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DanielVarga comments on Best of Rationality Quotes, 2014 Edition - Less Wrong Discussion

13 Post author: DanielVarga 27 February 2015 10:43PM

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Comment author: DanielVarga 27 February 2015 10:52:19PM *  5 points [-]

Top short quotes (2009-2014) by karma per character:

  • 60 A Bet is a Tax on BullshitAlex Tabarrok
  • 45 Luck is statistics taken personally.Penn Jillette
  • 35 Comic Quote Minus 37-- Ryan ArmandAlso a favourite.
  • 42 I've got to start listening to those quiet, nagging doubts.Calvin
  • 34 Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.Ken Wilber
  • 51 I will not procrastinate regarding any ritual granting immortality.--Evil Overlord List #230
  • 34 A problem well stated is a problem half solved.Charles Kettering
  • 26 "I accidentally changed my mind."my four-year-old
  • 27 "Most haystacks do not even have a needle."-- Lorenzo
  • 50 He uses statistics as a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not for illumination.G.K. Chesterton
  • 29 The greatest weariness comes from work not done.-Eric Hoffer
  • 31 Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.Voltaire
  • 32 If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid."Murphy's Laws of Combat"
  • 41 The Noah principle: predicting rain doesn’t count, building arks does.-Warren E. Buffett
  • 41 Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.-Joel Spolsky
  • 25 What goes unsaid eventually goes unthought.Steve Sailer
  • 40 People say "think outside the box," as if the box wasn't a fucking great idea.Sean Thomason
  • 27 Procrastination is the thief of compound interest.-Venkatesh Rao
  • 21 "A problem well put, is half solved." - John Dewey
  • 38 A raise is only a raise for thirty days; after that, it’s just your salary.-- David Russo
  • 37 It’s easy to lie with statistics, but it’s easier to lie without them.-Fred Mosteller
  • 32 If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.-Seneca
  • 25 The most practical thing in the world is a good theory.Helmholtz
  • 35 It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.George Bernard Shaw
  • 30 When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?John Maynard Keynes
  • 27 Part of the potential of things is how they break.Vi Hart, How To Snakes
  • 32 Precise forecasts masquerade as accurate ones.-- Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise
  • 29 Writing program code is a good way of debugging your thinking.-- Bill Venables
  • 15 Focusing is about saying no.-- Steve Jobs
  • 34 "Working in mysterious ways" is the greatest euphemism for failure ever devised.TheTweetOfGod
  • 35 However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.-- Winston Churchill
  • 29 "Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from SCIENCE!"~Girl Genius
  • 32 There is one rule that's very simple, but not easy: observe reality and adjust.Ran Prieur
  • 32 The Company that needs a new machine tool is already paying for it.-old Warner Swasey ad
  • 34 Market exchange is a pathetically inadequate substitute for love, but it scales better.S. T. Rev
  • 22 Things are only impossible until they're not.-- Jean-Luc Picard
  • 30 Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.— John Von Neumann
  • 26 A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.Daniel Dennett
  • 30 “Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.” - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
  • 27 Complex problems have simple, easy to understand wrong answers.— Grossman's Law
  • 25 The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.Gloria Steinem
  • 31 It's a horrible feeling when you don't understand why you did something.-- Dennis Monokroussos
  • 29 We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it.Mark Twain
  • 27 It is easy to be certain....One has only to be sufficiently vague.Charles S. Peirce
  • 26 Shouldn't "it works like a charm" be said about things that don't work?Jason Roy
  • 12 Reality is not optional.Thomas Sowell
  • 11 Death is the gods' crime.Unsounded
  • 25 Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.Dean Schlicter
  • 23 It is better to destroy one's own errors than those of others.Democritus
  • 22 Most people would rather die than think; many do.– Bertrand Russell
  • 28 Nature draws no line between living and nonliving.-- K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation
  • 30 Now, now, perfectly symmetrical violence never solved anything.--Professor Farnsworth, Futurama.
  • 26 The dream is damned and dreamer too if dreaming's all that dreamers do.--Rory Miller
  • 17 Statistics is applied philosophy of science.A. P. Dawid
  • 19 Luck is opportunity plus preparation plus luck.--Jane Espenson
  • 28 Nobody panics when things go "according to plan"… even if the plan is horrifying.The Joker
  • 19 Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.Robert A. Heinlein
  • 18 A sharp knife is nothing without a sharp eye.Klingon proverb.
  • 25 We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones.-Robert Wright, The Moral Animal
  • 27 Train your tongue to say "I don't know", lest you be brought to falsehood -Babylonian Talmud
  • 22 The only road to doing good shows, is doing bad shows.Louis C.K., on Reddit
  • 17 Nothing is so obvious that it’s obvious.— Errol Morris
  • 20 Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.--Mike Tyson
  • 22 Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.Lawrence Krauss
  • 28 My brain technically-not-a-lies to me far more than it actually lies to me.-- Aristosophy (again)
  • 26 “Anything left on your bucket list?”“Not dying...”-Bill Gates in his AMA on reddit.
  • 20 Better our hypotheses die for our errors than ourselves.-- Karl Popper
  • 27 If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance we can solve them.-- Isaac Asimov
  • 23 "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."--Friedrich Nietzsche
  • 26 A man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance.Unknown
  • 20 I honestly don't know. Let's see what happens.-- Hans. The Troll Hunter
  • 26 Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.H.L. Mencken
  • 27 The first rule of human club is you don't explicitly discuss the rules of human club.Silas Dogood
  • 18 Good things come to those who steal them.-- Magnificent Sasquatch
  • 14 "Anything you can do, I can do meta" -Rudolf Carnap
  • 17 Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions - Daniel Kahneman
  • 20 The singularity is my retirement plan.-- tocomment, in a Hacker News post
  • 26 If Tetris has taught me anything it's that errors pile up and accomplishments disappear.-Unknown
  • 26 A faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.Arthur C. Clarke
  • 21 Know the hair you have to get the hair you want.-Pantene Pro-V hair care bottle
  • 14 I intend to live forever or die trying-- Groucho Marx
  • 26 We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.-- F. A. Hayek
  • 22 Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.-- Voltaire
  • 19 In general, we are least aware of what our minds do best.— Marvin Minsky
  • 19 He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.J.S. Mill
  • 25 A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it, is committing another mistake.-Confucius
  • 20 No matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, turn back.-- Turkish proverb
  • 25 If you were taught that elves caused rain, every time it rained, you'd see the proof of elves.Ariex
  • 16 Keep your solutions close, and your problems closer.afoolswisdom
  • 15 History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.-Mark Twain
  • 11 Whenever you can, count.--Sir Francis Galton
  • 19 God created the Earth, but the Dutch created the Netherlands.-- Dutch proverb