Rationality Quotes February 2014
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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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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"The story of Japanese railways during the earthquake and tsunami is the story of an unceasing drumbeat of everything going right [...] The overwhelming response of Japanese engineering to the challenge posed by an earthquake larger than any in the last century was to function exactly as designed. Millions of people are alive right now because the system worked and the system worked and the system worked.
That this happened was, I say with no hint of exaggeration, one of the triumphs of human civilization. Every engineer in this country should be walking a little taller this week. We can’t say that too loudly, because it would be inappropriate with folks still missing and many families in mourning, but it doesn’t make it any less true."
--Patrick McKenzie, "Some Perspective on the Japan Earthquake"
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/03/13/some-perspective-on-the-japan-earthquake
(Disaster is not inevitable.)
"To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth." Wittgenstein. "Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough," p. 119
-- L. Bob Rife, Snow Crash
"Nothing exists in contradiction to nature, only in contradiction to what we know of it." - Dana Scully, The X-Files
--Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage.
Charlatans also tend to do this.
Often, a charlatan would dedicate her life to selling boats. When questioned if she really believes in the floods, obviously she does! Why else would she be wasting her life as a boatwright?
Given that the most well known story of a prophet predicting a flood involved him building a boat, that doesn't sound like anything particularly insightful.
What's the context?
I think it means that Prophets aren't worth taking seriously unless they are staking their own reputation, well-being, or money on what they predict. There are many people who claim to know a particular thing for certain but who curiously aren't putting all of their own money on it. A perfect example probably being people selling stocks and investment plans.
The Departed
A comment on slatestarcodex.
I had to see the context to parse that.
He's saying that he's better at tests than he is at reality. Not that he's better at tests than reality is.
Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
--Mike Tyson
-- José Ortega y Gasset
You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.
(Wholeheartedly endorse this quote.)
It seems that there must be some corollary here. That guy who is being taught of the art of war seems to be benefiting from fighting often with one enemy. If you are either better at learning from experience or have more need to learn arts of war (ie. you are the newbie not the master) then fighting often with one enemy seems to help you (all non-epistemic issues such as "all your soldiers die" being equal).
Fighting someone a lot teaches him your art of war, but may not teach him the art of war in general. He may be better off fighting multiple people, learning less about each one.
- Tao Te Ching
- Straw dog in Wikipedia
--Scott Aaaronson, Retiring falsifiability? A storm in Russell’s teacup
Philosophy Bro writing as Popper:
Also, this from his summary of Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra":
-- Lewis Mumford, The Conduct of Life
Steve Sailor
--Thomas Sowell
Colonel John Boyd
On the other hand:
Jonathan Swift
Or, of course, some combination thereof.
Richard Feynman in Cargo Cult Science
Peter Watts, Blindsight
I'm curious as to the context.
I actually had difficulty following that part of the book. I think the question was something like, what use is self-awareness? And I think the answer the narrator came to, after being forced to understand, was gung vg'f abg rfcrpvnyyl hfrshy naq va snpg bar bs gur bgure punenpgref jnf abg frys njner.
I've read Blindsight, and looked it up again for the context, but I still don't see why this is a rationality quote.
The most obvious rationalist message I see is that some questions have answers which are simple, obvious, and wrong. For us humans, some kind of shock, confusion, or other well-timed interruption, can help us get past that first answer.
What khafra said, and also pattern-matching. You ask me a question, I answer the question I thought you asked, which is not necessarily the same.
-- Confucius
E.O. Wilson
"Washington had always taught himself from experience. He learned the lessons of the American war all the more readily because he had no conventional lessons to unlearn. … Long before the end of the war, Washington had become much more effective than any of his military opponents. But this did not mean that what he had taught himself would have made him a great general on the battlefields of Europe. Evolved not from theory but from dealing with specific problems, his preeminence was achieved through a Darwinian adaptation to environment. It was the triumph of a man who knows how to learn, not in the narrow sense of studying other people's conceptions, but in the transcendent sense of making a synthesis from the totality of experience." -- James Thomas Flexner in Washington : The Indispensable Man (1984), Chapter 23 : Goodbye to War, p. 183
Samwise Gamgee, The Lord of the Rings
Joel Spolsky
Yeah, but that happens anyway.
Richard Feynman in Cargo Cult Science
I wonder how Feynman knew this. The usual source of US reading score data is the NAEP, but AFAIK the earliest nationally representative NAEP results are from 1971 & 1975, and Feynman gave that speech in 1974. (Wouldn't it be painfully ironic if...?)
1974 is well after the publication of Why Johnny Can't Read. (You may not be familiar with it, but it was a big influence at the time.)
He had probably seen data on a state or local level and then extrapolated to the rest of the country, reasoning that teaching methods were similar nationally.
Original source unknown (at least to me).
ETA: Now that I think about it, I should explain this a little. It's funny and all, but it's a rationality quote because it conveys to me the idea that Eliezer calls nihil supernum. If your best isn't enough then God won't save you, your parents won't save you, Superman won't save you. You just...don't get whatever it is you wanted.
Here you go
Not necessarily. There's Lady Luck :-)
Thanks for the link, but that's not the original source ;-)
How are you distinguishing the true original source from the it-is-actually-secondary "original" source?
By age. Despair, Inc, which invented the demotivator, was incorporated in 1998. I first ran across the quote on Usenet in 1994 or 1995.
Ah, a good point. It's interesting that Google in unable to locate this quote before it became a demotivator.
