Cryonics is an experiment. So far the control group isn't doing very well.
Dr. Ralph Merkle (quoted on the Alcor website - I'm surprised this hasn't been posted before, but I can't find it in the past pages)
On the living/non-living part, yeah. (They're all dead.)
On the brains remaining recognizable and intact, I suspect they're doing better than even professionally embalmed and maintained corpses like Lenin or Mao are.
Miracle Max: Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do.
Inigo Montoya: What's that?
Miracle Max: Go through his clothes and look for loose change.
Reminds me of the proposed double blind studies about the effectiveness of parachutes in preventing injuries while falling from great heights.
I thought it was trite, but here it is.
ETA: Posted this from work, didn't realize it was paywalled. Here's a pdf
If you say that all experiments have to be placebo controlled double blind experiments you aren't advocating more experiments.
You are advocating that the resources get spread about over less experiments but that those experiments that are done have a higher standard. http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/2011/01/25/monocultures-of-evidence/
Education is implication. It is not the things you say which children respect; when you say things, they very commonly laugh and do the opposite. It is the things you assume which really sink into them. It is the things you forget even to teach that they learn.
G. K. Chesterton, article in the Illustrated London News, 1907, collected in "The Man Who Was Orthodox", p.96.
Your post reminds me of this quote about how a teacher's assumptions affect identity:
"When those who have the power to name and to socially construct reality choose not to see you or hear you ... when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked in the mirror and saw nothing." —Adrienne Rich, 1984
As I read this quote, I was reminded of what it felt like to be (repressed) homosexual in a strongly heteronormative culture. The act of claiming my sexuality could only happen outside of that culture (in Europe, for me), and when I came back home, I became profoundly depressed, convinced I would never amount to anything.
Gay people are often surprised at how their internal turmoil, which seems so particular and special, turns out to be the usual result of growing up queer in a straight society. We're surprised because our experience is so different from what most people around us seem to be feeling.
So, I would say Rich was not generalizing from one example, but was talking about the generality of the experience of the ignored minority, and trying to convey that experience to an audience who would be largely ignorant of that feeling of psychic non-existence. They have been affirmed by whatever presumptions are prevalent in their society, be they heteronormative, ethnic, racial, religious or whatever.
So, this is a great rationality quote, because it reminds us all (gay people included) to challenge ourselves constantly to recognize the lenses through which we understand reality, and to try to sort out what is real from what is cultural. People, especially young people, kill themselves because of this. Challenging our cultural assumptions can save lives.
When things get too complicated, it sometimes makes sense to stop and wonder: Have I asked the right question?
Enrico Bombieri
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." -Daniel J. Boorstin
This reminds me of "It ain't what we don't know that hurts us, it's what we know that ain't so."
Which I have seen attributed to at least half a dozen different people over the years.
The discovery that the universe has no purpose need not prevent a human being from having one.
-Irwin Edman
Peanuts, 1961 April 26&27:
Lucy: You can't drift along forever. You have to direct your thinking. For instance, you have to decide whether you're going to be a liberal or a conservative. You have to take some sort of stand. You have to associate yourself with some sort of cause.
Linus: How can a person just decide what he's going to think? Doesn't he have to think first, and then try to discover what it is that he's thought?
Don't hate the playa, hate the game
-- Ice-T
Or, as the Urban Dictionary puts it:
Do not fault the successful participant in a flawed system; try instead to discern and rebuke that aspect of its organization which allows or encourages the behavior that has provoked your displeasure.
A meta-comment: It's always good to have an arsenal of mainstream-accessible quotes to use for those times when explaining game theory is just loo much of an inferential leap. I'd like to find more of these.
Don't hate the playa, hate the game
Disagree. This is just a get out of jail free card, a universal excuse. Don't blame me, blame the system / my genes / my memes / my parents / determinism / indeterminism...
When said in first person, it can feel like a dodge.
However, when used as a third-person response to retorts like "politicians have got to stop being so corrupt!", I find it fits just fine, and it is in this context that I posted it. (also, notice that the elaboration is in third person)
That just is not what the statement means
That may not be what it's supposed to mean, but I've heard people use it that way.
If there were no players, then there would be no game.
Given the context, I stand by my interpretation.
Er, that context doesn't sound like "I'm a puppet of the system" to me at all. It sounds more like, "don't be mad at me because I'm successful and you're not ("Actin' like a brother done did somethin' wrong cause he got his game tight"); if you have to be mad at something, be mad at the rules which elevate some and lower others ("some come up and some get done up"), by requiring us to risk much to gain great rewards ("If you out for mega cheddar, you got to go high risk"). Otherwise, work on improving your own performance ("tighten your aim"), rather than envying my success ("act like you don't see me / You wanna be me")."
Given that most of the song is bragging about his past actions and willingness to take more such actions in the future, it certainly doesn't sound like a declaration of helplessness. Heck, for a rap song, it's practically self-improvement advice. ;-)
I think this quote is especially apposite when your looking at ways of reforming a system. Attributing bad policy outcomes to the perfidy of individuals is generally unhelpful in designing a solution.
Don't hate the playa, hate the game
It's good to understand the player's actions as being part of a particular game. But it's okay to punish the player, if you're feeling altruistic or vengeful enough (that is, you want to do your part to discourage people from playing that game).
When you're not prepared to anger the player, the game is indeed a safe target for your ineffectual outrage.
If a man proves too clearly and convincingly to himself . . . that a tiger is an optical illusion--well, he will find out he is wrong. The tiger will himself intervene in the discussion, in a manner which will be in every sense conclusive.
G. K. Chesterton (unsourced)
Apologetics is a subset of theology, concerned strictly with justifying the tenets of the faith to doubters and nonbelievers.
Thomas Aquinas, by contrast, argued for the existence of God only briefly at the very beginning of the Summa Theologica, and devoted the rest to elucidating the properties of God, the other supernatural beings, and humanity. Much of theology is philosophy done with some particular background assumptions; apologetics is argument and rhetoric in defense of those assumptions.
ETA: In the modern world, most of the positive arguments for the existence of God are (of course) fatally flawed. The older "mainline" denominations realize this on some level and have essentially fallen back to the position "You can't know that there's not a God", which is something of a defense against losing one's own faith but not a great opening gambit for winning converts. The newer Protestant denominations aren't generally aware of the flaws in their arguments, and so use them to win converts.
In particular, the mainline denominations (and their theologians) shy away from empirical tests, while the newer denominations (and their apologists) embrace bad empirical tests. This is of course an oversimplification, but it's generally true.
There is some theoretical amount of honesty that is indistinguishable from mental illness...Imagine if you stopped filtering everything you said...just try to imagine yourself living without self-censorship. Wouldn't you sound crazy?
In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.
Winston Churchill
What scientists have in common is not that they agree on the same theories, or even that they always agree on the same facts, but that they agree on the procedures to be followed in testing theories and establishing facts.
Bruce Gregory "Inventing Reality: Physics as Language" pp.186-187.
On noticing confusion:
"Holmes," I cried, "this is impossible."
"Admirable!" he said. "A most illuminating remark. It is impossible as I state it, and therefore I must in some respect have stated it wrong.
Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Priory School
You'll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.
-- David Foster Wallace
"If the wonder's gone when the truth is known, there never was any wonder." — Gregory House, M.D. ("House" Season 4, Episode 8 "You Don't Want to Know," written by Sara Hess)
I'm quite uncomfortable with these sorts of statements. Rationalism and science are ways of approaching and analysing the world, not modes of aesthetic appreciation. This smacks a little to me of the idea that the scientifically aware realise that there is 'more beauty' in nature than in art.
If I met someone who was clear-minded, analytical and empirical I wouldn't call them irrational and unscientific just because they experience wonder at unexplained magic tricks rather than great scientific theories, or because they found the poetry of Eliot more beautiful than the structure of the universe (I know you haven't claimed the latter, just addressing a more widespread 'scientific people appreciate X' claim).
It's terrible not being able to be happy even though you're not wrong.
-Kaname Madoka, Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Episode #7 of Madoka, and I'm thinking, "It's amazing how many anime problems can be solved by polyamory and the pattern theory of identity."
EDMUND
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit
of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity; fools by
heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion
of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star!
Wm. Shakspere King Lear
The classical theorists resemble Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world who, discovering that in experience straight lines apparently parallel often meet, rebuke the lines for not keeping straight as the only remedy for the unfortunate collisions which are occurring. Yet, in truth, there is no remedy except to throw over the axiom of parallels and to work out a non-Euclidean geometry.
