Rationality Quotes Thread October 2015

elharo

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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.

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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.

All consumption is dumb, if you think too hard about it.

Says someone who clearly hasn't been just hungry for a long while if ever.

More to the point, I don't see what consumption habits have to do with picking investments. When you are "paying someone just to rebrand index funds for you" you don't get Miley Cyrus to twerk you.

Says someone who [...]

I think you may be taking him a little too literally. He's criticizing that position as much as he's endorsing it. (The context is that he's commenting on a sort of "financial services for The Youth Of Today" product, and he's saying: "yeah, from one perspective this is silly because those people should just be investing in index funds; but that's also the perspective that says they should never actually be spending anything, which is pretty unreasonable when you think about it; so why shouldn't one thing they spend ... (read more)

0ike11y

I understood him as saying that paying for anything (with perhaps the exception of items necessary to live) is spending money on something you presumably enjoy, and criticising someone for spending money on something they enjoy is misplaced. So if someone enjoys the rebranding of index funds enough to pay for it, he's fine with it. Edit: "When you are "paying someone just to rebrand index funds for you" you don't get Miley Cyrus to twerk you." both are forms of paying for enjoyment. People are paying a fee for someone to rebrand index funds for them, just like they might pay a fee to go to a concert or, for that matter, buy a newspaper with stories about companies that interests them. What difference are you claiming between the two?

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Rationality Quotes Thread October 2015

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Rationality Quotes Thread October 2015

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