Another monthly installment of the rationality quotes thread. The usual rules apply:
"If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?"
"Oh jeez. Probably."
"What!? Why!?"
"Because all my friends did. Think about it -- which scenario is more likely: every single person I know, many of them levelheaded and afraid of heights, abruptly went crazy at exactly the same time... ...or the bridge is on fire?"
Dilbert dunnit first!
(Seeing that strip again reminds me of an explanation for why teenagers in the US tend to take more risks than adults. It's not because the teenagers irrationally underestimate risks but because they see bigger benefits to taking risks.)
Let me just put the text string ‘xkcd’ in here, because I was going to add this if nobody else had, and it's lucky that I found it first.
Oh, and there's more text in the comic than what's quoted, and it's good too, so read the comic everybody!
It’s nice to elect the right people, but that’s not the way you solve things. The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things.
No one can be good for long if goodness is not in demand.
Also:
The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set some limit on infinite error.
I think the spirit of the quote is that instead of counting on anyone to be a both benevolent and effective ruler, or counting on voters to recognize such things, design the political environment so that that will happen naturally, even when an office is occupied by a corrupt or ineffective person.
Simplest positive example I can think of offhand: if there's lots of content-free posting going on and you want it to go away, changing the board parameters so that user titles are no longer based on postcount goes a surprisingly long way.
Simplest negative example I can think of: if you think there's too much complaining going on (I didn't, but the board owner at the time did), allocating a subforum for complaints will only make things worse. Even if you call it something like "Constructive Criticism".
In Munich in the days of the great theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld (1868–1954), trolley cars were cooled in summer by two small fans set into their ceilings. When the trolley was in motion, air flowing over its top would spin the fans, pulling warm air out of the cars. One student noticed that although the motion of any given fan was fairly random—fans could turn either clockwise or counterclockwise—the two fans in a single car nearly always rotated in opposite directions. Why was this? Finally he brought the problem to Sommerfeld.
“That is easy to explain,” said Sommerfeld. “Air hits the fan at the front of the car first, giving it a random motion in one direction. But once the trolley begins to move, a vortex created by the first fan travels down the top of the car and sets the second fan moving in precisely the same direction.”
“But, Professor Sommerfeld,” the student protested, “what happens is in fact the opposite! The two fans nearly always rotate in different directions.”
“Ahhhh!” said Sommerfeld. “But of course that is even easier to explain.”
Devine and Cohen, Absolute Zero Gravity, p. 96.
The story appears to be apocryphal. I've heard many versions of it associated with various famous scientists. The source quoted is a collection of jokes, with very low veracity. Additionally, there are no independent versions of the story anywhere on Google. By the way, the quoted date of Sommerfeld's death is also incorrect. I wonder if there even were (unpowered) ceiling fans in Munich's trolleys during that time.
Men in Black on guessing the teacher's password:
Zed: You're all here because you are the best of the best. Marines, air force, navy SEALs, army rangers, NYPD. And we're looking for one of you. Just one.
[...]
Edwards: Maybe you already answered this, but, why exactly are we here?
Zed: [noticing a recruit raising his hand] Son?
Jenson: Second Lieutenant, Jake Jenson. West Point. Graduate with honors. We're here because you are looking for the best of the best of the best, sir! [throws Edwards a contemptible glance]
[Edwards laughs]
Zed: What's so funny, Edwards?
Edwards: Boy, Captain America over here! "The best of the best of the best, sir!" "With honors." Yeah, he's just really excited and he has no clue why we're here. That's just, that's very funny to me.
It is because a mirror has no commitment to any image that it can clearly and accurately reflect any image before it. The mind of a warrior is like a mirror in that it has no commitment to any outcome and is free to let form and purpose result on the spot, according to the situation.
—Yagyū Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword
Real artists ship.
-- Steve Jobs
(The Organization Formerly Known as SIAI had this problem until relatively recently. Eliezer worked, but he never published anything.)
Most people, when giving advice, don't optimize for maximal usefulness. They optimize for something like maximal apparent-insight or maximal signaling-wisdom or maximal mind-blowing, which are a priori all very different goals. So you shouldn't expect that incredibly useful advice sounds like incredibly insightful, wise, or mind-blowing advice in general. There's probably a lot of incredibly useful advice that no one gives because it sounds too obvious and you don't get to look cool by giving it. One such piece of advice I received recently was "plan things."
