Rationality Quotes December 2013

Cyan

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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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

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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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

You can't legitimately cherry pick a few examples

If you are going to tell me what i can and can't do, then please let me return the favor.

You can't effectively counter a list of prices of items whose quality is the same in the 70s and the 10s but whos price is quite different without giving at least a few examples whos price goes in the other direction. It simply doesn't make sense to challenge my methodology as cherry picking, which it was not, without doing the minimum amount of work it would require to check to see if you have any case at all by discovering even one item whos quality has not changed much between the 70s and the 10s but whos price has decreased. T-shirts? cardboard boxes? soft-serve ice cream from a truck? A bus ride across a city? You have probably literally a million things you could choose from to check their prices and you don't bother finding even one?

It makes more sense in a discussion like this, if you realize I am right to just accept that and to not make arguments against me that have the form of sensible concerns but lack the content.

I'm not cherry picking examples. I'm remembering my trips to the store and library on bicycle when I was 12 years old and other trips I took around that age, and what the prices were. A slice of pizza was $0.25. There is simply NOTHING in my recollection that was more expensive then than it is now, not even cherries.

You can't effectively counter a list of prices of items whose quality is the same in the 70s and the 10s but whos price is quite different without giving at least a few examples whos price goes in the other direction. It simply doesn't make sense to challenge my methodology as cherry picking, which it was not, without doing the minimum amount of work it would require to check to see if you have any case at all by discovering even one item whos quality has not changed much between the 70s and the 10s but whos price has decreased.

...he said, on the Internet.

1Jiro13y

You can do anything you want, it just wouldn't be a legitimate argument. [...] You're either cherry-picking examples, or by coincidence you're picking cherry-pickable examples. I can't read your mind, and if you indeed chose the examples for that reason, it's just a coincidence that you chose examples that are very inapt. But they're still inapt. Comic books specifically, as well your other examples of gasoline and college educations, have gone up in price a lot for well-understood reasons that are unrelated to the fact that things in general go up in price. [...] That slice of pizza is only "more expensive" because of inflation. Same for your T-shirts and bus rides. And if all you're saying is that prices have gone up according to inflation, then of course they have. But by the standards of the post you were replying to, and almost anyone else, that means that pizza hasn't gone up in price at all--that was about price compared to income and income has gone up because of inflation too, so prices have not increased relative to income. .>You have probably literally a million things you could choose from to check their prices and you don't bother finding even one? That million things only went up in price because of inflation, which doesn't count. Comic books (and gas and college) are different because they have gone up faster than inflation, and thus really are "more expensive", but they're more expensive for specific reasons.