-- Christopher Ryan
But to argue that our ancestors were dietary omnivores is a criticism of vegetarianism.
One man's modus ponens...
How so?
It implies that vegeterian diets are harmful and/or suboptimal in all kinds of unforeseen ways, because we haven't evolved to tolerate them, let along optimize for them.
I take your point, though I don't think I'd go so far as to say that the fact that our ancestors were dietary omnivores implies that vegetarianism is sub-optimal. Our evolutionary history is not by any means sure to provide us with optimal dietary behaviors or digestive processes.
Only if you make a few extra assumptions which may or may not be correct, and may or may not also apply to monogamy. (Or commit the naturalistic fallacy.)
The paleo diet movement urges that people should eat as our distant ancestors ate, so where does that leave his analogy?
To the conclusion that we should totally have more sex with everyone.
Somehow I don't have an objection to that.
Well, to be pedantic Christopher Ryan just said “no more”, not “no more and no less”, though the latter was clearly implicated.
Except that the actual diets they propose don't particularly resemble what our distant ancestors likely ate.
I don't know -- the core of paleo diets is "Don't eat grains, don't eat seed oils, avoid processed foods. Eat mostly meat, fish, eggs, fruits, and vegetables (with some specifics about particular starchy and non-starchy veggies)".
Of course some paleo people go off the deep end and rail about the dangers of nightshades and how every plant from the New World is a horror to human biochemistry. But I always thought about them as the lunatic fringe.
Why do you think that doesn't resemble what our distant ancestors likely ate?
Our distant ancestors couldn't go to the supermarket and buy meat, fish, eggs, fruits and vegetables.
It's actually unclear what their diet looked like, in particular what proportion of calories they derived from meat. I suppose that their diets varied greatly depending on geographical location, season, etc.
In any case, the meat of wild game animals is nutritionally different than the meat of domesticated sedentary animals, typically feed on soy and corn, and wild berries and tubers are nutritionally different than cultivated fruits and vegetables.
Then we actually don't know whether paleo diets resemble what our distant ancestors likely ate, do we?
That's a pretty certain conclusion.
And yes, I agree that game meat and wild tubers are quite different from pork chops and supermarket sweet potatoes. I am not sure why this is relevant, though. Ignoring agriculture is pretty much impossible for most people and, in any case, we are mostly talking about the right direction to shift your diet in, not about exact matches.
I suppose they may be similar by coincidence.
The point is that the shifts suggested by the paleo dieters aren't necessarily in the direction of truly ancestral diets.
For instance, paleo dieters often suggest to reduce the intake of calories from starches and increase calories from meat, because paleolithic people supposedly ate that way. Setting aside the obvious naturalistic fallacy, it's not actually clear (and it can be quite well false) that paleolithic people normally consumed less starches and more meat than the typical Western pattern diet (or the Mediterranean diet, or other "healthy" variations of the Western pattern diet).
EDIT:
To expand they previous point, it seems that mainstream nutritionists and paleo dieters both agree that the Western pattern diet is not very healthy. Both suggest to reduce sugars, salt, alcohol, caffeine and processed foods.
The difference is that mainstream nutritionists suggest to reduce meat and dairy, while paleo dieters suggest to reduce starchy foods. Paleo dieters can't really support their non-mainstream suggestions with evidence of ancestral dietary patterns.
First, as we agreed, there were many different "truly ancestral" diets. Second, it depends on the starting point. I will assert that if you start with a typical American diet, eating most any kind of paleo will shift you in the right direction. We can argue about starches and such, but it's pretty clear that no one ate large quantities of grains or seed oils 100kya, not to mention all the processed food-like substances :-/
Apart from the fact that, as has been pointed out, there is something wrong with this quote's obvious premise that the omnivorosity of our ancestors is not an argument against vegetarianism, I find the connotations of the phrase "sexual omnivores" somewhat questionable. It suggests that sexuality is somehow of predatory nature.
Our ancestors were dietary omnivores. As a result, we are optimized for that diet, and while that doesn't mean that it's the best possible diet, it is a good reason to believe that you're better off eating some meat. If you're just concerned about you, that's a pretty good criticism of vegetarianism. If you're concerned about animals, or you believe that a god you trust told you not to eat meat, or something like that, it's still a valid criticism, but it's a lot less important and it doesn't address the main reason you chose to be a vegetarian.
I am not a vegetarian, but the usual rebuttal to this is that the standard Western diet bears little more resemblance to the ancestral version than the vegetarian alternative: the nutritional profile of largely sedentary farm animals, lots of grains, and cultivated fruits and vegetables doesn't look much like that of (say) wild tubers, berries, fish, and occasionally an antelope that you pursued into exhaustion and clubbed with a rock. This as far as I can tell is true (albeit complicated by the fact that we have little good data on what our ancestral diets actually looked like, evocative pictures aside, and also by the fact that the best modern analogues we have are fantastically varied), but it isn't a positive argument in favor of vegetarianism.
The analogy to sexual behavior is left as an exercise.
I am a vegetarian, but I still feel like vegetables and meat are really different. If our ancestors ate meat, and we don't, that's a significant difference, even if the precise meat and vegetables aren't the same.
Vegan diets generally lack necessary micro-nutrients unless integrated with supplements or fortified foods.
Vegetarian diets that include diary and/or eggs are usually considered healthy.
Because our ancestors were only omnivores on those relatively rare occasions they could pull it off, and had to be able to function without it, because it was often impossible or very hard?
