Another monthly installment of the rationality quotes thread. The usual rules apply:
In a class I taught at Berkeley, I did an experiment where I wrote a simple little program that would let people type either "f" or "d" and would predict which key they were going to push next. It's actually very easy to write a program that will make the right prediction about 70% of the time. Most people don't really know how to type randomly. They'll have too many alternations and so on. There will be all sorts of patterns, so you just have to build some sort of probabilistic model. Even a very crude one will do well. I couldn't even beat my own program, knowing exactly how it worked. I challenged people to try this and the program was getting between 70% and 80% prediction rates. Then, we found one student that the program predicted exactly 50% of the time. We asked him what his secret was and he responded that he "just used his free will."
Holy Belldandy, it sounds like someone located the player character. Everyone get your quests ready!
Woah, I'd better implement Phase One of my evil plan if it's going to be ready in time for the hero to encounter it.
I would have easily won that game (and maybe made a quip about free will when asked how...). All you need is some memorized secret randomness. For example, a randomly generated password that you've memorized, but you'd have to figure out how to convert it to bits on the fly.
Personally I'd recommend going to random.org, generating a few hexadecimal bytes (which are pretty easy to convert to both bits and numbers in any desired range), memorizing them, and keeping them secret. Then you'll always be able to act unpredictably.
Well, unpredictably to a computer program. If you want to be able to be unpredictable to someone who's good at reading your next move from your face, you would need some way to not know your next move before making it. One way would be to run something like an algorithm that generates the binary expansion of pi in your head, and delaying calculating the next bit until the best moment. Of course, you wouldn't actually choose pi, but something less well-known and preferably easier to calculate. I don't know any such algorithms, and I guess if anyone knows a good one, they're not likely to share. But if it was something like a pseudorandom bitstream generator that takes a seed, it could be shared, as long as you didn't share your seed. If anyone's thought about this in more depth and is willing to share, I'm interested.
When I need this I just look at the nearest object. If the first letter is between a and m, that's a 0. If it's between n and z, that's a 1. For larger strings of random bits, take a piece of memorized text (like a song you like) and do this with the first letter of each word.
There once was a hare who mocked a passing tortoise for being slow. The erudite tortoise responded by challenging the hare to a race.
Built for speed, and with his pride on the line, the hare easily won - I mean, it wasn't even close - and resumed his mocking anew.
Winston Rowntree, Non-Bullshit Fables
I've always thought there should be a version where the hare gets eaten by a fox halfway through the race, while the tortoise plods along safely inside its armored mobile home.
"The peril of arguing with you is forgetting to argue with myself. Don’t make me convince you: I don’t want to believe that much."
The others are quite nice too: http://www.theliteraryreview.org/WordPress/tlr-poetry/
That link is now broken. It turns out it was a highly incomplete excerpt from "Vectors 3.0" so I've put By the Numbers on Libgen and put up a complete version taken from the book. (I like some of the aphorisms, so I've ordered the other 2 books to scan as well.)
Jack Sparrow: [after Will draws his sword] Put it away, son. It's not worth you getting beat again.
Will Turner: You didn't beat me. You ignored the rules of engagement. In a fair fight, I'd kill you.
Jack Sparrow: Then that's not much incentive for me to fight fair, then, is it? [Jack turns the ship, hitting Will with the boom]
Jack Sparrow: Now as long as you're just hanging there, pay attention. The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and what a man can't do. For instance, you can accept that your father was a pirate and a good man or you can't. But pirate is in your blood, boy, so you'll have to square with that some day. And me, for example, I can let you drown, but I can't bring this ship into Tortuga all by me onesies, savvy? So, can you sail under the command of a pirate, or can you not?
The pirate-specific stuff is a bit extraneous, but I've always thought this scene neatly captured the virtue of cold, calculating practicality. Not that "fairness" is never important to worry about, but when you're faced with a problem, do you care more about solving it, or arguing that your situation isn't fair? What can you do, and what can't you do? Reminds me of What do I want? What do I have? How can I best use the latter to get the former?
