Rationality Quotes April 2014

elharo

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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.

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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.

So whatever Penn Jillette means when he says "believe". In case you think that's no coherent concept, that would also be an answer that I would accept.

If we're talking about Penn Jillete's conception of "beliefs", then I would say that he probably has in mind pieces of information that our minds can represent and reason about abstractly, although this is of course somewhat speculative as I cannot speak for Penn Jillette. I would say that this probably doesn't apply to the other species you named, but may apply to some other existing species, and probably some of our ancestors in the Homo genus.

I'm not arguing better or worse. I'm arguing different. People who listen to their hearts don't go on killing sprees.

I would regard this as a highly extraordinary claim demanding commensurately extraordinary evidence, and I would caution that this is a case which seems very prone to inviting the No True Scotsman fallacy. First off, how would you determine whether an individual listens to their heart or not, and second, how do you know that individuals who listen to their hearts don't engage in such antisocial behaviors?

I would regard this as a highly extraordinary claim demanding commensurately extraordinary evidence, and I would caution that this is a case which seems very prone to inviting the No True Scotsman fallacy. First off, how would you determine whether an individual listens to their heart or not, and second, how do you know that individuals who listen to their hearts don't engage in such antisocial behaviors?

There are people who listen to their heads who go on killing sprees. I believe Christian's claims is that listening to one's heart is either uncorrelated or negatively correlated with going on killing sprees.

0ChristianKl12y

At the moment by observing and checking whether specific qualia are there. If I really wanted to make the proof in numbers, that would require that I systematically calibrate my own perception first and determine sensitivity and specificity of my perception of other people. I'm also still a person who's fairly intellectual. There are people with better perception than myself and getting them to do the assessing might be better. Having a way to get that data via a more automated process that doesn't need a perceptive human would also be nice. At the moment I however have no clear idea about how to go about measuring or the necessary financial resources to finance that kind of research. [...] A mix of more theoretical thinking and practical observation of the behavior of people with whom I'm interacting changes when the qualia I'm perceiving suggests that the locus of their attention within their body changes. [...] I understand that's an advanced claim. At the moment I'm more concerned with making clear what the claim is than proving it. If I say that Harry is not going to kill people if he listens to Hufflepuff but might kill if he listens to Slytherin, would that be a strange claim for you? If I say people who always listen to Hufflepuff don't go on killing sprees would that seem strange to you? Most people you know don't have the ability to mentally commit to 100% listen to Hufflepuff in every decision that they make in their lifes. If I remember right Eliezer uses those different persona because it's popular in systematic therapy to do so and someone he knows taught him that thinking that way can be useful. Those persona have a different quality than organs that can be perceived kinesthetically but they are not that different. Lastly it's useful to keep in mind what extraordinary claim needing extraordinary evidence can lead to. If you take it too far it shuts down people from saying what they honestly believe and instead let's them argue beliefs that th

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Rationality Quotes April 2014

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Rationality Quotes April 2014

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