Oh. Huh.
Yeah, I can see how that might be roughly analogous. It didn't sound like it, just based on the quote ...
It could be, if you subscribe to a weaker version of Kant's "ought implies can" that says (roughly) "ought implies psychologically feasible".
The basic thought here is that moral principles are suspect if they are SO difficult to follow that practically everybody is just always drowning in akrasia & hypocrisy. Think of a moral code that forbids talking, sex, and non-bland food for everyone - it's not physically impossible for humans to follow such a code, so it doesn't violate Kant's original dictum, but it's just not reasonable to expect it to happen in practice.
So I could see an argument that says that asking all humans to be monogamous is like asking them to take a lifelong vow of silence. I don't buy that argument & I actually think monogamy is important, but the logical structure makes sense to me.
Since most people have probably stolen some nonessential thing at least once in their lifetime, the same reasoning means that a moral principle of never stealing nonessential things is also suspect. You'd have to have a principle "don't steal too often" or something like that, not "don't steal"/
If most people have stolen something (have they?) it seems more likely to be out of carelessness than out of irresistible temptation. If you asked me to go 5 years without stealing anything, no problem. I promise I'll never try a raisin from the bulk bin, or use vidtomp3, again.
No sex, talking, or spicy food for 5 years? Even if I could form the intention to do that, I'll fail miserably. It's not a reasonable thing to expect oneself to do.
I don't think so, especially if you also count the ‘theft’ of non-rivalrous goods such as soft copies of copyrighted material. (I dunno about how we could set about to find out who is right about “most people”, though.)
Except Christopher Ryan is talking of people who choose to be monogamous or vegetarians.
Still, somebody on Less Wrong once told me that they thought I wouldn't be “free” to be monogamous in the US because if I stopped being so in the future the police wouldn't punish me. Of course the exact same thing applies to vegetarianism, but that person said I am free to be on a diet (and tapped out).
I think I understand the idea Eugene is getting at in the sibling thread. Let me see if I can explain it a little differently.
As Sister Y explained in this excellent article, people no longer have a way of committing themselves to marriage. This is a problem for two reasons, neither of which applies to vegetarianism.
In a sense, marriage IS commitment, and talking about a "marriage" without commitment is like talking about a "prisoner" who can leave his cell any time he wants, or a "warranty" which can be ignored at the company's discretion. Now, you could argue that this is a matter of semantics, and to some extent you would be right, but there is a deeper issue here; that marriage with commitment and "marriage" without commitment are so far apart in relationship-space that we should treat them as completely different things, and that we might be justified in not wanting to call these clusters of relationships by the same name at all (some people like to call the modern relationship cluster Marriage 2.0 for just this reason).
If you can't credibly commit to doing something, you are going to have trouble finding people who are willing to expose themselves to risk should you fail to do so. Thus, by removing your freedom to pre-commit yourself to fulfilling a marriage contract, your freedom to enter into these contracts has been reduced (indeed, the collapse of the marriage rate appears to be an empirical confirmation of this model). Thomas Schelling covered this in his The Strategy of Conflict.
Now, the term under discussion is "monogamy", not "marriage", but back to problem 1; the modern serial "monogamy" is a completely different cluster of relationships from the old monogamy, which implied marriage. Dalrock, for example, argues that serial "monogamy" is a promiscuous and immoral relationship model, which are things he doesn't believe about the traditional religious monogamy model. Whether you agree with him or not, the point is, again, that modern serial "monogamy" is pretty different from old monogamy which meant things like not marrying two wives at once, and maybe some people want to avoid overloading an existing term to incorporate such a different new concept.
For my own part, I would say that two people who are continuing to live together despite both of them preferring to stop doing so, solely because they committed to doing so at some time in the past, is at least as far away from what the word "marriage" properly refers to as two people who are living together today because they feel like it but would happily walk away from each other tomorrow if they found themselves feeling differently.
But I accept that this position is not universally accepted, and in particular that other people might use "marriage" to refer to the first kind of relationship, even among people who can't stand the sight of each other, aren't speaking to each other, don't share goals or values, etc., as long as they are barred from (for example) marrying anyone else and as long as the legal, financial and organizational obligations that go along with marriage can be imposed on them successfully.
And I can see how, for someone whose concept of marriage works this way, the analysis you perform here makes sense: I can't meaningfully precommit to not hating the very sight of you in twenty years, but if marriage is unrelated to whether I hate the sight of you, then I can meaningfully precommit to remaining married to you... and the way I do that is by subjecting myself to a legal system that continues imposing those obligations on me for the rest of my life, no matter what happens.
And, sure, I can see how such a person would similarly want words like "monogamy" to refer to such a lifetime commitment, and words like "divorce" to refer to an empty set, etc.
Just to confirm, this is in fact a decent summary of my position.
Well, in the comment I was talking about in the grandparent (which I'd link to if this thing was faster) I said “relationship with my girlfriend” rather than “marriage with my wife”, which I'd think makes clear the former is what I was talking about. Maybe “monogamy” it's a bad label for it, but ‘$word is a bad label for $thing’ hardly implies ‘I'm not free to do $thing’. (And while it's unlike traditional lifelong monogamy, it's also unlike Bay-Area-technophile-style polyamory, and given that around here more people practice the latter than the former it seems more useful to me to have a word to distinguish it from the latter than from the former.)
(I'm not sure what exactly Christopher Ryan meant by “monogamy”, but he was opposing it to EEA-style sexual omnivory, which from his description sounds more like Bay-Area-technophile-style polyamory than First-World-small-town-mainstream-style serial monogamy to me.)
The difference between monogamy and vegetarianism here is that monogamy requires a binding commitment from another person. Thus, the inability to make a binding contract is a problem for monogamy but not vegetarianism.
How does that distinguish being free to be monogamous and being free to be vegetarian? The number of vegetarians who make binding contracts to be vegetarian is essentially nonexistent.
Why?
Because monogamy relies on your spouse also being monogamous.
And playing chess relies on your opponent also following the rules of chess, so aren't we free to play chess either? (Or will the police arrest me if I castle while my king is in check?)
So what?
Monogamy just means that you do not seek more than one sexual or romantic partner.
You can be monogamous while your party isn't. Whether this would suit you is a matter of personal preferences.
Or, two partners can be monogamous even if they have no legal mean to bind themselves to.
I also mean that by “monogamy”, but other people in this conversation have made clearer they mean something narrower by that word, so this discussion sounds like “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” when Alice has already made clear she means an auditory sensation and Bob has already made clear he means an acoustic wave.
Tapping out.
--Paul Krugman, "The Trouble With Being Abstruse"
big inferential distances usually --> long chain of reasoning --> at least one step is more likely to be wrong
On the other hand some things really are complicated.
Right, but I think the spirit of the Krugman quote is that complication may be unavoidable, but shouldn't be made into a goal or a badge of honour the way the theorist did. Also that complicatedness is ceteris paribus weak evidence of incorrectness, because of the logic I stated earlier.
The implication seems anti-rationality.
As Noah Smith points out
Um. We can't forecast anything so let's construct some narratives..? :-/
I think the point is more "good forecasting requires keeping an eye on what your models are actually saying about the real world."
That's not what the quote expresses.
The quote basically says that there must be a dumbed-down version of describing whatever you are doing and you must know it -- otherwise you're clueless. And that just ain't true.
Specifically, it's not true in most hard sciences (an in math, too, of course).
Krugman, however, used to do research in economics where there is not much hard stuff and even that spectacularly doesn't work. Accordingly, there is nothing which is really complicated but does produce real results (as in, again, hard sciences). Given this, he thinks that really complicated things are just pointless and one must construct narratives -- because that's how economics, basically, exerts its influence. It makes up stories (about growth rates and money and productivity and... ) and if a story is too complicated it's no good.
That's fine for economics but a really bad path to take for disciplines which are actually grounded in reality.
OTOH it was Feynman who said something like ‘we don't know how to explain [something] to freshmen, therefore we don't really understand it yet’, and Einstein and Rutherford are alleged to have said similar things about explaining stuff to grandmothers and bartenders respectively.
He probably was using the word “understand” in a relatively narrow sense (after all he was the same person who said that no-one understood QM), and I agree with your general point, but certain people do overestimate how impossible it is to explain certain things in a way that can be understood by intelligent laymen (as done e.g. in Feynman's QED).
I think according to Feynman the fact that nobody understands QM is the reason why we can't easily teach it to freshman.
In some sense I think modern physics even dropped the goal of understanding. It got replaced by the mantra of "Shut up and calculate."
I also often underrate it. I once tried to teach a first year student in informatics A the principle of recursion. The whole course uses Haskel to make a point of teaching recursion. I don't think why was stupid but the new phenomenological primitive of recursion was really hard to get into her brain. I think I spent 2-3 hours in one-on-one tutoring.
There no way to explain a concept that requires 3 new phenomenological primitives that a layman doesn't have to that layman to make him really understand. You might find substitutions and explain the concept in a way that reduces to primitives he already has, but then you aren't really explaining the full concept.
You might enjoy the book How the Hippies Saved Physics by David Kaiser, if you haven't already read it.
Thanks, I will put it on my reading list.
Yes, I think Krugman was just repeating a well-known observation without meaning all that much by it. However I think my point still stands: people in hard sciences (where results are checked against reality) can afford to make such observations, people in soft sciences (where what matters is sounding convincing) can not.
http://xkcd.com/1330
Better read than excerpted in full.
Wait, hold on. You can't just flood Hell. There are people down there, apparently preserved well enough to torture for eternity without ageing (except if ageing is the torture, of course). Surely there's some way to exploit this!
Also, Hell would mean Lucifer is somewhere down there. Do you think we can dredge him up for a decent Faustian bargain? Any decent LW-er should be able to do a few things with Faust's traditional Omni-Knowledge that should render Christian-style immortal souls obsolete and unnecessary, and possibly irretrievable when Lucifer comes collecting as well.
Let's get Munchkining, people.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheSalvationWar
Ehh, The Salvation War has some interesting moments about facing down existential threats and not giving up and building a bright future for humanity across the corpses of eldritch horrors, but you have to be willing to slog through a lot of drek. I read the first book of The Salvation War and it can't seem to make up its mind just to what extent it's supposed to be following any particular cosmology, mythology, or theology. I get the impression that it wants to be a chronicle of the moment when humanity cast down the Hordes of Hell, but it's executed more like a chronicle of the moment when humanity engaged in massive amounts of gun porn against acid-blooded fire-spitting lightning-throwing ogres, that happened to be called demons. I say ogres because they're large, brutish, stupid, and generally fill much the same niche as ogres do in Dungeons&Dragons. Whereas many of the classical demonic attributes like temptation, seduction, offering forbidden knowledge, reading the hearts of men to know your dark secrets and embarassing desires, or confronting you with a litany of your sins, have been left more or less by the wayside.
I got the impression that The Salvation War might have happened when the author read a synopsis of the Old Testament and noticed that, with a few obvious exceptions like that creation narrative thing, we can now do just about everything that God's cited as doing. Which is a nifty observation and would make for a good short story, but I don't think it can quite carry something the length of a long novel.
Particularly in the MilSF genre, which devolves rapidly if it ever becomes obvious that the central conflict's heavily weighted towards the protagonists.
Your impression is exactly correct. That is literally what happened, at least according to the TVTropes page.
They do have seduction. They just never managed to use it successfully. Mostly because people quickly started wearing tinfoil hats. That doesn't stop it completely, but if everyone can see that you're a demon, all the pheromones will do is make them stop being uncomfortable with you.
They can read the hearts of men to know their dark secrets and embarrassing desires, but they've never used it for more than sorting souls into the nine circles of hell, for no adequately explained reason.
So the humans win because the demons are incompetent at using their abilities.
It's more because of counters. I don't think that was even the main reason tinfoil hats became popular.
Although the demons could have made much better use of their portals. Emptying volcanoes onto cities isn't easy, but heaven later showed that a pile of rocks can do major damage, if you drop them from high enough.
I got the impression that heaven would have won had Lemuel actually thought they could, instead of figuring out how he could come out on top when they lose.
It's clever, but I don't think the workers would be irrational for sealing it up.
If Hell is real, then it makes sense to conclude Christianity or Islam is mostly true too. Which means that a super-powerful agent wants those people tortured. If you try and save them, you will fail. (There's no thwarting an omnipotent or near-omnipotent being). And this agent will probably torture you too for trying.
Edit: In other words, "Nobody fucks with the Jesus."
When I try and imagine what the god who could exist and call himself Yahweh and not have been noticed until now would do in a situation, my brain spits out "do nothing and continue to hide oneself, because it was part of the plan all along"
So maybe by flooding Hell you're acausally making Yahweh decide in advance when he made the plan "I'm gonna torture people up until this person floods Hell." instead of "I'm gonna torture them forever."
Cool response! Upvoted. But when I saw the comic, I read it as:
"Hey! Certain things are pretty scary and seem to be beyond our human abilities to deal with! But in the face of fear, we should size things up and take action, large-scale action if need be." In other words, a metaphor for death. (But I've been seeing many things as metaphors for death lately, so your mileage may vary.)
The "Yahweh wants it this way" conclusion is interesting, but then again: If God had to put Hell literally underground, he seems like more a Philip Pullman-ish "mortal god" than an all-powerful superbeing, since he works on the same material plane as us, more or less. (Imagine, for example, what the Devil would be in a literal underground hell. Invincible monster? Probably nothing a few nukes couldn't deal with.) Or perhaps they found the door to Hades and they'll get to face off against a (very beatable) Greek pantheon.
Either way: Better to wage war on Hell than let it sit there. I don't trust any superbeing not to send me there, however pure a life I lead (even if we're just thinking about Christianity vs. Islam, I seem to have only half a chance at Heaven).
How is this a rationality quote? The main conceit amounts deciding who would win in a fight based on how awesome Monroe happens to find them.
"Let's just seal up Hell and leave it there" = "Let's just accept the good things about death and leave it there". But I see lots of things with LW glasses on at this point, so it could be a stretch. Also just a fun example of seeing problems from a new angle
If I hadn't read Three Worlds Collide, I would very likely not have gotten Black Hat Guy's point in that comic.
To me that seemed as more of a case of,
"Let's flood hell with the ocean, Satan won't escape" = "Let's just put this AI in a box, it won't get out".
-- Horace
Nassim Taleb
Nassim Taleb
Submitted for a fun discussion:
-- Slavoj Zizek
(Several versions of this quote exist, with this seeming to be the oldest, dating to 2005, but he also articulated the same sentiment at the Occupy Wall Street protests, which is notable because they took place during a period when the established system of capitalism was in a self-acknowledged crisis.)
Rationality principle being invoked? What looks like impossibility or inevitability is often just a failure to generate alternative hypotheses.
I disagree with everything that Zizek says in this passage. What is strange about recognizing that global capitalism is here to stay, given the track record of the other two ideologies he mentions? The "cosmic" catastrophes (which are merely earthbound) aren't something that I see getting much interest from the general public, let alone obsession. Global warming does get interest but he doesn't use that example. The examples he does give, asteroids and viruses, are real things, that anyone who knows about agrees are real problems. They are in fact easier to imagine than any "radical change in capitalism", because they are vastly simpler. Newtonian physics applied to rocks in near vacuum. Replicators whose only perception of the world is as atoms they can use to make more of themselves. There is nothing paradoxical about this.
Absent from the passage is any hint of an idea for the radical change in capitalism that he presumably wants to see. Perhaps he describes one elsewhere?
What is strange? The complete failure to imagine anything other than capitalism, communism, or fascism, to think outside "things we have already tried" despite the observation that the things we've already tried all suck.
Personally speaking, I could give you a long, detailed proposal for a significantly different economic system, which, notably, does not require human beings to begin behaving in radically different ways, nor requires throwing anyone in camps of any kind. What I cannot do is give you a neat, one-word name for my proposed system (which is, of course, open to revisions and improvements, blah blah blah), because anything with a one-word name is already so fixed and set-in-stone as to be either the status quo or non-novel.
A rational individual, and especially a trans-whatever individual, should no more believe there are only three economic systems than he believes there are only three flavors of ice-cream.
I think you're projecting; it's by no means a mutually agreed observation that these things all suck. Plenty of people think that capitalism is great. Some, despite the evidence of the past century, still think communism is great - the author of that quote, Slavoj Zizek, prominent among them. And while few openly call themselves Fascists, there's actually no shortage of people holding views that fit broadly in that spectrum.
To change your analogy:
Alice: Chocolate ice-cream is the best.
Bob: No, vanilla is the most delicious.
Eli: Look, we're all agreed that chocolate and vanilla ice-cream both suck. So let's all try pistachio!
A&B together: No!!!
That's a very good point. However, I would still call it a failure of rationality if it went like this:
Alice: Chocolate is best.
Bob: No, vanilla is delicious.
Me: I don't really like either of those, so let's get pistachio.
A&B together: There's no such thing as ice-cream flavors other than chocolate and vanilla. Now hurry up and cast the tie-breaking vote!
-The Last Psychiatrist
A lot of stories are about characters trying to fix problems in their lives, but to claim that this is "story" as a whole isn't really accurate.
You could gather a bunch of kids around a campfire and tell them how the Earth turns and the Sun rises in the morning when we rotate into its light, then it becomes dark as we spin away from it. If the kids didn't know this, they would probably be fascinated by it. This would have nothing to do with a character putting their life in order.
In order to innovate, it helps to find the most reductionist definitions of things that you can, so you can find new ways to do that thing. In the case of "story," it's more accurate to say that it's communicating a series of events that give people enjoyable emotions. You get a lot of potential emotions out of talking about people trying to overcome problems, but you also get some enjoyable emotions out of other things, like my example of the Sun lighting the Earth, which gives the feeling of satisfying curiosity.
Did you actually do this experiment in reality?
I also think that the kids would treat the Earth and the Sun as protagonists.
Some of the kids might do that out of habit, but the value of the story is independent of whether or not they do that, thus protagonists, while very common and very useful in storytelling, are not required.
Also, it's not a story. It's a fact. It might be a fascinating fact. But it's not narration.
Hi Cruetzer,
Stories can be factual. Those aren't mutually-exclusive categories.
I didn't mean to say that factual events cannot constitute a story in principle, although I see how you arrived at that implicature. When I said "It's a fact", what I had in mind was that that is the reason why you would tell it to children. Because you're not supposed to tell people things that are not stories and also not facts.
Hi,
You definitely can tell factual things to children (or people in general) in order to teach them about the world. But, you can also tell them factual things in order to let them hear something interesting or stimulating while they're bored.
Sort-of like how someone might tell you how their car broke down when they come in late to work. And if you go to a comedy club later, he might tell you about the same thing, but for a different reason: Because it's funny.
So when I bring up the sun-moon example at a campfire, I intend to mean it as being something that will draw the kid's interest (basically an emotional effect), and yeah, I imagine it as being told in a way where it is more like narration and describes thing in a more dramatic way. But since it's intended to create an emotional effect, and the factual nature of it is really much less important, I say that's a story, since the emotion effect is what I've found the core purpose of storytelling to be.
Hopefully I put that clearly.
That would be an example of a story without a protagonist. Your life has, by definition, a protagonist; you. it cannot therefore be a story without a protagonist. It might not be 'story' as a whole, but as long as you desire something, it seems to me that the story of your life will fit into that definition.
True, but that is not the defining aspect of 'story'; nor is your scenario of a campfire. There's nothing stopping anyone from reading the phone book while sitting around a campfire, but that does not make it a story.
Am I missing something, or is this almost a tautology? "Sometimes you will desire things. I don't know if you'll obtain them." Is there anything else that that quote says?
You are missing something.
The quote says that we seek the object of desire as a means to bring our lifes into balance. As a spoke lately about Eliezer in relation to story telling it means Eliezer is trying to safe the world from UFAI in order to fulfill his psychological need to bring his own life in order.
The way I imagine Eliezer he would tell you that you misunderstand him if you would treat him like he just wants to safe the world because he has a strong need to bring his own life in order. He might tell you that psychoanalysts are full of crap if they identify an imbalance in his life as a course for his quest to safe the world.
Most people are not seriously out in a quest to safe the world. If you believe in what the psychoanalysis textbook said you might ask: "What event happened that brought so much imbalance into Eliezer life that he went into the quest to safe the world?"
-- @superlativeish
Having just looked this up, it reads like a walk-through to a point-and-click adventure.
Yes, the early point-and-click adventures were based on these types of fairy tales.
G.K. Chesterton
I feel there is an important insight here, but somewhat hidden. Let me try to capture it in one domain: mathematics.
Any mathematician will tell you that the way to prove good theorems is NOT to start with the axioms and move down the tree of implications until you hit upon something that looks interesting.
Instead, the way is to start with examples, or with an intuition, and try to formalize it into a conjecture. And then try to build further intuition as to why it might be true; possibly by trying more examples or building some heuristic arguments. Once you get a sense of why it might be true, then use that intuition to look for techniques that people have used to capture that intuition. As an example, if you feel that the objects you're studying have some notion of closeness, then you can introduce a topology on your objects and then use the techniques of topology to make further progress. And only at the end, when you're almost sure about how it's going to go down, do you build rigorous proofs starting from some simple statements.
So I guess Chesterton is trying to emphasize that building an intuitive, heuristic understanding of why something might be true is much more important than trying to build a deductive argument using logic. The latter always follows the former. I would be very interested in examples outside of math.
-- Peter van Inwagen
If the Church is wrong, and the materialists are wrong, then it seems that we really know very little about how the world works; and if this is so, then on what, exactly, can you base this dismissal?
In many fictional settings, ghosts can be very harmful indeed. What if the ghost has telekinetic powers? What if it can cast magic spells? What if it can possess you and devour your soul? No, if I were inclined to go ahead and believe in ghosts, I would not then proceed to dismiss their threat so easily.
I agree, that seems to be the weakest step. What I guess he means is that if there are ghosts they seem to be quite wispy and unobtrusive. If they went around and did a lot of stuff we would presumably have good evidence for their existence.
Possession. I think is psychology the effect is named "Alien Hand Syndrome". There was a time when my arm was moving around in ways that I didn't control (but could override if I wanted) that happened directly after a little girl doing "spirit healing".
While certainly not believing in ghosts at that moment in time, I was seriously thinking about reading up on defenses against ghosts.
But then today I would have no problem spending a night meditating at a graveyard. I think people aren't really afraid of ghosts but they are afraid of the unknown. If you are a materialist and have to deal with a goal, the biggest fear isn't that the ghost hurts you but that you have to rearrange your whole way of looking at the world.
Spending a night at a graveyard might be a good training exercise for a rationalist. If you don't want to admit that you believe in ghosts but fear being in a graveyard at night, go and face your fears.
Why? I have better things to do than train my system 1, which alieves in various things, on such matters which are unlikely to ever come up in my life and be relevant to my goals.
There are more reasons to do it than training your system 1. It sounds like it would be an interesting experience and make a good story. Interesting experiences are worth their weight in insights, and good stories are useful to any goals that involve social interaction.
Also, graveyards at night are a lot less crowded then parks, i.e. awesome for outdoors sex.
Isn't that rather disrespectful to the dead? Yes, I realize the dead are not physically alive to be appalled, but I still think a graveyard is a place of life-taking, not life-making. We ought respect that.
Why should we respect that? As you said, the dead don't care.
"Respect for the dead" is a shorthand for "Respect for the living who care about the dead".
So, when I commemorate my friend J.'s death every year, I'm really honoring myself?
You may be making yourself a better person; but J. is — alas — not around to receive benefit.
Do you prefer them to be dead? Also, what of their living relatives who come to the graveyard to mourn?
I don't prefer them to be dead, but I'm not making them any more dead by being in a graveyard. As for the living relatives - some may not like it, but that alone doesn't necessarily mean that it's wrong to do so, as they're not actually being harmed, only their sensibilities are being offended.
It's not rude if it's not a social setting. If no one sees you do it, no one's sensibilities are offended.
So we can at least agree that it's extremely rude, but you place less moral value on the rudeness than I do?
Well it would be a bit of a dick move to let eli_sennesh or others who would feel similarly find out about your actions. Of course, this restriction tends to cripple the "charming anecdote" advantage.
And going in with that intention would provide a very powerful motivation to lose one's alief in ghosts!
If you allow your system 1 to alieve in various things than it will quite often determine your actions without you being aware that it's your system 1 that driving you to do something irrational. You will make up plausible sounding explanations for why your decisions are rational.
Being able to face silly fears builds strength of mind that also useful when you push against your other ugh-fields.
We are talking about training system 1 not to be afraid on graveyards at night, which I'm very much inclined to think is a complete waste of time, not about training system 1 in general. I'm not sure to what extent the "strenght of mind" that you build by engaging in such curious exercises as spending a night on a graveyard carries over to something actually useful...
In any case, this has nothing to do with not wanting to admit that one believes in ghosts. Most of us genuinely do not believe in ghosts, but do alieve in them.
If spending a night at a graveyard is basically a boring prospect for you that's just a waste of time you might not learn much.
If it's of the other hand an experience that triggers significant emotions than you do learn something by being confronted with your emotions.
At a graveyard even a smart rationalist can't easily reason himself into an excuse that it's valid to be afraid of ghost. Yet you get a significant emotional response. That pattern makes it a good general training exercise.
In also speaking about a single night and not a regular activity.
John R. Pierce, An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise, during a discussion about translating the idea of a vocoder to transmit human facial movements.
A.J.P. Taylor
-- Gian-Carlo Rota
Missing context, I think.
Nassim Taleb
I'm not sure that I'd call that the "ultimate" freedom (ranking things like this always seems contrived), but it is definitely an important freedom, so the spirit of the quote is entirely valid.
What is the relationship of this to rationality?
"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them." -Galileo Galilei (via BrainyQuote)
It's got a few things going for it.
It sounds really profound, It's by a person well-respected for his contributions to science It seems to give usable advice for improving your rationality.
Only one problem: it's bullshit. Standard counterexample: quantum mechanics. But even in Galileo's time, or earlier, a rationalist shouldn't have believed this. There's a huge sampling bias. You don't tend to discover things you can't understand.
Quantum mechanics is infinitely easier to understand than to discover.
Not things that are only understood at a "shut up and calculate" level - for example, if you discover a reliable physical relation, but have no idea why it works.
"Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." Susan Ertz
Edit: I read this as "Hey, if I can't add days to the end I'll add them to the middle." It never occurred to me to think the author wanted everyone to die.
