Here's another installment of rationality quotes. The usual rules apply:
..."The spatial anomaly has interacted with the tachyonic radiation in the nebula, it's interfering with our sensors. It's impossible to get a reading."
"There's no time - we'll have to take the ship straight through it!"
"Captain, I advise against this course of action. I have calculated the odds against our surviving such an action at three thousand, seven hundred and forty-five to one."
"Damn the odds, we've got to try... wait a second. Where, exactly, did you get that number from?"
"I hardly think this is the time for-"
"No. No, fuck you, this is exactly the time. The fate of the galaxy is at stake. Trillions of lives are hanging in the balance. You just pulled four significant digits out of your ass, I want to see you show your goddamn work."
"Well, I used the actuarial data from the past fifty years, relating to known cases of ships passing through nebulae that are interacting with spatial anomalies. There have been approximately two million such incidents reported, with only five hundred and forty-two incidents in which the ship in question survived intact."
"And did you at all take into account that ship buil
To be exact, we tend to succeed twenty-four point five percent more often than the statistics would otherwise indicate
Well... not quite. The selection effect makes the survival number basically impossible to calculate, but regularly surviving risky scenarios seems like it would provide a bit better odds for the influence of moxie than 249:200.
Fun Bayes application: what's the likelihood ratio for the existence vs. nonexistence of moxie-based immunity to death during battle for military leaders, given the military history of Earth?
Well... not quite. The selection effect makes the survival number basically impossible to calculate, but regularly surviving risky scenarios seems like it would provide a bit better odds for the influence of moxie than 249:200.
At some point, if the Vulcan is smart enough, I suspect the calculation would begin to hinge more on plot twists and the odds that the story is nearing its end, as the hypothesis that they are wearing Plot Armor rises up to the forefront.
I'd also suspect that the Vulcan would realize quickly that as his prediction for the probability of success approaches 1, the odds of a sudden plot reversal that plunges them all in deep poo also approaches 1. And then the Vulcan would immediately adjust to always spouting off some random high-odds-against-us number all the time just to make sure they'd always succeed heroically.
Ow, this is starting to sound very newcomblike.
And then the Vulcan would immediately adjust to always spouting off some random high-odds-against-us number all the time just to make sure they'd always succeed heroically.
Holy crap, canon!Spock is a genius rationalist after all.
The computer is secretly making paper clips in cargo bay 2, beaming them into space when noone is looking.
I want to believe.
There have been approximately two million such incidents reported, with only five hundred and forty-two incidents in which the ship in question survived intact.
Unweighted, that's 3690:1 odds.
we tend to succeed twenty-four point five percent more often than the statistics would otherwise indicate - and, in fact, that number jumps to twenty-nine point two percent specifically in cases where I state the odds against our success to three significant digits or greater
Since odds to three or more significant figures have been quoted, that gives us 2856:1 odds (still without weighting). From this, I conclude that the successful incidents usually involved ships that were either very differently designed to the ship in question, or were a long time ago (case in point - the 47-year-old success case). This implies that the current ship's design is actually somewhat more likely to fall afoul of the nebula than an average ship, or an older ship. Rather substantially, in fact; enough to almost exactly counter the determination/drive factor.
An investigation into the shipyards, and current design paradigms, may be in order once the trillions of lives have been saved. I suspect that too little emphasis is being placed on safety at some point in the design process.
An investigation into the shipyards, and current design paradigms, may be in order...
...as I recommended strenuously before we left dock at the beginning of this mission, since a similar analysis performed then gave approximately 8000:1 odds that before this mission was complete you would do something deeply stupid that got us all killed, no matter how strenuously I tried to instruct you in basic risk factor analysis. That having failed, I gave serious consideration to simply taking over the ship myself, which I estimate will increase by a factor of approximately 3000 the utility created by our missions (even taking into account the reduced "moxie factor", which is primarily of use during crises a sensible Captain would avoid getting into in the first place). However, I observe that my superiors in the High Command have not taken over Starfleet and the Federation, despite the obvious benefits of such a strategy. At first this led me to 83% confidence that the High Command was in possession of extremely compelling unshared evidence of the value of humanity's leadership, which at that time led me to update significantly in favor of that view myself. I have since then reduced that confidence to 76%, with a 13% confidence that the High Command has instead been subverted by hostile powers partial to humanity.
The steel-Vulcan in the original quote admits that humans have an edge in the field of interpersonal relations. I imagine that's why the Vulcans let the humans lead; because the humans are capable of persuading all the other races in the Federation to go along with this whole 'federation' idea, and leave the Vulcans more-or-less alone as long as they share some of their research results.
Or, to put it another way; Vulcan High Command has managed to foist off the boring administration work onto the humans, in exchange for mere unimportant status, and is not eager to have it land back on their laps again.
Of course, some Vulcans do think that a Vulcan-led empire would be an improvement over a human-led one. The last batch to think that went off and formed the Romulan Empire. The Vulcans and the Romulans are currently running a long-term, large-scale experiment to see which paradigm creates a more lasting empire in practice. (They don't tell the other races that it's all a political experiment, of course. They might not be great at interpersonal realtions, but they have found out in the past that that is a very bad idea).
The Federation makes decisions that affect the state of the Galaxy, and they make different decisions than they would under Vulcan control
Eh, questionable. I'm sure many of us have been in situations where we're advising more senior staff and the manager or whoever isn't really the one making the decision anymore - they're just the talking head we get to rubber stamp what those of us who actually deal with the problem have decided is going to happen.
In practice I tend to find that the people who control access to information, rather than the people who wield formal authority, tend to have the most power in an organisation.
You shouldn't trust people who claim to know 4 digits of accuracy for a forcast like this.
You shouldn't trust a human person who makes that claim. But if we are using 'person' in a way that includes the steel-Vulcan from the quote then yes, you should.
The uncertainity involved in the calculation has to be greater.
It is all uncertainty. There is no particular reason to doubt the steel-Vulcan's ability to calibrate 'meta' uncertainties too.
In the face of all the other evidence about the relative capabilities of the species in question that the character in question is implied to have it would be an error to overvalue the heuristic "don't trust people who fail to signal humility via truncating calculations". The latter is, after all, merely a convention. Given the downsides of that convention (it inevitably makes predictions worse) it is relatively unlikely that the Vulcans would have the same traditions regarding significant figure expression.
And lo, Wedrifid did invent the concept of Steel Vulcan and it was good.
Do we actually have enough fictional examples of this to form a trope? (At least 3, 5 would be better.)
If many of your input variables only have two digits of accuracy the end result shouldn't have four digits of accuracy.
Almost-inaudibly, whispering in a small corner of the room while scribbling in a notebook that the teacher is totally stupid while said teacher says something similar to the quote above:
under the assumption that all variables have equivalent ratios of weight to the final result and that the probability distribution of the randomness is evenly distributed across sub-digits of inaccuracy, along with a few other invisible assumptions about the nature of the data and calculations
Yep, that's me in high school.
In your example, the cited specific case only means that the final accuracy to be calculated is +- 0.01 individual ship relevance, which means that at the worst this one instance, by the standard half-the-last-significant-digit rule of thumb (which is not by any means an inherent property of uncertainties) means that there's +- 0.5% * 1 ship variance over the 542 : 2 000 000 ratio for this particular error margin.
Note also that "24% weight of the relevance of 1 ship in the odds" translates very poorly in digit-accuracies to "3745 : 1", beca...
If many of your input variables only have two digits of accuracy the end result shouldn't have four digits of accuracy.
That is indeed the (mere, human) convention as taught in high schools of our shared culture. See above regarding the absurdity of using that heuristic as a reason for rejecting the advice of what amounts to a superintelligence.
It's not about accuracy, it's about not privileging 3700 over 3745. Neither is a particularly round number in, say, binary, and omitting saying "forty five" after converting this number into decimal system for human consumption is not much of a time saver.
Either that, or it reflects an accurate understanding of the things that humans (justifiably or otherwise) treat as signals of authoritative knowledge. I mean, there's a reason people who want to sound like experts quote statistics to absurd levels of precision; rounding off sounds less definitive to most people.
‘Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that in your promiscuous pursuit of women you are merely trying to assuage your subconscious fears of sexual impotence?’
‘Yes, sir, it has.’
‘Then why do you do it?’
‘To assuage my fears of sexual impotence.’
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
explaining /= explaining away
A lot of people gave very selflessly to build this warship so we can go out and battle the vikings, but the time has come to admit that hard work and hope are no substitute for actual knowledge and that we've made a really shitty ship. If we sail this ship against the vikings, we'll be massacred immediately.
Oglaf webcomic, "Bilge"
(Oglaf is usually NSFW, so I'm not linking, even if this particular comic has nothing worse than coarse language.)
Well, since Conscientiousness is heritable to a substantial degree, perhaps she inherited her knack for hard work.
Unless challenged to think otherwise, people quickly move from "Phew! Dodged a bullet on that one!" to "I'm a great bullet-dodger."
Discussing the "Near-miss bias" which they define as a tendency to "take more risk after an event in which luck played a critical role in deciding the event's [favorable] outcome."
Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, page 150.
When I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this -- it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.
I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person -- to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know that the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control.
She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happens. Nowadays there's a certain danger of the same thing happening, even in the famous field of physics. ...
-- Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!
