Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach, because we ask “Can I believe it?” when we want to believe something, but “Must I believe it?” when we don’t want to believe. The answer is almost always yes to the first question and no to the second.
--Jon Haidt, The Righteous Mind
I think psychologist Tom Gilovich is the original source of the "Can I?" vs. "Must I?" description of motivated reasoning. He wrote about it in his 1991 book How We Know What Isn't So.
For desired conclusions, we ask ourselves, "Can I believe this?", but for unpalatable conclusions we ask, "Must I believe this?
Probably people have seen this before, but I really like it:
People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing, that's why we recommend it daily.
The key to avoiding rivalries is to introduce a new pole, which mediates your relationship to the antagonist. For me this pole is often Scripture. I renounce my claim to be thoroughly aligned with the pole of Scripture and refocus my attention on it, using it to mediate my relationship with the antagonistic party. Alternatively, I focus on a non-aggressive third party. You may notice that this same pattern is observed in the UK parliamentary system of the House of Commons, for instance. MPs don’t directly address each other: all of their interactions are mediated by and addressed to a non-aggressive, non-partisan third party – the Speaker. This serves to dampen antagonisms and decrease the tendency to fall into rivalry. In a conversation where such a ‘Speaker’ figure is lacking, you need mentally to establish and situate yourself relative to one. For me, the peaceful lurker or eavesdropper, Christ, or the Scripture can all serve in such a role. As I engage directly with this peaceful party and my relationship with the aggressive party becomes mediated by this party, I find it so much easier to retain my calm.
..."Update: many people have read this post and suggested that, in the first file example, you should use the much simpler protocol of copying the file to modified to a temp file, modifying the temp file, and then renaming the temp file to overwrite the original file. In fact, that’s probably the most common comment I’ve gotten on this post. If you think this solves the problem, I’m going to ask you to pause for five seconds and consider the problems this might have. (...) The fact that so many people thought that this was a simple solution to the probl
Each individual instance of outperformance can be put into its own coherent narrative, can be made to look logical and earned on its own terms. But when you throw them together it's hard to escape the impression of a coin-flipping contest with a song and dance at the end.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
I want you to be the Admiral Nagumo of my staff. I want your every thought, every instinct as you believe Admiral Nagumo might have them. You are to see the war, their operations, their aims, from the Japanese viewpoint and keep me advised what you are thinking about, what you are doing, and what purpose, what strategy, motivates your operations. If you can do this, you will give me the kind of information needed to win this war.
-Admiral Nimitz from Edwin Layton, And I Was There, 1985, p. 357.
There’s nothing rigorous about looking for shiny objects that happen to be statistically significant.
I think the common thread in a lot of these [horrible] relationships is people who have managed to go through their entire lives without realizing that “Person did Thing, which caused me to be upset” is not the same thing as “Person did something wrong”, much less “I have a right to forbid Person from ever doing Thing again”.
--Ozymandias (most of the post is unrelated)
Looking for mental information in individual neuronal firing patterns is looking at the wrong level of scale and at the wrong kind of physical manifestation. As in other statistical dynamical regularities, there are a vast number of microstates (i.e., network activity patterns) that can constitute the same ghloal attractor, and a vast numbmer of trajectories of microstate-to-microstate changes that will tend to converge to a common attractor. But it is the final quasi-regular network-level dynamic, like a melody played by a million-instrument orchestra, that is the medium of mental information. - Terrence W. Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, pp. 516 - 517.
Harms take longer to show up & disprove than benefits. So evidence-based medicine disproportionately channels optimism
If you want to understand another group, follow the sacredness.
--Jon Haidt, The Righteous Mind
If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
-- The killer shortly before killing his victim in No Country for Old Men
And we must study through reading, listening, discussing, observing and thinking. We must not neglect any one of those ways of study. The trouble with most of us is that we fall down on the latter -- thinking -- because it's hard work for people to think, And, as Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler said recently, 'all of the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think.'
...The basic key that I follow when engaging with antagonistic individuals is to recognize that we will always tend to imitate someone. In mimetic rivalries, the antagonism can come to dominate so much that the third pole (and there is always a third pole – a relationship, an issue, a symptom, etc.) becomes interchangeable. The key to avoiding rivalries is to introduce a new pole, which mediates your relationship to the antagonist. For me this pole is often Scripture. I renounce my claim to be thoroughly aligned with the pole of Scripture and refocus my atte
This appears to be empirically incorrect, at least in some fields. A few examples:
..."For it is easy to criticise and break down the spirit of others, but to know yourself takes maybe a lifetime" Bruce Lee
"Remember, my friend to enjoy your planning as well as your accomplishment, for life is too short for negative energy". -Bruce Lee
"We should devote outselves to being self-sufficient and must not depend upon the external rating by others for our happiness" -Bruce
"Remember, my friend, to ejoy your plannng as well as your accomplishment, for life is too short for negative neergy" Lee *Just realised a
Because we live in a culture that fears being alone, being rejected, feeling unworthy and unlovable, we confuse love with attachment, dependency, sexual attraction, romantic illusion, lust, infatuation, or obligation.
...How to predict if bombing ISIS in Syria is a good idea:
Draw up a comprehensive spreadsheet of every 'Western' intervention (and almost-but-not-quite-intervention) in a >foreign country.
Rate each case by how similar it is to the present case (e.g. location, how long ago it was, civil war vs no civil war, >religious war vs non-religious war, how many countries support the intervention, cultural differences between the >countries involved, level of involvement, etc).
Rate how much each intervention (or decision not to intervene) helped or hurt
" 'Bill is wrong, but bill works hard, so even though its the wrong solution, he's likely to succeed', and that the best compliment I ever received"
-Bill Gates, quoting someone else
If you were to rank order and say, I'm going to start a company, what's the highest return on investment for the risk? Space and Cars would be at the bottom.
-Elon Musk in the same vid
Rating each decision on a scale of 1 to 10 and then taking a weighted average is a recipe for biasing the result against intervention, since you've created a hard upper limit for how much you count an intervention as helping, so you'll count a successful intervention as 10 and be unable to count a successful intervention that does even more good as more than 10. (This has a similar problem at the low end of the scale, but that doesn't affect the final result since you can't go below zero intervention.)
This also produces bad results in cases where the intervention failed because it was insufficient. You'd end up concluding that intervention is bad when it may just be that insufficient intervention is bad. This method has clause 2 to cover similarity of case, but not similarity of intervention, and at any rate "similarity" is a fuzzy concept. If bombing half the country is a disaster and bombing a whole country succeeds, is bombing half a country "similar" to bombing a whole country? (Actually, you usually end up compressing all the dispute over intervention into a dispute over how similar two cases are.)
And it's generally a bad idea to put on a numerical scale things that you can't actually measure numerically. It gives a false appearance of accuracy and precision, like a company executive who wants to see figures for his company improve but doesn't actually care where the figures come from.
Also, "level of improvement created" is subject to noise. It is possible for an improvement to fail for reasons unrelated to the effectiveness of the intervention, like if the country gets hit by a meteor the next day (or more realistically, gets invaded or attacked the next day).
Basically one huge problem here is that there isn't enough data compared to the number of variables involved.
Not to mention that this is a problem in what Taleb would call extremistan, i.e., the distribution of possible outcomes from intervening, or not-intervening, are fat-tailed and include a lot of rare possibilities that haven't yet shown up in the data at all.
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are: