Rationality Quotes July 2013

Vaniver

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

I've been rich and I’ve been poor. Rich is better.

It's very easy for a rich person to become poor: just give all you have away. It's very hard for a poor person to become rich: almost all of them try, and very few succeed.

If people found, on reflection, that being poor was better than being rich, then they would give their wealth away. We don't observe this.

Therefore I believe being rich is better, even without the benefit of personal experience.

1A1987dM13y

That's not the case for all the people who have been poor and have been rich (see e.g. certain lottery winners). I guess it largely depend on how one became rich, as well as how one spends the money.