I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend
Faramir, from Lord of the Rings on lost purposes and the thing that he protects
Things that are your fault are good because they can be fixed. If they're someone else's fault, you have to fix them, and that's much harder.
-- Geoff Anders (paraphrased)
You want accurate beliefs and useful emotions.
From a participant at the January CFAR workshop. I don't remember who. This struck me as an excellent description of what rationalists seek.
People often seem to get these mixed up, resulting in "You want useful beliefs and accurate emotions."
Not sure what an "accurate emotion" would mean, feel like some sort of domain error. (e.g. a blue sound.)
An accurate emotion = "I'm angry because I should be angry because she is being really, really mean to me."
A useful emotion = "Showing empathy towards someone being mean to me will minimize the cost to me of others' hostility."
This is addressed by several Sequence posts, e.g. Why truth? And..., Dark Side Epistemology, and Focus Your Uncertainty.
Beliefs shoulder the burden of having to reflect the territory, while emotions don't. (Although many people seem to have beliefs that could be secretly encoding heuristics that, if they thought about it, they could just be executing anyway, e.g. believing that people are nice could be secretly encoding a heuristic to be nice to people, which you could just do anyway. This is one kind of not-really-anticipation-controlling belief that doesn't seem to be addressed by the Sequences.)
"I design a cell to not fail and then assume it will and then ask the next 'what-if' questions," Sinnett said. "And then I design the batteries that if there is a failure of one cell it won't propagate to another. And then I assume that I am wrong and that it will propagate to another and then I design the enclosure and the redundancy of the equipment to assume that all the cells are involved and the airplane needs to be able to play through that."
—Mike Sinnett, Boeing's 787 chief project engineer
I wept because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet, then I continued weeping because his foot problem did not actually solve my shoe problem.
-- Noah Brand
I'd prefer if this quote ended with " ... and then I got done weeping and started working on my shoe budget," but oh wells.
"...And then I remembered status is positional, felt superior to the footless man, and stopped weeping."
Shoes aren't just about positional social status, are they? (I mean, the difference between a $20 pair of shoes and a $300 pair of shoes mostly is, but the difference between a $20 pair of shoes and no shoes at all isn't, is it?)
This quote is mainly arguing against the attitude that says "you have feet therefore your shoe problem is a non-problem, don't even bother feeling bad or working on it".
That may be, but the actual context of the quote it's arguing with is quite different, on a couple of fronts.
Harold Abbott, the author of the original 1934 couplet ("I had the blues because I had no shoes / Until upon the street, I met a man who had no feet"), wrote it to memorialize an encounter with a happy legless man, at a time when Abbott was dead broke and depressed. (Abbott was not actually lacking in shoes, nor the man only lacking in feet, but apparently in those days people took their couplet-writing seriously. ;-) )
Thing is, at the time he encountered the legless man (who smiled and said good morning), Abbott was actually walking to the bank in order to borrow money to go to Kansas City to look for a job. And not only did he not stop walking to the bank after the encounter, he decided to ask for twice as much money as he had originally intended to borrow. He had in fact raised his sights, rather than lowering them.
That is, the full story is not anything like, "other people ...
On scientists trying to photograph an atom's shadow:
...the idea sounds stupid. But scientists don't care about sounding stupid, which is what makes them not stupid, and they did it anyway.
Luke McKinney - 6 Microscopic Images That Will Blow Your Mind
It seems that 32 Bostonians have simultaneously dropped dead in a ten-block radius for no apparent reason, and General Purcell wants to know if it was caused by a covert weapon. Of course, the military has been put in charge of the investigation and everything is hush-hush.
Without examining anything, Keyes takes about five seconds to surmise that the victims all died from malfunctioning pacemakers and the malfunction was definitely not due to a secret weapon. We're supposed to be impressed, but our experience with real scientists and engineers indicates that when they're on-the-record, top-notch scientists and engineers won't even speculate about the color of their socks without looking at their ankles. They have top-notch reputations because they're almost always right. They're almost always right because they keep their mouths shut until they've fully analyzed the data.
