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Rationality Quotes December 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.
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Comments (440)
-- Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach
It is a good quote in general, but not quite a rationality quote.
I thought it was a nice illustration of the distinction between map and territory, or between different maps of the same territory. In other words, JFK and the speaker's uncle were very close together by a certain map, but that doesn't mean they were very similar in real life.
-Richard Hamming, Mathematics on a Distant Planet
I agree with the quote, but don't really see any point or importance to it.
It's actually called Mathematics on a Distant Planet.
Thanks! I've made the change.
AlyssaRowan On Hacker News
Schneier on Security blog post
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
-- Bertrand Russell
Duplicate.
Dunning–Kruger effect
-- Lisa Bradley, a character in Brennan Lee Mulligan & Molly Ostertag's Strong Female Protagonist
Or by physics. Not all consequences for overconfidence are social.
Actually, well I suppose it depends on what you mean by "met".
There's no such things as gods.
I think this is about the only scenario on LW that someone can be justifiably downvoted for that statement.
I up-voted it for dissenting against sloppy thinking disguised as being deep or clever. Twisting the word 'god' to include other things that do fit the original, literal or intended meaning of the term results in useless equivocation.
I don't see why. Non-agents simply don't fit the definition of "god", so equivocating on the definition of "god" from "world-changingly powerful agent" to "abstract personification of causality itself" does not really shed any light on anything.
Why are you arguing about taste? People adapt metaphors to help them think and act effectively. Human brains like agent-metaphors a lot: witness the popularity of the Moloch essay.
Your problem with classical religion might be that a lot of silly people are classically religious.
"But is the metaphor true" is kind of a silly question, imo.
Also, if there is an agenty God, it/she/he made sure to construct a world where nudges here and there are hard to trace.
No, my actual problem here is that these metaphors are not useful for making predictions.
Is that your line for good language use, prediction effectiveness? Do you have an issue with Scott's Moloch metaphor also? What about poetic language more generally?
Look: I am not a major fan of using poetic language to describe real life. Really. Just don't like it. And the problem with Scott's "metaphor" is that it wasn't a metaphor: he actually explicitly tagged the post as having an epistemic status of Fanciful Visionary Visions. It wasn't supposed to be anything approaching a useful sociological analysis that cuts reality at the joints. It wasn't supposed to be a rational way to think about the world.
But because it told a colorful story that stirs the emotions, people remember it far more prominently than any of Scott's writing on mere statistics that actually addresses reality, and now I have to put up with people pretending there's a demon at work in the world.
Fair enough. Why insist others share this preference? I like poetry (T. S. Eliot for example).
A ton of math is about metaphors (Lakoff wrote a book about this).
This is false. Not only does the LW wiki have a definition of "god" that is a non-agent, the study of theology points one to numerous gods that people believe in that are non-agents. There's a reason that many of the popular monotheisms refer to their god as a personal god; it stands in contrast to the heresy of a non-personal (i.e., non-agent) god.
Let's look at why are asking the question. The relevant property in this discussion is "will punish you for being 'uppity" ". Being an agent isn't directly relevant to that.
But causality can't punish you for being uppity. You basically just cannot be uppity against causality.
It isn't meant to be some rigorous account of how the world works, it's a deliberate mythology. I'm not entirely convinced as to whether it's a good idea, but aspie criticisms that amount to "god don't real" are missing the point entirely.
http://www.moreright.net/postrat-religion/
Actually, upon reading that article you've linked, I've found it to be cogent and well-written but emotionally toxic, tenuous in its connection to facts, and philosophically/existentially filled to the brim with lost purposes. To give examples, the obsession with preserving "European civilization" and the admiration for the internet's cult of ultra-masculinity (which should really be called pseudo-masculinity since it so exaggerates the present day's Masculinity Tropes that it dramatically misses other modes of masculinity, despite their actual historicity) portray the writer as chiefly, bizarrely concerned with present-day cultural trends rather than with the kind of good-in-themselves terminal values around which one could design a society from scratch if necessary.
I mean, sorry to be uncharitable in my reading, but I just don't see why I should want to build white European Christian or post-Christian society, in the first place. I know that reactionary and conservative communities give immense weight and worry to cultural goal-drift away from whatever weird version of white Christian/post-Christian society it is they actually like (derisive tone because it often seems they like The Silmarillion more than Actually Existing Europe), but it seems to me that the only way to really avoid random drift is to ground one's worldview in things that are actually, verifiably, literally true. Only an epistemic thought process will obtain consistent, nonrandom, meaningful results.
And since there is a truth of the matter when it comes to human beings' emotional and existential needs, it seems you couldn't get anywhere by doing anything but anchoring yourself to that truth and drawing as close as possible. Any deviation into lost purposes, ill-posed questions, and fallacious reasoning will be punished.
If you attach yourself to some invented image of some particular time-period in European history and try to pump all the entropy out of it, try to optimize everything to forcibly fit that image you've got in your head, you will only succeed in destroying everything else that you aren't acknowledging you care about. And since that image isn't even a terminal goal, a good-in-itself, the everything else will just be more-or-less everything.
If you separate Myth from Truth, Truth will burn you in hellfire. There is no escape.
(Also, citing an imageboard as a source of information about mythology and religion is just embarrassingly bad scholarship.)
Says the guy citing a deliberately informal wiki as a source of information about historical cultures :P
Fine, but Dungeons and Dragons is also a constructed, deliberate mythology, and you wouldn't respond to a quote about "You haven't met gods" by saying, "Actually, I role-played encountering Boccob the Uncaring, God of Magic, just last Tuesday."
Well actually, I would respond that way, but as a joke. I would not expect to be taken seriously.
I'm not sure this is very rational. Assuming that you are more competent than you really are -- which seems to be a matter of hubris -- is indeed capable of destroying you.
Yes, but more favorable outcomes are also possible, like becoming the [e.g. 43rd] President.
I think the way it works is that people are built to have hubris for signalling purposes, and then they're built to be lazy and risk-averse to counter the dangers of hubris. If you don't get rid of risk-aversion and akrasia but you do get rid of hubris, that can be problematic.
-- Pope Francis, Open Mind, Faithful Heart: Reflections on Following Jesus
I think it's worth clarifying that Pope Francis and Jorge Mario Bergoglio are one and the same person.
Lesson learned: do not just copy-paste from Amazon.
I assume this is a pro-cryonics quote, but I don't quite see how it relates to rationality. Its point is, quite clearly, "Accept Jesus as your personal savior and gain the gift of Eternal Life".
It seems to me it's anti-death rather than pro-cryonics; the two aren't quite the same, and in particular being anti-death no more implies being pro-cryonics than it implies being pro-Jesus. And while no doubt Bergoglio's (= Pope Francis's) anti-death-ism is tightly tied up with his pro-Jesus-ism, what he's written here can stand on its own as an expression of an anti-death attitude.
(I'm not sure being strongly opposed to death should really qualify something as a Rationality Quote either, but that's a different complaint from "it's really all about Jesus".)
– Jimmy Kimmel
That's just not true. Death rate, as the name implies, is a rate - the population that died in this year divided by the average total population. If "death rate" is 100%, then "birth rate" is 100% by the same reasoning, because 100% of people were born.
That depends on whether fetuses are people ...
If yes, the actual birth rate is around 80%. http://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/Data_Stats/Abortion.htm
I wouldn't consider abortion a "birth", per se.
Exactly, so only people who aren't aborted count as born, in which case the birth rate is 80%.
Ah, "actual" threw me off. So you mean something close to "The lifetime projected probability of being born(/dying) for people who came into existence during the last year".
It's actually only about 45 percent. The death rate for the world as a whole is about 93 percent.
Ayn Rand, to a Catholic Priest.
Philosophers have played a game going way back where they believe that popular religion comes in handy as a fiction for keeping the mob in line, but they view themselves as god-optional. The philosophes in the Enlightenment started the experiment of letting the mob in on the truth, and the experiment has apparently gone so far in parts of Europe like Estonia that some populations have lost familiarity with christian beliefs, or even how to pronounce Jesus' name in their own language. Or so Phil Zuckerman claims:
https://books.google.com/books?id=C-glNscSpiUC&lpg=PP1&dq=phil%20zuckerman&pg=PA96#v=onepage&q=estonia&f=false
The mob is pretty well educated these days, and the standard of living is so high that there's much less incentive to step out of line. I don't think we can compare modern nations to historical nations to make any claim about whether religion keeps people in line.
The claim that people can't pronounce Jesus' name might apply to former Soviet Union countries, but I doubt it applies anywhere else in Europe.
Do you know that Jesus's actual name is Yeshua?
We don't know that. It was likely some variant of the name commonly translated as "Joshua" in English. It could have been Yeshua or Yehoshua or a variety of slightly Aramacized variants of that.
But English language's "Jesus" is still far off.
Sure, but I fail to see how that's relevant to the point in question.
--Rudyard Kipling, "Dane-Geld"
A nice reminder about the value of one-boxing, especially in light of current events.
Well, when this capitulation happened in 2012 no one except a few "right-wing nuts" seemed to care.
This was definitely not the right link to use, at all - how about wikipedia instead? Nor am I sure what point you want to make besides scoring political points - how about specific recommendations?
You don't see that last link as a publicity stunt? I tentatively suspect that it is - though maybe I should put that under 50% - with a lot of the remaining probability going to blackmail of some individual(s).
Abigail
(Is self-reference ok? This struck me.)
Jeff Bezos
-- Adam Cadre
This seems like explaining vs. explaining away. The process by which better players pick up wins is by winning the "contest of athletic prowess." The game itself is interesting to watch because we like to see competent people play, and when upsets happen, they often happen for reasons that are easily displayed and engaged with in terms of the mechanics of the game.
This is similar to choosing strict determinism over compatibilism. Which players are the "best" depends on each of those players' individual efforts during the game. You could extend the idea to the executives too, anyway--which groups of executives acquire better players is largely a function of which have the best executives.
Efforts are only one variable here, and the quote did say "largely a function of". Those being said, look at how often teams replay each other during a season with a different winner.
E. T. Jaynes, Probability: The Logic of Science
"You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10^12 to 1 against."
The neutrino anomaly was about 5*10^6 to 1 against. Not quite 10^12 to 1, but I still think it shows that odds that small aren't what they're cracked up to be.
Alas, as nice a quote as it is, it seems to be bogus:
But, as compiler optimizations exploit increasingly recondite properties of the programming language definition, we find ourselves having to program as if the compiler were our ex-wife’s or ex-husband’s divorce lawyer, lest it introduce security bugs into our kernels, as happened with FreeBSD a couple of years back with a function erroneously annotated as noreturn, and as is happening now with bounds checks depending on signed overflow behavior.
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Wouldn't something good happening correctly result in a Bayseian update on the probability that you are a genius, and something bad a Bayseian update on the probability that someone is an idiot? (perhaps even you)
Yes, but if something good happens you have to update on the probability that someone besides you is a genius, and if something bad happens you have to update on the probability that you're the idiot. The problem is people only update the parts that make them look better.
Yes, but the issue is whether or not those are the dominant hypotheses that come to mind. It's better to see success and failure as results of plans and facts than innate ability or disability.
Not without a causal link, the absence of which is conspicuous.
Not necessarily. Causation might not be present, true, but causation is not necessary for correlation, and statistical correlation is what Bayes is all about. Correlation often implies causation, and even when it doesn't, it should still be respected as a real statistical phenomenon. All Jiro's update would require is that P(success|genius) > P(success|~genius), which I don't think is too hard to grant. It might not update enough to make the hypothesis the dominant hypothesis, true, but the update definitely occurs.
"Because" (in the original quote) is about causality. Your inequality implies nothing causal without a lot of assumptions. I don't understand what your setup is for increasing belief about a causal link based on an observed correlation (not saying it is impossible, but I think it would be helpful to be precise here).
Jiro's comment is correct but a non-sequitur because he was (correctly) pointing out there is a dependence between success and genius that you can exploit to update. But that is not what the original quote was talking about at all, it was talking about an incorrect, self-serving assignment of a causal link in a complicated situation.
Yes, naturally. I suppose I should have made myself a little clearer there; I was not making any reference to the original quote, but rather to Jiro's comment, which makes no mention of causation, only Bayesian updates.
Because P(causation|correlation) > P(causation|~correlation). That is, it's more likely that a causal link exists if you see a correlation than if you don't see a correlation.
As for your second paragraph, Jiro himself/herself has come to clarify, so I don't think it's necessary (for me) to continue that particular discussion.
Where are you getting this? What are the numerical values of those probabilities?
You can have presence or absence of a correlation between A and B, coexisting with presence or absence of a causal arrow between A and B. All four combinations occur in ordinary, everyday phenomena.
I cannot see how to define, let alone measure, probabilities P(causation|correlation) and P(causation|~correlation) over all possible phenomena.
I also don't know what distinction you intend in other comments in this thread between "correlation" and "real correlation". This is what I understand by "correlation", and there is nothing I would contrast with this and call "real correlation".
Do you think it is literally equally likely that causation exists if you observe a correlation, and if you don't? That observing the presence or absence of a correlation should not change your probability estimate of a causal link at all? If not, then you acknowledge that P(causation|correlation) != P(causation|~correlation). Then it's just a question of which probability is greater. I assert that, intuitively, the former seems likely to be greater.
By "real correlation" I mean a correlation that is not simply an artifact of your statistical analysis, but is actually "present in the data", so to speak. Let me know if you still find this unclear. (For some examples of "unreal" correlations, take a look here.)
I think I have no way of assigning numbers to the quantities P(causation|correlation) and P(causation|~correlation) assessed over all examples of pairs of variables. If you do, tell me what numbers you get.
I asked why and you have said "intuition", which means that you don't know why.
My belief is different, but I also know why I hold it. Leaping from correlation to causation is never justified without reasons other than the correlation itself, reasons specific to the particular quantities being studied. Examples such as the one you just linked to illustrate why. There is no end of correlations that exist without a causal arrow between the two quantities. Merely observing a correlation tells you nothing about whether such an arrow exists. For what it's worth, I believe that is in accordance with the views of statisticians generally. If you want to overturn basic knowledge in statistics, you will need a lot more than a pronouncement of your intuition.
A correlation (or any other measure of statistical dependence) is something computed from the data. There is no such thing as a correlation not "present in the data".
What I think you mean by a "real correlation" seems to be an actual causal link, but that reduces your claim that "real correlation" implies causation to a tautology. What observations would you undertake to determine whether a correlation is, in your terms, a "real" correlation?
My original question was whether you think the probabilities are equal. This reply does not appear to address that question. Even if you have no way of assigning numbers, that does not imply that the three possibilities (>, =, <) are equally likely. Let's say we somehow did find those probabilities. Would you be willing to say, right now, that they would turn out to be equal (with high probability)?
Okay, here's my reasoning (which I thought was intuitively obvious, hence the talk of "intuition", but illusion of transparency, I guess):
The presence of a correlation between two variables means (among other things) that those two variables are statistically dependent. There are many ways for variables to be dependent, one of which is causation. When you observe that a correlation is present, you are effectively eliminating the possibility that the variables are independent. With this possibility gone, the remaining possibilities must increase in probability mass, i.e. become more likely, if we still want the total to sum to 1. This includes the possibility of causation. Thus, the probability of some causal link existing is higher after we observe a correlation than before: P(causation|correlation) > P(causation|~correlation).
If you are using a flawed or unsuitable analysis method, it is very possible for you to (seemingly) get a correlation when in fact no such correlation exists. An example of such a flawed method may be found here, where a correlation is found between ratios of quantities despite those quantities being statistically independent, thus giving the false impression that a correlation is present when it is actually not.
As I suggested in my reply to Lumifer, redundancy helps.
How will you be able to distinguish between the two?
You also seem to be using the word "correlation" to mean "any kind of relationship or dependency" which is not what it normally means.
Redundancy helps. Use multiple analysis methods, show someone else your results, etc. If everything turns out the way it's supposed to, then that's strong evidence that the correlation is "real".
EDIT: It appears I've been ninja'd. Yes, I am not using the term "correlation" in the technical sense, but in the colloquial sense of "any dependency". Sorry if that's been making things unclear.
The quote about causality is a characterization of an opponent's view. I was suggesting that the quote's author may have mischaracterized his opponent's view by interpreting a Bayseian update as an assertion of causality.
--Shunryu Suzuki
I think this is a very important sentiment. I'm however not sure how to get others to adopt it.
It's the wisdom that comes with age. Doctors call it Alzheimer's.
:-D
Are you saying that because you don't understand the point that the orginal quote wants to make, or are you using it to try to make a unrelated joke?
I'm using it to make a related joke.
Alzheimer's first attacks short term memory before long-term memory. It makes learning harder. It has little to do with being open to new learning.
The quote doesn't talk about easier learning. Alzheimer's makes it easier to approach problems as "a beginner", with "a fresh mind" :-P
Tough crowd.
Or, in ChristianKI's case, tough Kraut. Since IIRC he's a Berliner (an actual one, not like JFK).
Paul Graham
The situation is far worse than that. At least a compiled program you can: add more memory or run it on a faster computer, disassemble the code and see at which step things go wrong, rewind if there's a problem, interface with programs you've written, etc. If compiled programs really were that bad, hackers would have already won (as security researchers wouldn't be able to take apart malware), drm would work, no emulators for undocumented devices would exist.
The state of the mind is many orders of magnitude worse.
Also, I'd quibble with "we don't know why". The word I'd use is how. We know why, perhaps not in detail (although we sort of know how, in even less detail.)
i largely agree in context, but i think it's not an entirely accurate picture of reality.
there are definite, well known, documented methods for increasing available resources for the brain, as well as doing the equivalent of decompilation, debugging, etc... sure, the methods are a lot less reliable than what we have available for most simple computer programs.
also, once you get to debugging/adding resources to programming systems which even remotely approximate the complexity of the brain, though, that difference becomes much smaller than you'd expect. in theory you should be able to debug large, complex, computing systems - and figure out where to add which resource, or which portion to rewrite/replace; for most systems, though, i suspect the success rate is much lower than what we get for the brain.
try, for example, comparing success rates/timelines/etc... for psychotherapists helping broken brains rewrite themselves, vs. success rates for startups trying to correctly scale their computer systems without going bankrupt. and these rates are in the context of computer systems which are a lot less complex, in both implementation and function, than most brains. sure, the psychotherapy methods seem much more crude, and the rates are much lower than we'd like to admit them to be - but i wouldn't be surprised if they easily compete with success rates for fixing broken computer systems, if not outperform.
But startups seem to do that pretty routinely. One does not hear about the 'Dodo bird verdict' for startups trying to scale. Startups fail for many reasons, but I'm having a hard time thinking of any, ever, for which the explanation was insurmountable performance problems caused by scaling.
(Wait, I can think of one: Friendster's demise is usually blamed on the social network being so slow due to perpetual performance problems. On the other hand, I can probably go through the last few months of Hacker News and find a number of post-mortems blaming business factors, a platform screwing them over, bad leadership, lack of investment at key points, people just plain not liking their product...)
in retrospect, that's a highly in-field specific bit of information and difficult to obtain without significant exposure - it's probably a bad example.
for context:
friendster failed at 100m+ users - that's several orders of magnitude more attention than the vast majority of startups ever obtain before failing, and a very unusual point to fail due to scalability problems (with that much attention, and experience scaling, scaling should really be a function of adequate funding more than anything else).
there's a selection effect for startups, at least the ones i've seen so far: ones that fail to adequately scale, almost never make it into the public eye. since failing to scale is a very embarrassing bit of information to admit publicly after the fact - the info is unlikely to be publicly known unless the problem gets independently, externally, publicized, for any startup.
i'd expect any startup that makes it past the O(1m active users) point and then proceeds to noticeably be impeded by performance problems to be unusual - maybe they make it there by cleverly pivoting around their scalability problems (or otherwise dancing around them/putting them off), with the hope of buying (or getting bought) out of the problems later on.
Ah.. a compiled program running on limited computing resources(memory, cpu etc..). I kinda think the metaphor assumes that implicitly. Perhaps it results in a leaky abstraction for most others(i.e: not working with computers), but i don't really see it as a problem.
Agree 'how' is more accurate than why.
"Why" usually resolves to "how" (if not always (in the physical world), with one notable exception).
eventually the truth/reality/answer is indifferent to the phrasing of the question (as why/how). I do think phrasing it as how makes it easier to answer(in the instrumental sense) than why. Also what is the exception, am not aware of it, please point me.
"Why are you in the hospital?" - "Because I was injured when a car hit me."
"Why did the car hit you?" - "Because the driver was drunk and I was standing at the intersection."
"Why was the driver drunk?" and "Why were you standing at the intersection?" and so on and so forth.
Every "why" question about something occurring in the natural world is answered by going one (or more) levels down in the granularity, describing one high-level phenomenon via its components, typically lower-level phenomena.
This isn't unlike deriving one corollary from another. You're climbing back* the derivation tree towards the axioms, so to speak. It's the same in any system, the math analogy would be if someone asked you "why does this corollary hold", which you'd answer by tracing it back to the nearest theorem. Then "why does this theorem hold" would be answered by describing its lower-level* lemmata. Back we go, ever towards the axioms.
All these are more aptly described as "how"-questions, "how" is the scientific question, since what we're doing is finding descriptions, not reasons, in some sense.
Of course you could just solve such distinctions via dictionary and then in daily usage use "why" and "how" interchangeably, which is fine. But it's illuminating to notice the underlying logic.
Which leaves as the only truly distinct "why"-question the "why those axioms?", which in the real world is typically phrased as "why anything at all?". Krauss tries to reduce that to a "how" question in A Universe From Nothing, as does the Tegmark multiverse, which doesn't work except snuggling in one more descriptive layer in front of the axioms.
There is a good case to be made that this one remaining true "why"-question, which does not reduce to merely some one-level-lower description, is actually ill-formed and doesn't make sense. The territory just provides us with evidence, the model we build to compress that evidence implicitly surmises the existence of underlying axioms in the territory. But why bother with that single remaining "Why"-question when the answer is forever outside our reach?
*(We know real trees are upside down, unlike these strange biological things in that strange place outside our window.)
Am Douglas Adams on this one. 42 is the answer, we don't know the question. Seriously, though I've gotten to a stage where I don't wonder much about the one 'why' axiom anymore*. Thanks for the clarification though.
*-- Used to wonder some 10 years ago though.
A quote from my son (just turned eleven years):
This sounds trite but I think it is actually the correct (or most sensible) answer. I was kind of impressed. Maybe we should ask children more of these grande questions and gain factual answers instead of taking them as deeper as they are.
I prefer:
Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast Of Champions
Indeed, I suppose their worldview are much clearer and in some ways unbiased than ours. When child is born he sees the world as it is, not through many prisms including our subjective value judgements
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvMiXk2gGSk
Insightful? I give him credit for his epistemic humility, at least.
— George R. R. Martin, Wikiquote, audio interview source
(Changed from an earlier quote I decided I'd keep for later.)
Wow. I am, uh, embarrassed to say that I somehow managed to get caught up in the replies to this comment without ever actually seeing the quote itself until now. (In my defense, I did get here through the Recent Comments sidebar, but still... yeah, not one of my prouder moments.) So, now that I've finally gotten around to reading the quote, uh...
...Maybe I'm dense, but I'm not quite understanding this one. I mean, I understand that it's an explanation of Martin's philosophy of writing, but I'm not really seeing the rationality tie-in. I could probably shoehorn in an explanation for why and how it relates, but the problem with such an explanation is that it would be exactly that: shoehorned in. I feel as though advice of this sort would be much better suited to a writing thread than to a rationality quotes thread. Could someone explain this one to me? Thanks in advance.
Fair point. To be honest, I just got this quote from Martin's Wikiquote page after I decided to save the original and needed something to replace it. (I suppose I could've done something like change the whole post to "[DELETED]" and then retract it, but this seemed good enough at the time.)
I can't really make a rigorous case for this quote's appropriateness here, what actually drove my decision to use this was basically a hunch. My after-the-fact rationalization is that maybe this quote sort of touched on the Beyond the Reach of God sense that death is allowed to happen to anyone, at any time, and especially in dangerous situations, as opposed to most fiction which would only allow the hero to die in some big heroic sacrifice?
For an after-the-fact rationalization, that's actually not bad. On the other hand, I think Martin might actually push it a little too far; reality isn't as pretty as most fiction writers make it out to be, true, but it isn't actively out to get you, either. The universe is just neutral. While it doesn't prevent people from suffering or dying, neither does it go out of its way to make sure they do. In ASoIaF, on the other hand, it's as though events are conspiring to screw everyone over, almost as if Martin is trying to show that he isn't like those other writers who are too "soft" on their characters. In doing so, however, I feel he fell into the opposite trap: that of making his world too hostile. Everything went wrong for the characters, which broke my suspension of disbelief every bit as badly as it would have if everything had gone right.
His reputation as a "bloody minded bastard" aside, Martin has creznaragyl xvyyrq bss n tenaq gbgny bs bar CBI punenpgre va gur ebhtuyl svir gubhfnaq phzhyngvir cntrf bs gur NFbVnS frevrf fb sne (abg pbhagvat cebybthr/rcvybthr punenpgref, jubz ab bar rkcrpgf gb fheivir sbe zber guna bar puncgre). Gur raqvat bs gur zbfg erprag obbx yrnirf bar CBI punenpgre'f sngr hapyrne, ohg gur infg znwbevgl bs gur snaqbz rkcrpgf uvz gb or onpx va fbzr sbez be nabgure. (Aba-CBI graq gb qebc yvxr syvrf, ohg gur nhqvrapr vf yrff nggnpurq gb gurz.)
For me, it's not just a problem of suspension of disbelief, it's a problem of destroying involvement in the story. If too much bad happens to the characters, I'm less likely to be emotionally invested in them. Martin's "The Princess and the Queen" (a prequel to ASoIaF) in Dangerous Women is especially awful that way, through the characters aren't developed very much, either. I'm hoping he does a better job in the main series.
Prediction: 30% chance it's a Christmas related quote.
Nope, just saving my first choice of quote for the beginning of the next thread. I figure if I post a good quote now, people will mostly only see it from the recent comment and recent quote feeds, and after a few others get posted, people will mostly forget about it and not, if they were to like it, upvote it. Whereas if it were one of the first posts in a thread, and people liked it and started upvoting it, it would stay high on the page and gather even more attention and upvotes, creating a positive feedback loop which would give me karma.
Machiavellian, isn't it? I doubt it'll work out that well, but I figure it's worth a shot.
I think that we use "Best" (which is a complicated thing other than "absolute points") rather than "Top" (absolute points) precisely to reduce the effectiveness of that strategy.
That's interesting. What criterion/criteria does "Best" use, then?
And on a different but related note: does it really negate the strategy? I note that, despite using the "Best" setting, this page still tends to display higher-karma comments near the top; furthermore, most of those high-karma comments seem to have been posted pretty early in the month. That suggests to me that Gondolinian's strategy may still have a shot.
Technical explanation
Non-technical explanation
All right, thanks. So, I gave both articles a read-through, and I think that as described, the system implemented won't necessarily negate the strategy (though it may somewhat reduce said strategy's effectiveness). Really, it all depends on how awesome Gondolinian's quote is; if it's awesome enough to get a rating that's 100% positive, then the display order will be organized by confidence level, which in practice just means a greater number of votes most of the time (more votes → less uncertainty), which in turn means it'll need to be posted earlier, which brings us back to the original situation, blah blah blah etc. (A single downvote, however, would be sufficient to screw up the entire affair, so there's that.) I guess that's why you originally said it would only reduce the strategy's effectiveness, not eliminate it entirely.
That's awesome. My metaphorical hat is off to Gondolinian for figuring out a way to game the system--and crucially, take the second step: countering akrasia and actually doing it. Instrumental rationality at its finest.
Don't bet on it. :)
^Everyone should upvote this in an ironic celebration of your honesty.
--Marcel Proust
Better, but make sure you keep the stuff you don't want quoted on a different paragraph.
I think
are generally preferred on Rationality Quotes threads. You can make blockquotes by typing a greater-than symbol (>) followed by a space before each paragraph in your quote (no need for quotation marks).
Also, that specific quote doesn't make much sense to me without context.
After a joint American-Soviet mission to Mars, the astronauts return home and refuse to tell who was the first to put their feet on the planet. Everybody pesters them, but they say they did it together (though they really couldn't.) The Soviet one is drinking with a new friend, whom he knows for a few hours, and the friend says it is impossible that Harrison will claim the honour - and so gets dubbed 'a Martian' himself. Martianss here is really a name for humans for whom petty things don't matter, who work for mankind.
This is off on a tangent, but why couldn't they? If they went through all the effort to make it a joint mission, stepping off of the ship at the same time, at least to the point where neither could tell who landed first, seems comparatively easy.
I wondered myself. Maybe they decided not to risk anything-just in case.
Offend with substance, don't offend with style.
Fixing broken windows is useful even if you don't care about the actual window.
I find myself confused...: (
Formatting quotes properly isn't hard, there no good reason against it.
Supporters of the Soviets were keen on moral equivalency.
Imagine if that was done with Nazis. "Petty things like the difference between people who burn others in ovens, and people who don't, don't matter".
I think that the quote means "petty things like who stepped out of the spaceship first don't matter", not "petty things like the difference between us and those capitalist pigs don't matter".
It's also true that the line between "American" and "Soviet" (or, for that matter, between "American" and "1940s German") is not drawn in remotely the same way as the line between "burns others in ovens" and "doesn't": it is mainly indicative of which part of the world you were born in. I have much greater sympathy for moral equivalency in the first case than in the second.
Ok, how about the difference between "sends people to the gulags on trumped up charges" and "doesn't", or "engineers famines" and "doesn't"?
That's (approximately) the difference between Stalin and not Stalin. I'm pretty sure most Soviet astronauts had never engineered a single famine.
The "participating in the system" argument given by Jiro is more reasonable, so see my cousin comment for my reply to that.
And most members of the Nazi rocket program never put anyone into an oven.
The line between a random American and a random Soviet person depends mostly on what part of the world they were born in. A person who lands on Mars is not random; they couldn't get to Mars without enthusiastically participating in the system. The people who praise the astronauts are aware of this too, and will treat the astronauts' successes as a success of the system, not mainly as the success of an individual astronaut.
They both landed on Mars. Which one touched first is random. If it wasn't, it would be signalling that one country is better, which is the exact opposite of the point of a joint mission to Mars. It's to show the two countries respect each other as equals. Getting to Mars is just a bonus.
I find it hard to think of someone who "enthusiastically participates in the system" in order to go to space as being morally culpable for everything that the system has done.
It's not quite a matter of choosing between participating in the system or being punished by the system. It's possible to live an inconspicuous life with only mild risk of suffering the consequences of no enthusiastic participation. But this is incompatible with accomplishing something noteworthy.
I can admire someone who has the ambition of going to space, but denies that ambition on moral grounds because it would support a political faction. However, I think a moral framework that demands this is unreasonably strict.
I'm not holding the astronaut responsible for anything. It's the reverse: because the astronaut had to work within the system to succeed, his success is not his personal success, it's the system's success. Saying "it doesn't matter which astronaut won" is saying "it doesn't matter which system won". When one system starved up to 7.5 million people to death and another didn't, which system won is not a petty issue.
(You could, however, argue that "first man on Mars" and "second man on Mars" are very similar achievements and that one is so marginally close to the other the difference between the two is petty. But I don't think that's what most people who express this kind of pettiness sentiment mean.)
I see your point; I think that saying "the system won", though, is an easy story to tell that doesn't reflect what actually happens very well. I don't see how the starving-people-to-death part of the system and the space-race part are sufficiently connected that the space-race part winning helps the starving-people-to-death part.
(If you disagree about this prediction, I will be unhappy to discuss it further but happy to say "okay, this is the underlying fact on which we disagree, let's stop there". Is this the underlying fact on which we disagree, or is there more to it?)
Thus, my understanding of the original quote is "The Pursuit of Science lies above political differences, and sabotaging the former because of the latter is petty."
Try replacing "starving people to death" with "putting people in ovens".
Via propaganda.
Specifically, in the form of "Yes, all y'all are starving and we had to shoot a few of your friends and relatives for not being enthusiastic enough, but look! We are actually achieving GREAT THINGS! Digging ditches in Siberian permafrost is part of the common effort which makes our society SUCCESSFUL and we can prove that it is successful because we just WON THE SPACE RACE!".
I think that the Soviet Union actually got a lot of propaganda mileage out of Sputnik and Gagarin in real life.
And that is, of course, ignoring the other part -- that space rockets with minor modifications function perfectly well as ICBMs...
That particular person didn't care for the system. He was the Editor-in-chief of a (fictional) journal 'Science and thought', dedicated to protecting population from fraud and literally wasn't afraid of the devil. But he did care about space exploration. The quote was meant to express the muchsimpler message about selective pressure'out there' that makes ordinary oneupmanship as a habit of mind irrelevant.
Yes, imagine. (Spoilers for "Worm".)
Do you have a summary? I don't want to bother reading that.
Summary: The superheroes of Worm regularly fight against existential threats called Endbringers, and have to work together with villains (some of whom are neo-nazis) to do it. They've been able to set up rules to ensure the villains can co-operate (no arrests, no using villains as bait, everyone gets medical attention afterwards), without which the Endbringers would win. However, the linked chapter explains that they've failed to extend this to post-fight celebrations, since the public won't accept any form of moral equivalence. Since the public will protest if villains are honoured for their sacrifices, and the villains riot if heroes are honoured but villains are not, no-one gets honoured.
I think "petty things don't matter" connotes that the differences are small on an absolute scale and that working together demonstrates this, not that the differences are merely small in relation to the goal on which everyone works together. The latter is honoring Nazis for their sacrifices; the former is saying "the fact that Nazis can sacrifice shows that it's not important to oppose Naziism".
If you were writing any story in which the protagonist works with Nazis or neo-Nazis, you'd want them to face a greater threat - perhaps an existential threat, like nuclear war in the time when the USSR existed. Otherwise you'd be writing a ridiculous straw-man.
Interesting note for people who've read "Worm" - gur svefg Raqoevatre gb nccrne va gur jbeyq bs gur fgbel jnf enqvbnpgvir, gur frpbaq bprna-eryngrq, naq gur fpnel bar znxrf zr guvax bs NTV.
Tyler Cowen
We also confuse "what is important" with "what is interesting" fairly often.
Raymond Smullyan, This Book Needs No Title, taking joy in the merely real
Duplicate
Whoops! Thank you.
Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Corculum
Since you're probably aware that one Roman senator (Cato) ended his speeches with "Carthage must be destroyed," you should also know that another responded with the opposite.
How is this a rationality quote?
Accurate beliefs, efficient altruism, and giving historical credit to the good guys. What does it say about us that (I would guess) most well educated westerners know about the "Carthage must be destroyed" quote but not the "Carthage must be saved" one?
It says that we care about the real as opposed to the imaginary. That is entirely to our credit.
Regardless of what may be considered moral, Carthage was destroyed. Educated people who wish to understand ancient history therefore naturally wish to learn of Cato's anti-Carthaginian campaign, precisely because it was successful. In addition, Cato the Elder was considered a model of behaviour by subsequent generations of Romans, in a way that Corculum was not, therefore to understand ancient Rome we have to understand the behaviour they valourised.
Similarly, Fumimaro Konoe is not nearly as famous as Hideki Tojo. This is not because educated Westerners favour Tojo's foreign policy, but because Tojo won the debate and Japan went to war.
Good point.
While I agree with the overall sentiment, I think it's important not to overdo this approach. Let me explain.
Consider the situation where you have a stochastic process which generates values -- for example, you're drawing random values from a certain distribution. So you draw a number and let's say it is 17.
On the one hand you did draw 17 -- that number is "real" and the rest of the distribution which didn't get realized is only "imaginary". You should care about that 17 and not about what did not happen.
On the other hand, if we're interested not just in a single sample, but in the whole process and the distribution underlying it, that number 17 is almost irrelevant. We want to understand the entire distribution and that involves parts which did not get realized but had potential to be realized. We care about them because they inform our understanding of what might happen if the process runs again and generates another value.
Similarly, if you treat history as a sequence of one-off events, you should pay attention only to what actually happened and ignore what did not. But if you want to see history as a set of long-term processes which generate many events, you're probably interested in estimating the entire shape of these processes and that includes "invisible" parts which did not actually happen but could have happened.
There are obvious methodological pitfalls here and I would recommend wielding Occam's Razor with abandon, but that should not conceal the underlying epistemic point that what did not happen could be important, too.
You make a good point.
Why is Publius Scipio Nasica a "good guy"? His opposition to Carthage's destruction was based on his idea that without a strong external enemy Rome will descend into decadence. (see Plutarch). That, to me, tentatively places him into the "pain builds character so I will make sure you will have lots of pain" camp which is not quite the good guys camp.
Well, it did.
That's an awesome response.
Forgive my fulfilling of Godwin's Law, but if a Nazi leader repeatedly told Hitler "Don't kill the Jews because struggling against them in the economic marketplace will make Germans stronger" would you consider this leader a "good guy"?
No, I would not.
And the equivalent position, actually, would be "Do not kill all the Jews at once, keep on killing them for a long time because the struggle will keep the Germans morally pure".
The intent matters.
Okay, what does it have to do with efficient altruism?
It's an example of someone speaking out against genocide. The effort ultimately failed, but engaging in political advocacy against mass murder could reasonably be considered efficient altruism?
Arguable, but let's suppose it can. So, you gave an example of efficient altruism failing. Did you mean it as contra-efficient altruism quote?
I meant it as having a high positive expected value, not a counter-example.
Unfortunately, it ended up being a counterexample. Downvote.
George S. Patton
Ideally, everyone should be thinking alike. How about
Humans have bounded rationality, different available data sets, and different sets of accumulated experience (which is freqently labeled as part of intuition).
Twenty art students are drawing the same life model. They are all thinking about the task; they will produce twenty different drawings. In what world would it be ideal for them to produce identical drawings?
Twenty animators apply for the same job at Pixar. They put a great deal of thought into their applications, and submit twenty different demo reels. In what world would it be ideal for them to produce identical demo reels?
Twenty designers compete to design the new logo for a company. In what world would it be ideal for them to come up with identical logos?
Twenty would-be startup founders come up with ideas for new products. In what world would it be ideal for them to come up with the same idea?
Twenty students take the same exam. In what world would it be ideal for them to give the same answers?
Twenty people thinking alike lynch an innocent man. Does this happen in an ideal world?
In 1 and 2, the thinking is not the type being referred to in the quote. In 3, assuming only one of theirs get chosen, then there are 19 failures, hence 19 non-thinkers or non-sufficient thinking. In 4, they're not all trying to answer the same question "what's the best way to make money", but the question "what's a good way to make money". (That may also apply to 3.) I touched on the difference in another thread. In 5, yes, every test-taker should give the correct answer to every question. Obvious for multiple choice tests, and even other tests usually only have one really correct answer, even if there may be more than one way to phrase it.
In 6, first of all, your example is isomorphic to its complement; where 20 people decide not to lynch an innocent man. If you defend the original quote, then some of them must not be thinking. And the actual answer is that my quoted version is one-sided; agreement doesn't imply idealism, idealism implies agreement.
I could add a disclaimer; everyone should be thinking alike in cases referred to by the first quote. I don't have a good way to narrow down exactly what that is off-hand right now, it's kind of intuitional. Do you have an example where my claim conflicts directly with what the first quote would say, and you think it's obvious in that scenario that they are right and not me?
The quote is without a provenance that I can discover. If authentic, I presume that Patton was referring to military planning. I don't see a line separating that type of thinking from cases (1)-(4) and some of (5). Ideas must be found or created to achieve results that are not totally ordered. Thinking better is helpful but thinking alike is not.
Only if you "thinking better" to retroactively mean "won". But that is not what the word "thinking" means.
I doubt any of those entrepreneurs are indifferent between a given level of success and 10 times that level.
Perhaps you are thinking only of a limited type of exam. There is only one correct answer to "what is 23 times 87?"[1] Not all exams are like that.
Philosophy:
Ancient history (from here:
The link also provides the marking criteria for the question. The ideal result can only be described as "twenty students giving the same answer" if, as in case (3), "the same answer" is redefined to mean "anything that gets top marks", in which case it becomes tautological.
I reject both of those. Agreement doesn't imply ideal, of course (case 6 was just a test to see if people were thinking). But neither does ideal imply agreement, except by definitional shenanigans. And your version of Patton's quote doesn't include the hypothesis of ideality anyway. Neither does Patton's. We are, or should be, talking about the real world.
What are those cases? Military planning, I am assuming, on the basis of who Patton was. Twenty generals gather to decide how to address the present juncture of a war. All will have ideas; these ideas will not all be the same. They will bring different backgrounds of knowledge and experience to the matter. In that situation, if they all all agree at once on what to do, I believe Patton's version applies.
(1) Ubj znal crbcyr'f svefg gubhtug ba ernqvat gung jnf "nun, urknqrpvzny!" Whfg...qba'g.
You are invited by a friend to what he calls a "cool organization". You walk into the building, and are promptly greeted by around twenty different people, all using variations on the same welcome phrase. You ask what the main point of the organization is, and several different people chime in at the same time, all answering, "Politics." You ask what kind of politics. Every single one of them proceeds to endorse the idea that abortion is unconditionally bad. Now feeling rather creeped out, you ask them for their reasoning. Several of them give answers, but all of those answers are variations of the same argument, and the way in which they say it gives you the feeling as though they are reciting this argument from memory.
Would you be inclined to stay at this "cool organization" a moment longer than you have to?
Now substitute "abortion is unconditionally bad" with "creationism should not be taught as science in public schools".
If you would still be creeped out by that, then your creep detector is miscalibrated; that would mean nobody can have an organization dedicated to a cause without creeping you out.
If you would not be creeped out by that, then your initial reaction to the abortion example was probably being mindkilled by abortion, not being creeped out by the fact that a lot of people agreed on something.
Just because I agree with their ideas doesn't mean I won't find it creepy. A cult is a cult, regardless of what it promotes. If I wanted to join an anti-creationist community, I certainly wouldn't join that one, and there are plenty such communities that manage to get their message across without coming off as cultish.
The example is supposed to sound cultist because the people think alike. But I have a hard time seeing how a non-cultist anti-creationist group would produce different arguments against creationism.
The non-cultist group could of course not all use the same welcome phrase, but that's not really the heart of what the example is supposed to illustrate,
There are multiple anti-creationist arguments out there, so if they all immediately jump to the same one, I'd be suspicious. But even beyond that, it's natural for humans to disagree about stuff, because we're not perfect Bayesians. If you see a bunch of humans agreeing completely, you should immediately think "cult", or at the very least "these people don't think for themselves". (I'd be much less suspicious if we replace humans with Bayesian superintelligences, however, because those actually follow Aumann's Agreement Theorem.)
Yes, actually, and I don't see why it is creepy despite your repeated assertions that it is.
And if they gave completely different arguments, you'd complain about the remarkable co-incidence that all these arguments suggest the same policy.
Difference of opinion, then. I would find it creepy as all hell.
I probably would, yes, but I would still prefer that world to the one in which they gave only one argument.
Now you're just arguing from creepiness.
Just because people should reach the same conclusions does not imply they should always do the same thing; e.g. some versions of chicken have the optimal solution where both players have the same options but they should do different things. (On a one-off with binding preconditions (or TDT done right), where the sum of outcomes on their doing different things is higher than any symmetrical outcome, they should commit to choose randomly in coordination.)
This example looks similiar to me; the cool cultists don't know how to assign turns. Even if I had several clones, we wouldn't all be doing the same things; not because we would disagree on what was important, but because it's unnecessary to do some things more than once.
Also, this organization sounds really cool! Where can I join? (Seriously, I've never been in a cult before and would love to have the experience.)
You really don't want that.
edit: A concrete useful suggestion is to reorganize your life in such a way that you have better things to do with your time than be a tourist in other people's misery and ruin.