= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Rationality Quotes November 2014
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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (337)
Colin Howson, talking about how Cox's theorem bears the mark of Cox's training as a physicist (source):
This is from a novel (Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone). The situation is a man and a woman who have to work together but have trouble trusting each other because of propaganda from an old war:
That is an interesting thought. When I try to ground it in contemporary reality my thoughts turn to politics. Modern democratic politics is partly about telling stories to motivate voters, but which stories have outlasted their usefulness? Any answer is likely to be contentious.
Turning to the past, I wrote a little essay suggesting that stories of going back to nature to live in a recent golden age when life was simpler may serve as examples of stories that have outlasted their usefulness by a century.
--Eric Raymond on the value of bilinguilism
This is also the same reason I like Alan Perlis's quote on programming languages. Paraphrased it reads "There's no point in learning a new language that doesn't teach you a new way of thinking." I equate "the new way of thinking" with maps here.
My native language is Russian (and was also the only language I could speak before my teens). I can also speak English, and it is my primary language for thinking now (it is MUCH easier to think in English, than in Russian - Russian is horrible). The two languages do not feel like different maps. I do have some problems in conversing with Russian-speaking individuals, mostly with expressing myself (English offers so many useful features not present in Russian that I feel like an amputee when I can't use them), but I do not think that knowing the distinction helped me with rationality much. They are not different ways of seeing the world, but different ways of describing what you see. Not different maps, different map colorings, maybe.
Hmmm. I have a slightly different experience to you. I am bilingual - English/Afrikaans - though my Afrikaans was never a language I used a lot and I have a very poor grasp of it in comparison.
This has led to something interesting - if I try to think in Afrikaans, I notice a distinct difference in my thoughts. Normally, my thoughts take the form of an internal monologue (almost, but not quite, exclusively). If I try to think in Afrikaans, which has a different grammar (and importantly, a different word order) to English, then I get the distinct impression of parts of my thoughts queued up and waiting for their part of the sentence to happen. This tells me that there are more complicated things going on inside my head than I had previously thought.
...though interesting, I have not as yet found any practical use for this knowledge.
I don't know Afrikaans, but Russian is very much unlike English in a lot of things - most notably, the order of words in a sentence usually plays next to no role whatsoever in terms of actual meaning (you may sound somewhat posh or dramatic if you randomize it too much, but Yoda still sounds pretty normal in all Star Wars Rusian translations I know). Given all that, I don't feel anything like you describe when I think in Russian.
Hmmm. Looking it up, I see that English and Russian are both broadly categorised as subject-verb-object languages, while Afrikaans is a subject-object-verb language.
Hence, if I were to translate directly word-for-word from grammatically correct Afrikaans to English, without changing the word order, the result would be something along the lines of "He did to the shops go" or "He did a bit of milk at the shop buy".
I've never come across an Afrikaans translation of Star Wars to listen to Yoda in (to be fair, I've never really looked, either).
You can probably get a similar effect without needing to learn another language if you convolute your grammar to the point of putting the verb at the end of each and every sentence.
I think I wouldn't. It is the way that questions are asked in Russian in the most widespread version ("Did you take my gun?" -> "You my gun take?" (there is nothing like 'did' in this sentence)), and I sometimes speak affirmatives that way just as a habit (nobody makes a deal out of it).
Say, is Afrikaans an easy language to learn the basics of? Just out of curiosity.
I think it depends where you start from. I grew up in a place where both English and Afrikaans are widely spoken (South Africa - to my knowledge, still the only country where Afrikaans is widely spoken) and so I had some idea of the basics of both from a very young age, which helped me immeasurably.
Afrikaans is also very close to Dutch (to the point that a Dutch and an Afrikaans speaker can communicate using their respective languages with only minor difficulty, and I've managed to leverage my knowledge of Afrikaans to be able to understand most of an article written in Dutch) - so if you know Dutch, it'll probably be fairly trivial to learn Afrikaans.
Starting with Russian and English... I have very little idea of what Russian is like, so I don't know what sort of starting point that gives you.
But I think I can safely say that, all else being equal, English would be significantly more difficult to learn than Afrikaans.
I, too, sometimes find that it is easier for me to express certain ideas in English than in my native language. However, I guess, in my case the reason seems to be analogous to the reasons mentioned in Steven Pinker's article "Why Academics Stink at Writing". Although it mainly talks about why academics find it difficult to express their ideas in simple words, it seems to me that if one uses predominantly English in certain settings or talking about certain subjects, then the reasons (chunking and functional fixedness) why ideas about these subjects are difficult to express in one's native language are probably similar.
While scholars package their ideas and abstractions into chunks, in everyday language we package the connotations of words/idioms/expressions into similar implicit chunks that are hard to separate from the word/idiom/expression itself. Direct translation might not preserve all these connotations. It seems to me that while we could try to preserve some connotations that are most relevant in a given situation, we might feel uncomfortable doing so, because losing connotations feels like losing accuracy and precise meaning of what we tried to convey, even in situations where a simple paraphrase could preserve connotations that are actually relevant.
In a professional setting, functional fixedness becomes very important. It is probably the reason why so much professional jargon (outside the Anglosphere) is based on other languages, especially English.
I empathize with this. But, still, it's not like those communicational biases actually affect beliefs about reality (aka maps).
Are there no instances in Russian which reveal a poorly categorized concept in English, or vice-versa?
I'm surprised ESR didn't bring up the difficulty of talking about "free software" in a language that doesn't distinguish "libre" from "gratuit", for example.
My own favorite example is how stunningly ambiguous the word "why" seems after learning about finer distinctions like the "por que" vs "para que" distinction in Spanish. How many creationists are subconsciously confused by the fact that "from what cause?" and "for what purpose?" are treated in English as identical questions?
You can always translate the ambiguity logically (into any sufficiently "complete" language?), but the increased awkwardness of the translation may have an effect. For an example from today's news commentary: even some ardent feminists are surprised to learn that "Banksy" might be a woman, possibly because even if you know intellectually that English uses "he" as a neutral pronoun for a person of unknown gender, that's not always enough to prevent prose references to an unknown person as "he" from affecting you subliminally.
Interesting. I was going to point to "how come?" and "what for?" as examples of this distinction being made in English, but after a bit of thought they don't actually work as such: "how come you gave me a dollar?" is a linguistically valid question and could be validly answered by something like "so you can buy a candy bar". Using "what for" to point to a cause rather than a purpose is more dialectical, but I have heard it.
Oh yes, there are. My personal pet peeve, there is no way to distinguish "difficulty" and "complexity" in Russian. There is even no simple way (or, at least, I don't know one) like "difficult as in how hard it is to do, not as in how hard it is to describe"). However, hard way (spending a minute explaining the difference and then using some shorthand) works perfectly with Russian-only speakers, even not very intelligent ones. They do seem to have that distinction in their maps, and sometimes even comment on how weird it is that it is impossible to spell it properly. I never saw anyone being confused by it.
BTW, Russian does have that distinction. Question words is one area in which Russian is superior, in my opinion.
Oh, that reminds me. In Russian, every noun has a grammatical gender. Cabinet is male, keyboard is female and window is neuter. It DOES carry a lot of connotations that affect me in introspectively noticable ways.
Curious note: when rereading this post last time before posting, I noticed that in the very first paragraph, when I talked about distinction between complexity and difficulty, I used words "simple" and "hard" as literal antonyms without even noticing.
Трудный. Although a related word that is hard to translate into Russian is "challenge".
вызов
Is there a russian word for "fun?"
In Russia, state has fun with you.
Веселье. It's a bit closer to "joy" or "merry-ness", though. Why?
Lots of other words seem to be used in similar contexts, e.g. 'prikol,' 'klyevo', maybe even 'pizdyetz' (some may be archaic, it's been a while since I had been immersed in Russian), but none of them seem to be exactly right. I think it's weird that there is no exact isomorphism from such a basic English concept.
Nobody uses the word Веселье in colloquial Russian in this sense, but people use "fun" in colloquial English all the time.
I came to realise, that I use the word 'fun' in its original English pronounciation (фан) quite a lot in Russian speech, as do my peers. It seems that we have just adopted it.
That's interesting, thank you. Russian has adapted a lot of English vocabulary in the internet age.
There is actually a bit of sneaky cultural warfare in this. After all, it's not just language that is being adopted. Language is just the audible tip of a cultural iceberg.
There a lot of distinctions that English doesn't make, such as singular second person or gerund versus present participle, and some that it makes that aren't really necessary, such as clock versus watch.
I'm a bit confused by the word "spell", and wonder whether you mean the fourth definition given here: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/spell?s=t
Or possibly because the prior for the gender of the kind of person who'd the kind of things Banksy does is heavily in favor of him being male.
You don't only add awkwardness. You nearly always also add additional meaning or lose meaning.
If you for example want to translate the English "Dear students," into German you can either say: "Liebe Schüler,", "Liebe Schüler und Schülerinnen," or "Liebe Schülerinnen und Schüler,". In German the words have a gender and if you want to be gender neutral you need both the male and the female form. Then you have to decide which one of those you write first and which one last.
Oh good point! And if you don't know the context when performing the translation (perhaps it's an announcement at an all-girls or an all-boys school?), then the translation will be incorrect.
The ambiguity in the original sentence may be impossible to preserve in the translation process, which doesn't mean that translation is impossible, but it does mean that information must be added by the translator to the sentence that wasn't present in the original sentence.
Sometimes I do small contract translation jobs as a side activity, but it's very frustrating when a client sends me snippets of text to be translated without the full context.
I remember a quote along the lines "Different languages don't restrict what you can say, they restrict what you can not say". For instance, in a gendered language, you can't not say the gender, or at least draw a lot of attention to the fact that you aren't saying the gender.
Mark Twain
Actually I found this in The topology of Seemingly impossible functional programs which is using topological methods to 'check' infinitely many cases in finite time. Which might even be applicable to FAI research.
... wait, what? You can equate predicates of predicates but not predicates?!
(Two hours later)
Well, I'll be damned...
Inconceivable, isn't it? Extra points for actually implementing it.
The key here is the halting requirement. The other stuff is red herrings.
Personality problems and pattern ordered by difficulty to change according to Seligman:
From 'What You Can Change and What You Can't*' by Seligman pg. 244 of the reviewed ('vintage') edition of 2006, explicitly confirmed to be still state of the art.
Just read the book and thought this table to be quite quote-worthy even though it isn't prosaic.
* These terms have specific and possibly somewhat non-standard definitions in the book. Seligman gives a convincing theory for formation of aspects of sexuality of different 'depth' (a core concept of Seligman) based on biological facts around expression of genes and hormones. See chapter 11.
Someone should write a post called "Open Problems in Self-Improvement".
Maybe you? Apparently you have some specific Open Problems in mind - I don't. Could you spell them out?
Alas, no. I just saw the bottom half of that list and my physicist instincts said "ah, some nice person has provided a list of interesting and difficult unsolved problems".
I wonder whether the classification of PTSD takes account of the apparently miraculous effects of MDMA shown in some studies.
Those studies show improvement with MDMA, but they have small sample sizes and their control groups (which get similarly unusually intense/long therapy sessions without MDMA) show some improvement too. The "apparently miraculous" effect size is at least a good part hype.
Also, lots of people take MDMA in non-therapeutic contexts and lie about it, so it isn't like you're going to find a control group of people you can be definitely sure haven't taken MDMA since they got PTSD - especially if they've heard of said hype.
I'm not saying MDMA doesn't help with PTSD (I even grant that it could help in the treatment of Antisocial Personality, Postpartum Depression and especially Couples Therapy), I'm just saying I wouldn't be surprised if more than half of the measured effect was due to the length/intensity of the therapeutic sessions these studies use, rather than due to the drug.
My 9-year-old son on Halloween.
Can't optimize for two quantities at once. If he could get the maximum amount of candy but not the absolute minimum of walking, what does he choose?
fudged with a constant of proportionality (pun intended).
You are a good parent.
The Valley of Bad Rationality at work again. Improved optimisation skills and strategic awareness applied to increase the amount of candy consumed while reducing physical exercise!
Joel S. Gehrke, Sr. on Twitter referencing American Ebola policy and fears.
Freefall by Mark Stanley.
I don't entirely agree with them. Dr. Bowmen knows that the they won't do anything, which is why he started messing with Florence in the first place. If they made a habit of doing something during an emergency, Dr. Bowmen would stop causing them.
Dr. Bowmen is consistently two steps ahead of the base commander. Instead of not causing emergencies, he might just leave better traps. Or nastier ones.
Or he might just arrange to have the Base Commander fired and replaced.
Huh. My default reaction during an emergency is to freeze out like a deer in the headlights.
It seems to me that this is related to the idea of roles. If you don't see yourself as being responsible for handling emergencies, you probably won't do anything about them, hoping someone else will. But if you do see yourself as being the person responsible for handling a crisis situation, then you're a lot more likely to do something about it, because you've taken that responsibility upon yourself.
It's a particularly nuanced response to both take that kind of responsibility for a situation, and then, after carefully evaluating the options, decide that the best course is to do nothing, since it conflicts with that cultivated need to respond. That said, it could easily be a better choice than the alternative of making a probably-bad decision in the spur of the moment with incomplete information. Used properly, it's a level above the position of decisive but unplanned action... though on the surface, it can be hard to distinguish from the default bystander position of passing off responsibility.
-- Hugh Herr (in his talk about bionics)
This looks closer to a cheer for local memes (transhumanism) than a rationality quote. Can you give me a reason I'm wrong in thinking this?
Do you think that quotes about rejecting artificial limitations should be accepted here? I think that such quotes should be allowed, and that this quote falls into that category, so this quote is sufficiently rational to belong here.
OTOH, maybe my view assumes without sufficient justification that these limitations are artificial. Or maybe quotes about rejecting artificial limitations shouldn't be allowed here in general?
(I agree the quote gives a cheerleader vibe. But I don't think that's sufficient to disallow it from this thread.)
I think the quote reads as simply the assertion that the limitations of disability can be rejected, with language implying this applies to all disability, which for some reasonable definitions is probably false.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
As a Nietzsche-lover, why is this one here?
I took it as a reminder of what was discussed in How to Actually Change Your Mind: confirmation bias, affective death spirals etc.
--Stephen Covey (in response to, paraphrased, 'how do I get other people to use these self-help techniques?')
--Bogdan M (emphasis mine)
Source/context?
http://www.cliffstamp.com/knives/forum/read.php?5,28239,page=2
-- a member of the scientific collaboration I'm in.
Marriage to Kim Kardashian is not contagious. The danger of Ebola is not to be measured by how many it has killed, but how many it may kill.
As far as we know! Perhaps it simply has a long incubation period, and transitive polyamory will be legally recognized some time in the 2020s.
If you prefer another comparison, here is one.
Drone strikes aren't contagious either. (Come to think of it, is the original quote actually true? One U.S. citizen notably died of Ebola in the U.S. How have those working with Ebola victims in Africa fared?)
The point being, that the original quote and this one are nonsensical comparisons. The only way for people in the U.S. (whether they are citizens or not) to be safe from Ebola is for people with Ebola to be prevented from entering; if found to have entered, to be isolated; if found to have been contagious before isolation, for their contacts to be found. I gather from the news that this is, more or less, being done, in spite of people protesting, in effect, "we are safe, therefore precautions are unnecessary".
But when the people are safe, they do not see the use of the things that keep them safe.
They kinda are :-D First by physical proximity at the moment of the strike (you get to be called "collateral damage"), and second, via the "association with suspicious persons" method.
Are you, by any chance, looking for absolute safety? It tends to be very expensive to achieve and even then fails often enough.
If we are talking about "driving the risks from Ebola to the general background risk level", well, at the moment it's well below that level.
I hope not. Because Richard's proposal doesn't provide that. Especially when 'drone strikes' have already been brought up in conversation. Sure, most of the remaining risks would sound about as realistic as a plot from a season of 24 but as you say this is a threat well below general background risk level so implausibility is expected.
