Rationality Quotes February 2014

5 [deleted] 02 February 2014 01:35PM

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  • Do not quote yourself.
  • Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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

Comments (482)

Comment author: Yvain 02 February 2014 03:56:26PM *  3 points [-]

'East of the Sun, West of the Moon,' rather than being an unreachable fairy tale place, actually refers to where I am like 25% of the time.

-- @superlativeish

Comment author: VAuroch 04 February 2014 11:59:12PM -1 points [-]

This seemed clever for a minute. Then I remembered that East and West don't even generalize to a global scale, let alone an extraplanetary one, and it stopped seeming clever.

Comment author: Yvain 07 February 2014 05:48:15AM 4 points [-]

One can talk about points on Earth corresponding to the position of a celestial body - for example, the high tide being "directly under" the moon, or noon being "directly under" the sun.

If it is noon in California and high tide in New York, and you're in Missouri, I think it makes sense to say you are east of the sun, west of the moon.

Comment author: ciphergoth 07 February 2014 08:27:17AM 6 points [-]

In other words, the plane that contains both you and the axis of the Earth divides the Universe into East and West. (Ignoring relativity)

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 07 February 2014 03:48:33PM 0 points [-]

Having just looked this up, it reads like a walk-through to a point-and-click adventure.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 February 2014 04:42:00AM 2 points [-]

Yes, the early point-and-click adventures were based on these types of fairy tales.

Comment author: bramflakes 02 February 2014 05:32:29PM 2 points [-]

In our days of unlimited science and technology, people's unfulfilled aspirations have become so important to them that a special word, popular in the press, has been coined to denote such dreams. That word is breakthrough. More rarely, it may also be used to describe something, usually trivial, which has actually been accomplished.

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.

Comment author: iarwain1 02 February 2014 05:42:54PM *  -1 points [-]

The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.

Winston Churchill

Comment author: Jiro 02 February 2014 06:53:35PM *  0 points [-]

That's like saying that the best argument against capitalism is a five minute conversation with the average person about how he decides to buy things.

Or, in other words, Fallacy of composition .

Just because individual voters vote poorly (or because individual purchasers only buy things based on how cheap they are) doesn't mean that democracy (or the market) don't work.

Also, remember that Churchill was a colonialist and opposed the independence of India.

Comment author: bramflakes 02 February 2014 07:36:01PM 5 points [-]

They aren't equivalent. Markets have very strong self-corrective behavior that either punish poor decisions, or reward someone else who fixes the result of the poor decision. Democracy punishes poor voter decisions extremely weakly if at all, and on much longer timescales. The behavior of individual voters can be generalized to the behavior of voters en masse.

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 02 February 2014 07:41:00PM 6 points [-]

Also, remember that Churchill was a colonialist and opposed the independence of India.

Isn't it sort of embarrassing to use an ad hominem against a quote which is so obviously misattributed?

Comment author: Jiro 02 February 2014 08:37:19PM *  1 point [-]

You can use an ad hominem against an argument from authority. It's fighting fire with fire by showing that the authority isn't such a good authority. Sure, that has no bearing on the truth of the statement, but the appeal to authority never did in the first place.

The point is that Churchill opposed democracy in a situation where the verdict of history is that opposing democracy was absolutely the wrong thing to do. A quote which shows Churchill being elitist and against democracy completely fits with that. That isn't obviously a case of misattribution at all, it's just Churchill being Churchill.

Of course, Churchill was known for speaking out in favor of democracy in the context of Britain, but don't confuse that with wanting democracy for everyone.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 February 2014 03:11:44AM 1 point [-]

The point is that Churchill opposed democracy in a situation where the verdict of history is that opposing democracy was absolutely the wrong thing to do.

What point would that be? True opposing independence for India turned out to be wrong, then again independence for the African colonies has been mostly a disaster.

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 02 February 2014 09:00:53PM 8 points [-]

The cases are not really parallel. A bad capitalist loses money and becomes less strongly weighted in a sensible list of all capitalists. A bad voter gets a bad government, but is quite unlikely to lose his vote as a result, although it's been known to happen. But the feedback is very slow, very uncertain, and worst of all, binary - you can't lose 10% of your vote.

Comment author: Torello 02 February 2014 09:43:18PM *  -1 points [-]

A bad capitalist loses money and becomes less strongly weighted in a sensible list of all capitalists

Markets have very strong self-corrective behavior

What about the auto bailouts and record bonuses in finance after the recent economic crisis? Or do you think this is a case of the faults you point out in democracy (slow, weak punishment) leaking into capitalism?

Comment author: fubarobfusco 02 February 2014 10:19:36PM 11 points [-]

People use the words "capitalist" and "capitalism" to mean several different things, and a lot of conversations using that word run awry because the participants either don't realize this — or, worse, become derailed into dictionary arguments about whose definition is legitimate.

For instance, many right-libertarians use "capitalism" to mean an economic system that is simultaneously unregulated and free from coercion and fraud. The way they use the word, the United States today does not have a "capitalist" economy.

Meanwhile, many leftists use "capitalism" to mean an economic system in which a minority of participants own the industrial and finance capital, and through this ownership exercise economic and political power over the majority who make use of that capital to do labor. The way they use the word, the United States does have a "capitalist" economy.

For that matter, some use "capitalist" to mean an advocate of capitalist economy; others use it to mean an owner of capital. A capitalist might not be a capitalist. For instance, right-libertarians might say that Warren Buffett, who advocates increased taxes on the rich, is a capitalist [investor] who is not a capitalist [advocate of unregulated free market].

Comment author: [deleted] 03 February 2014 09:01:51AM -2 points [-]

You're confusing the different metrics at work.

Capitalism is about capital accumulation. People who are good at achieving capital accumulation, by whatever (hopefully legal) means, become rich capitalists.

Democracy is about the will of the voters. Since it does not have a metric to optimize for outside the will of the voters, it does not actually care if the voters are complete idiots.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 03 February 2014 03:11:04PM *  9 points [-]

Democracy is supposed to optimize for the will of the voters, but in fact it optimizes for the ability to get the votes. If I can make people vote for me even if I don't give them what they want (e.g. because I lie to them, or because I convince them that my competitors would be even worse), I win the election.

I could similarly say: People who are good at getting votes, by whatever (hopefully legal) means, become successful politicians in democracy.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 February 2014 03:27:59PM 1 point [-]

You are entirely correct, and this is the good critique of democracy.

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 05 February 2014 07:20:00AM 2 points [-]

Democracy uses the will of the voters as a tool to build a good society for the voters, in the same way that autocracy uses the will of a philosopher-king to build a good society for the subjects. It, or rather the people who set it up, didn't give a damn about the will of the voters per se; what they wanted was the wellbeing, agency, and other CEV stuff of the population. You are confusing their means with an end in itself.

Comment author: [deleted] 05 February 2014 12:05:41PM -1 points [-]

I think you are correct, provided your own assumptions that politics is about building a good society for the subjects/voters/citizens, ie: that politics is a large-scale extension of ethics.

However, most people don't share the LW notions of ethics, so real-world politics has tended to be more sort of, "What people resort to when fundamental ethical disagreements occur over terminal values or moral epistemology." I think this view is more historical: politics has been an extension of diplomacy, a continuing attempt to prevent Hobbes's "war of all against all" (or rather, a war of Moral Greens versus Moral Blues versus Moral Grays versus Moral Reds, etc for however many different fundamental moral views are current in the population).

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 05 February 2014 01:00:35PM 0 points [-]

However, most people don't share the LW notions of ethics,

What are LW ethics? DIfferent individuals seem to adopt every possible theory except Divine Command, AFAICT.

And how would it help?

Comment author: wedrifid 05 February 2014 02:47:19PM *  1 point [-]

What are LW ethics? DIfferent individuals seem to adopt every possible theory except Divine Command, AFAICT.

I don't think there is even that exception.

ETA: There have been long term participants who had that ethical system (and associated beliefs). Both because they were simply religious and because they went loopy with convoluted meta reasoning and ended up back there.

Comment author: [deleted] 05 February 2014 02:49:55PM -1 points [-]

Isn't there an entire ethics Sequence?

Never mind, I'll bugger off.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 05 February 2014 03:44:07PM -2 points [-]

Isn't there an entire ethics Sequence?

It seems to consist of someone thinkign aloud and changing their mind.

Comment author: Creutzer 05 February 2014 04:39:34PM 1 point [-]

Wait, did I miss something? Which change of mind are you referring to?

Comment author: [deleted] 05 February 2014 08:56:13PM 0 points [-]

Huh. Might as well stake my own position then. Humean sentimentalist/emotivist here, what up?

Comment author: Creutzer 05 February 2014 04:38:05PM 0 points [-]

I suppose people use the term "LW ethics" to refer to Eliezer's moral indexicalism (Is there a name for the position that has actually been adopted into more wide-spread use here?) plus consequentialism, but I agree with the objection to the suggestion of uniformity.

Comment author: Strange7 03 February 2014 06:47:07PM -1 points [-]

It's not strictly binary. Absurdities like the electoral college and gerrymandering can effectively devalue some people's votes without eliminating them outright.

Comment author: James_Miller 02 February 2014 11:40:04PM 7 points [-]

Test: find someone who just voted and ask the person to (a) justify their vote, and (b) justify the purchase of some large ticket item (cell phone, car, house) they made. I bet they make more intelligent arguments for (b) than (a).

Comment author: Jiro 03 February 2014 12:16:16AM 2 points [-]

They may be able to justify the act of purchase, but they won't be able to justify (or usually, even comprehend) how their purchase affects the prices and supply of items on the market. Yet their purchase does exactly that, and does so much better than some central authority setting prices and deciding how much of an item is to be sold. In fact, that's the best system we've found so far of running a market and it depends on millions of people who are only acting for their own selfish reasons and have no idea how what they are doing affects the larger picture.

Comment author: Desrtopa 03 February 2014 05:54:55AM 3 points [-]

Given an impartial arbitrator to judge the intelligence of the arguments, I think I would probably take that bet, at least for cell phone or laptop scale purchases, rather than something like a house or car, where the decisions are usually made over much longer timeframes.

However, regardless of which decisions people argue for more persuasively, it doesn't really prove much, because these types of explanations overwhelmingly tend to be justifications people create for themselves, rather than the true reasons underlying their decisions.

Comment author: Manfred 02 February 2014 09:50:43PM 3 points [-]

The best argument argument

This is is a problem here.

Comment author: iarwain1 02 February 2014 10:46:21PM *  2 points [-]

Fixed, thanks.

Comment author: wedrifid 03 February 2014 08:38:20AM *  6 points [-]

The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.

I observe that by their very nature claims that something is the "best argument against X" can more readily support X than undermine it.

Rejecting all the arguments against democracy that are better than said five minute conversation constitutes rather comprehensive support for democracy. (It rules out considerations of the various failure modes, perverse incentives and biases that are associated with such a system.)

Comment author: Fronken 04 February 2014 09:56:34PM *  0 points [-]

He never said they were "rejected" or "ruled out". Just weaker than the conversation - which I assume is because the average person is much worse than you, as cultured political disputant, experience.

Probably not true, still, unless you have the raw mind power to deduce all the flaws of the human mind from that mere conversation. And even then, only maybe.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 February 2014 09:02:54AM 11 points [-]

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

-- H.L. Mencken

Comment author: RichardKennaway 03 February 2014 01:01:54PM 12 points [-]

I find it rather unlikely that he ever said that. Google turns up only unattributed repetitions.

Wikipedia and Wikiquote require quotes to be attributed using reliable sources. I think the rationality quotes threads should adopt the same standard.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 February 2014 12:26:09PM *  0 points [-]

I find it rather unlikely that he ever said that.

Prior or posterior to looking for sources and failing to find one? If the latter, why?

EDIT: I meant the former.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 04 February 2014 01:27:50PM *  8 points [-]

Prior or posterior to looking for sources and failing to find one? If the latter, why?

Neither the thought nor the expression sound like Churchill, and Google didn't find a source. A more assiduous search (i.e. going through the first four pages of results instead of the first two) turns up this, a dustbin of unsourced quotations on the Wikipedia talk page for Churchill. At this point I think it pretty clear he never said it.

ETA: Here and here a Churchill historian who has published a book of Churchill quotations asserts he never said it, and gives some sourced quotations of some things he did say about democracy. They are completely inconsistent with the "five minute conversation" quote. I think that puts sufficient nails in the coffin.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 February 2014 07:32:42PM *  4 points [-]

Something poorly understood about skeptical philosophers (Hume, Sextus Empiricus, Huet, Montaigne, Pyrrho & the Pyrrhonian skeptics) is that their skepticism tends to be directed at contemporary experts, rather than traditions, which they tend to follow as a default strategy. And the crowds against which they stand up are the crowds of "experts", or the masses infatuated with "expert" driven ideas.


[ Note 1- This is in response to a question by Adam Gurri who was wondering whether there was an inconsistency between being independent and skeptical, yet respecting the "inner" information in the time-tested thanks to the Lindy Effect.]
[Note 2- The "skeptics" of today do the exact opposite: an agglomeration of "light" intellectuals going against traditions but not against experts.]

Nassim Taleb

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 February 2014 07:35:20PM 0 points [-]

The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it.

Nassim Taleb

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 02 February 2014 08:58:34PM 6 points [-]

"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.

Comment author: lavalamp 03 February 2014 06:12:26AM *  2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Nornagest 03 February 2014 06:23:12AM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: Desrtopa 03 February 2014 06:27:22AM 4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: wedrifid 03 February 2014 03:58:34PM 3 points [-]

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?

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.)

Comment author: ChristianKl 04 February 2014 02:35:53PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 February 2014 06:42:48AM 0 points [-]

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.

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.

Comment author: wedrifid 03 February 2014 08:31:37AM 4 points [-]

(By way partial of support for quote I perceive to be downvoted too far.)

The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it.

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.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 06 February 2014 06:12:30PM 3 points [-]

Alternatively, one that prevents an imbecile from being in power in the first place?

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 February 2014 07:36:45PM 1 point [-]

The ultimate freedom lies in not having to explain "why" you did something.

Nassim Taleb

Comment author: SaidAchmiz 02 February 2014 07:39:58PM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: fortyeridania 03 February 2014 08:16:43PM 1 point [-]

What is the relationship of this to rationality?

Comment author: [deleted] 04 February 2014 03:14:40PM -1 points [-]

If you look over the Best of 2013 and Best of All Time rationality quotes thread, you'll quickly notice nearly none of the top ones relate to rationality.

Just like subreddits converge to images and jokes, less wrong converges to in-group circlejerkery.

Comment author: Vulture 04 February 2014 03:24:09PM *  2 points [-]

Aside from the regrettable anti-death quote that crowns the All Time list, most of the top quotes on both seem to be directly about epistemic rationality.

Comment author: roystgnr 04 February 2014 08:52:45PM 5 points [-]

Although I agree that the anti-death joke is overrated, it can be read as a general statement on instrumental rationality, a recognition of the fact that Type I and Type II errors can have very asymmetric consequences. The question of "what hypothesis should I act on when under great uncertainty" often boils down to "which action is easier to correct if/when I turn out to be wrong later". Under this reading the joke isn't "death really sucks amirite?" but rather "if I'm alive by mistake it's much easier to change that than if I'm dead by mistake".

Comment author: Vulture 04 February 2014 09:01:23PM *  0 points [-]

I like that interpretation, and it's a lesson I'm glad to be reminded of. Something tells me, though, (and I suspect you agree) that most people who upvoted the original quote did not do so on the basis of that interpretation.

(And since we can do a similar pedagogical interpretation of anyone expressing a well-reasoned sentiment, I don't think it's very likely that the original poster intended it that way either)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 February 2014 07:39:17PM 4 points [-]

The problem isn't just that there are so many things we do for reasons too deep for us to understand; it is that our attempts to explain them spoil the party and cause us to stop doing them.

Nassim Taleb

Comment author: jsbennett86 02 February 2014 10:43:22PM 6 points [-]

...it just goes to show you that if you write convoluted, dense academic prose nobody will understand it and your ideas will be misinterpreted and then the misinterpreted ideas will be ridiculed even when they weren't your ideas.

Joel Spolsky

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 03 February 2014 08:37:07AM 4 points [-]

Yeah, but that happens anyway.

Comment author: Alejandro1 03 February 2014 03:21:43AM 26 points [-]

A serious prophet upon predicting a flood should be the first man to climb a tree.

--Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage.

Comment author: DanielLC 10 February 2014 08:23:06PM 1 point [-]

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?

Comment author: EGarrett 13 February 2014 09:02:56PM *  9 points [-]

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.

Comment author: SolveIt 03 February 2014 02:50:12PM 6 points [-]

Your legs are too short, so use your head!

Samwise Gamgee, The Lord of the Rings

Comment author: WalterL 03 February 2014 05:08:58PM 16 points [-]

You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.

  • Napoleon Bonaparte
Comment author: wedrifid 06 February 2014 10:15:40PM 0 points [-]

(Wholeheartedly endorse this quote.)

You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.

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).

Comment author: Jiro 07 February 2014 01:46:23AM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: wedrifid 07 February 2014 02:02:16AM -1 points [-]

Fighting someone a lot teaches him your art of war, but may not teach him the art of war in general.

Yes. Nevertheless, to whatever extent it is bad for Napoleon to fight one enemy often and thereby teach him it is beneficial to the person learning. If the benefit given to the enemy is enough that even Napoleon (the learner's enemy) cares about it then presumably it is a consideration for the person doing the learning as well. Presumably each side cares about the learning that has been done specifically because they care about the outcome of conflicts between the two of them. One is helped, the other hindered. Things that influence the outcome of direct battle between two sides tend to be like that.

He may be better off fighting multiple people, learning less each one.

Yes, or he may better off learning about some economic matters (thereby supplementing his 'art' with superior firepower). Or he may be better off buying delicious cookies. I didn't oppose the notion of opportunity cost. In fact, for the sake of pedantry I even included a 'ceritus paribus' clause.

Comment author: shminux 03 February 2014 06:08:08PM *  22 points [-]

I’m better at tests than reality. Reality doesn’t tell you which of a million bits of information to look at.

A comment on slatestarcodex.

Comment author: DanielLC 10 February 2014 08:29:23PM 3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Vaniver 03 February 2014 06:45:58PM 13 points [-]

But, while nothing can be done about the past, much can be done in the present to prepare for the future.

--Thomas Sowell

Comment author: Stabilizer 03 February 2014 11:13:23PM 3 points [-]

From McKee's textbook of psychoanalysis:

"Story begins when an event, either by human decision or accident in the universe, radically upsets the balance of forces in the protagonist's life, arousing in that character the need to restore the balance of life. To do so, that character will conceive of an "Object of Desire," that which they [believe] they need to put life back into balance. They will then go off into their world, into themselves, in the various dimensions of their existence, seeking that Object of Desire, trying to restore the balance of life, and they will struggle against forces of antagonism that will come from their own inner natures as human beings, their relationships with other human beings, their personal and/or social life, and the physical environment itself. They may or may not achieve that Object of Desire; they may or may not finally be able to restore their life to a satisfying balance. That, in the simplest possible way, defines the elements of story."

Everything that happens in your life is digested by you through this process, so it would be worth your time to memorize it.

-The Last Psychiatrist

Comment author: EGarrett 04 February 2014 01:39:06PM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 06 February 2014 03:32:01AM 0 points [-]

If the kids didn't know this, they would probably be fascinated by it.

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.

Comment author: EGarrett 06 February 2014 06:01:40AM *  -2 points [-]

Hi Rolf,

You're free to read the phone book around a campfire, but no one would care. That's a key thing. Remember, I added that the kids (if they had curious minds and didn't know it) would probably be fascinated by it. If you ask google to "define story," the second definition you get is...

"An account of past events in someone's life or in the evolution of something."

Not that I necessarily think dictionary definitions are the be-all end-all authority in the meaning of our conversational terms, but it gives at least some indication that we don't NECESSARILY need a protagonist (though they are VERY VERY common and very useful). Instead, I think there's a second real purpose and definition of "stories" (and as I'm sure you gathered, I think it also dictates that some segment of the population tends to care about the story or want to hear it).

Obviously this conversation would require more space and I've been considered writing a bunch of posts (or a sequence? Not totally familiar with the terms yet) to go into it.

(lastly, I didn't vote your comment down)

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 06 February 2014 07:27:38AM 1 point [-]

You're free to read the phone book around a campfire, but no one would care. That's a key thing.

My argument is precisely that it's not a key thing; you can have a story that nobody cares about or a non-story that people find deeply interesting. If you don't like the phonebook, make it a journal article describing a measurement of nonzero CP violation in charm mixing; I know any number of people who would find that extremely fascinating, but you just cannot call it a story.

"An account of past events in someone's life or in the evolution of something."

Your account of why night and day exist would not meet this definition.

Comment author: EGarrett 06 February 2014 07:57:30AM *  -1 points [-]

Hi Rolf,

You definitely can have a story that is uninteresting or fails. But they take the form of things that people WOULD care about. Likewise, you can have a computer that doesn't turn on, but it takes the form of something that WOULD if it functioned properly. Offering that value to people IS in fact the key purpose of a story, even if sometimes it fails to do so. I apologize if this isn't clear.

A scientific journal article, which I assume is your example, exists to communicate true information (though just like the bad story, they may sometimes be falsified). So a journal article that someone finds interesting would NOT be a story. But if that article was outside of that purpose, and existed to CREATE positive emotion though (not yelling at you just trying to emphasize and don't know the formatting yet), then it would be classifiable as a story.

That's the point I was trying to put across with the campfire-sun-and-moon example. You're telling it to interest the kids or entertain them (or scare them, make them laugh etc.). That's why we "sit around the campfire."

Lastly, the night and day example is quite clearly an account of how our cycles of night and day come to exist. It seems clear that this fits the second half of the definition.

I hope this helps to put things across.

Comment author: CCC 06 February 2014 04:23:45AM *  1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: EGarrett 06 February 2014 06:07:27AM -2 points [-]

Hi CCC,

The story of your life would definitely include a protagonist. But I think there are other things we could agree would fit the category of a story (like perhaps "How the Universe was born" with an actual scientifically supportable account of the big bang), but which wouldn't have any type of human or living protagonist.

Hopefully this makes some sense.

Comment author: CCC 06 February 2014 07:48:47AM 0 points [-]

Yes, that makes perfect sense. I can list several ideas for stories without a protagonist, as well; any physical process (e.g. the hydrological cycle) would do, amongst others.

My point was that, though these are stories, they are not and cannot be the story of a person's life (due to the lack of a protagonist). Looking back over my comment, I see it was a good deal less clear than I thought it was at the time, and for that I apologise.

Comment author: EGarrett 06 February 2014 08:09:37AM -1 points [-]

Hi CCC,

I think we're on similar ground. But let me be clear, stories exist (according to my best estimates) to create positive emotions. So a physical process would be a story IF it was something you could or would tell to other people to interest them. Or, similarly, to thrill or excite them (I think some people would view stories about comets impacting planets etc as exciting).

You're right though that these definitely are NOT the story of someone's life. I was just trying to point out originally that the quote used the term "story" without any additional qualifiers when talking about a person and so on...and I wanted to make it clear that while it is VERY common and useful to use people or main characters when telling stories...it's not actually a requirement. And of course, knowing the core requirements and meanings for terms or ideas help us to think about those ideas clearly and use them properly.

Similar to what you said at the end, I know that my examples may not have been perfectly chosen, and I hope this helps. Like I said, this is my personal pet-topic and I'm looking into starting a series of posts on it, since I don't see much related to it here, and there are amazing things to be learned when you approach books, movies and other modern stories with rational tools to understand how they really work.

Comment author: CCC 07 February 2014 04:55:55AM 1 point [-]

I think we're on similar ground.

I think I agree.

But let me be clear, stories exist (according to my best estimates) to create positive emotions.

Hmmm... some stories are written with the intention of creating negative emotions (sadness, anger, fear). While these are not the stories I enjoy, they do exist. And some stories are written with the intention of passing along information, not emotion (for example, to give a true account of some historical event(s)).

"Story" is a very broad term.

I'm perfectly in agreement with your second paragraph, and I do believe I would find such a series of posts interesting. One can learn things from books, yes, but one must be careful what lessons one takes away; not all things that fiction teaches are true.

Comment author: EGarrett 07 February 2014 06:57:27AM *  -1 points [-]

Hi CCC,

Yes, there are stories that seem to have the sole effect of pissing people off. And there are also some rare people who write what they think are stories with the intent of making people angry or sad (fear in a lot of cases creates excitement or adrenaline, which is why a lot of people like horror movies so I can't list fear among the negatives).

But I think in the majority of those cases, if you speak to most of those people and look at their work, you'll find that their intent was, in their minds, to "educate" or "inform" other people. (though often these people don't have anything very insightful to really say), so their intent was to do something positive via negative means.

At the end of the day though, and here's an example of how my thoughts aren't coming out in a clear order, there's an important distinction here and I'm glad you found it to help me clarify myself. Stories exist, according to our modern usage, to create emotions, positive OR negative, but we WATCH stories to get positive emotions. When we get overall good feelings (whichever they may be, excitement, satisfaction etc), we will say things like "that was a damned good movie." And when we don't get those feelings, we'll say and think that it was bad.

A lot of people who write stories do so to create the negative emotions, and I think those people are confused and, if their goal is to be professional writers and build an audience, they're dooming themselves to fail. As I'm sure you can know from other fields, writing has many people who don't really understand what they're doing and don't think clearly about it and get bad results because of it.

Comment author: CCC 07 February 2014 10:29:54AM 4 points [-]

As far as sad stories go, I do believe that one particularly famous example can be found in Romeo And Juliet (Shakespeare). Some people actually do enjoy a well-written sad story; there's even a whole page on tvtropes called "Downer Ending" which lists a lot of sad stories, some of which are actually quite well-written and thought-provoking.

I don't think they were all written with the explicit intention of being sad stories, though. I imagine that quite a few were written with the intention of, instead of provoking an emotional response, rather provoking some other response. For example, Flowers for Algernon (I don't know if you're familiar with it) is most certainly a sad story, especially near the end; but the intention seems to be to inspire thought and raise questions rather than to inspire emotion. (It also won a few awards; sad stories don't necessarily fail).

So, yes, while inspiring emotion is one reason to write stories, even a common reason, it is far from the only reason.

Comment author: EGarrett 07 February 2014 08:29:42PM 1 point [-]

(I don't know the formatting yet, so when I use capitalized words here, I'm just doing it for emphasis, not to yell at you, of course)

Hi CCC,

That is a great thing to bring up, and very important. There are indeed stories, like Flowers for Algernon (or my favorite example, almost every episode of the original Twilight Zone), that quite clearly exist to give IDEAS instead of what appears to be basic emotions. And this leads us to one of the most eye-opening conclusions I ever had about storytelling.

You see...YES, some stories ARE primarily intended to inspire thought and raise questions, BUT...and here's one of the things that was a "eureka moment" for me...getting those new ideas...those inspiring ideas or things to think about...ALSO give us a positive emotion...and THAT positive emotion...a feeling I refer to as "enlightenment"...IS why those stories exist.

This is exactly why I say (and I'm sure others say) that a good scientist has to BE right, regardless of how he sounds, but a good storyteller has to SOUND right, regardless of whether or not he actually is right.

Quick example...THIS is why creation-myths are so popular as stories. They aren't actually RIGHT, but they are plausible enough to satisfy the curiosity of the ancient people who heard them. They wanted to know where the Sun came from. The idea that Horus created it (or a chariot pulled it across the sky), did the job for them nicely, so that story was successful and spread through the culture. If you had tried to tell them about gravity as a physical force, it wouldn't have involved things they understood, so it wouldn't have worked. It would've been fine for science, but would've failed to spread, interest and capture the imagination of the audience, which is basically what a great story does.

There are plenty of ways this applies, and lots of ways we get these feelings of new, useful or satisfying ideas from stories...but it is indeed one major thing that stories can do. But I hope I did a decent job here of describing how it fits with this idea of stories existing to generate emotion.

Comment author: ChristianKl 09 February 2014 10:34:18PM 0 points [-]

But let me be clear, stories exist (according to my best estimates) to create positive emotions.

Which positive emotion is the story that you did tell in your post supposed to create?

Comment author: EGarrett 09 February 2014 11:23:03PM *  -1 points [-]

Hi Christian,

The sun-and-moon story is intended to create the release of the pleasure-chemicals (I think dopamine) that we feel when we get a new idea or are exposed to new or interesting thoughts.

This feeling (I just refer to it as "enlightenment") is actually one of the strongest positive emotional experiences we can have. And that feeling, of an interesting or correct new idea, is what actually is important for the story to work. Whether or not the idea is true in reality is basically irrelevant.

Hopefully this makes sense.

Comment author: ChristianKl 10 February 2014 12:39:21AM *  -1 points [-]

Your post was not about selling the sun-and-moon story but about telling a story about how stories create positive emotions.

If you want to understand stories you don't learn much when you only focus on the kind of stories that you see on TV, read in fiction books or tell at campfires.

Start investigating the stories that you tell other people. Start investigating the stories that you tell yourself. As far as strength of stories I don't think the sun-and-the-moon story in the form you told it is very strong.

I do have the experience at being at NLP seminars (Bandler line, the line after Grinder is less narrated). There you have people who tell stories that take away someone's phobia of spiders without the person noticing. Other stories did affect me on a physical level in a way where I switched from having my body weight from being in the inside of my feet to being at the outside of my feet.

Apart from the experience of NLP I did QS press work that about telling a story. After doing it for half a year I found myself giving a talk in front of 300 hackers at the Chaos Computer Congress. In addition I had brought along 3 journalist to cover it for their documentary about measurement in general. Two of them do the core documentary and the third was the camera man.

Dealing with the energy that flows when you throws yourself into a bigger story isn't easy. I did things like giving an interview for two hours knowing that the journalist picks less than one minute of what I say. Doing that and not saying details that I don't want in the story is mentally challenging.

Most of my Lesswrong posts aren't heavily narrated. On LW I focus on trying to communicate intellectual ideas instead of focusing on telling stories. I do sometimes add narration into a post but not at the expense of intellectual depth.

If you want to understand stories take a look at my latest LW post about stories: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jly/on_straw_vulcan_rationality/ahns . When you have got the first layer of the story, read it again and see what payload it contains besides the obvious message. It's a story that does a little more than just creating positive emotions (despite being narrated the post is all true facts).

Comment author: EGarrett 10 February 2014 01:07:38AM *  -1 points [-]

Hi Christian,

Your post was not about selling the sun-and-moon story but about telling a story about how stories create positive emotions.

If you want to understand stories you don't learn much when you only focus on the kind of stories that you see on TV, read in fiction books or tell at campfires.

I'm focused on any type of story that causes a positive reaction from people or spreads among people. I personally have found it to be wonderfully complex and have learned an incredible amount studying this.

Start investigating the stories that you tell other people. Start investigating the stories that you tell yourself. As far as strength of stories I don't think the sun-and-the-moon story in the form you told it is very strong.

Let's not misunderstand each other. I didn't say that it was a strong story, that goes into a list of multiple things that stories can do for us, that would be enough for a number of discussions...and strong stories do many things from that list. I only provided a single example to try to isolate one thing, which is that stories don't require protagonists.

I do have the experience at being at NLP seminars (Bandler line, the line after Grinder is less narrated). There you have people who tell stories that take away someone's phobia of spiders without the person noticing. Other stories did affect me on a physical level in a way where I switched from having my body weight from being in the inside of my feet to being at the outside of my feet.

Well firstly, neuro-linguistic programming is speech. It might overlap with stories, but it is not the same category. We'd have to discuss the actual nature of what was said to see if it fits the commonly accepted idea of a story (and of course we'll have to come to some reasonable definition). Also, we would investigate whether you enjoyed this experience, and if so we can see if you spread or shared what happened to you because of that enjoyment, which would bring us back to what I said about what makes stories spread or be successful.

Apart from the experience of NLP I did QS press work that about telling a story. After doing it for half a year I found myself giving a talk in front of 300 hackers at the Chaos Computer Congress. In addition I had brought along 3 journalist to cover it for their documentary about measurement in general. Two of them do the core documentary and the third was the camera man.

I'm sure you're a very intelligent person with relevant experiences. Naturally though, I'm most interested in the ideas we're discussing, and the examples, logic and so on we can bring to it, as we can always be wrong regardless of what qualifications we have.

Dealing with the energy that flows when you throws yourself into a bigger story isn't easy. I did things like giving an interview for two hours knowing that the journalist picks less than one minute of what I say. Doing that and not saying details that I don't want in the story is mentally challenging.

Most of my Lesswrong posts aren't heavily narrated. On LW I focus on trying to communicate intellectual ideas instead of focusing on telling stories. I do sometimes add narration into a post but not at the expense of intellectual depth.

I understand totally. We always have to strike the balance between covering what we need and not saying too much. I certainly at times have this issue too.

If you want to understand stories take a look at my latest LW post about stories: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jly/on_straw_vulcan_rationality/ahns . When you have got the first layer of the story, read it again and see what payload it contains besides the obvious message. It's a story that does a little more than just creating positive emotions (despite being narrated the post is all true facts).

Let me clarify my point here. Stories CAN do more than give you positive emotions (like give you actual true and useful information), but I hold that positive emotions are the primary thing they do, and play the major role in causing people to like stories and spread them to others, which are key to stories (and books, movies, storytelling speeches, myths etc etc) being profitable or just well-known and "successful."

Comment author: ChristianKl 09 February 2014 10:58:17PM *  1 point [-]

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.

Did you actually do this experiment in reality?

I also think that the kids would treat the Earth and the Sun as protagonists.

Comment author: EGarrett 09 February 2014 11:48:20PM *  0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: CCC 06 February 2014 04:20:58AM 1 point [-]

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?

Comment author: ChristianKl 09 February 2014 10:53:39PM 2 points [-]

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?"

Comment author: Stabilizer 03 February 2014 11:17:35PM *  -2 points [-]

It's unfortunate that when we feel a storm,
We can roll ourselves over 'cause we're uncomfortable.

-Paradise Circus, Massive Attack

Comment author: brainoil 04 February 2014 12:32:52AM 26 points [-]

"Nothing exists in contradiction to nature, only in contradiction to what we know of it." - Dana Scully, The X-Files

Comment author: philh 04 February 2014 12:42:38AM 9 points [-]

What a stupid fucking question. I could have answered it in a second, if Sarasti hadn't forced me to understand it first.

Peter Watts, Blindsight

Comment author: RichardKennaway 04 February 2014 11:17:14AM 0 points [-]

I've read Blindsight, and looked it up again for the context, but I still don't see why this is a rationality quote.

Comment author: khafra 04 February 2014 11:45:57AM 10 points [-]

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.

Comment author: philh 04 February 2014 02:05:52PM 4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: DanielLC 10 February 2014 08:34:40PM 0 points [-]

I'm curious as to the context.

Comment author: philh 11 February 2014 01:16:36AM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 04 February 2014 05:26:01AM 27 points [-]

Shit, if I took time out to have an opinion about everything, I wouldn't get any work done...

-- L. Bob Rife, Snow Crash

Comment author: katydee 04 February 2014 07:50:26AM 11 points [-]

The most important thing in life is to be free to do things. There are only two ways to insure that freedom - you can be rich or you can you reduce your needs to zero.

Colonel John Boyd

Comment author: RichardKennaway 04 February 2014 08:37:55AM 21 points [-]

On the other hand:

The Stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.

Jonathan Swift

Comment author: Antisuji 06 February 2014 02:42:47AM 5 points [-]

Or, of course, some combination thereof.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 04 February 2014 11:37:41AM *  -2 points [-]

At multiple points in its development, research in connectionism has been marked by technical breakthroughs that significantly advanced the computational and representational power of existing models. These breakthroughs led to excitement that connectionism was the best framework within which to understand the brain. However, the initial rushes of research that followed focused primarily on demonstrations of what could be accomplished within this framework, with little attention to the theoretical commitments behind the models or whether their operation captured something fundamental to human or animal cognition. Consequently, when challenges arose to connectionism’s computational power, the field suffered major setbacks, because there was insufficient theoretical or empirical grounding to fall back on. Only after researchers began to take connectionism seriously as a mechanistic model, to address what it could and could not predict, and to consider what constraints it placed on psychological theory, did the field mature to the point that it was able to make a lasting contribution. This shift in perspective also helped to clarify the models’ scope, in terms of what questions they should be expected to answer, and identified shortcomings that in turn spurred further research.

There are of course numerous perspectives on the historical and current contributions of connectionism, and it is not the purpose of the present article to debate these views. Instead, we merely summarize two points in the history of connectionism that illustrate how overemphasis on computational power at the expense of theoretical development can delay scientific progress.

Early work on artificial neurons by McCulloch and Pitts (1943) and synaptic learning rules by Hebb (1949) showed how simple, neuron-like units could automatically learn various prediction tasks. This new framework seemed very promising as a source of explanations for autonomous, intelligent behavior. A rush of research followed, culminated by Rosenblatt’s (1962) perceptron model, for which he boldly claimed, “Given an elementary a-perceptron, a stimulus world W, and any classification C(W) for which a solution exists, . . . an error correction procedure will always yield a solution to C(W) in finite time” (p. 111). However, Minsky and Papert (1969) pointed out a fatal flaw: Perceptrons are provably unable to solve problems requiring nonlinear solutions. This straightforward yet unanticipated critique devastated the connectionist movement such that there was little research under that framework for the ensuing 15 years.

Connectionism underwent a revival in themid-1980s, primarily triggered by the development of back-propagation, a learning algorithm that could be used in multilayer networks (Rumelhart et al. 1986). This advance dramatically expanded the representational capacity of connectionist models, to the point where they were capable of approximating any function to arbitrary precision, bolstering hopes that paired with powerful learning rules any task could be learnable (Hornik et al. 1989). This technical advance led to a flood of new work, as researchers sought to show that neural networks could reproduce the gamut of psychological phenomena, from perception to decision making to language processing (e.g., McClelland et al. 1986; Rumelhart et al. 1986). Unfortunately, the bubble was to burst once again, following a series of attacks on connectionism’s representational capabilities and lack of grounding. Connectionist models were criticized for being incapable of capturing the compositionality and productivity characteristic of language processing and other cognitive representations (Fodor & Pylyshyn 1988); for being too opaque (e.g., in the distribution and dynamics of their weights) to offer insight into their own operation, much less that of the brain (Smolensky 1988); and for using learning rules that are biologically implausible and amount to little more than a generalized regression (Crick 1989). The theoretical position underlying connectionism was thus reduced to the vague claim that that the brain can learn through feedback to predict its environment, without a psychological explanation being offered of how it does so. As before, once the excitement over computational power was tempered, the shortage of theoretical substance was exposed.

One reason that research in connectionism suffered such setbacks is that, although there were undeniably important theoretical contributions made during this time, overall there was insufficient critical evaluation of the nature and validity of the psychological claims underlying the approach. During the initial explosions of connectionist research, not enough effort was spent asking what it would mean for the brain to be fundamentally governed by distributed representations and tuning of association strengths, or which possible specific assumptions within this framework were most consistent with the data. Consequently, when the limitations of the metaphor were brought to light, the field was not prepared with an adequate answer. On the other hand, pointing out the shortcomings of the approach (e.g., Marcus 1998; Pinker & Prince 1988) was productive in the long run, because it focused research on the hard problems. Over the last two decades, attempts to answer these criticisms have led to numerous innovative approaches to computational problems such as object binding (Hummel & Biederman 1992), structured representation (Pollack 1990), recurrent dynamics (Elman 1990), and executive control (e.g., Miller & Cohen 2001; Rougier et al. 2005). At the same time, integration with knowledge of anatomy and physiology has led to much more biologically realistic networks capable of predicting neurological, pharmacological, and lesion data (e.g., Boucher et al. 2007; Frank et al. 2004). As a result, connectionist modeling of cognition has a much firmer grounding than before.

