Rationality Quotes December 2013

Cyan

Rationality quotes time!

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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.)
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Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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.
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Rationality quotes time!

The usual rules:

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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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

I think to answer that, we'd need to be clear about what we mean by saying that a community "has" a technology.

If I go to a tribe of hunter-gatherers, hand them a bunch of solar-powered toasters, and leave... do they now "have toaster technology"?

I think not. I'd have to think a bit harder to define exactly what I would consider to be "having technology", but my intuition says that being able to build the thing, and/or having people in your society who understand how it works, is a requirement.

To our hypothetical hunter-gatherers, the toasters are outright magic. They haven't the first clue of the most basic scientific or technological principles behind the artifacts that are in their physical possession.

So I'd have to ask what you think is an example of an intervention that causes a community to have a technology, where previously they did not.

Jiro's example of making mobile phones available to a town that lacks the facilities for building its own mobile phones (factories, etc) seems to me a good enough example of an intervention that causes a community to have a technology they previously lacked.

6Jiro12y

In the present day, the average third world country doesn't "have" cell phones, by this definition. In fact, the average first world inner city doesn't have them either.