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Rationality Quotes April 2014
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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
And one new rule:
- Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
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Comments (656)
--Penn Jillette in "Penn Jillette Is Willing to Be a Guest on Adolf Hitler's Talk Show, Vanity Fair, June 17, 2010
That leaves the question of how Penn actually knows that Chalie Manson was acting based on what his heart was telling him.
Psychopaths are frequently bad at empathy or "listening to their hearts". It might even be the defining characteristic of what makes someone a psychopath.
You missed the point entirely. 'Listening to their (own) hearts' is not empathy, it's just giving credibility to your instinctive beliefs, regardless of wether they have a basis or not. How is believing that everyone is connected by a network of magical energy tethers and acting according to that any different than believing that my soul will be saved if I massacre 40 people and acting on that?
The only difference is the actual acts that you take due to the beliefs. Mind you, it's a very important difference, but the quote is not talking about that, it's talking about beliefs themselves and using them as a sufficient justification for acts.
I think that plenty of people who call themselves rationalists simply have no idea what listening to one's own heart actually means.
It's like talking with a blind man who has no concept about how green differs from red about how one using a traffic light, to decide when to stop your car. You mean at on time one lamp shown you that you have to stop and at another time it tells you to go ahead? How do you tell the difference?
You basically left out the part about listening to your heart. Having a cognitive belief and making decisions based on mental analysis of the consequences of the belief is not what listening to one's heart is about.
If a human tries to murder another, certain automatic programming fires that dissuades the human from killing. Emotions come up. If you listen to them, you won't kill. You actually have to refuse to listen to your heart to be capable of killing. Maybe there are a few Buddhists who manage to be in a complete state of pure heartfelt love while they ram a knife into someone's else heart but that's very far from what 99.99% of the population is capable of.
In the military soldiers get trained to disassociate the emotions that prevent them from killing others. Psychopaths usually do have a bunch of beliefs about morals. What they lack is the ability to listen to their hearts in a way that guides their actions.
The philosophers of ethics steal more books than other philosophers. It's not clear that well thought out moral beliefs are useful for preventing people from engaging in immoral actions.
No. Whether or someone is in their head or listens to their heart can matter to the people around him, if those people are perceptive enough to tell the difference. It probably effects most people on an unconscious level.
Listening to your heart just means listening to your innermost desires. It has nothing to do with empathy. Meaning that psychopaths listen to their heart just as much as anyone else. I've never heard anyone use the idiom "listen to your heart" to mean to practice empathy.
-- Rational!Quirrel, HPMoR chapter 20
In other words: how else can you justify a moral belief and consequent actions, except by saying that you really truly believe in your heart that you're Right?
We should not confuse between the fact that almost all people other than Manson think he was morally wrong, and the fact that his justification for his action seems to me to be of the same kind as the justifications anyone else ever gives for their moral beliefs and actions.
Unlike Quirrell, Penn Jillette is not referring to "knowing in your heart" that your moral values are correct, but to "knowing in your heart" some matters of fact (which may then serve as a justification for having some moral values, or directly for some action).
In what way is "deserve" a matter of fact?
"Deserving" is a moral theorem, not a moral axiom. You can most definitely test and check whether someone deserves something, by asking about the rules of the game and their position within the game.
If there is no game at hand, I would say "deserving" becomes nonsense, but that's just me.
If you're a moral realist, and you think moral opinions are statements of fact (which may be right or wrong), then you think it's possible to "know in your heart" moral "facts".
If you're a moral anti-realist (like me), and you think moral opinions are statements of preferences (in other words, statements of fact about your own preferences and your own brain-wiring), then all moral opinions are such. And then surely Manson's statement of his preferences has the same status as anyone else's, and the only difference is that most people disagree with Manson.
What else is there?
However, it's true that Jillette talks about factual amoral beliefs like fairies and gods. So my comment was somewhat misdirected. I still think it's partly relevant, because people who believe in gods (i.e. most people) usually tie them closely to their moral opinions. It's impossible to discuss morals (of most humans) without discussing religious beliefs.
This quote seems like it's lumping every process for arriving at beliefs besides reason into one. "If you don't follow the process I understand and is guaranteed not to produce beliefs like that, then I can't guarantee you won't produce beliefs like that!" But there are many such processes besides reason, that could be going on in their "hearts" to produce their beliefs. Because they are all opaque and non-negotiable and not this particular one you trust not to make people murder Sharon Tate, does not mean that they all have the same probability of producing plane-flying-into-building beliefs.
Consider the following made-up quote: "when you say you believe something is acceptable for some reason other than the Bible said so, you have completely justified Stalin's planned famines. You have justified Pol Pot. If it's acceptable for for you, why isn't it acceptable for them? Why are you different? If you say 'I believe that gays should not be stoned to death and the Bible doesn't support me but I believe it in my heart', then it's perfectly okay to believe in your heart that dissidents should be sent to be worked to death in Siberia. It's perfectly okay to believe because your secular morality says so that all the intellectuals in your country need to be killed."
I would respond to it: "Stop lumping all moralities into two classes, your morality, and all others. One of these lumps has lots of variation in it, and sub-lumps which need to be distinguished, because most of them do not actually condone gulags"
And likewise I respond to Penn Jilette's quote: "Stop lumping all epistemologies into two classes, yours, and the one where people draw beliefs from their 'hearts'. One of these lumps has lots of variation in it, and sub-lumps which need to be distinguished, because most of them do not actually result in beliefs that drive them to fly planes into buildings."
The wishful-thinking new-age "all powerful force of love" faith epistemology is actually pretty safe in terms of not driving people to violence who wouldn't already be inclined to it. That belief wouldn't make them feel good. Though of course, faith plus ancient texts which condone violence can be more dangerous, though as we know empirically, for some reason, people driven to violence by their religions are rare these days, even coming from religions like that.
I'd have to disagree here; I think that "faith" is a useful reference class that pretty effectively cleaves reality at the joints, which does in fact lump together the epistemologies Penn Jilette is objecting to.
The fact that some communities of people who have norms which promote taking beliefs on faith do not tend to engage in acts of violence, while some such communities do, does not mean that their epistemologies are particularly distinct. Their specific beliefs might be different, but one group will not have much basis to criticize the grounds of others' beliefs.
The flaw he's arguing here is not "faith-based reasoning sometimes drives people to commit acts of violence," but "faith-based reasoning is unreliable enough that it can justify anything, in practice as well as principle, including acts of extreme violence."
People who follow the moral code of the Bible versus peopel that don't is also a pretty clear criteria that separates some epistemologies from others.
People who uses a pendulum to make decisions as a very different epistemology than someone who thinks about what the authorities in his particular church want him to do and acts accordingly.
The kind of people who win the world debating championship also haave no problem justying policies like genocide with rational arguments that win competive intellectual debates.
Justifying actions is something different than decision criteria.
Yes, but then you can go a step down from there, and ask "why do you believe in the contents of the bible?" For some individuals, this will actually be a question of evidence; they are prepared to reason about the evidence for and against the truth of the biblical narrative, and reject it given an adequate balance of evidence. They're generally more biased on the question than they realize, but they are at least convinced that they must have adequate evidence to justify their belief in the biblical narrative.
I have argued people out of their religious belief before (and not just Christianity,) but never someone who thought that it was correct to take factual beliefs that feel right "on faith" without first convincing them that this is incorrect as a general rule, not simply in the specific case of religion. This is an epistemic underpinning which unites people from different religions, whatever tenets or holy books they might ascribe to. I've also argued the same point with people who were not religious; it's not simply a quality of any particular religion, it's one of the most common memetic defenses in the human arsenal.
That means you can actually make people less harmful if you tell them to listen to their hearts instead of listening to ancient texts. The person who's completely in their head and analyses the ancient text for absolute guidance of action is dangerous.
A lot of religions also have tricks were the believer has to go through painful exercises. Just look at a Christian sect like Opus Dei with cilices. The kind of religious believer who wears a cilice loses touch with his heart. Getting someone who's in the habit of causing his own body pain with a cilice to harm other people is easier.
I don't think it's lumping everything together. It's criticizing the rule "Act on what you feel in your heart." That applies to a lot of people's beliefs, but it certainly isn't the epistemology of everyone who doesn't agree with Penn Jillette.
The problem with "Act on what you feel in your heart" is that it's too generalizable. It proves too much, because of course someone else might feel something different and some of those things might be horrible. But if my epistemology is an appeal to an external source (which I guess in this context would be a religious book but I'm going to use "believe whatever Rameses II believed" because I think that's funnier), then that doesn't necessarily have the same problem.
You can criticize my choice of Rameses II, and you probably should. But now my epistemology is based on an external source and not just my feelings. Unless you reduce me to saying I trust Rameses because I Just Feel that he's trustworthy, this epistemology does not have the same problem as the one criticized in the quote.
All this to say, Jillette is not unfairly lumping things together and there exist types of morality/epistemology that can be wrong without having this argument apply.
It looks like there's all this undefined behavior, and demons coming out the nose from the outside because you aren't looking at the exact details of what's going on in with their feelings that are choosing the beliefs. Though a C compiler given an undefined construct may cause your program to crash, it will never literally cause demons to come out of your nose, and you could figure this out if you looked at the implementation of the compiler. It's still deterministic.
As an atheistic meta-ethical ant-realist, my utility function is basically whatever I want it to be. It's entirely internal. From the outside, from someone who has a system where they follow something external and clearly specified, they could shout "Nasal demons!", but demons will never come out my nose, and my internal, ever so frighteningly non-negotiable desires are never going to include planned famines. It has reliable internal structure.
The mistake is looking at a particular kind of specification that defines all the behavior, and then looking at a system not covered by that specification, but which is controlled by another specification you haven't bothered to understand, and saying "Who can possibly say what that system will do?"
Some processors (even x86) have instructions (such as bit rotate) which are useful for significant performance boosts in stuff like cryptography, and yet aren't accessible from C or C++, and to use it you have to perform hacks like writing the machine code out as bytes, casting its address to a function pointer and calling it. That's undefined behavior with respect to the C/C++ standard. But it's perfectly predictable if you know what platform you're on.
Other people who aren't meta-ethical anti-realists' utility functions are not really negotiable either. You can't really give them a valid argument that will convince them not to do something evil if they happen to be psychopaths. They just have internal desires and things they care about, and they care a lot more about having a morality which sounds logical when argued for than I do.
And if you actually examine what's going on with the feelings of people with feeling-driven epistemology that makes them believe things, instead of just shouting "Nasal demons! Unspecified behavior! Infinitely beyond the reach of understanding!" you will see that the non-psychopathic ones have mostly-deterministic internal structure to their feelings that prevents them from believing that they should murder Sharon Tate. And psychopaths won't be made ethical by reasoning with them anyway. I don't believe the 9/11 hijackers were psychopaths, but that's the holy book problem I mentioned, and a rare case.
In most cases of undefined C constructs, there isn't another carefully-tuned structure that's doing the job of the C standard in making the behavior something you want, so you crash. And faith-epistemology does behave like this (crashing, rather than running hacky cryptographic code that uses the rotate instructions) when it comes to generating beliefs that don't have obvious consequences to the user. So it would have been a fair criticism to say "You believe something because you believe it in your heart, and you've justified not signing your children up for cryonics because you believe in an afterlife," because (A) they actually do that, (B) it's a result of them having an epistemology which doesn't track the truth.
Disclaimer: I'm not signed up for cryonics, though if I had kids, they would be.
I very much doubt that. At least with present technology you cannot self-modify to prefer dead babies over live ones; and there's presumably no technological advance that can make you want to.
If utility functions are those constructed by the VNM theorem, your utility function is your wants; it is not something you can have wants about. There is nothing in the machinery of the theorem that allows for a utility function to talk about itself, to have wants about wants. Utility functions and the lotteries that they evaluate belong to different worlds.
Are there theorems about the existence and construction of self-inspecting utility functions?
'Act on an external standard' is just as generalizable - because you can choose just about anything as your standard. You might choose to consistently act like Gandhi, or like Hitler, or like Zeus, or like a certain book suggests, or like my cat Peter who enjoys killing things and scratching cardboard boxes. If the only thing I know about you is that you consistently behave like someone else, but I don't know like whom, then I can't actually predict your behavior at all.
The more important question is: if you act on what you feel in your heart, what determines or changes what is in your heart? And if you act on an external standard, what makes you choose or change your standard?
Does anyone know how often this happens in statistical meta-analysis?
As a percentage? No. But qualitatively speaking, "often."
The most recent book I read discusses this particularly with respect to medicine, where the problem is especially pronounced because a majority of studies are conducted or funded by an industry with a financial stake in the results, with considerable leeway to influence them even without committing formal violations of procedure. But even in fields where this is not the case, issues like non-publication of data (a large proportion of all studies conducted are not published, and those which are not published are much more likely to contain negative results) will tend to make the available literature statistically unrepresentative.
Fairly often. One strategy I've seen is to compare meta-analyses to a later very-large study (rare for obvious reasons when dealing with RCTs) and seeing how often the confidence interval is blown; usually much higher than it should be. (The idea is that the larger study will give a higher-precision result which is a 'ground truth' or oracle for the meta-analysis's estimate, and if it's later, it will not have been included in the meta-analysis and also cannot have led the meta-analysts into Milliken-style distorting their results to get the 'right' answer.)
For example: LeLorier J, Gregoire G, Benhaddad A, Lapierre J, Derderian F. "Discrepancies between meta-analyses and subsequent large randomized, controlled trials". N Engl J Med 1997;337:536e42
(You can probably dig up more results looking through reverse citations of that paper, since it seems to be the originator of this criticism. And also, although I disagree with a lot of it, "Combining heterogenous studies using the random-effects model is a mistake and leads to inconclusive meta-analyses", Al khalaf et al 2010.)
We can't know for certain. That's the idea of systematic biases. There no way to tell if all your trials are slanted in a specific fashion, if the biases also appears in your high quality studies.
On the other hand we have fields such as homeopathy or telephathy (Ganzfeld experiments) where there are meta-analysis that treat all studies mostly equally that find that homeopathy works and telepahty exist. On the other hand you have meta-analysis who try to filter out low quality studies who come to the conclusion that homeopathy doesn't work and telepathy doesn't exist.
A bigger danger is publication bias. collect 10 well run trials without knowing that 20 similar well run ones exist but weren't published because their findings weren't convenient and your meta-analysis ends up distorted from the outset.
~J. Stanton, "The Paleo Identity Crisis: What Is The Paleo Diet, Anyway?"
But the answers might be specific to each individual because the biochemistry of humans is not exactly the same.
Individuals being different from each other shouldn't necessarily diminish the significance of biochemistry. Biochemistry should explain not just our similarities but overarching principles that organize and explain the differences.
My point wasn't that biochemistry is not important. My point was that the answers you get from biochemistry might be complicated and limited in application.
It not at all clear that someone who knows all the biochemistry will outperform someone who's good at feeling what goes on in his body.
In the absence of good measurement instruments feelings allow you to respond to specific situations much better than theoretical understanding.
Depending on the outcome specificied and the type of feelings attended to, of course.
Yes, being able to tell apart the feeling, that makes you crave sugar from the felling that tells you that you should eat some flesh to fix your B12 deficieny, isn't easy.
Getting clear about the outcome that you want to achieve with your eating choices is also not straightforward.
Both are skills for which understanding biochemistry is secondary.
As far as I can tell, distinguishing between those sorts of feeling is a matter of accumulated experience. There aren't classes of feelings, some of which are desires for things which are bad for you and others which are desires for what you need.
I'm not 100% sure because I'm not that good at making eating choicses but there are those people who make intuitive eating choices you wouldn't eat sugared food but who eat mostly raw vegan and who their raw steak once a month to stock up on B12 when their body calls for it (or whatever the body actually calls for when he brings up the desire to eat flesh).
With cognitive thinking, there far- and near-thinking. I think that exists also for feelings. Fun would be a word that generally describes a near-feeling while life satisfaction refers to a more far-feeling.
A meditation is finished when you feel it's finished. If you don't have that feeling which can take years to develop you need a clock to tell you when 15 minutes are over because otherwise you might use it as a excuse to quit the meditation when things become really hard.
I am told that the natural feeling for gravity and balance is worse than useless to a pilot.
I am told this as well.
Cool! I've looked for that manifesto on line before, and failed to find it; thanks for the link! Too many people seem to get all of their knowledge of the Vienna Circle and Logical Positivism from its critics. It's good to look at the primary sources. The translation is a little clunky (perhaps too literal), but so much better than not having it available at all.
I agree.
The Logical Positivists were, to my mind, the greatest philosophers ever, and it's a shame they have been the target of so much unfair criticism. Of course they were wrong on many issues, but their attitude towards philosophy, knowledge and political action is unsurpassed. If we can revive their spirit again, philosophy will have a bright future.
What the logical positivist position on political action? Are you talking about things like getting evolution out of science classes, or are you talking about something else?
The Logical Positivists were mostly pretty far left, but they mostly didn't engage in much political advocacy; though this was controversial among members of the movement (Neurath thought they should be more overtly political), most of them seemed to think that helping people think more clearly and make better use of science was a better way to encourage superior outcomes than advocating specific policies. They were also involved in various causes, though; many members of the Vienna Circle were involved in adult education efforts in Vienna, for example. The more I think about it, the more I think it's pretty accurate to say they had a lot in common with the Less Wrong crowd in their approach to politics (though they were almost certainly further left, even taking into account that the surveys suggest Less Wrong itself is further left than many people seem to realize).
This quote by Anthony de Jasay echoes the Logical Empiricist stance on political action.
I'm talking primarily of their resistance to nazism, and how they saw intellectual and political strugges as inextricably intertwined. In this they were very similar to the French revolutionaries. See for instance this article where Carnap criticizes the nazi philosopher Heidegger in his usual meticulous and over-dry manner. Amazing that he managed to keep so cool in the face of such evil stupidity.
After the war, the US and Britain became the heart of analytic philosophy, and much of the seriousness of the Vienna Circle (and also Popper) disappeared. What replaced it was a rather frivolous, smart aleck kind of philosophy personified especially by people like Lewis and Kripke, but to some degree also Quine, Davidson, Austin and others.
In his excellent The Decline of the German Mandarins Fritz Ringer shows that the German academia grew increasingly dominated by mad romantic reactionaries from 1890 to 1933 (where the book ends). It seems to me (and I think, but am not sure, that Ringer touches upon this at some point) that this, however, spurred real thinkers, in the enlightenment tradition, to greater heights than they otherwise would have reached. They were forced to focus on the big questions, to come up with fundamental reasons for why you should adopt the rationalist perspective, because, unlike in the Anglo-Saxon world, this perspective had a terrifying opponent in the form of romantic reaction. Ringer mostly focuses on the great sociologist Max Weber and others like him, but I think that a similar can be told about the Vienna Circle (I don't recall whether he comments on them).
