Introduction I suspected that the type of stuff that gets posted in Rationality Quotes reinforces the mistaken way of throwing about the word rational. To test this, I set out to look at the first twenty rationality quotes in the most recent RQ thread. In the end I only looked at the first ten because it was taking more time and energy than would permit me to continue past that. (I'd only seen one of them before, namely the one that prompted me to make this comment.)

A look at the quotes

In our large, anonymous society, it's easy to forget moral and reputational pressures and concentrate on legal pressure and security systems. This is a mistake; even though our informal social pressures fade into the background, they're still responsible for most of the cooperation in society.

There might be an intended, implicit lesson here that would systematically improve thinking, but without more concrete examples and elaboration (I'm not sure what the exact mistake being pointed to is), we're left guessing what it might be. In cases like this where it's not clear, it's best to point out explicitly what the general habit of thought (cognitive algorithm) is that should be corrected, and how one should correct it, rather than to point in the vague direction of something highly specific going wrong.

As the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of "normal" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.

These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.

Without context, I'm struggling to understand the meaning of this quote, too. The Paul Graham article it appears in, after a quick skim, does not appear to be teaching a general lesson about how to think; rather it appears to be making a specific observation. I don't feel like I've learned about a bad cognitive habit I had by reading this, or been taught a new useful way to think.

If you're expecting the world to be fair with you because you are fair, you are fooling yourself. That's like expecting a lion not to eat you because you didn't eat him.

Although this again seems like it's vague enough that the range of possible interpretations is fairly broad, I feel like this is interpretable into useful advice. It doesn't make a clear point about habits of thought, though, and I had to consciously try to make up a plausible general lesson for it (just world fallacy), that I probably wouldn't have been able to think up if I didn't already know that general lesson.

He says we could learn a lot from primitive tribes. But they could learn a lot more from us!

I understand and like this quote. It feels like this quote is an antidote to a specific type of thought (patronising signalling of reverence for the wisdom of primitive tribes), and maybe more generally serves as an encouragement to revisit some of our cultural relativism/self-flagellation. But probably not very generalisable. (I note with amusement how unconvincing I find the cognitive process that generated this quote.)

Procrastination is the thief of compound interest.

There can be value to creating witty mottos for our endeavours (e.g. battling akrasia). But such battles aside, this does not feel like it's offering much insight into cognitive processes.

Allow me to express now, once and for all, my deep respect for the work of the experimenter and for his fight to wring significant facts from an inflexible Nature, who says so distinctly "No" and so indistinctly "Yes" to our theories.

If I'm interpreting this correctly, then this can be taken as a quote about the difficulty of locating strong hypotheses. Not particularly epiphanic by Less Wrong standards, but it is clearer than some of the previous examples and does indeed allude to a general protocol.

[A]lmost no innovative programs work, in the sense of reliably demonstrating benefits in excess of costs in replicated RCTs [randomized controlled trials]. Only about 10 percent of new social programs in fields like education, criminology and social welfare demonstrate statistically significant benefits in RCTs. When presented with an intelligent-sounding program endorsed by experts in the topic, our rational Bayesian prior ought to be “It is very likely that this program would fail to demonstrate improvement versus current practice if I tested it.”

In other words, discovering program improvements that really work is extremely hard. We labor in the dark -- scratching and clawing for tiny scraps of causal insight.

Pretty good. General lesson: Without causal insight, we should be suspicious when a string of Promising Solutions fails. Applicable to solutions to problems in one's personal life. Observing an an analogue in tackling mathematical or philosophical problems, this suggests a general attitude to problem-solving of being suspicious of guessing solutions instead of striving for insight.

The use with children of experimental [educational] methods, that is, methods that have not been finally assessed and found effective, might seem difficult to justify. Yet the traditional methods we use in the classroom every day have exactly this characteristic--they are highly experimental in that we know very little about their educational efficacy in comparison with alternative methods. There is widespread cynicism among students and even among practiced teachers about the effectiveness of lecturing or repetitive drill (which we would distinguish from carefully designed practice), yet these methods are in widespread use. Equally troublesome, new "theories" of education are introduced into schools every day (without labeling them as experiments) on the basis of their philosophical or common-sense plausibility but without genuine empirical support. We should make a larger place for responsible experimentation that draws on the available knowledge--it deserves at least as large a place as we now provide for faddish, unsystematic and unassessed informal "experiments" or educational "reforms."

Good. General lesson: Apply reversal tests to complaints against novel approaches, to combat status quo bias.

The general principle of antifragility, it is much better to do things you cannot explain than explain things you cannot do.

Dual of quote before previous. At first I thought I understood this immediately. Then I noticed I was confused and had to remind myself what Taleb's antifragility concept actually is. I feel like it's something to do with doing that which works, regardless of whether we have a good understanding of why it works. I could guess at but am not sure of what the 'explain things you cannot do' part means.

"He keeps saying, you can run, but you can't hide. Since when do we take advice from this guy?"

You got a really good point there, Rick. I mean, if the truth was that we could hide, it's not like he would just give us that information.

Trope deconstruction making a nod to likelihood ratios. Could be taken as a general reminder to be alert to likelihood ratios and incentives to lie. Cool.

Conclusion Out of ten quotes, I would identify two as reinforcing general but basic principles of thought (hypothesis location, likelihood ratios), another that is useful and general (skepticism of Promising Solutions), one which is insightful and general (reversal tests for status quo biases), and one that I wasn't convinced I really grokked but which possibly taught a general lesson (antifragility).

I would call that maybe a score of 2.5 out of 10, in terms of quotes that might actually encourage improvement in general cognitive algorithms. I would therefore suggest something like one of the following:

(1) Be more rigorous in checking that quotes really are rationality quotes before posting them (2) Having two separate threads—one for rationality quotes and one for other quotes (3) Renaming 'Rationality Quotes' to 'Quotes' and just having the one thread. This might seem trivial but it at least decreases the association of non-rationality quotes to the concept of rationality.

I would also suggest that quote posters provide longer quotes to provide context or write the context themselves, and explain the lesson behind the quotes. Some of the above quotes seemed obvious at first, but I mysteriously found that when I tried to formulate them crisply, I found them hard to pin down.