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I read this and connected it to the horrible feeling I got from trying to look at myself during my first attempts to grok the world from a stereotypical bible-belt perspective. I got an Error Message: People who have yet to hear god's word, and satan-lovers who willfully defy or ignore god, sure, but to simply not believe any of it just wasn't in the domain. I can't think of non-computer/mathematic terms to describe looking at the blank spot, and those don't capture the psychological horror of finding yourself in it. (Or rather, not finding.)
"If a man heareth me and believeth not, I shall not judge him." or words to that effect.
I think it's somewhere around John 12, or is that Luke 12?, quoting Jesus.
Sorry, it's been a while since I last checked.
This reminds me of "It ain't what we don't know that hurts us, it's what we know that ain't so."
Which I have seen attributed to at least half a dozen different people over the years.
Also, "what we don't know that we don't know"
In response to
Rationality Quotes: March 2011
There is some theoretical amount of honesty that is indistinguishable from mental illness...Imagine if you stopped filtering everything you said...just try to imagine yourself living without self-censorship. Wouldn't you sound crazy?
Some people practice "Radical Honesty" which seems much like that. Seems to me you'd need to start young, before you've got too many skeletons in the closet, before you've got too much to lose, and whilst you have time to recover. Probably also need an honesty-proof career.
As for sounding crazy, I'm already crazy and readily admit it.
If it's stupid, but it works, it ain't stupid.
Who are you quoting?
I seem to recall having read/heard this before.
Mind you, it depends on the reliability of it working. If something has a (real) 90% chance of making the problem twice as bad, but just happens to fix it, then it's still stupid.
I am wary of the fact that this quote feels like something that one might enjoy reading, but find that when he lays the book down (if he's being properly cautious in believing claims), he's learned nothing, at best. At worst, he may be on his way to becoming a sort of Randroid.
I could be wrong, but I think that people would start reading this sort of thing out of an expectation of mixed catharsis/usefulness, only to find that they've just wasted their time.
I think the potential usefulness is to shock some people out of their mental ataxia and into prioritizing their wishes in order to focus their will.
In response to
Rationality Quotes: March 2011
What scientists have in common is not that they agree on the same theories, or even that they always agree on the same facts, but that they agree on the procedures to be followed in testing theories and establishing facts.
Bruce Gregory "Inventing Reality: Physics as Language" pp.186-187.
It might be more accurate to substitute "rules" for "procedures".
Unfortunately in Medicine at least, there seems to be a substantial degree of sloppiness in applying the rules, particularly in the use of metastudies.
In response to
The Bottom Line
...And your effectiveness as a person is determined by whichever algorithm actually causes your actions.
Define "effectiveness as a person" - in many cases the bias leading to the pre-written conclusion has some form of survival value (e.g. social survival). Due partly to childhood issues resulting in a period of complete? rejection of the value of emotions, I have an unusually high resistance to intellectual bias, yet on a number of measures of "effectiveness as a person" I do not seem to be measuring up well yet (on some others I seem to be doing okay).
Also, as I mentioned in my reply to the first comment, real world algorithms are often an amalgam of the two approaches, so it is not so much which algorithm as what weighting the approaches get. In most (if not all) people this weighting changes with the subject, not just with the person's general level of rationality/intellectual honesty.
As it is almost impossible to detect and neutralize all of one's biases and assumptions, and dangerous to attempt "counter-bias", arriving at a result known to be truly unbiased is rare. NOTE: Playing "Devil's Advocate" sensibly is not "counter-bias" and in a reasonable entity will help to reveal and neutralize bias.
In response to
The Bottom Line
For the person who reads and evaluates the arguments, the question is: what would count as evidence about whether the author wrote the conclusion down first or at the end of his analysis? It is noteworthy that most media, such as newspapers or academic journals, appear to do little to communicate such evidence. So either this is hard evidence to obtain, or few readers are interested in it.
"What would count as evidence about whether the author wrote the conclusion down first or at the end of his analysis?":
Past history of accuracy/trustworthiness;
Evidence of a lack of incentive for bias;
Spot check results for sampling bias.
The last may be unreliable if a) you're the author, or b) your spot check evidence source may be biased, e.g. by a generally accepted biased paradigm.
In the real world this is complicated by the fact that the bottom line may have only been "pencilled in", biased the argument, then been adjusted as a result of the argument - e.g.
"Pencilled in" bottom line is 65;
Unbiased bottom line would be 45;
Adjusted bottom line is 55; - neither correct, nor as incorrect as the original "pencilled in" value.
This "weak bias" algorithm can be recursive, leading eventually (sometimes over many years) to virtual elimination of the original bias, as often happens in scientific and philosophical discourse.
Too late, I went and found it online elsewhere :P
In context, the quote is not directed at anyone, and is just a rhetorical question leading straight to "no of course not." Out of context it quite naturally looks like it's directed at some group, changing the meaning a bit.
The quotes from Landau and Lifshitz definitely made me "what," but so did the solutions Bell proposed. 1990 is 20 years ago, I guess.
Just remember, 2011 will be 20 years ago in 2031! ;-)
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As I read this quote, I was reminded of what it felt like to be (repressed) homosexual in a strongly heteronormative culture. The act of claiming my sexuality could only happen outside of that culture (in Europe, for me), and when I came back home, I became profoundly depressed, convinced I would never amount to anything.
Gay people are often surprised at how their internal turmoil, which seems so particular and special, turns out to be the usual result of growing up queer in a straight society. We're surprised because our experience is so different from what most people around us seem to be feeling.
So, I would say Rich was not generalizing from one example, but was talking about the generality of the experience of the ignored minority, and trying to convey that experience to an audience who would be largely ignorant of that feeling of psychic non-existence. They have been affirmed by whatever presumptions are prevalent in their society, be they heteronormative, ethnic, racial, religious or whatever.
So, this is a great rationality quote, because it reminds us all (gay people included) to challenge ourselves constantly to recognize the lenses through which we understand reality, and to try to sort out what is real from what is cultural. People, especially young people, kill themselves because of this. Challenging our cultural assumptions can save lives.
And some people still believe that people choose to be homosexual.
If that were so, why would teenagers commit suicide instead of choosing to be heterosexual.
To me, a gay man is just less competition, and since lots of women are not interested in me anyway, what difference does it make if some of them are gay?