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Sometimes you hear philosophers bemoaning the fact that philosophers tend not to form consensuses like certain other disciplines do (sciences in particular). But there is no great mystery to this. The sciences reward consensus-forming as long as certain procedures are followed: agreements through experimental verification, processes of peer review, etc. Philosophy has nothing like this. Philosophers are rewarded for coming up with creative reasons not to agree with other people. The whole thrust of professional philosophy is toward inventing ways to regard opposing arguments as failure, as long as those ways don't exhibit any obvious flaws. However much philosophers are interested in the truth, philosophy as a profession is not structured so as to converge on it; it is structured so as to have the maximal possible divergence that can be sustained given common conventions. We are not trained to find ways to come to agree with each other; we are trained to find ways to disagree with each other.

Brandon Watson

Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.

Bertrand Russell

Or a mathematician.

3anonym12y
He did say "all exact science", a phrasing I think he probably chose carefully, so I'd charitably interpret the remark as being about people uttering purported scientific truths.
2Dojan12y
http://xkcd.com/263/
0A1987dM12y
I hope no-one takes the title-text of that as a challenge.
0wedrifid12y
I actually did when I read it. If I ever get into an argument about the merits of racial segregation my speech is now prepared!
2sketerpot12y
I think it's safe to say that Bertrand Russell knew about mathematicians, as he was one himself. :-)
0MixedNuts12y
Hydrogen atoms have exactly one proton.
0Oscar_Cunningham12y
What do you mean by "hydrogen atom" and "have" and "exactly" and "proton". ("One" I can deal with for now, but quantum physics makes the rest of your sentence meaningless (i.e. it makes your sentence an inexact high level description.))
2MixedNuts12y
By "proton" I mean a thingy that creates a potential well where an electron bops around, and by "hydrogen atom" I mean a single of these with a single electron in it, and by "have" I mean that when the electron has high enough energy you don't call it an hydrogen atom but "a proton here and an electron over there". This is of course a tautology. By "one" I mean S(0) (and by "0" I mean the empty set), which is also a tautology. And if you don't know what I mean by "exactly" then you don't understand the parent quote anyway. Admittedly a good counterexample would involve an exact truth that is not a tautology.
5Oligopsony12y
There are exactly zero unicorns.
0DoubleReed12y
But you can construct rigid, exact definitions for all of those things. Though I suppose those definitions would have to be approximations. So Mathematics gets to have exactness to it, but of course Mathematics is typically not considered a science.

News flash, dearies: there’s lots of areas of life that aren’t ‘science’ where people do tend to get a mite hung up on particulars of what is and is not, in fact, true. Like in bookkeeping. Like in criminal investigations. Like when they’re trying to establish where their spouse was last night.

Like, in fact, in most facets of life, hundreds of times a day, even if accounting isn’t your field and you’re not the accused at a criminal trial, and you’re not even married. Getting the facts right isn’t a concern of ‘science’, specifically. It’s a general concern of human beings. Getting reality right is, frequently, indeed, rather important if you wish to stay alive. It’s not a particularly academic question whether the car is or is not coming, when you cross the road. It’s the sort of thing one likes to get right. And we don’t generally call this ‘science’, either. We call it ‘looking’.

-- AJ Milne

3sketerpot12y
Not to be confused with A. A. Milne, who wrote Winnie the Pooh. For some context, this is a response to allegations of scientism, a word with remarkably overt anti-epistemological connotations.
5Paul Crowley12y
Speaking of which, lukeprog discusses the idea of "reclaiming" the word scientism on his blog.
1Eugine_Nier12y
Really, I see it as describing a family of genuine failure modes that people trying to be "scientific" often fall into. For example: a) attempting to argue by definition that something is "science" and therefore right. b) arguing that just because some evidence isn't scientific, that it's not valid evidence. c) insisting that the results of the latest scientific research should are right, despite results in the relevant field having a very poor replication rate. In case people try to argue that these errors rarely get made, here is a comment by Yvain with 22 karma that makes errors (b) and (c).
6JoshuaZ12y
Can you point out where Yvain makes those comments that you think violate b and c? Reading that post it looks to me like Yvain's points are a little more nuanced than that. Note incidentally that while you might be able to use the word that way, the vast majority of people who use it seem to use it in a way closer to what sketerpot is talking about. If one interacts at all with either young earth creationists or homeopaths for example it often doesn't take long before the term is thrown around.
1Eugine_Nier12y
Here are some excerpts from Yvain's comments that exhibit the problems I mentioned, (as well as others that maybe I should add). This essentially error (b) with elements of (c). From a Bayesian perspective "saying there are likely flaws in mainstream medical research" does mean one should decrease the weight one assigns to all medical findings, thus one should assign more (relative weight) to other, non-scientific, evidence, e.g., evidence likely to be based an anecdotes. This argument violates conservation of expected evidence. [Here follows several paragraphs describing of how much he discourages people from being afraid to take statins along with some references to "good doctors" and "correctly prescribed statin" that seem to be there to help set up a potential No True Scotsman] If my doctor recommends I take statin, I don't care about the base rates for statin "correctly prescribed" by "good doctors", I care about the base rate of statin as actually prescribed by actual doctors. Then Nancy tells her anecdote Yvain's reply begins: Funny how he didn't see fit to mention this it his first post while he spent several paragraphs arguing for why satins are perfectly safe. I'm not sure but somehow I suspect these numbers assume the statin was prescribed "correctly". Furthermore, they certainly don't take into account the base rate for medical studies being false. Also, he next says: Somehow I suspect the numbers he gives in the preceding paragraph assumed no drug interactions.
2JoshuaZ12y
I don't read most of that the way you've read it. For example, Yvain said "Saying that there are likely flaws in mainstream medical research doesn't license you to discount any specific medical finding unless you have particular reason to believe that finding is false." Discount is much stronger language than simply reducing weight in the claim. No it doesn't. It only violates that if in the alternate case where Yvain knew that almost all new studies turn out to be right he would point this as a success of the method. I suspect that in that counterfactual, he likely would. But that's still not a b or a c type violation. Most of the reply to Nancy while potentially problematic doesn't fall into b and c. But I don't think you are being fair when you say: The standard of safe is very different than listing every well known side-effect, especially if they only happen in a fraction of the population. I don't see a contradiction here, and if there is one, it doesn't seem to fall under b or c in any obvious way.
0Eugine_Nier12y
It's not clear what Yvain indented to mean by "discount"; however, the rest of his argument assumes he can disregard the base rate unless there you have specific evidence.
0Eugine_Nier12y
In my experience scientists arguing with creationists (I haven't looked at arguments with homeopaths) frequently make the mistakes I list above, as well as a few related ones. In particular using the AJ Milne quote ciphergoth cited in an argument against creationism is itself at best a straw man, after all the creationist also cares about getting the facts right, in fact that's why he's arguing with the scientist, because he believes the scientist has his facts wrong. In any case the underlying argument in the AJ Milne quote is: all people are about truth; therefore, you should believe what science has to say about subject X. This is an example of either (1) or (2) depending on how the implicit premises are made precise.
3ajmilne12y
Actually, the underlying argument is not: 'all people are about truth; therefore, you should believe what science has to say about subject X'. The underlying argument actually is: attacking someone else's argument on the basis that said argument is apparently unreasonably concerned with something so naive as the actual facts of the matter, and smearing this as 'scientism' is purely misdirection, and utterly without logical basis. It's a culturally-based ploy that works only if one has been convinced that determining the actual facts of the matter are an exclusive and unreasonable obsession that only follows from one being afflicted with this apparent disease 'scientism', and, apparently, reasonable people not so obsessed really don't worry about such trifles as factuality. It's a mite peculiar, to me, that you can read a comment that merely specifically says, in fact, that concerns with factual correctness are not the exclusive domain of science (and it was, in fact, a comment on a false dichotomy of exactly this nature--again, the context is at the link), and assume that what it means, apparently, is 'science by definition is right'. This assumption is utter nonsense. I've no idea where you pulled that from, but it sure as hell wasn't from my quote.

Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality. When you tell the truth, you have nothing to keep track of. The world itself becomes your memory, and if questions arise, you can always point others back to it. You can even reconsider certain facts and honestly change your views. And you can openly discuss your confusion, conflicts, and doubts with all comers. In this way, a commitment to the truth is naturally purifying of error.

Sam Harris, "Lying"

I think this is actually a myth. It's appealing, to us who love truth so much, to think that deviating from the path of the truth is deadly and dangerous and leads inevitably to dark side epistemology. But there is a trick to telling lies, such that they only differ from the truth in minor, difficult to verify ways. If you tell elegant lies, they will cling to the surface of the truth like a parasite, and you will be able to do almost anything with them that you could do with the truth. You just have to remember a few extra bits that you changed, and otherwise behave as a normal honest person would, given those few extra bits.

Worse, you can simply let people catch you, then get angry with them and bully them into accepting your claims not to have lied out of a mix of imperfect certainty and conflict avoidance. By doing this you condition them to accept the radical form of dominance where they have the authority to tell you what you are morally entitled to believe.

1Bongo12y
*where you have the authority to tell them (?)
3MichaelVassar12y
Yep. Sorry.

You're not actually disagreeing with Harris. Crafting efficient lies that behave as you describe is hard, particularly on the spot during conversation. Practice helps, and having your interlocutor's trust can compensate for a lot of imperfections, but it's still a lot of work compared to just sharing everything you know

Hm, that gives me an idea: study lying as a computational complexity problem. Just as we can study how much computing power it takes to distinguish random data from encrypted data, we can study how much computing power it takes to formulate (self-serving) hypotheses that take too much effort to distinguish from the truth.

Just a thought...

(Scott Aaronson's paper opened my eyes on the subject.)

I don't know much about the problem in question, but there's a related open problem in number theory.

Suppose I am thinking of a positive integer from 1 to n. You know this and know n. You want to figure out my number but are only allowed to ask if my number is in some range you name. In this game it is easy to see that you can always find out my number in less than 1+log2 n questions.

But what if I'm allowed to lie k times for some fixed k (that you know). Then the problem becomes much more difficult. A general bound in terms of k and n is open.

This suggests to me that working out problems involving lying, even in toy models, can quickly become complicated and difficult to examine.

Are you familiar with the seemingly similar question about the prisoners, king, and coin? I don't know the name, but it goes like this:

There are n prisoners in separate rooms, each with a doorway to a central chamber (CC) that has a coin. One by one, the king takes a random prisoner into the CC (no one else can see what is going on), and asks the prisoner if the king has brought all prisoners into the CC by now. The prisoner can either answer "yes" or "I don't know". If he says the former and is wrong, all prisoners are executed. If he's right, they're released.

If If he says "I don't know", he can set the coin to heads or tails. The king may turn over the coin after a prisoner leaves (and before he brings the next in), but he may only do so a finite k number of times in total. (This is a key similarity to the number of lies in the problem you describe).

The prisoners may discuss a strategy before starting, but the king gets to listen in and learn their strategy. So long as the game continues, every prisoner will be picked inifinte times (i.e. every prisoner can always expect to get picked again).

Is it possible for the prisoners to guarantee t

... (read more)
0khafra12y
Doesn't your comment on Slashdot indicate that there is no solution?
0SilasBarta12y
Maybe I wasn't clear. The blockquoted part is (my phrasing of) the problem statement. In the slashdot thread (and this is all from memory), several correct, bounded solutions were posted. I'll try to find the thread. (IIRC the original phrasing had a cup instead of a coin.) The intuition behind the existence of a solution is that the prisoners can effectively send infinite one-bit messages between each other, while the king can only block a finite number of them, so they just need to choose a leader and run some "message accumulator" protocol that will reach a certain state when all prisoners are certain to have been in the CC. Edit: Wow, that was actually easy to find. Here's the discussion that spawned it, and here's the thread that introduces this problem, and here's a comment with a solution. Apparently, the problem has a name it goes by.
-1khafra12y
This is the comment that provoked mine. Your link and this do seem to be solutions, though.
2SilasBarta12y
There are some comments I wish I could delete from slashdot ... and this site, for that matter ... such as the parent.
5Nominull12y
Not that I am implying that it is normal to be honest, haha.
0Morendil12y
It is customary to add at the end of such confessions, "or so I'm told", which is technically not a lie but merely an implicature.

Being embarrassed about your knowledge is anathema to rational conversation. You can see it in drug policy debates, where nobody talks about how relatively harmless marijuana is, for fear that people might know that they smoke it. You can see it in censorship debates, where no community member is going to stand up and say "hey, this porno doesn't violate my standards, in fact it's pretty hot". We can stand around pretending to be good people, or we can get at the truth.

I'm more willing to admit to lying here, because I trust you guys more than most people to take that admission only for what it is, and no more.

