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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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.
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 fac... (read more)