The history of the shuttle is a typical example of a generic problem that occurs frequently in the development of science and technology, the problem of premature choice. Premature choice means betting all your money on one horse before you have found out whether she is lame. Politicians and administrators responsible for large project are often obsessed with avoiding waste. To avoid waste they find it reasonable to choose one design as soon as possible and shut down the support of alternatives. ... The evolution of science and technology is a Darwinian process of the survival of the fittest. In science and technology, as in biological evolution, waste is the secret of efficiency. Without waste you cannot find out which horse is the fittest. This is a hard lesson for politicians and administrators to learn.
Freeman Dyson, From Eros to Gaia
[T]he kind of mirage that came from modern data-dredging capabilities: if you watch trillions of things, you will often see one-in-a-million coincidences.
-- Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End
'Twas grief enough to think mankind
All hollow servile insincere -
But worse to trust to my own mind
And find the same corruption there
If your only tool is deconstruction the whole world looks like narrative.
...The world of to-day attaches a large importance to mental independence, or thinking for oneself; yet the manner in which these things are cultivated is very partial. In some matters we are, perhaps too independent (for we need to think socially as well as to act socially); but in other matters we are not independent enough; we are hardly independent at all. For we always interpret mental independence as being independence of old things. But if the mind is to stand in a real loneliness and liberty, and judge mere time and mere circumstances, and all the wasting things of this world, if the mind is really a strong and emancipated judge of things unbribed and unbrowbeaten, it must assert its superiority, not merely to old things, but to new things.
It must forsee the old age of things still in a strenuous infancy. It must stand by the tombstone of the babe unborn. It must treat the twentieth century as it treats the twelfth, as something which by its own nature has already had an end. A free man must not only be free from the past; a free man must be free from the future. He must be ready to face the rising and increasing thing, and to judge it by immortal tests. It is a very poor ma
"I’ve found that’s all you have to do to get ahead in life, be non-idiotic and live a long time. It’s harder to be non-idiotic than most people think." - Charlie Munger
Nobody wants to hear that you will try your best. It is the wrong thing to say. It is like saying "I probably won't hit you with a shovel." Suddenly everyone is afraid you will do the opposite.
--Lemony Snicket, All the Wrong Questions
Your tactics are self-centered. You have forgotten that you are not the only player on the board, that inherent talent speaks for no more than experience, and that others around you seek to expand their authority and constrain yours. Your error is fundamental to the human psyche: you have allowed yourself to believe that others are mechanisms, static and solvable, whereas you are an agent.
Purity Cartone, in The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson, p. 180
“All the things I have done in my life that I am proud of are all things on the threshold of which I felt immense fear.” - Washington here
"When you are looking for something beautiful and satisfying, it's much harder to find the ugly truth." Penn Jillette, in his book "Oh, God, No" , talking about showing how magic tricks are done.
So long as we allow the terms of the debate to be shaped by what is politically possible, we’ll only ever be taking tiny steps and calling them major.
...Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To b
Like it is easy for me to sit here and say to young people, one, you should invest in broad index funds, not funds concentrated in trendy areas like the Internet or clean technology, and, two, you should try to minimize fees instead of paying someone just to rebrand index funds for you. But you should drink tap water instead of Coke, too, and stay home and read Proust instead of blowing a whole month of your salary on Taylor Swift tickets. All consumption is dumb, if you think too hard about it. That's why it is consumption.
The smug mask of virtue triumphant could be almost as horrible as the face of wickedness revealed. Almost as horrible, but not quite.
-- Granny Weatherwax. Carpe Jugulum, Terry Pratchett
“Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, you must fear or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.”
For those people who insist, however, that the only thing that is important is that the theory agrees with experiment, I would like to make an imaginary discussion between a Mayan astronomer and his student...
These are the opening words of a ~1.5 minute monologue in one of Feynman's lectures; I won't transcribe the remainder but it can be viewed here.
If these lines are read by a young geologist, then, especially for him, it should be noted that excitement in scientific work is harmful rather than useful. Caught in 'rare-metal fever', I took hundreds of samples but missed plenty of interesting things. I almost did not study enclosing rocks, totally ignored unique carbonate concretions, which in themselves could be a subject of a whole thesis, but saddest of all - I very superficially studied fossilized soils. Alas, the find fell in the hands of underprepared researcher.
Ya. E. Yudovitch. Gramm more expensive than tonne: rare elements in coals (p. 102, Moscow, 1989.)
The worst of all auguries is from consent in matters intellectual.
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, section LXXVII.
"When you are looking for something beautiful and satisfying, it's much harder to find the ugly truth." Penn Jillette, in his book "Oh, God, No" , talking about showing how magic tricks are done.
