MattG comments on Rationality Quotes March 2014 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: malcolmocean 01 March 2014 03:34PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 10 March 2014 08:56:31PM -1 points [-]

"The fragilista falls for the Soviet-Harvard delusion, the (unscientific) overestimation of the reach of scientific knowledge. Because of such delusion, he is what is called a naive rationalist, a rationalizer, or sometimes just a rationalist, in the sense that he believes that the reasons behind things are automatically accessible to him. And let us not confuse rationalizing with rational—the two are almost always exact opposites. Outside of physics, and generally in complex domains, the reasons behind things have had a tendency to make themselves less obvious to us, and even less to the fragilista." - Nassim Taleb