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Rationality Quotes May 2014
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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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.
- Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
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Comments (294)
“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer.”
― Douglas Adams
I like this quote, but it occurs to me that "I don't know" is often a reasonable answer to a question.
How about this:
"I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I can't think of an answer which I am confident will not put me in a negative light."
That just seems like overly honest politicking to me.
-- Carlos Bueno, Mature Optimization, pg. 14. Emphasis mine.
-- Alan Lightman
Every 100 million years or so, an asteroid or comet the size of a mountain smashes into the earth, killing nearly everything that lives. If ever we needed proof of Nature’s indifference to the welfare of complex organisms such as ourselves, there it is. The history of life on this planet has been one of merciless destruction and blind, lurching renewal.
Sam Harris, Mother Nature is Not Our Friend, in response to the Edge Annual Question 2008
http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/the-edge-annual-question-20081#sthash.IBMyMOQN.dpuf
When another asserted something that I thought an error, I deny'd myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appear'd or seem'd to me some difference, etc.
I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engag'd in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I propos'd my opinions procur'd them a readier reception and less contradiction; I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevail'd with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right.
Benjamin Franklin
Unfortunately this self-debasing style of contradiction has become the norm, and the people I talk to can instantly notice when I am pouring sugar on top of a serving of their own ass. Perhaps they are simply noticing changes in my tone of voice or body language, but in sufficiently intellectual partners I've noticed that abruptly contradicting them startles them into thinking more often, though I avoid this in everyday conversation with non-intellectuals for fear of increasing resentment.
I would love to hear what Richard Dawkins would say in reply to this quote.
Personally, I think it's great advice--challenging people immediately and directly is often not a good long-term strategy.
Dawkins, in arguments with theists, homeopaths, etc., is not trying to convince his interlocutors; nor are most of the other well-known atheist public figures. The aim to convince bystanders — the private atheist who is unsure whether to "come out", the theist who's all but lost his faith but isn't sure whether atheism is a position one may take publicly, the person who's lukewarm on religious arguments but has always had a rather benign and respectful view of religion, etc.
In private conversations with someone whose opinions are of concern to you, Franklin's advice make sense. The public arguments of Dawkins & Co. are more akin to performances than conversations. I think he achieves his aim admirably. I, for one, have little interest in watching people get on a public stage and have exchanges laden with "in certain cases or circumstances..." and other such mealy-mouthed nonsense.
Wikipedia:Don't stuff beans up your nose
There is a shorter version :-)
"Kids, while we're away, don't lock the cat in the fridge", said the parents.
"Ooooh, that's a great idea", said the kids...
-- Scott Aaronson
The same is true for a lot of intellectual concepts outside of math.
If only we could put together, say, a four-year college degree course intended to have this effect ...
I think that's a super idea. I'd like to design it and I'd like to take it. The ideas that underlie everything else. Like a whole university course devoted to A-level maths, but covering every simple underlying idea. We should start by trying to work out what the syllabus should be.
(one 16 lecture course on each topic, and we'll have three courses per term so that's 36 courses in total)
Off the top of my head we should have: groups, calculus, dimensional analysis, estimation, probability (inc bayes), relativity, quantum mechanics, electronics, programming, chemistry, evolution, evolutionary psychology, heuristics and biases, law, public speaking, creative writing, economics, logic, game theory, game-of-life, how-to-win-friends-and-influence people, history, cosmology, geography, atomic theory, molecular biology ...
All taught with immediate direct applications to actual things in the immediate environment and if you can't come up with simple examples that a child would find interesting and could understand then it doesn't make the cut.
Any more suggestions? If we get loads let's make a post on 'The ideal 4-year university course'.
The joke was that this is precisely what a liberal arts degree was meant to be; the main problem is that liberal arts degrees haven't kept up with the times.
Here's a related post, though it doesn't have that many suggestions: http://lesswrong.com/lw/l7/the_simple_math_of_everything/
What like?
For my part, I've found the economic notions of opportunity cost and marginal utility to be like this.
That's maths too.
A good deal of the sequences seem to fall in this category. Conservation of expected evidence, for instance.
"Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution"
— Theodosius Dobzhansky
The fact that a theory that can be stated in ten words frames an entire discipline is quite incredible. Compared to group theory and probability, it sure seems like an easier uploading process as well.
"Mathematics is about proving theorems based on axioms and other theorems" also frames a whole discipline.
A frame tells you something about a disciple but it doesn't tell you everything.
What are the ten words or less in which evolution can be stated?
warped by random change
what replicates stays around
always evolving
(More constraints! More constraints!)
change without motion
the lament of the red queen
coevolution
"Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die."
-Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
I think that Darwin would himself acknowledge that "fittest" is a more accurate rendition than "strongest," but whether the quote can be rendered in this way without breaking the ten words constraint comes down to a question of whether "unfittest" counts as a legit word.
I think "fit" has become a free-floating standard rather than meaning "fitting into a particular environment".
Maladapted, as an adjective? Though I suppose that's cheating a bit since it's a sense of adaptation that draws on an evolutionary metaphor.
"We have what replicated better; noise permanently affects replicative ability"?
Natural Selection: the differential survival of replicators with heritable variation.
"Man is not going to wait passively for millions of years before evolution offers him a better brain."
--Corneliu E. Giurgea, the chemist who synthesized Piracetam and coined the term 'Nootropic'
I tend to disagree.. I have done some things which I thought was experimenting with but did not come up with any clear conclusion after the experiment and analysis. On rewriting the thesis it turned out there were a lot more implicit assumptions inside the hypothesis that I was not aware of. I think it was a badly designed experiment and it was rather unproductive in retrospective analysis. I suppose one could argue that it brought to light the implicit assumptions and that was a useful result. Somehow(not sure how or why) I find that a low standard to consider something an experiment.
— Robert Morris, quoted in Brian Snow's "We Need Assurance!"
Experiments can fail if they are executed or planned improperly. If both the control and the experimental group are given sugar pills, for example, or the equipment fails in a shower of sparks, the experiment has provided no evidence by which one can update. It is a small quibble, and probably not what the quote meant to illustrate (I'm guessing that the experiment provided evidence which downgraded the probability of the hypothesis), but something to note nonetheless: experiments are not magic knowledge-providers.
I think Ferguson would call those "results," and from those you would have learned about performing experiments, not about the original hypothesis you were interested in.
If anything, I think a really failed experiment is one that makes you think you've learned something that is in fact wrong, which is the result of flaws in the experiment that you never become aware of.
Ferguson's proposed new language is a downgrade. Being unable to identify something as a failure when the outcome sucks is fatalism and not particularly useful.
An experiment is supposed to teach you the truth. If you run the experiment badly and, say, get a false positive, then the experiment failed.
- Herman Chernoff (pg 34 of Past, Present, and Future of Statistical Science, available here)
Actually, if you do this with something besides a test, this sounds like a really good way to teach a third-grader probabilities.
Captain James Tiberius Kirk dodging an appeal to nature and the "what the hell" effect, to optimize for consequences instead of virtue.
--Kevan Lee
This is from Greg Egan's 1999 novel Teranesia; since there are no hits for ‘Teranesia’ in the Google custom search, I'm inferring that it hasn't been posted before.
Here's a little background. This is a spoiler for some events early in the novel, but it is early; it's not a spoiler for the really big stuff (not even in this chapter). So Prabir lives alone with his father (‘Baba’) and mother (and baby sister Madhusree who is not in this scene), and their garden has been sown with mines for some very interesting reasons that needn't concern us, and Baba has discovered this by being blown up by one. But he's still alive, so mother and Prabir have laid a ladder atop some boxes across the garden, and she's crawled along the ladder to rescue Baba without setting off more mines. But this is harder than anticipated.
(taken from the American hardback edition, pages 50&51)
[Edit: grammar in the text written by me]
It is a good quote, and it works in context, but often it pays to (temporarily) believe that "what you'd like to be true" actually is and do your hardest (or even impossible) to figure out how you got there. “Yes, we can do it.” could be the first step toward figuring out the "how" part.
-- Joseph P. Simmons, The Reformation: Can Social Scientists Save Themselves
Voted up for the linked article more than for the quote.
Accident, n. An inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws.
I don't think there's such a thing as "unmediated experience of the world".
(I like the quotation a lot for giving a plausible, lucid reason why Zen might spurn the usual sort of analytical discourse. But it's so clear an explanation of an idea that I think it's revealed a basic problem with the idea, namely that it points towards a non-existent goal.)
There is such a thing as a less mediated experience of the world.
Can you give some examples of more and less mediated experiences?
That's an interesting question-- "mediated" should probably be modified by "of what?" and "by what?".
It's definitely possible for perceptions to become less mediated by focusing on small details so that prototypes aren't dominant. It's possible to become a lot more perceptive about color, and Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is about seeing angles, lengths, shading, curves, etc. rather than objects and thus being able to draw accurately.
If you get some distance on your emotions through meditation and/or CBT, is your experience of your emotions less mediated? More mediated? Wrong questions? I think meditators assume that the calm you achieve is already there-- you just weren't noticing it until you meditated enough, so your emotions are more mediated and your calm is less mediated, but now that I've put it into words, I'm not sure what you would use for evidence that the calm was always there rather than created by meditation.
Thank you for the evidence that it's possible to get 12 karma points for something that doesn't exactly make sense.
Because? People who claim it are lying? You dont have it, and your mind is typical?
Or maybe they and satt mean different things by “unmediated”.
Because causal mechanisms to relay information from the world to one's brain are a necessary prerequisite for "experience of the world", so one's "experience of the world" is always mediated by those causal mechanisms.
And it's not possible for just the cognitive mechanisms to shut down, and leave the perceptual ones?
If you shut down the cognitive mechanisms completely, would you even remember what you have perceived? Or even that you have perceived something?
Maybe not. That matches some reports of nonordinary experience.
I doubt it's possible. I'm sceptical that one can cleanly sort every experience-related bodily mechanism into a "cognitive" category xor a "perceptual" category. Intuitively, for example, I might think of my eyes as perceptual, and the parts of my brain that process visual signals as cognitive, but if all of those bits of my brain were cut out, I'd expect to see nothing at all, not an "unmediated" view of the world — which implies my brain is perceptual as well as cognitive. So I expect the idea of just shutting down the cognitive mechanisms and leaving the perceptual mechanisms intact is incoherent.
(Often there're also external physical mechanisms which are further mediators. You can't see an object without light going from the object to your eye, and you can't hear something without a medium between the source and your ear.)
It's like neutrality on Wikipedia. You'll never attain neutrality, but there is such a thing as less and more, and you want to head in the "more" direction.
I think I see what you mean; if I mentally substitute "is closer to an" for "involves the", and "that state would have" for "that state has", the practice the quotation describes makes more sense to me. (I'm leery of the idea that it's better to head in the direction of less mediation — taking off my glasses doesn't give me a clearer view of the world — but that's a different objection.)
So while the original quotation talked about not thinking at all, your revised version urges that we think as little as possible. How does it qualify as a "rationality quote"?
It can be rationally beneficial to realise now much mediation is involved in perception, in the same way it is useful to replace naive ealism with scientific realism.
Relatively unmediated perception is also aesthetically interesting, and therefore of terminal value to many.
You tell me; I have to squint pretty hard to make it read as telling me something useful about rationality.
Words are used to point to places. The thing that comes to your mind when you hear the words "unmediated experience of the world" might not exist. That doesn't mean that there aren't using people who use that phrase to point to something real.
Couldn't you say exactly that to anyone who doubts the existence of anything?
You could. And the way to resolve a dispute over the existence of, say, unicorns, would be to determine what is being meant by the word, in terms of what observations their existence implies that you will be more likely to see. Then you can go and make those observations.
The problem with talk of mental phenomena like "unmediated perception" is that it is difficult to do this, because the words are pointing into the mind of the person using them, which no-one else can see. Or worse, the person isn't pointing anywhere, but repeating something someone else has said, without having had personal experience. How can you tell whether a disagreement is due to the words being used differently, the minds being actually different, or the words and the minds being much the same but the people having differing awareness of their respective minds?
This is a problem I have with pretty much everything I have read about meditation. I can follow the external instructions about sitting, but if I cannot match up the description of the results to be supposedly obtained with my experience, there isn't anywhere to go with that.
You can construe the goal as non existent, but that is an uncharitable reading.
Whether the goal exists is an empirical question, no...? I don't understand where (a lack of) charity enters into it.
The principle of charity relates to what people mean by what they say. Unmitigated experience might be empirically nonexistent under one interpretation of unmediated but not under another. If someone claims to have had unmediated experience , that is evidence relating to what they mean by their words.