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/e3yjg/is_there_any_way_to_improve_intelligence_or_are/c153p8w
reddit user jjbcn on trying to improve your intelligence
If you're not a student of physics, The Feynman Lectures on Physics is probably really useful for this purpose. It's free for download!
http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/
It seems like the Feynman lectures were a bit like the Sequences for those Caltech students:
I've noticed that one of the biggest thing holding me back in math/physics is an aversion to thinking too hard/long about math and physics problems. It seems to me that if I was able to overcome this aversion and math was as fun as playing video games I'd be a lot better at it.
Good video games are designed to be fun, that is their purpose. Math, um, not so much.
And at least some math instructors effectively teach that if you aren't already finding (their presentations of) math fascinating, that you must just not be a Math Person.
Of course bad instructors can say this as easily as good ones.
But isn't it true to say that if you have reasonably wide experience with different presentations of math, and you don't find any of them fascinating, then you're probably not a Math Person? Or do Math People not exist as a natural category?
I'd be ever so interested in the answer to this question. It seems really obvious that some people are good at maths and some people aren't.
But it's also really obvious that some people like sprouts. And it turns out as far as I'm aware that it's possible to like sprouts for both genetic and environmental reasons. I'd love to know the causes of mathematical ability. Especially since it seems to be possible to be both 'clever' and 'bad at maths'. Does anyone know what the latest thinking on it is?
My recent experiences trying to design IQ tests tell me that that's both innate and very trainable. In fact I'd now trust the sort of test that asks you how to spell or define randomly chosen words much more than the Raven's type tests. It's really hard to fake good speling, whereas the pattern tests are probably just telling you whether you once spent half an hour looking closely at the wallpaper. Which is exactly the reverse of the belief that I started with.
Related: some people believe that programming talent is very innate and people can be sharply separated into those who can and cannot learn to write code. Previously on LW here, and I think there was an earlier more substantive post but I can't find it now. See also this. Gwern collected some further evidence and counterevidence.
It was probably mentioned in the earlier discussions, but I believe the "two humps" pattern can easily be explained by bad teaching. If it hapens in the whole profession, maybe no one has yet discovered a good way to teach it, because most of the people who understand the topic were autodidacts.
As a model, imagine that a programming ability is a number. You come to school with some value between 0 and 10. A teacher can give you +20 bonus. Problem is, the teacher cannot explain the most simple stuff which you need to get to level 5; maybe because it is so obvious to the teacher that they can't understand how specifically someone else would not already understand it. So the kids with starting values between 0 and 4 can't follow the lessons and don't learn anything, while the kids with starting values 5 to 10 get the +20 bonus. At the end, you get the "two humps"; one group with values 0 to 4, another group with values 25 to 30. -- And the worst part is that this belief creates a spiral, because when everyone observed the "two humps" at the adult people, then if some student with starting value 4 does not understand the lesson, we don't feel a need to fix this; obviously they were just not meant to understand programming.
What are those starting concepts that some people get and some people don't? Probably things like "the computer is just a mechanical thing which follows some mechanical rules; it has no mind, and it doesn't really understand anything", but you need to feel it in the gut level. (Maybe aspies have a natural advantage here, because they don't expect the computer to have a mind.) It could probably help to play with some simple mechanical machines first, where the kids could observe the moving parts. In other words, maybe we don't only need specialized educational software, but also hardware. A computer in a form of a black box is already too big piece of magic, prone to be anthropomorphized. You should probably start with a mechanical typewriter and a mechanical calculator.
A lot of effort has gone into trying to invent ways of teaching programming to complete newbies. If really no-one has succeeded at all, then maybe it's time to seriously consider that some people can't be taught.
A claim that someone cannot be taught by any possible intervention would be a very strong claim indeed, and almost certainly false. But a claim that no-one knows how to teach this even though a lot of people have tried and failed for a long time now, makes predictions pretty similar to the theory that some people simply can't be taught.
This model matches the known facts, but it doesn't tell us what we really want to know. What determines what value people start out with? Does everyone start out with 0 and some people increase their value in unknown, perhaps spontaneous ways? Or are some people just born with high values and they'll arrive at 5 or 10 no matter what they do, while others will stay at 0 no matter what?
I don't know if educators have tried teaching the concepts you suggest explicitly.
My bet would be on childhood experience. For example the kinds of toys used. I would predict a positive effect of various construction sets. It's like "Reductionism for Kindergarten". :D
The silent pre-programming knowledge could be things like: "this toy is interacted with by placing its pieces and observing what they do (or modelling in one's mind what they would do), instead of e.g. talking to the toy and pretending the toy understands".
That seems like rather a strong claim. Everyone who can program now was a complete newbie at some point. Presumably they did not learn by a bolt of divine inspiration out of the blue sky.
http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/
The researcher didn't distinguish the conjectured cause (bimodal differences in students' ability to form models of computation) from other possible causes (just to name one — some students are more confident, and computing classes reward confidence).
And the researcher's advisor later described his enthusiasm for the study as "prescription-drug induced over-hyping" of the results ...
Clearly further research is needed. It should probably not assume that programmers are magic special people, no matter how appealing that notion is to many programmers.
Once upon a time, it would have been a radical proposition to suggest that even 25% of the population might one day be able to read and write. Reading and writing were the province of magic special people like scribes and priests. Today, we count on almost every adult being able to read traffic signs, recipes, bills, emails, and so on — even the ones who do not do "serious reading".
A problem with programming education is that it is frequently unclear what the point of it is. Is it to identify those students who can learn to get jobs as programmers in industry or research? Is it to improve students' ability to control the technology that is a greater and greater part of their world? Is it to teach the mathematical concepts of elementary computer science?
We know why we teach kids to read. The wonders of literature aside, we know full well that they cannot get on as competent adults if they are literate. Literacy was not a necessity for most people two thousand years ago; it is a necessity for most people today. Will programming ever become that sort of necessity?
Bad teaching? There's an even simpler explanation (at least regarding programming): autodidacts with previous experience versus regular students without previous experience. The fact that the teaching is often geared towards the students with previous experience and suffers from a major tone of "Why don't you know this already?" throughout the first year or two of undergrad doesn't help a bit.
"I can teach you this only if you already know it" seems like bad teaching to me. Not sure if we are not just debating definitions here.
Math is a bit like liftening weights. Sitting in front of a heavy mathematical problem is challenging. The job of a good teacher isn't to remove the challenge. Math is about abstract thinking and a teacher who tries to spare his students from doing abstract thinking isn't doing it right.
Deliberate practice is mentally taxing.
The difficult thing as a teacher is to motivate the student to face the challenge whether the challenge is lifting weights or doing complicated math.
The job of a good teacher is to find a slightly less challenging problem, and to give you that problem first. Ideally, to find a sequence of problems very smoothly increasing in difficulty.
Just like a computer game doesn't start with the boss fight, although some determined players would win that, too.
No. Being good at math is about being able to keep your attention on a complicated proof even if it's very challenging and your head seems like it's going to burst.
If you want to build muscles you don't slowly increase the amount of weight and keep it at a level where it's effortless. You train to exhaustion of given muscles.
Building mental stamina to tackle very complicated abstract problems that aren't solvable in five minutes is part of a good math education.
Deliberate practice is supposed to feel hard. A computer game is supposed to feel fun. You can play a computer game for 12 hours. A few hours of delibrate practice are on the other usually enough to get someone to the rand of exhaustion.
If you only face problems in your education that are smooth like a computer game, you aren't well prepared for facing hard problems in reality. A good math education teaches you the mindset that's required to stick with a tough abstract problem and tackle it head on even if you can't fully grasp it after looking 30 minutes at it.
You might not use calculus at your job, but if your math education teaches you the ability to stay focused on hard abstract problems than it fulfilled it's purpose.
You can teach calculus by giving the student concrete real world examples but that defeats the point of the exercise. If we are honest most students won't need the calculus at their job. It's not the point of math education. At least in the mindset in which I got taught math at school in Germany.
This is a very strong set of assertions which I find deeply counter intuitive. Of course that doesn't mean it isn't true. Do you have any evidence for any of it?
Which one's do you find counter intuitive? It's a mix of referencing a few very modern ideas with more traditional ideas of education while staying away from the no-child-left-behind philosophy of education.
I can make any of the points in more depths but the post was already long, and I'm sort of afraid that people don't read my post on LW if they get too long ;) Which ones do you find particularly interesting?
You don't put on so much weight than you couldn't possibly lift it, either (nor so much weight that you could only lift it with atrocious form and risk of injury, the analogue of which would be memorising a proof as though it was a prayer in a dead language and only having a faulty understanding of what the words mean).
Yes, memorizing proof isn't the point. You want to derive proofs. I think it's perfectly fine to sit 1 hours in front of a complicated proof and not be able to solve the proof.
A ten year old might not have that mental stamia, but a good math education should teach it, so it's there by the end of school.
I think math is more fun than playing video games. But I guess it's subjective.
Lucky you.
You have to want to be a wizard.
This is your secret?
You have to want to learn how to be a wizard.
Plenty of us took the Wizard's Oath as kids and still have a hard time in math classes sometimes.
I think everyone has trouble in math class, eventually.
From here. Or as I just think of it, if you don't at least have a hard time sometimes, if not fail sometimes, you're not shooting high enough.
Trying to actually understand what equations describe is something I'm always trying to do in school, but I find my teachers positively trained in the art of superficiality and dark-side teaching. Allow me to share two actual conversations with my Maths and Physics teachers from school.:
(Physics class)
And yet to most people, I can't even vent the ridiculousness of a teacher actually saying this; they just think it's the norm!
What level of school?
Secondary school.
A visit to wikipedia suggests that "secondary school" can refer to either what we in the U.S. call "middle school / junior high school", or what we call "high school". That's a fairly wide range of grade levels. In which year of pre-university education are you?
Oh, okay. After I finish this year, I'll study at school for one final year, and then go to university.
Edit: I am confused that this got five up votes, and would be interested in hearing an explanation from someone who up voted it.
So you wanted to know not how to derive the solution but how to derive the derivation?
I wouldn't blame the teacher for not going there. There's not enough time in class to do something like that. Bringing the students to understand the presented math is hard enough. Describing the process of how this math was found, would take too long. Because especially for harder problems there were probably dozens of mathematicians who studied the problem for centuries in order to find those derivations that your teacher presents to you.
He doesn't have to give proofs. Just explaining the intuition behind each formula doesn't take that long and will help the students understand how and when to use them. Giving intuitions really isn't esoteric trivia for advanced students, it's something that will make solving problems easier for everyone relative to if they just memorized each individual case where each formula applies.
I suspect this is typical mind fallacy at work. There are many students who either can't, or don't want to, learn mathematical intuitions or explanations. They prefer to learn a few formulas and rules by rote, the same way they do in every other class.
I'm closer to the typical mind than most people here with regard to math. I deeply loved humanities and thought of math and mathy fields as completely sterile and lifeless up until late high school, when I first realized that there was more to math than memorizing formulas. And then boom it became fun and also dramatically easier. Before that I didn't reject the idea of learning using mathematical intuitions, I just had no idea that mathematical intuitions were a thing that could exist.
I suspect that most people learn school-things by rote simply because they don't realize that school-things can be learned another way. This is evidenced by how people don't choose to learn things they actually find interesting or useful by rote. There are quite a few people out there who think "book smarts" and "street smarts" are completely separate things and they just don't have book smarts because they aren't good at memorizing disjointed lists of facts.
This is hard to test. What we need here are studies that test different methods of teaching math on randomly selected people.
Of course people self-selecting to participate in the study would ruin it, and most people hate math after the experience and wouldn't participate unless paid large sums.
On the other hand, a study of highschool students who are forced to participate also isn't very useful because the fact of forcing students to study may well be the major reason why they find it a not fun experience and don't study well.
Former teacher confirming this. Some students are willing to spend a lot of energy to avoid understanding a topic. They actively demand memorization without understanding... sometimes they even bring their parents as a support; and I have seen some of the parents complaining in the newspapers (where the complaints become very unspecific, that the education is "too difficult" and "inefficient", or something like this).
Which is completely puzzling for the first time you see this, as a teacher, because in every internet discussion about education, teachers are criticized for allegedly insisting on memorization without understanding, and every layman seems to propose new ideas about education with less facts and more "critical thinking". So, you get the impression that there is a popular demand for understanding instead of memorization... and you go to classroom believing you will fix the system... and there is almost a revolution against you, outraged kids refusing to hear any explanations and insisting you just tell them the facts they need to memorize for the exams, and skip the superfluous stuff. (Then you go back to internet, read more complaints about how teachers are insisting that kids memorize the stuff instead of undestanding, and you just give up any hope of a sane discussion.)
My first explanation was that understanding is the best way, but memorization can be more efficient in short term, especially if you expect to forget the stuff and never use it again after the exam. Some subjects probably are like this, but math famously is not. Which is why math is the most hated subject.
Another explanation was that the students probably never actually had an experience of understanding something, at least not in the school, so they literally don't understand what I was trying to do. Which is a horrible idea, if true, but... that wouldn't make it less true, right? Still makes me think: Didn't those kids at least have an experience of something being explained by a book, or by a popular science movie? Probably most of them just don't read such books or watch those movies. -- I wonder what would happen if I just showed the kids some TED videos; would they be interested, or would they hate it?
By the way, this seems not related to whether the topic is difficult. Even explaining how easy things work can be met by resistance. This time not because it is "too difficult", but because "we should just skip the boring simple stuff". (Of course, skipping the boring simple stuff is the best recipe to later find the more advanced stuff too difficult.) I wonder how much impact here has the internet-induced attention deficit.
Speaking as a student: I sympathize with Benito, have myself had his sort of frustration, and far prefer understanding to memorization... yet I must speak up for the side of the students in your experience. Why?
Because the incentives in the education system encourage memorization, and discourage understanding.
Say I'm in a class, learning some difficult topic. I know there will be a test, and the test will make up a big chunk of my grade (maybe all the tests together are most of my grade). I know the test will be such that passing it is easiest if I memorize — because that's how tests are. What do I do?
True understanding in complex topics requires contemplation, experimentation, exploration; "playing around" with the material, trying things out for myself, taking time to think about it, going out and reading other things about the topic, discussing the topic with knowledgeable people. I'd love to do all of that...
... but I have three other classes, and they all expect me to read absurd amounts of material in time for next week's lecture, and work on a major project apiece, and I have no time for any of those wonderful things I listed, and I have had four hours of sleep (and god forbid I have a job in addition to all of that) and I am in no state to deeply understand anything. Memorizing is faster and doesn't require such expenditures of cognitive effort.
So what do I do? Do I try to understand, and not be able to understand enough, in time for the test on Monday, and thus fail the class? Or do I just memorize, and pass? And what good do your understanding-based teaching techniques do me, if you're still going to give me tests and base my grade on them, and if the educational system is not going to allow me the conditions to make my own way to true understanding of the material?
None. No good at all.
I had this experience in a context of high school, with no homework and no additional study at home.
None of the students' classes assigned any homework?!
Some of them probably did, but most didn't. The "no homework and no additional study at home" part was meant only for computer science, which I taught.
Ah. I think this is why I'm finding physics and maths so difficult, even though my teachers said I'd find it easy. It's not just that the teachers have no incentive to make me understand, it's that because teachers aren't trained to teach understanding, when I keep asking for it, they don't know how to give it... This explains a lot of their behaviour.
Even when I've sat down one-on-one with a teacher and asked for the explanation of a piece of physics I totally haven't understood, they guy just spoke at me for five/ten minutes, without stopping to ask me if I followed that step, or even just to repeat what he'd said, and then considered the matter settled at the end without questions about how I'd followed it. The problem with my understanding was at the beginning as well, and when he stopped, he finished as if delivering the end of a speech, as though it were final. It would've been a little awkward for me to ask him to re-explain the first bit... I thought he was a bad teacher, but he's just never been incentivised to continually stop and check for understanding, after deriving the requisite equations.
And that's why my maths teacher can never answer questions that go under the surface of what he teaches... I think he'd be perfectly able to understand it on the level to give me an explanation, as when I push him he does, but otherwise...
His catchphrase in our classroom is "In twenty years of questioning, nobody's ever asked me that before." He then re-assures us that it's okay for us to have asked it, as he assumes we think that having asked a new question is a bad thing...
Edit: Originally said something arrogant.
Why do you think that?
Oops, I didn't mean to sound quite so arrogant, and I merely meant in the top bit of the class. If you do want to know my actual reasons for thinking so, off the top of my head I'd mention teachers saying so generally, teachers saying so specifically, performance in maths competitions, a small year group such that I know everyone in the class fairly well and can see their abilities, observation of marks (grades) over the past six years, and I get paid to tutor maths to students in lower years.
Still, edited.
What do you think about these other possible explanations?
Some of these students really can't learn to prove mathematical theorems. If exams required real understanding of math, then no matter how much these students and their teachers tried, with all the pedagogical techniques we know today, they would fail the exams.
These students really have very unpleasant subjective experiences when they try to understand math, a kind of mental suffering. They are bad at math because people are generally bad at doing very unpleasant things: they only do the absolute minimum they can get away with, so they don't get enough practice to become better, and they also have trouble concentrating at practice because the experience is a bad one. Even if they can improve with practice, this would mean they'll never practice enough to improve. (You may think that understanding something should be more fun than rote learning, and this may be true for some of them, but they never get to actually understand enough to realize this for themselves.)
The students are just time-discounting. They care more about not studying now, then about passing the exam later. Or, they are procrastinating, planning to study just before the exam. An effort to understand something takes more time in the short term than just memorizing it; it only pays off once you've understood enough things.
The students, as a social group, perceive themselves as opposed to and resisting the authority of teachers. They can't usually resist mandatory things: attending classes, doing homework, having to pass exams; and they resent this. Whenever a teacher tries to introduce a study activity that isn't mandatory (other teachers aren't doing it), students will push back. Any students who speak up in class and say "actually I'm enjoying this extra material/alternative approach, please keep teaching it" would be betraying their peers. This is a matter of politics, and even if a teacher introduces non-mandatory or alternative techniques that are really objectively fun and efficient, students may not perceive them as such because they're seeing them as "extra study" or "extra oppression", not "a teacher trying to help us".
It could be different explanations for different people. This said, options 1 and 2 seem to contradict with my experience that students object even against explaining relatively simple non-mathy things. My experience comes mostly from high school where I taught everything during the lessons, no homeword, no home study; this seems to rule out option 3.
Option 4 seems plausible, I just feel it is not the full explanation, it's more like a collective cooperation against something that most students already dislike individually.
In my school math education we had the standard that everything we learn get's proved. If you are not in the habit of proving math, students are not well prepared for doing real math in university which is about mathematical proofs.
In general the math that's not understood but memorized gets soon forgotten and is not worth teaching in the first place.
That's a great rule, but it still has to have limits. Otherwise you couldn't teach calculus without teaching number theory and set theory and probably some algebraic structures and mathematical logic too.
What is wrong with learning logic, set theory, and number theory before (or in the context of high school, instead of) calculus?
EDIT: Personally, I think going into computer science would have been easier if in high school I learned logic and set theory my last two years rather than trigonometry and calculus.
The thing that's wrong is exactly that it would indeed have to be instead of calculus. And then students would not pass the nationally mandated matriculation exams or university entry exams, which test knowledge of calculus. One part of the system can't change independently from the others. I agree that if you're going to teach just one field of math, then calculus is not the optimal choice.
