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Rationality Quotes April 2016
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
- 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 Do not quote with only a name.
- 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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.
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Comments (58)
"Knotty theological questions are the least worrying of problems to me."
"Why?"
"Because they will be resolved in the hereafter, and meanwhile they can be safely shelved."
-- Ken Follet. Pillars of the Earth, pg 696 (Kindle edition)
It seems to me like this depends a lot on what sort of knotty theological questions.
Suppose there is a dispute among Christians about whether doing some particular thing is necessary for salvation. Then the question can't be safely shelved until "the hereafter" because if one side is right then the other is in grave danger.
Or suppose there is a dispute about whether doing some particular thing is morally wrong (and therefore / because it is) hateful to the gods. Then even if for whatever reason you are confident of not being punished for doing it, if you care about doing the right thing or about pleasing the gods then you will want to resolve that dispute.
The context in this instance -- thanks, Google Books! -- appears to be a question about transubstantiation, arising in 12th-century England. I think a Christian believer might reasonably be concerned that disbelieving in transubstantiation if it's right might be dangerous, and that the reverse might be idolatrous -- which they'd presumably want to avoid even if they weren't worried they'd be damned for it.
In my experience, most U.S. Evangelical Christians boil the basis of salvation down to one's response to Jesus' death and resurrection. You have to believe in it or at least say you believe in it. That's about it. It's relatively easy redemption.
Almost everything else seems increasingly negotiable and thought to be not worth arguing about.
This seems to me to be a response to the proliferation of "knotty theological problems" to the masses via the internet. It would bog down the movement to worry about whether Job was a real person or whether or not Obama is the really the Antichrist based on Revelation X:XX. It has the potential to fracture the sect and it's just plain a buzzkill to dwell on such minutiae.
Better to just Believe in Jesus™ and sort out the details posthumously when you're hanging out in your BRAND NEW MANSION!
Yup. Most evangelical Christians elsewhere, too, at least in principle (I suspect the reward-and-punishment view of salvation and damnation is hard to eradicate altogether). But evangelical Christians are not the only Christians, and in 12th-century England -- the setting for the quotation above -- there were no evangelicals as such.
If you mean the original quotation: no, it's set in the 12th century. If you mean the belief among evangelicals that salvation is dependent on faith and affiliation rather than on good versus bad actions: no, that's been central to evangelicalism since evangelicalism existed, and widely believed by Protestants since Protestantism existed. (I'm not sure about the history of the idea pre-Reformation, but I bet it cropped up from time to time.)
I was taught that, ultimately, it was about recognizing that you are not worthy of salvation, but that God can choose to save you anyway. If you insist on being judged on your merits, you will be. This won't work out for you, because of all the sinning. Salvation is for those who are willing to let God intercede on their behalf.
I think this is a similar thing in different words. You can allow Jesus to intercede for you by acknowledging 1) you are sinful and in need of an intercessor and 2) Jesus has the power to do the interceding. Jesus death and resurrection is the lynch pin of his divinity and associated magical intercessory powers.
It get's a bit tricky when "consistently sinful" people claim to believe in Jesus and admit their own sinfulness. They are sort of gaming the system, though many believe God can just pick out the insincere followers.
The doctrine of transubstantiation was off-and-on in Christianity from the third or fourth century but wasn't actually adopted by the Catholic Church until the 4th Lateran Council in 1215 AD. It wasn't formalized until the Council of Trent (1545-63 AD). So, to a 12th Century monk, transubstantiation may have been a "knotty theological question" but of no concern where salvation was concerned. I was kind of impressed how well Follet did his homework for that book.
Reason is poor propaganda when opposed by the yammering, unceasing lies of shrewd and evil and self-serving men. The little man has no way to judge and the shoddy lies are packaged more attractively. There is no way to offer color to a colorblind man, nor is there any way for us to give the man of imperfect brain the canny skill to distinguish a lie from a truth.
-- Robert A Heinlein. Assignment in Eternity, Loc 939 (Kindle edition)
There is no point to this "rationality" project anymore, everybody can go home.
Project? Which project?
Improving epistemic rationality, at least. Better thinking through understanding our mind's flaws. I don't think anyone here has a "perfect brain". Maybe it's possible to improve instrumental rationality while having no way to distinguish lies from truth, but it would probably be a random walk.
It turns out that a lot of color blind people can see their difficult colors a little bit, and technological aid helps.
http://wearecolorblind.com/article/oxy-iso-glasses-review/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-eyewear-could-help-people-with-red-green-color-blindness/
They don't seem to help (most?) people as much of the more enthusiastic early reviews said, but aren't totally useless, either.
So it helps them to be less wrong, as it were.
You're right. I've corrected it. Thank you
Oops. That was a reply to a PM about a typo.
I guess we'll just have to rely on all those people with perfect brains, then.
I can predict with great confidence that those people will not make any mistakes.
(They will not do anything else, either.)
Which story is that? I'm betting on "Gulf".
And you would be correct.
Scott Adams
A perfect example of a fully general counter-argument!
Nup, because you can bottom out in surveys of economic consensus :-)
If I were to steelman the usefulness of the argument, I'd say the conclusion is that positions on economics shouldn't be indispensable parts of a political movement, because that makes it impossible to reason about economics and check whether that position is wrong. Which is just a specific form of the general argument against identifying with object-level beliefs*.
*For that matter, one should perhaps be careful about identifying with meta-level beliefs as well, although I don't know if that's entirely possible for a human to do, even discounting the argument that there might be conservation of tribalism. It might be possible to reduce ones' identity down to a general framework for coming up with good meta-level beliefs, and avoid object-level
Some people political movements prioritize other stuff, but you can't get elected by saying that you don't care about the economy, it would be a political suicide. Therefore they claim that by a happy coincidence their ideas about the stuff they prioritize and economics prescribe the same solutions.
Economics is about more than just the economy. It's generally about how people react to incentives. If you look at feminism equal pay is quite high on their list of priorities.
-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 152
-- John le Carre
Peter Thiel
Interesting: He makes the argument that progress in physical areas of technology (transportation, chemistry etc.) has slowed in part due to government regulation (which would explain why the computers and the internet have been the one thing progressing drastically). But the United States has never been the source of all or even the majority of the worlds' new inventions, so an explanation focused on the U.S. government can't fill that large a gap (although, I suppose a slowdown of 1/3rd or even more would be explained).
Any information on what the situation has been in other countries? I wouldn't be surprised if the entire First World has trended towards drastically more regulation, which would indeed leave only the places with fewer inventors and little capital to invest or consumer-money to spend able to experiment with technologies in those fields (if true, the implications for the chance of changing the situation aren't as bright as if it's just the United States). Still, this is something that has to be remembered in any discussion of technology, or for that matter any questions of this type. More generally there seems to be a general lack of tendency (among Americans at least) to check on or be aware of other countries in all sorts of questions, and the few times they are brought up it's usually a single anecdote to reinforce the speakers' point (but even these are less common than one would expect). That seems to be a serious impediment to actually figuring out problems.
If you look at the area of transportation innovation in trains does happen outside of the US. Japan manages to build better trains over time and even our European trains are better than those trains of the past. There a general thought that Detroit did worse than German or Japanese carmakers.
In general Europe has also seen an increase in regulation. Europe outlawed GMO's. Germany banned nuclear plants. German culture is often even more critical of new technology than the US.
David D. Burns in "When Panic Attacks: The New, Drug-Free Anxiety Therapy That Can Change Your Life-Broadway"
All anxiety? Surely not. People get anxious about exams and going to the dentist and mortgages and impending wars and loads of other stuff that hasn't got squat to do with this particular behaviour. That's so obvious that nobody would make their model that absurdly broad.
I think what the author wanted to say was "based on the idea that there exists a psychological pattern that leads to anxiety and is caused by niceness."
(Just nitpicking bad writing here, but it has to be said.)
It's not bad writting, it's you judging writing based on not having the context. Likely you misunderstand the word model.
But as far as the dentist example goes, a large part of the anxiety of going to the dentist is about you not wanting to feel pain but allowing someone else to do something painful to you without you being allowed to be angry at them. That's what niceness is about in that model.
Most people who feel anxiety before exams have a history of surpressing anger at their teachers but our school system doesn't consider it okay to express that anger.
Both of those situations are possible to be modeled in that model.
I do of course lack the context, that's true. Does the context define anxiety in such a narrow way that it makes more sense to trace it all back to being nice? (I imagine that's what it would take for the context to justify that particular phrasing.)
I'm not particularly convinced that dentist anxiety would be any better in a world where yelling at your dentist for hurting you were considered socially acceptable, though. Anyway, even if those two examples can be explained away, better examples of anxiety that don't seem to relate to niceness in any way aren't difficult to think of at all. Some people become anxious from being inside an elevator or an airplane or just a very small room, or atop a tall building. Or being surrounded by sharks. Or on fire.
Surely in many cases, anxiety is a direct result of perceived danger, or of anticipating or being confronted with scary things.
Angry outbursts can relieve anxiety, sure, but surely not every single instance of anxiety is caused by not letting oneself be angry.
Steve Sailer
If your project is to make sure that anybody who joins LW who has neoreactionary views get's banned I think you are on a good way by constantly reregistering accounts and training the jobs to pattern match accounts that contain neoreactionary views as accounts needing to be banned.
Acquiring knowledge requires a lot of work every time. Using fully general counterarguments doesn't. Also, for some reason people think that meta-things are higher status than things. Does anybody know why?
Going meta typically requires the ability to step out of the usual context (not a terribly common skill), a degree of reflexivity, and some intellectual power. Basically, idiots never go meta because they can't.
This seems true, if you're talking about what I think you're talking about.
I've had to teach myself a meta-textual awareness when reading academic stuff, in order to keep in mind why I'm reading this, compare the contents with what other authors say, connect with related concepts, see the implications, etc., while I'm reading. It certainly takes a lot more effort and presence of mind than just following the text.
I would call what you are describing "putting into context" or "inserting new information into an existing framework", but yes, to do that you need some meta awareness.
However if you're reading academic research, what I would consider fully "going meta" is not just looking at other authors or connecting with related concepts, but rather considering the authors' incentives and, say, trying to correct for the publication bias.
Yeah, that too.
Related thought: I think meta is a direction, rather than one specific level. What that would mean is that you can always go further meta; there's reading the text, and then there's considering the text within the academic landscape, then there's examining the text together with its whole branch of science amidst all the sciences, then with science in general amidst human endeavours, etc.
Does that make sense?
Sure, you can go meta again and again. I don't think in terms of meta as a direction, but I think of it as relative to the current level. So you go meta and step out of the current context, but this means you find yourself in a new context, and you can repeat: go meta and step out of this context. You find yourself in a new context and you can repeat: go meta and step out of this context. You find yourself in a new context... :-)
That still sounds like 'meta' is a direction of (metaphorical) movement, but that it can be a different direction every time. Do you suppose you could have a situation where repeatedly 'going meta' would have you moving from one subject to the other and then back again, and again?
If you want to think of it as a direction, the direction is outside. I don't think you can do loops.
That makes sense, I suppose.
Eric S. Raymond here: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7076
Some Plant Myths, The American Botanist, v 9 #1, 1905
"He who builds his cart behind closed gates will find it not suited to the tracks outside the gates."
-Unattributed (Chinese) proverb, quoted by Chen Duxiu in "Call to Youth" 1915.
-‘Happiness’, 2005: 113
Like what?
If I knew, I probably wouldn't post so much.
-Rejection sensitivity: http://www.psychologyineverydaylife.net/2013/03/17/rejection-sensitivity-three-ways-to-toughen-up/
--Elizabeth Fulhame
Nick Winter in The Motivation Hacker
So, you are taking your motivation cues from zombies?
X-D
Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra.