Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.
Though I am glad not everyone followed this advice with regards to me, when I was (more of) an idiot. I owe those patient, sympathetic, tolerant people a great deal.
I would also like to note that I have learned a number of interesting things by (a) spending an hour researching idiotic claims and (b) reading carefully thought out refutations of idiocy - like how they're called "federal forts" because the statutes of the states in which they were built include explicitly ceding the land upon which they were built to the federal government.