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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.
No observation is false. Any explanation for a given observation may, with finite probability, be false; no matter how obvious and inarguable it may seem.
That may be, but if you label them 'impossible' and dismiss them, you won't gather more evidence to prove it. And if something you consider impossible has actually happened, you're missing an opportunity to improve your model significantly.
This is in fact what happens in-context. With a preposterously-detailed description of observable events (via magic hypnosis; I didn't say the novel made sense), Gently concludes that something has happened which could not have happened as described, and that the only explanation which would explain the results involves time travel; the other person says that it's impossible, to which Gently replies this.
7CCC
I saw it as more of a warning about the limits of maps - when something happens that you think is impossible, then it is time to update your map, and not rail against the territory for failing to match it.
(Of course, it is possible that you have been fooled, somehow, into thinking that something has happened which has, in actual fact, not happened. This possibility should be considered and appropriately weighted (given whatever evidence you have of the thing actually happening) against the possibility that the map is simply wrong.)
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are: