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When you believe in things that you don't understand
Then you suffer
Superstition ain't the way
-Stevie Wonder, Superstition
In response to
Rationality Quotes July 2011
I realize that LW participants are having fun with this, but I’m a songwriter and I feel motivated to comment.
Writing lyrics is an extreme exercise in lossy data compression. If the lyrics are going to be interesting, you must have a tremendous story or concept in mind. Then you start throwing out 95% of your precious ideas because each gestalt has to fit into 4 lines and hit the listener in the gut or the heart. The best that you can hope for is to make people feel a few emotions and ponder a few ideas.
Stevie Wonder is among the best at the craft. He had to balance precision against brevity, word flow, and many other pressures including boring his audience. So even though a line like “All you need is love” or “my humps, my humps, my lovely lady lumps” hit the mark for their particular topics, I have to adjust Stevie Wonder’s score way up for pulling off a number 1 Bilboard hit with a subject carrying a large difficulty factor.
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Please pray with me eugman,.. to Saint E. T. Jaynes:
Saint Edwin, I pray for rationality as I begin this day, for I understand there is uncertainty in probability models to be reduced, priors to be corrected, superstitions to be squelched and suckers to be Dutch booked. Grant me the courage to be alert so that that I may correctly hear P(B|A). Thy voice; to persevere, that I may share Thy victory; and to remember, lest I forget the way by which Thou has led me. And when this day is done, Saint Edwin, may I have the courage to see Thy guiding hand in the laws of conditional probability, in the significant features of subjectivist position that have been healed, and in the foundations of statistical inference that have been given.
Amen.