-John Maynard Keynes, on models of unemployment that seemed nice on paper but did not measure up to the real world.
"An accumulation of facts, however large, is no more science than a pile of bricks is a house."
-Clyde Kluckhohn
Thinking allows us to anticipate ill consequences without suffering them.
Roger Peters, Practical Intelligence
What exactly qualifies some physical systems to play the role of 'measurer'? Was the wavefunction of the world waiting to jump for thousands of millions of years until a single-celled living creature appeared? Or did it have to wait a little longer, for some better qualified system... with a PhD?
John Stewart Bell, "Against Measurement" in Physics World, 1990.
Running into a pole is a drag, but never being allowed to run into a pole is a disaster. Pain is part of the price of freedom.
Daniel Kish (Human Echolocation researcher, advocate and instructor).
I would rather see the pole coming so that I wouldn't run into it. I'm not sure this metaphor succeeded.
I rather suspect you miss the point of the metaphor. Perhaps you also missed the entirely literal meaning as well. Seeing the pole coming is not an option you have available if, as is the case with Kish and many of the people he works with, you do not have retinas.
while enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere, on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disaster.
[ In The Intelligent Investor, Benjamin Graham, who was Warren Buffett's mentor, shares his views on investing for a wider audience. I like the rationalist, no-nonsense approach he takes (as seen in this quote) esp. in a field like this ]
Stupid is as stupid does.
This is an old saying, which I learnt from the 1994 movie Forrest Gump (not otherwise a bastion of rationalism).
While we may judge people as irrational ("stupid") based on what they know (epistemic rationality, roughly), it's instrumental rationality that matters in the end.
The majority of people in this world are ataxic: they cannot coordinate their mental muscles to make a purposed movement. They have no real Will, only a set of wishes, many of which contradict others. The victim wobbles from one to the other (and it is no less wobbling because the movements may occasionally be very violent), and at the end of life the movements cancel each other out. Nothing has been achieved, except the one thing of which the victim is not conscious: the destruction of his own character, the confirming of indecision.
-- Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA
Crowley's writings are an odd mixture of utter raving, self-conscious mysticism, and surprising introspective clarity. The above refers to his concept of True Will, which reads at times like an occultist's parameterization of epistemic rationality; some of his writings on meditation, too, wouldn't look too far out of place as top-level posts here.
Here's a long one:
"When humanity lay grovelling in all men's sight, crushed to the earth under the dead weight of superstition whose grim features loured menacingly upon mortals from the four quarters of the sky, a man of Greece was first to raise mortal eyes in defiance, first to stand erect and brave the challenge. Fables of the gods did not crush him, nor the lightning flash and the growling menace of the sky. Rather, they quickened his manhood, so that he, first of all men, longed to smash the constraining locks of nature's doors. The vital vigour of his mind prevailed. He ventured far out beyond the flaming ramparts of the world and voyaged in mind throughout infinity. Returning victorious, he proclaimed to us what can be and what cannot: how a limit is fixed to the power of everything and an immovable frontier post. Therefore superstition in its turn lies crushed beneath his feet, and we by his triumph are lifted level with the skies."
-Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe
I wasn't sure who this was referring to (I thought it was about Socrates), so I looked it up. It's about Epicurus.
If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.
William James
Outrage is fine if it leads to effective action. If it doesn't, it's just a hobby.
William T. Powers
An irrationality quote from Samuel Johnson via Boswell:
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."
I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex.
Bertrand Russell
I am taking a first-aid class at my local community college. Our instructor, a paramedic, after telling us about the importance of blood flow to the brain, and the poor prognosis for someone who is left comatose from oxygen deprivation, says:
"There are some people who say, 'But miracles can happen!' Yeah, miracles are one in a million. What number are you?"
I got your Friendly AI problem right here...
"To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society."
Theodore Roosevelt
Can't help but twist that into "To educate a society in morals and not in mind is to educate a menace to humanity..."
It is discipline, the rigorous attention to detail, that distinguishes the work of a scholar from that of a dilettante.
Unfortunately I lost the source for this - anybody recognize it? It was from a book I read 12 to 15 years ago, I can't remember any more than that.
"If you want truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between "for" and "against" is the mind's worst disease." — Sent-ts'an
There is no thing easier than to fool oneself. For, what we desire, we willingly believe. Reality, however, is often different.
Demosthenes (384–322 BCE)
I look at my Caltech classmates and conclude that math whizzes do not take over the world. The true geniuses—the artists of the scientific world—may be unlocking the mysteries of the universe, but the run-of-the-mill really smart overachievers like me? They’re likely to end up in high-class drone work, perfecting new types of crossword-puzzle-oriented screen savers or perhaps (really) tweaking the computer system that controls the flow in beer guns at Applebee’s.
Not a rationality quote as such, but maybe an anti-hubris caveat for those of us that were never child prodigies.
Ethics is ... the art of recommending to others the sacrifices for cooperation with oneself.
-Bertrand Russell
Ethics is ... the art of recommending to others the sacrifices for cooperation with oneself.
The great ethicists of history share essentially the same goal: get strangers to always pick D. ...
Homer: Why'd they build this ghost town so far away?
Lisa: Because they discovered gold right over there!
Homer: It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything.
The Simpsons, "Kidney Trouble"
Unless the group is 'taking in', learning from life, then it really has nothing to work with, and nothing real to offer other people, except the memory of something. And there are so many groups around trying to make it on the memory of something - something Jesus said once, or Carl Jung. We are actually living witnesses, celebrating the life we are sharing now, or we are trying to live in the past, which no longer exists anyway.
David Templer
I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.
— Randall Munroe, today's xkcd alt text
Pragmatic rationality, perhaps? :
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. Yogi Berra
You would have to notice when they acheive the impossible.
Or that they make visible progress towards the impossible.
Or that they acheive interesting side projects in their down time from working on the impossible.
Or that they acheive interesting side projects in their down time from working on the impossible.
That is a good one (that applies even under strict definitions of 'the impossible'). Closely related is if they make valuable tangential contributions to the non-impossible while working on the impossible.
"The hell of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the hell where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the hell and become such a part of it that you can never see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the hell, are not hell, then make them endure, give them space." -- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
This is the las...
"Hell" is the default translation, and definitely the correct one here, in my opinion (just as it is, for example, in Dante).
"Inferno" in English should just be a fancy Italianate way of saying "hell", but seems to have acquired a connotation of literal heat and flames. (That is, it's as if people have forgotten that "the blazing inferno of a burning building" is a metaphor.) In any case, neither cultured fanciness nor literal flames are intended by Calvino in that passage, as far as I can tell.
I'm not sure prudishness is necessarily to blame; it may just be a case of that all-too-common translator syndrome of reaching for a word that looks like the original word, rather than the word that the author would have used if he or she were actually a native speaker of the language you're translating into.
Here's the passage in the original, for those interested (source):
L'inferno dei viventi non è qualcosa che sarà; se ce n'è uno, è quello che è già qui, l'inferno che abitiamo tutti i giorni, che formiamo stando insieme. Due modi ci sono per non soffrirne. Il primo riesce facile a molti: accettare l'inferno e diventarne parte fino al punto di non vederlo più. Il secondo è rischioso ed esige attenzione e apprendimento continui: cercare e saper riconoscere chi e cosa, in mezzo all'inferno, non è inferno, e farlo durare, e dargli spazio.
It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence; and where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is worse than presumption to believe.
-- Clifford, The Ethics of Belief
But I've learned from my mistakes
This time I will escape
I'm too young to die
We're all too young to die!
Agent Orange - Too Young To Die
The golden goose is a great thing for everybody until down the road you discover you are that guy wringing the bird's neck screaming at it to lay you some more goddamn eggs you honking piece of shit.
-Andrew Hussie
Perhaps it will help to know that Andrew Hussie is a webcomic artist, and his webcomic is the golden egg in question?
It's a newcomb-like problem faced by anyone who wants to enjoy anyone else's creative output. People fear creating good things for fear that they will be expected to go on creating them.
More generally, it's an extension of the original moral-- have respect for how things actually work instead of trying to force them to be what you want.
The word real does not seem to be a descriptive term. It seems to be an honorific term that we bestow on our most cherished beliefs - our most treasured ways of thinking.
Bruce Gregory, Inventing Reality: Physics as Language, p.184
This point was made long ago by J.L. Austin in (I believe) Sense and Sensibilia. Austin points out several things about "real", among them that "real" is substantive-hungry: You can't answer "Is such-and-so real?" without asking first, "Is it a real what?"
A decoy duck is not a real duck, but it is a real decoy -- whereas a rubber duck is not a real decoy; and a decoy coot might be mistaken for a decoy duck if you know little of waterfowl, but isn't a real decoy duck.
There is no sense of "real" that applies to all substantives that we would describe as real. The word makes sense only in contrast to specific ways of being unreal: being a forgery, a toy, an hallucination, a fictional character, an exaggeration, a case of mistaken identity, a doctored picture, etc. It is these negative concepts, and not the concept of "real", that actually do all the explanatory work. "Real" is both ambiguous and negative.
It's hard to define 'real'; it's not clear that it's doing any work.
"Hard to define" and "not clearly doing any work" are distinct properties; I'd agree about the former and not the latter. I do find it difficult to give a definition of "real" that isn't going to break when dealing with unusual border cases; but nevertheless, if I consider the question "Is Harry Potter real?", or "Is Barack Obama real?", or "Are atoms real?", then the two possible answers I could give for each will imply distinct models of reality that anticipate different experiences, and furthermore the word "real" can transfer such a model into someone else's mind pretty successfully. It doesn't particularly seem to have any of the characteristics of a non-descriptive term.
...Man's spontaneous tendency is to give credence to assertions and reproduce them, without even distinguishing them clearly from his own observations. In everyday life, do we not accept indiscriminately, without any sort of verification, rumors, anonymous and unverified reports, all sorts of "documents" of little or no worth? We need a special reason to take the trouble to examine the provenance and value of a document about what happened yesterday; otherwise, if it is not unlikely to the point of scandal, and as long as no one contradicts it, we
And is that laziness so bad? If extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, presumably ordinary claims require merely ordinary evidence...
"Ordinary claims require merely ordinary evidence" is an overlooked and tremendously important corollary.
...Agents who correctly record information from their observations, and industriously draw correct conclusions from their evidence, may be rational in some Olympian sense. But they are still cold-blooded recording devices. But knowledge is scarce, and rationality does not reside in always being cautious, and continual correctness. Its peak moments occur with warm-blooded agents, who are opinionated, make mistakes, but who subsequently correct themselves. Thus, rationality is about the dynamics of being wrong just as much as about that of being right: through
Scepticism is as much the result of knowledge, as knowledge is of scepticism. To be content with what we at present know, is, for the most part, to shut our ears against conviction; since, from the very gradual character of our education, we must continually forget, and emancipate ourselves from, knowledge previously acquired; we must set aside old notions and embrace fresh ones; and, as we learn, we must be daily unlearning something which it has cost us no small labour and anxiety to acquire.
Alexander Pope
I have asked dozens of bicycle riders how they turn to the left. I have never found a single person who stated all the facts correctly when first asked. They almost invariably said that to turn to the left, they turned the handlebar to the left and as a result made a turn to the left. But on further questioning them, some would agree that they first turned the handlebar a little to the right, and then as the machine inclined to the left, they turned the handlebar to the left and as a result made the circle, inclining inward.
-Wilbur Wright
Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
Samuel Butler
Quoted in the chapter on bounded rationality and the Revelation Principle in "Computational Aspects of Preference Aggregation" (.pdf) - an award winning 2006 PhD. Dissertation in AI by Vincent Conitzer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_base_on_balls
Baseball pitchers have the option to 'walk' a batter, giving the other team a slight advantage but denying them the chance to gain a large advantage. Barry Bonds, a batter who holds the Major League Baseball record for home runs (a home run is a coup for the batter's team), also holds the record for intentional walks. By walking Barry Bonds, the pitcher denies him a shot at a home run. In other words, Paige is advising other pitchers to walk a batter when it minimizes expected risk to do so.
Since this denies the batter the opportunity to even try to get a hit, some consider it to be unsportsmanlike, and when overused it makes a baseball game less interesting. A culture of good sportsmanship and interesting games are communal goods in baseball-- the former keeps a spirit of goodwill, and the latter increases profitability-- so at a stretch, you might say Paige advises defecting in Prisoner's Dilemma type problems.
"Once we are all working in the slave-pits together, I will try to put in a good word for you all. I will be like the old Barnard Hughes character in Tron, who remembers the Master Control Program when it was just accounting software."
-- Ken Jennings
It is necessary to know the power and the infirmity of our nature, before we can determine what reason can do in restraining the emotions, and what is beyond her power.
Spinoza
Your brain has only a thin veneer of relatively modern, analytical circuits that are often no match for the blunt emotional power of the most ancient parts of your mind.
Jason Zweig
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not, sadly, their own facts."
By Ben Goldacre
My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the map-maker's distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual.
-- Howard Zinn in A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
There is some value in criticizing that which has been improperly popularly lionized, but this introduces its own skew. Zinn managed to truly piss me off because in his chapter on WWII he either did not mention or mentioned only in passing the rape of Nanking and similar Japanese atrocities, spent a few paragraphs on the Holocaust, surprisingly didn't particularly mention the firebombings of Dresden or Tokyo, but harped for several pages on the atomic bombs. Perhaps they needed examination, but incessantly and loudly examining them at the expense of everything else leaves the reader with a distinct impression of Zinn's own political beliefs.
I think this might be behind much of (American) conservatives' anger with liberals in the foreign policy domain, as exemplified by the insult "blame-America-first". Liberals are questioning America's policies, which is well and good, while leaving it as read that the actions of their adversaries (since the dynamic evolved, usually USSR or terrorists) are much worse. Conservatives see that apparent bias and gain the impression that all liberals hate America in particular. The situation is not improved by much political mind-death on all sides. This is probably going off on a bit of a tangent, but it's at least marginally relevant.
"Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought" Henri Bergson
When I first read this, I thought it was just applause lights. But I actually think it's highly applicable to rationalist standards of belief and practice.
Perhaps this precedes subsequent rationality:
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. John Dewey
On Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions
Context: The main character has been talking about the wonderful mysteriousness that makes another character so interesting. His companion (a self described humanist), tries to correct him, saying:
"You should know that I have an equal dislike of seeing you in hot pursuit of mystery. By turning personality into an enigma, you run the danger of idol-worship. You are venerating a mask. You see something mystical where there is only mystification."
-Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
I'm afraid that this isn't a quote, but it seems like the best place to put it.
Earlier today, I had a discussion with my girlfriend about Santa Claus etc. She opined that it was worthwhile to believe in ‘impossible things’ (her words) because belief is in itself valuable. I didn't know where to begin disagreeing with that. (There was also something about the ‘magic of childhood’.)
This evening, we saw Rango. She squeezed my hand when the characters started talking about how it was important to have something to believe in, it gives people hope, etc. I ...
I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.
Knowing the risk, I quote this (given that I am a utilitarian pragmatist):
Truth is what works. William James
Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.
— G. K. Chesterson
From Lord Of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien:
"He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom."
Although I think breaking things actually can be pretty useful if there are more things of that kind. If you're breaking something unique, well, then...
Intelligence is your primary means of survival.
People who keep secrets are your enemies.
Keeping secrets is a waste of time.
from a review of T Leary, The Intelligence Agents in Michael Marotta, The Code Book, 3rd ed
...People just have no clue about their genuine nature. I have countless friends who describe themselves as "cynical," and they're all wrong. True cynics would never classify themselves as such, because it would mean that they know their view of the world is unjustly negative; despite their best efforts at being grumpy, a self-described cynic is secretly optimistic about normal human nature. Individuals who are truly cynical will always insist they're pragmatic. The same goes for anyone who claims to be "creative." If you define your pers
[I]f the world weren’t going to hell, it would be a great place.
-- Paul Krugman
(Not that this is necessarily a rationality quote, I just think it's cute.)
"Hell" is the default translation, and definitely the correct one here, in my opinion (just as it is, for example, in Dante).
"Inferno" in English should just be a fancy Italianate way of saying "hell", but seems to have acquired a connotation of literal heat and flames. (That is, it's as if people have forgotten that "the blazing inferno of a burning building" is a metaphor.) In any case, neither cultured fanciness nor literal flames are intended by Calvino in that passage, as far as I can tell.
I'm not sure prudishness is necessarily to blame; it may just be a case of that all-too-common translator syndrome of reaching for a word that looks like the original word, rather than the word that the author would have used if he or she were actually a native speaker of the language you're translating into.
Here's the passage in the original, for those interested (source):