I don't want to sound defensive, but lest people think the same of me: I assure you, reader, whoever you are: I do not want you to die. (Never thought I'd have to make that as a contentful disclaimer)
All things being equal, I think I would rather be at loose ends than be dead.
That said, I would imagine that part of the problem is that many peoples' desire for immortality is informed partly by an instinctive reluctance to die -- as distinguished from a genuine preference for living over non-existence.
Mine is partly informed by the desire to have sufficient time to figure out what to do with myself on said rainy Sunday afternoon. Also by the desire to be able to do Nothing on said afternoon if I want to, without it exacting an opportunity cost.
Actually, that might be exactly what I want, or at least a concise description of one of the things I want: For a particular use of time to have zero opportunity cost. I wouldn't be as bitter about going to work for eight to ten hours a day if that didn't mean eight to ten hours I can't use doing something more interesting/entertaining/relaxing/whatever.
I think this requires everyone to be immortal...and maybe everything?
That might be a distinction without a difference; my preferences come partly from my instincts.
Well I think it's analogous to the difference between liking and wanting, as described here:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1lb/are_wireheads_happy/
If there is a distinction between wanting and liking, then arguably there is a distinction between disliking and "not wanting."
Me too. I found the quote thought provoking but I feel I should mention, no, I am not stating I want everybody to die.
So, the solution is to deny them immortality. Right?
I'm continually amazed by people who think that conflate the concepts of whether immortality is a sensible choice for any given individual and whether it's ok to decide, for all of humanity, whether the choice should even be available. (And, almost invariably, answer the latter question in the affirmative, and furthermore usually decide that no, the choice should not be available.)
My answer to statements, or questions, or insinuations (like the one in the parent) that maybe it's not a good idea to be immortal, is:
"By all means, don't be immortal. Go ahead and die. I won't stop you."
But don't think you have any right to make that decision for me.
Solution? The quote is an observation, it does not state a problem to be solved.
Even if this is denotatively true (I don't know a single person who meets that criteria but maybe a million of them exist) the connotations are still bullshit.
This is no rationality quote.
Whether boredom is an issue, death doesn't seem like an ideal solution. If we were a race of immortals and we start to get boredom I don't think that suicide is a solution anyone would propose.
I wouldn't be so sure of that.
Frederick Starr: Lost Enlightenment
Very interesting account of the rise and fall of the arab enlightenment in central asia.
First chapter here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s10064.pdf
From that chapter:
Thanks for making me aware of this (I added it to my "to read" list on Goodreads), but this isn't really a rationality quote.
Should this go in the media thread?
Maybe.
The key point is "That he himself was at the same time a subtle and nuanced thinker and a genuine champion of the life of piety made his attack all the more effective." which is a "rationality quote" or else I'm mistakes as what qualifies. And the rest just leads up to it and provides interesting context.
If you're interested in the history of how science can be lost, you may also be interested in The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn by Lucio Russo.
Nassim Taleb
"Without suffering" seems like a really high bar. Additionally, do we really want a system that can, presumably, put an utter genius with leet rationality skillz in the top position, and not gain from it? If the correlation between doing well and having a smart leader is literally zero, that's what you get.
I wouldn't call the "without suffering from it" clause a high bar to clear. You'd just need a system where any leader's intentions will be carried out so ineffectually that it makes no practical difference who's in charge.
A system which can actually achieve desirable outcomes with an idiot in charge, though, is probably at least as difficult to implement as a system which ensures that only competent people will end up in charge.
This response seems to rely on wilfully misunderstanding of the grandparent.
Preventing damage from an imbecile does not require or imply inability to benefit from a genius. The difference in outcome between having an average leader and an imbecile must be minimal. The difference between an average leader and a genius can be arbitrarily large. It would be uncharitable (as well as just plain wrong) to assume that Taleb is claiming that the correlation between leader intelligence and performance is zero.
(Whether such a system is remotely possible is a whole other issue.)
I dunno. I'd be pretty happy with a system that produced reasonable output when staffed with idiots, because that seems like a certainty. I actually think that's probably why democracy seems to be better than monarchies-- it has a much lower requirement for smarts/benevolence. "Without suffering" may be a high bar, but the universe is allowed to give us problems like that! (And I don't think that democracy is even close to a complete solution.)
EDIT: Also, perhaps the entirety of the system should be to make sure that an "utter genius with leet rationality skillz" is in the top position? I'd be very happy with a system that caused that even when staffed by morons.
Seems to me that a system that incentivized putting smart people in high places would do better in the long run than one that was designed to be robust against idiocy and didn't concern itself with those incentives.
The trick is making sure those incentives don't end up Goodharting themselves. Don't think I've ever heard of a system that's completely solved that problem yet.
The point of the quote is to not have a single center of power. Traditionally democracy is supposed to have checks and balances. If you have three powers and the legislative makes a bad law the supreme court can just throw out the law and no damage is done.
If you however have a legislative led by a utter genius with leet rationality skillz that makes great laws the supreme court won't throw out the laws.
Not quiet, it set a precedent that increases the supreme court's power and makes the system more vulnerable to idiots on the supreme court.
(By way partial of support for quote I perceive to be downvoted too far.)
While the quote has the typical problems of hyperbole found in this kind of soundbite, the principle conveyed seems sound. Minimising the damage that can be done by stupid people with power is one of the more important desideratum when designing a system of power allocation.
Alternatively, one that prevents an imbecile from being in power in the first place?