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It is a good quote in general, but not quite a rationality quote.
I thought it was a nice illustration of the distinction between map and territory, or between different maps of the same territory. In other words, JFK and the speaker's uncle were very close together by a certain map, but that doesn't mean they were very similar in real life.
In response to
Rationality Quotes December 2014
After reading Contrafactus, a friend said to me: "My uncle was almost President of the U.S.!"
"Really?" I said.
"Sure," he replied, "he was skipper of the PT 108." (John F. Kennedy was skipper of the PT 109).
-- Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach
In response to
Rationality Quotes November 2014
"I remember reading of a competition for a paper on resolution of singularities of surface; Castelnuovo and Enriques were in the committee. Beppo Levi presented his famous paper on the resolution of singularities for surfaces.
Enriques asked him for a couple of examples and was convinced; Castelnuovo was not. The discussion got heated. Enriques exclaimed 'I am ready to cut off my head if this does not work', and Castelnuovo replied 'I don't think that would prove it either.'"
In response to
My April Fools' Day Confession
Amusing post, thanks. It seems clear that life in advanced countries is indeed much worse than it could possibly be, and that failures to plan and cooperate are at least partly to blame. On the other hand, life is also much, much better than it could be (and was for most people in history), and I fully expect that it will continue to improve in the future. Maybe at some point we will be so rich, and coordinate so well, that some of your suggestions become commonplace.
Only about 10 percent of new social programs in fields like education, criminology and social welfare demonstrate statistically significant benefits in RCTs
This is a higher rate than I'd expected. It implies that current policies in these three fields are not really thoroughly thought out, or at least not to the extent that I had expected. It seems that there is substantial room for improvement.
I would have expected perhaps one or two percent.
Remember that programs will not even be tested unless there are good reasons to expect improvement over current protocol. Most programs that are explicitly considered are worse than those that are tested, and most possible programs are worse than those that are explicitly considered. Therefore we can expect that far, far fewer than ten percent of possible programs would yield significant improvements.
In response to
We need new humans, please help
Why not submit this as a comment on the prior post?
in what way are those theories exclusive of each other?
His claim, to my understanding, is that the first theory completely explains the interaction between minorities and liberal politicians.
In response to
[LINK] Why I'm not on the Rationalist Masterlist
Who here thinks that the author of the blog post is female? I did.
Surprise(?)! The blog post doesn't seem to contain any information that would allow you to deduce the gender of the author. I briefly searched through the blog post and the comment found on Yvain's site, but I became none the wiser (I stopped searching at that point to respect the author's privacy). I wonder why I thought that the author of the blog post is female...
I have read fairly many blog entries similar to this one, and to my recollection all were written by women.
[Occupy Wall Street] let itself be co-opted into caring about social justice at the cost of their other goals.
When discussing OWS and similar political movements, the term "social justice" gets quite ambiguous. OWS has always been about social justice, by any reasonable meaning of the term. To be clear, you obviously mean identity politics, the notion that self-styled "minority" groups are more equal than everyone else.
Using words like this to describe ideas you don't like seems distasteful, and in fact similar to what the blogger was originally complaining about.
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Is it that crazy to expect that a moderator remove posts like this? I don't mind that the quality is not very good, but the inclusion of racial slurs should make it over the line.