2Document12y
You sound like you're advocating radical honesty. It seems like there should be a middle ground of making sure relevant information is introduced, but doing it in a way that minimizes derailing self-disclosure (or self-disclosure that could cost you in status). Also, arguing from personal experience can be form of defection, shifting the conversation to an arena where one's convincingness is proportional to one's willingness to lie. (I think I have some comments saved that say that better than I can.)
6Eugine_Nier12y
As any decent defense attorney will tell you: if you're accused of something you didn't do, this is still an extremely bad approach.
9wedrifid12y
Definitely. If questions arise you should always point others back to your attorney! ;)
3lessdazed12y
For a defendant, lying is the only thing worse than telling the truth. Telling the truth is still often a terrible idea, particularly for a person accused in the formal American legal system. (Edited to change meaning to what I originally intended but typed incorrectly. Original words were "For a defendant, the only thing worse than lying is telling the truth," but the above is what I had intended.)
2NihilCredo12y
Don't defence attorneys (at least in the USA) heartily recommend shutting up as opposed to lying?
2Kaj_Sotala12y
Yes.
3[anonymous]12y
.
1MinibearRex12y
Greater than signs are only necessary at the beginning of the paragraph, by the way.
0Automaton12y
Thanks, fixed.
0RobertLumley12y
Should "Lying" be italicized and not in quotes, since it's a book?

"What do you think the big headlines were in 1666, the year Newton posited gravitation as a universal force, discovered that white light was composed of the colors of the spectrum, and invented differential calculus, or in 1905, the “annus mirabilis” when Einstein confirmed quantum theory by analyzing the photoelectric effect, introduced special relativity, and proposed the formulation that matter and energy are equivalent? The Great Fire of London and the Anglo-Dutch War; The Russian Revolution and the Russo-Japanese War. The posturing and squabbling of politicians and the exchange of gunfire over issues that would be of little interest or significance to anyone alive now. In other words, ephemeral bullshit. These insights and discoveries are the real history of our species, the slow painstaking climb from ignorance to understanding."

  • Tim Kreider

On the other hand, those thousands of lives cut short by violence are also the real history of our species — the misery we are climbing out of. The value of the discovery of the spectrum of light lies in its being put to use in ensuring that London never burns again.

I'm tempted to agree but at another level tempted to disagree. The Great Fire, the Anglo-Dutch War and the Russo-Japanese war might not have had such large scale impacts, but the Russian Revolution laid to formation of the USSR and the cold war, leading to one of the greatest existential risk to human ever. Much of the science done in the 1950s and 60s was as part of the US v. USSR general competition for superiority. Without the Russian Revolution we might very well have never gone to the moon.

Also, Newton wasn't the first person to posit gravity as a universal force. Oresme discussed the same idea in the 1300s. Newton wasn't even the first person to posit an inverse square law. He was just the first to show that an inverse square law lead to elliptical orbits and other observed behavior. See this essay.

The quote is indeed imperfect, but I think the sentiment it conveys is accurate.

After all, in a thousand years or so, Russian revolution and the USSR will be as important as the Mongol invasion and the Khanate of the Golden Horde are today. If we didn't get to the moon fifty years ago, there would have been some other conflict pushing some other line of advancement.

It is also, for the actual point of the quote, irrelevant who made the discoveries. The point is that in long range, the importance of those discoveries will always overshadow ephemeral political events.

After all, in a thousand years or so, Russian revolution and the USSR will be as important as the Mongol invasion and the Khanate of the Golden Horde are today.

Which is to say: pretty important. Not that it's important what exacly some boundary was, or who did what to whom...but all these things are part of the overall development of our current state of affairs, from the development of paper money to credit systems, from Chinese approach to Tibet to the extent of distribution of Islam.

I think it's risky to assume that "science", while more easily identified as rational, is in fact more rational than the rational facts of history, and its causal relationship to the present.

Discoveries in science are, in a sense, what "has to be". But while histroy could have been different, itt wasn't, and it simply "is what it is".

0SurahAhriman12y
We most likely would not have been to the moon without the Russian Revolution (at least, not by 1969). Kennedy himself thought the space race was a great waste of resources, but supported it as a PR move against the USSR.

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.

André Gide

[-][anonymous]12y410

.

Don't you feel in your heart that these contradictions do not really contradict: that there is a cosmos that contains them all? The soul goes round upon a wheel of stars and all things return; perhaps Strake and I have striven in many shapes, beast against beast and bird against bird, and perhaps we shall strive for ever. But since we seek and need each other, even that eternal hatred is an eternal love. Good and evil go round in a wheel that is one thing and not many. Do you not realize in your heart, do you not believe behind all your beliefs, that there is but one reality and we are its shadows; and that all things are but aspects of one thing: a centre where men melt into Man and Man into God?'

'No,' said Father Brown.

-- G.K. Chesterton

I so adore cliches. They create an expectation to subvert.

3Eugine_Nier12y
Do that too much and you'll end up with a "high brow" piece that's incomprehensible to anyone not familiar with the cliches you're subverting.
2RobinZ12y
The short story in question is "The Dagger with Wings", originally published in The Incredulity of Father Brown. That said, I don't quite understand why this constitutes a Rationality Quote.

That said, I don't quite understand why this constitutes a Rationality Quote.

To me, the lesson is that when someone appeals to your intuitions - you can just say no.

"Don't you feel there must be a supreme being, that everything has a purpose and a place in the grand order of things?"

"No."

(Fun story, incidentally.)

[-][anonymous]12y340

A decision was wise, even though it led to disastrous consequences, if the evidence at hand indicated it was the best one to make; and a decision was foolish, even though it led to the happiest possible consequences, if it was unreasonable to expect those consequences.

-- Herodotus

4Eugine_Nier12y
The problem with that quote is that human biases often go the other way, i.e., we'd rather blame bad consequences on bad luck then admit we made a bad decision.
6J_Taylor12y
The quote may still have some use when applied to humans other than oneself.
4gwern12y
I tried to track this down, and this seems to be Jaynes's paraphrase of Herodotus; pg 2 of "Bayesian Methods: General Background". (I looked through one translation, http://classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.mb.txt , and was unable to locate it.)
0[anonymous]12y
I got it out of "Data Analysis A Bayesian Tutorial" pg 4 where it is attributed to Herodotus

After some more searching and a pointer on Straight Dope, I think I've found it in Book 7 of the Histories when Artabanus is trying to dissuade Xerxes from launching his ill-fated war against the Greeks, where it is, as one would expect from Jaynes's paraphrase, different:

"1 So do not plan to run the risk of any such danger when there is no need for it. Listen to me instead: for now dismiss this assembly; consider the matter by yourself and, whenever you so please, declare what seems best to you. 2 A well-laid plan is always to my mind most profitable; even if it is thwarted later, the plan was no less good, and it is only chance that has baffled the design; but if fortune favor one who has planned poorly, then he has gotten only a prize of chance, and his plan was no less bad."

Or in another translation:

"Think then no more of incurring so great a danger when no need presses, but follow the advice I tender. Break up this meeting, and when thou hast well considered the matter with thyself, and settled what thou wilt do, declare to us thy resolve. I know not of aught in the world that so profits a man as taking good counsel with himself; for even if things fall out against one's hopes, still one has counselled well, though fortune has made the counsel of none effect: whereas if a man counsels ill and luck follows, he has gotten a windfall, but his counsel is none the less silly."

T-Rex: If I lived in the past I'd have different beliefs, because I'd have nobody modern around to teach me anything else!

FACT.

And I find it really unlikely that I would come up with all our modern good stuff on my own, running around saying "You guys! Democracy is pretty okay. Also, women are equal to men, and racism? Kind of a dick move." If I was raised by racist and sexist parents in the middle of a racist and sexist society, I'm pretty certain I'd be racist and sexist! I'm only as enlightened as I am today because I've stood on the shoulders of giants.

Right. So that raises the question: Is everyone from that period in Hell, or is Heaven overwhelmingly populated by racists?

-- T-Rex, Dinosaur Comics

I think the obvious answer would be that Heaven is overwhelmingly populated by ex-racists. Once they get there, they'd have people around to teach them better stuff.

6DSimon12y
Who would teach them? The more severe racists from periods even further back?
9Alicorn12y
Maybe the dead of other races, provably ensouled and with barriers to communication magically removed.
8falenas10812y
I think the assumption is that divine beings would be there.
4[anonymous]12y
Are you assuming people from the past are always more racist for any given time period?
2DSimon12y
That's a good point, there would be many many exceptions to such a prediction. So at most, all I can say is that the racists in heaven are unlikely to find much in the way of 20th century ideals until people from the 20th century start dying and showing up there.
0smk12y
Why do they need to be taught? Isn't prejudice one of those human frailties that gets magically cleansed when you go to heaven? I mean, if you believe in that stuff. :)
8Document12y
Above the comic:
0[anonymous]12y
In the least convenient possible world, who says you can "teach" a utility function?

I believe this was the point EY was trying to make in Archimedes's Chronophone. In short, it's a lot harder to send advice to the past when you can only transmit your justification for believing the advice. If your true reason for holding your "enlightened" views is because they're popular, then the recipients on the other side will only hear that they should do whatever practice was popular for them.

2NancyLebovitz12y
All that's needed is a belief in purgatory.
4DSimon12y
We'd probably all end up there too, based on the near certainty that we're doing things that people in the future will correctly consider as obviously immoral.
4sketerpot12y
I intend to anticipate as many of those harsh-judgement-of-future-generations things as possible, do the right thing now, and breeze through purgatory so much faster than the rest of those chumps. Bwahaha. On that note, does anybody want to speculate about what people in the future will correctly regard as immoral that we're doing now? The time to think about this is before we get to the future and/or purgatory. Some low-hanging fruit, for example, would be the widespread mistreatment of people with gender identity disorder, or squandering money on forms of charity that are actually harmful, e.g. destroying poor countries' textile industries by flooding the market with cheap donated clothes.
2NancyLebovitz12y
I can't tell whether this is deadpan humor or not. I think closed borders will be considered a great evil in the future, but that's probably another way of saying that not enough people are agreeing with me now.
0sketerpot12y
Well, I don't believe in purgatory, so that part was an (apparently ill-fated) attempt at deadpan humor. The question was sincere, though: if we're confident that we'll probably be scorned by future generations for something we're doing now, then the obvious response to that is to try to find out what it is, so we can do something about it now. The closed-borders thing definitely has the features of a great candidate: closed borders are generally considered necessary, and you can make a reasonable case for them being evil.
0NancyLebovitz12y
How can you tell what our descendents are going to think? If Pinker's right, the world tends towards increasing kindness, but we're kinder to homosexuals and less kind to smokers than we were, so it's still something of a gamble. Do you expect all the future generations to agree with each other?
0Eugine_Nier12y
One good place to start is to think about Paul Graham's essay What you can't say.
0DSimon12y
Agreed, and it's why I'm vegan.
0pedanterrific12y
That's an interesting interpretation of "we". Unless you do those things...?
2sketerpot12y
I meant "we" as in "we, as a society", or more specifically "we, the society that I happen to find myself in." Please pardon the ambiguity.
0pedanterrific12y
I was being facetious. Please pardon the ambiguity. Seems to imply, at least to me, a function of "we" that includes "I". Plus, it seems a more interesting question to ask what you're doing that might come to be considered immoral - it's rather unlikely that you're really perfect, isn't it? It's easy to say "that thing that all those other people are doing, and which I already think is immoral, will come to be considered immoral by our descendants." That's just saying "I'm better than you, neener neener."
0sketerpot12y
Ah, I misread DSimon's use of "we", and the misunderstandings cascaded from there. My mistake. To clarify, I would like to hear things that I may be doing that future generations may be justified in disapproving of. It's an interesting and relevant question. Gloating about my own supposed superiority (neener neener) hadn't even crossed my mind. Like the vast majority here, I aim to improve myself.
2pedanterrific12y
Looking back, my last post came out rather more accusatory than I intended, for which I apologize. To get back on topic, how about "not cryonically preserving people against their will"?
3[anonymous]12y
Obligatory SMBC
0[anonymous]12y
Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, if they existed, depend on what GOD believes not what people, in the future or otherwise, believe.
"We know this much
Death is an evil;
we have the gods'
word for it; they too
would die if death
were a good thing"

--Sappho #7; trans. Barnard (seen on http://www.nada.kth.se/%7Easa/Quotes/immortality )

4Vaniver12y
Combine this with Nietzsche's "God is dead."

The most valuable acquisitions in a scientific or technical education are the general-purpose mental tools which remain serviceable for a lifetime. I rate natural language and mathematics as the most important of these tools, and computer science as a third.

George E. Forsythe

It would be an error to suppose that the great discoverer seizes at once upon the truth, or has any unerring method of divining it. In all probability the errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one. Fertility of imagination and abundance of guesses at truth are among the first requisites of discovery; but the erroneous guesses must be many times as numerous as those that prove well founded. The weakest analogies, the most whimsical notions, the most apparently absurd theories, may pass through the teeming brain, and no record remain of more than the hundredth part….

W. Stanley Jevons

Truths were carved from the identical wood as were lies — words — and so sank or floated with equal ease. But since truths were carved by the World, they rarely appeased Men and their innumerable vanities.

-- Drusas Achamian, in "The White-Luck Warrior" by R. Scott Bakker

The god we seek must rule the world according to our own will.

Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2

0wedrifid12y
Wow, that one is actually brilliant!

Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.

