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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.
What did you have in mind specifically?
Rationality also involves paradigm shifts, revolutions and inversions. "Use priors" is not, should not be, a call for fundamental conservatism.
One person's complex rationalisation is another's paradigm shift.
Evolution, relativity and quantum physics are paradigm shifts. Some people still aren't aboard with some of them, finding them against "logic", "reason", "common sense", etc. The self-professed rationalist Ayn Rand rejected all three: do you want to be another Ayn Rand?
The conservative incremental paradigm, applied retroactivley, would lead lwrationalists to reject good science. So they kind of don't believe in it as the only paradigm. But they also kind of do, since it is the only paradigm they use when discussing theology., or other things they don't like.
Not sure what "paradigm shift" is supposed to mean, but it sounds to me like "nobody had the slightest suspicion, then came a prophet, told something completely unexpected, and everyone's mind was blown". Well, if it is supposed to be anything like that, then evolution and relativity are poor examples (not completely sure about quantum physics).
With evolution, people already had millenia of experience with breeding. Darwin's new idea was, essentially: "if human breede... (read more)