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elharo comments on Rationality Quotes September 2014 - Less Wrong
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Comments (379)
True or false, I'm trying but I really can't see how this is a rationality quote. It is simply a pithy and marginally funny statement about one topic.
I think it's time to add one new rule to the list, right at the top:
Can anyone say that in fewer words?
This is how:
The rest of the logic in the link I gave is even more interesting (and "rational").
Making one's point in a memorable way is a rationality technique.
As for your rule, it appears to me so subjective as to be completely useless. For one where one sees "what to believe" another sees "how to think".
Assume for the sake of argument, the statement is correct.
This quote does not expose a fallacy, that is an error in reasoning. There is nothing in this quote to indicate the rationality shortcoming that causes people to believe the incorrect statement. Rather this exposes an error of fact. The rationality question is why do people come to believe errors of fact and how we can avoid that.
You may be reading the sunk cost fallacy into this quote, or it may be in an unquoted part of the original article, but I don't see it here. If the rest of the article better elucidates rationality techniques that led Adams to come to this conclusion, then likely the wrong extract from the article was selected to quote.
Making one's point in a memorable (including humorous) way may be an instrumental rationality technique. That is, it helps to convince other people of your beliefs. However in my experience it is a very bad epistemic rationality technique. In particular it tends to overweight the opinions of people like Adams who are very talented at being funny, while underweighting the opinions of genuine experts in a field, who are somewhat dry and not nearly as amusing.