Robert A. Heinlein

4Teal_Thanatos12y
So very true (in reality) and so very wrong (morally) at the same time. It's my sincere hope that work on Raising the Sanity Waterline will eventually annihilate the relevance of this quote to modern society.

He wanted to find fault with the idea but couldn't quite do it on the spur of the moment. He filed it away for later discrediting

The Magician King by Lev Grossman

6ShardPhoenix12y
Ibid.

I honestly don't know. Let's see what happens.

-- Hans. The Troll Hunter

5Dorikka12y
Kaboom!
0scav12y
Voted up :) Yeah, well. In the context of the film it was one of the funniest lines, especially since it was delivered completely deadpan. I won't spoil it for anyone by explaining that context. But as an aside, sometimes a nice big unexpected kaboom motivates and advances knowledge like nothing else. I'm kind of disappointed that the LHC hasn't made a mini black hole (as long as Stephen Hawking is right) or melted a hole through the alps or something :)
9MarkusRamikin12y
Please don't ever work on something truly dangerous. ;)

Don't worry. I promise only to destroy the world if I didn't expect it to happen.

I was thinking more in terms of cooking your own food or something. ;)

Three proposed derogatory labels from Dilbert creator Scott Adams:

Labelass: A special kind of idiot who uses labels as a substitute for comprehension.

Binarian: A special kind of idiot who believes that all people who hold a different view from oneself have the same views as each other.

Masturdebator: One who takes pleasure in furiously debating viewpoints that only exist in the imagination.

Binarian: A special kind of idiot who believes that all people who hold a different view from oneself have the same views as each other.

That's something I have to occasionally remind myself not to be, as an atheist.

0lessdazed12y
Were you never religious?

Oh, I was. Catholic. Why do you ask, do you suppose religious people aren't prone to thinking that the "religious viewpoint" generally means their own?

Well, anyway, I was only religious until about the age of 9 or 10, so that doesn't mean much. What should mean more is that later in life even as an atheist I had a lot of interest in religion and spirituality, and I became familiar with a lot of varied ideas; I'd read the Bible and Bhagavad Gita for pleasure, and debated with my religious friends avidly. It was all rather interesting, since at that time I wasn't a strong atheist by any means and I suspected there might be something to it.

But eventually my views shifted towards strong atheism, and I felt I'd more or less exhausted the topic. Since then I notice my brain got lazier when it came to processing religious ideas. If by some chance I find myself in debate with a religious friend (not long ago I had a big one with a Jewish friend of mine who's very unimpressed with Eliezer ;) and more importantly, has wrong ideas about evolution), it takes effort to actually listen to what he's saying and make sure I understand where he's coming from - rather than accessing my the... (read more)

4endoself12y
That means you understand it.
0lessdazed12y
Ex-religious people, who had previously conflated atheism and other religions, might be less prone to being binarians after becoming atheists.
3[anonymous]12y
Sample size of one, but I also have to remind myself as MarkusRamikin does. I was openly religious up until about 18, and was only someone I'd consider a serious doubter at 14, with relapses at 16 and 18. Prior to 14 and between the lapses, religiously pretty strong.
1lessdazed12y
I often enough find myself with no plausible theory of mind for why a person says a thing that I don't think I do that much.
2MarkusRamikin12y
Perhaps it's not a question of much. Maybe we're awesome enough to detect even small variations in rationality and be alarmed if they're in the wrong direction. ;) I mean, obviously I never catch myself being literally "binarian".
1Document12y
Why would that be obvious?
0MarkusRamikin12y
Uhm, because of everything else I said in this thread, before saying that. I should expect that any reasonable reader would by now find it highly unlikely that I literally assume all religious people believe identical things. Were you serious or just being clever? In case I was genuinely unclear: I see "binarian" as a sort of anti-ideal, a severe case of cached thought reliance. Not something anyone of lesswrong level of sophistication would normally sink to all the way, more like a far away goal towards which you don't want to take even small steps.
3Document12y
What's the word for someone who sees errors as defining character attributes that only occur in "idiots" and not decent, sensible people like theirself and their friends and readers?
4lessdazed12y
I don't think Adams thinks highly of himself or his readers.
5dlthomas12y
Indeed. He often describes his motivation for posts as "Dance, monkeys, dance!"
[-][anonymous]12y230

Most people who quote Einstein’s declaration that “God does not play dice” seem not to realize that a dice-playing God would be an improvement over the actual situation

-Scott Aaronson, from here

Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned.

Jorge Luis Borges, "The Secret Miracle".

6Kaj_Sotala12y
"Like every human" would be more correct.
5Unnamed12y
See: Kruger, J., & Gilovich, T. (2004). Actions, intentions, and trait assessment: The road to self-enhancement is paved with good intentions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 328-339. pdf.pdf)
1sketerpot12y
Is that actually true? A lot of authors are their own toughest critics; they're so close to what they write that they see all its imperfections, and tend to obsess over flaws that aren't actually that noticeable to most of their readers.

The least evil is still evil. The least monstrous is still monstrous

When, as will happen, you are yourself forced to choose between two bad things, then choose the lesser of the evils and choose it boldly. That will be the right choice and, if circumstances are truly as circumscribed as you believe them to be, that will be the right thing to do in that situation.

But it still won't be a good thing. It isn't a good thing and cannot be made good.

Fred Clarke, August 9

1RobinZ12y
Alternative link, for anyone else who had problems with the typepad one.

If the Coyote orders all those gizmos then why doesn't he just order food?

  • Unknown
[-][anonymous]12y160

Because it's not about food, but the challenge? Without the roadrunner, Wile E. is nothing. He depends on not succeeding. (Just noticed what a great role model he is.)

To quote Warner's famous essay on cartoonialism, "The struggle itself...is enough to fill a character's heart. One must imagine Coyote happy."

According to certain versions, Chuck Jones and his team established a set of rules for the cartoon (such as "The audience's sympathy must remain with the Coyote" and "Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote's greatest enemy"). One of them is supposed to have been:

The Coyote could stop anytime—IF he were not a fanatic. (Repeat: "A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim." —George Santayana).

6Desrtopa12y
Can't get refrigerated shipping out there in the desert.
3grendelkhan12y
Jerky-of-the-month club?
[-][anonymous]12y190

Jettison politics from your personal life. Jawing about political ideology is worse than useless — it’s a time suck and a trick played by your status-seeking reptilian hindbrain on your frontal lobes that does nothing to bring you more happiness OR status. Your vote really won’t matter.

--Roissy in DC

6Eugine_Nier12y
Surrendering to the barbarians are we.
-1[anonymous]12y
To paraphrase Roissy, feel free trying to save this doomed civilization, I'll be poolside getting a tan.

Except that we are all part of this "doomed civilization", and if it collapses in civil war, nuclear apocalypse or even just a gigantic economic collapse, being at poolside won't keep you safe. So we have to save it, or to fix it. Now you can say that building a friendly AI is a much more efficient way of saving it/fixing it that getting involved in politics. That's something I can fully respect. But saying that you don't care or don't want to try is irresponsible.

For myself, saving it is very close to the thing I've to protect so I won't skip any single way I have under my own power of trying to save it : from understanding the world better to raising the sanity waterline around me to giving to charity to using train or walking instead of having a car to getting involve in politics even if it's "dirty". Because what matter is to win.

I'm very open to any argument about "this would be a more efficient way to save it" that would make me stronger in defending what I've to protect, but "don't try to save it, have fun and if everything collapse too bad" is not acceptable, it doesn't help my terminal values.

7[anonymous]12y
His argument is that the modern world was doomed before we where born, there is nothing really one can do to reform or save it. There can be no "have to" when there is a fairly strong possibility that nothing can be done, because incentives, biases and plain ignorance are aligned in such a way that effective positive action will bring overwhelming response against it. Anyone who thinks voting will solve anything has quite a bit of a way to go in my mind. When civil war/nuclear apocalypse/gigantic economic collapse comes Roissy will still have a tan when it happens. The activist won't. Actually I do think it is by far the most productive course of action, and I do support that effort as much as I can. But should that in itself raise some alarm bells in our minds? Getting Friendly AI right before it is too late is such long shot by most estimates. If contributing to this is indeed the best option for maximising desirable mid term future states of the universe for an individual or small group, we should pause to think about just how little certainty and influence a person has on a system composed of 7 billion people, their machines and the natural envrionment For some games the only way to win is not to play. I am quite certain the average LWer will do the world much more good if he tries to promote rational thinking and tries, as best as he can, to detached and disinvest himself both emotionally and resource-wise from daily politics and ideology. I am not saying the tiny influence a person has on the world automatically dosen't matter if a huge payoff is at all possible. I am saying that people are over-invested into politics, far beyond the point of diminishing returns due to our brains and our society tricking us into believing we matter far more in the process of government than we actually do. Remember the opportunity cost of involvement in politics! I partially endorse the poolside getting a tan recommendation, because I'm actually convinced that taking a sw
5shokwave12y
This seems suspiciously convenient for someone who already prefers poolside tanning to saving the modern world.
4[anonymous]12y
The idea that you actually can save the modern world is also convenient for people with a certain self-perception.
6shokwave12y
Yes, and there are endless crackpots who believe themselves to be doing just that. Someone who is genuinely out to save the world will (unfortunately) share this same feature with crackpots; they will have to distinguish themselves from crackpots in other ways.
5bogus12y
If folks are over-invested into politics, there are two ways of making the situation more optimal. 1. Reduce investment into politics. This is Roissy's recommendation. This option does not directly affect political issues, but it does free up effort/resources to be spent on more productive things (science, business, personal enjoyment etc.) 2. Raise the social payoff of investment into politics. This entails promoting reform and change in political processes so as to make them more deliberative, less ideological, more conducive to efficient outcomes etc. This option yields a direct payoff by improving political outcomes. I'm not saying that (2) is easy. But a site having as mission statement "refining the art of human rationality" should definitely take an interest in the issue, since so much of human deliberation occurs in the public sphere.
7[anonymous]12y
In the absence of research into the issue of good governance and the conditions that affect change of government by a order of magnitude better than what is currently available, I would say promoting point two is in practice harmful advice. Strategy 1. has a guaranteed pay-off but requires an individual to admit to himself that investment so far has been wasted. Strategy 2. can be used to rationalize any escalation of investment and past investment, a very comforting idea. But I wish to stress something, people who disinvest from politics can invest, if they really want to improve governance at any cost, into quality rationalist research that is sorely lacking. In fact I claim that a community comprised exclusively of involved and politically active citizens can in fact never come up with what would amount to "useful social science" on certain issues (say the effect of governance). I would thus argue that a site dedicated to "the refinement of human rationality" has not only thrived because of the no mind killer rule, it might if it put its resources to it radically improve the quality of government precisely by dis-investing emotionally and resource wise from politics to partially mitigate the perverse incentives involved in the endeavour.
3bogus12y
You do not consider "quality rationalist research" into good governance to fall under political involvement? Yes, it is very different than day-to-day involvement into political practice, ideology etc. But then again, I have not seen the latter advocated much in this thread, or at all on LW. I for one am quite wary of any "escalation of investment", expressly because affecting any stable system (natural or social) is unfeasible without a thorough, rational understanding of its structure and leverage points. And so most effort into political activism is indeed "wasted"[1]. But given that so many folks apparently are emotionally invested into changing governance in some way, I don't think there's anything wrong with helping such folks achieve desirable outcomes. [1] I am obviously disregarding exceptional cases such as the "Arab Spring" uprisings; but even the Tea Party has had negligible effects (e.g. the leading R nominations for the 2012 election are widely seen as mediocre, and TP candidates are not faring well), and I expect little better from the 'Occupy' effort given how unfocused it is.
4roland12y
Allow me a small nitpick in a great commentary: I would advise against the tan due to the dangers of skin cancer and skin damage. Tanning has become a cultural obsession in the west, not so much in asian countries but is generally unhealthy for white skin. You only should get enough sun to produce the necessary Vitamin D, other than that, avoid it! Go for the swim though, it is healthy!
2roland12y
Wow, my thoughts, I'm surprised to read them here. ;)
0roland12y
Agreed!
3[anonymous]12y
Wondering why people are down voting this, considering I and other LWers have advocated political disengagement in the context of live in first world (and other) states as a recipe for personal happiness and improved productivity, and such comments have been up voted in the past.
7lessdazed12y
That could have used anonymity. If other people think political ideology is highly relevant to status, doesn't that make it probably at least somewhat so?
0[anonymous]12y
I was actually searching for your thread, but didn't find it among articles tagged by quotes. I would have used it if it was so. Some pretty low status people have been quoted in rationality threads in the past, including people with really odious ideologies. Are downvoters convinced that Roissy is even lower status than those individuals or are they rather concerned that since Roissy (as the blog was back in 2007-2009) was read by quite a few members of the OB/LW community (including Robin Hanson who still links to him)! Basically is this a fear that while Roissy's beliefs pay rent in anticipated experience they are evil (as in espousing different values) and thus shouldn't be allowed to influence fellow LWers who are clearly not good enough thinkers to handle this? If this is so this may be a confirmation of Vladimir_M's take on the state of gender related debates on LW. Or it could just be a bad quote.
9wedrifid12y
It isn't low status as much as it is "out group". Low status doesn't warrant that kind of attention.
2[anonymous]12y
Posters like dedalus2u (if I recall this right) have argued that out group is basically just lowest possible status.
5wedrifid12y
I disagree with posters like dedalus2u. Practically speaking I would far prefer to be the out-group villain that people desperately try to lower in status than the person that actually has low status within the group who gets treated with utter indifference.
2[anonymous]12y
I think I agree.
4wedrifid12y
So, I am sure, would that Roissy fellow. :)
2RobertLumley12y
Not a downvoter (and I doubt this is why people are downvoting, but I suppose it could be) but I somewhat disagree. There is a (very small) group of friends with whom I can discuss political topics without them becoming mind-killing. Frequently this is due to admitted information gaps between us, and it's about learning the specifics of an issue. It's certainly not easy though, and often involves us switching sides on each other when we see one of us using dark arts. Similarly, I would expect most LWers to be able to (somewhat) rationally discuss politics. Which is not to say that they would enjoy it/should just that I would expect them to be far more able (moreso than my friends) to do it productively. If I had to guess why people are downvoting, though, it would be because discussing politics can bring you more happiness, and indeed does for many people, even if it's just yelling at each other. Although I feel very uncertain (p = 0.35) that this is actually the reason for downvotes.
0wedrifid12y
I just upvoted it. It is extremely good advice.
[-][anonymous]12y120

It was actually Lesswrong which made me realize politics is mostly bunk, when I saw that we could talk about nearly anything it and it was completely irrelevant. And we often speak of big things. Daily politics, anything shorter than a several decade long trend or a revolution will simply not affect you and is a waste of cognitive resources and often a source of frustration.

