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10 Rationality Quotes Thread June 2015

by Gondolinian

31st May 2015

1 min read

134

10

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

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Rationality Quotes Thread June 2015

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[-]dspeyer10y360

As a general rule, 90% of the execution time of your program will be spent in 10% of its code. Profilers are tools that help you identify the 10% of hot spots that constrain the speed of your program. This is a good thing for making it faster.

But in the Unix tradition, profilers have a far more important function. They enable you not to optimize the other 90%! This is good, and not just because it saves you work. The really valuable effect is that not optimizing that 90% holds down global complexity and reduces bugs.

-- Eric Raymond, The Art of Unix Programming

(Applies to optimization in general)

[-]satt10y250

If, like the truth, falsehood had only one face, we should know better where we are, for we should then take the opposite of what a liar said to be the truth. But the opposite of a truth has a hundred thousand shapes and a limitless field.

— Montaigne, "On Liars"

[-]Lumifer10y230

I am the victim of a perversely designed set of incentives
You game the system
He is a crook.

-- Daniel of CrookedTimber

The whole post from which the quote is taken is quite interesting as well.

[-]LawrenceC10y200

"Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: it gives them something to do."

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, on the topic of mysterious answers to mysterious questions.

[-]VoiceOfRa10y150

Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.) Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point

... (read more)

7satt10y

— Mike Skinner, "When You Wasn't Famous"

0[anonymous]10y

This is interesting. But perhaps some professions or some subsets of them are really better understood by the general public and journalists than others. For example in software, a lot of people seem to have a good basic idea about what a web browser is how game development looks like. However it is really funny that if you work with ERP/business software like SAP, Oracle Financials or Navision, you find that nobody outside the fairly narrow profession has any clue. Articles are full of empty platitudes like "XY implements best-practice business processs and provides transparency" and it is very clear that this all simply means absolutely no idea about what it actually does, or how, or even what it is for. Meanwhile, a huge number of people know that game development is usually about artists making 3D objects and textures, an inner core of real programmers making a 3D engine and an outer circle of less-real-programmers-but-know-more-about-fun type of people writing scripts to script the behavior of the 3D objects in the engine. At least this is what the common knowledge seems to be and IMHO fairly accurate.

0Zubon10y

It's accurate but not very precise, in the same way that the story about how there are wet streets and rain is true but misses the inner connections. Many people fail to get the distinctions between programmers, artists, and designers, because they want designers to fix bugs, just shift staff to design, etc. And testers are nowhere in that simplified model. So people have enough of an idea to get the wrong idea. Many game developers have a shaky idea of how game development works once the team is larger than can work in one room. That becomes project management, and if you ever want to to see the planning fallacy in all its glory, follow game development and the timelines of when things will be ready. Showing off my own availability bias, the first example that comes to mind is this game, which was "two months from beta" three years ago and has yet to release. Heck, last week's big story in game development was the PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight, a major release that had to be taken off the market and is now labeled as available this fall. They had to revise the release date after releasing.

[-]ike10y120

If the BBC, the UN, and specialists cannot agree on what the word means, neither can politicians or the police. Does it make sense to soldier on fighting a semantic battle that will never be won? Why argue for a word that everyone agrees in confusing and some find loaded?

Daniel Pipes, I Give Up: There Is No Terrorism, There Are No Terrorists

(Noteworthy for changing their opinion after decades of holding the opposite view)

-2VoiceOfRa10y

Because a lot of the people involved object to the semantics of the word not the word itself. And they will fight just as hard against any other word that seeks to point to that cluster in thingspace.

2ike10y

The point is that there is no cluster in thingspace referred to by the word; the fact that there are so many diverging definitions shows that. If he switches to another word or words that don't have basic definitional debates, then while people can object to his implications of using the word, they can't misinterpret or be confused over what is meant.

0Lumifer10y

This is debatable. I believe there is -- it's just that the word is so convenient for propaganda, it is routinely hijacked.

-2VoiceOfRa10y

It's not just that. For a lot of people it's convenient to apply the connotations of "terrorist" to everything besides actual terrorists, e.g., the AP is perfectly willing to call the UKIP or Tea Party "terrorists" while refusing to call groups like Hamas terrorist. This is similar to the way the US government has declared war on poverty/drugs/cancer, while calling actual wars "kinetic actions".

5ChristianKl10y

Could you link to an article in which the AP calls the Tea Party "terrorists"? The term terrorist is often used to describe nonstate actors. Hamas is govern and that makes it a state actor. That's basically the same justification of why the CIA employee who isn't a military solider isn't a terrorist when he bombs rescuers against the laws of war with a drone.

[-]Salemicus10y110

When unsavvy observers see a nonprofit organization with dozens of people on its board, they think: “Look how many great people are committed to this organization! It must be extremely well run.” Actually, a huge board will exercise no effective oversight at all; it merely provides cover for whatever microdictator actually runs the organization.

Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

[-]dspeyer10y110

You are probably not cynical enough if you think you could beat seven billion people at cynicism.

--Alicorn? (I'm not sure exactly how authorship of these pages works)

7Alicorn10y

Yes, that line was mine. I'm flattered :)

[-]Lumifer10y90

While I’m impressed by an explanation that’s as flexible as a circus contortionist, I’d prefer something that isn’t consistent with any possible state of the universe. I’m no Popperian, but I like my theories to be at least a little bit falsifiable.

Scott Sumner

027chaos10y

I have a hard time telling theories which are bad ones due to inappropriately flexibility apart from theories which are good ones but work in conditions with incomplete data or necessarily limited assumptions etc. Are there any good formalized notions of flexibility that do work distinguishing these?

2Lumifer10y

There are formalized notions of flexibility for models which generally use concepts like "degrees of freedom". However they are limited in that they don't take account of the "hidden flexibility" stemming from things like the garden of the forking paths or the filedrawer bias. Theories have additional issues -- like not being sufficiently well formalized.

[-]Davidmanheim10y90

It is easier to imagine the rest of the universe being just as it is if a patient took pill A rather than pill B than it is trying to imagine what else in the universe would have had to be different if the temperature yesterday had been 30 degrees rather than 40. It may be the case that human actions, seem sufficiently free that we have an easier time imagining only one specific action being different, and nothing else.

(T. Vanderweele, “Explanation in causal Inference” p. 453-455) – Quoted in J. Pearl, Blog post “Causation without Manipulation”

127chaos10y

I recognize the idea of the quote, but am wondering how true it really is, and why this would be so. If the pill counterfactual seems easier than the weather counterfactual, is this due to something fundamentally important about complexity or is it just an illusion? I ask this because when I try to think about the details of each scenario, the pill example ceases to seem comparatively simple. Asking questions like "how does pill A get to pill B's location?" presents to me as many difficulties as asking "how did that heat get to that location"? So maybe the difference lies in the fact that we tend to not look at details when evaluating counterfactuals relevant to human decisions?

1Davidmanheim10y

I think it does have to do with both complexity and recognition of complexity - I suspect that the book goes into much more detail, but it's expensive, so I don't have it.

0[anonymous]10y

Just to clarify, this is a serious issue when doing counterfactual analysis; we can't easily estimate many counterfactuals because of this bias.

[-]27chaos10y70

Perhaps the most important message to have emerged from these studies on instabilities is that we do not necessarily have a complete understanding of a system once we know the equations that govern it; what we really want to know are the particular solutions to those equations. The latter need not be obvious from the former. This cannot be emphasized too strongly in any branch of science. The American physicist Freeman Dyson has pointed out that for Albert Einstein and J.Robert Oppenheimer in their later years, 'to discover the right equations was all tha

... (read more)

[-]Epictetus10y40

A single example of extravagance or greed does a lot of harm--an intimate who leads a pampered life gradually makes one soft and flabby; a wealthy neighbor provokes cravings in one; a companion with a malicious nature tends to rub off some of his rust even on someone of an innocent and open-hearted nature--what then do you imagine the effect on a person's character is when the assault comes from the world at large? You must inevitably either hate or imitate the world. But the right thing is to shun both courses: you should neither become like the bad beca

... (read more)

[-]Epictetus10y40

That which is past is gone and irrevocable, and wise men have enough to do with things present and to come: therefore they do but trifle with themselves that labour in past matters. There is no man that doth a wrong for the wrong's sake, but thereby to purchase himself profit or pleasure or honour or the like. Therefore why should I be angry with a man for loving himself better than me?

--Francis Bacon, On Revenge

5Gondolinian10y

You don't have to be angry (and it is probably better if you aren't), but deterrents are still a thing.

4Epictetus10y

Deterrent effects would fall under "things present and to come". If you expect some kind of future benefit from a retaliatory act, that's one thing. On the other hand, if you seek vengeance because you're outraged that someone would dare wrong you, then you're mentally living in the past.

-2Gondolinian10y

Fair enough, but there's also a sense in which deterrence is acausal. In order to make a truly credible threat of retaliation for defection, you have to be completely willing to follow through with the retaliation if they defect, even if, after the defection, following through does not seem to have any future benefits.

2Gondolinian10y

I shouldn't have phrased that so confidently; I was essentially just thinking out loud. Would anyone who knows more about decision theory mind explaining where I went wrong?

5Epictetus10y

It's not wrong. In many contexts such a strategy is advisable. It's the theory behind mutually assured destruction. You personally aren't going to benefit from launching a retaliatory nuclear strike, but the knowledge that you'd do it anyway might just keep your enemy from launching a first strike. On a smaller scale, you can see this sort of thing going on in prisons and criminal organizations where appearing weak can turn you into a target. One drawback is that while a reputation for retaliating against every wrong will make people less likely to wrong you, those who decide to wrong you anyway will make sure to leave you in no position to retaliate. There's another drawback that occurs if you allow for miscommunication: retaliation against something you wrongfully thought was a defection can lead your opponent to retaliate against what he perceives is an unprovoked attack. It all depends on the situation. Sometimes it's better to be more forgiving and sometimes it's better to be more vindictive.

5VoiceOfRa10y

You weren't. A single down vote doesn't mean you're wrong.

2Gram_Stone10y

I don't know a lot about decision theory, and I have to guess at an unidentified person's thought process, but I'll take a swing at this: * They might have downvoted you because real-world deterrence involves causal influence. Usually where there's talk of precommitments, there's also talk of acausal trade, so I think your brain lumped them together, but agents can precommit in ordinary trade as well. However, it is true that you can analyze ordinary trade in acausal terms, and it seems that you have done this. So your words implied that deterrence doesn't involve any causal effects, which is false, but you really just wanted to point out that you can analyze ordinary trade acausally, which is true. * They might have downvoted you because they think it's silly to talk about provably cooperative humans, or further, because they find it objectionable that your ideas about decision theory and provable cooperation would lead you to what they consider a morally repugnant conclusion in your counterfactual (i.e. retaliate anyway); I think I've seen some people who think things like that. I do consider this a lot less likely than the first possibility. * They might have downvoted you because the agent in the downvoter's simulation of your counterfactual was using causal decision theory. Also, I don't really get what the point would be if deterrence were acausal. Were you thinking something like, "Deterrence is acausal, therefore maybe tense is not a concept that we can even apply to deterrence."?

3DanArmak10y

Deterrence is the fitness-maximizer, revenge is the adaptation-executer.

[-]James_Miller10y40

SLAVER: What about the dwarf?

MALKO: Worthless. Cut his throat.

TYRION (The Dwarf): Wait, wait! Wait, wait, wait, let’s discuss this!

MALKO: And then chop off his cock. We can sell it for a fortune. A dwarf’s cock has magic powers.

TYRION: Wait, wait, wait, wait! You can’t just hand a dried cock to a merchant and expect him to pay for it. He has to know it came from a dwarf. And how could he know unless he sees the dwarf?

SLAVER: It will be a dwarf-sized cock.

TYRION: Guess again.

MALKO: The dwarf lives until we find a cock merchant.

From Game of Thrones

This relat... (read more)

5advael10y

It's less that he finds an argument whose premise is repugnant, and more that he realizes that he doesn't have a good angle of attack for convincing the slavers to not mutilate/kill him at all, but does have one for delaying doing so. I'd argue it's more of a "perfect is the enemy of the good" judgement on his part than a disagreeable argument (After all, Tyrion has gleefully made that clarification to several people before.)

3Fivehundred10y

What would he find detestable about having a large cock?

2[anonymous]10y

It is funny that in the books he repeatedly says to women that he has a normal sized penis.

0[anonymous]10y

(BTW, in my country there is a urban legend according to which height and penis length are inversely correlated.)

[-]VoiceOfRa10y30

Things don't necessarily happen for a reason; but things survive for a reason.

Nassim Taleb

[-]Manfred10y30

Before the modern triumph of the definition of "subjective probability" associated with de Finetti (c. 1937), there were a multitude of attempts to formalize this vague concept. Here's John Maynard Keynes, from A Treatise on Probability (1921):

Probability is relative in a sense to the principles of human reason. The degree of probability, which it is rational for us to entertain, does not presume perfect logical insight, and is relative in part to the secondary propositions which we in fact know; and it is not dependent upon whether more perfec

... (read more)

[-]Gunnar_Zarncke10y20

"One of the reasons we are attracted to the Colosseum is because of the incredible violence that went on here. The question it poses is, how could such an advanced culture have staged such bloody spectacles? The Colosseum is a snapshot in stone, a physical embodiment of the culture of Rome."

-- Gary Glassman (quoted in Colosseum killing machine reconstructed after more than 1,500 years

Emphasis mine: I'm not surprised. Culture is relative and I see lots of reasons this could have been beneficial to the society at that time.

6Jiro10y

The obvious question is "what's so contradictory about being an advanced culture and staging bloody spectacles"? Especially given the large ground that is covered by the term "advanced culture".

0[anonymous]10y

Well, it is one of the things that was drilled into us all life long that there is a progress in history from barbaric behavior to "nice" (or, properly, ethical, compassionate) behavior. But beyond that there is indeed a process of increasing cooperation. There is usually peace inside nations and empires, i.e. they don't allow their constitutent tribes, if they still exist, to fight each other. While this increasing cooperation is largely about banding together to fight someone else, still it creates a certain progress in morals. Thucydides wrote that the ancestors of Greeks did not know the idea of peace. They just pirated on each other all the time. Peace was invented through military alliance: teamed up against some other polis and then realized it is not nice to pirate on your ally. So through banding up to fight someone else, internal cooperation and peace is acheived. And you cannot have an advanced culture without it. There is no economic progress with a deep division of labor, meaning trade, meaning peace within the empire. And this success of cooperation permeates then religion and philosophy and people's values. Sorry, I think I dumped a bit of an unedited train of thought on you. I'll try to organize better. So advanced means rich, rich means division of labor, div. of labor means trade, trade means peace inside the empire, means a value system that values cooperation and peace increasingly, then the whole thing gets justified by philosophy, art and religion which ingraines the values even more, and then they should be shocked by bloody spectacles.

0Jiro10y

The "bloody spectacles" that the article refers to are animals, not people, being killed. There is a cursory mention that the animals fought people, but the article is clearly about the animals. The kind of cooperation in advanced cultures that you're talking about involves people cooperating with other people, not with animals.

6Richard_Kennaway10y

One can imagine alternative versions of Rome with or without the bloody spectacles, and with various possible levels of prosperity, happiness, or whatever you count as a benefit to society. Which versions are the counterfactuals against which you are comparing the actual history?

3Epictetus10y

I think there's an underlying assumption here that an advanced culture should be similar to our own. Let's reverse the question: "How did a culture that stages such bloody spectacles manage to achieve so much?". Rome didn't become advanced and then start with gladiator games; those were around in some form for a long time. Is it that big a shock that Rome managed to get far without abandoning those games?

7DanielLC10y

It was similar to ours. They just didn't have CGI, so they had to do bloody spectacles the hard way.

3Lumifer10y

I think the underlying assumption is much worse: that any advanced culture must be squeamish about things which the author finds squeamish, barbaric, and uncouth.

0[anonymous]10y

I think it is not just squeamishness, I think it is the idea that without a strongly pro-cooperation value system, how the eff does one achieve the level of cooperation to have a wide division of labor and trade and thus actually get rich and advanced?

0Lumifer10y

I see no contradiction at all between having a "strongly pro-cooperation value system" and having bloody spectacles in the arena. Humans still are great fans of bloody spectacles, it's just that nowadays it's easier to produce fake ones on screens.

2[anonymous]10y

Yes, they stem from the human sacrifice of captives at the funerals of big guys, really old. Downright sacred, originally, not just a spectacle. Your proposal sounds good. If I interpret it properly: cultures have old traditions that live on despite maybe even contradicting their own values. I.e. if they had to invent it at that, they would not, because it contradicts the values, but being a tradition, it carries on. For example today we would not invent cars or at least would not allow civilian car ownership. We have a safety oriented culture and proposing that every chump should be allowed to drive two tons of steel with 180 km/h top speed and easily wiping out a bus stop full of people if he falls asleep or killing a whole family in another car, if it was proposed today it would be shot down as a CRAZY dangerous idea. It would be seen as far worse than civilian gun ownership because with a gun you don't kill five people by mistake. But as it is an old tradition, so lives on despite contradicting accepted values. But if we had to invent it now, we would be horrified.

1[anonymous]10y

Saying "values" and "culture" doesn't generate correct predictions in an environment where people can spot trade-offs that work in their favor.

0[anonymous]10y

This is true, if I interpret it correctly (trade-off: expect utility gained > expected utility loss from violating values and risking ostracism) but how is it relevant here?

-1Lumifer10y

Err... no.

2[anonymous]10y

http://nypost.com/2011/12/16/hey-they-still-let-us-drive/

6Lumifer10y

Yeah... NY Post is not really the bastion of thoughtful analyses and deep reflection.

-9VoiceOfRa10y

1gwern10y

Contradiction is all well and good, but I think you can do better; can you name three examples of new technologies invented in the last 50 years and freely available to all civilian Americans each of which technologies causes up to 30,000 deaths and 2 million injuries annually?

3Epictetus10y

High fructose corn syrup and its ilk have been rather devastating.

0Lumifer10y

Et tu, Brute, want to look at only one side of the cost-benefit analysis?

0hairyfigment10y

I only thought of one possible example immediately - but are you asserting that people predicted those numbers when we invented cars?

1Vaniver10y

You do realize that that's one thousandth the scale of what gwern is describing, right? (That may not be quite fair, as phone-distracted drivers fall in the "drivers" category instead of the "phone" category, but order of magnitude is important!)

0hairyfigment10y

More importantly, I'm disputing that it makes sense to judge by the numbers today.

0soreff10y

It certainly isn't a perfect measure - but it seems like a decent one. I'd suggest correcting for some measure of how common the technology is. If there was something that only 10% of people have, but those 10% are getting killed at the same fraction per year as automobile drivers, I'd think it is still notable, though it wouldn't precisely meet gwern's criteria. If there were a technology which much less than 10% of the population has, then I'd be skeptical that it was unrestricted, at least in practice. Frankly, there aren't very many technologies added over that period (besides the various flavors of electronic computation/communications/entertainment) that have that been so widely available. Microwave ovens - and I don't see many accidents from them. Perhaps home power tools? Forbes cites 37,000 emergency room visits per year from power nailers. They count another 37,000 from riding lawnmowers, but less than 100 killed.

0gwern10y

They don't have to have predicted contemporary accident rates a century ago for automobiles to have been banned or restricted at some point since - none of that data is remotely new or surprising, after all - yet here we are with near-unrestricted cars.

2wol42verine10y

Their culture may have been "advanced" but it was based on Violence as a primary ideal. Rome conquered its foreign enemies, assassinated its unpopular politicians and slaughtered for mass entertainment. This may be a simplification of an entire culture but the fact is the Roman Empire considered death and murder to be integral to their society.

0Lumifer10y

So, is this a rationality quote or a fail-at-rationality quote?

[-]Salemicus10y20

When Baby Boomers grow up and write books to explain why one or another individual is successful, they point to the power of a particular individual’s context as determined by chance. But they miss the even bigger social context for their own preferred explanations: a whole generation learned from childhood to overrate the power of chance and underrate the importance of planning. Gladwell at first appears to be making a contrarian critique of the myth of the self-made businessman, but actually his own account encapsulates the conventional view of a genera

... (read more)

-127chaos10y

Smacks of Deep Wisdom.

2Salemicus10y

Look, a single quote like this is never going to prove, to the satisfaction of the sceptical, a controversial thesis. But whole sections of the book are dedicated to arguing in favour of what Thiel calls the "determinate" viewpoint (that what matters is vision, planning and execution, and "secrets") and against the "indeterminate" viewpoint (it's all social context, luck, insurance, EMH). See for example this lecture in the series on which the book was based. It's possible Thiel goes too far in some instances, but the point he's making here, that people heavily underrate planning and heavily overrate chance is clearly true. As he writes elsewhere in the book: If you have a substantive counterargument to make, I'd like to hear it. But your drive-by insults aren't helpful.

-427chaos10y

Why put the quote here, if it is so short it can only serve to reaffirm people's preexisting beliefs? I feel like rationality quotes should not be about echoing political claims, especially contentious ones. Instead, it should be about providing clearly sensible advice for people. Thiel's quote is not only debatable, but also clearly targeted at a political group - the Baby Boomers. So it seems to violate most of the supposed norms of this website to me. I don't strongly disagree with the quote's claim so much as I just see no reason to believe it is true. You say the truth of the argument is obvious, but it's genuinely not obvious to me. I think you've bitten the mind projection fallacy here, it seems obvious to you because you have priors other people do not share. Since you have challenged me to make an argument, I'll point out that people who are born in third world countries are all but guaranteed to remain in poverty for all their lives. Even if it were somehow possible to improve the planning capabilities of all people in the third world simultaneously, I don't think this situation would change. The reason for third-world poverty is not that people make bad plans, it's that they have few opportunities to plan to achieve. When societies' coordination mechanisms are broken, it's not individual planning that is important. I agree planning is underrated in general, in countries like the US. But I don't think it's a major and ironic flaw of the Baby Boomers or anything like that. That sort of grandiose claim is way out of proportion to whatever evidence might exist on this question. All generations have problems with planning, irony is not important to truth-finding, other problems are much more significant. You seem to want to claim that Thiel's words should just be interpreted metaphorically, that their overall idea is okay even if the specifics of what he said aren't, but that smacks loudly of rationalization to me. And even using your charitable standards,

[-][anonymous]10y10

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[-]RobFack10y10

“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.”

George Bernard Shaw

[-]Nomad10y10

And just to be clear, the narrative being put forth above -- that everyone claiming to be poor is secretly rich -- is once more not something that anyone actually believes. Offer anyone saying it the chance to live in the public housing projects or trailer parks where these secretly rich welfare queens dwell and all you'll see is a cloud of dust and a tiny silhouette sprinting off into the horizon. But you don't need the majority to actually believe it, only to "believe" it.

Cracked pointing out the danger of belief in belief.

[-]Jiro10y100

I don't think that people believe that everyone claiming to be poor is actually rich. They might, however, believe that many people (not everyone) claiming to be poor are secretly richer than they appear (which is probably not "rich" most of the time).

I am skeptical about attempts to analyze why one's political opponents believe things, because it's easy to strawman in this manner and generally use it as an excuse to treat one's opponents' claims as not worth addressing.

[-][anonymous]10y00

Perhaps the most important message to have emerged from these studies on instabilities is that we do not necessarily have a complete understanding of a system once we know the equations that govern it; what we really want to know are the particular solutions to those equations. The latter need not be obvious from the former. This cannot be emphasized too strongly in any branch of science. The American physicist Freeman Dyson has pointed out that for Albert Einstein and J.Robert Oppenheimer in their later years, 'to discover the right equations was all tha

... (read more)

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[-][anonymous]10y00

Perhaps the most important message to have emerged from these studies on instabilities is that we do not necessarily have a complete understanding of a system once we know the equations that govern it; what we really want to know are the particular solutions to those equations. The latter need not be obvious from the former. This cannot be emphasized too strongly in any branch of science. The American physicist Freeman Dyson has pointed out that for Albert Einstein and J.Robert Oppenheimer in their later years, 'to discover the right equations was all tha

... (read more)

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[-]DanielLC10y00

Fate is simply the ultimate Carnymancer. It doesn't play fair. And therefore, neither should we!

-- Rob Balder, Erfworld

[-][anonymous]10y00

It's better to learn how to learn how to do something than to learn how to do. Time permitting, learn how to learn how to learn how to do.

Notch, billionaire game programmer

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[-]VoiceOfRa10y-10

In science, "scientific consensus" works for rejection not acceptance. Otherwise we'd be in middle ages.

Nassim Taleb

4Manfred10y

Scientific consensus doesn't 'work' in the sense of "when it rejects an idea, that idea is always wrong" any more than it "works" in the sense of "when it accepts an idea, that idea is always right" - what's going on is much better understood in terms of Bayesian evidence, and the apparent asymmetry between accepting and rejecting is actually due to the asymmetry between the evidential status of promoted beliefs versus random possible beliefs.

2ChristianKl10y

Bayesianism isn't about rejection or acceptance it's about probabilities. Taleb says that if the scientific consensus tells you that bloodletting is a bad idea, don't do bloodletting. On the other if science tells you that drug X is fine, that doesn't automatically mean it's good to take the drug.

