Rationality Quotes November 2014

elharo

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The 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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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.
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 Do not quote with only a name.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, another rationality quotes thread. The 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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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.
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 Do not quote with only a name.

Drone strikes aren't contagious

They kinda are :-D First by physical proximity at the moment of the strike (you get to be called "collateral damage"), and second, via the "association with suspicious persons" method.

The only way for people in the U.S. (whether they are citizens or not) to be safe from Ebola is for people with Ebola to be prevented from entering

Are you, by any chance, looking for absolute safety? It tends to be very expensive to achieve and even then fails often enough.

If we are talking about "driving the risks from Ebola to the general background risk level", well, at the moment it's well below that level.

driving the risks ... to the general background risk level

IAWYC, but in general the right thing to do is to reduce the risk until the marginal cost of reducing it more exceeds the disutility of what one is risking: for example, if I can spend one cent to reduce the probability I'll die tomorrow by 1e-7 (e.g. by not being as much of a jackass while driving) I should do so, even though the general background risk level (according to actuarial tables for my gender, age and province) is more than an order of magnitude larger.

3Richard_Kennaway12y

Are you saying that because precautions are in place, the risk is being kept below that level, or that because the risk is below that level, precautions need not be taken? The first is fine, the second is not.

0wedrifid12y

I hope not. Because Richard's proposal doesn't provide that. Especially when 'drone strikes' have already been brought up in conversation. Sure, most of the remaining risks would sound about as realistic as a plot from a season of 24 but as you say this is a threat well below general background risk level so implausibility is expected.