A good rule of thumb to ask yourself in all situations is, “If not now, then when?” Many people delay important habits, work and goals for some hypothetical future. But the future quickly becomes the present and nothing will have changed.

Scott Young

Hollywood is filled with feel-good messages about how robotic logic is no match for fuzzy, warm, human irrationality, and how the power of love will overcome pesky obstacles such as a malevolent superintelligent computer. Unfortunately there isn’t a great deal of cause to think this is the case, any more than there is that noble gorillas can defeat evil human poachers with the power of chest-beating and the ability to use rudimentary tools.

From the British Newspaper 'The Telegraph', and their article on Nick Bostrom's awesome new book 'Superintelligence'.

I just thought it was a great analogy. Nice to see AI as an X-Risk in the mainstream media too.

"I want information. I want to understand you. To understand what exactly I'm fighting. You can help me."
"I obviously won't."
"I will kill you if you don't help me. I'm not bluffing, Broadwings. I will kill you and you will die alone and unseen, and frankly you are far too intelligent to simply believe that the stories of ancestral halls are true. You will die and that will probably be it, and nobody will ever know if you talked or not—not that conversing with an enemy in a war you don't support is dishonorable in the first place."
"You'll let me leave if I stonewall, because you don't want to set a precedent of murdering surrendered officers."
"We'll see. Would you like another cup?"
"No."
Derpy smiled deviously. "You know, in that last battle? We didn't fly our cannon up there to the cliffs. Nope. We had Earth ponies drag them. Earth ponies are capable of astounding physical feats, you know. We're probably going to be using more mobility in our artillery deployment going forward, now that they've demonstrated how effective the concept is."
"...why did you tell me that? What would drive you to tell me that?"

A man is walking on the moon with his eyes turned up toward space And the bright blue world that watches him reflected on his face. The whole world sees the hero there and the module crew also. But few can see the guiding team that guards him from below.

Here's a health to the man who walked the moon, and the module crew above, And the team that watches from the sky with worry, joy, and love. To all who blazed the sky-trail come raise your glasses 'round; And a health to the unknown heroes, too, who never left the ground.

Here's a health to the ship's designers, and the welders of her seams, And all who man the radar-scan to watch our dawning dreams. For all the unknown heroes, sing out to every shore: "What makes one step a giant leap is all the steps before".

Leslie Fish, musically praising the Hufflepuff virtues.

That's why I'm skeptical of people who look at some catastrophic failure of a complex system and say, "Wow, the odds of this happening are astronomical. Five different safety systems had to fail simultaneously!" What they don't realize is that one or two of those systems are failing all the time, and it's up to the other three systems to prevent the failure from turning into a disaster.

-- Raymond Chen

It was a gamble: would people really take time out of their busy lives to answer other people’s questions, for nothing more than fake internet points and bragging rights?

It turns out that people will do anything for fake internet points.

Just kidding. At best, the points, and the gamification, and the focused structure of the site did little more than encourage people to keep doing what they were already doing. People came because they wanted to help other people, because they needed to learn something new, or because they wanted to show off the clever way they’d solved a problem.

...

An incredible number of people jumped at the chance to help a stranger

-- Jay Hanlon, Five year retrospective on StackOverflow

The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

-- Alberto Brandolini (via David Brin)

But if that were the case, then moral philosophers - who reason about ethical principles all day long - should be more virtuous than other people. Are they? The philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel tried to find out. He used surveys and more surreptitious methods to measure how often moral philosophers give to charity, vote, call their mothers, donate blood, donate organs, clean up after themselves at philosophy conferences, and respond to emails purportedly from students. And in none of these ways are moral philosophers better than other philosophers or professors in other fields.

Schwitzgebel even scrounged up the missing-book lists from dozens of libraries and found that academic books on ethics, which are presumably mostly borrowed by ethicists, are more likely to be stolen or just never returned than books in other areas of philosophy. In other words, expertise in moral reasoning does not seem to improve moral behavior, and it might even make it worse (perhaps by making the rider more skilled at post hoc justification). Schwitzgebel still has yet to find a single measure on which moral philosophers behave better than other philosophers.

• Jonathon Haidt, discussing the idea that ethi

We try things. Occasionally they even work.

Parson Gotti

Come back with your shield - or on it.

Our kind might not be able to cooperate, but the Spartans certainly could. The Spartans were masters of hoplite phalanx warfare where often every individual would have been better off running away but collectively everyone was better off if none ran away than if all did. The above quote is what Plutarch says Spartan mothers would tell their sons before battle. (Because shields were heavy if you were going to run away you would drop it, and coming back on your shield meant you were dead.) Spreading memes to overcome collective action problems is civilization level rational.

After describing

blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

David Foster Wallace continues

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you will, too.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

Albert Einstein

The power is not in the choice of metaphor, it is in the ability to shift among metaphors. Teaching people this other metaphor [...] but not leaving them with the flexibility to move freely in and out is not having enabled them at all.

-- Kent Pitman

Language exists only on the surface of our consciousness. The great human struggles are played out in silence and in the ability to express oneself.

Franz Xavier Kroetz

Two mares, each convinced she was standing firmly on The Shores Of Rationality, stared helplessly into The Sea Of Confusion and despaired over their inability to ever rescue the friend helplessly floundering within.

A vivid description of inferential distance from Twilight's Escort Service.

Edit: It's from a comedy that relies on misunderstandings; Twilight chooses the word "escort" to advertise her teleportation abilities. If you don't enjoy awkwardness-based comedies, I recommend you stay away. The actual quote is about explaining a value dif... (read more)

'Deep pragmatism' is Joshua Greene's name for 'utilitarianism'.

Today we, some of us, defend the rights of gays and women with great conviction. But before we could do it with feeling, before our feelings felt like “rights,” someone had to do it with thinking. I’m a deep pragmatist, and a liberal, because I believe in this kind of progress and that our work is not yet done.

Joshua Greene, “Moral Tribes"

"Just as eating against one’s will is injurious to health, so studying without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in." -Da Vinci

I'm starting a new 30 day challenge: the month of no "should." Instead of tediously working down a list of all the little chores and errands that I "should" be doing, I'll work to listen to what that little voice inside me wants to do. I think it will be interesting.

— Matt Cutts

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.

-Isaac Asimov

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and common sense.

-Buddha

But the more central point is that trying to explain or predict [institutional] behavior idealistically, in terms of things called "values" or moral fortitude, is foolish. It's magical thinking. "One party believes in..." Institutions don't have beliefs. They have incentives.

• Internet commenter

There is, to the [Slytherin adept], only one reality governing everything from quarks to galaxies. Humans have no special place within it. Any idea predicated on the special status of the human — such as justice, fairness, equality, talent — is raw material for a theater of mediated realities that can be created via subtraction of conflicting evidence, polishing and masking.

• Venkatesh Rao, The Gervais principle