I see. What more charitable interpretation of "unmediated experience" would you prefer?
Maybe the PoC would be an easier sell if it were phrased in terms of the "typical semantics fallacy".
— Errol Morris
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." -George Bernard Shaw
Or naivety, depending on how cynical the critic is.
And of course, inaccurate observations are commonly called cynical and/or naive as well...
Real probabilities about the structure and properties of the cosmos, and its relation to living organisms on this planet, can be reach’d only by correlating the findings of all who have competently investigated both the subject itself, and our mental equipment for approaching and interpreting it — astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and so on. The only sensible method is that of assembling all the objective scientifick data of 1931, and forming a fresh chain of partial indications bas’d exclusively on that data and on no conceptions derived from earlier and less ample arrays of data; meanwhile testing, by the psychological knowledge of 1931, the workings and inclinations of our minds in accepting, connecting, and making deductions from data, and most particularly weeding out all tendencies to give more than equal consideration to conceptions which would never have occurred to us had we not formerly harboured provisional and capricious ideas of the universe now conclusively known to be false. It goes without saying that this realistic principle fully allows for the examination of those irrational feelings and wishes about the universe, upon which idealists so amusingly base their various dogmatick speculations.
-- H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 1932-1934.
What's with bas'd and dogmatick? Is Lovecraft aiming at some antique effect, or did he write in a non-standard dialect?
Yes and yes. Lovecraft was writing in early 20th century New England, but he typically affected the forms of late 1700s British English, or at least tried to. Partly this was for stylistic effect, but I get the sense that he also thought of his native idiom as intellectually debased.
The aesthetics of tradition were kind of a thing with Lovecraft, although in other ways he was thoroughly modern. Not that these affectations were exclusive to Lovecraft by any means; William Hope Hodgson for example wrote The Night Land (a seminal 1912 horror/SF story and notable Lovecraft influence) in an excruciating pseudo-17th-century dialect.
Consider my priors for knowledge of Bayes-fu by wise predecessors to be significantly raised.
-- Max H. Bazerman
Context? I can randomly replace elements of this by their opposites and get something that sounds just as truthy.
Try it!
"[Because/although] [positive/negative] [illusions/perceptions] provide a [short/long]-term [benefit/cost] with [larger/smaller] [long/short]-term [costs/benefits], they can [become/avoid] a form of [emotional/intellectual] [procrastination/spur to action]."
It's from a book on decision-making, in a section on motivational biases. Bazerman discusses the evidence that positive illusions help ('[research] suggest[s] that positive illusions enhance and protect self-esteem, increase personal contentment, help individuals to persist at difficult tasks, and facilitate coping with aversive and uncontrollable events" is a short sample), talks about clusters (unrealistically positive views of the self, unrealistic optimism, illusion of control, self-serving attributions, and positive illusions in groups and society), and then the quote is from a section labeled "Are Positive Illusions Good for You?". Here's the full paragraph it is from:
It looks to me like doing an odd number of flips is often silly. ("Because positive illusions typically provide a long-term cost with larger long-term costs, they can avoid a form of emotional procrastination." What?)
"Because positive illusions provide a short-term benefit with smaller short-term benefits, they can become a form of intellectual procrastination."
― Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men (Discworld, #30)
If you want to use your selfishness to help others, then you're not selfish.
Do we really need to go into the question what “selfishness” actually means? In ordinary situations I'd say that “the actual altruist [is] whichever one actually holds open doors for little old ladies”; maybe in certain situations we need different words to specify whether they do so because it's in their own utility function or because of religious/game-theoretical/superrational/acausal/whatever-they-call-it-these-days reasons, but...
I don't think this is just a problem with definitions. This is fake morality.
She's giving a fake justification for helping others as her own self interest. Someone who finds a way to justify buying a million dollar laptop is clearly just being selfish and doesn't really care about their claimed morality of altruism. Similarly, someone who tries to justify helping others is clearly just being altruistic and doesn't really care about their claimed morality of selfishness.
Of course you're not. But human nature is supposedly selfish, and if your true goals are altruistic, you will have to find a way to turn it around.
Emphasis on "supposedly", since the popular hypotheses about "selfish human nature" are far too simplistic to reflect any actual results of psychological research.
Of course they are. Unlike those about Pratchett's witches, though. They reflect the 'locally-selfish-globally-altruistic' concept surprisingly well.
Selfishness seems to be referred to as primarily a a mindset or attitude. Helping others as an outcome. I think they can co-exist at the same time, for example Adam Smith's invisible hand in capitalism.
Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
The worker is paid for his work, and with this money he obtains a roof over his head, food on the table, and the wherewithal to raise a family and to pursue other activities when he is not working. Sisyphus works for nothing and does nothing but work. That Camus sees, or affects to see, no difference between their situations says something about Camus, but nothing about work.
Is it truly different to work because the Gods have forced you, compared to working because the threat of starvation and homelessness has forced you?
I thought the quote was suggesting both tasks are equally arbitrary and pointless, though, rather than discussing compensation. It seems more interesting.
Yes, it is.
Some people have it harder than others, but we all work because the threat of starvation and homelessness forces us; except for those relying on the charity of friends and family (including deceased ones), or of institutions. The meat machines we live in require sustenance and shelter, without which we die, and these resources are provided either by our own work or by that of others. Death is free. Life has to be worked for.
Some are fortunate enough to have the abilities, health, energy, and social environment to be confident of always finding people to pay for whatever it is we want to direct our efforts towards. The wolves are so very far from our door that we can forget, or never realise, that they are out there, inching closer when we rest and retreating when we work.
So you can apply the story of Sisyphus to all of us, but only in the larger sense that we are forced to run all the while just to stay alive, and that only for 70 years or so. It applies just as much to Camus (whose Wiki page is rather uninformative about how he actually earned a living) as to the lowest factory worker.
We may, of course, daydream of a future in which we need care no more to clothe and eat. We may work to bring such a future about. But that is not the world we live in today, nor has it ever been, nor will it be for a very long time.
It is suggesting that, and, I say, it is wrong.
(One might argue that "the workman of today" is less likely to accomplish something meaningful, in the course of earning their living.)
Even if everything was meaningless - which it isn't, in my opinion, but Camus does seem to have thought so - and everyone must work or starve - which, as you note, is not true because people are compassionate - surely that merely makes the comparison to Sisyphus that much more relevant? How does it undermine the quote?
Indeed, if it's that hard to escape, surely comparing starvation to the inescapable will of the gods is that much more accurate?
That depends on the strength of one's transhumanist faith. :)
One can repurpose Camus as much as Camus repurposes Sisyphus, but the original passage does go on to say, "Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious..." So Camus is not talking about us all, certainly not intellectuals like himself, but about the proles.
I think there's a non-negligible difference between "I push the same rock around every day, and there it is back in the exact place it started again" and e.g. "I push the same kinds of rock around every day, but last year's are now embedded in the building we just finished."
Camus may answer along the lines of "since [any ascribing of meaning] is absurd in the first place, if you think there's objectively more meaning in the building you built than in the rock you pushed up, you're not taking the premise seriously". In a way we're whistling in a dark forest.
Nassim Taleb
Scott Aaronson in reply to the statements like "A stone is conscious to the “inputs” of gravity and electrostatic repulsion"
It reminds me of Justice Potter Stewart: "I know it when I see it!"
Well, it's the converse, which seems a lot more useful a criterion to me.
I'm not sure Scott isn't just falling victim to the sorites paradox here. There are lots of macroscale definitions which seem to break down at their smallest application, and it's not immediately obvious that consciousness couldn't be one of them.
The question is whether to interpret such a falling apart of a definition (which I take to mean that related decision problems cannot be clearly answered anymore) as an inherent or even necessary attribute of concepts which 'live' at a macroscale, or as a weakness of said definition, as a sign that we're mistaking a fuzzy word cloud for a precisely defined set.
Hmm. I see his point, I thinks, but I ... think it does mean that, actually. Without fully understanding the definition, you should be less sure that a better understanding wouldn't classify them differently.
Picture a slave-owner saying something similar about a slave, for instance. Slave-owners were even more confused than we are about personhood, and I think it's clear that they weren't "crystal clear on what [isn't a person", in retrospect.
Steven Pinker
This lacks a ring of truth for me.
A lot of folks seem to expect the science of human beings to reinforce their bitterness and condemnation of human nature (roughly, "people are mostly crap"). I kinda suspect that if you asked "sophisticated people" (whoever those are) to name some important psychology experiments, those who named any would come up with Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment and Milgram's obedience experiments pretty early on. Not a lot of emotional uplift there.