That said, if I recognize that I'm in a group that values "fairness" as an abstract virtue, then arguing that my situation isn't fair is often a useful way of solving my problem by recruiting alliances.
I am in many groups where, when choosing between two strategies A and B, fairness is one of the things we take into account. I'm not sure that's a problem.
The pirate-specific stuff is a bit extraneous
Jack Sparrow: The only rules that really matter are these: what a [person] can do and what a [person] can't do. For instance, you can accept that [different customs from yours are traditional and commonly accepted in the world] or you can't. But [this thing you dislike] is [an inevitable feature of your human existence], boy, so you'll have to square with that some day ... So, can you [ally with somebody you find distasteful], or can you not?
Well, it certainly didn't stop Jack Sparrow from being a beloved character.
You can be ruthless and popular, if you're sufficiently charismatic about it.
It also helps to be fictional, or at least sufficiently removed from the target audience that they perceive you in far mode.
More specifically, one thing I learned from Terry that I was not taught in school is the importance of bad proofs. I would say "I think this is true", work on it, see that there was no nice proof, and give up. Terry would say "Here's a criterion that eliminates most of the problem. Then in what's left, here's a worse one that handles most of the detritus. One or two more epicycles. At that point it comes down to fourteen cases, and I checked them." Yuck. But we would know it was true, and we would move on. (Usually these would get cleaned up a fair bit before publication.)
A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped. True, you occasionally face a question such as 17 × 24 = ? to which no answer comes immediately to mind, but these dumbfounded moments are rare. The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way. You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing it. Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend.
Daniel Kahneman,Thinking, Fast and Slow
I've read your link to John Leslie with both curiosity and bafflement.
17 x 24 is not perhaps the best example of a question for which no answer comes immediately to mind. Seventeen has the curious property that 17 x 6 = 102. (The recurring decimal 1/6 = 0.166666... hints to us that 17 x 6 = 102 is just the first of a series of near misses on a round number, 167 x 6 = 1002, 1667 x 6 = 10002, etc). So multiplying 17 by any small multiple of 6 is no harder than the two times table. In particular 17 x 24 = 17 x (6 x 4) = (17 x 6) x 4 = 102 x 4 = 408.
17 x 23 might have served better, were it not for the curious symmetry around the number 20, with 17 = 20 - 3 while 23 = 20 + 3. One is reminded of the identity (x + y)(x - y) = x^2 - y^2 which is often useful in arithmetic and tells us at once that 17 x 23 = 20 x 20 - 3 x 3 = 400 - 9 = 391.
17 x 25 has a different defect as an example, because one can hardly avoid apprehending 25 as one quarter of 100, which stimulates the observation that 17 = 16 + 1 and 16 is full of yummy fourness. 17 x 25 = (16 + 1) x 25 = (4 x 4 + 1) x 25 = 4 x 4 x 25 + 1 x 25 = 4 x 100 + 25 = 425.
17 x 26 is a better example. Nature has its little jokes. 7 x 3 = 21 the...
I'm not sure exactly what he had in mind, but learning the multiplication tables using Anki isn't exactly rote.
Now, this may not be the case for others, but when I see a new problem like 17 x 24, I don't just keep reading off the answer until I remember it when the note comes back around. Instead, I try to answer it using mental arithmetic, no matter how long it takes. I do this by breaking the problem into easier problems (perhaps by multiplying 17 x 20 and then adding that to 17 x 4). Sooner or later my brain will simply present the answers to the intermediate steps for me to add together and only much later do those steps fade away completely and the final answer is immediately retrievable.
Doing things this way, simply as a matter of course, you develop somewhat of a feel for how certain numbers multiply and develop a kind of "friendship with the integers." Er, at least, that's what it feels like from the inside.
Don’t settle. Don’t finish crappy books. If you don’t like the menu, leave the restaurant. If you’re not on the right path, get off it.
--Chris Brogan on the Sunk Cost Fallacy
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance we can solve them.
-- Isaac Asimov
Within the philosophy of science, the view that new discoveries constitute a break with tradition was challenged by Polanyi, who argued that discoveries may be made by the sheer power of believing more strongly than anyone else in current theories, rather than going beyond the paradigm. For example, the theory of Brownian motion which Einstein produced in 1905, may be seen as a literal articulation of the kinetic theory of gases at the time. As Polanyi said:
Discoveries made by the surprising configuration of existing theories might in fact be likened to the feat of a Columbus whose genius lay in taking literally and as a guide to action that the earth was round, which his contemporaries held vaguely and as a mere matter for speculation.
― David Lamb & Susan M. Easton, Multiple Discovery: The pattern of scientific progress, pp. 100-101
Columbus's "genius" was using the largest estimate for the size of Eurasia and the smallest estimate for the size of the world to make the numbers say what he wanted them to. As normally happens with that sort of thing, he was dead wrong. But he got lucky and it turned out there was another continent there.
Yes, actually. He believed the true dimensions of the Earth would conform to his interpretation of a particular Bible verse (thwo-thirds of the earth should be land, and one-third water, so the Ocean had to be smaller than believed) and fudged the numbers to fit.
Perhaps Columbus's "genius" was simply to take action. I've noticed this in executives and higher-ranking military officers I've met-- they get a quick view of the possibilities, then they make a decision and execute it. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but the success rate is a lot better than for people who never take action at all.
BOSWELL. 'Sir Alexander Dick tells me, that he remembers having a thousand people in a year to dine at his house: that is, reckoning each person as one, each time that he dined there.' JOHNSON. 'That, Sir, is about three a day.' BOSWELL. 'How your statement lessens the idea.' JOHNSON. 'That, Sir, is the good of counting. It brings every thing to a certainty, which before floated in the mind indefinitely.'
From Boswell's Life of Johnson. HT to a commenter on the West Hunter blog.
If each person counts as one for each time he dines, Alexander can only claim to have personally hosted the guests at his most recent meal; the others were guests of someone else.
One test adults use is whether you still have the kid flake reflex. When you're a little kid and you're asked to do something hard, you can cry and say "I can't do it" and the adults will probably let you off. As a kid there's a magic button you can press by saying "I'm just a kid" that will get you out of most difficult situations. Whereas adults, by definition, are not allowed to flake. They still do, of course, but when they do they're ruthlessly pruned.
-Paul Graham
The way to deal with uncertainty is to analyze it into components. Most people who are reluctant to do something have about eight different reasons mixed together in their heads, and don't know themselves which are biggest. Some will be justified and some bogus, but unless you know the relative proportion of each, you don't know whether your overall uncertainty is mostly justified or mostly bogus.
--Paul Graham, same essay
If the climate skeptics want to win me over, then the way for them to do so is straightforward: they should ignore me, and try instead to win over the academic climatology community, majorities of chemists and physicists, Nobel laureates, the IPCC, National Academies of Science, etc. with superior research and arguments.
-- Scott Aaronson on areas of expertise
If the atheists what to win me over, then the way for them to do so is straightforward: they should ignore me, and try instead to win over the theology community, bishops, the Pope, pastors, denominational and non-denominational bodies, etc., with superior research and arguments.
To this, the skeptics might respond: but of course we can’t win over the mainstream scientific community, since they’re all in the grip of an evil left-wing conspiracy or delusion! Now, that response is precisely where “the buck stops” for me, and further discussion becomes useless. If I’m asked which of the following two groups is more likely to be in the grip of a delusion — (a) Senate Republicans, Freeman Dyson, and a certain excitable string-theory blogger, or (b) virtually every single expert in the relevant fields, and virtually every other chemist and physicist who I’ve ever respected or heard of — well then, it comes down to a judgment call, but I’m 100% comfortable with my judgment.
-- Scott Aaronson in the next paragraph
Not that I don't think this is a fair counterpoint to make, but in my own experience trying to find the best arguments for religion, I learned a lot more and got better reasoning talking to random laypeople than by asking priests and theologians.
Of course, the fact that I talked to a lot more laypeople than priests and theologians is most likely the determining factor here, but my experiences discussing the nature and details of climate change have not followed a similar pattern at all.
I think "etc." is a request to the reader to be a good classifier--simply truncating the list at "etc." is overfitting, and defeats the purpose of the "etc." Contrariwise, construing "etc." to mean "everything else, everywhere" is trying to make do with fewer parameters than you actually need. The proper use of "etc." is to use the training examples to construct a good classifier, and flesh out members of the category by lazy evaluation as needed.
Something a Chess Master told me as a child has stuck with me:
How did you get so good?
I've lost more games than you've ever played.
-- Robert Tanner
Dude, suckin' at something is the first step to being sorta good at something.
-- Jake the Dog (Adventure Time)
Will is (non-seriously) pointing out that the synchronicity between army1987's Facebook status and Qiaochu's comment is too great to be explained by coincidence alone, and is thus strong evidence for the existence of God.
How did you get so good?
I've lost more games than you've ever played.
Which is of course a different question to "What should I do to get good at Chess?" which is all about deliberate practice with a small proportion of time devoted to playing actual games.
By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.
Amazon isn’t a store, not really. Not in any sense that we can regularly think about stores. It’s a strange pulsing network of potential goods, global supply chains, and alien associative algorithms with the skin of a store stretched over it, so we don’t lose our minds.
The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills.
-- Albert Einstein
When I was a Christian, and when I began this intense period of study which eventually led to my atheism, my goal, my one and only goal, was to find the best evidence and argument I could find that would lead people to the truth of Jesus Christ. That was a huge mistake. As a skeptic now, my goal is very similar - it just stops short. My goal is to find the best evidence and argument, period. Not the best evidence and argument that leads to a preconceived conclusion. The best evidence and argument, period, and go wherever the evidence leads.
One of the things that focusing is about is giving up pursuing good things.
Which means that if I want to focus, I need to decide which good things I'm going to say "no" to.
This may seem obvious, but after seeing many not-otherwise-stupid management structures create lists of "priorities" that encompass everything good (and consequently aren't priorities at all), I'm inclined to say that it isn't as obvious as it may seem.
Joe Pyne was a confrontational talk show host and amputee, which I say for reasons that will become clear. For reasons that will never become clear, he actually thought it was a good idea to get into a zing-fight with Frank Zappa, his guest of the day. As soon as Zappa had been seated, the following exchange took place:
Pyne: I guess your long hair makes you a girl.
Zappa: I guess your wooden leg makes you a table.
Of course this would imply that Pyne is not a featherless biped.
Source: Robert Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
"In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim. ... [the one] who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other; [the one] who defines thus dominates and lives; and [the one] who is defined is subjugated and may be killed."
"In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined."
-- Thomas Szasz
WAYS TO KILL 2 BIRDS W/ 1 STONE
How rare it is to encounter advice about the future which begins from a premise of incomplete knowledge!
─James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State
"Alas", said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into."
"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.
-Kafka, A Little Fable
"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.
Moral: Just because the superior agent knows what is best for you and could give you flawless advice, doesn't mean it will not prefer to consume you for your component atoms!
My problem with this is, that like a number of Kafka's parables, the more I think about it, the less I understand it.
There is a mouse, and a mouse-trap, and a cat. The mouse is running towards the trap, he says, and the cat says that to avoid it, all he must do is change his direction and eats the mouse. What? Where did this cat come from? Is this cat chasing the mouse down the hallway? Well, if he is, then that's pretty darn awful advice, because if the cat is right behind the mouse, then turning to avoid the trap just means he's eaten by the cat, so either way he is doomed.
Actually, given Kafka's novels, so often characterized by double-binds and false dilemmas, maybe that's the point: that all choices lead to one's doom, and the cat's true observation hides the more important observation that the entire system is rigged.
('"Alas", said the voter, "at first in the primaries the options seemed so wide and so much change possible that I was glad there was an establishment candidate to turn to to moderate the others, but as time passed the Overton Window closed in and now there is the final voting booth into which I must walk and vote for the lesser of two evils."...
If you will learn to work with the system, you can go as far as the system will support you ... By realizing you have to use the system and studying how to get the system to do your work, you learn how to adapt the system to your desires. Or you can fight it steadily, as a small undeclared war, for the whole of your life ... Very few of you have the ability to both reform the system and become a first-class scientist.
—Richard Hamming
(I recommend the whole talk, which contains some great examples and many other excellent points.)
I think the thing that strikes me most about this talk is how different science was then versus now. For one small example he was asked to comment on the relative effectiveness of giving talks, writing papers and writing books. In today's world its not a question anyone would ask, and the answer would be "write at least a few papers a year or you won't keep your job."
There is nothing so disturbing to one's well-being and judgment as to see a friend get rich
Charles P Kindleberger, in Manias, Panics and Crashes; a History of Financial Crisis
One can be extremely confident when giving goal-based advice because it's always right. When you switch to giving instrument-based advice--when you switch from cheerleading to playing the game--you have to warn your audience that Your Mileage May Vary, that there's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip.
-- Garret Jones
We live during the hinge of history. Given the scientific and technological discoveries of the last two centuries, the world has never changed as fast. We shall soon have even greater powers to transform, not only our surroundings, but ourselves and our successors. If we act wisely in the next few centuries, humanity will survive its most dangerous and decisive period. Our descendants could, if necessary, go elsewhere, spreading through the galaxy.
...What now matters most is that we avoid ending human history.
Parfit, On What Matters, Vol. 2 (pp. 616-620).
The iron rule of nature is: you get what you reward for. If you want ants to come, you put sugar on the floor.
--Charlie Munger
“You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar.” “You can catch even more with manure; what's your point?”
--Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory
“You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar.” “You can catch even more with manure; what's your point?”
That's actually an insightful analogy regarding human social politics.
But I now thought that this end [one's happiness] was only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness[....] Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness along the way[....] Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.
-- John Stuart Mill, autobiography
I came to the psychology of human misjudgment almost against my will; I rejected it until I realized that my attitude was costing me a lot of money, and reduced my ability to help everything I loved.
--Charlie Munger
But regardless of whether we believe our own positions are inviolable, it behooves us to know and understand the arguments of those who disagree. We should do this for two reasons. First, our inviolable position may be anything but. What we assume is true could be false. The only way we’ll discover this is to face up to evidence and arguments against our position. Because, as much as we may not enjoy it, discovering we’ve believed a falsehood means we’re now closer to believing the truth than we were before. And that’s something we should only ever feel gratitude for.
Aaron Ross Powell, Free Thoughts
This is why steelmanning is a really good community norm. Social incentives for understanding the other's position are usually bad, but if people give credit for steelmanning, these incentives are better.
Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical. Consequently we cannot give any answer to questions of this kind, but can only point out that they are nonsensical. Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language. [...] And it is not surprising that the deepest problems are in fact not problems at all.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921
Charles Darwin used to say that whenever he ran into something that contradicted a conclusion he cherished, he was obliged to write the new finding down within 30 minutes. Otherwise his mind would work to reject the discordant information, much as the body rejects transplants.
-- Warren Buffett
I have no idea whether this is true of Darwin, but it still might be good advice.
...The lack of a well-delineated hypothesis is not necessarily a barrier to acceptance of new directions in medical practice. The classic example is John Snow's demonstration that the 1854 cholera epidemic in London was attributable to contaminants in the water. When he removed the handle from the Broad Street pump, the number of cases in the area served by that pump promptly began to wane. Exactly what was in the water that caused the cholera would not be demonstrated for more than a quarter of a century. Still the results of Snow's intervention were so dra
If a statement is false, that's the worst thing you can say about it. You don't need to say it's heretical. And if it isn't false, it shouldn't be suppressed.
I like the sentiment, but Paul Graham seems to be claiming that information hazards don't exist, and that doesn't appear to be true.
I would say this is not ALWAYS true. But for the purpose of civilized discussion between human beings, it does seem like a very useful rule of thumb.
Like all great rationalists you believed in things that were twice as incredible as theology.
― Halldór Laxness, Under the Glacier.
