It wasn’t easier, the ghost explains, you just knew how to do it. Sometimes the easiest method you know is the hardest method there is.

It’s like… to someone who only knows how to dig with a spoon, the notion of digging something as large as a trench will terrify them. All they know are spoons, so as far as they’re concerned, digging is simply difficult. The only way they can imagine it getting any easier is if they change – digging with a spoon until they get stronger, faster, and tougher. And the dangerous people, they’ll actually try this.

Everyone who will ever oppose you in life is a crazy, burly dude with a spoon, and you will never be able to outspoon them. Even the powerful people, they’re just spooning harder and more vigorously than everyone else, like hungry orphan children eating soup. Except the soup is power. I’ll level with you here: I have completely lost track of this analogy.

What I’m saying, giant talking cat, is that everyone is stupid. They attain a narrow grasp of reality and live their life as though there is nothing else. But you, me, creatures with imagination – we aren’t constrained by our experiences. We’re inspired by them. If we have trouble digging with a spoon, we build a shovel. If we’re stopped by a wall, we make a door. And if we can’t make a door, we ask ourselves whether we really need an opening to pass through something solid in the first place.

You point out that you’re not a ghost, and that you do need an opening to pass through solid objects.

No – that’s your mistake, he replies. That’s why you’re still not thinking like a witchhunter. You’re trying to do things right, and that’s wrong. Mysticism means taking a step back – accepting that the very laws of reason and logic you abide by are merely one option of many. It means knowing you only see half the picture in a world where everyone else thinks they see the whole thing. It means having the sheer arrogance to have humility.

That’s why I’m saying you have to think like a witchhunter. You have to be a little wrong to be completely right – to abandon truth in favor of questioning falsehood. If you think something’s the easiest way, you have to know you’re wrong. You have to understand how to stand against the very stance of understanding! You have to know you are inferior; that your knowledge and perceptions will never stand up to the true scope of all possible reality. You have to be a little further from perfect, and embrace that notion.

Source: http://www.prequeladventure.com/2014/05/3391/

I'm tired of coherent nonsense!

-- Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Samuel Beckett

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

Attributed to Malcolm Forbes.

Imagine, then, that a man should need to get fire from a neighbour, and, upon finding a big bright fire there, should stay there continually warming himself; just so it is if a man comes to another to share the benefit of a discourse, and does not think it necessary to kindle from it some illumination for himself and some thinking of his own, but, delighting in the discourse, sits enchanted; he gets, as it were, a bright and ruddy glow in the form of opinion imparted to him by what is said, but the mouldiness and darkness of his inner mind he has not dissipated nor banished by the warm glow of philosophy.

Plutarch, "De Auditu" (On Listening), a chapter of his Moralia.

This essay is also the original source of the much-quoted line "The mind is not a pot to be filled, but a fire to be ignited." It is variously attributed, but is a fair distillation of the original passage, which comes directly before the quote above:

For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth.

I reject the concept of "me" as some sort of static thing. Instead I see my moist robot container as something I can manipulate to engineer my mood to the situation. There are times when having more ego is useful. There are times when it is better to be humble. I jack my body chemistry as needed.

Scott Adams on consciously controlling your own moods and feelings

Students have no shortcomings, they have only peculiarities. The job of a teacher is to turn these peculiarities into advantages.

--Israel Gelfand, found here

"The most amazing thing about philosophy is that even though no nobody knows to do it, and even though it has never achieved anything, it is still possible to do it really badly"

--Oolon Kaloophid

Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

 — Friedrich Nietzsche

“The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.”

― Stanley Milgram

“It may be that we are puppets-puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation. (1974)

― Stanley Milgram

“Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”

― Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority

“But the culture has failed, almost entirely, in inculcating internal controls on actions that have their origin in authority. For this reason, the latter constitutes a far greater danger to human survival.”

― Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority

“The essence in obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as an instrument for carrying out another person's wishes and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions.”

― Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority

“It is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.”

― Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority

“It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders.”

― Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority

“I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”

― Robert A. Heinlein

The ultimate result of shielding men from the results of folly is to fill the world with fools.

 — Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), ”State Tampering with Money and Banks“ (1891)

It has come to be accepted practice in introducing new physical quantities that they shall be regarded as defined by the series of measuring operations and calculations of which they are the result. Those who associate with the result a mental picture of some entity disporting itself in a metaphysical realm of existence do so at their own risk; physics can accept no responsibility for this embellishment.

Sir Arthur Eddington, 1939, The Philosophy of Physical Science

"Many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters and bachelors of the most renowned universities" Ludwig Von Mises

Whilst arguing that uncertainty is best measured using numbers and probabilities:

We want to measure uncertainties in order to combine them. A politician said that he preferred adverbs to numbers. Unfortunately it is difficult to combine adverbs.

• Dennis V. Lindley, Understanding Uncertainty

Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability.

• Rudolf Carnap

If only it were that easy in real life...

“If only there were irrational people somewhere, insidiously believing stupid things, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and mock them. But the line dividing rationality and irrationality cuts through the mind of every human being. And who is willing to mock a piece of his own mind?”

(With apologies to Solzhenitsyn).

– Said Achmiz, in a comment on Slate Star Codex’s post “The Cowpox of Doubt”

But understanding human limitations does not mean we can overcome them. It only means we can’t pretend they don’t exist. It should point us toward humility, not hubris.

Yuval Levin in the National Review

You know what vast plans he had. I knew of them too—I could not perhaps understand,—but others knew of them.

• Kurtz' English girlfriend, in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, failing to notice confusion

Our recent research into team behavior [...] reveals an interesting paradox: Although teams that are large, virtual, diverse, and composed of highly educated specialists are increasingly crucial with challenging projects, those same four characteristics make it hard for teams to get anything done. To put it another way, the qualities required for success are the same qualities that undermine success. Members of complex teams are less likely—absent other influences—to share knowledge freely, to learn from one another, to shift workloads flexibly to break up unexpected bottlenecks, to help one another complete jobs and meet deadlines, and to share resources—in other words, to collaborate. They are less likely to say that they “sink or swim” together, want one another to succeed, or view their goals as compatible.

Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams by Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson

This seems applicable as the LessWrong community is "large, virtual, diverse, and composed of highly educated specialists" and the community wants to solve challenging projects.

Being wrong about something feels exactly the same as being right about something.

-- many different people, most recently user chipaca on HN

And this is going to be tricky, because it is definitely still Bella's right to not take Billy's advice. "You're dating a murderer" is not something that she has to let influence her decision, because hey, it's still her life. But all this is happening in the larger social context where women and girls are sometimes told that their new boyfriend is, say, a rapist. And we're told from the day we're born that this is how we're supposed to react: defensively. Defending him.

We (women especially) are regularly told that men are "innocent until proven guilty". We're urged to apply legal precepts to our personal opinions, and to allow those legal concepts to even override our good judgement. We're told that believing other survivors is akin to monstrous vigilante (in-)justice: witch hunt, lynch mob, kangaroo court. We're not allowed to disassociate from friends who are rapists, or who abused their girlfriends, if we ourselves didn't see it happen. I was once pushed roughly to the floor by my (ex-)husband while four of our closest friends watched; not a single one of them dropped his acquaintance after our divorce. The abuse that happened to me was seen as a private matter, not something they felt allowed to have an opinion on.

• Ana Mardoll, Twilight deconstruction

Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much more powerful, though usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge. We are all prodigious olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make the difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is a new trick, perhaps less than 100 thousand years old. We have not yet mastered it. It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so when we do it.

Hans Moravec, Wikipedia/Moravec's Paradox

'There is of course the question of public safety,' said Vetinari. 'Did I hear you say earlier you have blown up... "one or three" I think was the phrase?"

'I made those explode a-purpose, to see exactly how it 'appened. That's the way to get knowledge, you see, sir.'

Raising Steam, Terry Pratchett

Regarding the first steam engine in Pratchett's fictional world.

If the best minds were in charge of designing a bridge, I would expect the bridge to hold up well even in a storm. If the best minds were in charge of designing an airplane, I would expect it to fly reliably. But if the best minds were in charge of something no one really knows how to do, I would be ready for a failure, albeit a failure with superb academic credentials.

Terry Coxon

"Did many people die?"

"Three thousand four hundred and ninety-two."

"A small proportion."

"It is always one hundred percent for the individual concerned."

"Still..."

"No, no still."

-Ian Banks, Look to Windward

The most significant moment in the course of intellectual development, which gives birth to the purely human forms of practical and abstract intelligence, occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously completely independent lines of development, converge.

1930 Lev Vygotsky in Mind and Society (transcribed by Andy Blunden and Nate Schmolze)

Online: http://www.cles.mlc.edu.tw/~cerntcu/099-curriculum/Edu_Psy/EP_03_New.pdf

“Even if it's not your fault, it's your responsibility.”

• Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

There is nothing that can be said by mathematical symbols and relations which cannot also be said by words. The converse, however, is false. Much that can be and is said by words cannot be put into equations — because it is nonsense.

Clifford Truesdell

On thrust work, drag work, and why creative work is perpetually frustrating --

"Each individual creative episode is unsustainable by its very nature. As a given episode accelerates, surpassing the sustainable long term trajectory, the thrust engine overwhelms the available supporting capabilities. ... Just as momentum build to truly exciting levels…some new limitation appears squelching that momentum. ...The problem is that you outran your supporting capabilities and that deficit became a source of drag. Perhaps you didn’t have systems in place to capture leads. Perhaps you lacked the bandwidth necessary to follow up on all the new opportunities. Perhaps, due to lack of experience, you pursued the wrong opportunities. Perhaps you just didn’t know what to do next – you outran your existing knowledge base. In one way or another new varieties of drag emerge. The accelerating curve you had been riding becomes unsustainable and you find yourself mired in the slow build of the next episode. This is what we experience as anti-climax and temporary stagnation." -- Greg Raider, from his essay "A Pilgrimage Through Stagnation and Acceleration"

The whole piece is worth reading, it's really good -- http://onthespiral.com/pilgrimage-through-stagnation-acceleration

Hat tip to Zach Obront for linking me to it originally.

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

Donald Knuth on the difference between theory and practice.

...the utility of a thought experiment is inversely proportional to the size of its departure from reality.

-- Daniel Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking

Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up "What's that?"- It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said "this is a man," "this is a house," etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then?

• Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz., telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.

Alan Turing (from "Computing Machinery and Intelligence")

Eadem Mutata Resurgo

[the] Same, [but] Changed, I [shall] Rise

On the tombstone of Jacob Bernoulli.

"Throughout the day, Stargirl had been dropping money. She was the Johnny Appleseed of loose change: a penny here, a nickel there. Tossed to the sidewalk, laid on a shelf or bench. Even quarters.

"I hate change," she said. "It's so . . . jangly."

"Do you realize how much you must throw away in a year?" I said.

"Did you ever see a little kid's face when he spots a penny on a sidewalk?”

Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

Teenage stupidity is magical. At that age, you're so dumb that you may think you know you're dumb, but you're actually so ignorant (and arrogant) that you think you're smart and wise for knowing you're dumb. In reality, you're just dumb. Take away the recursive loop of delusion and any sense of how wise you are even though you're so young, and the truth is all that remains: You Are Dumb.

Cracked

Specifically, [these recent books that deal with parallel universes] argue that if some scientific theory X has enough experimental support for us to take it seriously, then we must take seriously also all its predictions Y, even if these predictions are themselves untestable (involving parallel universes, for example).

As a warm-up example, let's consider Einstein's theory of General Relativity. It's widely considered a scientific theory worthy of taking seriously, because it has made countless correct predictions -- from the gravitational bending of light to the time dilation measured by our GPS phones. This means that we must also take seriously its prediction for what happens inside black holes, even though this is something we can never observe and report on in Scientific American. If someone doesn't like these black hole predictions, they can't simply opt out of them and dismiss them as unscientific: instead, they need to come up with a different mathematical theory that matches every single successful prediction that general relativity has made -- yet doesn't give the disagreeable black hole predictions.

-- Max Tegmark, Scientific American guest blog, 2014-02-04

Slartibartfast: Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I think that the chances of finding out what's actually going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, "Hang the sense of it," and keep yourself busy. I'd much rather be happy than right any day.

Arthur Dent: And are you?

Slartibartfast: Well... no. That's where it all falls down, of course.

Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"It is one thing for you to say, ‘Let the world burn.' It is another to say, ‘Let Molly burn.' The difference is all in the name."

-- Uriel, Ghost Story, Jim Butcher

Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore.

-- Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson

It is, in fact, a very good rule to be especially suspicious of work that says what you want to hear, precisely because the will to believe is a natural human tendency that must be fought.

- Paul Krugman

(Edited to add context)

Context: The speakers work for a railroad. An important customer has just fired them in favor of a competitor, the Phoenix-Durango Railroad.

Jim Taggart [Company president, antagonist]: "What does he expect? That we drop all our other shippers, sacrifice the interests of the whole country and give him all our trains?"

Eddie Willers [Junior exec, sympathetic character]: "Why, no. He doesn't expect anything. He just deals with the Phoenix-Durango."

• Atlas Shrugged

It gets at the idea talked about here sometimes that reality has no obligation to give you tests you can pass; sometimes you just fail and that's it.

ETA: On reflection, what I think the quote really gets at is that Taggart cannot understand that his terminal goals may be only someone else's instrumental goals, that other people are not extensions of himself. Taggart's terminal goal is to run as many trains as possible. If he can help a customer, then the customer is happy to have Taggart carry his freight, and Taggart's terminal goal aligns with the customer's instrumental goal. But the customer's terminal goal is not to give Taggart Inc. business, but just to get his freight shipped. If the customer can find a better alternative, like competing railroad, he'll switch. For Taggart, of course, that is not a better alternative at all, hence his anger and confusion.

(Apologies for lack of context initially).

Dogs know how to swim, but it’s unlikely they know any truths describing their activities.

-- Richard Fumerton, Epistemology

“I propose we simply postpone the worrisome question of what really has a mind, about what the proper domain of the intentional stance is. Whatever the right answer to that question is—if it has a right answer—this will not jeopardize the plain fact that the intentional stance works remarkably well as a prediction method in these other areas, almost as well as it works in our daily lives as folk psychologists dealing with other people. This move of mine annoys and frustrates some philosophers, who want to blow the whistle and insist on properly settling the issue of what a mind, a belief, a desire is before taking another step. Define your terms, sir! No, I won’t. That would be premature. I want to explore first the power and the extent of application of this good trick, the intentional stance. Once we see what it is good for, and why, we can come back and ask ourselves if we still feel the need for formal, watertight definitions. My move is an instance of nibbling on a tough problem instead of trying to eat (and digest) the whole thing from the outset. “Many of the thinking tools I will be demonstrating are good at nibbling, at roughly locating a few “fixed” points that will help us see the general shape of the problem. In Elbow Room (1984a), o compared my method to the sculptor’s method of roughing out the form in a block of marble, approaching the final surfaces cautiously, modestly, working by successive approximation. Many philosophers apparently cannot work that way and have to secure (or so they think) the utterly fixed boundaries of their problems and possible solutions before they can venture any hypotheses.”

-Daniel Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Chapter 18 "The Intentional Stance" [Bold is original]

Reminded me of the idea of 'hacking away at the edges'.

The mathematician and Fields medalist Vladimir Voevodsky on using automated proof assistants in mathematics:

[Following the discovery of some errors in his earlier work:] I think it was at this moment that I largely stopped doing what is called “curiosity driven research” and started to think seriously about the future.

[...]

A technical argument by a trusted author, which is hard to check and looks similar to arguments known to be correct, is hardly ever checked in detail.

[...]

It soon became clear that the only real long-term solution to the problems that I encountered is to start using computers in the verification of mathematical reasoning.

[...]

Among mathematicians computer proof verification was almost a forbidden subject. A conversation started about the need for computer proof assistants would invariably drift to the Goedel Incompleteness Theorem (which has nothing to do with the actual problem) or to one or two cases of verification of already existing proofs, which were used only to demonstrate how impractical the whole idea was.

[...]

I now do my mathematics with a proof assistant and do not have to worry all the time about mistakes in my arguments or about how to convince others that my arguments are correct.

From a March 26, 2014 talk. Slides available here.

It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.

-- Alfred Adler

ADDED: Source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_Adler

Quoted in: Phyllis Bottome, Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom (1939), ch. 5

Problems of Neurosis: A Book of Case Histories (1929)

He said:

When you play bridge with beginners—when you try to help them out—you give them some general rules to go by. Then they follow the rule and something goes wrong. But if you'd had their hand you wouldn't have played the thing you told them to play, because you'd have seen all the reasons the rule did not apply.

from The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

A BS detection Heuristic.

You can tell if a discipline is BS if the degree depends severely on the prestige of the school granting it. I remember when I applied to MBA programs being told that anything outside the top 10 or 20 would be a waste of time. On the other hand a degree in mathematics is much less dependent on the shool (conditional on being above a certain level, so the heuristic would apply to the differene betwewn top 10 and top 2000 schools).

The same applies to research papers. In math and physics, a result posted on arXiv (with a minimum hurdle) is fine. In low quality fields like academic finance (where almost all academics are charlatans and all papers some form of complicated storytelling), the "prestige" of the journal is the sole criterion.

Nassim Taleb