They say it is better to be poor and happy than rich and miserable, but how about a compromise like moderately rich and just moody?
Princess Diana
Lewis is less than perfectly clear about what theory it is he is opposing, but whatever it is he claims it is "almost universal among my fellow-countrymen". I do not find it plausible that almost all Englishmen[1] in 1949 believed that there should be no constraints on how criminals are treated other than the overall interests of "the collective"; do you, really?
[1] "Englishmen" should here be interpreted with exactly whatever degree of assumed maleness Lewis employed when he wrote "countrymen".
The nearest thing Lewis gets to a clear statement of "the Humanitarian theory" (as he calls what he's arguing against) is, I think, this:
According to the Humanitarian theory, to punish a man because he deserves it, and as much as he deserves, is mere revenge, and, therefore, barbarous and immoral. It is maintained that the only legitimate motives for punishing are the desire to deter others by example or to mend the criminal. When this theory is combined, as frequently happens, with the belief that crime is more or less pathological, the idea of mending tails off into that of healing or curing and punishment becomes therapeutic.
Now, as it happens, I believe (at least as a first approximation) that the only legitimate motives for punishing are the desire to deter others by example or to mend the criminal. I don't quite think that "crime is more or less pathological", and nor for that matter do I believe that even a majority of 1949 Englishmen thought so, but I don't think this makes an essential difference here. But I do not hold that there are, or should be, no other constraints on punishment, nor do I hold that the only appropriate constraint is the welfare of the collective[2]. I am pretty sure that these are not in any useful sense implied by the belief that the only legitimate motives for punishing are, etc.; nor do I see any other reason to think that someone who thinks the only legitimate motives for punishing are, etc., should think there are no other constraints on punishment.
[2] I might endorse a sufficiently careful claim that the only appropriate constraint is some sort of global utility, but note that "sufficiently careful" includes, e.g., taking into account the fact that treating some individuals very badly "for the general good" is likely to have all kinds of second-order side effects, mostly very bad ones.
Lewis does not (at least, not as I read him) regard the claim that there are no other constraints on punishment as part of the Humanitarian Theory; he suggests that it follows from that theory, but he is wrong. Specifically, his argument goes like this: (1) The HT, unlike the older "Retributive Theory", is not concerned with desert. (2) The question "is it just?" is specifically a question about desert; it doesn't make sense to ask "is this a just deterrent?", only "will it in fact deter?", and similarly for curing. (3) Therefore, "when we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether".
But note what he's done in step 3. "When we cease to consider what the criminal deserves". He is conflating two notions of desert. (a) What punishment does the criminal deserve, on account of the wickedness of his conduct or the harm it has caused? (b) What treatment does the criminal deserve, according to whatever general principles govern how we treat people? The "Humanitarian" theory of punishment indeed declines to make question (a) central, but that doesn't mean it forbids you to ask question (b). And if you refuse to ask question (b) then you are on the road to totalitarianism quite independently of any questions about punishment.
Lewis goes on to say (purporting to describe the opinions of adherents of the "Humanitarian theory") that " the only two questions we may now ask about a punishment are whether it deters and whether it cures". But, again, this does not follow from the HT, nor is there any other reason why an adherent of the HT should endorse it.
If you prefer to read Lewis not as saying that this follows from the HT, but as saying that it is part of the HT, then my objection is different: so far as I know, scarcely anyone has ever endorsed this "extended Humanitarian theory", and his arguments are not relevant to anyone who endorses merely the "unextended HT" that simply says that the only legitimate motives for punishing are the desire to deter and the desire to mend.
* * * *
Now, Lewis does write this:
The immediate starting point of this article was a letter [...] The author was pleading that a certain sin, now treated by our Laws as a crime, should henceforward be treated as a disease. And he complained that under the present system the offender, after a term in gaol, was simply let out to return to his original environment where he would probably relapse.
Of course we don't have the original letter; we don't even know that Lewis didn't make it up, or misunderstand it. (Though I would guess that, being generally both honest and intelligent, he did neither.) So it's hard to tell very much about what its author actually thought. But maybe Lewis did in fact encounter an adherent of what I've called the "extended Humanitarian theory". If so, fair enough; let us agree that the EHT is unpleasant and conducive to totalitarianism. But let us not pretend, as unfortunately Lewis does, that the EHT is either the same thing as, or a necessary consequence of, the idea that punishment should be for deterrence and reform rather than for retribution.
But note what he's done in step 3. "When we cease to consider what the criminal deserves". He is conflating two notions of desert. (a) What punishment does the criminal deserve, on account of the wickedness of his conduct or the harm it has caused? (b) What treatment does the criminal deserve, according to whatever general principles govern how we treat people?
I don't think so. By desert he refers to (a) alone. You have extended it to (b).
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are: