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Very much like Alexander Pope's:
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
Or Terry Pratchett:
HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
In response to
Rationality Quotes October 2011
Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.
Bertrand Russell
Or a mathematician.
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Meetup : Munich Meetup, Saturday September 10th, 2PM
Would like to attend, but probably can't at that time
In response to
Rationality Quotes September 2011
She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it)
-- Lewis Carrol, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
Hard to believe that it hasn't show up here before...
I agree 100%. When I was house hunting, the number one priority (besides living in a good school district) was to buy a house which would be easy to turn around and sell if necessary.
If 95% of the houses in your town have 3+ bedrooms and 2+ bathrooms, you are arguably making a mistake if you save 5 or even 10 percent by buying a 2 bedroom house. Even if that's all you need.
So the upshot is that people who want to be rational often need to factor in other peoples' preferences, whether rational or not. As Ambrose Bierce pointed out, fashion is the dictator whom the wise both ridicule and obey.
If the your number one priority in finding a house is being able to easily sell it, you probably should rent rather than buy.
Justice, at least the way I've heard it used, is very much revenge without the stigma.
Criminal justice only if you tune out the rehabilitation aspect. Civil justice only if you tune out everything except punitive damages (which don't exist in many jurisdictions).
This is confusing. Does your use of violence change your intended destination, or does it just exert certain optimization pressures on future world-states, as do all of your other actions?
Read the (long) linked-to article from which the quote stems. Basically the point is that using violence to achieve a goal teaches the people involved that violence is an effective, legitimate way to achieve goals - and at some later point they will invariably have conflicting goals.
What are the tigers with a pouch for their young? There seem to be no large carnivorous marsupials. A candidate is the marsupial lion (which is also striped), but it's been extinct for a while.
Edit: Ah, the thylacine ("Tasmanian wolf") was also known as the Tasmanian tiger. Yay for learning!
The quote is from a fantasy book. There are dragons in it...
In response to
Rationality Quotes: June 2011
"At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”
-Milton Friedman story
A few points come to mind:
- Presumably they also wanted a canal and there may well be an optimum point where you maximize some sort of combined utility
- Jobs programs, even those that create nothing particularly useful, are about giving people a sense of worth and accomplishment, otherwise you could just hand out money. Obviously futile make-work activities like the one suggested achieve the opposite of that and are, indeed, often deliberately used to punish and humiliate people.
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There are many people who want to die. There are few who are willing to commit suicide to do it.
The point is that whether and how much one wants to die tends to fluctuate a lot, and the willingness to commit suicide depends a lot on the availiability of means to easily and painlessly do so. A large percentage of suicide attempts are opportunistic rather than planned. The planned ones probably succeed more often, but that does not necessarily mean that those people really wanted to die more - just that their will to die was over a certain threshold for a certain time.