Rationality Quotes October 2014

Tyrrell_McAllister

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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.

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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.

How is this a rationality quote? I can see people thinking this is a good argument, especially if you politically agreed with the author, but it doesn't seem to be about rationality, or demonstrating an unusually great deal of rationality

It expresses two ideas:

Reduction to incentives is such a useful hammer that it's tempting to think of the world as homo economus nails. Like all simplified models, that can be useful, but it can also be dangerously wrong.
It isn't very much information to say that people have a price. The real information lies in what that price is. It may be true to say "people are dishonest", but if you want to win, you need to specify which people and how dishonest.

12sketerpot12y

It would definitely be a rationality quote if it went on to quote the part where Eric Flint decided to test his hypothesis by putting some of his books online, for free, and watching his sales numbers.

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