One interesting thing about Ms. Dowd’s description of “hardball” political tactics is just how dainty and genteel her brass knuckle suggestions actually are. A speech, an appeal to reason: there is nothing here about lucrative contracts for political supporters, promises of sinecure jobs for politicians who lose their seats, a “blank check” for administrative backing on some obscure tax loophole that a particular politician could award to a favored client; there’s not even a delicate hint about grand jury investigations that can be stopped in their tracks or compromising photographs or wiretaps that need never see the light of day. Far be it from Ms Dowd to speak of or even hint at the kind of strategy that actual politicians think about when words like ‘hardball’ come to mind. Ms Dowd speaks of brass knuckles and then shows us a doily; at some level it speaks well of Ms. Dowd as a human being that even when she tries she seems unable to come up with an offer someone can’t refuse.
-- Walter Russell Mead, describing someone else's failure to understand what a desperate effort actually looks like.
When a problem comes along / You must whip it / Before the cream sets out too long / You must whip it / When something's goin' wrong / You must whip it
Now whip it / Into shape / Shape it up / Get straight / Go forward / Move ahead / Try to detect it / It's not too late / To whip it / Whip it good
-- Devo, on the value of confronting problems rather than letting them fester
Philosophy... is what you have to do until you figure out what questions you should have been asking in the first place.
Daniel Dennett
But if the question is "Has this caused you to revise downward your estimate of the value of health insurance?" the answer has to obviously be yes. Anyone who answers differently is looking deep into their intestinal loops, not the Oregon study. You don't have to revise the estimate to zero, or even a low number. But if you'd asked folks before the results dropped what we'd expect to see if insurance made people a lot healthier, they'd have said "statistically significant improvement on basic markers for the most common chronic diseases. The fact that we didn't see that means that we should now say that health insurance, or at least Medicaid, probably doesn't make as big a difference in health as we thought.
-- Megan McArdle, trying to explain Bayesian updates and the importance of making predictions in advance, without referring to any mathematics.
This may be true, but McArdle's point is precisely that this was not said before the study came out. At that time, people confidently expected that health insurance would, in fact, improve health outcomes. Your argument is one that was only made after the result was known; this is a classic failure mode.
(nods) Yup. Of course, McArdle's claims about what people would have said before the study, if asked, are also only being made after the results are known, which as you say is a classic failure mode.
Of course, McArdle is neither passing laws nor doing research, just writing articles, so the cost of failure is low. And it's kind of nice to see someone in the mainstream (sorta) press making the point that surprising observations should change our confidence in our beliefs, which people surprisingly often overlook.
Anyway, the quality of McArdle's analysis notwithstanding, one place this sort of reasoning seems to lead us is to the idea that when passing a law, we ought to say something about what we anticipate the results of passing that law to be, and have a convention of repealing laws that don't actually accomplish the thing that we said we were passing the law in order to accomplish.
Which in principle I would be all in favor of, except for the obvious failure mode that if I personally don't want us to accomplish that, I am now given an incentive to manipulate the system in other ways to lower whatever metrics we said we were going to measure. (Note: I am not claiming here that any such thing happened in the Oregon study.)
That said, even taking that failure mode into account, it might still be preferable to passing laws with unarticulated expected benefits and keeping them on the books despite those benefits never materializing.
Of course, McArdle's claims about what people would have said before the study, if asked, are also only being made after the results are known, which as you say is a classic failure mode.
I don't think that's true; if you read her original article on the subject, linked in the one I link, she quotes statistics like this:
Most of you probably have probably heard the statistic that being uninsured kills 18,000 people a year. Or maybe it's 27,000. Those figures come from an Institute of Medicine report (later updated by the Urban Institute) that was drawn from [nonrandom observational] studies.
And back in 2010, she said
I took a keen interest when, at the fervid climax of the health-care debate in mid-December, a Washington Post blogger, Ezra Klein, declared that Senator Joseph Lieberman, by refusing to vote for a bill with a public option, was apparently “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands” of uninsured people in order to punish the progressives who had opposed his reelection in 2006. In the ensuing blogstorm, conservatives condemned Klein’s “venomous smear,” while liberals solemnly debated the circumstances under which one may properly accuse one’s opponents of mass murder.
I don't think her statement is entirely post-hoc.
If I throw a die and it comes up heads, I'd update in the direction of it being a very unusual die. :-)
If the effect is so small that a sample of several thousand is not sufficient to reliably observe it, then it doesn't even matter that it is positive.
I strongly disagree.
An old comment of mine gives us a counterexample. A couple of years ago, a meta-analysis of RCTs found that taking aspirin daily reduces the risk of dying from cancer by ~20% in middle-aged and older adults. This is very much a practically significant effect, and it's probably an underestimate for reasons I'll omit for brevity — look at the paper if you're curious.
If you do look at the paper, notice figure 1, which summarizes the results of the 8 individual RCTs the meta-analysis used. Even though all of the RCTs had sample sizes in the thousands, 7 of them failed to show a statistically significant effect, including the 4 largest (sample sizes 5139, 5085, 3711 & 3310). The effect is therefore "so small that a sample of several thousand is not sufficient to reliably observe it", but we would be absolutely wrong to infer that "it doesn't even matter that it is positive"!
The heuristic that a hard-to-detect effect is probably too small to care about is a fair rule of thumb, but it's only a h...
For one mistake made for not knowing, ten mistakes are made for not looking.
Nowadays many educated people treat reinforcement theory as if it were something not terribly important that they have known and understood all along. In fact most people don't understand it, or they would not behave so badly to the people around them.
-- Karen Pryor, Don't Shoot the Dog!: The New Art of Teaching and Training
it is often better to pull numbers out of your arse and use them to make a decision, than to pull a decision out of your arse.
-- Paul Crowley
This is a claim about reality. Do we actually know that pulling numbers out of your arse actually does produce better results than pulling the decisions out directly? Or does it just feel better, because you have a theory now?
it is often better to pull numbers out of your arse and use them to make a decision, than to pull a decision out of your arse.
How often? I can imagine this heuristic being better or worse depending on the details of which figures are chosen and how the are used.
If I had to guess, I'd say that it's often better because picking a few random numbers leads to actually thinking about the decision for at least half a minute.
In practice, guessing at numbers and running a calculation actually serves as a quick second opinion on your original intuitive decision. If the numbers imply something far different from the decision that System 1 is offering, I don't immediately shrug and go with the numbers: I notice that I am confused, and flag this as something where I need to consider the reliability both of the calculation and of my basic intuition. If the calculation checks out with my original intuition, then I simply go for it.
Basically, a heuristic utility calculation is a cheap error flag which pops up more often when my intuitions are out of step with reality than when they're in step with reality. That makes it incredibly valuable.
of which figures are chosen and how the are used.
On first pass, I read this as "which figures are chosen and how the arse is used". That seemed oddly appropriate.
With numbers you can do anything you like. Suppose I have the sacred number 9 and I want to get a number 1314, date of the execution of Jaques de Molay - a date dear to anyone who, like me, professes devotion ot the Templar tradition of knighthood. What do I do? I multiply 9 by one hundred and forty-six, the fateful day of the destruction of Carthage. How did I arrive at this? I divided thirteen hundred and fourteen by two, three, et cetera, until I found a satisfying date. I could also have divided thirteen hundred and fourteen by 6.28, the double of 3.14 and I would have got two hundred and nine. That is the year Attulus I, king of Pergamon, ascended the throne. You see?
Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum (1989)
...We would all like to believe that if we win something it is because of our skill, but if we lose it is because of the good luck or cheating of our opponent. This is nowhere more apparent than in the game of backgammon. A good opponent will play in such a way that the dice rolls having highest probability will be "good rolls" for them on their next turn, enabling them to take the other player's pieces, consolidate their position, etc. However, since there is an element of randomness, when these rolls actually come up it is very difficult even for me to believe that my opponent's fortune is due to their skill rather than their luck. Whenever I am being consistently beaten by an opponent I have to fight very hard to make myself believe that there is actually something wrong with my play and figure out how to correct it.
This phenomenon is nowhere more apparent than in computer backgammon. Computer backgammon is essentially a solved problem. Unlike Chess or Go, the best neural network algorithms that run even on modest hardware will consistently beat most human players, and perhaps draw with the best in the world. In fact, we have learnt rather a lot from these algorit
I like the quote, but I have a nitpick:
We would all like to believe that... if we lose it is because of the good luck or cheating of our opponent.
When I've lost in the first round of single-elimination tournaments, I've found myself hoping that the person who beat me would prove skilled enough to win the entire tournament. That way, my loss wouldn't mean that I totally sucked, but only that I wasn't the best. So I think the quoted observation fails to account for nuances relating to how losses inform us about our skill level.
Ownership is not limited to material things. It can also apply to points of view. Once we take ownership of an idea—whether it’s about politics or sports—what do we do? We love it perhaps more than we should. We prize it more than it is worth. And most frequently, we have trouble letting go of it because we can’t stand the idea of its loss. What are we left with then? An ideology—rigid and unyielding.
Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, New York, 2008, pp. 138-139
When I argue with reality, I lose -- but only 100 percent of the time.
-- Byron Katie, Loving What Is
And I told her that no matter what the org chart said, my real bosses were a bunch of mice in cages and cells in a dish, and they didn’t know what the corporate goals were and they couldn’t be “Coached For Success”, the way that poster on the wall said.
There is, perhaps, a word missing from the English language. If Derek Lowe were speaking, instead of writing, he would put an exaggerated emphasis on the word real and native speakers of English would pick up on a special, metaphorical meaning for the word real in the phrase real boss. The idea is that there are hidden, behind the scenes connections more potent (more real?) than the overt connections.
There is a man in a suit, call him the actual boss, who issues orders. Perhaps one order is "run the toxicology tests". The actual boss is the same as the real boss so far. Perhaps another order is "and show that the compound is safe." Now power shifts to the mice. If the compound poisons the mice and they die, then the compound wasn't safe. The actual boss has no power here. It is the mice who are the real boss. They have final say on whether the compound is safe, regardless of the orders that the actual boss gave.
Derek Lowe is giving us an offshoot of an aphorism by Francis Bacon: "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." Again the point is lost if one refuses to find a poetic reading. Nature accepts no commands; there are no Harry-Potter style spells. Nature issues no commands; we do not hear and obey, we just obey. (So why is Bacon advising us to obey?)
No one thinks that their boss has the power to rearrange physical reality at a whim.
It is a very common feature of bad bosses that they think they have the authority to order their underlings to rearrange physical reality. This seems to be exactly what's going on in the original post.
it reads like this: "Because my job performance may be affected by the laws of physical reality, which my boss is powerless to alter, he (the boss) in fact has no power over me!"
The fact that the speaker is addressing his boss directly changes the meaning a lot. I'd read it as "No matter what official authority you have, if you order me to violate the laws of physics then the laws of physics are going to win." Referring to the mice as his "real boss" is an attempt to explain why he's constrained by the nature of reality to someone who spends a lot more time thinking about org charts than about the nature of reality.
It's often a good habit to keep track of seemingly identical concepts separately, just in case you're wrong and they're not identical.
-- aristosophy
This is often a good idea in mathematics. Two concepts that are equivalent in some context may no longer be equivalent once you move to a more general context; for example, familiar equivalent definitions are often no longer equivalent if you start dropping axioms from set theory or logic (e.g. the axiom of choice or excluded middle).
Arguable example: probability and uncertainty. (More or less identical in my theorizing, but some call the idea of their identity the ludic fallacy.)
One of the biggest tasks, according to Gardner, was tracking information and beliefs back to their roots. This is always important, but especially in a field as rich in hearsay as herbal medicine. One little piece of information, or an unsubstantiated report, can grow and become magnified, quickly becoming an unquestioned truism. She used as an example the truism that the extracts of the herb Ginkgo Biloba might cause dangerous bleeding. Everyone says it can. The journalists say it. The doctors say it. The herbalists say it. Even I say it! It's nearly impossible to read a scientific paper on Ginkgo that doesn't mention this alleged danger. But why do we say it - where did the information come from? Turns out, there was one case report - of a single person - who couldn't clot efficiently after taking Ginkgo. Another 178 papers were published that mentioned this danger, citing only this one report. Those 178 papers were cited by over 4,100 other papers. So now we have almost 4-and-a-half thousand references in the scientific literature - not to mention the tens of thousands of references in the popular press - to the dangers of Ginkgo, all traceable back to a single person whose bleeding may or may not have been attributable to the herb.
Upvoted initially because this seemed like a good example of what I've taken to calling a "leprechaun" - a fact that spreads in spite of limited empirical backing; however a quick Google search (fact-checking the fact-check, as it were) leads to this article which at the very least suggests that the second-hand story told above is somewhat exaggerated: the evidence for bleeding associated with Gingko Biloba is rather more solid than "one case report - of a single person". Upvote retracted, I'm afraid...
(ETA: also, the other story at that link makes for... interesting reading for a rationalist.)
He who says "Better to go without belief forever than believe a lie!" merely shows his own... private horror of becoming a dupe... It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories... over enemies or over nature gained.
William James
This debate brings to mind one of the more interesting differences between the hard sciences and other fields. This occurs when you firmly believe A, someone makes a compelling argument, and within a few seconds you firmly believe not-A, to the point of arguing for not-A with even more vigor that you used for A just a few seconds ago.
-- Lou Scheffer
(Most recent example from my own life that springs to mind: "It seems incredibly improbable that any Turing machine of size 100 could encode a complete solution to the halting problem for all Turing machines of size up to almost 100... oh. Nevermind.")
So what's the program? Is it the one that runs every turing machine up to length 100 for BusyBeaver(100) steps, and gets the number BusyBeaver(100) by running the BusyBeaver_100 program whose source code is hardcoded into it? That would be of length 100+c for some constant c, but maybe you didn't think the constant was worth mentioning.
One of the most impressive features of brains – especially human brains — is the flexibility to learn almost any kind of task that comes its way. Give an apprentice the desire to impress his master and a chicken-sexing task, and his brain devotes its massive resources to distinguishing males from females. Give an unemployed aviation enthusiast a chance to be a national hero, and his brain learns to distinguish enemy aircraft from local flyboys. This flexibility of learning accounts for a large part of what we consider human intelligence. While many animals are properly called intelligent, humans distinguish themselves in that they are so flexibly intelligent, fashioning their neural circuits to match the task at hand. It is for this reason that we can colonize every region on the planet, learn the local language we’re born into, and master skills as diverse as playing the violin, high-jumping and operating space shuttle cockpits.
David Eagleman, Incognito, p. 71
There are probably no more than 100 people alive that can make their way through Bach's 2nd Partita for violin.
I'm pretty sure you're underestimating that by...a lot. Fermi estimate time:
Bach's sonatas and partitas for solo violin) are a cornerstone of the violin repertory. We may therefore assume that every professor of violin at a major university or conservatory has performed at least one of them at least once, just like we may assume that every professor of mathematics has studied the Lebesgue dominated convergence theorem. How many professors of violin are there? Let's just consider one country, the United States. Each state in the U.S. has at least two major public universities (typically "University of X" and "X State University", where X is the state); some have many more, and this doesn't even count private universities. Personal experience suggests that the average big state university has about one professor of violin. There are 50 states in the U.S., so that's 100 people already right there. And we have yet to count:
Ever notice how you never hear humans playing music that humans aren't capable of learning to play? I think there may be some selection effects at play here...
PROF. PLUM: What are you afraid of, a fate worse than death?
MRS. PEACOCK: No, just death; isn't that enough?
--Clue (1985)
"I don't really understand metaphysics or why it's needed." -- Matt Simpson
"Sketch version: There is no "no metaphysics" anwser, there is only "metaphysics I just unconsciously accept" and "metaphysics I've actually thought about". You can do it well or you can do it badly but you can't not do metaphysics." -- Andrew Summitt
This is a wild guess, but (on the assumption that you endorse this quote) is the thought that MWI stands in relation to experimentally testable physics as something like a metaphysical thesis, and that instrumentalism doesn't lack metaphysical theses of this kind, but simply refuses to acknowledge and examine them?
Anyway, a related quote, and so far as I know the oldest of this kind:
The man who is ready to prove that metaphysical knowledge is wholly impossible..is a brother metaphysician with a rival theory of first principles. -F. H. Bradley "Appearance and Reality" 1893
Actually, it was someone asking what the heck I meant by "reality fluid", to which the answer is that I don't know either which is why I always call it "magical reality fluid". I mean, I could add in something that sounded impressive and might to some degree be helpful along the lines of "It's the mind-projection-fallacy conjugate of 'probability' as it appears inside hypotheses about collections of real things in which some real things are more predicted to happen to me than others for purposes of executing post-observation Bayesian updates, like, if the squared modulus rule appearing in the Born statistics reflected the quantity present of an actual kind of stuff" but I think saying, "It's magic, which is the mind-projection-fallacy conjugate of 'I'm confused'" would be wiser in a conversation like that. I think it's very important not to create the illusion of knowing more than you do, when you try to operate at the frontiers of your own ability to be coherent. At the same time, refusing to digress into metaphysics even to demarcate the things that confuse you, even to form ideas which can be explicitly incoherent rather than implicitly incoherent, is indeed to become the slave of the unexamined thought.
...But consider: Newton has thought things that no man before has ever thought. A great accomplishment to be sure. Perhaps the greatest achievement any human mind has ever made. Very well - what does that say of Newton, and of us? Why, that his mind is framed in such a way that it can out-think anyone else's. So all hail Isaac Newton! Let us give him his due, and glorify and worship whatever generative force can frame such a mind.
Now consider Hooke. Hooke has perceived things that no man before us has ever perceived. What does that say of Hooke, and of us? That Hooke was framed in some special way? No, for just look at you, Robert - by your leave, you are stooped, asthmatic, fitful, beset by aches and ills, your eyes and ears are no better than those of men who've not perceived a thousandth part of what you have.
Newton makes his discoveries in geometrical realms, where our minds cannot go, he strolls in a walled garden filled with wonders, to which he has the only key. But you Hooke, are cheek-by-jowl with all of humanity in the streets of London. Anyone can look at the things you have looked at. But in those things you see what no one else has. You are the millionth human to lo
Don't you understand anything about commitment, about being a pro, about sticking with what you say you wanna be? You don't do it just when you feel good. You don't do it just when you're not tired. You don't do it just when it's sunny. You do it every day of your life. You do it when it hurts to do it, when it's the last thing in the world that you wanna do, when there are a million reasons not to do it. You do it because you're a professional.
-- Teddy Atlas
The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them — especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind...
Daniel Dennett
If we think of an intuition pump as a carefully design persuasion tool, we can see that it might repay us to reverse engineer the tool, checking out all the moving parts to see what they are doing... consider the intuition pump to be a tool with many settings, and "turn all the knobs" to see if the same intuitions still get pumped when you consider different variations.
Daniel Dennett
You can't do much carpentry with your bare hands, and you can't do much thinking with your bare brain.
Bo Dahlbom
If you find it strange that I make no use of the qualities one calls heat, cold, moistness, and dryness…, as the philosophers [of the schools] do, I tell you that these qualities appear to me to be in need of explanation, and if I am not mistaken, not only these four qualities, but also all the others, and even all of the forms of inanimate bodies can be explained without having to assume anything else for this in their matter but motion, size, shape, and the arrangement of their parts.
-- René Descartes
All knowledge, every empirical statement about the real world, is an "if..., then..." proposition; there is no "fact" without "theory". But we buy knowledge with the assumptions we make - the more assumptions made, the more knowledge obtained. ...all knowledge is paid for; if the assumptions are correct, we have a bargain.
--Clyde Coombs, A theory of data 1964, pg284,488
He who is firm in will molds the world to himself.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hermann und Dorothea, IX. 303.
if you have to choose between two explanations and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, choose the other one.
-Paul Graham
In Germany in 1911 the minimum requirement for a professor was a head circumference of 52 centimeters. This was used to discriminate against women; [one] leading medical physicist of the time stated: "We do not have to ask for the head circumference of women of genius — they do not exist." At the same time... a French scientist of note pointed out that, on average, women had brains which were closer in size to gorillas than they were to those of men! These serve as good examples of trying to use some sort of measure to come to the conclusion that was wanted... in the first place.
I am also thankful that, once I had an appetite for philosophy, I did not fall into the hands of some so-called wise man, and that I did not waste my time publishing or attempting to solve logical puzzles, or busy myself with observing the sky.
-Marcus Aurelius
...“Monads and atoms both are infinitely small, yet everything is made out of them; and in considering how such a paradox is possible, we must look to the interactions among them <...> But either way, we’re obliged to explain the things we see — like the church-tower — solely in terms of those interactions. ”
“Solely, Doctor? ”
“Solely, your highness. For if God made the world according to understandable, consistent laws <...> then it must be consistent through and through, top to bottom. If it is made of atoms, then it is made of atoms, and must b
...Reality, for me, is what is true. The truth is whatever is in front of you, whatever is really happening. Whether you like it or not, it's raining now. "It shouldn't be raining" is just a thought. In reality, there is no such thing as a "should" or a "shouldn't." These are only thoughts that we impose onto reality. The mind is like a carpenter's level. When the bubble is off to one side -- "It shouldn't be raining" -- we can know that the mind is caught in its thinking. When the bubble is right in the middle -- &quo
...The most common mistake that people make in this regard is believing other people. For instance, a testimonial— whether it comes to you from a friend or blares out at you from a TV screen—is a poor criterion for determining truth.
A case in point is the experience of a writer for a popular fitness magazine who once wrote a facetious article about a “miracle supplement.” At the bottom of the page on which the article appeared, he had the magazine’s art department create a perforated square roughly the size of a postage stamp, next to which appeared the foll
We are enormously indebted to those academics; what could be more advantageous in an intellectual contest--whether it be bridge, chess, or stock selection--than to have opponents who have been taught thinking is a waste of energy?
Warren Buffet on proponents of the efficient market hypothesis
If you attempt to make sense of the world of ideas and meanings, free will and morality, art and science and even philosophy itself without a sound and quite detailed knowledge of evolution, you have one hand tied behind your back.
Daniel Dennett
When you have spoken the word, it reigns over you. When it is unspoken you reign over it.
-Arabian proverb
Why do you say that? Many times, you say something publicly, it then becomes part of your identity, and after that there is a subconscious force that tries to make sure that your future actions and words are in line with what you said earlier.
...this seems exactly, diametrically wrong.
I would have said merely wrong. ie. When reversed it would still be stupidity. There seem to be both advantages and disadvantages to public expression with respect to it influencing you. Something along the lines of identity commitments on one side and the potential for denial, hypocrisy and lack of feedback on the other.
Rodger Cotes defending Newton from the charge that his theory treats gravity as an occult cause:
...I can hear some people disagreeing with this conclusion and muttering something or other about occult qualities. They are always prattling on and on to the effect that gravity is something occult, and that occult causes are to be banished completely from philosophy. But it is easy to answer them: occult causes are not those causes whose existence is very clearly demonstrated by observations, but only those whose existence is occult, imagined, and not yet prove
The stony path to truth is competing with seductive, easier paths that turn out to be dead ends.
Marcel Kinsbourne, quoted in Dennett (2013)
Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
Matthew 7:13-14
-We can't go back. We don't understand everything yet.
-"Everything" is a little ambitious. We barely understand anything.
-Yeah. But that's what the first part of understanding everything looks like.
--from the ongoing animation xkcd: Time, dialogue transcript found here
Citation? I've read the Tao Teh Ching in a few translations and I don't recognize that at all; a Google and Google Books makes it sound like the usual apocrypha.
To recognize that some of the things our culture believes are not true imposes on us the duty of finding out which are true and which are not.
--Allan Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs, "Western Civ"
Rationality is not the gold standard against which all other forms of thought are to be judged. Adaptation is the gold standard against which rationality must be judged, along with all other forms of thought.
"If someone tells you their results before the results are gathered, be suspicious."
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, - Randall Munroe.
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
"People don't pay much attention to anything unless you give them reason to"
--The Night Circus
Illustration of availability bias:
Baldrick: But then I will go to Hell forever for stealing.
Blackadder: Believe me, Baldrick, eternity in the company of Beelzebub, and all his hellish instruments of death, will be a picnic compared to five minutes with me... and this pencil.
"Take a step back. Look at the bigger picture. That's how you devour a whale. One bite at a time."
-Congressman Frank Underwood in the TV series House of Cards
...Suppose that, unlike in the “stone soup” scenario I outlined above, it eventually becomes clear that quantum annealing can be made to work on thousands of qubits, but that it’s a dead end as far as getting a quantum speedup is concerned. Suppose the evidence piles up that simulated annealing on a conventional computer will continue to beat quantum annealing, if even the slightest effort is put into optimizing the classical annealing code. If that happens, then I predict that the very same people now hyping D-Wave will turn around and—without the slighte
...The Spanish flu of 1918 killed 25-50 million people. World War II killed 60 million people; 107 is the order of the largest catastrophes in humanity’s written history. Substantially larger numbers, such as 500 million deaths, and especially qualitatively different scenarios such as the extinction of the entire human species, seem to trigger a different mode of thinking—enter into a ‘separate magisterium’. People who would never dream of hurting a child hear of an existential risk, and say, ‘Well, maybe the human species doesn’t really deserve to survive.’
Can someone explain to me what is going on here? The comment is getting downvoted and Eliezer himself is telling me not to quote him (or so it appears--it's not clear whether he is being serious or not). Before deciding to post the comment, I read the instructions closely and it seemed clear that the quote--which comes from a published book, not from LW, OB, or HPMoR--didn't violate any of the rules. Maybe this is all obvious to those who post regularly on this section, but I am myself rather puzzled by the whole thing.
Can someone explain to me what is going on here?
You have the honour to have provoked the introduction of a new guideline (or a more explicit and precise modified version of an existing one). The norms shall henceforth be clearer to everyone. Bravo!
The spirit of the no-LW, OB, HPMoR rule is that the community shouldn't be quoting itself in quotes threads. That has a dangerous echo chamber-y feel to it.
There's a family resemblance effect going on here. Since Eliezer is the founder of the site, quoting him violates the spirit of the rule more strongly than quoting off-site writings of other Less Wrongers.
...how are we supposed to tell people about this rule?
Edit: Aw, I thought it was funny.
I think that the purpose of the current instruction is to refrain from quoting ourselves and each other. So I'd see it as a trivial extension to understand that Eliezer and other well-known members of the community should not be used for a source for quotes.
"Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?" "Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"
From Richard Feynman one last letter to his first wife, over a year after her death from TB (incidentally, antibiotics had been discovered and were being tested on humans a few months before her death; a year sooner, and she would have had a good chance of recovery):
My darling wife, I do adore you.
I love my wife. My wife is dead.
Rich.P.S. Please excuse my not mailing this -- but I don't know your new address.
Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman.
The whole letter and the rest of the book is well wor...
When it comes to understanding how our universe evolves, religion and theology have been at best irrelevant. They often muddy the waters, for example, by focusing on questions of nothingness without providing any definition of the term based on empirical evidence. While we do not yet fully understand the origin of our universe, there is no reason to expect things to change in this regard. Moreover, I expect that ultimately the same will be true for understanding of areas that religion now considers its own territory, such as human morality.
Science has been...
More from Scott Aaronson:
maybe there’s a yet-undiscovered law of physics implying that every Earth-like planet must eventually contain at least one kangaroo!
Even more from the same source:
...OK, now I’ll try to address free will.
Like consciousness, free will has an aspect that seems outside the scope of scientific investigation almost by definition. Are “you” the author of your choices? Well, what exactly do we mean by “you”? No matter what sequence of physical causes, random events, or even supernatural interventions led up to your making a particular choice, a skeptic could always claim that the choice wasn’t really made by “you,” but only by an impersonating demon that looks and acts like you.
On the other ha
It might be more accurate to say that pretty much everything, including what we call biology and physics -- humans are the ones codifying it -- is memetically selected to be learnable by humans. Not that it all develops towards being easier to learn.