"Killing is wrong, no matter what," is a very powerful and standard meme for heroes.
It is counter intuitive for someone who "loves people" to kill someone. It requires a less-biased assessment of expected utility than is typically performed. That's why I enjoyed the original quote; in the context of the movie, it made sense in the way of typical human failings for him to say no, and his body language and tone highly suggested he would do so right until the end.
In my reading, the assessment was funny exactly because it was emotional and therefore biased. That's what use of "son of a bitch" suggested as well.
David: But you're a doctor--you help people!
Dr. Mordin Solus: Lots of ways to help people. Sometimes heal patients; sometimes execute dangerous people. Either way helps.
-- Mass Effect 2
I am stunned by the relatively high mod-points of this exchange.
I agree that the quotes are moderately funny. (Albeit the M.S. quote was much more funny in the specific context within the game, but even there it was his white-wash response to an action that earned Shepard renegade points.)
Still, I can't see, how all this is related to the "art of human rationality"...
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Often attributed to Pablo Picasso, but I can't find a reliable source.
I'm quite curious to hear what LW thinks of this one.
I think, the quote is useless and in rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of IT.
E.g. experimental mathematics would not exist without computers. Computer simulation is fantastic way to empirically produce and check hypotheses.
Okay, I'll choose my own way.
What else does Auditore say I should do?
Why do you care? You should not follow it anyways. ;)
Information theory challenge: A few posters have mentioned here that the average entropy of a character in English is about one bit. This carries an interesting implication: you should be able to create an interface using only two of the keyboards keys, such that composing an English message requires just as many keystrokes, on average, as it takes on a regular keyboard.
To do so, you'd have to exploit all the regularities of English to offer suggestions that save the user from having to specify individual letters. Most of the entropy is in the intial charaters of a word or message, so you would probably spend more strokes on specifying those, but then make it up with some "autocomplete" feature for large portions of the message.
If that's too hard, it should be a lot easier to do a 3-input method, which only requires your message set to have an entropy of less than ~1.5 bits per character.
Just thought I'd point that out, as it might be something worth thinking about.
This is already exploited on cell phones to some extent.
We don't need anyone to tell us what to do. Not Savonarola, not the Medici. We are free to follow our own path. There are those who will take that freedom from us, and too many of you gladly give it. But it is our ability to choose- whatever you think is true- that makes us human...There is no book or teacher to give you the answers, to show you the way. Choose your own way! Do not follow me, or anyone else.
(Assassin's Creed II, Ezio Auditore's speech)
Rationalists should win
I hate to see this clever statement to be taken out of context and being reinterpreted as a moralizing slogan.
If you trace it back, this was originally a desideratum on rational thinking, not some general moral imperative.
It plainly says that if your supposedly "rational" strategy leads to a demonstrably inferior solution or gets beaten by some stupider looking agent, then the strategy must be reevaluated as you have no right to call it rational anymore.
What then do you make of Jayne's observation in the Comments: "Our present model of the robot is quite literally real, because today it is almost universally true that any nontrivial probability evaluation is performed by a computer"?
In my reading it means, that there are already actual implementations for all probability inference operations that the authors consider in the book.
This has been probably a true statement, even in the 60'ies. It does not mean that the robot as a whole is resource-wise feasible.
An analogy: It is not hard to implement all (non-probabilistic) logical derivation rules. It is also straightforward to use them to generate all true mathematical theorems (e.g. within ZFC). However this does not imply that we have an practical (i.e. efficient) general purpose mathematical theorem-prover. It gives an algorithm to prove every provable theorems eventually, but its run-time consumption makes this approach practically useless.
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Interesting tidbit from the article:
I have long been thinking that the openly aggressive approach some display in promoting atheism / political ideas / whatever seems counterproductive, and more likely to make the other people not listen than it is to make them listen. These results seem to support that, though there have also been contradictory reports from people saying that the very aggressiveness was what made them actually think.
I think one of the reasons this self-esteem seeding works is that identifying your core values makes other issues look less important.
On the other hand, if you e.g. independently expressed that God is an important element of your identity and belief in him is one of your treasured values, then it may backfire and you will be even harder to move you away from that. (Of course I am not sure: I have never seen any scientific data on that. This is purely a wild guess.)