Even though there are no ways of knowing for sure, there are ways of knowing for pretty sure.
Daniel Handler (pen name Lemony Snicket)
“I’ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, ‘don’t try to fly too high,’ or whether it might also be thought of as ‘forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings.”
Similarly:
I've never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.
...The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And in a war that you cannot win, you don't want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don't want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knows how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can't, someone who understands that the damage is greatest if all you do is battle to the bitter end.
Most often, these days, medicine seems to supply neither Custers nor Lees. We are increasingly the generals who march the soldiers onward, saying all the while, "You let me know when you want to stop." All-out treatment, we tell the incurably ill, is a train you can get off at any time--just say when. But for most patients and their families we are asking too much. They remain riven by doubt and fear and desperation; some are deluded by a fantasy of what medical science can achieve. Our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People only die once. They have no experience to draw on. They need doctors and nurses who
“Pharmaceutical happiness isn’t actual happiness, John. It just feels like it for a while.”
“And if I take aspirin for a headache, my lack of headache isn’t actual lack of headache. It just feels like it for a while. I don’t see the relevance.”
From "Beyond the curtain", fiction by Jeffrey Wells.
A: I don't believe in love. It's just a bunch of chemical reactions. B: [kicks A in the balls] A: WHYYY??! B: I don't believe in pain. It's just a chemical reaction.
"It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." -Einstein
"Our beliefs about ourselves and the world are built on each other in a Jenga-like fashion. My belief that Keynes said “When the facts change, I change my mind” was a block sitting at the apex. It supported nothing else, so I could easily pick it up and toss it without disturbing other blocks. But when Jean-Pierre makes a forecast in his specialty, that block is lower in the structure, sitting next to a block of self-perception, near the tower’s core. So it’s a lot harder to pull that block out without upsetting other blocks—which makes Jean-Pierre reluctant to tamper with it."
-Phillip Tetlock, Superforecasting
"The first step in changing someone’s mind is to know where that mind is."
-William Ury, Getting to Yes With Yourself
At root, our work suggests that creativity in science appears to be a nearly universal phenomenon of two extremes. At one extreme is conventionality and at the other is novelty. Curiously, notable advances in science appear most closely linked not with efforts along one boundary or the other but with efforts that reach toward both frontiers.
Mukherjee et. al, Atypical Combinations and Scientific Impact.
The terror that took Baru came from the deepest part of her soul. It was a terror particular to her, a fundamental concern—the apocalyptic possibility that the world simply did not permit plans, that it worked in chaotic and unmasterable ways, that one single stroke of fortune, one well-aimed bowshot by a man she had never met, could bring total disaster. The fear that the basic logic she used to negotiate the world was a lie.
Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant, p. 292
The NTP Classic devs fell into investing increasing effort merely fighting the friction of their own limiting assumptions because they lacked something that Dave Mills had and I have and any systems architect necessarily must have – professional courage. It’s the same quality that a surgeon needs to cut into a patient – the confidence, bordering on arrogance, that you do have what it takes to go in and solve the problem even if there’s bound to be blood on the floor before you’re done.
That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted.
George Boole, Laws of Thought, ch. 2.
John Green on human inability to instinctively appreciate large numbers and broad events:
...My current number one goal in life is to someday be as excited about something as Cheez Doodles Guy is about Cheez Doodles. But its a weird facet of human brains that some thins cause that joyful excitement and others don't. Like today, the World Health Organisation announced that maternal death over the last twenty-five years has fallen 44% worldwide. This is amazing news (arguably even better news than discovering Cheez Doodles in Antarctica) and yet while I am enc
"What tit for tat lacks is a way of saying “Enough is enough.” It is too provocable, and not forgiving enough. And indeed, subsequent versions of Axelrod’s tournament, which allowed possibilities of mistakes and misperceptions, showed other, more generous strategies to be superior to tit for tat."
-Avanish Dixit, The Art of Strategy
"Wisdom is not the same thing as information. Wisdom is information + experience + context, and only a human can do that. Wisdom is information you can actually use."
-Tucker Max, The Book in a Box Method
The optimist fell ten stories, and at each window bar he shouted to the folks inside: 'Doing all right so far!'
Anonymous; quoted for instance in The Manager's Dilemma
"If you want to understand UFOs, reincarnation, and God, do not study UFOs, reincarnation, and God.
Study people."
Avatar, a character in Scott Adams' book, "God's Debris"
" Look forward and reason backward. Anticipate where your initial decisions will ultimately lead and use this information to calculate your best choice."
-Avanish Dixit, The Art of Strategy
...I picked up the folders for the two courses required of every student at the school. Statistics and epidemiology. Epi—what?
In the first lecture, we ‘reviewed’ all the major study types. For example, in the case-control study you find a group of people with a disease, and then look for people who are much the same but without the disease. You compare the two groups to see if they have different risks. It’s a relatively cheap method, but it doesn’t tell you much about the order in which things happen. I can’t remember all the examples used in the lecture,
I come from a country that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I'm from Missouri. You've got to show me.
...it will be illuminating to discuss briefly an aspect of the biology and chemistry of yesterday, namely vitalism. Vitalism is the notion that living matter contains a vital principle which is absent from non-living entities, so that living matter obeys different laws from those that rule non-living matter. This is an old idea, and it is by no means ridiculous. This idea has led in chemistry to a distinction between organic and inorganic substances.
-- POST-HUMAN MATHEMATICS by David Ruelle
(strange that this very winding-road like insight follows from ...
For sentimental pacifism is, after all, but a return to the method of the jungle. It is in the jungle that emotionalism alone determines conduct, and wherever that is true no other than the law of the jungle is possible. For the emotion of hate is sure sooner or later to follow on the emotion of love, and then there is a spring for the throat.
Robert Millikan, "Science and modern life", The Atlantic Monthly, April 1928, Quoted in Understanding Poetry, 3rd edition, 1960.
To answer without thinking leads to many defeats.
Tried to find original source, but beyond "in a poem" my English google fu turned up naught. I think its a good sentiment though. Folks go wrong less often by carefully coming to the wrong decision than they do by not stopping to think.
"In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it." -GK Chesterton
Graphical quote of the day - The Periodic Table of Irrational Nonsense:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_RQjQvxtmK8A/TFiXItuYZ7I/AAAAAAAADMs/fYApM83k26s/s1600/Woo+Table+v2.0.png
I've said before that a "financial crisis" means, roughly, "that someone borrows money from someone else and can't pay it back, and it is socially or politically unacceptable that the people who loaned the money not get their money back." So the way to avoid financial crises is to clearly define the classes of people whom it is socially and politically acceptable not to pay back.
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."
Often attributed to Yogi Berra, but research done at Snopes casts doubt on this.
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/berra/practicetheory.asp
I thought of this quote when I read E. Yudkowsky's essay on The Map and the Territory.
Met's manager Terry Collins made the controversial decision to pitch Matt Harvey instead of Jeurys Familia in the ninth inning of the final game of the 2015 MLB world series. After Harvey walked the first batter, Collins again faced the decision of whether to bring in Familia or let Harvey continue pitching:
"If you're going to let him just face one guy, you shouldn't have sent him out there," Collins said about the decision not to lift Harvey after the leadoff walk.
Classic sunk cost fallacy.
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
