Quotes Repository

Dorikka

Quotes are a unique enough medium of expression that I'm interested in viewing quotes that people have found collectable, emotionally impactful, useful, memorable, or otherwise noteworthy - perhaps others are similarly interested. To clarify, these need not be even remotely related to rationality. I'm hijacking the mandates traditionally used for the Rationality Quotes thread, with a few modifications:

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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.
Do not repeat quotes found in a Rationality Quotes thread.
If possible, try to post 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. Note that this can be helpful, but is not mandatory - I would much prefer a quote with only a name to no quote at all.

Please post any meta discussion in the top-level comment named "Meta".

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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.
Do not repeat quotes found in a Rationality Quotes thread.
If possible, try to post 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. Note that this can be helpful, but is not mandatory - I would much prefer a quote with only a name to no quote at all.

Please post any meta discussion in the top-level comment named "Meta".

Doubt... or test? My assumption/belief is that Elizabeth Warren doesn't know what keeps people running. Your assumption/belief is that she does know what keeps people running. If we can test our assumptions/beliefs... then shouldn't we? Or is the possibility of being right better than the possibility of being proved wrong?

Really this is where betting comes into play..

A bet instantly raises the marginal private cost of error, which leads to a sharp increase in rationality. Faced with financial consequences, people suddenly - if temporarily - admit to themselves that they know a lot less than they like to believe - and bet accordingly. - Bryan Caplan, Beating the Odds: Why Do People Insist on Even Bets?

... which brings us back to Carnegie...

Yet you and I, if we examine the facts closely, will discover that the majority of our opinions, our most cherished beliefs, our creeds, the principles of conduct on which many of us base our very lives, are the result of suggestion, not reasoning… Prejudiced, biased, and reiterated assertions, not logic, have formulated our beliefs.

If you're not willing to bet that Elizabeth Warren knows what keeps people running... then this leads me to believe that you really haven't examined your belief.

Nobody "knows what keeps people running", and it takes a huge organization with experts in many different fields to give us SNAFU instead of total disaster.

827chaos11y

I think there's a lot of work within the concept of "know what keeps people running" that needs to be elaborated on before I can even evaluate the question in a coherent way. I think Warren probably understands the politics of Washington DC than I do. I think she better understands working with constituents and negotiating tradeoffs between different goals than I do. I think she better understands quite a lot of policy better than I do. She also has better working familiarity with it than I do. There's not any clear way to evaluate whether or not Elizabeth Warren knows better than I do how to keep people running. Not taking an ill formed necessarily impossible hypothetical to win bet doesn't prove anything. You're acting like you're extremely rational and you've got skin in the game so you're more trustworthy and have thought things through better, but you're dealing with hypotheticals just as much as I am here. What "test" is it that your beliefs pass that the other beliefs fail?! Also, I never even said that I am on Elizabeth Warren's side of the question you asked. You sort of just assumed. I don't really feel much enthusiasm for either option presented, however.