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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.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 "overwhelming probability" of being "unlikely to hit" is a bad analogy to the real world. Hamas's rockets don't kill many people, but they're not so unlikely to hit that they don't kill some people. It's not as if they're blowing a puff of cigarette smoke towards you and increasing the probability by 0.001 that you may someday get cancer--people actually die from those rockets.
Furthermore, you left out the part where the guy deliberately shot at you from a crowded neighborhood so that the only way to defend yourself is to endanger the people around him.
Don't use political examples in a non-political argument. There are always plenty of others to choose from.