...and then adjusted our senses of the 'incredible' accordingly, so that Special Relativity seemed less incredible, and God more so.
Before remembering the older definition of "incredible" that is presumably meant, I parsed this as "Like all great rationalists you believed in things that were twice as awesome as theology"; and thought "Only twice?".
That on probabilistic or rational reflection one can come to believe intuitively implausible things that are as or more extraordinary than their theological counterparts. Or to mutilate Hamlet, that there are more things on earth than are dreamt of in heaven.
Most of quantum physics and relativity are certainly intuitively weirder than Jesus turning water into wine, self-replicating bread or a body of water splitting itself to create a passage.
I mean, our physics say it's technically possible to make machines that do all of this. Without magic. Using energy collected in space and sent to Earth using beams of light. Although we probably wouldn't use beams of light because that's inefficient.
Scott Adams on evolution toward... what?
I see the iWatch as the next phase in our evolution to full cyborg status. I want my Google glasses, iWatch, smartphone, and anything else you want to attach to my body. Frankly, I'm tired of being nothing but a skin-bag full of decaying organs. I want to be the machine I was always meant to be. That prospect excites me.
As she stared at her wall, she understood that she would have to deal with it, accept it all as a new part of her existence. That was the only reasonable thing to do. She didn't have to be happy about it, but the universe wasn't structured around her happiness.
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
--Francis Bacon
'Talking of a Court-martial that was sitting upon a very momentous publick occasion, he expressed much doubt of an enlightened decision; and said, that perhaps there was not a member of it, who in the whole course of his life, had ever spent an hour by himself in balancing probabilities.'
Boswell's Life of Johnson (quoted in "Applied Scientific Inference", Sturrock 1994)
The quote struck me as a poetic way of affirming the general importance of metacognition - a reminder that we are at the center of everything we do, and therefore investing in self improvement is an investment with a multiplier effect. I admit though this may be adding my own meaning that doesn't exist in the quote's context.
I've always seen that whole speech as a pretty good example of reasoning from the wrong premises: Henry V makes the argument that God will decide the outcome of the battle and so if given the opportunity to have more Englishmen fighting along side them, he would choose to fight without them since then he gets more glory for winning a harder fight and if they lose then fewer will have died. Of course he doesn't take this to the logical conclusion and go out and fight alone, but I guess Shakespeare couldn't have pushed history quite that far.
Rewatching Branagh's version recently, I keyed in on a different aspect. In his speech, Henry describes in detail all the glory and status the survivors of the battle will enjoy for the rest of their lives, while (of course) totally downplaying the fact that few of them can expect to collect on that reward. He's making a ...
Here I was thinking command came to you naturally.
This anxiety attack seems natural enough. Now let's fix it with science.
This DOES teach me a lesson that coming up with absurd-sounding situations on the spot to demonstrate something’s “self-evident implausibility” is liable to come back to bite me, though. I should do it more often, just to accidentally stumble across out of the box ideas.
Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.
--Daniel Kahneman on the dichotomy between the self that experiences things from moment to moment and the self that remembers and evaluates experiences as a whole. (from Thinking, Fast and Slow )
These studies are the record of a failure-- the failure of facts to sustain a preconceived theory. The facts assembled, however, seemed worthy of further examination. If they would not prove what we had hoped to have them prove, it seemed desirable to turn them loose and to follow them to whatever end they might lead.
Edgar Lawrence Smith, Common Stocks as Long Term Investments
"Never forget I am not this silver body, Mahrai. I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an Al through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side."
-Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward
Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
-- Albert Einstein
--Pirates of the Caribbean
The pirate-specific stuff is a bit extraneous, but I've always thought this scene neatly captured the virtue of cold, calculating practicality. Not that "fairness" is never important to worry about, but when you're faced with a problem, do you care more about solving it, or arguing that your situation isn't fair? What can you do, and what can't you do? Reminds me of What do I want? What do I have? How can I best use the latter to get the former?
Frankly this is precisely the kind of ruthless pragmatism that gives utilitarians such a horrible reputation.