Rationality Quotes December 2014

Salemicus

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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.

The annual US GDP per capita is $55,036. For Somalia, it's $145

This is availability bias. There are clearly other factors differentiating Somalia and the US. If there weren't, there would be massive starvation in Somalia because you can't get by on $145 a year in the US.

I can assure you that successful people are not born in the US by chance.

Really? Do you think successful people don't have children? And that they don't try to make these children US citizens by 'immigrating' (often illegally) to the USA? I can assure you this happens frequently.

As of 2005, there were 2.6 billion people who lived on the equivalent of under $2 per day

Yes, but most of those people live in areas where $2 goes a long way.

What possible values could they have where that could be considered success?

That's up for them to define, not for you to define. Why should they care about your standards? Let them say they are successful if they believe they are successful. You lose nothing but your ego by acknowledging somebody else's success.

Yes, but most of those people live in areas where $2 goes a long way.

The GDP statistics I cited were nominal. The $2 a day thing was not. They don't make $2 a day. The make enough to go as far as $2 would in the US.

Really? Do you think successful people don't have children? And that they don't try to make these children US citizens by 'immigrating' (often illegally) to the USA? I can assure you this happens frequently.

Only 13% of the US population is immigrants. 20% of the world's immigrant population is in the US, so it works out to about two milli... (read more)

2Nornagest12y

There's a couple of things going on there. One is that Somalia is in fact a very malnourished country. Another is that the GDP figures DanielLC cites are nominal, not based on purchasing power parity, and therefore can be skewed by exchange rates. The currencies of poor third-world nations tend to be very weak, so going by nominal GDP will end up making them look even poorer than they actually are. PPP estimates for Somalia seem uncommon for some reason, but the CIA estimated a per-capita annual value of around $600 USD in 2010.

2Wes_W12y

There is, in fact, massive starvation in Somalia, price differences notwithstanding. The first sentence of the first link from a Google search for "malnutrition statistics somalia" says that "Somalia has some of the highest malnutrition rates in the world".