I've always loved the initial exchange between Gregory and Syme in "The Man Who Was Thursday".
Context: Gregory is an anarchist poet, Syme is claiming to be a poet of respectability, which Gregory maintains is impossible.
....The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway."
"So it is," said Mr. Syme.
"Nonsense!" said Gregory, who was very rational when anyone else attempted paradox. "Why do all the clerks and navvies in the railway trains look so sad and tired, so very sad and tired? I will tell you. It is because they know that the train is going right. It is because they know that whatever place they have taken a ticket for that place they will reach. It is because after they have passed Sloane Square they know that the next station must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture! oh, their eyes like stars and their souls again in Eden, if the next station were unaccountably Baker Street!"
"It is you who are unpoetical," replied the poet Syme. "If what you say of clerks is true, they can only be as prosaic as your poetry. The rare...
As the ancient saying goes, "just because two of you are arguing, does not mean that one of you is right."
This one should help you empathize with other people more.
"Everyone has a secret world inside of them. All the people in the whole world, no matter how dull they seem on the outside, inside them they've got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds."
-Neil Gaiman
This seems like typical mind fallacy. Especially since the quote comes from a writer, who is used to having lots of worlds in his head and may be especially prone to making unwarranted assumptions that his mind is thus typical.
The usual touchstone, whether that which someone asserts is merely his persuasion -- or at least his subjective conviction, that is, his firm belief -- is betting. It often happens that someone propounds his views with such positive and uncompromising assurance that he seems to have entirely set aside all thought of possible error. A bet disconcerts him. Sometimes it turns out that he has a conviction which can be estimated at a value of one ducat, but not of ten. For he is very willing to venture one ducat, but when it is a question of ten he becomes aware, as he had not previously been, that it may very well be that he is in error. If, in a given case, we represent ourselves as staking the happiness of our whole life, the triumphant tone of our judgment is greatly abated; we become extremely diffident, and discover for the first time that our belief does not reach so far. Thus pragmatic belief always exists in some specific degree, which, according to differences in the interests at stake, may be large or may be small. - Immanuel Kant , The Critique of Pure Reason
...It is easy to believe; doubting is more difficult. Experience and knowledge and thinking are necessary before we can doubt and question intelligently. Tell a child that Santa Claus comes down the chimney or a savage that thunder is the anger of the gods and the child and the savage will accept your statements until they acquire sufficient knowledge to cause them to demur. Millions in India passionately believe that the waters of the Ganges are holy, that snakes are deities in disguise, that it is as wrong to kill a cow as it is to kill a person - and, a
The noble lord in this case, as in so many others, first destroys his opponent, and then destroys his own position afterwards. The noble lord is the Prince Rupert of parliamentary discussion: his charge is resistless, but when he returns from the pursuit he always finds his camp in the possession of the enemy.
Benjamin Disraeli, source, on the speeches of Lord Stanley. I often think of this quote regarding the effectiveness (or otherwise) of different kinds of rhetoric.
For context, Prince Rupert was a cavalry commander whose charges were extremely effect...
Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest. Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime.
-Richard Hamming, You and Your Research
The same critical concept in two different disciplines:
"Of several responses made to the same situation, those which are accompanied or closely followed by satisfaction to the animal will, other things being equal, be more firmly connected with the situation, so that, when it recurs, they will be more likely to recur; those which are accompanied or closely followed by discomfort to the animal will, other things being equal, have their connections with that situation weakened, so that, when it recurs, they will be less likely to occur. The greater the ...
But have you ever asked yourselves sufficiently how much the erection of every ideal on earth has cost? How much reality has had to be misunderstood and slandered, how many lies have had to be sanctified, how many consciences disturbed, how much "God" sacrificed every time? If a temple is to be erected a temple must be destroyed: that is the law - let anyone who can show me a case in which it is not fulfilled! - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals
Human laws aim to induce human beings to virtue little by little, not all at once. And so the laws do not immediately impose on the many imperfect citizens what already belongs to virtuous citizens, namely, that citizens abstain from everything evil. Otherwise, the imperfect citizens, unable to endure those commands, would erupt into worse evil things.
-Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Perhaps any sufficiently advanced logic is indistinguishable from stupidity. - Alex Tabarrok, The Rise of Opaque Intelligence
As readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between taste and judgment, so long, that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a book are two: this I like; this I don't like.
For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don't like it; I can see this is good and, though at present I don't like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don't like it.
~ W. H. Auden, A Certain World: A Commonplace Book
But no option for "I can see that this is trash and, though at present I like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to discard it."?
The truth can be of use when you can see where falsehoods lay.
Don't quit on hopes or dreams when you have simply got to -
Chin up! Don't bet on sinking ships because they'll only drag you down!
You've got to keep on sailing even when you want to frown!
The world will keep on turning without matter where you land.
You might as well be running when your feet should hit the sand!
-Rainbow Dash, lyrics to Sinking Ships, a song from Bittersweet, a fan-made episode of MLP:FiM.
So far as this is the case, it is evident that government, by excluding or even by superseding individual agency, either substitutes a less qualified instrumentality for one better qualified, or at any rate substitutes its own mode of accomplishing the work, for all the variety of modes which would be tried by a number of equally qualified persons aiming at the same end; a competition by many degrees more propitious to the progress of improvement than any uniformity of system. - J.S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy
...It is thus that the private interests and passions of individuals naturally dispose them to turn their stocks towards the employments which in ordinary cases are most advantageous to the society. But if from this natural preference they should turn too much of it towards those employments, the fall of profit in them and the rise of it in all others immediately dispose them to alter this faulty distribution. Without any intervention of law, therefore, the private interests and passions of men naturally lead them to divide and distribute the stock of every
What I'm suggesting is that we create a market in the public sector. Individual citizens would choose where their individual tax dollars go.
Citizens would only be able to choose to give their taxes back to themselves if this option was available. But why, if the public sector is about overcoming collective action problems, would this option be available? Is putting money back into your pocket a collective action problem?
So far not a single person has made a donation to my blog. Maybe it's because nobody values my blog? Naw, that can't be right! It's because of the free-rider problem! People guess that I'm going to continue blogging whether or not I get any money... so why should they contribute if they don't have to?
With this in mind I can pretend there are gazillions of people who derive value from my blog. But what if you wanted to challenge my belief? One way you could do it would be to create a blog sector. Everybody would get "taxed" $5 a month but... they could choose which blogs they gave their money to.
With this system in place, what would I be able to say if I still didn't receive any contributions? Unfortunately I wouldn't be able to blame it on the free-rider problem. I'd have to come up with some other rationalization.
Well... maybe I'd give myself $5 a month for my own blog. Why not? Do you think everybody would start a blog so that they could put their $5/month back in their own pockets? If so, then you'd probably have to figure out some sort of threshold. Maybe something like... any blog that 30 or fewer people contributed to would be booted from the blog sector.
Now let's apply this logic to the public sector. If too few people contributed to a public good then we would say that it has insufficient demand breadth. If it has insufficient demand breadth then it's not an adequately large enough collective action problem to warrant inclusion in the public sector. Therefore, people wouldn't be able to spend their taxes on helping to overcome it.
With that under our belt.. we can get back to congress. If people have to pay taxes anyways, but they don't give any of their taxes to congress... then congress wouldn't have sufficient demand breadth. Perhaps congress creates some value (just like my blog) but clearly people derive more value from other public goods.
A blog sector makes perfect economic sense. There's plenty of studies on the free-rider problem. But if you wanted people to elect a small group of representatives to allocate everybody's blog "taxes"... then I'd ask you to cite the economic justification for the additional step. And you wouldn't be able to because it doesn't exist.
I've been digging and debating this for several years and there's absolutely no economic evidence to support our current system. Yet, most people believe in it. This is why I like Carnegie's quote... it's painfully pertinent.
So, you're suggesting that the public should get to choose where their tax dollars go out of a list of preselected options. Who selects the options that go onto the list?
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 any meta discussion in the top-level comment named "Meta".