Are you saying that because precautions are in place, the risk is being kept below that level, or that because the risk is below that level, precautions need not be taken? The first is fine, the second is not.
It's a feedback loop: observe the current state and the dynamics, adjust as needed.
IAWYC, but in general the right thing to do is to reduce the risk until the marginal cost of reducing it more exceeds the disutility of what one is risking: for example, if I can spend one cent to reduce the probability I'll die tomorrow by 1e-7 (e.g. by not being as much of a jackass while driving) I should do so, even though the general background risk level (according to actuarial tables for my gender, age and province) is more than an order of magnitude larger.
Theoretically. In practice you're unlikely to be able to evaluate the risks with the necessary accuracy.
Not necessarily. The reduction may have positive value in absolute terms, but carry the opportunity cost of preventing you from devoting those resources to more valuable risk reductions.
I don't think you've just disagreed. When I say something has a marginal cost of $2.50, that doesn't mean I'm considering the sadness inherent in having fewer shiny metal discs and green pieces of paper, it means there's some opportunity cost which that money could have afforded which I would instead have to forgo.
Patrick Sawyer was a US citizen. Skimming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_epidemic_in_West_Africa doesn't reveal any others, but we only need one more to tie with Kim.
Edit: actually, it looks like Duncan wasn't a US citizen.
Also more than have died from UFAI. Clearly that's not worth worrying over either.
I'm not terrified of Ebola because it's been demonstrated to be controllable in fairly developed counties, but as a general rule this quote seems incredibly out of place on less wrong. People here discuss the dangers of things which have literally never happened before almost every day.
-- Bill James, American baseball writer and statistician.
Scepticism is directed not at things, but at claims. And claims about things difficult to measure should face increased scepticism.
Interesting position! I can't speak for James, but I want to engage with this. Let's pretend, for the scope of this thread, that I made the statement about the proper role of skepticism.
I'm happy to endorse your wording. I agree it's more precise to talk about "claims" than "things" in this context.
Quick communication check. When you say "increased" you're implying at least two distinct levels of skepticism. From your assertion, I gather that difficult-to-measure claims like "there exist good leaders, people who can improve the performance of the rest of their team" will face your higher level of skepticism.
Could you give me an example of a claim that faces your lower level of skepticism?
Well, I'm actually treating scepticism as a continuous variable, let's say defined on non-negative real numbers for simplicity, where 0 means "I Believe!" and some sufficiently high number means "You're lying".
"It's raining outside"
"This thing weights five pounds"
"Free-falling objects start to accelerate by about 9.8 m/s/s"
That strikes me as really ... odd.
To whom is the advice addressed? If something is actually untrue, and one has determined it to be untrue, then the task of being skeptical about it is finished.
I could probably find a loophole in the preceding statement, but it couldn't possibly be what Bill James was referring to.
As for directing skepticism at [claims depending upon] things that are difficult to measure, well that seems like one step away from directing skepticism at claims depending on little evidence. Which is surely what we want to do. Again, there's a loophole, but clearly not something Bill James was trying to point out.
Brandon Sanderson
A counterexample to the initial claim, which is probably more true of epic fantasy than of fiction generally: In Ayn Rand's fiction, it is indeed the heroes who have great and awesome schemes; the villains just want to wet their beaks, or to stop people from doing great and awesome things, depending on how villainous they are.
The dialogues in the film versions of Atlas Shrugged always felt bland and lame to me until I realized that the "good ones" were saying their lines as "good ones." When I read the book, I felt instinctively drawn to imagining the "good ones" saying their lines as "villains." When you read Dagny as the villain, her dialogues feel much more potent.
Really? Perhaps I should reread at least some of Atlas Shrugged from that angle, but I don't see how wanting to run a railroad competently can be read as villianous.
It might be more accurate to say that Ayn Rand's heroes start with grand and awesome schemes. There's a lot of speechifying in between, but in terms of action they always seem to degenerate into some form of "screw you guys, I'm going home" by the end.
I haven't read it for a long time, but I remember thinking that the first third of Atlas Shrugged is a much better book than the whole thing -- because up to that point, it's a novel about building something great in the face of adversity, and after that the adversity wins and it becomes a novel about spite and destruction on all sides. Also because it's way too long for its plot, but never mind that.
It's not clear to me that this is a counterexample. Ayn Rand's fiction strikes me as mediocre in general, but what strength it has seems to flow from following this principle.
[edit]I seem to have misread the parent, and am agreeing with it.
At least one of us is misreading the other's comment: I was suggesting Rand's fiction as a counterexample to
which seems to agree with, not be contradicted by, your "flow[s] from following this principle".
Ah, yes. I missed the "initial claim" bit, and thought you meant this was a counterexample to Sanderson's whole claim.
That's often true, but there are counter-examples, like my all time favorite : the Foundation cycle. In it, especially the beginning of it (the Foundation novel and the prequels), it's truly the heroes who are doing something awesome - the Foundation and all what's associated to it - and the villains who try to prevent them (and even that is more complicated/interesting as simple "vilain").
It's also often the case in Jules Verne fiction, or in the rest of "hard scifi", be it about trans-humanism (permutation city for example) or about planetary exploration.
The trope is Villains Act Heroes React, and the Foundation stories don't actually defy this AFAIC recall.
It does in various points of the saga, some examples I can give easily, other are spoilers so I'll ROT13 them.
