Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it's not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn't ask the question: What was Aragorn's tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren't gone – they're in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?
In real life, real-life kings had real-life problems to deal with. Just being a good guy was not the answer. You had to make hard, hard decisions. Sometimes what seemed to be a good decision turned around and bit you in the ass; it was the law of unintended consequences. I've tried to get at some of these in my books. My people who are trying to rule don't have an easy time of it. Just having good intentions doesn't make you a wise king.
— George R. R. Martin, Rolling Stone interview (emphasis mine)
Although the main point of this quote is valid (that sound policies rather than great men are the cause of good government), criticizing Lord of the Rings for having a “medieval philosophy” is a bit silly – it is like criticizing Johnny Cash for sounding “kind of country”. More so than an author of fiction, Tolkien was a scholar who focused much of his effort on studying medieval literature and translating that literature into modern English. Medieval literature was an inspiration and a major influence on his fiction. Of course the Lord of the Rings has a medieval philosophy; it was intended to have a medieval philosophy.
Does the intent matter? Intended or not, Lord of the Rings has come to occupy a certain cultural position; surely it's right to ask whether it's fit for it, even if that position is not the one the original author intended?
An escalator can never break -- it can only become stairs. You should never see an "Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order" sign, just "Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience. We apologize for the fact that you can still get up there."
One or more steps completely missing. Or, more commonly, the escalator blocked off because some repairmen are working on it.
With the information age the world looks uglier, dirtier, more corrupt, scheming, mostly because the malicious was hidden from us before.
It's not just information age, but also freedom of speech. Many people in regimes without free speech sincerely believe that there is no crime (except by people corrupted by other countries), no drug abuse, etc., simply because they can never read about it in the newspapers. So when the regime later changes, they will believe that things got worse, because now they can read about all the bad stuff (and of course some politicians will use this bias to say "this wasn't happening before when we had the power, so... vote for us again").
We have blind, one-eyed, cross-eyed, and squinting people, and visions long, short, clear, confused, weak, or indefatigable. All this is a faithful image of our understanding; but we know scarcely any false vision. There are not many men who always mistake a rooster for a horse, or a chamber pot for a house. How is it that we often meet with minds, otherwise judicious, that are absolutely wrong in some things of importance? How is it that the same Siamese man who can never be fooled when he is supposed to receive three rupees, firmly believes in the metamorphoses of Sammonocodom...
If these besotted beings are shown a little geometry, they learn it easily enough; but, strange to say, this does not set them right. They perceive the truths of geometry; but it does not teach them to weigh probabilities: they have taken their bent; they will reason falsely all their lives; and I am sorry for them.
-Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary
"Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect." -- Salman Rushdie
In the final volume of the book A Positively Final Appearance (1997), Guinness recounts grudgingly giving an autograph to a young fan who claimed to have watched Star Wars over 100 times, on the condition that the boy promise to stop watching the film, because, as Guinness told him, "this is going to be an ill effect on your life." The fan was stunned at first, but later thanked him (though some sources say it went differently). Guinness is quoted as saying: "'Well,' I said, 'do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again?' He burst into tears. His mother drew herself up to an immense height. 'What a dreadful thing to say to a child!' she barked, and dragged the poor kid away. Maybe she was right but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities."
Some people seem terribly smug about being right about one thing. It makes me wonder if this is, in fact, the only thing they’ve ever gotten right in their whole lives.
That's not literally true. It's just booing irrational people. Which is appropriate for Ozy on zher own blog, but not for this thread of useful quotes.
To the superficial observer, scientific truth is unassailable, the logic of science is infallible; and if scientific men sometimes make mistakes, it is because they have not understood the rules of the game. Mathematical truths are derived from a few self-evident propositions, by a chain of flawless reasonings; they are imposed not only on us, but also on nature itself. By them the Creator is fettered, as it were, and His choice is limited to a relatively small number of solutions. A few experiments, therefore, will be sufficient to enable us to determine what choice He has made. From each experiment a number of consequences will follow by a series of mathematical deductions...This, to the minds of most people...is the origin of certainty in science.
But upon more mature reflection the position held by hypothesis was seen; it was recognized that it is as necessary to the experimenter as to the mathematician. And then the doubt arose if all these constructions are built on solid foundations. The conclusion was drawn that a breath would bring them to the ground. This sceptical attitude does not escape the charge of superficiality. To doubt everything or to believe everything is two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.
-Henri Poincare, Science and Hypothesis
Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
Ralph Waldo Emerson on If You Demand Magic, Magic Won't Help
And yet, I also have packed my backpack, embarked in the air, and woken up in Rome, and unlike Emerson have indeed been intoxicated in contemplation of the things that were. And as in Rome, so also in Florence, and Prague, and London, and the cave monasteries of Turkey, and the Alhambra, and the temples of Japan, and other places also.
In other words, YMMV.
Most of the time what we see is developers trying to minmax, micro-optimize and balance their designs, but when addressing metrics as a tool to achieve that goal, they acknowledge the relevance of the tool and at the same time their eyes wander, looking for someone else to talk to. I believe it is a human trait: when we don't know exactly how to do something, we will do anything else, procrastinating the blurry task indefinitely.
I want to climb a mountain, not so I can get to the top, but because I want to hang out at base camp. That seems fun as shit. You sleep in a colorful tent, grow a beard, drink hot chocolate, walk around... ‘Hey, you going to the top?’ . . . ‘Soon.’
I think anthropomorphism is the worst of all. I have now seen programs "trying to do things", "wanting to do things", "believing thing to be true", "knowing things" etc. Don't be so naïve as to believe that this use of language is harmless. It invited the programmer to identify himself with the execution of the program and almost forces upon him the use of operational semantics.
-- Edgar Dijkstra, The Fruits of Misunderstanding
I know who Dijkstra was, respect him greatly, and agree with most of that article, and indeed, most of everything he wrote. But this is something I disagree about. He would (here) have us speak of a computer's "store" instead of its "memory", and there were various other substitutions that he would have us do. All that that would achieve would be to develop a parallel vocabulary, one for computing machines and one for thinking beings, and an injunction to always use the right vocabulary for the right context.
What it is for a human being to try things, want things, believe things, know things, etc. is different from what it is for a program to do these things. But they also have an amount of commonality that makes insisting on separate vocabulary an unproductive ritual.
So when, for example, a compiler complains to me (must I say "issues an error message"?) that it couldn't find a file, I want it to give me the answers to questions such as "why did you look for that file?" (i.e. show me the place where you were instructed to access it), "what were you looking for?" (i.e. show me the file name exactly as you received it), "where d...
A computer is a mathematical machine, mathematics made physical. It is built of logic gates, devices which compute certain outputs as mathematical functions of their inputs. This is what they are designed to be, and in comparison with all the other physical devices mankind has contrived, they operate with phenomenal reliability.
Mathematics operates with absolute certainty. (Anyone quoting Eliezer's password is invited to go away and not come back until they've devised a new foundation for probability theory in which P(A|A) < 1.) Physical realisations can fall short. But an ordinary desktop computer can operate for weeks at a time without any hardware glitches. If you multiply the number of gates by the clock speed by the duration, that comes to somewhere in the region of 10 to the 24th operations -- approximately Avogadro's number -- every one of which worked as designed. When your program goes wrong, hardware error isn't the way to bet.
If the basic semiconductor gate were not so reliable, if each gate failed "only" one in a million times, you would be having millions of errors every second and computing on the scale of today would hardly be possible. This is one reas...
What goes around doesn’t come around. Karma’s not a bitch, she’s a myth (or a mythess).
Some people claim that it is really, really difficult for humans to psych themselves up to kill another human...The neat thing about this argument is that me shooting or impaling some of the idiots saying that we’re too cool to kill would actually be introducing valid evidence. In most argumentation, strangling your opponent can legitimately be seen as a sign that your case is weak.
Not for the first time, someone on LW links a West Hunter page that isn't content to make a reasonable point, but has to exaggerate that point and present it with sneering.
Cochran's post is short, but to make it even shorter:
Some people claim that it is really, really difficult for humans to psych themselves up to kill another human. They often cite a claim by S. L. A. Marshall that only a small fraction – less than 25% – of WWII American combat infantrymen fired their weapons in battle.
[...] it’s all bullshit. S.L.A Marshall’s ‘data’ is vapor; there was and is nothing to it. He made shit up, not just on this topic. There’s every to reason to think that the vast majority of infantrymen throughout history did their level best to kill those on the other side [...]
You have to wonder about a universal human instinct that apparently misfired in every battle in recorded history.
It's true that Marshall's claim about WWII soldiers isn't trustworthy. (I haven't spent enough time with the literature to go further and confirm the claim's made-up bullshit vapour. But it wouldn't surprise me.) Unfortunately Cochran has to have his cherry on top; he writes off not only Marshall but t...
If you read through the comments in the linked article (which of course you were under no obligation to do before commenting here) you see that Cochran's main point was that it's silly to think that soldiers avoid killing because they have some basic aversion to doing so, although Cochran agrees that fear might cause them to not put themselves in a position where they can shoot.
In World War Two, it is a fact that only 15-20 percent of the soldiers fired at the enemy.
One of the originals is Men Against Fire by World War I Officer S. L. A Marshall.
You find this claim all over the place; the problem with it is that comrade "S.L.A.M" is not "one of the originals", he is the sole and only source for the claim - and he made it up. A cursory Wiki search shows:
[So-and-so demonstrated] that Marshall had not actually conducted the research upon which he based his ratio-of-fire theory. "The 'systematic collection of data' appears to have been an invention."
My emphasis.
The best evidence we have is that killing is in fact difficult for most people, most of the time, even in war.
Ok. So on the one hand we've got a single book, later shown to have been an invention, but taken up by a huge number of people so it looks like a consensus, in the best Dark-Arts, "you have to be smart to know this", counterintuitive-Deep-Wisdom style. And on the other hand we have a huge amount of dead people, mysteriously killed by bullets that, somehow, got fired in spite of the noted reluctance of men to do so. I propose that your accola...
And on the other hand we have a huge amount of dead people, mysteriously killed by bullets that, somehow, got fired in spite of the noted reluctance of men to do so.
Let's not overstate your case, shall we? No 'somehow' about it, even if 90% of soldiers didn't want to shoot, the remaining 10% could kill a hell of a lot of people; that is the point of guns and explosives, after all - they make killing people quick and easy compared to nagging them to death.
(Where is the precise model relating known mortality rates to number of soldiers shooting, such that Marshall's claims could have been rejected on their face solely because they conflicted with mortality rates? There is none. The majority of soldiers survive wars, after all.)
I do not see how this suggestion could be positively refuted. It enjoys a status well known in academic circles and doubtless elsewhere,—that of the Remotely Conceivable Alternative, contrary to the obvious implication of the facts, incapable of proof or disproof.
-- Denys L. Page (1908-1978), History and the Homeric Iliad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 57
Homer Simpson, on relativity of happiness: "When something great happens to one person, everyone else's life gets a little worse."
Source: http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=the-simpsons&episode=s26e08
...We next tried to define what characteristics distinguished the smarter teams from the rest, and we were a bit surprised by the answers we got. We gave each volunteer an individual I.Q. test, but teams with higher average I.Q.s didn’t score much higher on our collective intelligence tasks than did teams with lower average I.Q.s. Nor did teams with more extroverted people, or teams whose members reported feeling more motivated to contribute to their group’s success.
Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics.
First, their members
Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart.
Peter Watts, Echopraxia, on altruism. Well ok, I admit, not on altruism per se.
I don't try to intimidate anybody before a fight. That's nonsense. I intimidate people by hitting them.
-Mike Tyson
Alternatively, he says that he doesn't need to signal his confidence... and thereby signals confidence.
...Truth —more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality— is the essential foundation for producing good outcomes.
I want you to work for yourself, to come up with independent opinions, to stress-test them, to be wary about being overconfident, and to reflect on the consequences of your decisions and constantly improve.
[...] Your goals will determine the “machine” that you create to achieve them; that machine will produce outcomes that you should compare with your goals to judge how your machine is working. Your “machine” will consist of the design and
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning —
I always liked Fitzgerald's portrayal of what Something to Protect feels like.
Happy New Year's resolutions, all.
Happy is the man who always looks on the bright side of everything, and through life’s ups and downs lets himself be guided by reason. What will only make others weep will be for him a source of laughter, and in the midst of the whirlwinds of the world he will find peace.
From the finale of Cosi Fan Tutte, by W. A. Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte
Revolution is internal
Help yourself at any time
Evolution isn't over
We are about to use our mind
I guess that's partly what we're here for, right?
We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent was a youthful effervescence which we have now lost.
Emerson
Malkina: I don't think I miss things. I think to miss something is to hope that it will come back, but it's not coming back.
Reiner: You don't think that's a bit cold?
Malkina: The truth has no temperature.
Cameron Diaz and Javier Bardem in The Counselor
It is the beginning of a new year, and time for the beginning of a new rationality quotes thread.
The rules are: