Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:
I understand what an equation means if I have a way of figuring out the characteristics of its solution without actually solving it.
Paul Dirac
...A few years into this book, I was diagnosed as diabetic and received a questionnaire in the mail. The insurance carrier stated that diabetics often suffer from depression and it was worried about me. One of the questions was “Do you think about death?” Yes, I do. “How often?” the company wanted to know. “Yearly? Monthly? Weekly? Daily?” And if daily, how many times per day? I dutifully wrote in, “About 70 times per day.” The next time I saw my internist, she told me the insurer had recommended psychotherapy for my severe depression. I explained to her why I thought about death all day—merely an occupational hazard—and she suggested getting therapy nonetheless. I thought, fine, it might help with the research.
The therapist found me tragically undepressed, and I asked her if she could help me design a new life that would maximize the few years that I had left. After all, one should have a different life strategy at sixty than at twenty. She asked why I thought I was going to die and why I had such a great fear of death. I said, I am going to die. It’s not a fear; it’s a reality. There must be some behavior that could be contraindicated for a man my age but other normally dangerous
On counter-signaling, how not to do:
US police investigated a parked car with a personalized plate reading "SMUGLER". They found the vehicle, packed with 24 lb (11 kg) of narcotics, parked near the Canadian border at a hotel named "The Smugglers' Inn." Police believed the trafficker thought that being so obvious would deter the authorities.
-- The Irish Independent, "News In Brief"
Maybe the guy had been reading too much Edgar Allan Poe? As a child, I loved "The Purloined Letter" and tried to play that trick on my sister - taking something from her and hiding it "in plain sight". Of course, she found it immediately.
ETA: it was a girl, not a guy.
You are probably right that more information drew police attention to the car, but "near the border" gets one most of the way to legally justified. In the 1970s, the US Supreme Court explicitly approved a permanent checkpoint approximately 50 miles north of the Mexican border.
There are big differences between "a study" and "a good study" and "a published study" and "a study that's been independently confirmed" and "a study that's been independently confirmed a dozen times over." These differences are important; when a scientist says something, it's not the same as the Pope saying it. It's only when dozens and hundreds of scientists start saying the same thing that we should start telling people to guzzle red wine out of a fire hose.
...Another learning which cost me much to recognize, can be stated in four words. The facts are friendly.
It has interested me a great deal that most psychotherapists, especially the psychoanalysts, have steadily refused to make any scientific investigation of their therapy, or to permit others to do this. I can understand this reaction because I have felt it. Especially in our early investigations I can well remember the anxiety of waiting to see how the findings came out. Suppose our hypotheses were disproved! Suppose we were mistaken in our views! Suppose our opinions were not justified! At such times, as I look back, it seems to me that I regarded the facts as potential enemies, as possible bearers of disaster. I have perhaps been slow in coming to realize that the facts are always friendly. Every bit of evidence one can acquire, in any area, leads one that much closer to what is true. And being closer to the truth can never be a harmful or dangerous or unsatisfying thing. So while I still hate to readjust my thinking, still hate to give up old ways of perceiving and conceptualizing, yet at some deeper level I have, to a considerable degree, come to realize that these painful reor
Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste. Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark, "Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think," surprise you?
It surprises people like Greg Egan, and they're not entirely stupid, because brains are Turing complete modulo the finite memory - there's no analogue of that for visible wavelengths.
If this weren't Less Wrong, I'd just slink away now and pretend I never saw this, but:
I don't understand this comment, but it sounds important. Where can I go and what can I read that will cause me to understand statements like this in the future?
When speaking about sensory inputs, it makes sense to say that different species (even different individuals) have different ranges, so one can percieve something and other can't.
With computation it is known that sufficiently strong programming languages are in some sense equal. For example, you could speak about relative advantages of Basic, C/C++, Java, Lisp, Pascal, Python, etc., but in each of these languages you can write a simulator of the remaining ones. This means that if an algorithm can be implemented in one of these languages, it can be implemented in all of them -- in worst case, it would be implemented as a simulation of another language running its native implementation.
There are some technical details, though. Simulating another program is slower and requires more memory than the original program. So it could be argued that on a given hardware you could do a program in language X which uses all the memory and all available time, so it does not necessarily follow that you can do the same program in language Y. But on this level of abstraction we ignore hardware limits. We assume that the computer is fast enough and has enough memory for whatever purpose. (More precise...
brains are Turing complete modulo the finite memory
What does that statement mean in the context of thoughts?
That is, when I think about human thoughts I think about information processing algorithms, which typically rely on hardware set up for that explicit purpose. So even though I might be able to repurpose my "verbal manipulation" module to do formal logic, that doesn't mean I have a formal logic module.
Any defects in my ability to repurpose might be specific to me: I might able to think the thought "A-> B, ~A, therefore ~B" with the flavor of trueness, and another person can only think that thought with the flavor of falseness. If the truth flavor is as much a part of the thought as the textual content, then the second thinker cannot think the thought that the first thinker can.
Aren't there people who can hear sounds but not music? Are their brains not Turing complete? Are musical thoughts ones they cannot think?
It means nothing, although Greg Egan is quite impressed by it. Sad but true: Someone with an IQ of, say, 90 can be trained to operate a Turing machine, but will in all probability never understand matrix calculus. The belief that Turing-complete = understanding-complete is false. It just isn't stupid.
Have you ever tried to teach math to anyone who is not good at math? In my youth I once tutored a woman who was poor, but motivated enough to pay $40/session. A major obstacle was teaching her how to calculate (a^b)^c and getting her to reliably notice that minus times minus equals plus. Despite my attempts at creative physical demonstrations of the notion of a balanced scale, I couldn't get her to really understand the notion of doing the same things to both sides of a mathematical equation. I don't think she would ever understand what was going on in matrix calculus, period, barring "teaching methods" that involve neural reprogramming or gain of additional hardware.
Your claim is too large for the evidence you present in support of it.
Teaching someone math who is not good at math is hard, but "will in all probability never understand matrix calculus"!? I don't think you're using the Try Harder.
Assume teaching is hard (list of weak evidence: it's a three year undergraduate degree; humanity has hardly allowed itself to run any proper experiments in the field, and those that have been run seem usually to be generally ignored by professional practitioners; it's massively subject to the typical mind fallacy and most practitioners don't know that fallacy exists). That you, "in your youth" (without having studied teaching), "once" tutored a woman who you couldn't teach very well… doesn't support any very strong conclusion.
It seems very likely to me that Omega could teach matrix calculus to someone with IQ 90 given reasonable time and motivation from the student. One of the things I'm willing to devote significant resources to in the coming years is making education into a proper science. Given the tools of that proper science I humbly submit that you could teach your former student a lot. Track the progress of the Khan Academy for some promising developments in the field.
I fear you're committing the typical mind fallacy. The dyscalculic could simulate a Turing machine, but all of mathematics, including basic arithmetic, is whaargarbl to them. They're often highly intelligent (though of course the diagnosis is "intelligent elsewhere, unintelligent at maths"), good at words and social things, but literally unable to calculate 17+17 more accurately than "somewhere in the twenties or thirties" or "I have no idea" without machine assistance. I didn't believe it either until I saw it.
Obviously the man in the Chinese room lacks understanding, by most common definitions of understanding. It is the room as a system which understands Chinese. (Assuming lookup tables can understand. By functional definitions, they should be able to.)
Westerners are fond of the saying ‘Life isn’t fair.’ Then, they end in snide triumphant: ‘So get used to it!’
What a cruel, sadistic notion to revel in! What a terrible, patriarchal response to a child’s budding sense of ethics. Announce to an Iroquois, ‘Life isn’t fair,’ and her response will be: ‘Then make it fair!’
Barbara Alice Mann
I agree with the necessity of making life more fair, and disagree with the connotational noble Pocahontas lecturing a sadistic western patriarch. (Note: the last three words are taken from the quote.)
Agree that that looks an awful lot like an abuse of the noble savage meme. Barbara Alice Mann appears to be an anthropologist and a Seneca, so that's at least two points where she should really know better -- then again, there's a long and more than somewhat suspect history of anthropologists using their research to make didactic points about Western society. (Margaret Mead, for example.)
Not sure I entirely agree re: fairness. "Life's not fair" seems to me to succinctly express the very important point that natural law and the fundamentals of game theory are invariant relative to egalitarian intuitions. This can't be changed, only worked around, and a response of "so make it fair" seems to dilute that point by implying that any failure of egalitarianism might ideally be traced to some corresponding failure of morality or foresight.
Unfair is the opposite of fair, not the logical complement. The moon is neither happy nor sad.
That is indeed possible if F is incoherent or has no referent. The assertion seems equivalent to "There's no such thing as fairness".
I'm confused because it was Eliezer who taught me this.
(P or ~P) is not always a reliable heuristic, if you substitute arbitrary English sentences for P.
EDIT: I'm now resisting the temptation to tell Eliezer to "read the sequences".
Original parent says, "The world is neither fair nor unfair", meaning, "The world is neither deliberately fair nor deliberately unfair", and my comment was meant to be interpreted as replying, "Of course the world is unfair - if it's not fair, it must be unfair - and it doesn't matter that it's accidental rather than deliberate." Also to counteract the deep wisdom aura that "The world is neither fair nor unfair" gets from counterintuitively violating the (F \/ ~F) axiom schema.
I didn't think I could remove the quote from that attitude about it very effectively without butchering it. I did lop off a subsequent sentence that made it worse.
Don't they usually say it about situations that they could choose to change, to people who don't have the choice?
Do people typically say "life isn't fair" about situations that people could choose to change?
Introspection tells me this statement usually gets trotted out when the cost of achieving fairness is too high to warrant serious consideration.
EDIT: Whoops, I just realised that my imagination only outputted situations involving adults. When imagining situations involving children I get the opposite of my original claim.
The automatic pursuit of fairness might lead to perverse incentives. I have in mind some (non-genetically related) family in Mexico who don't bother saving money for the future because their extended family and neighbours would expect them to pay for food and gifts if they happen to acquire "extra" cash. Perhaps this "Western" patriarchal peculiarity has some merit after all.
Is this really about fairness? Seems like different people agree that fairness is a good thing, but use different definitions of fairness. Or perhaps the word fairness is often used to mean "applause lights of my group".
For someone fairness means "everyone has food to eat", for another fairness means "everyone pays for their own food". Then proponents of one definition accuse the others of not being fair -- the debate is framed as if the problem is not different definitions of fairness, but rather our group caring about fairness and the other group ignoring fairness; which of course means that we are morally right and they are morally wrong.
Gene Hofstadt: You people. You think money is the answer to every problem.
Don Draper: No, just this particular problem.
Mad Men, "My Old Kentucky Home"
Another good one from Don Draper:
I hate to break it to you, but there is no big lie, there is no system, the universe is indifferent.
A faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
Arthur C. Clarke
Which leads us to today's Umeshism: "Why are existing religions so troublesome? Because they're all false, the only ones that exist are so dangerous that they can survive the truth."
The other day I was thinking about Discworld, and then I remembered this and figured it would make a good rationality quote...
[Vimes] distrusted the kind of person who'd take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, "Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fell on hard times," and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man's boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he'd been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!
-- Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
Reminded of a quote I saw on TV Tropes of a MetaFilter comment by ericbop:
Encyclopedia Brown? What a hack! To this day, I occasionally reach into my left pocket for my keys with my right hand, just to prove that little brat wrong.
"What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?" This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table. Richard continued, "What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself."
Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
What really matters is:–
Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn't mean anything else.
Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don't implement promises, but keep them.
Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean "More people died" don't say "Mortality rose."
In writing. Don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, "Please will you do my job for me."
Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
-- C. S. Lewis
‘I’m exactly in the position of the man who said, ‘I can believe the impossible, but not the improbable.’’
‘That’s what you call a paradox, isn’t it?’ asked the other.
‘It’s what I call common sense, properly understood,’ replied Father Brown. ’It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don’t understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it’s only incredible.
-G. K. Chesterton, The Curse of the Golden Cross
"What was the Sherlock Holmes principle? 'Once you have discounted the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'"
"I reject that entirely," said Dirk sharply. "The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something that works in all respects other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable? Your instinct is to say, 'Yes, but he or she simply wouldn't do that.'"
"Well, it happened to me today, in fact," replied Kate.
"Ah, yes," said Dirk, slapping the table and making the glasses jump. "Your girl in the wheelchair -- a perfect example. The idea that she is somehow receiving yesterday's stock market prices apparently out of thin air is merely impossible, and therefore must be the case, because the idea that she is maintaining an immensely complex and laborious hoax of no benefit to herself is hopelessly improbable. The first idea merely supposes that there is something we don't know about, and God knows there are enough of those. The second, however, runs contrary to something fundamental and human which we do know about. We should therefore be very suspicious of it and all its specious rationality."
-- Douglas Adams. The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988) p.169
I can't find the quote easily (it's somewhere in God, No!), but Penn Jillette has said that one aspect of magic tricks is the magician putting in more work to set them up than anyone sane would expect.
I'm moderately sure that he's overestimating how clearly the vast majority of people think about what's needed to make a magic trick work.
His partner Teller says the same thing here:
Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest. My partner, Penn, and I once produced 500 live cockroaches from a top hat on the desk of talk-show host David Letterman. To prepare this took weeks. We hired an entomologist who provided slow-moving, camera-friendly cockroaches (the kind from under your stove don't hang around for close-ups) and taught us to pick the bugs up without screaming like preadolescent girls. Then we built a secret compartment out of foam-core (one of the few materials cockroaches can't cling to) and worked out a devious routine for sneaking the compartment into the hat. More trouble than the trick was worth? To you, probably. But not to magicians.
Edit: That trick is 19 minutes and 50 seconds into this video.
Choosing something that's "too obvious" out of a large search space can work if you're playing against a small number of competitors, but when there are millions of people involved, not only are some of them going to un-ironically choose "1-2-3-4-5-6", but more than one person will choose it for the same reason it appeals to you.
...[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades.
However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarized version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, an
On politics as the mind-killer:
We’re at the point where people are morally certain about the empirical facts of what happened between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman on the basis of their general political worldviews. This isn’t exactly surprising—we are tribal creatures who like master narratives—but it feels as though it’s gotten more pronounced recently, and it’s almost certainly making us all stupider.
-- Julian Sanchez (the whole post is worth reading)
"Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad‘Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson"
Frank Herbert, Dune
It took me years to learn not to feel afraid due to a perceived status threat when I was having a hard time figuring something out.
A good way to make it hard for me to learn something is to tell me that how quickly I understand it is an indicator of my intellectual aptitude.
Interesting article about a study on this effect:
Dweck’s researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score—by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning—by about 20 percent.
Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”
This seems like a more complicated explanation than the data supports. It seems simpler, and equally justified, to say that praising effort leads to more effort, which is a good thing on tasks where more effort yields greater success.
I would be interested to see a variation on this study where the second-round problems were engineered to require breaking of established first-round mental sets in order to solve them. What effect does praising effort after the first round have in this case?
Perhaps it leads to more effort, which may be counterproductive for those sorts of problems, and thereby lead to less success than emphasizing intelligence. Or, perhaps not. I'm not making a confident prediction here, but I'd consider a praising-effort-yields-greater-success result more surprising (and thus more informative) in that scenario than the original one.
I believe I am accurate in saying that educators too are interested in learnings which make a difference. Simple knowledge of facts has its value. To know who won the battle of Poltava, or when the umpteenth opus of Mozart was first performed, may win $64,000 or some other sum for the possessor of this information, but I believe educators in general are a little embarrassed by the assumption that the acquisition of such knowledge constitutes education. Speaking of this reminds me of a forceful statement made by a professor of agronomy in my freshman year in college. Whatever knowledge I gained in his course has departed completely, but I remember how, with World War I as his background, he was comparing factual knowledge with ammunition. He wound up his little discourse with the exhortation, "Don't be a damned ammunition wagon; be a rifle!"
-Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy (1961)
I know a lot of scientists as well as laymen are scornful of philosophy - perhaps understandably so. Reading academic philosophy journals often makes my heart sink too. But without exception, we all share philosophical background assumptions and presuppositions. The penalty of not doing philosophy isn't to transcend it, but simply to give bad philosophical arguments a free pass.
When some Lesswrong-users use 'metaphysics', they mean other people's metaphysics. This is much like how some Christians use the term 'religion'.
Pedantry and mastery are opposite attitudes toward rules. To apply a rule to the letter, rigidly, unquestioningly, in cases where it fits and in cases where it does not fit, is pedantry. ... To apply a rule with natural ease, with judgment, noticing the cases where it fits, and without ever letting the words of the rule obscure the purpose of the action or the opportunities of the situation, is mastery.
Our minds contain processes that enable us to solve problems we consider difficult. "Intelligence" is our name for whichever of those processes we don't yet understand.
Some people dislike this "definition" because its meaning is doomed to keep changing as we learn more about psychology. But in my view that's exactly how it ought to be, because the very concept of intelligence is like a stage magician's trick. Like the concept of "the unexplored regions of Africa," it disappears as soon as we discover it.
-- Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind
But, the hard part comes after you conquer the world. What kind of world are you thinking of creating?
Johan Liebert, Monster
By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and, in effect, increases the mental power of the race.
Alfred North Whitehead, “An Introduction to Mathematics” (thanks to Terence Tao)
On specificity and sneaking on connotations; useful for the liberal-minded among us:
...I think, with racism and sexism and 'isms' generally, there's a sort of confusion of terminology.
A "Racist1" is someone, who, like a majority of people in this society, has subconsciously internalized some negative attitudes about minority racial groups. If a Racist1 takes the Implicit Association Test, her score shows she's biased against black people, like the majority of people (of all races) who took the test. Chances are, whether you know it or not, you're a Racist1.
A "Racist2" is someone who's kind of an insensitive jerk about race. The kind of guy who calls Obama the "Food Stamp President." Someone you wouldn't want your sister dating.
A "Racist3" is a neo-Nazi. You can never be quite sure that one day he won't snap and kill someone. He's clearly a social deviant.
People use the word "Racist" for all three things, and I think that's the source of a lot of arguments. When people get accused of being racists, they evade responsibility by saying, "Hey, I'm not a Racist3!" when in fact you were only saying they were Racist1 or Racist2. B
How about:
Someone who, following an honest best effort to evaluate the available evidence, concludes that some of the beliefs that nowadays fall under the standard definition of "racist" nevertheless may be true with probabilities significantly above zero.
Someone who performs Bayesian inference that somehow involves probabilities conditioned on the race of a person or a group of people, and whose conclusion happens to reflect negatively on this person or group in some way. (Or, alternatively, someone who doesn't believe that making such inferences is grossly immoral as a matter of principle.)
Both (1) and (2) fall squarely under the common usage of the term "racist," and yet I don't see how they would fit into the above cited classification.
Of course, some people would presumably argue that all beliefs in category (1) are in fact conclusively proven to be false with p~1, so it can be only a matter of incorrect conclusions motivated by the above listed categories of racism. Presumably they would also claim that, as a well-established general principle, no correct inferences in category (2) are ever possible. But do you really believe this?
It's not an improbable claim so much as a nigh-unfalsifiable claim.
I mean, imagine the following conversation between two hypothetical people, arbitrarily labelled RZ and EN here:
EN: By finding enough "code words" you can make any criticism of Obama racist.
RZ: What about this criticism?
EN: By declaring "epic", "confirmation mess", and "death blow" to be racist "code words", you can make that criticism racist.
RZ: But "epic", "confirmation mess", and "death blow" aren't racist code words!
EN: Right. Neither is "food stamps".
Of course, one way forward from this point is to taboo "code word" -- for example, to predict that an IAT would find stronger associations between "food stamps" and black people than between "epic" and black people, but would not find stronger associations between "food stamps" and white people than between "epic" and white people.
The most fundamental form of human stupidity is forgetting what we were trying to do in the first place
--Nietzsche
“The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance. ”
-St Augustine of Hippo
The mind commands the body and it obeys.
Augustine has obviously never tried to learn something which requires complicated movement, or at least he didn't try it as an adult.
For those who feel deeply about contemporary politics, certain topics have become so infected by considerations of prestige that a genuinely rational approach to them is almost impossible.
-George Orwell
Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.
G. K. Chesterton
Zach Wiener's elegant disproof:
Think of the strangest thing that's true. Okay. Now add a monkey dressed as Hitler.
(Although to be fair, it's possible that the disproof fails because "think of the strangest thing that's true" is impossible for a human brain.)
It also fails in the case where the strangest thing that's true is an infinite number of monkeys dressed as Hitler. Then adding one doesn't change it.
More to the point, the comparison is more about typical fiction, rather than ad hoc fictional scenarios. There are very few fictional works with monkeys dressed as Hitler.
In real life the major players are immune to mindreading, can communicate securely and instantaneously worldwide, and have tens of thousands of people working under them. You are, ironically, overlooking the strangeness of reality.
Conservation of detail may be a valid argument though.
This quote seems relevant:
They must be true because, if there were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them.
G. H. Hardy, upon receiving a letter containing mathematical formulae from Ramanujan
Don't just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the degenerate case? Where does the proof use the hypothesis?
From this moment forward, remember this: What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it. Efficiency is still important, but it is useless unless applied to the right things.
-Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek
In short, and I can't emphasize this strongly enough, a fundamental issue that any theory of psychology ultimately has to face is that brains are useful. They guide behavior. Any brain that didn't cause its owner to do useful--in the evolutionary sense--things, didn't cause reproduction.
-Robert Kurzban, Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind
...But when we have these irrational beliefs, these culturally coded assumptions, running so deep within our community and movement, how do we actually change that? How do we get people to further question themselves when they’ve already become convinced that they’re a rational person, a skeptic, and have moved on from irrationality, cognitive distortion and bias?
Well I think what we need to do is to change the fundamental structure and values of skepticism. We need to build our community and movement around slightly different premises.
As it has stood in the past, skepticism has been predicated on a belief in the power of the empirical and rational. It has been based on the premise that there is an empirical truth, and that it is knowable, and that certain tools and strategies like science and logic will allow us to reach that truth. In short, the “old guard” skepticism was based on a veneration of the rational. But the veneration of certain techniques or certain philosophies creates the problematic possibility of choosing to consider certain conclusions or beliefs to BE empirical and rational and above criticism, particularly beliefs derived from the “right” tools, and even more dan
Any collocation of persons, no matter how numerous, how scant, how even their homogeneity, how firmly they profess common doctrine, will presently reveal themselves to consist of smaller groups espousing variant versions of the common creed; and these sub-groups will manifest sub-sub-groups, and so to the final limit of the single individual, and even in this single person conflicting tendencies will express themselves.
— Jack Vance, The Languages of Pao
...Suppose you know a golfer's score on day 1 and are asked to predict his score on day 2. You expect the golfer to retain the same level of talent on the second day, so your best guesses will be "above average" for the [better-scoring] player and "below average" for the [worse-scoring] player. Luck, of course, is a different matter. Since you have no way of predicting the golfers' luck on the second (or any) day, your best guess must be that it will be average, neither good nor bad. This means that in the absence of any other information, your best guess about the players' score on day 2 should not be a repeat of their performance on day 1. ...
The best predicted performance on day 2 is more moderate, closer to the average than the evidence on which it is based (the score on day 1). This is why the pattern is called regression to the mean. The more extreme the original score, the more regression we expect, because an extremely good score suggests a very lucky day. The regressive prediction is reasonable, but its accuracy is not guaranteed. A few of the golfers who scored 66 on day 1 will do even better on the second day, if their luck improves. Most will do worse,
-- So... if they've got armor on, it's a battle !
-- And who told you that ?
-- A knight...
-- How'd you know he was a knight ?
-- Well... that's 'cause... he'd got armor on ?
-- You don't have to be a knight to buy armor. Any idiot can buy armor.
-- How do you know ?
-- 'Cause I sold armor.
-Game of Thrones (TV show)
He who knows how to do something is the servant of he who knows why that thing must be done.
-- Isuna Hasekura, Spice and Wolf vol. 5 ("servant" is justified by the medieval setting).
I first encountered this in a physics newsgroup, after some crank was taking some toy model way too seriously:
Analogies are like ropes; they tie things together pretty well, but you won't get very far if you try to push them.
Thaddeus Stout Tom Davidson
(I remembered something like "if you pull them too much, they break down", actually...)
Don't kid yourself, just because you got the correct numerical answer to a problem is not justification that you understand the physics of the problem. You must understand all the logical steps in arriving at that solution or you have gained nothing, right answer or not.
My old physics professor David Newton (yes, apparently that's the name he was born with) on how to study physics.
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
--Some AI Koans, collected by ESR
A weak man is not as happy as that same man would be if he were strong. This reality is offensive to some people who would like the intellectual or spiritual to take precedence. It is instructive to see what happens to these very people as their squat strength goes up.
-- Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength
In the real world things are very different. You just need to look around you. Nobody wants to die that way. People die of disease and accident. Death comes suddenly and there is no notion of good or bad. It leaves, not a dramatic feeling but great emptiness. When you lose someone you loved very much you feel this big empty space and think, 'If I had known this was coming I would have done things differently.'
Yoshinori Kitase
Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.
-- Christina Rossetti, Who has seen the Wind?
A shortcut for making less-biased predictions, taking base averages into account.
Regarding this problem: "Julie is currently a senior in a state university. She read fluently when she was four years old. What is her grade point average (GPA)?"
Recall that the correlation between two measures - in the present case, reading age and GPA - is equal to the proportion of shared factors among their determinants. What is your best guess about that proportion? My most optimistic guess is about 30%. Assuming this estimate, we have all we need to produce an unbiased prediction. Here are the directions for how to get there in four simple steps:
- Start with an estimate of average GPA.
- Determine the GPA that matches your impression of the evidence.
- Estimate the correlation between your evidence and GPA.
- If the correlation is .30, move 30% of the distance from the average to the matching GPA.
The fact that I can knock 12 points off a Hamilton Depression scale with an Ambien and a Krispy Kreme should serve as a warning about the validity and generalizability of the term "antidepressant."
"When I was young I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn."
-- Farenheit 451
I'll be sticking around a while, although I'm not doing too well right now (check the HPMOR discussion thread for those of you interested in viewing the carnage, it's beautiful). It's not really a rationality problem, but I need to learn how to deal with other people who have big egos, because apparently only two or three people received my comments the way I meant them to come across. Plus, I like the idea of losing so much karma in one day and then eventually earning it all back and being recognized as a super rationalist. Gaining the legitimate approval of a group who now have a lot against me will be a decent challenge.
Also I doubt that I would be able to resist commenting even if I wanted to. That's probably mostly it.
Tips for dealing with people with big egos:
I'll add to this that actually paying attention to wedrifid is instructive here.
My own interpretation of wedrifid's behavior is that mostly s/he ignores all of these ad-hoc rules in favor of:
1) paying attention to the status implications of what's going on,
2) correctly recognizing that attempts to lower someone's status are attacks
3) honoring the obligations of implicit social alliances when an ally is attacked
I endorse this and have been trying to get better about #3 myself.
Might be too advanced for someone who just learned that saying "Please stop being stupid." is a bad idea.
The phrase "social alliances" makes me uneasy with the fear that if everyone did #3, LW would degenerate into typical green vs blue debates. Can you explain a bit more why you endorse it?
If Sam and I are engaged in some activity A, and Pat comes along and punishes Sam for A or otherwise interferes with Sam's ability to engage in A...
...if on reflection I endorse A, then I endorse interfering with Pat and aiding Sam, for several reasons: it results in more A, it keeps me from feeling like a coward and a hypocrite, and I establish myself as a reliable ally. I consider that one of the obligations of social alliance.
...if on reflection I reject A, then I endorse discussing the matter with Sam in private. Ideally we come to agreement on the matter, and either it changes to case 1, or I step up alongside Sam and we take the resulting social status hit of acknowledging our error together. This, too, I consider one of the obligations of social alliance.
...if on reflection I reject A and I can't come to agreement with Sam, I endorse acknowledging that I've unilaterally dissolved the aspect of our social alliance that was mediated by A. (Also, I take that status hit all by myself, but that's beside the point here.)
I agree with you that if I instead skip the reflective step and reflexively endorse A, that quickly degenerates into pure tribal warfare. But the failure in this...
I feel vaguely like Will_Newsome, now. I wonder if that's a good thing.
Start to worry if you begin to feel morally obliged to engage in activity 'Z' that neither you, Sam or Pat endorse but which you must support due to acausal social allegiance with Bink mediated by the demon X(A/N)th, who is responsible for UFOs, for the illusion of stars that we see in the sky and also divinely inspired the Bhagavad-Gita.
Been there, done that. (Not specifically. It would be creepy if you'd gotten the specifics right.) I blame the stroke, though.
Battling your way to sanity against corrupted hardware has the potential makings of a fascinating story.
Plus, I like the idea of losing so much karma in one day and then eventually earning it all back
This discussion is off-topic for the "Rationality Quotes" thread, but...
If you're interested in an easy way to gain karma, you might want to try an experimental method I've been kicking around:
Take an article from Wikipedia on a bias that we don't have an article about yet. Wikipedia has a list of cognitive biases. Write a top-level post about that bias, with appropriate use of references. Write it in a similar style to Eliezer's more straightforward posts on a bias, examples first.
My prediction is that such an article, if well-written, should gain about +40 votes; about +80 if it contains useful actionable material.
It needs to be a drawn out and painful and embarrassing process.
Oh, you want a Quest, not a goal. :-)
In that case, try writing an article that says exactly the opposite of something that somebody with very high (>10,000) karma says, even linking to their statement to make the contrast clear. Bonus points if you end up getting into a civil conversation directly with that person in the comments of your article.
Note: I believe that it is not only possible, but even easy, for you to do this and get a net karma gain. All you need is (a) a fairly good argument, and (b) a friendly tone.
One day I will write "How to karmawhore with LessWrong comments" if I can work out how to do it in such a way that it won't get -5000 within an hour.
I know how you could do it. You need to come up with a detailed written strategy for maximizing karma with minimal actual contribution. Have some third party (or several) that LW would trust hold on to it in secrect.
Then, for a week or two, apply that strategy as directly and blatantly as you think you can get away with, racking up as many points as possible.
Once that's done, compile a list of those comments and post it into an article, along with your original strategy document and the verification from the third party that you wrote the strategy before you wrote the comments, rather than ad-hocing a "strategy" onto a run of comments that happened to succeed.
Voila: you have now pulled a karma hack and then afterwards gone white-hat with the exploit data. LW will have no choice but to give you more karma for kindly revealing the vulnerability in their system! Excellent. >:-)
Have some third party (or several) that LW would trust hold on to it in secrect.
Nitpick: cryptography solves this much more neatly.
Of course, people could accuse you of having an efficient way of factorising numbers, but if you do karma is going to be the least of anyone's concerns.
It's not really a rationality problem, but I need to learn how to deal with other people who have big egos.
This is actually a really worthwhile skill to learn, independently of any LW-related foolishness. And it is actually a rationality problem.
That's right, Emotion. Go ahead, put Reason out of the way! That's great! Fine! ...for Hitler.
So the interesting and substantive question is not whether one thinks the fit will survive and thrive better than the unfit. They will. The interesting question is what the rules are that determine what is "fit."
-- David Henderson on Social Darwinism
Clearly, Bem’s psychic could bankrupt all casinos on the planet before anybody realized what was going on. This analysis leaves us with two possibilities. The first possibility is that, for whatever reason, the psi effects are not operative in casinos, but they are operative in psychological experiments on erotic pictures. The second possibility is that the psi effects are either nonexistent, or else so small that they cannot overcome the house advantage. Note that in the latter case, all of Bem’s experiments overestimate the effect.
Returning to Laplace’s Principle, we feel that the above reasons motivate us to assign our prior belief in precognition a number very close to zero.
Why Psychologists Must Change the Way They Analyze Their Data: The Case of Psi
Eric–Jan Wagenmakers, Ruud Wetzels, Denny Borsboom, & Han van der Maas
当局者迷，旁观者清
Chinese proverb, meaning "the onlooker sees things more clearly", or literally, "the player lost, the spectator clear"
三人成虎
Chinese proverb, "three men make a tiger", referring to a semi-mythological event during the Warring States period:
According to the Warring States Records, or Zhan Guo Ce, before he left on a trip to the state of Zhao, Pang Cong asked the King of Wei whether he would hypothetically believe in one civilian's report that a tiger was roaming the markets in the capital city, to which the King replied no. Pang Cong asked what the King thought if two people reported the same thing, and the King said he would begin to wonder. Pang Cong then asked, "what if three people all claimed to have seen a tiger?" The King replied that he would believe in it. Pang Cong reminded the King that the notion of a live tiger in a crowded market was absurd, yet when repeated by numerous people, it seemed real. As a high-ranking official, Pang Cong had more than three opponents and critics; naturally, he urged the King to pay no attention to those who would spread rumors about him while he was away. "I understand," the King replied, and Pang Cong left for Zhao. Yet, slanderous talk took place. When Pang Cong returned to Wei, the King indeed stopped seeing him.
-- Wikipedia
Any “technology” which claims miraculous benefits on a timescale longer than it takes to achieve tenure and retire is vaporware, and should not be taken seriously.
Uxbal: I don't want to die, Bea. I'm afraid to leave the children on their own... I can't.
Bea: You think you take care of the children Uxbal. Don't be naive. The universe takes care of them.
Uxbal: Yes... but the universe doesn't pay the rent.
-Biutiful
All fiction needs to be taken both seriusly and not seriously.
Seriously because even the silliest of art can change minds.
Not seriously because no matter the delusions of the author, or the tone of the work, it's still fiction; entertainment, simulated on an human brain.
Rasmus Eide aka. Armok_GoB.
PS. This is not taken from an LW/OB post.
To prize every thing according to its real use ought to be the aim of a rational being. There are few things which can much conduce to happiness, and, therefore, few things to be ardently desired. He that looks upon the business and bustle of the world, with the philosophy with which Socrates surveyed the fair at Athens, will turn away at last with his exclamation, 'How many things are here which I do not want'.
--Samuel Johnson, The Adventurer, #119, December 25, 1753.
"If you had a choice between the ability to detect falsehood and the ability to discover truth, which would you take? There was a time when I thought they were different ways of saying the same thing, but I no longer believe that. Most of my relatives, for example, are almost as good at seeing through subterfuge as they are at perpetrating it. I'm not at all sure, though, that they care much about truth. On the other hand, I'd always felt there was something noble, special, and honorable about seeking truth..."
The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith; and when the ordinary man calls himself a sceptic or an unbeliever, that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination to think anything out to a conclusion.
T. S. Eliot
"The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion draws all things else to support and agree with it.
And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects or despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusion may remain inviolate."
--Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620)
...Dear, my soul is grey
With poring over the long sum of ill;
So much for vice, so much for discontent...
Coherent in statistical despairs
With such a total of distracted life,
To see it down in figures on a page,
Plain, silent, clear, as God sees through the earth
The sense of all the graves, - that's terrible
For one who is not God, and cannot right
The wrong he looks on. May I choose indeed
But vow away my years, my means, my aims,
Among the helpers, if there's any help
In such a social strait? The common blood
That swings along my veins, is strong enough
To draw me t
The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician. At the heart of things science finds only a mad, never-ending quadrille of Mock Turtle Waves and Gryphon Particles. For a moment the waves and particles dance in grotesque, inconceivably complex patterns capable of reflecting on their own absurdity.
I was once a skeptic but was converted by the two missionaries on either side of my nose.
Robert Brault
Am I the only one who didn't realize before reading other comments that he was not claiming to have been converted by his nostrils?
The point of rationality isn't to better argue against beliefs you consider wrong but to change your existing beliefs to be more correct.
Using an elementary accounting text and with the help of an accountant friend, I began. For me, a composer, accounting had always been the symbol of ultimate boredom. But a surprise awaited me: Accounting is just a simple, practical tool for measuring resources, so as to better allocate and use them. In fact, I quickly realized that basic accounting concepts had a utility far beyond finance. Resources are almost always limited; one must constantly weigh costs and benefits to make enlightened decisions.
--Alan Belkin From the Stock Market to Music, via t...
If it can fool ten thousand users all at once (which ought to be dead simple, just add more servers), does that make it ten thousand times more human than Alan Turing?
There are two worlds: the world that is, and the world that should be. We live in one, and must create the other, if it is ever to be. -paraphrased from Jim Butcher's Turn Coat
Human beings have been designed by evolution to be good pattern matchers, and to trust the patterns they find; as a corollary their intuition about probability is abysmal. Lotteries and Las Vegas wouldn't function if it weren't so.
-Mark Rosenfelder (http://zompist.com/chance.htm)
One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.
--Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West
"An organized mind is a disciplined mind. And a disciplined mind is a powerful mind."
-- Batman (Batman the Brave and the Bold)
...AG: You know very well the channels of possi8ility at that exact juncture resulted from her decision paths as well as yours.
AG: 8ut even so, when it comes to your key decisions, the possi8ilities are pro8a8ly fewer and more discrete than you have presumed.
AG: Otherwise you would not see results consolidated into those vortices, would you? Possi8ility would resem8le an enormous hazy field of infinitely su8tle variations and micro-choices.
AG: Imagine if at that moment you truly were capa8le of anything, no matter how outlandish, a8surd, or patently fruitles
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
-C. Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1852.
Billings: [...] What do you think, Peters? What are the chances that this "jewpacabra" is real?
Peters: "I'm estimating somewhere around point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one percent.
Billings: (Sighs) We can't afford to take that chance. [...]
-- Trey Parker, Jewpacabra
(This is at about five minutes fifty seconds into the episode.)
Edit: Related Sequence post.
To a large degree, our values "just happen"—like our brains. When our values conflict—the value of preventing suffering versus the value of preserving the human species—we are tempted to choose the latter because it feels axiomatic to us. But that is a reason to treat it with extra suspicion, not to treat it as axiomatic.
Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.
Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.
T. S. Eliot, The Rock
Leonid: Without a purpose, a man is nothing.
Newton: Yes. But we wonder...do you share our gift? Do you have the necessary vision? Do you know the final fate of man?
Leonid: How could anyone know things like that?
Council: The Greater Science. The Quiet Math. The Silent Truth. The Hidden Arts. The Secret Alchemy.
Newton: Every question has an answer. Every equation has a solution.
> "The penalty of not doing philosophy isn't to transcend it, but simply to give bad philosophical arguments a free pass."
David Pearce
David Pearce ">www.reddit.com/r/Transhuman/comments/r7dui/david_pearce_ama/c43jfmk)
"Dear, my soul is grey With poring over the long sum of ill; So much for vice, so much for discontent... Coherent in statistical despairs With such a total of distracted life, To see it down in figures on a page, Plain, silent, clear, as God sees through the earth The sense of all the graves, - that's terrible For one who is not God, and cannot right The wrong he looks on. May I choose indeed But vow away my years, my means, my aims, Among the helpers, if there's any help In such a social strait? The common blood That swings along my veins, is strong enough To draw me to this duty."
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, 1856
The chess board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just and patient. We also know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.
-Thomas Huxley
But, the hard part comes after you conquer the world. What kind of world are you thinking of creating?
Johan Liebert, Monster
I adore Western medicine. I trust my doctor with my life. I’m just not sure I trust her with my death. Keep in mind that when it comes to your body and those of your family and who’s dead and who’s alive, who’s conscious and who’s not, your own judgment may be better than anyone else’s.
Dick Teresi, The Undead
They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force -- nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.
--Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
In the small circle of pain within the skull
You still shall tramp and tread one endless round
Of thought, to justify your action to yourselves,
Weaving a fiction which unravels as you weave,
Pacing forever in the hell of make-believe
Which never is belief: this is your fate on earth
And we must think no further of you.
T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
..."The material world," continued Dupin, "abounds with very strict analogies to the immaterial; and thus some color of truth has been given to the rhetorical dogma, that metaphor, or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument, as well as to embellish a description. The principle of the vis inertiae, for example, seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is commensurate with this difficulty,
Tom: "Diana, have you ever confronted a moral dilemma?"
Diana: "I have spent my life confronting real dilemmas. I have always found moral dilemmas to be the indulgence of the well-fed middle class."
— Waiting for God (TV Series)
In Pinker's book "How the Mind Works" he asks the same question. His observation (as I recall) was that much of our apparently abstract logical abilities are done by mapping abstractions like math onto evolved subsystems with different survival purposes in our ancestors: pattern recognition, 3D spatial visualization, etc. He suggests that some problems seem intractable because they don't map cleanly to any of those subsystems.