Prominent altruists aren't the people who have a larger care-o-meter, they're the people who have learned not to trust their care-o-meters... Nobody has [a care-o-meter] capable of faithfully representing the scope of the world's problems. But the fact that you can't feel the caring doesn't mean that you can't do the caring.

Nate Soares

The Courage Wolf looked long and slow at the Weasley twins. At length he spoke, "I see that you possess half of courage. That is good. Few achieve that."

"Half?" Fred asked, too awed to be truly offended.

"Yes," said the Wolf, "You know how to heroically defy, but you do not know how to heroically submit. How to say to another, 'You are wiser than I; tell me what to do and I will do it. I do not need to understand; I will not cost you the time to explain.' And there are those in your lives wiser than you, to whom you could say that."

"But what if they're wrong?" George said.

"If they are wrong, you die," the Wolf said plainly, "Horribly. And for nothing. That is why it is an act of courage."

• HPMOR omake by Daniel Speyer.

When I was 16, I wanted to follow in my grandfathers footsteps. I wanted to be a tradesman. I wanted to build things, and fix things, and make things with my own two hands. This was my passion, and I followed it for years. I took all the shop classes at school, and did all I could to absorb the knowledge and skill that came so easily to my granddad. Unfortunately, the handy gene skipped over me, and I became frustrated. But I remained determined to do whatever it took to become a tradesman.

One day, I brought home a sconce from woodshop that looked like a paramecium, and after a heavy sigh, my grandfather told me the truth. He explained that my life would be a lot more satisfying and productive if I got myself a different kind of toolbox. This was almost certainly the best advice I’ve ever received, but at the time, it was crushing. It felt contradictory to everything I knew about persistence, and the importance of “staying the course.” It felt like quitting. But here’s the “dirty truth,” Stephen. “Staying the course” only makes sense if you’re headed in a sensible direction. Because passion and persistence – while most often associated with success – are also essential ingredients

"While there are problems with what I have proposed, they should be compared to the existing alternatives, not to abstract utopias."

Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future (page number not provided by e-reader)

The version of Windows following 8.1 will be Windows 10, not Windows 9. Apparently this is because Microsoft knows that a lot of software naively looks at the first digit of the version number, concluding that it must be Windows 95 or Windows 98 if it starts with 9.

Many think this is stupid. They say that Microsoft should call the next version Windows 9, and if somebody’s dumb code breaks, it’s their own fault.

People who think that way aren’t billionaires. Microsoft got where it is, in part, because they have enough business savvy to take responsibility for problems that are not their fault but that would be perceived as being their fault.

-John D. Cook

I want to say "live and let live" about non-scientific views. But, then I read about measles outbreaks in countries where vaccines are free.

Zach Weinersmith (Twitter)

Related:

Rather than panicking about the single patient known to have Ebola in the US, protect yourself against a virus that kills up to 50,000 Americans every year. It's the flu, and simply getting the shot dramatically reduces your chances of becoming ill.

Erin Brodwin Business Insider

"You know, esoteric, non-intuitive truths have a certain appeal – once initiated, you’re no longer one of the rubes. Of course, the simplest and most common way of producing an esoteric truth is to just make it up."

West Hunter

The words out of your mouth will literally be ignored, misheard, or even contorted to the opposite of what they mean, if that’s what it takes to preserve the listener’s misconception

Scott Aaronson on why quantum computers don't speed up computations by parallelism, a popular misconception.

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not hide them -- especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of art, which in a way they are. The fundamental reaction to any mistake ought to be this: "Well, I won't do that again!" Natural selection doesn't actually think this thought; it just wipes out the goofers before they can reproduce; natural selection won't do that again, at least not as often. Animals that can learn -- learn not to make that noise, touch that wire, eat that food -- have something with a similar selective force in their brains. We human beings carry matters to a much more swift and efficient level. We can actually think that thought, reflecting on what we have just done: "Well, I won't do that again!" And when we reflect, we confront directly the problem that must be solved by any mistake-maker: what, exactly, is that? What was it about what I just did that got me into all this trouble? The trick is to take advantage of the particular details of the mess you've made, so that your next attempt

The winner worldview is that you have responsibility for your own life and it is irrelevant who is at fault if the people at fault can't or won't fix the problem. I've noticed over the course of my life that winners ignore questions of blame and fault and look for solutions they can personally influence. Losers blame others for their problems and expect that to produce results.

Scott Adams musing on what that woman in the Manhattan harassment video could do.

This actually clashes with the idea of heroic responsibility, a popular local notion. I guess it depends on what your values are.

My greatest inspiration is a low bank balance.

Ludwig Bemelmens

The humans aren't doing what the math says. The humans must be broken.

SMBC on the Ultimatum Game

"... beware of false dichotomies. Though it's fun to reduce a complex issue to a war between two slogans, two camps, or two schools of thought, it is rarely a path to understanding. Few good ideas can be insightfully captured in a single word ending with -ism, and most of our ideas are so crude that we can make more progress by analyzing and refining them than by pitting them against each other in a winner-take-all contest."

• Steven Pinker, on page 345 of The Sense of Style.

Physicists, in contrast with philosophers, are interested in determining observable consequences of the hypothesis that we are a simulation.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1847 , Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation

"Information always underrepresents reality."

Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (page number not provided by e-reader)

Chesterton's fence is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. The quotation is from Chesterton’s 1929 book The Thing, in the chapter entitled "The Drift from Domesticity":

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road.

Germany’s plans in the event of a two front war [WW I] were the results of years of study on the part of great soldiers, the German General Staff. That those plans failed was not due to any unsoundness on the part of the plans, but rather due to the fact that the plans could not be carried out by the field armies.

An official Army War College publication, 1923

While reverse stupidity isn't intelligence, learning how others rationalize failure can help us recognize our own mistakes.

Edited to reflect hydkyll's comment.

What if the polls prove to have no bias? Our model shows Republicans as about 75 percent likely to win a Senate majority. This may seem confusing: Doesn’t the official version of FiveThirtyEight’s model have Republicans as about 60 percent favorites instead? Yes, but some of the 40 percent chance it gives Democrats reflects the possibility that the polls will have a Republican bias. If the polls were guaranteed to be unbiased, that would would make Republicans more certain of winning.

Nate Silver

"If we take everything into account — not only what the ancients knew, but all of what we know today that they didn't know — then I think that we must frankly admit that we do not know. But, in admitting this, we have probably found the open channel."

Richard Feynman, "The Value of Science," public address at the National Academy of Sciences (Autumn 1955); published in What Do You Care What Other People Think (1988); republished in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman (1999) edited by Jeffrey Robbins.

Slytherin, the hat had almost put him in, and his similarity to Slytherin's heir Riddle himself had commented on. But he was beginning to think this wasn't because he had "un-Gryffindor" qualities that fit only in Slytherin, but because the two houses - normally pictured as opposites - were in some fundamental ways quite similar.

Ravenclaws in battle, he had no doubt, would cooly plan the sacrifice of distant strangers to achieve an important objective, though that cold logic could collapse in the face of sacrificing family instead. Hufflepuffs w