...Kissinger was not rushing to end our conversation that morning, and I had one more message to give him. “Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.
“I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.
“First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all―so much! incredible!―suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must
Sansa: "It can’t be worse."
Theon: "It can. It can always be worse."
Part of the reason I supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was because I thought he was so bad that the alternative had to be better. I didn't take enough time to consider worse alternatives to him.
I don't want to involve myself in an endless topic of debate by discussing the treatment of slaves, towards whom we Romans are exceptionally arrogant, harsh, and insulting. But the essence of the advice I'd like to give is this: treat your inferiors in the way in which you would like to be treated by your own superiors. And whenever it strikes you how much power you have over your slave, let it also strike you that your own master has just as much power over you. "I haven't got a master," you say. You're young yet; there's always the chance that you'll have one.
--Seneca, Letter XLVII
When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
Don’t waste time trying to make him think that [your philosophy] is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous — that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about. The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy’s own ground. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?
-- Archfiend Screwtape, The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis
There is the world that should be, and the world that is. We live in one.
And must create the other, if it is ever to be.
-- Jim Butcher, Turn Coat
If your moral reasoning doesn’t produce conclusions that seem absurd on the face of it… why are you bothering? I want to be the sort of person who would have come up with the absurd conclusion that slavery is wrong, or the absurd conclusion that women should have rights, or the absurd conclusion that sodomy shouldn’t be illegal.
-- Ozy Frantz (source)
1) This strikes me as careful cherrypicking of "absurd" results to pick only the non-absurd "absurd" ones. You're supposed to say "well, giving women rights isn't so absurd after all, people who thought it is absurd were mistaken", but not all absurd conclusions from the past turned out to be okay in hindsight. Some were pretty horrible.
2) People who say "it is okay if my moral reasoning produces absurd results" generally don't personally think "that sounds absurd, but I'll accept it anyway". Typically, the result is something they are strongly motivated to believe, but which is thought absurd by others. They welcome the moral reasoning because it provides a way to reject their critics.
(In the LW-sphere, there are people who actually do accept results that seem personally absurd, but the LW-sphere is a minority. Most people don't act that way. Go tell a vegetarian that he should support exterminating all wildlife to end wild animal suffering, and see what response you get.)
3) Rejecting reasoning that produces absurd results even if we can't find a flaw in the reasoning is an important way we avoid errors.
There is another proverb, "As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it"; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again.
-- G. K. Chesterton
Lack of curiosity made people lose money to Madoff. This you already know - people did not due their due diligence.
Here's what Bienes, a partner of Madoff's who passed clients to him, said to the PBS interviewer for The Madoff Affair (before the 10 minute mark) when asked how he thought Madoff could promise 20%:
Bienes: ‘How do I know? How do you split an atom, I know that you can split them, I don’t know how you do it. How does an airplane fly? I don’t ask.’ ‘Did you ask him?’ ’Never! Why would I ask him? I wouldn’t understand it if he explained it!’
And...
...There’s no sense in writing down to the level of the readers you think are out there. Half the time they aren’t really there, and the rest of the time, they’re not interested in a watered-down version of the real product. Even if you succeed, all that you achieve is that now a bunch of morons don’t understand the subject and think that you agree with them.
It’s much better to write the piece that you want to read yourself, which usually means pitching the technical content at a level slightly higher than you were comfortable with when you started thinking
Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway.
― J.R.R. Tolkien explains how we get problems with the availability heuristic in The Hobbit
God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. — And we — we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.
Sec. 107. in Friedrich Nietzsche's The Gay Science
Only in mathematics is it possible to demonstrate something beyond all doubt. When held to that standard, we find ourselves quickly overwhelmed.
Max Shron, Thinking with Data, p. 32
Most people are neurologically programmed so they cannot truly internalize the scope and import of deeply significant, long run, very good news. That means we spend too much time on small tasks and the short run. Clearing away a paper clip makes us, in relative terms, too happy in the short run, relative to the successful conclusion of World War II.
-- Tyler Cowen
...And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith —-
—- Or you use information theory to flatten it for you, to squash the tesseract into two dimensions and the Klein bottle into three, to simplify reality and pray to whatever Gods survived the millennium that your honorable twisting of the truth hasn't ruptured any of its load-bearing pylons. ...
I've never convinced myself that we made the right choice. I can cite the usual justifi
I don't know if this was featured here, but I hope it generates some discussion. Edsger Dijkstra, https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD611.html
"Traditionally there are two ways in which science can be justified, the Platonic and the pragmatic one. In the Platonic way —"l'art pour l'art"— science justifies itself by its beauty and internal consistency, in the pragmatic way science is justified by the usefulness of its products. My overall impression is that along this scale —which is not entirely independent of the B...
Vagueness in legal threats is the hallmark of meritless thuggery.
-- Ken White from Popehat
Ken wants you to be specific because a vague claim is usually a meritless claim. Not citing a good example implies that there are no good examples.
A demonstration of dark arts. Ellipses are mine, to remove unnecessary amplification.
...The laundry list, for us, had been a crossword puzzle with the squares empty and no definitions. The squares had to be filled in such a way that everything would fit. But perhaps that metaphor isn’t precise. In a crossword puzzle the words, intersecting, have to have letters in common. In our game we crossed not words but concepts, events, so the rules were different. Basically there were three rules.
Rule One: Concepts are connected by analogy. ...
Rule Two says that if t
“There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they had not heard there was such a thing.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld
the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.
Jeremy Bentham (standing on the shoulders of Joseph Priestley and Cesare Beccaria)
Gargantua's admonishment of Pantagruel to employ his youth to profit both in studies and in virtue:
...I intend, and will have it so, that thou learn the languages perfectly; first of all the Greek, as Quintilian will have it; secondly, the Latin; and then the Hebrew, for the Holy Scripture sake; and then the Chaldee and Arabic likewise, and that thou frame thy style in Greek in imitation of Plato, and for the Latin after Cicero. Let there be no history which thou shalt not have ready in thy memory; unto the prosecuting of which design, books of cosmography
Dr. Bunnigus: Are there 'bots (nano-machines creating new neural pathways) in my brain?
Petey: Nope. I don't need them. Your brain is working correctly. All I need to do is explain things to you, and you'll be able to make the right choice.
-Exchange between Dr. Bunnigus and the Benevolent Overlord AI (Petey) that turned the galactic core into a power generator. Schlock Mercenary 2015-07-25 by Howard Taylor
“When all hope was gone, they heeded the counsels of despair. Had they continued to strive, defying their doom, some unforseen wonder might have occurred."
-Stephen R. Donaldson
I’m posting several quotes enbloc since they are all from the same video: All from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryFB6mvy4uE
The key lesson for politicians: beware of vision. The future will probably mess up your vision. Instead of taking giant irreversible leaps, be backward-looking and evidence-based: what boring complex policy worked somewhere before?
The key lesson for politicians: beware of vision. The future will probably mess up your vision. Instead of taking giant irreversible leaps, be backward-looking and evidence-based: what boring complex policy worked somewhere before?
This quote describes a common failure mode. At the same time, if no one experimented with new visionary ideas, there wouldn't be examples for others to draw lessons from.
I wonder why. I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder.
I wonder why I wonder why
I wonder why I wonder!
-- Feynman Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman
The book is readable in general.
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are: