Weakly related epiphany: Hannibal Lector is the original prototype of an intelligence-in-a-box wanting to be let out, in "The Silence of the Lambs"
When I first watched that part where he convinces a fellow prisoner to commit suicide just by talking to them, I thought to myself, "Let's see him do it over a text-only IRC channel."
...I'm not a psychopath, I'm just very competitive.
"We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself." --Chris Mooney
This reminds me of "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." -- Aristotle
To me, this uses "educated" in the sense it ought to be meant.
"Fine phrases are the last resource of those who have run out of arguments." -- Peter Singer
"If anyone is going to ask for a real-world example of someone who does not know how a light switch works, I can't provide one off the top of my head, but I'd suggest looking at this, which is even more dreadful."
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." --- Aristotle
"All of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them."
---George Eliot, "Middlemarch"
I just realized today why they chose the name "GATTACA" for the eponymous movie.
"He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth." -- Goethe
"We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance" - John Archibald Wheeler
"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us." -- Gandalf, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
(This is not necessarily a rationalist quote, but yet, it kinda is :))
"Every conviction is a prison" ---- Nietzsche
Thanks RobinZ, The full quote is "Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise, and everything precise is so remote from everything that we normally think, that you cannot for a moment suppose that is what we really mean when we say what we think."
But the partial quote is much more crisp.
"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise"
"I sent the club a wire stating, PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER."
Groucho Marx
Real men wear Pinker (on their sleeve)
The dog does eat your homework
"Meditation"
-- I think that even there, it sort of starts out as an endeavor to signal to self "non-status-seekingness". This is why I think that the "zen patriarchs" in the koan stories whoop the newbie wards and humble them initially to break down their status-seeking natures, so that they may move on to the next level of meditation where they are not competing and signaling to themselves (and other apprentices) that they are best at "not vainly scrounging to be the best".
Yep, I would say behavior that you wouldn't want others to know about, but you have to engage in anyway. Such as overeating, or purging may be.
Hi Alicorn, Thanks for the response. But if we interpret that only she is offended by it, or any nonspecified group, then I think scotherns' examples such as
""The touch of another person's skin will still be wonderfully sensuous" - you can't say that - you are discriminating against those without a sense of touch!"
also are valid. It seems to me that we have to assume that she bases her case on some sizeable homogeneous group (that gets offended). Women? - perhaps she can clarify.
"There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it."
George Bernard Shaw, "Man and Superman"
"Do you realise just how disparaging that sounds, incidentally? Because women are obviously just a homogenous bunch..."
-- The original statement is offensive to women, doesn't that also mean that you assume that women are "just a homogenous bunch"? You seem to want to homogenise women for supporting points, but consider them heterogeneous for opposing points.
I find this paper to be a good resource to think about this subject: https://motherjones.com/files/emotional_dog_and_rational_tail.pdf