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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.
"My digital photography degree from an era of obsolescent technology isn't rendered completely useless through the passage of time" is a far cry from "I can divert the course of rivers".
That is true. This implies that new tools can be divided into two categories; those that use the same skills as the old tools but have a multiplicative effect on the results for all users (spoons->spades), and those that bring even an untrained user up to a certain basic level of competancy but make little or no difference to an expert user.
...having said that, I now realise that there is a third category of tool as well; that which can be used to great effect by an expert but is next to useless to a completely untrained user. An example of this sort of... (read more)