Rationality Quotes September 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 Do not quote with only a name.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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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.
Rationality Quotes August 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 Do not quote with only a name.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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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.
Rationality Quotes July 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 Do not quote with only a name.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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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.
Rationality Quotes June 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.
Rationality Quotes May 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.
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.
Rationality Quotes Thread March 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.
Rationality Quotes Thread August 2015
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.
Best of Rationality Quotes, 2014 Edition
Here is the way-too-late 2014 edition of the Best of Rationality Quotes collection. (Here is last year's.) Thanks Huluk for nudging me to do it.
Best of Rationality Quotes 2014 (300kB page, 235 quotes)
and Best of Rationality Quotes 2009-2014 (1900kB page, 1770 quotes)
The page was built by a short script (source code here) from all the LW Rationality Quotes threads so far. (We had such a thread each month since April 2009.) The script collects all comments with karma score 10 or more, and sorts them by score. Replies are not collected, only top-level comments.
As is now usual, I provide various statistics and top-lists based on the data. (Source code for these is also at the above link, see the README.) I added these as comments to the post:
- Top quote contributors by total karma score collected
- Top quote contributors by karma score collected in 2014
- Top quote contributors of 2014 by statistical significance level (See this comment for a description of this metric.)
- Top original authors by number of quotes
- Top original authors by total karma score collected
- Best short quotes 2009-2014
Quotes Repository
Quotes are a unique enough medium of expression that I'm interested in viewing quotes that people have found collectable, emotionally impactful, useful, memorable, or otherwise noteworthy - perhaps others are similarly interested. To clarify, these need not be even remotely related to rationality. I'm hijacking the mandates traditionally used for the Rationality Quotes thread, with a few modifications:
- 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.
- Do not repeat quotes found in a Rationality Quotes thread.
- If possible, try to post 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. Note that this can be helpful, but is not mandatory - I would much prefer a quote with only a name to no quote at all.
Please post any meta discussion in the top-level comment named "Meta".
Rationality Quotes October 2014
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.
Rationality Quotes January 2014
Rules:
- 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.
Rationality Quotes from people associated with LessWrong
The other rationality quotes thread operates under the rule:
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
Lately it seems that every MIRI or CFAR employee is excempt from being quoted.
As there are still interesting quotes that happen on LessWrong, Overcoming Bias, HPMoR and MIRI/CFAR employee in general, I think it makes sense to open this thread to provide a place for those quotes.
Quotes on Existential Risk
Similar to the AGI Quotes thread and the monthly Rationality Quotes threads, this is a thread for memorable quotes about existential risk.
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down 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.
Tidbit: “Semantic over-achievers”
[I'd put this in an open thread, but those don’t seem to happen these days, and while this is a quote it isn't a Rationality Quote.]
You know, one of the really weird things about us human beings […] is that we have somehow created for ourselves languages that are just a bit too flexible and expressive for our brains to handle. We have managed to build languages in which arbitrarily deep nesting of negation and quantification is possible, when we ourselves have major difficulties handling the semantics of anything beyond about depth 1 or 2. That is so weird. But that's how we are: semantic over-achievers, trying to use languages that are quite a bit beyond our intellectual powers.
— Geoffrey K. Pullum, Language Log, “Never fails: semantic over-achievers”, December 1, 2011
This seems like it might lead to something interesting to say about the design of minds and the usefulness of generalization/abstraction, or perhaps just a good sound bite.
AGI Quotes
Similar to the monthly Rationality Quotes threads, this is a thread for memorable quotes about Artificial General Intelligence.
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down 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 comments/posts on LW/OB.
Rationality Quotes With Attributions Hidden: from Mein Kampf to Men****x
This thread has an experimental format for posting rationality quotes. Here is the format:
For those posting quotes:
Post the quote as usual, but not the author, original language translated from, or other information. That information is to be input after the quote according to the following format:
[Source](http://linkgoes.here "hovertext goes here")
For example:
>When an idea is wanting, a word can always be found to take its place.
[Source](http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/30216.html "Goethe, translated.")
The source information will be available by hovering the mouse over "Source", without opening a new page. This format allows quotations to be evaluated with less context available, with all that entails. I hope this allays some of the uncertainty regarding why words of the Bible or authors such as Nietzsche are sometimes poorly received. People are encouraged to vote without considering the source information. If locally idolized people said genuinely silly things even considering the context, feel free to post those as well, but please use your best judgement as to whether or not taking it out of context is fair to the speaker.
Please use your own judgement in deciding which quotes thread to post material. This isn't intended to compete with the main thread, it's an experiment to see if people like a different format better. Some people thought this format, or something like it, should simply be tried on the next regular quotes thread to minimize any disruption caused by having multiple threads, while others thought disruption wold be minimized by having a separate thread and leaving the main thread as normal. This is what I decided to do.
The usual rules apply, except that there is no fixed limit to the number of quotes one may submit, because I'd like to populate this thread without taking too much from the usual thread.
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down 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 comments/posts on LW/OB.
Rationality Quotes: May 2011
It looks like, this month, I get to be the one to start the quotes thread.
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down 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 comments/posts on LW/OB.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Need help searching for a quote
Hey,
I'm trying to find a quote that I recall seeing in the sequences. It was a post by Eliezer, and near the end he made a statement to the effect that 'We don't always know what is right, but you should never physically harm someone in the course of a dispute. Argumentation is an acceptable answer, but killing is not.'
I am writing a paper about that claim, and any help finding the particular quote would be incredibly useful. I suspect that it's somewhere in the 'Politics is a Mind-Killer' sub-sequence, though I haven't found it there yet.
Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Thanks for the help in advance.
-Michael
UPDATE: The quote was found:
"And it is triple ultra forbidden to respond to criticism with violence. There are a very few injunctions in the human art of rationality that have no ifs, ands, buts, or escape clauses. This is one of them. Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever."
Some Morals from the Study of Human Irrationality [Link]
posted a selection of the “morals” from Stuart Sutherland’s Irrationality.
Link: commonsenseatheism.com/?p=13556
I was wondering if the same could be done for the Sequences and if it would be a good idea or rather hold people off from reading them at full length.
Is it even possible to summarize each post in one sentence? An example would be Belief in the Implied Invisible which could be summarized by a quote from the post Decoherence is Falsifiable and Testable:
If P(Y|X) ≈ 1, then P(X∧Y) ≈ P(X). Which is to say, believing extra details doesn't cost you extra probability when they are logical implications of general beliefs you already have.
One could then compile a quote paper and cite the accompanying posts. As Luke wrote, "If you want to know his reasons for giving all this advice, read the book."
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