0VoiceOfRa10y

The problem is that a lot of the people throwing around the term "scientific consensus" seem to believe it does.

[-]Salemicus10y-10

What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

[-]Username10y120

What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

Now, hold that thought, and consider that the most likely explanation is that you are wrong.

4ChristianKl10y

If it took you an hour to come up with the truth that's likely. If you however needed thousands of hours of thinking to discover it, the case for you knowing something that other people don't know is much better. Especially if you read various experts that connect to the topic and understand the state of the field, you can make a reasonable argument that you have something that qualifies. Peter Thiel talks about this being a foundation for successful startups. When Mark Zuckerberg being social network he had the insight to the truth that "real identify is really important for a social network" that few other people believed.

3[anonymous]10y

Thousands of hours of thinking and no experiment sounds dangerously close to philosophy :)

2ChristianKl10y

I said nothing about the absence of experiment. Ideally you want a mix of careful reflection, scholarship, discussing it with others and empirical investigation.

0lmm10y

That wasn't the insight. Google+ did more real identity than Facebook. I'd say Zuckerberg's crucial insight was "people will still use a social website even if you don't let them customise the look of their page".

3fubarobfusco10y

Or "the right seed population for a social network is young rich sexually-active people — e.g. Harvard students, then other college students, then whoever they drag in."

0pragmatist10y

Yeah, I think the initial exclusivity of Facebook really helped. I went to a school near Harvard at the time Facebook launched, and we were all vaguely aware of the site when it first launched as a Harvard-only site. It then expanded to include our school and a few others -- maybe ten or so, all quite prestigious -- and there was widespread adoption almost instantaneously on our campus. I think the sense of being invited to join an exclusive club had a lot to do with that. I don't know if Zuckerberg intended it, but playing on the elitism of college students was a very effective strategy to achieve rapid adoption at the early stage, and of course once that was achieved, there was enough momentum to ensure success once the site steadily opened up to larger and larger populations.

0ChristianKl10y

Peter Thiel who is on Facebook board of directors and who invested in Facebook very early argues that's the critical insight. The fact that you can't see from the outside that's what drove Facebook is only more evidence for it being a nonobvious insight where few outside people agree. Google+ was released a lot later. With Google+ it's also quite easy to register an account under a fake name which wasn't true with facebook in the initial days.

0lmm10y

That's simply wrong, at least if we're talking about the early days of Google+. I was on both in their early days and there were more fake names for longer on Facebook.

0ChristianKl10y

In the early days of Facebook you needed to have a university address to make an account. Most university students don't have fake email addresses under different names in the domain of their university. In most cases Google+ didn't do anything to verify that an account holder used their real name. They just filtered for things that looked like real names.

0lmm10y

They didn't check your name against your email. You needed a university email but you could, and people did, use a fake name with it, even an obviously fake one.

0Lumifer10y

In the early days Google+ was insisting on something that looked like a real name, but they came to their senses and I believe that by now you are not officially required to use your actual name on Google+.

0bentarm10y

I'd still bet that the majority of people who have a belief that meets all the criteria you suggest are probably wrong about that belief. For example, I think there's a reasonable case that most priests' religious beliefs would met your criteria, and it's clear that most priests are wrong (as long you you take priest to include holy men from all of the world's religions, it must be true). I won't speak to the usefulness of the quote as a means for generating useful entrepreneurial ideas.

2ChristianKl10y

I think most priests believed that their God is right before the became priests. That's not an idea that took them a lot of time to discover.

0bentarm10y

meh, scratch that, I misremembered the quote as "most people disagree with you"...

3Salemicus10y

That's possible. It's also possible, as Thiel says, that people shy away from unpopular truths out of conformity bias. Which is the bigger bias? In Thiel's view, (and mine), the chief problem is not that people are overconfidently proposing answers to that question. The chief problem is that people have no answers at all to that question, and can't think of any ways to generate them. You are right that it's a hard question, because you can be mistaken, and reversed stupidity is not truth, and so on. But it's not an impossible one.

[-]wubbles10y-10

Donald Rumsfeld, from http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2636 "Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."

3satt10y

Partial repeat.

[-][anonymous]10y-20

this was an unhelpful comment, removed and replaced by this comment

-327chaos10y

lol lol

[-]Gunnar_Zarncke10y-20

So you want to live forever? You might - even in a finite universe:

As Dyson imagined, a sense of purpose would motivate cognizant life to try to maintain itself as long as humanly — and then transhumanly — possible. [...] As the universe continued to cool, our AI descendants would need to take action. [...] [Dyson] imagines a gradual slowing down of thinking processes. Only necessary thoughts would transpire and these would happen at an increasingly snail-like pace. Between thoughts, the AI devices would hibernate to conserve vital, usable energy. By spa

... (read more)

[-]Fivehundred10y230

'Almost' infinite is not even close to infinite.

0Gunnar_Zarncke10y

The key point is that for you it wouldn't end. It's like zenos paradox.

0Nornagest10y

A finite number of thoughts implies an end to subjective experience. Zeno's paradox works because distances in the thought experiment can be infinitely subdivided.

627chaos10y

Meh. At least it's better than the alternative, but I still don't like this.

-1[anonymous]10y

Just do the hard scientific work of figuring out why there's any specific amount of stuff in the universe instead of no stuff, countably infinite stuff, or uncountably infinite stuff, and then find a way to make more stuff (or a proof-by-contradiction that no more stuff can be made).

[-][anonymous]10y-20

this was an unhelpful comment, removed and replaced by this comment

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

[-]Richard_Kennaway10y140

Every government dollar wasted on a poor programme is a dollar that a working person doesn’t have to spend on groceries, health care and education. It is also a dollar that the Government does not have available to spend on its policy priorities.

Making a few substitutions:

Every personal dollar wasted on poor choices is a dollar that the government doesn’t have to spend on the economy, health care and education. It is also a dollar that the person does not have available to spend on their own priorities.

Both of these are pretty much tautologies, advice that it would be better to do things better.

Besides that, the original quote does not occur in the document cited. Google turns up two hits for "Every government dollar wasted on a poor programme", here and here. The former cites the latter and the latter presents it as an isolated quote from some Australian politician. The general context of all three documents is evidence-based policy-making. While a fine thing (or at least a fine-sounding thing), the quote could be said by any politician, at any time, anywhere.

Searching for the shorter phrase "Every government dollar wasted" turns up a large number of u... (read more)

-7[anonymous]10y

[-][anonymous]10y-30

sds

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[-]Lumifer10y-30

We need to ask, what is it about our society where those of us who do not suffer from Asperger’s are at some massive disadvantage because we will be talked out of our interesting, original, creative ideas before they are even fully formed?

Peter Thiel

3Vaniver10y

Dupe.

1Lumifer10y

So it is.

[-]Scottbert10y-30

(In a supervillain prison, new inmate Sonic (not that one) has just announced he'll kill the others for fun.)

Martial artist inmate: "You seem pretty !@#$ing confident. If you wanna rise up in rank in this prison full of monsters, you'll have to beat me first."

Martial artist inmate: "Let me tell you this in advance. I'm a kenpo practitioner. I'm probably the first and last guy to ever rob a bank unarmed."

Sonic: "Doesn't mean $#!@ if you got caught though."

--One-Punch man Vol 4 extra

3Scottbert10y

What's wrong with it? Too vulgar? Too vague? Struck me as an example of failing to update after testing beliefs -- the criminal martial artist believed he was so strong, but he still was defeated -- and yet now he assumes he is unbeatable. Or perhaps a sort of villainous mirror of heroic responsibility -- All the excuses in the world don't matter if you failed to actually get away with your villainous plan.

5[anonymous]10y

In a prison for supervillains, everyone is equally caught, so the MA probably has updated on Sonic being a loser, too. (Although the real question is why the MA reveals even that much about himself - what if he plans to win without kenpo.)

2ChristianKl10y

It's not interesting.

0Unknowns10y

He's wrong about being the only unarmed robber.

1gwern10y

Charitably, it may be because of its superhero/supervillain setting. In real life, bank robbers seem to be commonly, or maybe even usually unarmed; they don't need to be armed because tellers always have instructions to cooperate, and being armed raises the legal penalties significantly while increasing the odds of something going wrong. (To give an example, today I was reading an IAmA with a bank robber on Reddit. He didn't carry any weapons except a hammer, in case the banks ever locked their (glass) doors while he was leaving, which one bank did try on him.)