[Charles] Darwin wrote in his autobiography of a habit he called a "golden rule": to immediately write down any observation that seemed inconsistent with his theories--"for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favorable ones."
-Robert Wright, The Moral Animal, p.280
A passion to make the world a better place is a fine reason to study social psychology. Sometimes, however, researchers let their ideals or their political beliefs cloud their judgment, such as in how they interpret their research findings. Social psychology can only be a science if it puts the pursuit of truth above all other goals. When researchers focus on a topic that is politically charged, such as race relations or whether divorce is bad for children, it is important to be extra careful in making sure that all views (perhaps especially disagreeable ones, or ones that go against established prejudices) are considered and that the conclusions from research are truly warranted.
Roy Baumeister & Brad Bushman, Social Psychology and Human Nature, Belmont, 2008, p. 13
...A special technique has been developed in mathematics. This technique, when applied to the real world, is sometimes useful, but can sometimes also lead to self-deception. This technique is called modelling. When constructing a model, the following idealization is made: certain facts which are only known with a certain degree of probability or with a certain degree of accuracy, are considered to be "absolutely" correct and are accepted as "axioms". The sense of this "absoluteness" lies precisely in the fact that we allow ourselves to use these "facts" according to the rules of formal logic, in the process declaring as "theorems" all that we can derive from them.
It is obvious that in any real-life activity it is impossible to wholly rely on such deductions. The reason is at least that the parameters of the studied phenomena are never known absolutely exactly and a small change in parameters (for example, the initial conditions of a process) can totally change the result...
In exactly the same way a small change in axioms (of which we cannot be completely sure) is capable, generally speaking, of leading to completely different conclusi
I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults.
Erasmus, Letter to an unidentified friend (1489)
Reread the quote. Erasmus isn't just talking about reading. There are multiple relations:
I agree with each of your bullet points, and they do help clarify the Erasmus quotation's relationship to rationality. Thanks.
Hypocrisy doesn't bother me. Everyone's got his ideal, and then the reality of what he can actually deliver. Scratch hypocrisy, and you're more likely to lose the ideal than the reality.
Milo Behr, Beowulf: A Bloody Calculus.
Hypocrisy does not mean falling short of one's ideals. It means only pretending to hold them.
On the dispersing of memes (note: politicised).
The reason that millions of people read books about Islam (even if they don't believe in it) instead of studying Cosmology is that cosmologist don't go around blowing up train stations, turning school girls into sex slaves, executing cartoonists, and crashing airplanes into skyscrapers. The reason why we are having a worldwide discussion about one of the most ridiculous superstitions in the history of humankind (to depict or not to depict a man who lived in the 7th century) is that people get killed because of that superstition.
-Piero Scaruffi
"Suppose you ask your friend Naomi to roll a die without letting you see the result... Having rolled the die Naomi must write down the result on a piece of paper (without showing you) and place it in an envelope...
So some people are happy to accept that there is genuine uncertainty about the number before it is thrown (because its existence is ‘not a fact’), but not after it is thrown. This is despite the fact that our knowledge of the number after it is thrown is as incomplete as it was before."
it helps to be on board with the quasi-positivist idea that the sets of things that can and can’t be done, by any experiment, are not just random collections of engineering details; rather, they’re the scaffolding on which we need to construct our understanding of what’s real.
On the subject of whether or not you can always be correct about the contents of your consciousness:
"Let us therefore look at the bizarre mirror image to blindsight: Anton’s syndrome. Patients who suddenly become completely blind due to a lesion in the visual cortex in some cases keep insisting on stillbeing visually aware. While claiming to be seeing persons, they bump into furniture and show all the other signs of functional blindness. Still, they act as if the phenomenal disappearance of all visually given aspects of reality is not phenomenally av...
Science meant looking -- a special kind of looking. Looking especially hard at the things you didn't understand. Looking at the stars, say, and not fearing them, not worshiping them, just asking questions, finding the question that would unlock the door to the next question and the question beyond that.
Robert Charles Wilson, Darwinia
“I’ve said I understand. Stop fighting after you have won.”
Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear
This type of man who is devoted to the study of wisdom is always most unlucky in everything, and particularly when it comes to procreating children; I imagine this is because Nature wants to ensure that the evils of wisdom shall not spread further throughout mankind.
Sadly, the insults of those we do not respect often matter, because of what they imply about that person's future conduct, and because of their effects on third parties.
So for example if a bully starts insulting you, this may matter, both because this might indicate he is about to attack you, and because it may cause other people to turn against you. To give a non-cyber-bullying example, the insults of Idi Amin against Indians residing in Uganda surely mattered to them, even though they did not respect him.
This seems inapt as a generalization about human psychology.
In one psychology experiment which a professor of mine told me about, test subjects were made to play a virtual game of catch with two other players, where every player was represented to each other player only as a nondescript computer avatar, the only input any player could give was which of the other two players to toss the "ball" to, and nobody had any identifying information about anyone else involved. Unbeknownst to the test subjects, the other two players were confederates of the experimenter, and their role was to gradually start excluding the test subject, eventually starting to toss the ball almost exclusively to each other, and almost never to the test subject.
Most test subjects found this highly emotionally taxing, to the point that such experiments will no longer be approved by the Institutional Review Board.
In addition to offering a hint of just how much ethical testing standards can hamstring psych research, it also suggests that our instinctive reactions to ostracization do not really demand identifying information on the perpetrators in order to come into play.
...Another important factor that influences attraction is similarity… elementary school students prefer other children who perform about as well as they do in academics, sports, and music, and best friends in high school tend to resemble each other in age, race, year in school, and grades. Attributes such as race, ethnic origin, social and educational level, family background, income, and religion do affect attraction in general and marital choice in particular. Also relevant are behavioral patterns such as the degree of gregariousness and drinking and smoki
I knew a guy with passion to be a pro golfer and the brain to be a great accountant. He followed his passion. He's homeless now.
I have a 7-second rule. If I need to write down an idea I have about seven seconds before a distraction replaces it. Notepad in all rooms.
Note to terrorists: We cartoonists aren't all unarmed.
Memo to everyone: Unhealthy food is not a gift item.
I need to stop being surprised at how many problems can be solved with clarity alone.
From the Scott Adams (Dilbert creator) Twitter account.
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.)
a problem only counts as solved when it's actually gone.
And there are a surprising number of problems that disappear once you have clarity, i.e., they are no longer a problem, even if you haven't done anything yet. They become, at most, minor goals or subgoals, or cease to be cognifively relevant because the actual action needed -- if indeed there is any -- can be done on autopilot.
IOW, a huge number of "problems" are merely situations mistakenly labeled as problems, or where the entire substance of the problem is actually internal to the person experiencing a problem. For example, the "problem" of "I don't know where to go for lunch around here" ceases to be a problem once you've achieved "clarity".
Or to put it another way, "problems" tend to exist in the map more than the territory, and Adams' quote is commenting on how it's always surprising how many of one's problems reside in one's map, rather than the territory. (Because we are biased towards assuming our problems come from the territory; evolutionarily speaking, that's where they used to mostly come from.)
Quote from the comedian Frankie Boyle in his new blog post, about people deciding whether they're offended by his jokes:
Also, a lot of people would form an opinion about the joke without having heard it. It's a feature of late capitalism that we get a lot of information thrown at us, and we have to make snap decisions and form strong opinions without really knowing anything. Sure, if our football club buys a new centre half we might do a bit of research. But often we're just being asked if we should bomb Syria or not, and we're busy, and we just have to say fuck it, yeah, my mate Gavin's in the army, so yeah.
I don’t think you can reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.
Removed due to formatting issues.
He who wants to know too much knows in the end nothing, and he who conversely believes that some things do not concern him, often victimizes himself, when, for example, the philosopher believes that history is dispensable to him.
-Immanuel Kant, Logic
Bean came up with his plan (the Third Invasion) because he thought there was no ansible, so the invasion fleet would hit the formics just when they found out they had lost the Second Invasion. When he found out there was an ansible, if he'd had the slightest sense in his head, he should have realised that the formics therefore knew they lost the moment it happened, seventy years ago, and thus could have launched their own fleet just as long ago.
And even when "truth" can be clearly defined, it is a concept to which natural selection is indifferent.
-Robert Wright, The Moral Animal, p. 272
If you want to use google instead of science to "prove me wrong" then I am happy to call you an imbecile as well as misinformed.
-- Jennifer Hibben-White, "My 15-Day-Old Son May Have Measles", 02/11/2015
...If a person doesn’t believe climate change is real, despite all the evidence to the contrary, is that a case of a dumb human or a science that has not earned credibility? We humans operate on pattern recognition. The pattern science serves up, thanks to its winged monkeys in the media, is something like this:
Step One: We are totally sure the answer is X.
Step Two: Oops. X is wrong. But Y is totally right. Trust us this time.
Science isn’t about being right every time, or even most of the time. It is about being more right over time and fixing what it got wr
We can't go back, Mat. The Wheel has turned, for better or worse. And it will keep on turning, as lights die and forests dim, storms call and skies break. Turn it will. The wheel is not hope, and the Wheel does not care, the Wheel simply is. But so long as it turns, folk may hope, folk may care. For with light that fades, another will eventually grow, and each storm that rages must eventually die. Thom Merrilin, The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
(For those unfamiliar with the series, the Wheel is basically reality/the universe)
Failure is the child of a... very extended family, including impulsiveness and hot-headedness.
For example: most men have inner conflicts of values; these conflicts, in most lives, take the form of small irrationalities, petty inconsistencies, mean little evasions, shabby little acts of cowardice, with no crucial moments of choice, no vital issues or great, decisive battles--and they add up to the stagnant, wasted life of a man who has betrayed all his values by the method of a leaking faucet.
--Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto
“What about honor and ethics?” “We’ve got honor in us, but it’s our own code...not the make-believe rules some frightened little man wrote for the rest of the frightened little men. Every man’s got his own honor and ethics, and so long as he sticks to ’em, who’s anybody else to point the finger? You may not like his ethics, but you've no right to call him unethical.”
-Alfred Bester, in The Demolished Man chapter 6 p 84, according to wikiquote
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are: