= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
EGarrett comments on Rationality Quotes February 2014 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (482)
"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.