-- Matt Jones & Bradley C. Love, Bayesian Fundamentalism or Enlightenment? On the explanatory status and theoretical contributions of Bayesian models of cognition

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 04 February 2014 11:39:49AM *  5 points [-]

(Also, reading this paper revealed to me that the "Bayesian Enlightenment" is actually used as a serious term within academia.)

Comment author: wedrifid 04 February 2014 08:20:33PM 13 points [-]

Perhaps we need a new thread: "Rationality Page Long Excerpts".

Comment author: EGarrett 05 February 2014 01:34:22AM 31 points [-]

"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

Comment author: EGarrett 05 February 2014 01:35:52AM -2 points [-]

"To learn is to stabilize preestablished synaptic combinations, and to eliminate the surplus."

--Jean-Pierre Changeux

Comment author: EGarrett 05 February 2014 01:37:30AM 7 points [-]

"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

Comment author: aarongertler 05 February 2014 03:47:49AM *  37 points [-]

"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.)

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 05 February 2014 04:36:11AM 16 points [-]

Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.

-- José Ortega y Gasset

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 05 February 2014 02:35:22PM 0 points [-]

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:

There is no more vexing question regarding the flowering of intellectual and cultural life in the era of Ibn Sina and Biruni than the date of its end. The most commonly accepted terminus point is the Mongol invasion, which Chinggis Khan launched in the spring of 1219. But this turns out to be both too early and too late. It is too early because of the several bursts of cultural brilliance that occurred thereafter; and it is too late because the cultural and religious crisis that threw the entire enterprise of rational enquiry, logic, and Muslim humanism into question occurred over a century prior to the Mongol invasion, when a Central Asian theologian named Ghazali placed strict limits on the exercise of logic and reason, demolished received assumptions about cause and effect, and ruthlessly attacked what he considered “the incoherence of the philosophers.”1 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.

Comment author: Nornagest 05 February 2014 07:31:17PM 3 points [-]

Should this go in the media thread?

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 06 February 2014 09:11:11PM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 05 February 2014 09:06:27PM *  3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: blacktrance 05 February 2014 09:35:41PM -2 points [-]

At this point, Rationality Quotes might as well just be Quotes.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 February 2014 07:09:50AM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 February 2014 07:56:11AM 13 points [-]

I'm a big fan of the cognitive utility of the old phrase: "The exception that proves the rule." But then I'm kind of an exception in that regard, since anytime I mention I like that, I get deluged with logical and etymological objections.

I merely mean that an exception that is famous for being exceptional suggests a general tendency in the opposite direction. The canonical example is that Beethoven's titanic fame as a deaf composer suggests that most composers aren't deaf, while, say, the lack of obsessive publicity about painter David Hockney's late onset deafness suggests that deafness isn't all that big of a deal, one way or another, to painters. Judging from the immortal fame of Beethoven's battle with deafness, we can assume that there aren't many deaf composers, while the ho-hum response to Hockney's deafness suggests that we can't make strong quantitative assumptions about painters and deafness.

Steve Sailor

Comment author: elharo 07 February 2014 12:40:46PM 15 points [-]

For Popper (if not for some of his later admirers), falsifiability was not a crude bludgeon. Rather, it was the centerpiece of a richly-articulated worldview holding that millennia of human philosophical reflection had gotten it backwards: the question isn’t how to arrive at the Truth, but rather how to eliminate error. Which sounds kind of obvious, until I meet yet another person who rails to me about how empirical positivism can’t provide its own ultimate justification, and should therefore be replaced by the person’s favorite brand of cringe-inducing ugh.

--Scott Aaaronson, Retiring falsifiability? A storm in Russell’s teacup

Comment author: Stabilizer 08 February 2014 05:53:30AM *  13 points [-]

Philosophy Bro writing as Popper:

So how does science proceed, if induction is fucked (which it is) and we can't logically determine how to have new ideas (which we can't)? Easy - just take a fucking guess. No, I don't mea- dammit, you asshole, I don't mean "guess how science works", I mean guessing just is how science works. Just start guessing shit and go from there. Of course you're going to make a couple stupid guesses at first. Seriously, some of the shit you're going to try is going to be genuinely fucked in the head. Remember when we thought heavier objects would fall faster? Boy was that wrong. But we took a guess, tried it out, and it didn't work. Instead of being whiny babies about it, scientists just took another guess and then tested that out, too. That's the process: guess, and then you test that guess. And if the test works, you're like "Huh! That was an even better guess than I thought." And the more tests it survives, the more people are like, "Great guess! I'll bet that's probably it." And then you get to a test that your guess doesn't pass, and you're like, "Welp, close but no cigar. Back to the drawing board."

We'll eliminate the fucking stupid guesses pretty quickly - it doesn't take long to show that we can't move things with our minds. Eventually, you start to build a pretty cool system of things so you can make better and better guesses. and you can totally use data to make good guesses; you don't always have to invent something completely new every time. I'm just saying that's all the data does, helps make good guesses. It doesn't prove shit.

And look! That method is deductive! What incredibly good news! You don't have to derive a universal statement from a bunch of single events, which is great because you can't; instead, you just guess a universal statement and then see if you can't find an event that breaks it. You can't get from "the sun keeps rising" to "the sun will always rise" but if one day the sun doesn't come up, you can be damn sure about "the sun does not always rise." All you need is one bad apple and you know for sure that not every apple is good, no induction needed. QED, motherfuckers.

And - AND - now we know what is and isn't science! Holy fuck I am on fire here. Not actually. Just- look, I'm solving lots of things, is my point. Scientific theories are falsifiable - they're incompatible with certain things we could observe. They predict shit, and then we see if that shit really happens. Back when we thought Newton's Laws were totally, completely true, Mercury had this weird fuck wobble in its orbit that said we should find another planet. Except we looked and no planet. And now we know for sure that Newton wasn't completely right. Einstein? He was a patent clerk for fuckssake, and he came up with a fucking incredible guess. And we just keep devising more and more complicated tests to check it out, and it keeps on passing. When it does finally fail, we'll fucking know. There won't be aaaaany confusion whatsoever. Souls? How the fuck would we go about testing for souls? "Well, we cut him open, and we didn't find a soul, so..." "Yeah, but you can't see souls! That's the whole point!" So you're saying we can't ever test for souls? That's fine, just, it means souls can't come to the science party. They're not falsifiable. You must be THIS FALSIFIABLE to ride the science ride, and souls just aren't.

Comment author: fezziwig 07 February 2014 01:24:43PM *  5 points [-]

Failure: when your best just isn't enough.

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.

Comment author: Lumifer 07 February 2014 03:30:30PM 2 points [-]

Original source unknown (at least to me).

