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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.
The second quote is clearly not solipsism; note that what is "created" will be solid enough to be judiciously studied by other actors, empiricism, etc. Note also that the second quote does not talk about creating "reality," it talks about creating "our own reality." In other words, remoulding the world to suit your own purposes. Any sensible reading of the quote leads to that interpretation.
Like Lumifer, the Singer/Feuerbach quote, made me think immediately of the famous "reality-based community" quote.
No, the second clearly implies that the speaker simply doesn't hold with Enlightenment principles, empiricism, and all that "judicious study of discernible reality" crap. That speaker clearly prefers to just act, not out of rational calculation towards a goal, but because acting is manly and awesome. This is why people have such vicious contempt for that speaker: not only is he not acting rationally on behalf of others, he doesn't even care about acting rationally on his own behalf, and he had the big guns.