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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.

Truth [is] not a function of time or place. Intellectual fashion is. Therefor[e], distance yourself from any given temporally contingent worldview.

Nyan Sandwich

The truth of a preposition may not be a function of time or place, but which preposition a natural-language sentence states is.

8pragmatist12y

I don't think I understand this quote. What is a "temporally contingent worldview"? It can't simply mean any worldview that wasn't widely held in the past, because that would mean distancing oneself from pretty much all science. What, then? Also, while I agree that the truth of a statement (that doesn't include spatio-temporal indexicals, either implicit or explicit) is not a function of time or place, widespread knowledge of a true statement usually varies with time and place. Not saying this justifies adoption of a temporally contingent worldview (since I'm not sure what is), but there does seem to be a bit of a non-sequitur in that quote.