As for the arts — horror films where everyone dies screaming seem to be regarded as every bit as lowbrow as feel-good comedies.
It's not obvious that one is better off with the truth. Assume that for some desirable thing X:
P(X|I believe X will happen) = 49%
P(X|I believe X won't happen) = 1%
It seems I can't rationally believe that X will happen. Perhaps I would be better off being deluded about it.
Sorry, I don't understand - why does sum of probabilities not equal 100% in your example? Assume that you missed "5" in "P(X|I believe X won't happen) = 1%"
But for what reason?
These probabilities are not required to sum to 1, because they are not incompatible and exhaustive possible outcomes of an experiment. More obvious example to illustrate:
P(6-sided die coming up as 6 | today is Monday) = 1/6
P(6-sided die coming up as 6 | today is not Monday) = 1/6
1/6 + 1/6 != 1
I think your example is not suitable for situation above - there I can see only two possible outcomes: X happen or X not happen. We don't know anything more about X. And P(X|A) + P(X|~A) = 1, isn't so?
No. You may have confused it with P(X|A) + P(~X|A) = 1 (note the tilda). In my case, either 6-sided die comes up as 6, or it doesn't.
Yes, either X happens or X doesn't happen. P(X) + P(~X) = 1, so therefore P(X | A) + P(~X | A) = 1. Both formulations are stating the probability of X. But one is adjusting for the probability of X given A; so either X given A happens or X given A doesn't happen (which is P(~X | A) not P(X | ~A)).
When Pinker said "better off", I assumed he included goal achievement. It's plausible that people are more motivated to do something if they're more certain than they should be based on the evidence. They might not try as hard otherwise, which will influence the probability that the goal is attained. I don't really know if that's true, though.
The thing may be worth doing even if the probability isn't high that it will succeed, because the expected value could be high. But if one isn't delusionally certain that one will be successful, it may no longer be worth doing because the probability that the attempt succeeds is lower. (That was the point of my first comment.)
There could be other psychological effects of knowing certain things. For example, maybe it would be difficult to handle being completely objective about one's own flaws and so on. Being objective about people you know may (conceivably) harm your relationships. Having to lie is uncomfortable. Knowing a completely useless but embarrassing fact about someone but pretending you don't is uncomfortable, not simply a harmless, unimportant update of your map of the territory. Etc.
I'm not saying I know of any general way to avoid harmful knowledge, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Patrick McKenzie on why having a publication date on your blog entry devalues it.
(Link to the, er, "content".)
And yet books always have a publication date.
ETA: as do scientific articles, of course, and the date really matters, not because of being "up to date" but because the date gives some context to whatever it is.
As far as books go:
I'm curious if showing a date is as bad as he thinks; he doesn't mention ever A/B testing the claim himself. (I'd test it on my site, except the date is already buried in the sidebar to the point where many people miss it, so I wouldn't expect much of a difference.)
I predict yes, but if I'm reading his position right showing the date is just a symptom of not having a Long Content focus, which is what he's really arguing for in that article (and which your site already has in spades).
If the problem is focusing on short-term writing which becomes worthless quickly, then simply hiding or showing dates shouldn't much affect how long readers stay on the page: most short-term stuff shows its colors very quickly. (How many sentences does it take to figure out you're not interested in a rant about John Kerry from 2004?)
I think McKenzie's argument is that using a date can turn long content into short content, which many people do on accident, and while he doesn't quantify it (which would be the value of A/B testing) I think he has enough evidence to establish the direction of the effect. Not using a date is obviously not sufficient to turn short content into long content, but I do think it may be helpful at getting one into the right state of mind, as it focuses the attention on sorting things by content rather than time. (Imagine trying to find all of Robin Hanson's writing on construal level theory- yes, you can use the nearfar tag on Overcoming Bias, but that's sorted by date, and there's no solid introduction.)
That's a good example of how weak date markers are: if the dates were deleted completely from every OB post, people would still find them incomprehensible because there's only one post which could be considered an overview of the concept, and is a needle in the haystack until and unless Hanson in some way synthesizes all his scattershot posts and allusions into a single Near-Far page.
The posts need some sort of organization imposed; the lack of that organization is what kills them, not some date markers. If my essays were broken up into 500-word chunks, and sorted either randomly or by date, they wouldn't look much better.
To expand on this a bit: he gives the following supporting example:
Nick Szabo
The very narrow choice of values and their seemingly libertarian phrasing implies some hidden criteria for what constitutes "a good answer" - which enables whoever follows this advice to immediately dismiss a proposal based on some unspecified "good"-ness of the answer without further thought or discussion, and dramatically downgrade their opinion of the proposer in the bargain. This seems detrimental to the rational acquisition of ideas and options.
EDIT: Criticism has since been withdrawn in response to context provided below.
The quote doesn't give that impression in context, including the comments - it's actually a statement about the importance of the rule of law. From the comments, Nick notes:
Acknowledged, and criticism withdrawn.
Trivially true, as one who cannot point out the difference is ignorant in the field of legal systems. I guess it is not what is meant?
In an opinion piece in the Boston Globe called "At MIT, the humanities are just as important as STEM" by Deborah K. Fitzgerald, Apr 30, 2014
The slashdot poster AthanasiusKircher goes on to ask
See slashdot post
Some of these things are not like the others...
Which are the odd ones out?
To a first approximation:
{ critical thinking skills; an ability to work with and interpret numbers and statistics; a willingness to experiment, to open up to change }
vs.
{ knowledge of the past and other cultures; access to the insights of great writers and artists }
Then you've got this one by itself because what the heck does it even mean:
{ the ability to navigate ambiguity }
{ the ability to navigate ambiguity }
I think this is one of the most important skills you get from the humanities. I have a friend who's a history professor. He's very used to hearing 20 different accounts of the same event told by different people, most of whom are self-serving if not outright lying, and working out what must actually have gone on, which looks like a strength to me.
He has a skill I'd like to have, but don't, and he got it from studying history, (and playing academic politics).
How did he know that his judgment of what actually had gone on was correct? How did he verify his conclusion?
Statistics is precisely that, but with numbers.
That only works if you have numbers.
Luckily, you can make numbers.
Perhaps the ability to work with poorly-defined objectives? Including how to get some idea of what someone wants and use that to ask useful questions to refine it?
-- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, pg. 76
Context: The quotes here are taken from the C.S. Lewis sci-fi novel Perelandra in which protagonist, Ransom, goes to an extremely ideal Venus to have philosophical discoveries and box with a man possessed by a demon.
These quotes come from the beginning of the novel when Ransom is attempting to describe the experience of having been transported through space by extraterrestrial means which had augmented his body to protect it from cold and hunger and atrophy for the duration of the journey.
This discussion (taking place in a debate over the Christian afterlife) touches upon certain sentiments about how the augmentation (or, for Lewis, glorification) of modern human bodies does not lessen us as humans but instead only improves that which is there.
C.S. Lewis, Perelandra, p. 29.
While we are quoting Perelandra
A parallel passage from 1984:
"You will understand that I must start by asking you certain questions. In general terms, what are you prepared to do?'
'Anything that we are capable of,' said Winston.
O'Brien had turned himself a little in his chair so that he was facing Winston. He almost ignored Julia, seeming to take it for granted that Winston could speak for her. For a moment the lids flitted down over his eyes. He began asking his questions in a low, expressionless voice, as though this were a routine, a sort of catechism, most of whose answers were known to him already.
'You are prepared to give your lives?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to commit murder?'
'Yes.'
'To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?'
'Yes.'
'To betray your country to foreign powers?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases--to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?'
'Yes.'
'If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child's face--are you prepared to do that?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to lose your identity and live out the rest of your life as a waiter or a dock-worker?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order you to do so?'
'Yes.'
'You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never see one another again?'
'No!' broke in Julia.
It appeared to Winston that a long time passed before he answered. For a moment he seemed even to have been deprived of the power of speech. His tongue worked soundlessly, forming the opening syllables first of one word, then of the other, over and over again. Until he had said it, he did not know which word he was going to say. 'No,' he said finally.
This feels like a combination of words that are supposed to sound Wisely, but don't actually make sense. (I guess Lewis uses this technique frequently.)
How specifically could being "definite" be a a problem for language? Take any specific thing, apply an arbitrary label, and you are done.
There could be a problem when a person X experienced some "qualia" that other people have never experienced, so they can't match the verbal description with anything in their experience. Or worse, they have something similar, which they match instead, even when told not to. And this seems like a situation described in the text. -- But then the problem is not having the shared experience. If they did, they would just need to apply an arbitrary label, and somehow make sure they refer to the same thing when using the label. The language would have absolutely no problem with that.
Since any attempt to defend the quote itself will only come off as a desire to shoehorn my chosen author into the rationality camp, I'll just give the simple reason why I chose to include that quote instead of stopping with the two previous:
I felt it touched on the subject of inferential distance and discussing reality using labels in a manner that was worthy of attention.
This remark seems to flow from an oversimplified view of how language works. In the context of, for example, a person or a chair, this paradigm seems pretty solid... at least, it gets you a lot. You can ostend the thing ('take' it, as it were) and then appy the label. But in the case of lots of "objects" there is nothing analogous to such 'taking' as a prior, discrete step from talking. For example, "objects" like happiness, or vagueness or definiteness themselves.
I think you may benefit from reading Wittgenstein, but maybe you'd just hate it. I think you need it though!
Am not sure I follow your comment. I think I get the basic gist of it and I agree with it, but I gotta ask. Did you really mean ostend(or was it a typo?)?. I can't really find it as a word in m-w.com or on google.
Yep, what The Ancient Geek said. Sorry I didn't reply in a timely way - I'm not a regular user. I'm glad you basically agree, and pardon me for using such a recherche word (did I just do it again?) needlessly. Philosophical training can do that to you; you get a bit blind to how certain words are, while they could be part of the general intellectual culture, actually only used in very specific circles. (I think 'precisification' is another example of this. I used it with an intelligent nerd friend recently and, while of course he understood it - it's self explanatory - he thought it was terrible, and probably thought I just made it up.)
Hope you look at Wittgenstein!
As in ostention, basically pointing, or a verbal substitute.
Yes.. If they had the shared experience, they would just need to apply an arbitrary label, however given how we learn language(by association based on how they are used by people around us on what we see as objective events/experiences), I am not too confident the labels will match even after having the shared experience. My previous comment assumes this, but did not make it explicit. And I derive the
quote from that assumption. I may be wrong about the assumption (since it seems to be more of a thought experiment than a practical experiment at the moment) but nevertheless I assign fairly high probability/confidence on that.
I tend to think of language as a symbolic system to denote/share/communicate these experiences with other brains. Ofcourse, there's the inherent challenge of seldom two experiences are same.(Even if it is an experiment on electrons). It's one of the reason, one of my sci-fi favourite scenario is brain-brain interfaces, that figure some way to interpret and transfer the empirical heuristic rules about a probability distribution(of any given event) one person has to another. Or may be am just being too idealistic about people always having such heuristics in their heads. (even if they are not aware of it) . :-)
There's a passage by Lewis, and probably from Perelandra, which is to the effect that people's actual choices are from a deeper part of themselves than the conscious mind. Might you happen to know it?
Off hand, I don't recall. There is a moment at the end of the book where Ransom has a revelatory experience of all life in existence and understands it as an interlocking dance, something that doesn't fit either his theory of predestination nor free will.
Actually, looked up some quotes and found this:
-- Lucien Zell (can't find an authoritative attribution)
I'm really not clear on what this is actually supposed to be a metaphor for.
It's clearly not something you would literally want to do, since the night is temporary and the light provided by the map is dim and brief. But maybe this is a metaphorical long-lasting night and bright burning map?
Destroying something that would be useful ir even necessary in the future so that you can better get through or perhaps survive the present.
Going to the same college as your high school sweetheart for example. Perhaps it will work out and you won't need the map.
I'm sure this has been discussed before, but my attempts at searches for those discussions failed, so...
Why is this thread in Main and not Discussion?
Last month I posted the rationality quotes in discussion. Someone complained and said it belonged in main so I moved it there. This month I just started it in Main.
Tradition, I guess.
In the Age of Sequences, Eliezer sometimes posted rationality quotes, in the article text (1, 2, 3, etc.). Things written by Eliezer in that era are probably automatically considered Main-level. And the new Rationality Quotes threads don't seem worse than the traditional ones -- if we look at the highly voted quotes.
Well, discussion didn't exist back than.
--- The Black Opera by Mary Gentle