Here you go

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.

Not necessarily. There's Lady Luck :-)

Comment author: fezziwig 07 February 2014 04:11:27PM 1 point [-]

Thanks for the link, but that's not the original source ;-)

Comment author: Lumifer 07 February 2014 04:18:39PM 0 points [-]

How are you distinguishing the true original source from the it-is-actually-secondary "original" source?

Comment author: fezziwig 07 February 2014 04:35:36PM *  5 points [-]

By age. Despair, Inc, which invented the demotivator, was incorporated in 1998. I first ran across the quote on Usenet in 1994 or 1995.

Comment author: Lumifer 07 February 2014 04:46:57PM 1 point [-]

Ah, a good point. It's interesting that Google in unable to locate this quote before it became a demotivator.

Comment author: Ixiel 07 February 2014 02:00:18PM *  0 points [-]

"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)

Comment author: brazil84 07 February 2014 03:00:31PM 10 points [-]

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.

Comment author: DSimon 07 February 2014 04:07:41PM 1 point [-]

That might be a distinction without a difference; my preferences come partly from my instincts.

Comment author: brazil84 07 February 2014 09:16:16PM 2 points [-]

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."

Comment author: Error 07 February 2014 04:57:43PM 6 points [-]

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.

Comment author: jobe_smith 07 February 2014 05:37:58PM -1 points [-]

For a particular use of time to have zero opportunity cost.

Mostly when people talk about opportunity cost, they mean the cost associated with forgoing a different option. So, if you sit on your couch and watch TV you are forgoing working at Jimmy Johns for $8/hour. That's your opportunity cost. It doesn't go to 0 just because you are immortal.

But I think I know you what you mean. You want to feel like you have plenty of time to do everything or nothing. You don't want to feel constrained by a limited lifespan. If that is how you feel, then I think its more of a psychological issue and can be dealt with directly. You don't need to need to become immortal to stop worrying about not having enough time to do everything you want to do in life. You just need to stop worrying.

Comment author: RowanE 07 February 2014 06:50:39PM 4 points [-]

You can dismiss anything anyone wants or is worried about, as a psychological issue that they can fix by ceasing to worry about or want the thing. It's even true that doing so will improve their circumstances. But it's hardly a better solution than the person actually getting the thing they want or avoiding the thing they're worried about.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 February 2014 06:53:26PM 1 point [-]

For a particular use of time to have zero opportunity cost.

I think this requires everyone to be immortal...and maybe everything?

Comment author: Ixiel 07 February 2014 08:15:28PM 0 points [-]

Me too. I found the quote thought provoking but I feel I should mention, no, I am not stating I want everybody to die.

Comment author: SaidAchmiz 07 February 2014 04:49:51PM *  5 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Lumifer 07 February 2014 04:52:49PM 4 points [-]

So, the solution is to deny them immortality. Right?

Solution? The quote is an observation, it does not state a problem to be solved.

Comment author: [deleted] 07 February 2014 05:36:26PM *  -1 points [-]

So suppose everyone (who wanted it so) were right now made immortal. Except, for moral reasons, the possibility of suicide were left open.

How confident are you that human beings would be around forever? Or for, say, a trillion years?

Right now, I don't want to die. There's more I want to see and do! And even if I can't think of anything, I think I'll come up with something new.

But after a trillion years of subjective experience? I really don't know. What kind of a person can keep themselves ticking for that long without just getting bored to death? Finding something for us all to do that will occupy us forever is a non-trivial existential problem, assuming most or all of the other ones get solved.

Comment author: SaidAchmiz 07 February 2014 09:04:24PM 2 points [-]

Is this meant to be an argument against anything I said? If so, I don't see how it is.

Comment author: ChristianKl 09 February 2014 09:38:37PM 0 points [-]

I think as a child I got bored from time to time and didn't know what to do with my time. I didn't really felt that at all in the last 5 years.

Comment author: [deleted] 09 February 2014 09:46:27PM 0 points [-]

I feel the same way, but I we're both working with a very small, probably very unrepresentative sample. Suppose you did live to be a trillion, with no end in sight: the years between 20 and 30 would probably be quite unlike most of your years so far.

Comment author: higurashimerlin 07 February 2014 05:43:11PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: Creutzer 07 February 2014 05:50:33PM 1 point [-]

I wouldn't be so sure of that.

Comment author: wedrifid 08 February 2014 02:05:33AM *  2 points [-]

"Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." Susan Ertz

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.

Comment author: B_For_Bandana 08 February 2014 12:39:25AM 25 points [-]

Madolyn: "Why is the last patient of the day always the hardest?"

Costigan: "Because you're tired and you don't give a shit. It's not supernatural."

The Departed

Comment author: ChristianKl 09 February 2014 09:35:25PM 5 points [-]

There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down--or hardly going up--in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress--lots of theory, but no progress--in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.

Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way--or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do "the right thing," according to the experts.

So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science.

Richard Feynman in Cargo Cult Science

Comment author: satt 10 February 2014 01:35:50AM 1 point [-]

but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down--or hardly going up--in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods.

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...?)

Comment author: bramflakes 10 February 2014 11:13:50PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: gwern 11 February 2014 01:50:49AM 3 points [-]

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.)

Comment author: ChristianKl 09 February 2014 09:47:13PM 9 points [-]

I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

Richard Feynman in Cargo Cult Science

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 February 2014 02:02:52AM *  -1 points [-]

As F. Scott Fitzgerald might have said if he had been a little more sober: the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to notice that this bathtub gin bottle is both part empty and part full at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

Steve Sailer

Comment author: Vaniver 10 February 2014 08:33:26PM 2 points [-]

Sailer.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 February 2014 02:28:14AM 1 point [-]

Thanks, fixed.

Comment author: Pfft 10 February 2014 05:43:22PM 20 points [-]

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

--Mike Tyson

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 11 February 2014 03:50:42AM *  4 points [-]

He who has begun has half done.

Dare to be wise; begin!

-- Horace

Comment author: Manfred 11 February 2014 11:01:58AM *  7 points [-]

Science offers the boldest metaphysics of the age. It is a thoroughly human construct, driven by the faith that if we dream, press to discover, explain, and dream again, thereby plunging repeatedly into new terrain, the world will somehow come clearer and we will grasp the true strangeness of the universe. And the strangeness will all probe to be connected, and make sense.

E.O. Wilson

Comment author: AshwinV 11 February 2014 11:45:05AM -2 points [-]

It also tells us which "new terrain" to prioritise :)

Comment author: EGarrett 13 February 2014 08:57:11PM 0 points [-]

"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them." -Galileo Galilei (via BrainyQuote)

Comment author: Mestroyer 14 February 2014 01:03:17AM 7 points [-]

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.

Comment author: blacktrance 14 February 2014 04:50:59PM 0 points [-]

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.