decision with an aesthetic benefit is not irrational. You are misusing "irrational".
(Or was this sarcasm?)
That's clearly the intent - except maybe for that last bit - but it's kinda a poor example, I have to admit.
I don't see why everyone is disagreeing with you. I definitely notice that people have a tendency to buy things labeled for some sort of purpose, where if they thought for a few minutes they could find a way to fulfill that same purpose without spending money. Unfortunately, I can't think of any examples off the top of my head.
Your quote is both literally and connotatively poor. If Spielberg had asked "Why spend two dollars on a bookmark? ... Why not use a dollar as a bookmark?" then there would at least have been some moral along the lines of efficient practicality. Even then it would be borderline.
It takes time and effort (admittedly not much of it, but usually even little of it makes a difference psychologically) to spend $1 on a bookmark. (I would have phrased it as “Why bother spending ...”.)
Why use a bookmark that's worth a whole dollar? I use scrap paper, or a sticky note if falling out is a risk (it almost always isn't.)
I do neither. I use any piece of sufficiently stiff paper I happen to have around (bookmarks purchased by someone else, playing cards, used train tickets, whatever).
Or just fold the corner of the page over.
I'm reminded of a picture I saw on Facebook of a doorstop still in its original packaging used as a doorstop.
-Unknown
-- Paraphrase of joke by Marcus Brigstocke
We can reformulate Tetris as follows: challenges keep appearing (at a fixed rate), and must be solved at the same rate; we cannot let too many unsolved challenges pile up, or we will be overwhelmed and lose the game.
So Tetris is really an anti-procrastination learning tool? Hmmm, wonder why that doesn't sound right….
But the challenge rate is not fixed. It increases at higher levels. So the lesson seems rather hollow: At some point, if you are successful at solving challenges, the rate at which new ones appear becomes too high for you.
It was either that or risk some people playing without stop until their bodies died in the real world.
...thus becoming useful object lessons to the rest of the species, and reducing our average susceptibility to reward systems with low variability. Not quite seeing the problem here.
And todays challenges can be used to remedy yesterdays failures.
There are no happy endings. Endings are the saddest part, So just give me a happy middle And a very happy start.
-Shel Silverstein
X will never reach [arbitrary standard], so let's not try to improve X.
I think the point is not that endings are generally and extrinsically sad, but rather that by definition, an ending is a thing which is sad, if we take the existence of such a thing to be good. (The ending of a bad thing, for example, is an exception, though generally because it allows for the existence of good things). The response, then, would not to be to try to improve endings, but rather to try to do away with them (and, barring that, improve the extrinsic qualities of the non-ending parts).
But but peak/end rule!
-Ledaal Kes (Exalted Aspect Book: Air)
Are they a villain who "solves" people by removing them from their way?
(Alternative response: Does "everything" include the puzzle of identifying something that can't be reduced to a puzzle?)
... You can remove people as problems without doing so euphemistically, i.e. killing them.
If you befriend them, for example.
And, well, yes. That does count as a puzzle.
The statement just seems weird without any context, I guess. It certainly isn't narrow.
Would you trust an AI that was being friendly to you as an attempted "solution" to the "puzzle" you presented?
Well, no, but I would never trust an AI if I couldn't prove (or nobody I trusted could prove) it was Friendly with respect to me, period.
... not that it would much matter, but..
Also, relevance? I'm not really understanding your point in general. Certainly, problems need to be solved, but I would hope that your morality is included as a constraint...
But not necessarily if you're a fictional character, hence my initial question. I think my point is that I'm not convinced the quote actually means anything, either in its original context or in its use here; it's sounding like "everything" just means "things for which the statement is true".
Still don't understand. By definition, if something is hampering you, it presents a problem: sometimes the solution is "leave it alone, all possible 'solutions' are actually worse," but it's still something that bears thinking about.
It is somewhat tautological, I'll grant, but us poor imperfect humans occasionally find tautologies helpful.
That depends, what sort of solution is it trying to find? If it's trying to maximize my happiness, that's all fine and dandy; if it's trying to minimize my capacity as an impediment to its acquisition of superior paperclip-maximizing hardware, I would object. Either way, I base my trust on the AI's goal, rather than its algorithms (assuming that the algorithms are effective at accomplishing that goal).
John C Wright
Jack Handey
Procrastination and The Extended Will 2009
Glenn Reynolds
I'm downvoting this quote. Read at a basic level, it supports a particular economic theory rather than a larger point of rationality.
For the record, the Austrian Business Cycle Theory is not generally accepted by mainstream economists. This isn't the place to discuss why, and it isn't the place to give ABCT the illusion of a "rational" stamp of approval.
"[W]hen you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." -- Sherlock Holmes
"When you have updated on the evidence, whatever is the most probable, however socially unnacceptable, must be believed."
Technically true. Some notable 'improbable' things that remain are the chance that you screwed up your thinking or measuring somewhere or that you are hallucinating. (I agree denotatively but are wary about the connotations.)
Duplicate (although correctly attributed this time).
I remember a response to this which goes something like - when you have eliminated the impossible, what remains may be more improbable than having made a mistake in one of your earlier impossibility proofs.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3m/rationalist_fiction/2p6
-- Stanislaw Lem, White Death
(as far as I know, this sweet short story never have been translated into English; I translated this passage myself from my Russian copy, so I will be glad if someone corrects my mistakes)
Not quite seeing the applicability as a rationality quote; but in "it's bed" you should drop the apostrophe.
-- Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto
Peter Greer
Calvin
This phrase was explicitly in my mind back when I was generalizing the "notice confusion" skill.
When you were what?
Rationality 101 ;^)
Peter Greer
Ariel Castro (according to The Onion)
misattributed often to Plato
Stephen Jay Gould
A proactive interest in the latter would seem to lead to extensive instrumental interest in the former. Finding things (such as convolutions in brains or genes) that are indicative of potentially valuable talent is the kind of thing that helps make efficient use of it.
That's a hard problem, with no reasonable way to measure it in in a large population in sight, or even direction of the relationship taken into account. Ideally you'd take a bunch of kids and look at their brains and then see how they grew up and see whether you could find anything that altered the distribution in similar cases - but ....
Well, you see the problem? It's a sort of twiddling your thumbs style studying, rather than addressing more immediate problems that might do something at a reasonable price/timeline.
There are surprisingly few MRI machines or DNA sequencers in cotton fields and sweatshops. Paraphrasing the original quote from Stephen Jay Gould: The problem is not how good we are at detecting talent; it's where we even bother to look for it.
There was only one Ramanujan; and we are all well-aware of Gould's views on intelligence here, I presume.
they are not well known to me
Turkish proverb
I like it when I hear philosophy in rap songs (or any kind of music, really) that I can actually fully agree with:
-- Vince Staples, "Versace Rap"