I question the bit about the soldier. For example, which wars actually did anything to preserve our freedoms rather than fiddle with other countries?

whether or not one agrees with the soldier quote, what does it have to do with rationality?

Looks like the soldier quote is gonna be big in comments. I think it's out of place too, and as opposed to most other quotes that Eliezer comes up with, it doesn't make a lot of sense. In the same way as: "It is the scalpel, not the surgeon, or the nurse, that fixed your wounds!"

Soldiers are tools wielded by the structure in power, and it is the structure in power that determines whether the soliders are going to protect your rights and take them away.

Perhaps, "The One" might argue, it is a different kind of person who becomes a soldier in an army that "protects freedom" rather than an army that oppresses its countrymen. There are probably more such idealists among the soldiers in the US army, than among troops commanded by the Burmese generals.

Even so, though, the idealist soldier does what he's commanded to do, and whether that which he does actually protects freedom or not, is largely determined by the structure of power, not the idealist soldier. He remains a tool, a hammer wielded by someone else's will.

#3 has blown my mind hole. Black Belt Bayesian is going in my Google Reader on the strength of that quote. Great stuff.

#5 is also great. Rationality Quotes 1-11 have made me fairly confident that if I can't see the link to rationality here, I usually need to think harder.

The soldier giveth and the soldier taketh away.

You can say the soldier is nothing without all the rest of the infrastructure. Still, since the soldier is the one who takes the most risk of personal harm or death, its easier to imagine replacing any of the other jobs in the larger scheme of things. If everyone in your group decides its too risky to be a soldier, you are vulnerable to another group which thinks differently.

Guess that's the obvious part, how it is a rationality quote I'm not sure. Maybe its rational to put soldiers in a special and revered category given how important they are, for now at least.

The soldier is the answer to "no moral argument will convince a rock" as applied to rival optimizers.

I'm not saying the irony is intentional (although I would claim it if I was Eliezer) but note who the soldier quote is from, and also note the content of the quote it succeeds.

The arrangement was intentional, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I endorse the negation of the quote.

"If you want to do good, work on the technology, not on getting power." - John McCarthy

Except for technologies with catastrophic potential (nanotech, biotech.)

Rationality fights on the side with the heaviest artillery. -- Napoleon Blownapart

I heart McCarthy's wikiquotes page.

The soldier quote is ludicrous, unless you consider refraining from shooting someone performing an action to be enabling that action.

Soldiers do not make any of those things possible. At most, they prevent external forces (and a few internal ones) from interfering with them - they can just as easily be used to prevent the exercise of those freedoms.

They are neither sufficient nor necessary.

The soldier protects your rights to do any of those actions, and as there always are people, who want to take them away from you, it is the soldier who is stopping them from doing so.

The soldiers would have defended the current government and its rules, no matter what those rules had been. Had the government opposed free speech against rebels who wanted to install free speech, the soldiers would have defended that government just as energetically. You might as well credit the sun with free speech, since without the sun we'd all be dead.

"I normally thought of (insert political part) as a disclaimer, or like the MPAA rating you see just before a movie starts: it told me before I continued into conversation with that person, that that person had limitations to their intellectual capacity or intellectual honesty."

You can make a pretty cool society, but it's meaningless unless you can protect it from disruption, that's the point of the quote. Of course the converse also holds, you can protect your society from disruption, but it's meaningless unless it's pretty cool.

Robin, the underlying point of the soldier quote (and others like it) is that the liberal society we enjoy comes at a (military) cost. Freedom, as the saying goes, isn't free. If we really want freedom of speech and the like, we had better be prepared to enforce it (ironic though that may seem).

Robin, the underlying point of the soldier quote (and others like it) is that the liberal society we enjoy comes at a (military) cost.

Except that it doesn't. Without a military, we could be taken over by a 'liberal' nation as easily as an illiberal one. We did not become a 'liberal' nation through the actions of soldiers.

The quote is just an extention of the secular religion particular to the American nation, one of the many religions began to provide a focus for the meme of Nationalism.

Jay has a good point about the Hated Enemy. To recast the quote for our audience: "I normally thought of "Bayes!" as a disclaimer, or like the MPAA rating you see just before a movie starts: it told me before I continued into conversation with that person, that that person had limitations to their intellectual capacity or intellectual honesty."

And as much as I enjoyed the quote from #12 I am about to gut, if we are engaging in Take That!, the Hated Enemy will respond: "Your denial of the importance of God amounts to announcing your intention to lie to us. No-one should believe anything you say."

Sure, others can turn the phrasing against you, but that doesn't mean theism isn't Bayesian evidence of bad things. It just provides a game-theoretic reason to avoid using that argument in public, maybe.

The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study POLITICS AND WAR, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain. -John Adams (emphasis mine)

I always found it strange that the most vocal supporters of flag-burning amendments are military types. Why bother risking your life "for freedom" if you are just going to come home and try to eliminate that freedom?

"It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press."

An obvious lie. Soldiers are always owned and paid for by the establishment. We owe our freedoms to the insurget, the freedom fighter, or if you perfer - the terrorist.