I do believe that for every field that's taught in highschool, the most important theories and results should be taught: evolution, genetics, cell structure and anatomy in biology; Newtonian mechanics, electromagnetism and relativity in physics (QM probably requires too much math for any high-school program); etc.
There won't be time to prove and fully explain everything that's being shown, because time is limited, and it's better that all the people in our society know about classical mechanics and EM and relativity, than that they know about just one of them but have studied and reproduced enough experiments to demonstrate that that one theory is true compared to all alternatives of similar complexity.
And similarly, I think it would be better if everyone knew about the fundamental results of all the important fields of math, than being able to prove a lot of theorems in a couple of fields on highschool exams but not getting to hear a lot of other fields.
Really? I think it's very beautiful and it's what hooked me. And it's the bit the scientists use. What would you teach everyone instead?
As far as possible, we should allow students to learn more and help guide them to the sciences. But scientists are in the end a small minority of the population and some things are important to teach to everyone. I don't think calculus passes that test, and neither does classic geometry and analytic geometry, which received a lot of time in my school.
Instead I would teach statistics, basic probability theory, programming (if you can sell it as applied math), basic set and number theory (e.g. countable and uncountable infinities, rational and real numbers), basic computer science with some important cryptography results given without proof (e.g. public-key encryption). At least one of these should demonstrate the concept of mathematical proofs and logic (set theory is a good candidate).
Interesting question. I'm a programmer who works in EDA software, including using transistor-level simulations, and I use surprisingly little math. Knowing the idea of a derivative (and how noisy numerical approximations to them can be!) is important - but it is really rare for me to actually compute one. It is reasonably common to run into a piece of code that reverses the transformation done by another pieces of code, but that is about it. The core algorithms of the simulators involves sophisticated math - but that is stable and encapsulated, so it is mostly a black box. As a citizen, statistics are potentially useful, but mostly just at the level of: This article quotes an X% change in something with N patients, does it look like N was large enough that this could possibly be statistically significant? But usually the problem with such studies in the the systematic errors, which are essentially impossible for a casual examination to find.
We actually did learn number theory, set theory, basic logic and algrebraic structures such as rings, groups and vector spaces.
In Germany every student has to select two subjects called "Leistungskurse" in which he gets more classes. In my case I selected math and physics which meant we had 5 hours worth of lessons in those subjects per week.
When I went to high school in Israel we had a similar system, but extra math wasn't an option (at least not at my school).
A big part of an undergrad math (or CS) degree is spent on these subjects. I don't believe the study everything, prove everything you do level is attainable with 5 hours per week for 3 years at the high-school level, even with a very good self-selected student group.
The German school system starts by separating students into 3 different kind of schools based on the academic skill of the student: Hauptschule, Realschule and Gymnasium. The Gymnasium is basically for those who go to university. That separation starts by school year 5 or 7 depending on where in Germany the school is located.
You have more than 3 years of math classes at school. I think proving stuff started at the 8 or 9 school year. At the beginning a lot of it focused on geometry.
At the time I think it was 4 hours of math per week for everyone. I think there were many cases where the students who were good at math had time to prove things while the more math adverse students took more time with the basic math problems.
What did the most advanced students (say, top 15%) study and prove by the end of highschool?
It's been a while but before introducing calculus we did go through the axioms and theorems of limit of a function.
Peano's axioms and how you it's enough to prove things for n=0 and that n->n+1 were basis for proofs.
Derive the derivation? Huh? And you say that's different from 'understanding' it. No, I just didn't have the most basic of intuitive ideas as to why he suddenly made an iterated equation, and I didn't understand why it worked, at any level. It was all just abstract symbol manipulation with no content for me, and that's not learning.
Furthermore, he does have the time. We have nine hours a week. With a class size of four pupils.
He may actually not know. People who teach maths are often not terribly good at it. Why don't you post the equation and the thing he turned it into? One of us will probably be able to see what is going on.
In all fairness, at university, being lectured by people whose job was maths research and who were truly world class at it, I remember similar happenings. Although they have subtler ways of telling you to shut up. Figuring out what's going on between the steps of a proof is half the fun and it tends to make your head explode with joy when you finally get it.
I just gave a couple of terms of first year maths lectures, stuff that I thought I knew well, and the effort of going through and actually understanding everything I was talking about turned what was supposed to be two hours a week into two days a week, so I can quite see why busy people don't bother. And in the process I found a couple of mistakes in the course notes (that of course get passed down from year to year, not rewritten from scratch with every new lecturer).
What's wrong with saying something to the effect of "There's a theorem -- it's not really within the scope of this course, but if you're really interested it's called the fixed-point theorem, you can look it up on Wikipedia or somewhere"?
Ahem:
Amusing, although I'll point out that there are some subtle difference between a physics classroom and the MOR!universe. Or at least, I think there are...
I will only say that when I was a physics major, there were negative course numbers in some copies of the course catalog. And the students who, it was rumored, attended those classes were... somewhat off, ever after.
And concerning how I got my math PhD, and the price I paid for it, and the reason I left the world of pure math research afterwards, I will say not one word.
Were there tentacles involved? Strange ethereal piping? Anything rugose or cyclopean in character?
I think we can safely say there were non-Euclidean geometries involved.
Were there also course numbers with a non-zero complex part?
For every EY quote, there exists an equal and opposite ~~EY~~ PC Hodgell quote:
(That was P.C. Hodgell, not EY.)
Good point, I'll correct it.
Edited OP to make it clear that you can provide a link to the place you found the quote, rather than needing to track down an authoritative original source.
-Timothy Gowers, on finding out a method he’d hoped would work, in fact would not.
Jessica speaking to Thufir Hawat in Frank Herbert's Dune
-- Reagan and Scipio debate the nature of definitions. From Templar, Arizona
G. K. Chesterton, attributed.
Upvoted. I would've preferred the following version:
Might someone offer an explanation of this to me?
Arguing about preferences (=opinions, =values) is pretty pointless.
On its own I can think of several things that these words might be uttered in order to express. A little search turns up a more extended form, with a claimed source:
Said to be by G.K. Chesterton in the New York Times Magazine of February 11, 1923, which appears to be a real thing, but one which is not online. According to this version, he is jibing at progressivism, the adulation of the latest thing because it is newer than yesterday's latest thing.
ETA: Chesterton uses the same analogy, in rather more words, here.
Note that this accentuates the relevance of a detail that might be skipped over in the original quote- that Thursday comes after Wednesday. That is, this may be intended as a dismissal of the 'all change is progress' position or the 'traditions are bad because they are traditions' position.
Nassim Taleb
Nassim Taleb
Nassim Taleb
I think, by this standard, law is a BS discipline. But I'm not sure what to make of that.
Well - law is, in a strict sense, entirely about convincing other humans that your interpretation is correct.
Whether or not it actually is correct in a formal sense is entirely screened off by that prime requirement, and so you probably shouldn't be surprised that all methods used by humans to convince other humans, in the absence of absolute truth, are applied. :)
Interesting. There are famous cases of self-taught lawyers from previous centuries.
I wonder if this says something bad about the modern legal system. Maybe the modern legal system is less about making arguments based on how the law works (or should work) than about the lawyer signaling high status to the judge so that he rules in your favor.
I don't think I have good reason to think this is the case. At any rate, it's clear enough that the prestige bit seems to come in heavily in hiring decisions, so let's just talk about that. How, in the ideal case, do you think lawyers would be evaluated for jobs? Off hand, I can't think of anything a lawyer could produce to show that she's a good hire.
There are famous cases of self-taught specialists in scientific fields, too. There aren't so many of them nowadays. That's because both the law and science are in a state where a practitioner must know a lot of details that didn't exist as part of the field in earlier days.
This seems false in physics. Prestige of your institution matters. Prestige of the journal matters, too. Arxiv is fine, Physical Reviews is better, PRL is better yet. Nature/Science is so high, if you publish something that is not perceived as top-quality, you may get resented by others for status jumping. And there are plenty of journals which only get to publish second- and third-rate results.
Of course, the usual countersignaling caveat applies: once you have enough status, posting on Arxiv is enough, you will get read. Not submitting to journals can be seen as a sign of status, though I don't think the field is there (yet).
My understating is that this effect is a lot smaller in physics than in the humanities.
By that standard, all academic disciplines are BS disciplines.
from The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
-- 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)
Comedian Simon Munnery:
The mathematician and Fields medalist Vladimir Voevodsky on using automated proof assistants in mathematics:
[...]
[...]
[...]
[...]
From a March 26, 2014 talk. Slides available here.
A video of the whole talk is available here.
And his textbook on the new univalent foundations of mathematics in homotopy type theory is here.
It is misleading to attribute that book solely to Voevodsky.
I know you're not supposed to quote yourself, but I came up with a cool saying about this a while back and I just want to share it.
Computer proof verification is like taking off and nuking the whole site from orbit: it's the only way to be sure.
Computer scientists seem much more ready to adopt the language of homotopy type theory than homotopy theorists at the moment. It should be noted that there are many competing new languages for expressing the insights garnered by infinity groupoids. Though Voevodsky's language is the only one that has any connection to computers, the competing language of quasi-categories is more popular.
-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'.
As far as I understand, he actually does define his terms. Dennett defines a mind as a rational agent/decision algorithm (subject to evolutionary baggage and bugs in the algorithm). Please correct me if I'm wrong.
At this point in the book, he certainly hasn't reached that conclusion. He's merely given parameters under which taking the Intentional Stance is a good idea; when it's useful to treat something as having a mind, beliefs, desires, etc. This, he says, will be a useful stepping stone to figuring out what minds and beliefs and desires really are, and how to know where they exist in this world.
-- Meta --
Shouldn't this be in Main rather than Discussion? I PM'ed the author, but didn't get a response.
EDIT: Thanks.
-- Richard Fumerton, Epistemology
Do dogs not know that bones are nice?
How would one tell?
First, you offer them a sequence of bets such that...oh wait.
Really? So, say, if I put a bone on the other side of the river, the dog doesn't know that it can swim across?
(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.
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).
Without context, it's a bit difficult to see how this is a rationality quote. Not everyone here has read Atlas Shrugged...
I've read AS a while ago, and I still don't remember enough of the context to interpret this quote...
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
-- Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson
And it seems to be going pretty well!
Ah, but you have not seen the counterfactual.
"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
I love the character of Uriel in the Dresden Files. I find his interpretation of the Fallen very interesting also.
Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
-- Max Tegmark, Scientific American guest blog, 2014-02-04
I would think the first objection to that line of reasoning would be that we know General Relativity is an incomplete theory of reality and expect to find something that supersedes it and gives better answers regarding black holes.
Cracked
I don't see how that's any different from all the other age groups ;-).
We are out of it, so we can bitch about ;-).
Being able to patronise the young is the only advantage of age
Failing health is the only disadvantage of age. In every other way, the years just make things better.
Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl
So as to keep the quote on its own, my commentary:
This passage (read at around age 10) may have been my first exposure to an EA mindset, and I think that "things you don't value much anymore can still provide great utility for other people" is a powerful lesson in general.
Eadem Mutata Resurgo
[the] Same, [but] Changed, I [shall] Rise
On the tombstone of Jacob Bernoulli.
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")
Can you provide some context? I don't understand: the claim that the evidence for telepathy is very strong is surely wrong, so is this sarcasm? A wordplay?
Turing's 1950 paper asks, "Can machines think?"
After introducing the Turing Test as a possible way to answer the question (in, he expects, the positive), he presents nine possible objections, and explains why he thinks each either doesn't apply or can be worked around. These objections deal with such topics as souls, Gödel's theorem, consciousness, and so on. Psychic powers are the last of these possible objections: if an interrogator can read the mind of a human, they can identify a human; if they can psychokinetically control the output of a computer, they can manipulate it.
From the context, it does seem that Turing gives some credence to the existence of psychic powers. This doesn't seem all that surprising for a British government mathematician in 1950. This was the era after the Rhines' apparently positive telepathy research — and well before major organized debunking of parapsychology as a pseudoscience (which started in the '70s with Randi and CSICOP). Governments including the US, UK, and USSR were putting actual money into ESP research.
Yes, but also remember that Turing's English, shy, and from King's College, home of a certain archness and dry wit. I think he's taking the piss, but the very ambiguity of it was why it appealed as a rationality quote. He's facing the evidence squarely, declaring his biases, taking the objection seriously, and yet there's still a profound feeling that he's defying the data. Or maybe not. Maybe I just read it that way because I don't buy telepathy.
Hodges claims that Turing at least had some interest in telepathy and prophesies:
Alan Turing: The Enigma (Chapter 7)
-- Daniel Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking
Donald Knuth on the difference between theory and practice.
Duplicate.