The remark included the following as a footnote:
Even top-notch engineers and scientists will speculate wildly when they're off-the-record. We define on-the-record as those times when their written or oral communications are likely to be taken seriously and directly attributed to the scientist or engineer making them. Surely answering a direct question posed by a general would fall into this category.
... I had not known about red buttons on SMBC.
roll d20... success on 'resist re-binge' check.
Eventually you just have to admit that if it looks like the absence of a duck, walks like the absence of a duck, and quacks like the absence of a duck, the duck is probably absent.
I agree subject to the specification that each such observation must look substantially more like the absence of a duck then a duck. There are many things we see which are not ducks in particular locations. My shoe doesn't look like a duck in my closet, but it also doesn't look like the absence of a duck in my closet. Or to put it another way, my sock looks exactly like it should look if there's no duck in my closet, but it also looks exactly like it should look if there is a duck in my closet.
if there's no corelation, there almost certainly isn't causation.
This is completely wrong, though not many people seem to understand that yet.
For example, the voltage across a capacitor is uncorrelated with the current through it; and another poster has pointed out the example of the thermostat, a topic I've also written about on occasion.
It's a fundamental principle of causal inference that you cannot get causal conclusions from wholly acausal premises and data. (See Judea Pearl, passim.) This applies just as much to negative conclusions as positive. Absence of correlation cannot on its own be taken as evidence of absence of causation.
Yes, this is completely wrong. There is frequently no correlation but strong causation due to effect cancellation (homeostasis, etc.)
Here's a recent paper making this point in the context of mediation analysis in social science (I could post many more):
http://www.quantpsy.org/pubs/rucker_preacher_tormala_petty_2011.pdf
Nancy, I don't mean to jump on you specifically here, but this does seem to me to be a special instance of a general online forum disease, where people {prefer to use | view as authoritative} online sources of information (blogs, wikipedia, even tvtropes, etc.) vs mainstream sources (books, academic papers, professionals). Vinge calls it "the net of a million lies" for a reason!
I've just come across a fascinatingly compact observation by I. J. Good:
Public and private utilities do not always coincide. This leads to ethical problems. Example - an invention is submitted to a scientific adviser of a firm...
The probability that the invention will work is p. The value to the firm if the invention is adopted and works is V, and the loss if the invention is adopted and fails is L. The value to the adviser personally if he advises the adoption of the invention and it works is v, and the loss if it fails to work is l. The losses to the firm and the adviser if he recommends the rejection of the invention are both negligible...
Then the firm's expected gain if the invention is adopted is pV - (1-p)L and the adviser's expected gain in the same circumstances is pv - (1-p)l. The firm has positive expected gain if p/(1-p) > L/V, and the adviser has positive expected gain if p/(1-p) > l/v.
If l/v > p/(1-p) > L/V, the adviser will be faced with an ethical problem, i.e. he will be tempted to act against the interests of the firm.
This is a beautifully simple recipe for a conflict of interest:
Considering absolute losses assuming failure and absolute gains ...
the Fearful Committee Formula.
Which is not nearly as common as the reverse, the Reckless Adviser Formula, when the personal loss to the adviser is so low and the potential personal gain is so high, they recommend adoption even when the expected gain for the company is negative.
[S]econd thoughts tend to be tentative, and people tend not to believe that they are being lied to. Their own fairmindedness makes them gullible. Upon hearing two versions of any story, the natural reaction of any casual listener is to assume both versions are slanted to favor their side, and that the truth is perhaps somewhere in the middle. So if I falsely accuse an innocent group of ten people of wrongdoing, the average bystander, if he later hears my false accusation disputed, will assume that five or six of the people are guilty, rather than assume I lied and admit that he was deceived.
That reminds me of http://xkcd.com/690/.
Also:
If one group of editors were to say the Earth is flat and another group were to say it is round, it would not benefit Wikipedia for the groups to compromise and say the Earth is shaped like a calzone.
(Quoting this before dinner is making me hungry.)
"In any man who dies, there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight. Not people die, but worlds die in them."
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Nah, this doesn't require any magic; just code reuse or the equivalent. If the cognitive mechanisms that we use to simulate other people are similar enough to those we use to run our own minds, it seems logical that those simulations, once rich and coherent enough, could acquire some characteristics of our minds that we normally think of as privileged. It follows that they could then diverge from their prototypes if there's not some fairly sophisticated error correction built in.
This seems plausible to me because evolution's usually a pretty parsimonious process; I wouldn't expect it to develop an independent mechanism for representing other minds when it's got a perfectly good mechanism for representing the self. Or vice versa; with the mirror test in mind it's plausible that self-image is a consequence of sufficiently good other-modeling, not the other way around.
Of course, I don't have anything I'd consider strong evidence for this -- hence the lowish p-value.
If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?
--Sam Harris
You put them into a social enviroment where the high status people value logic and evidence. You give them the plausible promise that they can increase their status in that enviroment by increasing the amount that they value logic and evidence.
The subject's capacity for deception is finite, and will be needed elsewhere. Sooner or later it becomes more cost-effective for the sincere belief to change.
This reminds me of
You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
which I believe is a paraphrasing of something Jonathan Swift said, but I'm not sure. Anyone have the original?
You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
I don't think this is empirically true, though. Suppose I believe strongly that violent crime rates are soaring in my country (Canada), largely because I hear people talking about "crime being on the rise" all the time, and because I hear about murders on the news. I did not reason myself into this position, in other words.
Then you show me some statistics, and I change my mind.
In general, I think a supermajority of our starting opinions (priors, essentially) are held for reasons that would not pass muster as 'rational,' even if we were being generous with that word. This is partly because we have to internalize a lot of things in our youth and we can't afford to vet everything our parents/friends/culture say to us. But the epistemic justification for the starting opinions may be terrible, and yet that doesn't mean we're incapable of having our minds changed.
If you can't appeal to reason to make reason appealing, you appeal to emotion and authority to make reason appealing.
No one really believes God will protect them from harm...
I have some friends who do... At least insofar as things like "I don't have to worry about finances because God is watching over me, so I won't bother trying to keep a balanced budget." Then again, being financially irresponsible (a behaviour I find extremely hard to understand and sympathize with) seems to be common-ish, and not just among people who think God will take care of their problems.
Q: I was wondering what the dumbest or funniest argument you've heard against the defeat of aging?
Aubrey de Grey: Um, It's been a very very long time since I've heard a question or concern I haven't heard before, so nothing's dumb or funny anymore, it's just... tedium.
The first response that comes to my mind is "because if the butterfly were trying that hard to escape the kid, it would fly above the kid's reach, and the kid would give up." When I look at the scene, I see a kid chasing a butterfly, and a butterfly too stupid to realize it should flee instead of simply dodging.
Animals on the intelligence levels of butterflies (which, keep in mind, have specific mating flight patterns they use to tell other members of their species apart from things like ribbons and stray flower petals,) don't seem to even have retreat instincts, just avoidance instincts. They can't recognize persistent pursuit. A fly won't hesitate to land on a person who has been trying to swat it for minutes on end.
Three things, in no particular order:
I seem to recall that, in some obscure language, each noun has an agency level and in a sentence the most agenty noun is the subject by default, unless the verb is specially inflected to show otherwise: for example, “[dog] [bite] [man]” would mean ‘a man bit a dog’, regardless of word order, because the noun “[man]” has higher agency than “[dog]”.
Would you sooner see a tiger chasing a man, or a man running away from a tiger? If the former, it's not just the fact that butterflies are not human, it's the fact that the butterflies are small.
I think that, at least in the case of the lion, it would also depend on whether the two of them are moving towards the left side or the right side of my visual field. I heard that in _The Great Wave off Kanagawa_ the boats are intended to look more agenty than the wave, but for Western people it will typically look like the other way round (due to Western languages being written from left to right), and for a Westerner to get the right effect they'd have to look at the picture in a mirror. (It works for me, at least.)
Is this visual field orientation issue really Western vs Eastern? If so, has it evaporated lately?
One of the media that most lends itself to testing this notion is video games, since there is almost always an agent, and often a preferred direction to gameplay. In some cases, there is a lot of free movement but when you enter a new zone/approach a boss, it generally goes one way rather than the other.
Eastern games favoring left-to-right over right-to-left: Super Mario Brothers, Ninja Gaiden, Megaman, Ghosts and Goblins, Double Dragon, TMNT, River City Ransom, Sonic the Hedgehog, Gradius/Lifeforce, UN Squadron, Rygar, Contra, Codename: Viper, Faxanadu (at least, the beginning, which is all I saw), Excitebike, Zelda 2, Act Raiser, Wizards and Warriors, and Cave Story.
On the other side, Final Fantasy combat generally puts the party on to right side, facing left. That's pretty leftward-oriented for sure. And very slightly - more slightly than any of the above - Metroid. Whenever you find a major powerup, you approach it from the right. You enter Tourian (the last area) from the right, and approach all 3 full bosses from the right. Those two are all I can think of with any sort of leftwa...
Every time you read something that mentions brain chemicals or brain scans, rewrite the sentence without the sciencey portions. “Hate makes people happy.” “Women feel closer to people after sex.” “Music makes people happy.” If the argument suddenly seems way less persuasive, or the news story way less ground-breaking… well. Someone’s doing something shady.
If you're not making quantitative predictions, you're probably doing it wrong.
--Gabe Newell during a talk. The whole talk is worthwhile if you're interested in institutional design or Valve.
The whole quote:
If you're not making quantitative predictions, you're probably doing it wrong, or you're probably not doing it as well as you can. That's sort of become kind of critical to how we operate. You have to predict in advance. Anybody can explain anything after the fact, and it has to be quantitative or you're not being serious about how you're approaching the problem.
The problems you face might not require a serious approach; without more information, I can't say.
Closeness in the experiment was reasonably literal but may also be interpreted in terms of identification with the torturer. If the church is doing the torturing then the especially religious may be more likely to think the tortured are guilty. If the state is doing the torturing then the especially patriotic (close to their country) may be more likely to think that the tortured/killed/jailed/abused are guilty. That part is fairly obvious but note the second less obvious implication–the worse the victim is treated the more the religious/patriotic will believe the victim is guilty. ... Research in moral reasoning is important because understanding why good people do evil things is more important than understanding why evil people do evil things.
Of a proposed course of action He wants men, so far as I can see, to ask very simple questions; is it righteous? is it prudent? is it possible? Now if we can keep men asking "Is it in accordance with the general movement of our time? Is it progressive or reactionary? Is this the way that History is going?" they will neglect the relevant questions. And the questions they do ask are, of course, unanswerable; for they do not know the future, and what the future will be depends very largely on just those choices which they now invoke the future to help them to make.
-- Screwtape, The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
Been making a game of looking for rationality quotes in the super bowl
"It's only weird if it doesn't work" --Bud Light Commercial
Only a rationality quote out of context, though, since the ad is about superstitious rituals among sports fans. My automatic mental reply is "well that doesn't work"
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total darkness sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
W. H. Auden, "The More Loving One"
(Incidentally, am I the only one mildly annoyed by how people seem to think of "rationality quotes" as "anti-deathism quotes"? The position may be rational, but it is not remotely related to rationality.)
You're not the only one. We should be doing more firewalling the optimal from the rational in general.
I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.
The whole speech is worth reading as one giant rationality quote
It is important, therefore, to always maintain a balanced view of markets. There is something extremely elegant about the way they allocate goods and resources, and the way the price system automatically adjusts the system of production in response to changes in demand. There is a clear sense in which markets achieve a level of coordination and efficiency that no other form of social organization is able to provide. However, markets are not magical, and they will not solve all our problems. They work properly only under very specific institutional conditions.
(Joseph Heath, The Efficient Society)
Heath is an excellent writer on economics/philosophy.
If you are reading this book and flipping out at every third sentence because you feel I'm insulting your intelligence, then I have three points of advice for you:
Stop reading my book. I didn't write it for you. I wrote it for people who don't already know everything.
Empty before you fill. You will have a hard time learning from someone with more knowledge if you already know everything.
Go learn Lisp. I hear people who know everything really like Lisp.