You are not living in a hunter gatherer tribe where your voice matters, the pay-offs are so low that how your country is run could be about as influenced by your actions as are plate tectonics and you probably couldn't tell the difference. Social interactions will inform you of change which specifically requires you to change behaviour, no need to watch the news.

Really following this advice in the past two years has saved me hundreds of hours that I've been able to spend on leisure and productive endeavours. This is ignoring the emotional investment, that I would have also wasted. If I'm going to waste that, I may as well root for my favourite sports team rather than political party! More entertaining and at least that won't cause me to cut myself from interesting people or career opportunities or leave me vulnerable for silly beliefs with repercussions beyond being mistaken about my team "deserving" to win.

Lesswrong, please listen, it is OK to put on your cynic hat when that is the best thing to do!

9Vladimir_M12y
A fully cynical approach, however, would likely still find that a certain level of interest in politics is necessary so that one could optimize one's political opinions (and when and how to express them) so as to maximize their signaling value. Moreover, I disagree with this statement: In cases of major economic and political instability, it can be tremendously valuable to be able to anticipate the coming trouble and undertake damage control as early as possible. Clearly, this isn't doable if you become aware of it only when you're struck with it completely unprepared. Now of course, one could argue that the present system in the Western world is so stable that the probability of such trouble is infinitesimal, or that there is no known method for predicting such trouble with any accuracy. However, this must be established separately from the issue of futility of trying to influence politics by personal activism or voting.
4[anonymous]12y
Ironically being apolitical people will assume your politics match theirs or at least fall somewhere on the spectrum of respectable consensus, so the difference between this and consciously maximising your opinions might be smaller than seems at first glance. There are indeed in the Western world professions where it is basically your job formally or informally to master such signalling and "know politics". But these are far from the majority, even among the educated classes. Maximising political signalling will do you some good but, consider the non-trivial amount of time, effort and energy spent on this. There is a very real opportunity cost here. I would agree with this. I tried to emphasise this here: Looking back I think I should have elaborated on this black swan more. I would argue that even in times of great instability and war it is relatively easy for most "common people" (who are either relatively politically apathetic or reactionary) to side post facto with the winning side, identifying which doesn't take much time or cognitive resources. If this was not the case several countries today should be less populous than they are. But of course people who find themselves in classes that suddenly become politicised but weren't until recently (like people who wore glasses under the Khmer Rouge) would find themselves in quite a bit of trouble if they happen to follow such strategies. I should have been more explicitly in separating these two. But the thing is I don't think our mind really understands us being informed about politics and not being able to influence it in at least a small way, with the possible exception that we are really low status in our tribe (something which will frustrate us if we don't feel we deserve this low status according to other signals).

Ironically being apolitical people will assume your politics match theirs or at least fall somewhere on the spectrum of respectable consensus, so the difference between this and consciously maximising your opinions might be smaller than seems at first glance.

I agree, though in societies that are ideologized to a high degree, it takes non-trivial knowledge to recognize all topics and opinions that will be taken as political, so that paradoxically you need some knowledge of politics to be safely apolitical. Similarly, in such societies, the range of professions that don't require at least some expression of ideological rectitude can be surprisingly narrow, and it may exclude practically all high-status professions, even those that are supposed to be strictly technical. It seems to me (though it would of course be a controversial question in its own right) that Western societies have been moving in this direction for quite a while now.

Now, people, especially smart people, usually have an instinct to synchronize unconsciously with the respectable opinion (or rather with some particular position within the range of the respectable opinion). They will obtain the necessary knowledge w... (read more)

7[anonymous]12y
People who value truth seeking and truth in itself have a higher than average probability of having a damaged mechanism. One does need to know ideology but this dosen't translate into voting, watching Fox News and CNN, reading newspapers, discussing politics, commenting on Facebook on who will win the Democratic nomination this year or caring who your congressman is. Knowing what the basic ideological structure of your society is does not translate into "doing politics" or "caring about politics" and not even exactly to "knowing politics". In fact since you bring up ideology, I will say that taking an outside view of dominant Western ideology one can conclude it is remarkably easy to figure out its result, compared to the extensive processing one must do within the framework provided by this ideology to get the same output. It is trivial to predict the correct position on nearly anything following a few simple rules. Building a black box seems the most reasonable course of action. Naturally you can't really state the rules emulating the black box or people will object, since the signalling is all messed up and it may ruin important narratives. Following the rule set isn't without its problems, you will get a few very false negatives, but comparatively many false positives (that persist as false positives because power structures haven't yet had need to levy them in their never ending quest for ...uh... power) but if anything you will end up seeming too orthodox for your own good. As long as you maintain your apolitical demeanour, aren't passionate about "your opinions" (how could you be, you are getting the result without the empowering rationalizations remember!) this will never get you into trouble. And the best part is that you will often end up being "right" a few years or a decade or two later, a few true believers who know you over a long period of time might even notice this and end up respecting you for being "forward-thinking".

It is trivial to predict the correct position on nearly anything following a few simple rules.

Could you please state these rules.

Rule 1: assume all judgments that things are [ETA: or are] not of equal value are due to motivated thinking by people writing their bottom line according to a weighted primeval in-group/out-group equation, and in response one should compensate along necessary opposite vectors [ETA: or find an ingroup member to inform you about their group].

Rule 2: Rule 1 does not apply to the extent the in-group in question is constructed around complying with these rules.

Note 1: There will not necessarily be unique solutions to these rules, for example, evidence that men and women think differently in important ways can either be dismissed entirely or have its interpretation arranged so that the tasks women are better at are more important.

Note 2: These rules only apply to conclusions in line with primeval in-group/out-group thinking, for example, no one cares if their non-African scientists discover that all modern non-Africans are descended from Neanderthals, because the in-group is allowed to say things that some perceived moral systems would see as making them inferior. The opposite would have been a different situation.

Note 3: Any conclusion that results from compensating more than one ... (read more)

5[anonymous]12y
Seems a good take. Up voted! Thinking long and hard about this formulation, I think it is equivalent to a great extent to my own approach on the rules, which I constructed mostly in status language. I should admonish myself for laziness, because that key part can be talked about in the abstract (I think) and I should have taken the time to write down a post on what could be talked about. But some solutions will be more popular than others. And choosing a very unpopular solution may get you into as much trouble as not following the core rule set at all. Analysis of why some gain greater popularity in various circles is where I think the meat lies.To give an example, rule 2 is often applied to rationalize adaptive behaviour (that often dosen't even arise from the human minds ability to deceive itself for gain, but from mere selection effects and memetic evolution), so that one can continue to espouse principles and opinions that signal good things about you because of the handicap principle. So tagging on what basically amounts to a simple model of moral fashion improves predictive power noticeably and I am sure you and others can think of other such useful additions to the black box replacement of contemporary Western ideological thought as well.
8[anonymous]12y
It is basically the most mind-killing thing that I can think of in the context of LW public discussion. Also the simple rules are only simple in comparison to what they replace.They are currently scattered through various notes and correspondences and a reference chart that's probably only understandable to me. I don't have a go to response or prepared mail, I do write about individual points when they come up. To properly introduce them fully to other LWers would probably take one or two top level quality articles, rather than a throwaway comment in an obscure thread.
5Eugine_Nier12y
Not without getting into highly mind-killing territory.
5[anonymous]12y
This comment is heavily downvoted, yet it is basically my own reason as implicitly outlined in this sentence.
4Vladimir_M12y
Why on Earth is this being downvoted?
2wedrifid12y
And, for that matter, not without violating said rules.
-22sam034512y

In fact since you bring up ideology, I will say that taking an outside view of dominant Western ideology one can conclude it is remarkably easy to figure out its result, compared to the extensive processing one must do within the framework provided by this ideology to get the same result.

No argument there, however getting to the point where you have an outside view is by itself a vast and difficult project in political and ideological self-education, which requires successful grappling with many extreme mind-killing issues without getting mind-killed yourself. You make it sound much easier than it really is!

3[anonymous]12y
You are right, it is much harder than I made it sound. But I am convinced that many LWers if they could be made clearly aware of the importance of this for a clear picture and committing to be very aggressive fighting several very hard to root out biases, could make the transition or perhaps at least trust another LWer who has done some of the legwork once they saw the predictive power of the model. Naturally the impulse of wanting to grab someone and shake violently until they realize the importance of something they have been missing their entire lives does little good. It is hard to communicate in many or few words, due to various complications, just how utterly vital this difficult and even dangerous (intellectually and perhaps emotionally) journey is in order to understand society. I sometimes fear it just can not be done.
3Oligopsony12y
Actually, I'd say the "Reason As Memetic Immune Disorder hypothesis has it basically correct - to the extent that one can be "too orthodox," one ultimately has to fall into one or another heterodoxy. Most anybody who strives to take 90% of secular Western ideology seriously, consistently, and literally is going to end up libertarian or communist or transhumanist or the like - and of course (in the society we're discussing) only nerds do this. I think you're right to observe and that most everybody's aware that if one's goal is to get by socially with minimum effort, taking official ideology at face value, like taking religion at face value, is insane, but then of course different people have different goals.
-4sam034512y
Consider racefail09, where sophisticated people with great skill in expressing themselves and intimate knowledge of our politics, nonetheless found themselves in no end of trouble for violating obscure and difficult to detect taboos, found themselves in grave and potentially career threatening trouble, despite determined and terrified effort to conform. Non political people are always getting in trouble for ideological violations - for example using "gay" or "twat" as curse word rather than "prick", and as racefail09 demonstrates, even highly political people who purport to have all the correct politics can and do regularly get in trouble. Racefail09 is suggestive of the Maoist self criticism movement. When collectivization was considerably less successful and complete than it had been officially decreed to be, Mao concluded that ten percent of the party were traitors, so it became necessary to find and punish that many traitors, regardless of whether they existed or not, and no amount of knowledge of what was necessary to conform ideologically could save one.
1bogus12y
Not at all. The people who complained about supposed racism in the original post should have been trolled hard for disputing the author's motives in wishing to write fiction about minority folks--and seeking to do it "right", i.e. minimizing outgroup biases. Their original arguments were non-sensical and should have been exposed as such. Instead what we got from the folks on the author's side was lots and lots of arguments about how minority people should have no say in the matter, and how pseudonymous/anonymous critics should be disregarded for not making their identity known (even though unprivileged critics have lots of reasons for being pseudonymous). The complainers' faction replied by correctly accusing the authors' side of racist bias, and that was that. It could no longer be sensibly argued that the OP authors were in the right when seeking to write about cultural outgroups in an unbiased way, so the debate was effectively lost. Hardly a marker of "sophisticated people with great skill in expressing themselves and intimate knowledge of our politics".
-16sam034512y
2[anonymous]12y
Knowing politics can't save you here in any case. At least will do you no more good than say a simple heuristic of sticking to others of your own ethnicity (which should keep you reasonably safe). And since you are sticking to them, they will again inform you of any potential trouble via daily interactions. Just remember to be more paranoid than the norm and not afraid to change countries. How much better is, someone involved in the political process, going to be at predicting this compared to someone who apolitically looks at the broad trends and reigning ideology? The latter person knows there is a certain probability of such a blow up, though he may miss it due to too infrequent updating, the former will probably only realize this is possible a few weeks or even days before the event. How these two approaches compare to each other depends on how fast one updates on new information I suppose. I would argue that a long term strategy of preparation for such possible "man made disasters" might outdo the rushed preparations of someone responding to the politics as they happen. Perfect blindness to both daily politics and the real mechanisms of how one's society function is naturally perilous. But consider the context of this discussions. The "real" mechanism would be perhaps controversial but mostly not covered under the "no mind killers" rule. Politics as in the politics that most obviously triggers this is useless.
9Vladimir_M12y
I think we're having a misunderstanding about what exactly we mean by the "no mind killers" rule. Clearly, getting into mind-killing debates with people is worse than useless; that much we can agree on. On the other hand, making a correct decision to bail out ahead of trouble requires that you face the very worst mind-killing issues head-on and make correct judgments about them. (It is possible that such attempts are ultimately futile or not worth the opportunity costs when all probabilities are considered, but there's a Catch-22 situation there, because consideration of at least some highly mind-killing topics is necessary in order to establish this.) However, when people speak about avoiding mind-killers on LW, they often have in mind complete cessation of thinking about such topics and living under the assumption that the status quo will continue indefinitely, or all until some grand technological game-changer. (Worse yet, sometimes they go further and privilege the hypotheses on controversial questions favored by the respectable opinion and official intellectual institutions, and consider attacks on these, but not adherence to them, as mind-killing.)
[-][anonymous]12y120

Politics as in the politics that most obviously triggers this is useless.

What I meant by this was things like idle speculating about the election. Indulging in off hand remarks about Gawddamn Liberals and Bible Thumping Conservatives. Frowning seriously and speaking about some politicians misconduct. Debating the particularities of certain laws. Endorsing candidates, criticizing candidates. Taking the parties stated platform seriously, ad hominens on the demographics that support a certain position, various other Dark Arts, ect.

In short everything that immediately triggers tribal feelings in those who are basically politically active average Joe "good citizens".

The "real" mechanism would be perhaps controversial but mostly not covered under the "no mind killers" rule.

These are of course ideological mind-killers. I would argue that currently there is some room for intelligent debates on LW about various such issues, the sore thumb being gender relations/sexual conduct. People are not obviously mind-killed by discussing say group differences or questioning Democracy (ok many are, but a substantial and not at all fringe fraction of LWers who have ... (read more)

-32sam034512y
5komponisto12y
(I think you meant to link to "Generalizing From One Example" instead of "The Mind Projection Fallacy", which is something different.)
1[anonymous]12y
You are right, thank you for pointing that out. Skimming through the article I can see why I remembered it as "Typical Mind Fallacy" rather than "Generalizing From One Example". I will fix the link.
-18sam034512y
5Tyrrell_McAllister12y
It's not quite that simple. You shouldn't just ask yourself, "Will my one little voice make things better? Or would exactly the same things happen if I said the opposite, all else being equal?" If UDT or TDT are at all on the right track, then you should ask, "If everyone who decides according to the same logic by which I decide decides to say this, will it make things better?" The number of people who share your logic may scale with total population, so it might still make sense to speak, even if you are individually an infinitesimal fraction of the total population.
5komponisto12y
Conversely, the Lesswrong community's attitude that politics is mostly bunk was one of the main things that convinced me that Lesswrong was a den of sanity. (I would in fact propose this as an excellent general litmus test for rationality, at least among the intelligent and informed.)
-2bogus12y
"Conversely, the Lesswrong community's attitude that politics is mostly bunk was one of the main things that convinced me that Lesswrong was a den of sanity. (I would in fact propose this as an excellent general litmus test for rationality, at least among the intelligent and informed.)" Really? How's this for a rationality quote: (Attributed to Pericles, Greek politician.) Stated differently, conflicts among folks in any society are inevitable. Politics is simply a way of de-escalating such conflicts and making sure they're dealt with peacefully, when simpler solutions like ethical debate become impractical (due to growing social complexity) and established law is contentious or not directly applicable.

Please note: thinking politics is bunk is not the same thing as not being interested in politics.

Or, to use a line I've always dreamed of using, after shocking somebody with unexpected political knowledge: "I said I was apathetic. I didn't say I was ignorant."

(And no, the Pericles quote is not a good rationality quote. It's blatant propaganda from the mouth of a politician.)

0bogus12y
OK, then what does it mean? If you mean that de-facto political practice (I'd rather call this "politics-as-usual", for clarity) is not worth getting involved with, or not promoting good outcomes, or something else which could be described as "is bunk", then I will probably agree. But again, this is not a sensible reason for disclaiming and renouncing any kind of involvement in politics. Instead, we might (and perhaps should) see this as an opportunity for raising the sanity waterline in this domain by promoting more effective styles of political involvement and argumentation.
5komponisto12y
In this context, "not signaling allegiance to a standard political faction". Or more generally, "not looking at the world through the prism of a standard political ideology".
1bogus12y
I might agree with you, except that factions (hence, folks needing to declare allegiance to some faction) have instrumental value in political processes, and it's hard to see what might replace them. So even though ideologies can be bad (since they often lead to absolute-sounding, black-and-white thinking) the best antidote to them is compromise and careful deliberation--as opposed to withdrawing politics entirely and ceding any debate to the faction with the briefest sound-bites and the most adherents.
3komponisto12y
If you think you know how to get yourself elected to public office, and/or get sane policies implemented, all while retaining enough sanity yourself to be able to tell which policies are sane, don't let me stop you. (Also don't let me stop you from using any other superpowers you may have, such as leaping tall buildings in a single bound.) My worry is about people whose time isn't best spent on politics getting their minds killed by it. Think of Eliezer turning into Noam Chomsky as the nightmare scenario. Unlikely to happen, and thank goodness. No, the problem is much more general than that. After all, sometimes the truth is black-and-white. What ideologies do is make you stupid. They prevent you from properly exploring the hypothesis space of explanations for phenomena or solutions to problems. They prevent you from being able to tell the difference between black-and-white situations and those that are more subtle. And they prevent you from correcting your mistakes.
3bogus12y
I think people seeking public office are saner than you give them credit for. Politicians tend to espouse crazy thinking because that's how the incentives are set up, both within political parties--where signalling loyalty to the party is often paramount, so lower-ranked folks refrain from any criticism of policies and personalities: not the way a rationally-inspired organization is managed--and in the broader political arena, especially during campaigns but this is when "politics" is most visible and salient. The mantra of a successful campaign can be phrased as: "stay on message; no compromise, no debating." Thus, almost no one's time is best spent on politics today, but this could be changed fairly easily. We are lucky, in that deliberative politics can be promoted incrementally both within organizations and in the broader political sphere. Especially if some parties or factions were to adopt open, deliberative methods and perhaps promote them as "more pragmatic, less ideological" and "more rationalist"; but also "more transparent and accountable", which appeals to the more idealistic folks and perhaps challenges them to influence policy by finding tolerable compromises.
3komponisto12y
Again, even if that were true, it's not the point. The purpose of the slogan "politics is the mind-killer" is not to discourage rationalists with political talent from becoming professional politicians; it is to prevent the dynamics of tribal-loyalty-signaling from poisoning truth-seeking discussion among those interested in the latter.
1bogus12y
You seem to be assuming that the only way to usefully affect politics in the real world is becoming a professional politician, which is not at all obvious. In general, political ideology has little to do with truth-seeking one way or another; rather, it is quite comparable to a personal moral code. (Indeed, we can talk about 'political Christianity', 'political Islam', 'political environmentalism' as being directly influenced by moral codes.) Surely we can agree that lots of folks here follow a deontological moral code, without this noticeably affecting their truth-seeking ability. Moreover, as a matter of fact, a lot of "truth-seeking" in the real world happens through adversarial processes which are quite comparable to political dynamics (and may in fact have similar rationales, such as ensuring "fairness" in the process and outcome). For the sake of consistency, we should be forced to promote a similar slogan "Law is the mind-killer!" and refrain from any discussion about the Knox/Sollicito case, lest tribal-loyalty signaling towards either the prosecutor's or the defendant's "side" poison any truth-seeking effort. If anything, law is even more problematic than politics, since biased/filtered evidence is so ubiquitous in legal processes.
4bogus12y
AFAICT, this is simply wrong. There are many political trends (on a scale of several months to a few years) which will noticeably affect the typical person. This is not to say that affecting such trends is easy or that conventional "political involvement" is useful. But this should be regarded as an open problem, not as a reason to renounce and surrender any kind of involvement with these issues.
2[anonymous]12y
The typical person will be informed of such trends by other typical people.
4Desrtopa12y
Insofar as politics is mostly bunk, I would say that it's because politicians are only about as sane as everyone else. If you want politics to accomplish anything useful, try to raise the sanity waterline.
1[anonymous]12y
Which as we know is very very hard to do by doing politics.
0MixedNuts12y
None of these statements imply any of the others.
2wedrifid12y
That is a plainly false claim. The second statement implies the first for a start.
4MixedNuts12y
There are ways to have politics in your personal life that aren't talking about ideology.
1J_Taylor12y
Could you give an example?
5MixedNuts12y
Silently thinking about ideology. Acting on the results in your personal life (you're a cop; do you arrest Mandela?). Thinking about who to vote for. Joining a union. Going on strike. Disobeying a law you don't like. Storming a significant building. Fighting in a civil war.
1[anonymous]12y
For politics beyond the municipal level I just don't see how. Politics is termed the art of the possible, this means one must necessarily aggressively signal to build coalitions. On the level of a state one must build coalitions around class, ideological, ethnic and even religious affiliations. Humans are built as hypocrites for a reason, some forms of signalling are easier and more safely done if you honestly believe (while keeping adaptive behaviour that dosen't quite go together with your beliefs). Biases and failures of our mind will shift your opinions closer to your stated opinions even if you guard against this, or at the very least your children will inherit them (see crypto-Jews or Kakure Kirishitan's to get a feeling for how hard it is to avoid this).
-1roland12y
Who is Roissy?
4arundelo12y
Roissy is a PUA whose old blog is now only available via the Internet Archive. Apparently this is his current blog. In a comment from April 2010, I said: However, I liked the grandparent and (a bit less) the other Roissy quote Konkvistador posted.

What good fortune for those in power that people do not think.

Adolph Hitler

[-][anonymous]12y190

What misfortune for all that those in power don't either.

An alternate, and perhaps even more frightening hypothesis: the people in power do think, and they're doing their best.

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.

William Lawrence Bragg

This is one of those occasions when it would be wise to translate back into respectable gene language, just to reassure ourselves that we have not become too carried away with subjective metaphors.

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, ch. 8

Whether their motives were righteous or venal, highminded or base, noble or ig-, in retrospect the obvious verdict is that they were all morons--yes, even the distinguished fellows and visiting scholars at think tanks and deans of international studies schools. They were morons because the whole moral, political and practical purpose of their scheme depended on its going exactly according to plan. Which nothing ever does. The Latin phrase for this logical fallacy would be Duh. Some of them were halfway intelligent; some of them may even have been well-intentioned; but they lacked imagination, and this is a fatal flaw. What we learn from history is that it never turns out like it's supposed to. And the one thing we know for sure about the future is that it won't be like we think.

Tim Kreider, Artist's Note for The Pain

"-but I think it would probably kill you."

"Comforting to know. Well, more comforting than not knowing it could kill you," I remark pointedly.

Sam Hughes

[-][anonymous]12y170

A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.

--Thomas Carlyle

5TheOtherDave12y
I love this quote, but it really isn't true. People frequently forego the first one.
6JoshuaZ12y
I just ran into a surprisingly candid example of Richard Feynman talking about when he did that. He worked on the atomic bomb to make sure that Nazis didn't get it first, but then he kept working on it even after the Nazis had been defeated.
3khafra12y
I don't think the first one ever gets generated unless someone else asks them why they did that something.
1Nominull12y
it must be nice to be clever enough to generate good reasons in real time, rather than having to spend all your spare cycles preemptively coming up with justifications for your actions.
3wedrifid12y
I love it too and I like to have an evil reason as well. That keeps things in perspective. And a right reason - which balances the 'good' with the 'evil' according to my ethical sentiment. But that's just a (morally ambiguous) ideal. The real reason, that which Carlyle mentions, is something else again.
2RobinZ12y
I have a different angle - I like to have a stupid reason, to amuse my friends with.
1lessdazed12y
I interpret "good reason" as "'good' reason".
0FiftyTwo12y
What is most awful is how often people do things for no reason at all.
4TheOtherDave12y
Why is that awful?

"Don’t ask yourself if something is fair. Ask someone else--a stranger in the street, for example." -Lemony Snicket

4wedrifid12y
Why? How does knowing about this 'fairness' thing help me? (This was the line I was expecting the quote to go after the first sentence.)

If you want a truly amoral reason to care, it is this: most other people do, and these are the people you will have to convince of any proposal you want to make about anything, ever. If you propose something unfair, and are called on it, you will lose status and your proposal is unlikely to be adopted.

I would be deeply surprised if you did not care at all about fairness. I tend to think that at least some regard for fairness is part of the common mental structures of humans (there's a sequence post about this but I can't find it)

4Jack12y
There is enough neuroatypicality here that I am only barely surprised when someone deviates significantly typical human morality.
1nshepperd12y
But mostly in the form of aspergers-like attributes, and this specific form of non-typicality isn't supposed to be very different to "normal people" in terms of moral feelings, as far as I've been told, anyway. (And in fact I vaguely remember reading an article on how "aspies" tended to care about morality more than the normals... ETA: found it. Doesn't look like a particularly trustworthy source though.)
2AdeleneDawner12y
I agree with this in a sense, but only in a sense. It seems to me that every culture has a slightly different idea of what 'fairness' means, to the point where the word itself doesn't really translate from one language to another. (Or perhaps I'm thinking of 'justice', which still seems similar enough to count.) The tendency to have something-like-fairness seems pretty universal, though, even if the specific concepts involved aren't.
2wedrifid12y
I love fairness. "Ethical Inhibitions" may be the one you are thinking of (or of interest anyway). Possibly my favorite post.
[-][anonymous]12y110

Agreed, but I don't think the quote necessarily disagrees with you. I interpreted it to mean, "If you want to know if something is fair, you can't just consult yourself." This says nothing about whether fairness is helpful or desirable, it's just warning against committing the typical mind fallacy with respect to fairness.

My faith in the expertise of physicists like Richard Feynman, for instance, permits me to endorse—and, if it comes to it, bet heavily on the truth of—a proposition that I don't understand. So far, my faith is not unlike religious faith, but I am not in the slightest bit motivated to go to my death rather than recant the formulas of physics. Watch: E doesn't equal mc2, it doesn't, it doesn't!

--Dan Dennet: Breaking the Spell

0khafra12y
Eppure si muovo?
4dlthomas12y
According to wikipedia, it's unlikely Galileo actually said this.
8khafra12y
Aside from my abject failure at the Italian language, I think my objection can be sustained. Semmelweis, for instance, was fired for his continued insistence that hand washing by doctors prevented disease; and met his end in a sanitarium. He saved many lives by insisting on hand washing, even though he predated the germ theory of disease, and there was probably something akin to a utilitarian calculation in his giving up his own welfare for that of many others. So, one does not go to one's death for the truth of the propositions one doesn't understand, but rather for the way the implications of those propositions affect one's terminal values. This brings us much closer to the religious who believe that very bad things happen if they recant their creed.
5komponisto12y
Indeed, because it's ungrammatical. The phrase that Galileo may (not) have said is: (EDIT: Unless, of course, what was meant was: i.e., "And yet....yes, I move!")
1Normal_Anomaly12y
I think that the legend works best as a legend if it's known to be untrue. After all, the point is that whether he said it or not, the earth kept moving.
2dlthomas12y
I'll grant that, for sure.
[-][anonymous]12y140

You are not a special little snowflake, but you should act like you are. If people are going to form impressions of you it’s better they make false positive ones than true negative ones.

-- Roissy in DC

0MixedNuts12y
Why am I not a special little snowflake? Also, that's not an equilibrium. If everyone acts like a snowflake, if will stop creating positive impressions and people who can afford to will start acting humble to countersignal snowflakiness. Unless very few people can afford to, in which case the decision is isomorphic to the prisoner's dilemma and Roissy is telling people to defect.

"Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good."

--#122 Assorted Opinions and Maxims, Friedrich Nietzsche

8lessdazed12y
Upvotes for irony if anyone can find an earlier version of the quote from a European source.
[-][anonymous]12y140

‎"Real magic is the kind of magic that is not real, while magic that is real (magic that can actually be done), is not real magic."

-Lee Siegle

[-][anonymous]12y140

Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses. It is a faculty that man has to exercise by choice. Thinking is not an automatic function. In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one’s consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality—or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make.

Ayn Rand

7Document12y
It's too bad this has already dropped off the front page. Someone should request sticky threads here, although I don't care enough.
2soreff12y
This view is much too binary. There are a myriad variety of choices of what to focus on, what aspect of it to focus on, and how much effort to apply to the focus. Someone can be purposefully aware of a very specific task, say a high speed race, with the bulk of their thinking down at the level of pattern matching. Someone can do highly abstract symbolic manipulations while half asleep and still recognize when they bump into the right set of manipulations to solve the problem.
0[anonymous]12y
"This means the application of reason to every aspect of one's life and concerns. It means choosing and validation one's opinions, one's decision, one's work, one's love, in accordance with the normal requirements of a cognitive process, the requirements of logic, objectivity, integration. Put negatively, the virtue means never placing any consideration above one's perception of reality. This includes never attempting to get away with a contradiction, a mystic fantasy, or an indulgence in context-dropping." - Leonard Peikoff wtf

It does not do to dwell on dreams... and forget to live.

Professor Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore

0Nominull12y
Not sure I want to take that from someone who died.
8wedrifid12y
Is all wisdom about living by anyone who is no longer alive made worthless by that fact? That seems rather arbitrary!
[-][anonymous]12y240

If the ancients were so wise, why are they dead?

-- Discordian saying

If the ancients were so wise, why are they dead?

Because they only had time to discover three quarters of the recipe for immortality before they died...

"I find the Law of Fives to be more and more manifest the harder I look."

--Principia Discordia (surprisingly, not quoted yet)

1shminux12y
Maybe because it has little to do with rationality?
0Manfred12y
(deleted to humor gwern, though probably ineffectually)
0gwern12y
I thought the relevance was extremely obvious to LW; before I explain, I'd like to hear what you interpret it as (or don't interpret it as being at all relevant).
4Normal_Anomaly12y
My guess (I haven't read RobinZ's) is that vg'f nobhg pbasvezngvba ovnf. Knowing what Discordianism is probably makes it more obvious.
2RobinZ12y
If I were to guess in rot13, I'd say it was about pbasvezngvba ovnf, napubevat, naq bgure fhpuyvxr curabzran - but I would still agree with shminux that it's not very good.

"As soon as we look at the nature of inference at this many-moves-ahead level of perception, our attitude toward probability theory and the proper way to use it in science becomes almost diametrically opposite to that expounded in most current textbooks. We need have no fear of making shaky calculations on inadequate knowledge; for if our predictions are indeed wrong, then we shall have an opportunity to improve that knowledge, an opportunity that would have been lost had we been too timid to make the calculations.

Instead of fearing wrong predictions, we look eagerly for them; it is only when predictions based on our present knowledge fail that probability theory leads us to fundamental new knowledge."

E.T. Jaynes's "Bayesian Methods: General Background"

"It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs."

  • Eric Hoffer
3[anonymous]12y
What is unbelief?

There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts.

Voltaire

[-][anonymous]12y130

.

I've read the source and context of that and it's really not impressing me as a rational thing to do... it's a clever/smartass thing to do, but in what way did Ilyssa win? Surely she didn't expect Eric to enlighten her on the subject in some way she hadn't thought about before, and now she is "miserable about Eric", and didn't get to enjoy Hamlet.

The "I can't stop myself" says it all - she can't choose not to defect. That's not a strength.

2DSimon12y
Another quote from that source amuses me: Reminds me of Secular Heaven
-1Manfred12y
Agreed. All the things to say that she finds "interesting" and "valid" seem to be shocking to other people. That's not a problem of being too honest, it's a problem of intentionally trying to drive people away (or being someone's bulbous caricature of a "rationalist"). And, of course, rational agents maximize their current utility functions.
1NancyLebovitz12y
Maybe her best chance for happiness would have been with a fellow rationalist, and there's only one way to find him.

Maybe, but there's nothing to support the idea that that's what's motivating Ilyssa there. It seems more like an excuse to blurt out anything contrarian that comes to mind, without having to exercise any impulse control or consider the actual, you know, effect of the words.

Maybe I'm committing the typical mind fallacy, but I think I see what's going on here because there's a part of me that likes that quote - the part of me that is clever and contrarian and enjoys throwing wrenches into arbitrary social scripts and customs, because the arbitrariness combined with the expectation of being conformed to offends me. I think many of us here can identify with that and perhaps that's what's causing people to mistake that quote as a rationalist one?

If not, then answer me this: was either instrumental or epistemic rationality served there in any way?

3[anonymous]12y
.
0MarkusRamikin12y
Out of context, I still get a little red flag when I see the "I can't stop myself" part. Though perhaps that might be because I didn't quite manage to divorce it from context in my mind... EDIT: Anyway, I think context matters, the spirit in which a quote was originally made should be taken into consideration. So I downvoted the quote because I don't want people to look up the source and then perceive that kind of smartassery as "rationality" as approved by lesswrongians.
0[anonymous]12y
.
0MarkusRamikin12y
I suppose... But if we change it and read it as being about something else (than what it was about in the original context) then it isn't really a rationality quote any more, is it? Can it suffice that I understood where you're coming from and respect what you were trying to say? (even before getting here, I upvoted your previous comment, for clarity and responding well without being defensive.) I just object to that quote, not to the sentiment you're trying to express.
0[anonymous]12y
.
1NancyLebovitz12y
Fair enough. Instrumental rationality is served if she likes blindsiding people more than anything else she could get from them, but she doesn't actually seem to, once she thinks about it.
-3Document12y
J. K. Rowling Edit: Wasn't expecting downvotes. Maybe the distinction between the attributions is obvious, but I still don't see it. Edit 2: Downvotes explained; thanks.
9Nominull12y
It is perhaps not obvious that you are ironically committing a sin in order to point out someone else's unironic sin, rather than just unironically sinning yourself.
5RobertLumley12y
I am also not a downvoter (I generally try not to) but I think it's likely due to the hostile, aggressive tone, and the lack of implied values, as NancyLebovitz touched on. I also might suggest that Rowling probably didn't mean that, since it was said by, ya know, Voldemort. Some may have downvoted because it implied Rowling agreed with it.
5NancyLebovitz12y
I'm not one of the downvoters, but I'd say the quote isn't rationalist because it leaves out what one might be seeking power for. And it makes a wild guess about why everyone isn't in line with the speaker's favorite value. I'd also say that it's important to think about where cooperation fits into trying to get anything done.
5Document12y
The point is that J. K. Rowling didn't say it.
7NancyLebovitz12y
There's more than one point. One is that it assuredly isn't Rowling's point of view, and another is that regardless of who said it, it isn't a rationalist statement. I recommend that we have a convention of not just attributing quotes to their authors, but at least mentioning if a quote is the words of a fictional character. Ideally, there would be a link or some mention of context.
1RobertLumley12y
Yes, I'm very confused. I knew it was Voldemort who said that, but could you perhaps explain your point? I'm unfamiliar with the original quote; were you trying to point out that Scott Aaronson didn't mean what was attributed to him anymore than Rowling meant what you attributed to her?
3Document12y
Also, when I first read the quote my brain inferred that Scott Aaronson had provoked some kind of blog drama kerfuffle and been forced into a backpedaling, self-justifying apology; which lowered its opinion of him.
3Document12y
Even if he meant it (and it's unclear what that would mean in context), the minimum standard for attributing a quotation to someone should be that they said it themselves.
0RobertLumley12y
I disagree, I attribute a number of qutoes in my quotesfile to Eliezer, even though they were actually "said" by Harry, in HPMOR. I feel like it's a far more honest attribution, provided you are able to ascertain which characters are actually the voice of the author, which for the vast majority of literature, is quite obvious.

provided you are able to ascertain which characters are actually the voice of the author, which for the vast majority of literature, is quite obvious.

This sounds like illusion of transparency to me. I've never written a character whose arbitrary lines I'd like quoted as though I'd said them sans fictional mouthpiece.

0RobertLumley12y
See my other comment.
8Document12y
That's an interesting example when EY has complained himself about people attributing views to him based on the story, and even put disclaimers on chapters 1 and 22 to try to stop it. I don't see how it's more honest. Are people going to infer that Scott doesn't hold any position that isn't attributed to him?
-2RobertLumley12y
I've noticed the disclaimers, but I feel fairly confident (p > 0.95) that none of the quotes (They're all said by Harry) he would mind being attributed to him. If the consensus is that I shouldn't attribute these quotes to him, or if he himself actually says so, I will certainly change them: • “When you put on the robes of a scientist you must forget all your politics and arguments and factions and sides, silence the desperate clingings of your mind, and wish only to hear the answer of Nature.” – Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality • “There is no justice in the laws of nature, … no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don't have to. We care. There is light in the world, and it is us.” - Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality • “So I won't ask you to say that [it] was wrong … just say that it was… sad. We won't talk about whether or not it was necessary, whether it was justified. I'll just ask you to say that it was sad that it happened. … If we start out by saying that every life is precious, that it's sad when anyone dies, then I know we'll meet someday.” – Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality • “I see little hope for democracy as an effective form of government, but I admire the poetry of how it makes its victims complicit in their own destruction.” – Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality • “Tell me something. What does a government have to do, what do the voters have to do with their democracy, what do the people of a country have to do, before I ought to decide that I'm not on their side any more?” – Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality ---------------------------------------- And I see it as more honest because the "character" doesn't exist. He isn't saying it, because he doesn't actually exist. If the

Why not use "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Eliezer Yudkowsky", rather than "Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"? My intuition is that putting the title of the work of fiction first makes it more clear that you're citing the author's words rather than necessarily the author's own opinions.

2RobertLumley12y
That's an excellent idea, I'll change my attributions when I get a chance.
3Alicorn12y
Nope.
0RobertLumley12y
Which isn't? Am I misremembering? The fourth is said by Quirrell, now that I think about it, isn't it.
5JoshuaZ12y
Question: If one isn't keeping track even which characters have said which quotes (and in this case a quote that jumps out as very much not a Harry thing to say), what makes you confident that you can judge which quotes are intended to be things the author agrees with? This should surely reduce your confidence by a fair bit.
0RobertLumley12y
It does, on the fourth quote. But to be fair, I had thought that all of the quotes were by Harry and then went to look them up - I did not look them up and then think they were all by Harry. I might have noticed it, had I done the latter. But once I had looked them up I did not reconsider my previous statement - it was made completely from memory (And I have a collection of upwards of 100 quotes).
3JoshuaZ12y
The first two quotes seem like things that Eliezer would actually agree with. But I'm substantially less convinced about the others.
1RobertLumley12y
I feel very confident about the first three. Less so about the last two, but I still feel like he generally would agree with them. If that's not the general consensus though, (Judging by the downvotes, it isn't) I'll change the attributions. This raises an interesting question though: when is it appropriate to attribute it to the author? The most obvious example I can think of would be John Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged - surely it's reasonable to attribute that to Rand: it's practically a nonfiction essay slapped in the middle of a book. Less ambiguous though: what about the words of a narrator? (I have a quote by Virginia Woolfe that was said by the narrator) Should that be attributed to the author? What if the narrator is a character in the story (Camus, The Plague, another one of my quotes)?
5Kaj_Sotala12y
This seems like an obvious case where you should have a policy of always doing X, even if not-X was right most of the time, because not-X will occasionally be wrong and cause harm while there's no harm in doing X. In other words, you should always have a (character, work, author) attribution, or (work, author) if it's said by the narrator. There's no reason to not do it, and an obvious reason why you should do it (because you will be wrong from time to time).
0RobertLumley12y
Why do you say (work, author) for a narrator? And what if the narrator is a character in the book, but technically not "speaking" at the time? And I think there is an obvious reason - namely that more attributions is more cumbersome and distracting, although I'm not sure that is a overly compelling reason.
5Kaj_Sotala12y
Admittedly, in such a case attributing it to the author is more justified. But the author-as-the-narrator saying something still isn't necessarily the same thing as the author saying something: there is the technique of an unreliable narrator, for instance. The narrator can also have a personality that's distinct from the author's, even a personality that the author would personally find repulsive. I wouldn't like it if people attributed what I wrote in Musings of a Vampire to me without clarifying that these aren't actually my views. I'm not sure what you mean. Example?
2RobertLumley12y
In The Plague, by Camus, the narrator is the protagonist of the story, which isn't revealed until the end. In To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolfe, the narrator is continually shifting between all of the main characters.
4Kaj_Sotala12y
In those cases, (work, author) and (character, work, author) would both be fine. The main thing is making clear that these aren't necessarily the views of the author.
-1ArisKatsaris12y
Never. It's fiction, so you should never attribute a quote from there to a real person. Never, never, never.
3dlthomas12y
You should never attribute mention in a way that implies use - but you should still attribute it as mention.
2thomblake12y
That confuses me, as I tend to think of attribution as a way of giving credit where credit is due, and the author is the one who strung together those particular words, regardless of any endorsement.
7Jack12y
"Blah blah bluh"- Fictional Character in Work of Fiction by Author's Name (Not that you didn't already know that)
1thomblake12y
Yes, that's the sort of attribution I was thinking of.
2ArisKatsaris12y
"Strung together those particular words, regardless of any endorsement" might work in a universe where words are strung together only for the pretty sound they make, not for their meaning. If you attribute artistry correctly and end up misattributing the meaning, you're effectively lying about the author, no matter what your actual intentions are. What is so hard about attributing the words to a work, and attributing the work to the author? Do we really need to debate the virtues of being clear and not misleading people?
1thomblake12y
Aha, I thought you were saying that a quote from a work of fiction should not be attributed to its author at all, which is what I took issue with. Clearly it makes sense to do so by way of the work, possibly taking pains to point out that it was from a work of fiction.
-1JoshuaZ12y
The third quote might be something Eliezer would agree about in the context of Malfoy in particular. The quote in a more general context is much more problematic. How many violent extremist groups would agree that the deaths they cause are sad? I'm not sure Eliezer expects to come to terms with them except in some very abstract far setting after some AGI has implemented some form of CEV or something like that. All the questions you raise can be easily handled by simply quoting all the potentially relevant information. When in doubt, supply more, not less information.
-1lessdazed12y
Less effective, less harmful, and most importantly with the least painful transitions of power - this is modern Western democracy. It's not half bad! Four out of five stars and one thumb up.
-1RobertLumley12y
What that quote always reminded me of was OBL, but you have a good point, it could easily be used as a rationalization by other groups.

"Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf."

--William James, "The Will to Believe" (section VII)

With a few brackets it is easy enough to see that 5 + 4 is 9. What is not easy to see is that 5 + 4 is not 6.

Carl Linderholm, Mathematics Made Difficult.

3lessdazed12y
I do not understand.
-1Patrick12y
-- Carl Linderholm, Mathematics Made Difficult Let me explain why it's not easy to see that 5+4 is not 6. Earlier, the numbers were defined as 2 = 1+1 3 = 1+2 4 = 1+3 5 = 1+4 6 = 1+5 7 = 1+6 8 = 1+7 9 = 1+8. Where + is associative. Consider a "clock" with 3 numbers, 1, 2, 3. x+y means "Start at x and advance y hours". 3 2 -> 1 Then 1+1 = 2 and 2+1 = 3, as per our definitions. Also, 3+1 = 1 (since if you start at the 3 and advance 1 hour, you end up at 1). Thus 4 = 1, 5 = 4+1 so 5 = 1+1 = 2. So 6 = 5+1 = 5 + 4.
0lessdazed12y
So because the numbers were defined with eight examples, no example explicitly showing associativity or commutivity, it's hard to see why there's no license to arbitrarily choose a modulus for each number? Or perhaps we only feel like we can do that if that would let us make two sides of an equation equal? As if the implicit rule connoted by the examples was "if two sides of an equation can be interpreted as "equal", one must declare them "equal", where "equal" is defined as amounting to the same, whatever modular operations must be done to make it so? So the definitions are incomplete without an example of something that does not equal something else?
9Manfred12y
It's not just about 8 examples - with any number of examples it would be perfectly valid to insert something like 6 = 1. And so there's an additional axiom in Peano arithmetic that has to explicitly rule it out (if you're talking about numbers that way). Not super-shocking.
8Alejandro112y
My interpretation of the original quote was to take "see that 5 + 4 is not 6" as "prove that you cannot prove that 5 + 4 = 6", in other words, "prove that Peano's arithmetic is consistent". Maybe I was too influenced by this.
3Manfred12y
I think that's a way better interpretation :D
5[anonymous]12y
My understanding is that given those eight definitions, it is impossible to prove any inequalities, because no inequality is given as an axiom, nor any properties that are true of some numbers but not others.

Thus I make no apologies for focusing on income. Over the long run in- come is more powerful than any ideology or religion in shaping lives. No God has commanded worshippers to their pious duties more forcefully than income as it subtly directs the fabric of our lives.

-- Gregory Clark, A farewell to Alms

[ In his interesting book on economic history, Gregory Clark follows Adam Smith ]

I think, therefore I am perhaps mistaken.

Sharon Fenick

Now, a symbol is not, properly speaking, either true or false; it is, rather, something more or less well selected to stand for the reality it represents, and pictures that reality in a more or less precise, or a more or less detailed manner.

Pierre Duhem The aim and structure of physical theory

"The role of art is to serve the rational man's need for a moment, an hour or some period of time in which he can experience the sense of his completed task, the sense of living in a universe where his values have been successfully achieved. It is like a moment of rest, a moment to gain fuel to move farther. Art gives him that fuel; the pleasure of contemplating the objectified reality of one’s own sense of life is the pleasure of feeling what it would be like to live in one’s ideal world."

-- Ayn Rand

Everything is revealed to he who turns over enough stones. (Including the snakes that he did not want to find.)

Anon

[-][anonymous]12y90

And the simple reason why it is so easy to fool psychiatrists with words like "atypical" and "tricyclic" is that most psychiatrists are stupendously ignorant of even kindergarten-level pharmacology and have barely any idea about how to interpret a study-- I don't mean p values, I mean looking at the y-axis; I mean the introduction. Much, much easier to base all of their arguments on empty terms that are nothing other than branding choices. Never mind the senseless term "atypical". Gun to head, is Seroquel an "antipsyc

... (read more)
1Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) 12y
I went and read the original article and was massively entertained, mainly because I just studied for weeks to memorize all those drug names. I remember it saying in our textbook that the second-generation "atypical" antipsychotics had fewer side effects...and I was surprised because my friend is on a second-generation antipsychotic (Zyprexa) and at some point has had pretty much every possible side effect.
7[anonymous]12y
I read TLP with a giant grain of salt, because sometimes the things he says about the psychiatric profession just seem downright implausible.
6kalla72412y
Speaking as a person in the field - while true in general, in this particular case he is completely correct. Atypical antipsychotics have turned out to be massively misrepresented by the pharmaceutical companies. To avoid misunderstandings: I am a great supporter of pharmacological interventions, and I don't think that "Big Pharma" is an evil force, but this case has been one of the darkest spots on the image of the profession in the last decade. The excellent and highly recommended "Mind Hacks" blog has been following the slow crash of the atypicals for a while. Latest can be seen here.
4Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) 12y
It reads like the writing of someone with an enormous axe to grind...

From the first episode of Dexter, season 6:

Batista: "...it's all about faith..."
Dexter: "Mmm..."
Batista: "It's something you feel, not something you can explain. It's very hard to put into words."

Dexter smiles politely, while thinking to himself: Because it makes no sense.

0Dojan12y
Dexter is atheist? Maybe I should see that show after all...
0RobertLumley12y
People put plenty of things into words that make no sense. Words are only words; that's why humanity invented mathematics.
1shokwave12y
Sure, but putting nonsense into words opens it to attack; fear of a justified attack may present as "it's hard to put into words".

"A scientific theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler."

Einstein

4PhilGoetz12y
Sounds good, but may not be meaningful outside of physics, where by "theory" you usually mean model, and a model can be made simpler or more complex as the occasion demands.
1[anonymous]12y
Considering my brain is too small for the universe, making the theory as simple as possible sounds like a good strategy when dealing with hard problems.
0[anonymous]12y
It's a good strategy if "possible" means "not too simple to function correctly". You can model a human as a point mass affected only by gravity, and this model is presumably too simple for most purposes, but it's not clear in what sense it's an impossible model.

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.

Isaac Asimov

If something doesn't make sense, one of your assumptions has to be wrong, because if something doesn't make sense, it can't be real.

House, episode 2x24, "No Reason"

9Desrtopa12y
Or if something doesn't make sense, you may not have learned to think like reality.
0[anonymous]12y
Great read thanks!
5[anonymous]12y
Isn't possible that you've just asked a Wrong Question? Although I guess you could claim that you have then made an assumption that the question could be answered . . .

The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

Apple

The ones who do are a proper subset of the ones who think they can, and there are serious costs to being in the difference between the two sets.

2Richard_Kennaway12y
Traditional saying.

Not every change is a catastrophe, but every catastrophe is a change.

-What the Wise Master might have said, if he were making a different point.

6Oscar_Cunningham12y
Apart from compound interest.
5Logos0112y
... even "staying the course" can be considered risking something if you have the proper mindset.
4Manfred12y
At which point the saying becomes equivalent to "don't exist, nothing gained." Not a very informative interpretation.
5dlthomas12y
Nothing ventured, less lost, however.
5aSynchro12y
There's a nice quote from George Bernard Shaw on the same subject: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." It's more demonstrative imho ^^
1Fyrius12y
Ah, that one. I may lack the context to properly appreciate this quote, but evaluating it on its own merits, I've always thought it's unfair - I think the judgemental aspect isn't necessarily warranted. It's unreasonable to want to adapt the world to ourselves, now? In many cases I think it's just a good idea, and there are plenty of examples that I don't think anyone would feel any need to disagree with. Humankind changed the world when they eliminated smallpox, for example. I may be missing the point.
3roland12y
Maybe the key to understand the quote is that "reasonable" and "unreasonable" are social judgements, society would rather want people to conform to the norms/world than have them change it. At least that's the way I read the quote.
0Fyrius12y
Oh, I see! That makes sense.
0MixedNuts12y
"Reason" in general seems to be a good set of heuristics. Trying to be reasonable will help you make financial decisions, plan ahead for common contingencies, work hard yet sustainably, get into stable relationships, etc. Another good point of reason is that its failings tend to be known or easy to predict; for example, it tends to select low-variance strategies, discount excitement, and underestimate the duration and magnitude of personality changes. That makes it easier to evaluate: use it much more for mortgages than for romance.
0RobertLumley12y
I dislike that quote. It used to be in my quotesfile, but I removed it sometime recently. It starts out on a bad premise, namely, that the reasonable man adapts himself to the world. There's no justification for that, and if you reverse "reasonable" and "unreasonable" the quote is pointless.
0roland12y
See my comment here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/7wm/rationality_quotes_october_2011/52wq
0RobertLumley12y
Yeah, I noticed that after I posted mine.

A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.

David Hume

Roughly true, but downvoted for being basic (by LW standards) to the point of being an applause light. Good Rationality Quotes are ones we can learn from, not just agree with.

From the film The Maggie. The quote is excerpted from here.

Background: Earlier part of the 20th century, the west coast of Scotland. Marshall, an American, is in a small chartered aircraft chasing a Clyde puffer captained by Mactaggart, with whom he has business. He and the pilot have just caught sight of her in the sea below. Night is approaching.

Marshall: Where do you reckon they're making for?
Pilot: It looks like they're putting into Inverkerran for the night.
Marshall: Tell me, if they thought I thought they were going to Inverkerran, where do you r... (read more)

[-][anonymous]12y60

But what a fool believes ... he sees
No wise man has the power
To reason away
What seems ... to be

Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins, via the Doobie Brothers

"I can do parkour for the rest of my life without even moving. Just efficient thinking."

  • Ryan Doyle, parkour athlete

There is an ironic but highly valuable quality to AI in all its forms. The e ffort to simulate or surpass human intelligence is uncovering subtleties and paradoxes about the human mind we might never have imagined. By way of heroic failures, AI is teaching us how truly strange [human] intelligence is.

Theodore Roszack

[-][anonymous]12y40

Nature admits no lie.

--Thomas Carlyle

2gwern12y
Indefinitely, anyway. I am reminded of another Carlyle quote that Moldbug quoted with approval (but then doesn't he always):

All the limitative Theorems of metamathematics and the theory of computation suggest that once the ability to represent your own structure has reached a certain critical point, that is the kiss of death: it guarantees that you can never represent yourself totally. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, Church's Undecidability Theorem, Turing's Halting Problem, Tarski's Truth Theorem-- all have the flavour of some ancient fairy tale which warns you that "To seek self- knowledge is to embark on a journey which . . . will always be incomplete, cannot be charted on a map, will never halt, cannot be described."

--Douglas Hofstadter

[-][anonymous]12y20

What you see, yet can not see over, is as good as infinite.

--Thomas Carlyle

"We don't gotta just accept the way things are, just like we don't gotta let ourselves be lessened by death or any other damn thing. Just like we don't need no God to shape the world for us. We can make or lives the way we want them."

-- Jesse Custer, Preacher (Garth Ennis)

Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them…there is nothing.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

6Teal_Thanatos12y
I've downvoted this for the following reasons. Appearances are deceiving and also people may present false appearances for their own benefit. What cannot be seen is still in effect (Gravity) Etc. In a practical demonstration, what appears to be a piece of stone. Behind it, It's sand. It's pressed together over time, precipitation of minerals causes binding. Inside there could be some old fossil. Who knows.
3sketerpot12y
Let's see if we can salvage it into a reasonable statement about epistemology: -- A woman being shown an amazing horse, upon being informed that the horse will "take you 'round the universe, and all the other places too." I'll admit, this insight is more impressive with musical accompaniment.
0JoshuaZ12y
I believe the intention of baiter is to refer to vague notions like spiritual domains or qualia that are somehow behind the epistemologically detectable aspects. I don't know the original context but given the sort of thing Sartre said it wouldn't surprise me if it meant something far from that in the original context.
[-][anonymous]12y20

.

4wedrifid12y
That guy needs to train his gut instincts more. Because I find mine damn useful and seldom 'dangerously wrong'.
2Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) 12y
In order to train gut instincts, wouldn't you already have to understand the thing that you were having gut instincts about, in order to know whether or not your instincts were telling you the right thing?
4lessdazed12y
In some contexts one can just see what the consequences are and judge the instincts without understanding.
1[anonymous]12y
.
4MarkusRamikin12y
I like this quote, myself. It reminds me that when you're being affected by a difficult-to-correct-for cognitive bias, what "feels" correct is wrong, and the correct answer doesn't feel right. Quoting Eliezer:
2wedrifid12y
Inexact sounds about right. There is certainly a point behind the quote (so I didn't downvote and can see why you would quote it) but perhaps it is a little overstated or slightly missing the problem of using the gut at the right time.

Lives of quiet desperation paradoxically may surface as ebullient market bubbles.

Peter Thiel, The Optimistic Thought Experiment

We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think — in fact they do so.

Bertrand Russell

The engineer does not believe in black magic, voodoo, or rain dances. The engineer believes in scientific truth, that is, truth that can be verified by experiment.

Samuel Florman

engineers turn out to be by far the most religious group of all academics – 66.5 per cent, followed again by 61.7 in economics, 49.9 in sciences, 48.8 per cent of social scientists, 46.3 of doctors and 44.1 per cent of lawyers, the most sceptical of the lot.

Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, Engineers of Jihad (p.51)

3khafra12y
No vote, but I've known several engineers who believe in black magic, voodoo, and/or rain dances.
0Emile12y
Is this a reference to Agile methodologies?
3khafra12y
Heh, it could be--but no; this is about a few educated, professional engineer friends of mine who are into pagan, asatru, ceremonial magick, and voudoun. Quite literally, black magic and voodoo (although I have yet to meet any who are well versed in native american ceremonies).
3bogus12y
In all fairness, paganism, voudoun and magick are more like shared ceremonial practices than "religions" in a conventional sense. And these ceremonies might well have instrumental value as mind-hacking devices: "worshiping" a voudun "form" probably primes your mind towards that form's attributes (love, war etc.). This is especially useful in collective ceremonies, where it also acts as a screening/signaling device.
2Xom12y
http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/black-magic.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/V/voodoo-programming.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/R/rain-dance.html
3RobertLumley12y
I'm very confused by the downvotes, could someone explain?

First off, it's easy to cheer "yay science!" and rag on low status beliefs, but does this quote tell us that this person is good at determining truth value in cases of controversy? If an experiment returns a particular result, do they feel compelled to believe it? What would they think, for example, about the OPERA measurements?

Second, a cheer for the epistemic rationality of engineers is particular is likely to be unpopular because engineers are somewhat famous for standing on the frontiers of crank science, and have a reputation for being more likely than others with "scientific" backgrounds to overestimate their own understanding and throw their credentials behind bad science.

2RobertLumley12y
This is in fact, what the other person I mentioned commented, which I agree with, in retrospect. I had the advantage of context though - the author didn't specifically mean to laud engineers - this statement was made in the context of an engineering ethics textbook (essay? It's hard to remember, it was awhile ago).
7Document12y
Didn't downvote, but: * Is he advocating rationality to people who want to be engineers, or is he just crowing about how much better engineers are than those stupid people in other fields who think they're just as smart? * Might be a nitpick, but speaking at all in terms of what one "believes in" rather than what's true is a bad habit. * It puts too much emphasis on conclusions rather than epistemology. * It sounds like "Believe what those cool people in lab coats say, not those freaks in robes", or "Believe things that sound scientific and modern, not things that sounds weird and fantastical". * It connotes that disbelieving in black magic is proof of a superior mind, rather than largely a fact about what culture one grew up in. * One should believe things that can't be verified by experiment.
1RobertLumley12y
Interesting, thanks. And good points. Someone had already PMed me their reason for downvoting though (not mentioned in your list), but didn't want to influence future votes.
0Document12y
I may have edited while you were reading; sorry if so.
0Document12y
(I thought I got the phrase "cool people in lab coats" from a LW comment, but now it's joined the list of comments I can't find with Google.)
[-][anonymous]12y00

At sea once more we had to pass the Sirens, whose sweet singing lures sailors to their doom. I had stopped up the ears of my crew with wax, and I alone listened while lashed to the mast, powerless to steer toward shipwreck.

-- Odysseus in Odyssey

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply
[-][anonymous]12y00

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

0Bugmaster12y
This isn't a bad quote, but I downvoted it anyway, because it's practically a cliche at this point in our popular culture. Sorry :-(
3[anonymous]12y
No worries! I think it kind of illustrates what bias is quite nicely though. I haven't been so "exposed" to it personally but I guess that's because I'm not from a English speaking country, I'll try to think of quote that would actually add something to the list next time. Thanks for stating your reason for downvoting! Cheers!
0Dojan12y
I've never heard it...

“Uniformity is death. Diversity is life”

Mikhaïl Bakounine

Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.

-Confucius

They say when you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.

They underestimate me.

-A Softer World

9wedrifid12y
That's terrible advice. Far better to spend that time thinking of a better attack plan. Make sure it includes contingencies to deal with anyone who may wish to avenge whoever you are killing.
6MichaelGR12y
My understanding is that the advice is to be aware that you could also end up dead, so you should dig an extra grave for yourself. It's not practical advice, it's a warning that revenge is dangerous and not worth it.
3MixedNuts12y
I think the point of the quote is that it's yet better to spend that time doing productive things unrelated to revenge, given that generating enough such contingencies is pretty costly. Edit: Actually, wedrifid is right.
8wedrifid12y
No, it isn't. That is another point that could be made in the general area of "Boo Revenge". The most useful point that is conveyed, via assuming it as a premise, is that taking revenge is dangerous. I argue that quotes don't (or rather shouldn't) get credit for all possible supporting arguments for the general position they are applauding.
2Jack12y
Boy, Less Wrong can be really literal-minded sometimes.
0[anonymous]12y
-2Bugmaster12y
"Literal-minded", "optimally efficient"; "to-mah-to", "to-may-to"...
1fiddlemath12y
I know this is a joke, but I want to take it seriously. Really, literal-mindedness is actually an issue in certain kinds of cases. And I realize what I'm about to do, and so I'll just stop here.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Winston Churchill

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply
4MBlume12y
been done at least once, but it's a good one =)
0lukeprog12y
Oops! For some reason my first search didn't turn it up.
[-][anonymous]12y00

It does not do to dwell on dreams... and forget to live.

  • Professor Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore
[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.

-Schopenhauer

2Nominull12y
Many of us are not Schopenhauer, and could stand to have our thoughts directed sometimes.

"Perfection isn't when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

0Nominull12y
Repeat. http://lesswrong.com/lw/mx/rationality_quotes_3/
3bcoburn12y
Also really badly needs to be applied to itself. So many words!
0sketerpot12y
I disagree. The symmetry of the "nothing left to add / nothing left to take away" phrasing is important to the poetry of the phrase. That matters.
0Nic_Smith12y
Warrigal previously suggested "Perfection is lack of excess."
0Normal_Anomaly12y
Perfection is efficiency.
0Oscar_Cunningham12y
Perfection's fast.
0Normal_Anomaly12y
I think "fast" is qualitatively different from "efficient" to the point where the meaning is lost. OTOH, "Perfection's efficient."
1pedanterrific12y
The problem with this notion: which is more perfect, "i c wat u dd thar" or "I see what you did there"?
0Normal_Anomaly12y
"Nothing left to take away," if it doesn't imply that perfection is the absence of anything at all, contains an implicit "without causing disfunctionality or other problems." ""i c wat u dd thar" is arguably not even an English sentence. It's also arguably an aesthetic affront (as is the at first accidental alliteration).
5Bugmaster12y
I agree with what you're saying in general, but I'm compelled to point out that, in some specific cases, "i c wat u dd thar" would actually be preferable. For example, such cases include -- just off the top of my head -- humor, parody, satire, and characterization (in a fictional narrative).
4Normal_Anomaly12y
True. In those cases, i c wat u dd thar" is fully functional, more so than "I see what you did there."
2pedanterrific12y
ADBOC. Well, if you have something against textspeak (or txtspk, compare newspeak) how about acronyms, such as 'laser'? The analogy seems to hold: as long as you agree beforehand on their meaning - as, indeed, must be done with all words - the brevity would be a virtue. Though, I suppose, YMMV. Agree with the first, strongly disagree with the second.

For truth is eternal and divine, and no phase in the development of truth, however small may be the region encompassed, can pass on without leaving a trace; truth remains, even though the garment in which poor mortals clothe it may fall to dust.

Herman Grassmann, Die Ausdehnungslehre (translation by, I think, Michael J. Crowe)

[-][anonymous]12y-20

The following story is true. There was a little boy, and his father said, “Do try to be like other people. Don’t frown.” And he tried and tried, but could not. So his father beat him with a strap; and then he was eaten up by lions. Reader, if young, take warning by his sad life and death. For though it may be an honour to be different from other people, if Carlyle’s dictum about the 30 million be still true, yet other people do not like it. So, if you are different, you had better hide it, and pretend to be solemn and wooden-headed. Until you make your fo

... (read more)

A scientific theory

Isn't just a hunch or a guess,

It's more like a question,

That's been put through a lot of tests

And when a theory emerges

Consistent with the facts,

The proof is with science

The truth is with science.

Science is real (4x)

-They Might Be Giants "Science is Real"

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9MixedNuts12y
They Might Be Giants tries to give their songs merits, not just messages, but that bit doesn't really show it.

In 1705, Sir Isaac Newton became discouraged after he fell up a flight of stairs.

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