Rationality Quotes September 2013

Vaniver

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

"Aw, you can't feed your family on minimum wage? well who told you to start a fucking family when your skills are only worth minimum wage?"

Pax Dickinson, former Chief Technology Officer at Business Insider, on rational family planning in the context of modern capitalism.

(in response to "That's perhaps an argument for the parents to starve but the children are moral innocents wrt their creation. Solutions?") - "If you remove all consequences to children from their parents stupid behavior, how will they ever learn any better?"

Him again on personal responsibility, setting proper incentives for the lazy masses, and learning one's place in society early on.

Upvoted on the basis of the intended point, but honestly, you kinda deserved all the downvotes you got for that, man.

Also, I can kinda see saying this to the people in question, as a sort of Heroic Responsibility thing, but what's actually going on here is the precise opposite of Heroic Responsibility.

1Fronken13y

... that is not rationality that is a mild infohazard trying to hack you into taking actions that make people starve. It should be kept away from people and counteragents spread to defend against further outbreaks. Seriously why would you post that as a rationality quote.

0Estarlio13y

This isn't rational. It's just elitist snobbery. You can use the exact same structure of argument with respect to anything: [...] Structurally identical. It's an ideology of knives in the dark, the screams of the dying and enslaved, and the blood red light of fire on steel. Those who honestly endorse its underlying principles would just as happily endorse any barbarism on the strength of the defeated's inability to escape it, provided it went on at some suitable distance from them. Why not be honest and sum up the only real thing it says? - Vae victus.

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Rationality Quotes September 2013

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Rationality Quotes September 2013

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