For everyone else who's here to learn, just read everything as if I'm smiling and I have a mischievous little twinkle in my eye.
Introduction to Learn Python The Hard Way, by Zed A. Shaw
If anyone feels even remotely inspired to click through and actually learn python, do it. Its been the most productive thing I've done on the internet.
This makes me wonder how much my writing skills would improve if I retyped excellently written essays for a while.
Benjamin Franklin's method of learning to write well is summarized here. His version:
...A question was once, somehow or other, started between Collins and me, of the propriety of educating the female sex in learning, and their abilities for study. He was of opinion that it was improper, and that they were naturally unequal to it. I took the contrary side, perhaps a little for dispute's sake. He was naturally more eloquent, had a ready plenty of words; and sometimes, as I thought, bore me down more by his fluency than by the strength of his reasons. As we parted without settling the point, and were not to see one another again for some time, I sat down to put my arguments in writing, which I copied fair and sent to him. He answered, and I replied. Three or four letters of a side had passed, when my father happened to find my papers and read them. Without entering into the discussion, he took occasion to talk to me about the manner of my writing; observed that, though I had the advantage of my antagonist in correct spelling and pointing (which I ow'd to the printing-house), I fell far short in elegance of expression, in method and in perspicuity, of which he convinced me by several i
I would expect the answer to be "not much, compared to writing and publishing horrible, horrible fanfiction".
But I've never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.
-- Randall Munroe
The publisher selected that design. The author's involvement almost always ends with the manuscript.
...Authors are deliberately excluded from all this, on the grounds that they're so in love with what's inside the book that they don't understand what the cover stuff is for. Which is advertising.
The purpose of cover art is not to show the reader what's inside the book.
It's to get his attention from across the bookstore and get him to pick the book up in the first place.
Half-naked women and muscular barbarians are very good for getting teenaged readers to at least take a look. Black and red are good, too. And spiffy hardware, like spaceships. Cut-out covers, foil, blood, all that stuff--it gets attention, and the art and marketing people really don't give a damn whether it agrees with what's inside the book.
The cover gets you to pick up the book and read the blurbs; the blurbs are supposed to convince you to actually buy it. The blurb writer doesn't care any more about accuracy than the art director did; his job is to sell the book, period. One way to do that is to skim through the book and pick out all the most lurid details.
So all this is done without the author's interference. The author might put up a fuss about the half-naked women, since everyone in the story is ninety years ol
You don't "judge" a book by its cover; you use the cover as additional evidence to more accurately predict what's in the book. Knowing what the publisher wants you to assume about the book is preferable to not knowing.
No, they selected them to sell more copies by highjacking the easier-to-press buttons of your nervous system.
On the other hand, the method of judging a book's contents by its cover clearly has holes in it considering Spice and Wolf 1 has the cover of Spice and Wolf 1.
Whenever you feel that society is forcing you to conform or treating you like a number, not a person, just ask yourself the following question: "Does my individuality create more work for other people?" If the answer is yes, then you should be prepared to pay more.
(Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell)
Evolutionary psychology, economics, and behavior studies in general often fail to account for what may be an innate, or strongly socialized, motivating variable. "Rational people will seek to maximize their gain." Sure. Now define gain. In many discussions about behavior and economics, we do not account for obedience and social pressure. This is a mistake, as it is evident that it is a highly significant, though invisible, determinant.
The Last Psychiatrist (http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/06/delaying_gratification.html)
Heaven? They tried to recruit me, but I turned them down. My place is here in shadows, with the blood and the fear and the screams of the dying, standing back to back with my loves against the world.
-- Time Braid
Responsibility without power breeds cynicism.
-- Scott Sumner (talking about Italian politicians when the EU controls their monetary policy, but it generalizes)
...I am, in most of my endeavors, a solidly successful person. I decide I want things to be a certain way, and I make it happen. I've done it with my career, my learning of music, understanding of foreign languages, and basically everything I've tried to do. For a long time, I've known that the key to getting started down the path of being remarkable in anything is to simply act with the intention of being remarkable.
If I want a better-than-average career, I can't simply 'go with the flow' and get it. Most people do just that: they wish for an outcome but ma
The example in the comic is not a good one. Of the choices on the board, E being proportional to mc^2 is the only option where the units match. You only need to have that one idea to save yourself the trouble of having lots of other ideas.
No scientific conclusions can ever be good or bad, desirable or undesirable, sexist, racist, offensive, reactionary or dangerous; they can only be true or false. No other adjectives apply.
This seems to imply that science is somehow free from motivated cognition — people looking for evidence to support their biases. Since other fields of human reason are not, it would be astonishing if science were.
(Bear in mind, I use "science" mostly as the name of a social institution — the scientific community, replete with journals, grants and funding sources, tenure, and all — and not as a name for an idealized form of pure knowledge-seeking.)
While I pretty much agree with the quote, it doesn't provide anyone that isn't already convinced with many good reasons to believe it. Less of an unusually rational statement and more of an empiricist applause light, in other words.
In any case, a scientific conclusion needn't be inherently offensive for closer examination to be recommended: if most researchers' backgrounds are likely to introduce implicit biases toward certain conclusions on certain topics, then taking a close look at the experimental structure to rule out such bias isn't merely a good political sop but is actually good science in its own right. Of course, dealing with this properly would involve hard work and numbers and wouldn't involve decrying all but the worst studies as bad science when you've read no more than the abstract.
I'd take an issue with "undesirable", the way I understand it. For example, the conclusion that traveling FTL is impossible without major scientific breakthroughs was quite undesirable to those who want to reach for the stars. Similarly with "dangerous": the discovery of nuclear energy was quite dangerous.
FTL being impossible is undesirable if you want to go to the stars.
The conclusion that "FTL is impossible" is undesirable if and only iff FTL is possible.
The two conditions are very different.
"It does not matter what we have believed," Caleb said. "What matters is the truth."
--Jovah's Angel by Sharon Shinn
Coincidences … are the worst enemies of the truth. (Les coïncidences … sont les pires ennemies de la vérité.)
Joke: a tourist was driving around lost in the countryside in Ireland among the 1 lane roads and hill farms divided by ancient stone fences, and he asks a sheep farmer how to get to Dublin, to which he replies:
"Well ... if I was going to Dublin, I wouldn't start from here."
Moral, as I see it anyway: While the heuristic "to get to Y, start from X instead of where you are" has some value (often cutting a hard problem into two simpler ones), ultimately we all must start from where we are.
...It has been said that the historian is the avenger, and that standing as a judge between the parties and rivalries and causes of bygone generations he can lift up the fallen and beat down the proud, and by his exposures and his verdicts, his satire and his moral indignation, can punish unrighteousness, avenge the injured or reward the innocent. One may be forgiven for not being too happy about any division of mankind into good and evil, progressive and reactionary, black and white; and it is not clear that moral indignation is not a dispersion of one’s en
True, reason was a difficult tool. You laboured with it to see a little more, and at best you got glimpses, partial truths; but the glimpses were always worth having.
Francis Spufford, Red Plenty
He gazed about him, and the very intensity of his desire to take in the new world at a glance defeated itself. He saw nothing but colours - colours that refused to form themselves into things. Moreover, he knew nothing yet well enough to see it: you cannot see things till you know roughly what they are.
-- C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.
Karl Popper
There's a failure mode associated to this attitude worth watching out for, which is assuming that people who disagree with you are being irrational and so not bothering to check if you have arguments against what they say.
It is interesting to note that Bohr was an outspoken critic of Einstein's light quantum (prior to 1924), that he mercilessly denounced Schrodinger's equation, discouraged Dirac's work on the relativist electron theory (telling him, incorrectly, that Klein and Gordon had already succeeded), opposed Pauli's introduction of the neutrino, ridiculed Yukawa's theory of the meson, and disparaged Feynman's approach to quantum electrodynamics.
[Footnote to: "This was a most disturbing result. Niels Bohr (not for the first time) was ready to abandon the law o...
Those who stand against the dark mirror of evil are trapped in an eternal conflict. Because, for the cultists; they only have to succeed once. But for the defenders of humanity, we have to prevail every single time.
-- From the final screen of Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land
Selection is the key to social harmony. Surround yourself with true friends who love you just as you are. If you don't see any around, quest for them.
Anything that's ever said is really just a signpost leading towards a certain state of being.
Eckhart Tolle, as quoted by Owen Cook in The Blueprint Decoded
Ultimately, if some AI scientist is very concerned that an AI is going to kill us all, their opinion is more informative of the approaches to AI which they find viable, than of AIs in general. If someone is convinced that any nuclear power plant can explode like a multi megaton nuclear bomb, well, its probably better to let someone else design a nuclear power plant.
I think you have the lesson entirely backward.
Now this foreknowledge cannot be elicited from spirits; it cannot be obtained inductively from experience, nor by any deductive calculation. Knowledge of the enemy's dispositions can only be obtained from other men. Hence the use of spies...
Sun Tzu on establishing a causal chain from reality to your beliefs.
...Even the most rational among us believe we have something called a "mind" that is capable of something called "free will" which all feels a bit like magic. We have a sense that our minds can cook up thoughts and ideas on its own, without the benefit of external stimulation. The belief is that we can think ourselves into whatever frame of mind we need. We think we can use our "willpower" to overcome sadness, or focus on what is important, whatever. My view is the opposite. I believe our internal sensation of "mind" i
Coincidences … are the worst enemies of the truth. (Les coïncidences … sont les pires ennemies de la vérité. —Gaston Leroux, Le mystère de la chambre jaune
"For belief did not end with a public renunciation, a moment when one's brethren called one a heretic, and damned. Belief ended in solitude, and silence, the same way it began." -Robert V. S. Redick, The Night Of The Swarm
(I'm mid-way through the book, but perhaps I should instead say that I am mid-way through gur sryybjfuvc bs gur evat, juvpu unf sbe fbzr ernfba orra vafregrq vagb gur zvqqyr bs vg, pbzcyrgr jvgu eviraqryy, zvfgl zbhagnvaf, naq gur jvmneq qvfnccrnevat gb svtug n zbafgre).
...Romance is for the evening, when the day's work of contributing to civilization is done. When all the drudgery of adult endeavors -- cooperation and competition and accountability and all of that -- can be put aside. The stars come out, a chill breeze blows, and the snapping of a twig out there can suddenly send chills up your spine!
Romance renounces accountability and so-called "objective reality!" It sees no need for them. And when that mind-set ruled our daylight hours, warping politics and business and the way we perceived our real-life nei
If you want to get the plain truth,
Be not concerned with right and wrong.
The conflict between right and wrong
Is the sickness of the mind.
-- Seng-Ts'an
I wouldn't be surprised if this has come up before:
...Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity.
The ideas Earthlings held didn't matter for hundreds of thousands of years, since they couldn't do much about them anyway. Ideas might as well be badges as anything.
They even had a saying about the futility of ideas: ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’
And then Earthlings discovered tools. S
"It seems to me that your first and third reasons contradict each other. Destroying the mirror cannot both multiply and exterminate the little pests."
"There's a contradiction, yes. That's because I don't know which is true. Destroying the mirror might kill them, or it might multiply them infinitely. I don't know. And neither do you."
--Lawrence Watt-Evans, The Spriggan Mirror
Gods? There are no 'gods', young bravo. There is only one God, and his name is Death - Him of Many Faces. And there is only one prayer that one says to him - 'Not Today'.
Syrio Forel, Game of Thrones based on A Song of Ice and Fire by George R R Martin
It doesn't matter that much, but I'm pretty sure that line is original to the HBO series, not to the books.
(Not my downvotes, incidentally, but I'd speculate they come from a desire to separate rationality from anti-deathism.)
This is why I don't care much for gambling. While a sucker is born with each tick of the clock, a cheater is born with each tock betwixt.
-- Doc Scratch, Homestuck
Then try to make it politically profitable to help sustain those changes you make. Make it so painfully obvious that the only reason to remove those changes would be for one's unethical gain that no politician would ever do so. The problem then though, is that people end up just not caring enough.
What you're describing is exactly the position of being able to make institutional design changes that can't be undone by potential future enemies. This position is "special" not only because the task is very difficult, but also because you have to be the first to think of it.