Rationality Quotes October 2013

A1987dM

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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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

Sure, but who claims/acts as if isolated facts do produce a science? This seems to be taking down a strawman.

Also, the analogy is misleading. A heap of bricks arranged in the right way with the right sorts of mutual connectors does produce a house. However, even an appropriately arranged and connected set of facts does not produce a science. At best, it produces a theory, which is a product of a science, but not a science itself. Science is more akin to architecture than to a house.

Sure, but who claims/acts as if isolated facts do produce a science?

Science classes, especially before high school level, are often taught as though science is just a collection facts about trees or dinosaurs or whatever. Anyone who hasn't had the benefit of a good science program in their school might continue to think that science is just experiments to generate facts.

6Richard_Kennaway13y

Korzybski is not here arguing against anything, but making an exposition. I won't type in the whole passage (which is only a Google search away anyway), but the quotation is from the beginning of chapter 4, entitled "On Structure", which is the first chapter of the second section of Science and Sanity, entitled "General on Structure". The first section, of three chapters, was introductory, an overture. He begins the main opera by drawing attention to two clear trends in the development of science: the increasing reliance on experiments, and the increase of verbal rigour. "The second tendency has an importance equal to that of the first; a number of isolated facts does not produce a science any more than a heap of bricks produces a house. The isolated facts must be put in order and brought into mutual structural relations in the form of some theory. Then, only, do we have a science."

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Rationality Quotes October 2013

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Rationality Quotes October 2013

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