In the first tome and the prequels, it's Harry Seldon who tries to develop pyschohistory and setup the Foundation, and different "villains" react to that. It's true that afterwards the Foundation is mostly reacting to Seldon Crisis, but those crisis are part of Seldon's Plan (so, of the hero planning ahead awesome things).
In the last tome, Foundation and Earth, it's clearly the heroes who start their own quest of finding back the Earth.
Now the spoiling parts (rot13) :
Va gur cerdhryf vg'f pyrneyl Qnarry jub gevrf gb chfu Fryqba gb qrirybc cflpubuvfgbel, naq Qnarry vf gur erny "ureb" bs gur rkgraqrq Sbhaqngvba-Ebobg plpyr.
Va Sbhaqngvba'f Rqtr, juvyr gur znva ureb vf vaqrrq ernpgvba gb orvat chfurq ol inevbhf punenpgre, vg'f abg ivyynvaf jub ner cynaavat gur jubyr riragf, ohg Tnvn, jub vf n cebqhpg bs Qnarry, fb ntnva, bs gur erny "nepu ureb" bs gur fntn.
There are other similar examples in other parts of the cycle, but less obvious ones.
The outline of the Hero's journey calls for the story to begin with the hero in a mundane situation of normality.
Sounds to me like the cliche isn't always positive.
has anyone been keeping a reading list selecting exclusively for heroes with awesome schemes?
-- Science, Common Sense and Reality by Howard Sankey
For those curious the paper uses Arthur Eddington's two tables metapher which is also nice to illustrate this:
I find it entertaining that no matter how weird the deep scientific explanation is, that explanation can only be developed by scientists who have a naive sensory relationship with their instruments. They have to handle the instruments (or the computer controls) as though their hands and tools are made of solid stuff moving at easy-to-perceive speeds.
That did cause some problems with quantum physics, when they assumed that their measuring equipment along with the scientists themselves weren't getting stuck in quantum superposition.
-- Windmill, PartiallyClips
A good one, but a duplicate.
Thomas W. Myers in Anatomy Trains - Page 3
Lampshading mysterious answers:
-- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams
-- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams
But the map is the map...
I always feel a bit bad for Vizzini. His plan is very well thought-out and sensible; he's just in the entirely wrong genre for those qualities to be remotely relevant to its success.
It doesn't help that up to that point, the genre looks like one where it should work. Obviously the character's timeline could make it more obvious, but from ours it isn't.
Well, we can extract a life lesson from this: make sure that having well thought-out and sensible plans is actually relevant to success in the context you're operating in :-/ Go meta if needed :-)
That seems like a failure of noticing confusion; some clear things are actually false.
I saw it as more of a warning about the limits of maps - when something happens that you think is impossible, then it is time to update your map, and not rail against the territory for failing to match it.
(Of course, it is possible that you have been fooled, somehow, into thinking that something has happened which has, in actual fact, not happened. This possibility should be considered and appropriately weighted (given whatever evidence you have of the thing actually happening) against the possibility that the map is simply wrong.)
That may be, but if you label them 'impossible' and dismiss them, you won't gather more evidence to prove it. And if something you consider impossible has actually happened, you're missing an opportunity to improve your model significantly.
This is in fact what happens in-context. With a preposterously-detailed description of observable events (via magic hypnosis; I didn't say the novel made sense), Gently concludes that something has happened which could not have happened as described, and that the only explanation which would explain the results involves time travel; the other person says that it's impossible, to which Gently replies this.
Yeah, I feel like in real world situations, hypothesizing time travel when things don't make sense is not likely to be epistemically successful.
Wasn't there a proverb about generalizing from fictional evidence? Especially from fiction that intentionally doesn't make sense?
I don't think the quote is talking about "hypothesizing" anything; I read it more as "You have to update on evidence whether that evidence fits into your original model of the world or not". Instead of "hypothesizing time travel when things don't make sense", it'd be more like a stranger appears in front of you in a flash of light with futuristic-looking technology, proves that he is genetically human, and claims to be from the future. In that case it doesn't matter what your priors were for something like that happening; it already happened, and crying "Impossible!" is as illegal a move in Bayes as moving your king into check is in chess.
Not that such a thing is likely to happen, of course, but if it did happen, would you sit back and claim it didn't because it "doesn't make sense"?
Yes. And then I would go see a psychologist. Because I find it more likely that I'm losing my grip on my own sanity than that I've just witnessed time travel.
Factually speaking, I think if you saw that happen, you would believe, regardless of your protestations now.
I don't think it's literally factually :-D
I think you're right. It's closer to, say... "serious counterfactually speaking".
Realistically speaking?
Unfortunately this still suffers from the whole "Time Traveller visits you" part of the claim - our language doesn't handle it well. It's a realistic claim about counterfactual response of a real brain to unrealistic stimulus.
Well, the insanity defense is always a possibility, but then again, you have no proof that you're not insane right now, either, so it seems to be a fully general counterargument that can apply at any time to any situation. Ignoring the possibility of insanity, would you see any point in refusing to update, i.e. claiming that what you just saw didn't happen?
It's always a possibility that I'm insane, but normally a fairly unlikely one.
The baseline hypothesis is (say) p = 0.999 that I'm sane, p = 0.0001 that I'm hallucinating. Let's further assume that if I'm hallucinating, there's a 2% chance that hallucination is about time travel. My prior is something like p = 0.000001 that time travel exists. If I assume those are the only two explanations of seeing a time traveler, (i.e. we're ignoring pranks and similar), my estimate of the probability that time travel exists would shift up to about 2% instead of 0.0001% -- a huge increase. The smart money (98%) is still on me hallucinating though.
If you screen out the insanity possibility, and any other possibility that gives better than 1 in a million chances of me seeing what appears to be a time traveler with what appears to be futuristic technology, yes, the time traveler hypothesis would dominate. However, the prior for that is quite low. There's a difference between "refusing to update" and "not updating far enough that one explanation is favored".
If I was abducted by aliens, my first inclination would likewise be to assume that I'm going insane -- this is despite the fact that nothing in the laws of physics precludes the existence of aliens. Are you saying that the average person who thinks they are abducted by aliens should trust their senses on that matter?
Ah. In that case, I think we're basically in agreement. To clarify: I only used the time travel as an example because that was the example that VAuroch used in his/her comment. I agree that even taking into account your observation of time travel, the posterior probability for your insanity is still much larger than the posterior probability for genuine time travel. You do agree, however, that even if you conclude that you are likely insane, the probability of time travel was still updated in a positive direction, right? It seems to me that Nominull (the person to whom I was originally replying) was implying that your probability estimate shouldn't change at all, because that's "clearly impossible"/"fictional evidence" or something along those lines. It is that implication which I disagree with; as long as you're not endorsing that implication, we're in agreement. (If Nominull is reading this and feels that I am mistaken in my reading of his/her comment, then he/she should feel free to clarify his/her meaning.)
Calvin Coolidge, Inaugural Address, 1924.
Baron, Thinking and Deciding
One of the major symptoms of my stroke was seriously truncated working memory, and I spent months both training it back and learning to work around the limitations of it.
So i agree that there are strategies that can overcome the limits of working memory,though I wouldn't describe them as "thinking more"... it was more like saving state externally on a regular basis, and developing useful habits of interacting with that saved state. More generally, it's not a question of doing the same thing for longer, it's a question of doing different things that end up taking longer. It's "thinking differently, for longer."
That being said, though, I cannot begin to describe how much smarter I felt (and seemed) when the damage began to heal and I could start doing stuff in my head again.
It's a bit unclear without the context, but what he means is that subjects should think more about the task and realize that they need to, e.g. use a pen and paper.
"I remember reading of a competition for a paper on resolution of singularities of surface; Castelnuovo and Enriques were in the committee. Beppo Levi presented his famous paper on the resolution of singularities for surfaces.
Enriques asked him for a couple of examples and was convinced; Castelnuovo was not. The discussion got heated. Enriques exclaimed 'I am ready to cut off my head if this does not work', and Castelnuovo replied 'I don't think that would prove it either.'"
-- Angelo Vistoli, mathoverflow
I think adding the author name in addition to "mathoverflow" would make sense.
Arthur Schopenhauer, letter to Johann Goethe, 1819.
If I may attempt to summarize:
Nyan Sandwich
I don't think I understand this quote. What is a "temporally contingent worldview"? It can't simply mean any worldview that wasn't widely held in the past, because that would mean distancing oneself from pretty much all science. What, then?
Also, while I agree that the truth of a statement (that doesn't include spatio-temporal indexicals, either implicit or explicit) is not a function of time or place, widespread knowledge of a true statement usually varies with time and place. Not saying this justifies adoption of a temporally contingent worldview (since I'm not sure what is), but there does seem to be a bit of a non-sequitur in that quote.
Without doing much in the way of research, which would spoil the game, I think the quote is urging people not to privilege the beliefs of the culture they live in. For example, many popular beliefs of the 1900's are clearly incorrect when viewed in hindsight; the logical conclusion is that, in a hundred years, many popular beliefs today will be seen as clearly incorrect by those future generations.
I can think of a few likely candidates off the top of my head. And sorry for the sesquipedalian loquaciousness. I keep trying to stop, but I can't!
The truth of a preposition may not be a function of time or place, but which preposition a natural-language sentence states is.
[in the context of creatively solving a programming problem]
"You will be wrong. You're going to think of better ideas. ... The facts change. ... When the facts change, do not dig in. Do it over again. See if your answer is still valid in light of the new requirements, the new facts. And if it isn't, change your mind, and don't apologize."
-- Rich Hickey
(note that, in context, he tries to differentiate between reasoning with incomplete information, which you don't need to apologize for - just change your mind and move on - and genuine mistakes or errors)
Teacher: So if you could live to be any age you like, what would it be?
Boy 2: Infinity.
Teacher: Infinity, you would live for ever? Why would you like to live for ever?
Boy 2: Because you just know a lot of people and make lots of new friends because you could travel to lots of countries and everything and meet loads of new animals and everything.
--Until (documentary)
http://mosaicscience.com/extra/until-transcript
While this is on My Side, I still have to protest trying to sneak any side (or particular (group of) utility function(s)) into the idea of "rationality".
To be fair, while it is possible to have a coherent preference for death far more often people have a cached heuristic to refrain from exactly the kind of (bloody obvious) reasoning that Boy 2 is explaining. Coherent preferences are a 'rationality' issue.
Since nothing in the quote prescribes the preference and instead merely illustrates reasoning that happens to follow from having preferences like those of Boy 2. If Boy 2 was saying (or implying) that Boy 1 should want to live to infinity then there would be a problem.
Richard Feynman on the Challenger incident
Dupe (twice).
Ah, crap. So, how does this work, exactly? Should I remove my comment?
If you hit the 'retract' button (it's the circle with the diagonal line through it), then the post will have a strikethrough and the karma will be locked where it is now, and that's what people typically do. In the future, do a search for quotes before you post them (but keep posting quotes!).
All right, cool, thanks. (I did actually search through the site to see if there were any repeats, but I guess I wasn't thorough enough in my search!)
-- Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics, pointing out entangled truths and contagious lies
"soon" can vary quite a bit, depending on what is false. Following the link, I'm skeptical of "From the study of that single pebble you could see the laws of physics and all they imply." Specifically, I'm skeptical that one can deduce the parts of the laws of physics that matter under extreme conditions (general relativity, physics at Plank-scale energies) by examining the behavior of matter under benchtop conditions, at achievable levels of accuracy. The motivation for building instruments like the LHC in the first place is that they allow probing parts of physical laws which would otherwise produce exceeding small effects or exceedingly rare phenomena.
The tricky part is the "achievable levels of accuracy". It would be possible for, say Galileo to invent general relativity using the orbit of mercury, probably. But from a pebble, you would need VERY precise measurements, to an absurd level.
Presenter: [Snipping 75 minutes of reading without eye contact.] "...so as you can see, I have reconceptualized and reconsidered and -icized and -atized until this problem I talk about is clearly both like and unlike what Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Plato, and Arendt implied by choosing one word instead of a universe of other words in these few sentences no one else has really talked much about."
Theory Search Committee Member: "Well, certainly, but since we have clear answers about this philosophical problem deriving from Augustine's flirtation with manichaeism [snipping 15 minutes of bibliographic citations] ... what could we turn to in order to understand why what you have presented improves our understanding of the problem at hand?"
Audience Member In the Back: "Data."*
*This totally happened.
source
I'm not really getting anything from this other than "Mainstream philosophy, boo! Empiricism, yeah!"
Is there anything more to this post?
If you read the comment thread on the source, you see that it isn't actually philosophy boo, empiricism yeah, but rather an internecine conflict within academic political science.
Honestly, I did read the source, and it's very difficult to get anything useful out of it. The closest I could interpret it is "Theory (In what? Political Science?) had become removed from "Other fields" (In political science? Science?)".
In general, if context is needed to interpret the quote (I.E. It doesn't stand on it's own), it's good to mention that context in the post, rather than just linking to a source and expecting people to follow a comment thread to understand it.
Sorry if this is overly critical, that was not my intention. I just don't get what the "internecine conflict" you are referring to is.
The latest in a continuing series on immediate Bayesian updating in response to information. (Also viable as an example of an "unknown known," since he knew the counter-example but had not thought to apply it.)
But but fictional evidence!
Excellent point, but his prior was even weaker.
James Hamilton on how Amazon speeds up AWS networking by only implementing part of required networking tasks.
(emphasis mine)
Is there anything like a general theory of satisficing that tells you when it's a good idea? It's reasonably easy to decide in individual cases provided you've got a lot of specific quantitative information, but suppose you don't have a lot of specific information and you only know qualitative facts about how something works within a system.
If not, should people just default to satisficing unless there are obvious reasons it will fall short of optimality, or should they do the opposite? I'm inclined to favor the former, but am interested to hear other people's perspectives.
--Marcus Aurelius
Funny, I upvoted your other quote and downvoted this one.
Anyhow, if the object of your affections surprises you with a cuddle and your well being is unimpacted, I wouldn't call that sane.
I think "tying it to" should be read in the sense of an anchor, not in the sense of "is impacted by."
--Seneca, on judging actions by expected value.
Holographic Model of The Universe
I first met this quote in a talk about quantum physics. Funny that it seems to come from an esoteric book. Crisis of faith, a drug withdrawal?
If you can't get people to take something seriously, sometimes it's because it's plainly wrong. The concept of "addicted to their beliefs" relieves you of having to listen to them. "Addiction" is no more an explanation of anything than "emergence".
This is in a context of wondering why "Western science" (an absurd concept) "has devoted several centuries to not believing in the paranormal." I shall resist the tu quoque against the author and just say that I think that book is made of wrong.
The YouTube link is to a German-language presentation. I have only a fragment of German, but with Google Translate I gather that the speaker was (d.2011) a management trainer and motivational speaker. Not good qualifications for talking about quantum physics. "'Alles ist mit allem verbunden' ...ja ja und die Erde ist eine Scheibe," as the first comment says.
Yes, and right after that he goes on:
...and seems not to notice that he himself has never questioned the beliefs with which he grew up?
The talk about quantum mechanics was nice for non-mathy laymen, although it barely scratches the surface. After reading the quantum physics sequence here, I sometimes like to try out stuff like this and compare them to it.
I would not try to use "addiction" as an explanation. I just liked the comparison between trying to get somebody to change a long-held belief and trying to get him to stop smoking.
You are arguing against a strawman. Saying someone acts like an addict is not the same thing as saying that he is an addict. It's especially not an explanation.
She has probably more formal qualifications than Eliezer and is more skeptic about her knowledge about quantum physics than Eliezer.
That is the point I was intending. The author of that book seems to use "addiction" as an explanation. "Why do these people not pay me any attention?" he asks himself. "I know, it's because they're addicted to their beliefs!"
Does she have knowledge to be sceptical about? I'm not going to slog through two hours of video, even if it were in English. Her works listed at de.wikipedia.org are on other subjects. No, there is nothing here that suggests to me that looking further into it would be useful.
If you read that article you will find that Spektrum (the German version of the Scientific American) wrote her a well meaning obituary.
I wonder why. Via Google Translate, the obituary says only:
(I think "Autorin der ersten Stunde" actually means "founding author" in this context. G & G is "Brain and Mind", a section of the magazine. ETA: Which is a perfectly good reason for giving her an obituary,)
It then has links to a few of her articles, but the ones I sampled were on topics in training and personal development, sprinkled with neuroscience. No QM.
The related skill is communicating science to a broad public in a way the public understands. That's what she did at Spektrum and what she does in that video. The room in which she's holding that lecture is a proper university hall at the Technische Universität München.
The lecture doesn't say something that would damage her reputation among academics.
Your stereotypical patterns don't work well in her case.
I'm not accusing Birkenbihl of peddling woo. The original comment posted by Roho does come from a book of woo, and Roho associated her name with the idea.
As I say, I'm not going to search two hours of video in a language I hardly know to find out what Birkenbihl said on the subject; so I do not know if Roho's attribution to Birkenbihl is accurate. I can imagine something of the sort being said in a popular exposition of the reception of quantum mechanics. But whether she said anything like it or not, the idea expressed in the quote is a poor one, especially so in the context it was quoted from.
Everything Is Problematic, an account of getting out of radical left wing politics.
I don't particularly agree with this quote, but the link it comes out of is excellent.
It's amazing!
Given that no revolution ever produced the system that the people who threw the revolution planned to introduce I don't think that it's an easy case to argue that you need to have a specific plan.
Waterfall is no good design paradigma.
This is trivially true if you mean that no revolution produced the desired result up to the end of time. But then, the same is true of anything any human being does.
If you interpret it in a narrow, nontrivial way such as "no revolution produced a result that was close to the desired result and took at least as long enough to become unrecognizeable as the existing order would have taken to become unrecognizeable", then there are several candidates, including the American Revolution and several post-Soviet states (if you count leaving the USSR as a revolution).
I'm not saying "result" but system. The US constitution got written after the US got independent and not before.
Some countries of the USSR did copy the Western style of democracy and free markets. They could do that by letting other countries send people to tell them how to run their country. They didn't do that because they themselves knew how to create a democratic state with free markets.
If my project is to lock my apartment with my key, then I can be quite certain that the result with look roughly like I plan beforehand. The bigger the project the harder it is to plan everything beforehand.
As a result big software projects get these days not fully planned in advance via waterfall but get created in an agile way. Creating a substantial new political system as opposed to just copy some existing one, is much more complex than a software project and therefore even less doable via waterfall.
No plan survives contact with the enemy (or reality), but that doesn't mean you can just wing it. Of course you need a specific plan, but you also need the ability to change that plan as needed, in a controlled and sensible way. Realising the problems of advanced planning means you need to spend more time, not less, on working out what you are trying to do.
Then why does every modern startup do agile development instead of spending more time on planning?
We do agile development where I work. That doesn't mean we don't plan. On the contrary. Agile development doesn't mean throwing a bunch of developers in a room and telling them "do whatever comes to mind" without any thought to what might come out of the process. It means constantly updating your plans, in an adaptive and iterative way.
Well, probably mostly because it's trendy. But as for why people who choose to do agile development for sensible reasons do so, I suspect it's because doing planning and data collection in such a way that they inform one another has better results than planning in the absence of data or data collection in the absence of a plan.
Why do you ask?
I'm reminded of Eisenhower:
-- From a speech to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference in Washington, D.C. (November 14, 1957) ; in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1957, National Archives and Records Service, Government Printing Office, p. 818 : ISBN 0160588510, 9780160588518
This strikes me as a common failing of rationality. Personally I've never really noticed it in politics though. People arguing politics from all corners of the spectrum usually know exactly what they want to happen instead, and will advocate for it in great detail.
However, in science it is extremely common for known broken theories to be espoused and taught because there's nothing (yet) better. There are many examples from the late 19th/early 20th centuries before quantum mechanics was figured out. For example, the prevailing theory of how the sun worked used a model of gravitational contraction that simply could not have powered the sun for anything like the known age of the earth. That model wasn't really discarded until the 1920s and 30s when Gamow and Teller figured out the nuclear reactions that really did power the sun.
There are many examples today, in many fields, where the existing model simply cannot be accurate. Yet until a better model comes along scientists are loath to discard it.
This irrationality, this unwillingness to listen to someone who says "This idea is wrong" unless they can also say "and this alternative idea is right" is a major theme of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
I've asked SJs whether there was ever a time in their lives when they thought they were in a group that was satisfyingly inclusive, whether there was some experience they were trying to make more common. Admittedly, I only asked a few people (and with tact set on maximum). The only answer I got was no.
It's possible I was overgeneralizing in several ways, but I was asking because it seemed to me that what I'd read of anti-racism had a tone of "something hurts, it's urgent to stop the pain", but there was no positive vision.
This might have something to do with political (and maybe even choices inside businesses) which actually make life better vs. those that don't. There's always some sort of vision, but maybe there are issues related not just to whether pieces of the vision are accurate, but whether it's clear enough in appropriate ways. For example, was part of the problem with centralized economies that no one had a clear idea of how information would get transmitted? (This is a real question.)
SJs? Can you elaborate? I'm not sure what you're referring to.
Tucker Max