The fear people have about the idea of adherence to protocol is rigidity. They imagine mindless automatons, heads down in a checklist, incapable of looking out their windshield and coping with the real world in front of them. But what you find, when a checklist is well made, is exactly the opposite. The checklist gets the dumb stuff out of the way, the routines your brain shouldn’t have to occupy itself with (Are the elevator controls set? Did the patient get her antibiotics on time? Did the managers sell all their shares? Is everyone on the same page here?), and lets it rise above to focus on the hard stuff (Where should we land?).
Here are the details of one of the sharpest checklists I’ve seen, a checklist for engine failure during flight in a single-engine Cessna airplane—the US Airways situation, only with a solo pilot. It is slimmed down to six key steps not to miss for restarting the engine, steps like making sure the fuel shutoff valve is in the OPEN position and putting the backup fuel pump switch ON. But step one on the list is the most fascinating. It is simply: FLY THE AIRPLANE. Because pilots sometimes become so desperate trying to restart their engine, so crushed by the cognitive overload of thinking through what could have gone wrong, they forget this most basic task. FLY THE AIRPLANE. This isn’t rigidity. This is making sure everyone has their best shot at survival.
-- Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto
I concur in the general case. But I would suggest the people complaining work in computers. I'm a Unix sysadmin; my job description is to automate myself out of existence. Checklist=shell script=JOB DONE, NEXT TASK TO ELIMINATE.
It turns out, thankfully, that work expands to fill the sysadmins available. Because even in the future, nothing works. I fully expect to be able to work to 100 if I want to.
when trying to characterize human beings as computational systems, the difference between “person” and “person with pencil and paper” is vast.
Facts which seem obvious in retrospect are often less salient than they appear, outside of their native contexts. If I'd been asked to describe humans as computational systems before reading the ancestor, pen and paper probably wouldn't be one of the things I'd have taken into account.
This phrase was explicitly in my mind back when I was generalizing the "notice confusion" skill.
In 2002, Wizards of the Coast put out Star Wars: The Trading Card Game designed by Richard Garfield.
As Richard modeled the game after a miniatures game, it made use of many six-sided dice. In combat, cards' damage was designated by how many six-sided dice they rolled. Wizards chose to stop producing the game due to poor sales. One of the contributing factors given through market research was that gamers seem to dislike six-sided dice in their trading card game.
Here's the kicker. When you dug deeper into the comments they equated dice with "lack of skill." But the game rolled huge amounts of dice. That greatly increased the consistency. (What I mean by this is that if you rolled a million dice, your chance of averaging 3.5 is much higher than if you rolled ten.) Players, though, equated lots of dice rolling with the game being "more random" even though that contradicts the actual math.
- Mark Rosewater, Kind Acts of Randomness
What I mean by this is that if you rolled a million dice, your chance of averaging 3.5 is much higher than if you rolled ten.
The chance of averaging exactly 3.5 would be a hell of a lot smaller. The chance of averaging between 3.45 and 3.55 would be larger, though.
When the axe came into the woods, many of the trees said, "At least the handle is one of us.
Turkish proverb
This analogy, this passage from the finite to infinite, is beset with pitfalls. How did Euler avoid them? He was a genius, some people will answer, and of course that is no explanation at all. Euler has shrewd reasons for trusting his discovery. We can understand his reasons with a little common sense, without any miraculous insight specific to genius.
—G. Polya, Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning Vol. 1
Once there was a miser, who to save money would eat nothing but oatmeal. And what's more, he would make a great big batch of it at the start of every week, and put it in a drawer, and when he wanted a meal he would slice off a piece and eat it cold; thus he saved on firewood. Now, by the end of the week, the oatmeal would be somewhat moldy and not very appetising; and so to make himself eat it, the miser would take out a bottle of good whiskey, and pour himself a glass, and say "All right, Olai, eat your oatmeal and when you're done, you can have a dram." Then he would eat his moldy oatmeal, and when he was done he'd laugh and pour the whiskey back in the bottle, and say "Hah! And you believed that? There's one born every minute, to be sure!" And thus he had a great savings in whiskey as well.
-- Norwegian folktale.
It explains lutefisk.
...Quote from Garrison Keillor's book Lake Wobegon Days: Every Advent we entered the purgatory of lutefisk, a repulsive gelatinous fishlike dish that tasted of soap and gave off an odor that would gag a goat. We did this in honor of Norwegian ancestors, much as if survivors of a famine might celebrate their deliverance by feasting on elm bark. I always felt the cold creeps as Advent approached, knowing that this dread delicacy would be put before me and I'd be told, "Just have a little." Eating a little was like vomiting a little, just as bad as a lot.
Quote from Garrison Keillor's book Pontoon: Lutefisk is cod that has been dried in a lye solution. It looks like the desiccated cadavers of squirrels run over by trucks, but after it is soaked and reconstituted and the lye is washed out and it's cooked, it looks more fish-related, though with lutefisk, the window of success is small. It can be tasty, but the statistics aren't on your side. It is the hereditary delicacy of Swedes and Norwegians who serve it around the holidays, in memory of their ancestors, who ate it because they were poor. Most lutefisk is not edible by normal people. It is reminiscent o
Betcha it'd work. I'm going to set a piece of candy in front of me, work for half an hour, and then put it back, at least once a day for a week.
I sometimes find that telling my Inner Lazy that it can decide—after I've done the first one—between whether to continue a series of tasks or to stop and be Lazy gets me to do the whole series of tasks. Despite having noticed explicitly that in practice this 'decision delay strategy' leads to the whole series getting done, it still works, and rather seems like tricking my Inner Lazy to transition into/hand the reins over to into my Inner Agent.
In the context of LW, I took it as an amusing critique of the whole idea of rewarding yourself for behaviours you want to do more .
It's either a cautionary tale about the dangers of deceiving yourself, or a humorous look at the impossibility of actually doing so.
The miser knows each time he will not get the reward, and that he will save on food and drink. That is the real reward,
Also, don't forget his pleasure at successfully tricking himself. ;-)
He took literally five seconds for something I'd spent two weeks on, which I guess is what being an expert means
-- Graduate student of our group, recognising a level above his own in a weekly progress report
It's a horrible feeling when you don't understand why you did something.
I think it may depend a lot on how well the action fits into your schema for reasonable behavior.
I have mild OCD. Its manifestations are usually unnoticeable to other people, and generally don't interfere with the ordinary function of my life, but occasionally lead to my engaging in behaviors that no ordinary person would consider worthwhile. The single most extreme manifestation, which still stands out in my memory, was a time when I was playing a video game, and saved my game file, then, doubting my own memory that I had saved it, did it again... and again... and again... until I had saved at least seven times, each time convinced that I couldn't yet be sure I had saved it "enough."
Afterwards, I was horrified at my own actions, because what I had just done was too obviously crazy to just handwave away.
his is appropriate for the context he's talking about (doing a different movement than than the one you intended in a chess game) and other high stakes situations (blurting an answer you know is wrong in an examination, saying/doing something awkward on a date, making a risky movement driving your car…)
I experience horrible feelings when I humiliate myself or put myself at risk. This phenomenon seems to occur independently of whether I have a good causal model for why I did those things.
He wasn't certain what he expected to find, which, in his experience, was generally a good enough reason to investigate something.
Harry Potter and the Confirmed Critical, Chapter 6
Ah. I read that one as a reference to the tendency to let tribal affiliation trump realistic evaluation of outcomes.
Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.
-Gloria Steinem
I read that as "looking for the right person to fall in love with". Then the sense is "be the right person for someone else". But that achieves a different goal entirely, since it doesn't make the other person right for you.
There are many cases where you want a different person right for the task.
Name three!
Romantic partners (inherently), trading and working partners (allowing you to specialize in your comparative advantage), deputies and office-holders (allowing you to deputize), soldiers (allowing you to send someone else to their death to win the war).
A man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance.
Unknown
In a famous study, spouses were asked, “How large was your personal contribution to keeping the place tidy, in percentages?” They also answered similar questions about “taking out the garbage,” “initiating social engagements,” etc. Would the self-estimated contributions add up to 100%, or more, or less? As expected, the self-assessed contributions added up to more than 100%.
-Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
On the other hand, the book doesn't give a citation, and searching for the exact text of the question turns up only that passage. Not sure what to make of that.
Ross & Sicoly (1979). Egocentric Biases in Availability and Attribution.
In the study, the spouses actually estimated their contributions by making a slash mark on a line segment which had endpoints labelled "primarily wife" and "primarily husband". The experimenters set it up this way, rather than asking for numerical percentages, for ethical reasons. In pilot testing using percentages, they "found that subjects were able to remember the percentages they recorded and that postquestionnaire comparisons of percentages provided a strong source of conflict between the spouses." (p. 325)
Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them.
Eugine_Nier's comment has the suppressed premise that status usually results from character traits (alone, or primarily). NancyLebovitz's response contradicts this suppressed premise.
If you get rich by being exceptionally virtuous, then redistributing the wealth will make it less obvious who is virtuous.
But if you get rich by having a rich dad, then redistributing the wealth will merely make it less obvious who had a rich dad.
Rin: "Even I make mistakes once in a while."
Shirou (thinking): ...This is hard. Would it be good for her if I correct her and point out that she makes mistakes often, not just once in a while?
From Jacques Vallee, Messengers of Deception...
'Then he posed a question that, obvious as it seems, had not really occurred to me: “What makes you think that UFOs are a scientific problem?”
I replied with something to the effect that a problem was only scientific in the way it was approached, but he would have none of that, and he began lecturing me. First, he said, science had certain rules. For example, it has to assume that the phenomena it is observing is natural in origin rather than artificial and possibly biased. Now the UFO phenomenon could be controlled by alien beings. “If it is,” added the Major, “then the study of it doesn’t belong to science. It belongs to Intelligence.” Meaning counterespionage. And that, he pointed out, was his domain. *
“Now, in the field of counterespionage, the rules are completely different.” He drew a simple diagram in my notebook. “You are a scientist. In science there is no concept of the ‘price’ of information. Suppose I gave you 95 per cent of the data concerning a phenomenon. You’re happy because you know 95 per cent of the phenomenon. Not so in intelligence. If I get 95 per cent of the data, I know that this is the ‘cheap’ part of the inf...
Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”
- “Silver Blaze” (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
If Tetris has taught me anything it's that errors pile up and accomplishments disappear.
-Unknown
It's ridiculous to think that video games influence children. After all, if Pac-Man had affected children born in the eighties, we'd all be running around in dark rooms, eating strange pills, and listening to repetitive electronic music.
-- Paraphrase of joke by Marcus Brigstocke
It's funny, but you really shouldn't be learning life lessons from Tetris.
If Tetris has taught me anything, it's the history of the Soviet Union.
So Tetris is really an anti-procrastination learning tool? Hmmm, wonder why that doesn't sound right….
If your parents made you practice the flute for 10,000 hours, and it wasn't your thing, you aren't an expert. You're a victim.
The most important skill involved in success is knowing how and when to switch to a game with better odds for you.
Aka http://demotivators.despair.com/demotivational/stupiditydemotivator.jpg
"Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never win AND never quit are idiots"
Karl Popper used to begin his lecture course on the philosophy of science by asking the students simply to 'observe'. Then he would wait in silence for one of them to ask what they were supposed to observe. [...] So he would explain to them that scientific observation is impossible without pre-existing knowledge about what to look at, what to look for, how to look, and how to interpret what one sees. And he would explain that, therefore, theory has to come first. It has to be conjectured, not derived.
David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
But, Senjougahara, can I set a condition too? A condition, or, well, something like a promise. Don't ever pretend you can see something that you can't, or that you can't see something that you can. If our viewpoints are inconsistent, let's talk it over. Promise me.
Finding a good formulation for a problem is often most of the work of solving it... Problem formulation and problem solution are mutually-recursive processes.
The opposite intellectual sin to wanting to derive everything from fundamental physics is holism which makes too much of the fact that everything is ultimately connected to everything else. Sure, but scientific progress is made by finding where the connections are weak enough to allow separate theories.
"But think how small he is," said the Black Panther, who would have spoiled Mowgli if he had had his own way. "How can his little head carry all thy long talk?"
"Is there anything in the jungle too little to be killed? No. That is why I teach him these things, and that is why I hit him, very softly, when he forgets."
Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book
And anyone that’s been involved in philanthropy eventually comes to that point. When you try to help, you try to give things, you start to have the consequences. There’s an author Bob Lupton, who really nails it when he says that when he gave something the first time, there was gratitude; and when he gave something a second time to that same community, there was anticipation; the third time, there was expectation; the fourth time, there was entitlement; and the fifth time, there was dependency. That is what we’ve all experienced when we’ve wanted to do good. Something changes the more we just give hand-out after hand-out. Something that is designed to be a help actually causes harm.
I agree with the thought, but I find the attribution implausible. "Finding yourself" sounds like modern pop-psych, not a phrase that GBS would ever have written. Google doesn't turn up a source.
If you cast out all the easy strategies that don't actually work as non-'solutions', then sure, in what remains among the set of solutions, the best is often the easiest, though not easy. I can think of much harder ways to save the world and I'm not trying any of them.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
A proactive interest in the latter would seem to lead to extensive instrumental interest in the former. Finding things (such as convolutions in brains or genes) that are indicative of potentially valuable talent is the kind of thing that helps make efficient use of it.
There are surprisingly few MRI machines or DNA sequencers in cotton fields and sweatshops. Paraphrasing the original quote from Stephen Jay Gould: The problem is not how good we are at detecting talent; it's where we even bother to look for it.
You need neither MRI machines nor DNA sequencers to detect intelligence. IQ test perform much better at detecting intelligence.
Yes; at this point with only 3 SNPs linked to intelligence, it's a joke to say that 'poor people aren't being sequenced and this is why we aren't detecting hidden gems'.
I suspect, actually, that Gould would not view "find the geniuses and get them out of the fields" as a reasonable solution to the problem he poses. What he wants is for there to be no stoop labour in the first place, whether for geniuses or the terminally mediocre. The geniuses are just a way to illustrate the problem.
I chose Ramanujan as my example because mathematics is extremely meritocratic, as proven by how he went from poor/middle-class Indian on the verge of starving to England on the strength of his correspondence & papers. If there really were countless such people, we would see many many examples of starving farmers banging out some impressive proofs and achieving levels of fame somewhat comparable to Einstein; hence the reference class of peasant-Einsteins must be very small since we see so few people using sheer brainpower to become famous like Ramanujan.
(Or we could simply point out that with average IQs in the 70s and 80s, average mathematician IQs closer to 140s - or 4 standard deviations away, even in a population of billions we still would only expect a small handful of Ramanujans - consistent with the evidence. Gould, of course, being a Marxist who denies any intelligence, would not agree.)
from poor/middle-class Indian
It is worth pointing out that Ramanujan, while poor, was still a Brahmin.
And not just that, but he had more education than the poorest Indians, and probably more than the second poorest. And got his hands on a math textbook, which was probably pretty low probability.
My bet is that there aren't a lot of geniuses doing stoop labor, especially in traditional peasant situations, but there are some who would have been geniuses if they'd had enough food when young and some education.
I think it can be illustrative, as a counter to the spotlight effect, to look at the personalities of math/science outliers who come from privileged backgrounds, and imagine them being born into poverty. Oppenheimer's conjugate was jailed or executed for attempted murder, instead of being threatened with academic probation. Gödel's conjugate added a postscript to his proof warning that the British Royal Family were possible Nazi collaborators, which got it binned, which convinced him that all British mathematicians were in on the conspiracy. Newton and Turing's conjugates were murdered as teenagers on suspicion of homosexuality. I have to make these stories up because if you're poor and at all weird, flawed, or unlucky your story is rarely recorded.
Oppenheimer's conjugate was jailed or executed for attempted murder, instead of being threatened with academic probation.
A gross exaggeration; execution was never in the cards for a poisoned apple which was never eaten.
Gödel's conjugate added a postscript to his proof warning that the British Royal Family were possible Nazi collaborators, which got it binned, which convinced him that all British mathematicians were in on the conspiracy.
Likewise. Goedel didn't go crazy until long after he was famous, and so your conjugate is in no way showing 'privilege'.
Newton and Turing's conjugates were murdered as teenagers on suspicion of homosexuality.
Likewise. You have some strange Whiggish conception of history where all periods were ones where gays would be lynched; Turing would not have been lynched anymore than President Buchanan would have, because so many upper-class Englishmen were notorious practicing gays and their boarding schools Sodoms and Gomorrahs. To remember the context of Turing's homosexuality conviction, this was in the same period where highly-placed gay Englishman after gay Englishman was turning out to be Soviet moles (see the Cambridge Five and how the bisex...
From his letter to G.H. Hardy:
I am already a half starving man. To preserve my brains I want food and this is my first consideration. Any sympathetic letter from you will be helpful to me here to get a scholarship either from the university or from the government.
Googling the text finds it quoted a bunch of places.
Besides his letter to Hardy, Wikipedia cites The Man Who Knew Infinity (on Libgen; it also quotes the 'half starving' passage), where the cited section reads:
...Describing the obsession with college degrees among ambitious young Indians around this time, an English writer, Herbert Compton, noted how "the loaves and fishes fall far short of the multitude, and the result is the creation of armies of hungry 'hopefuls'-the name is a literal trans- lation of the vernacular generic term omedwar used in describing them- who pass their lives in absolute idleness, waiting on the skirts of chance, or gravitate to courses entirely opposed to those which education in- tended." Ramanujan, it might have seemed in 1908, was just such an omedwar. Out of school, without a job, he hung around the house in Kumbakonam.
Times were hard. One day back at Pachaiyappa's, the wind had blown off Ramanujan's cap as he boarded the electric train for school, and Ramanujan's Sanskrit teacher, who insisted that boys wear their traditional tufts covered, asked him to step back out to the market and buy one. Ramanujan apologized that he lacked even the few annas it cost. (His classmates, who'd observed his
"The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Productivity of American Mathematicians" comes to mind as an interesting recent natural experiment where the floodgate of Russian mathematical talent was unleashed after the collapse of the USSR and many of them successfully rose in America despite academic math being a zero-sum game; consistent with meritocracy.
...Old man: Gotcha! So you do collect answers after all!
Eye: But of course! Everybody does! You need answers to base decisions on. Decisions that lead to actions. We wouldn't do much of anything, if we were always indecisive!
All I am saying is that I see no point in treasuring them! That's all!
Once you see that an answer is not serving its question properly anymore, it should be tossed away. It's just their natural life cycle. They usually kick and scream, raising one hell of a ruckus when we ask them to leave. Especially when they have been with us for a long time.
You see, too many actions have been based on those answers. Too much work and energy invested in them. They feel so important, so full of themselves. They will answer to no one. Not even to their initial question!
What's the point if a wrong answer will stop you from returning to the right question. Although sometimes people have no questions to return to... which is usually why they defend them, with such strong conviction.
That's exactly why I am extra cautious with all these big ol' answers that have been lying around, long before we came along. They bully their way into our collection without being invited by any questio
So, in a business setting, you’ve got to provide value to your customers so that they pay for the goods and services that you’re providing. Philanthropy is unfortunate in that the people that your customer base is made of oftentimes are the people that are writing the checks to support you. The people that are writing the donation checks are what keep organizations in business oftentimes. The people that are receiving the services, then, are oftentimes not paying for the services, and therefore their voice is not heard. And so within the nonprofit space, we’ve created a system where he/she who tells the best story is the one that’s rewarded. There’s an incentive to push down the stories that are not of positive impact. There’s the incentive to pretend that there are no negative things that happen, there’s the incentive to make sure that our failures are never made public, and there’s the disconnected between who’s paying for the service and who’s receiving the services. When you disconnect those two aspects, you do not have accountability that acts in the best interest of the people who are receiving what we are all trying to do, which is just to help in places of great need.
The mark of a great man is one who knows when to set aside the important things in order to accomplish the vital ones.
-- Tillaume, The Alloy of Law
But, unlike other species, we also know how not to know. We employ this unique ability to suppress our knowledge not just of mortality, but of everything we find uncomfortable, until our survival strategy becomes a threat to our survival.
[...] There is no virtue in sustaining a set of beliefs, regardless of the evidence. There is no virtue in either following other people unquestioningly or in cultivating a loyal and unquestioning band of followers.
While you can be definitively wrong, you cannot be definitely right. The best anyone can do is constantly to review the evidence and to keep improving and updating their knowledge. Journalism which attempts this is worth reading. Journalism which does not is a waste of time."
- George Monbiot, Introduction: On Trying to be Less Wrong.
To the layman, the philosopher, or the classical physicist, a statement of the form "this particle doesn't have a well-defined position" (or momentum, or x-component of spin angular momentum, or whatever) sounds vague, incompetent, or (worst of all) profound. It is none of these. But its precise meaning is, I think, almost impossible to convey to anyone who has not studied quantum mechanics in some depth.
- David Griffiths, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics. The book is not so good but I liked this quote.
Yes, it's wrong. In the QM formalism position is a fundamental property. However, the way physical properties work is very different from classical mechanics (CM). In CM, a property is basically a function that maps physical states to real numbers. So the x-component of momentum, for instance, is a function that takes a state as input and spits out a number as output, and that number is the value of the property for that state. Same state, same number, always. This is what it means for a property to have a well-defined value for every state.
In QM, physical properties are more complicated -- they're linear operators, if you want a mathematically exact treatment. But here's an attempt at an intuitive explanation: There are some special quantum states (called eigenstates) for which physical properties behave pretty much like they do in CM. If the particle is in one of those states, then the property takes the state as input and basically just spits out a number. Whenever the particle is in that state, you get the same number. For those states, the property does have a well-defined value.
But the problem in QM is that those are not the only states there are. There are other states as w...
Why spend a dollar on a bookmark? ... Why not use the dollar as a bookmark?
-Steven Spielberg
Dollars are floppy. It's nice to have a relatively rigid bookmark. I've used tissues and such as bookmarks in the past but they're unsatisfactory. Of course, that was back when I still read books in dead tree format.
I'm reminded of a picture I saw on Facebook of a doorstop still in its original packaging used as a doorstop.
My bookmark is made of two prices of fridge-magnet material. It can be closed around a few pages and the magnetism holds it in place, preventing it from falling out.
Plus dollars in my country are exclusively coins, the smallest note is $5.
exposure to objects common to the domain of business (e.g., boardroom tables and briefcases) increased the cognitive accessibility of the construct of competition (Study 1), the likelihood that an ambiguous social interaction would be perceived as less cooperative (Study 2), and the amount of money that participants proposed to retain for themselves in the “Ultimatum Game” (Studies 3 and 4).
-Abstract, Material priming: The influence of mundane physical objects on situational construal and competitive behavioral choice (via Yvain)
You're suffering from the typical ear fallacy. Some people have much stiffer cartilage, or something; I don't find it uncomfortable, but I've met people who're caused actual pain by it.
A decision with an aesthetic benefit is not irrational. You are misusing "irrational".
(Or was this sarcasm?)
I just think it's good to be confident. If I'm not on my team why should anybody else be?
-Robert Downey Jr.
I think it's good to be well-calibrated.
It is usually best to be socially confident while making well-calibrated predictions of success. The two are only slightly related and Downey is definitely talking about the social kind of confidence.
Well, I think the thrust of the quote had more to do with being confident in your own projects. But I'll try to do an answer to your point because I think it's important to recognise the limitations of domain specialists - some of whom just aren't very good at their jobs.
If you're not on your team of expert surgeons, you're gonna be screwed if they're not actually as expert as you might think they were. There's a bit in What Do You Care What Other People Think? Where Feynman is talking about his first wife's hospitalisation - and how he had done some reading around the area and come up with the idea that it might be TB - and didn't push for the idea because he thought that the doctors knew what they were doing.
...Then, sometime later, the bump began to change. It got bigger—or maybe it was smaller—and she got a fever. The fever got worse, so the family doctor decided Arlene should go to the hospital. She was told she had typhoid fever. Right away, as I still do today, I looked up the disease in medical books and read all about it. When I went to see Arlene in the hospital, she was in quarantine—we had to put on special gowns when we entered her room, and so on. The doctor was there,
He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.
-Thomas Jefferson
One who possesses a maximum-entropy prior is further from the truth than one who possesses an inductive prior riddled with many specific falsehoods and errors. Or more to the point, someone who endorses knowing nothing as a desirable state for fear of accepting falsehoods is further from the truth than somebody who believes many things, some of them false, but tries to pay attention and go on learning.
We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
The tired and thirsty prospector threw himself down at the edge of the watering hole and started to drink. But then he looked around and saw skulls and bones everywhere. "Uh-oh," he thought. "This watering hole is reserved for skeletons."
Jack Handey
Nobody can believe nothing. When a man says he believes nothing, two things are true: first, that there is something in which he desperately, perhaps dearly, wishes not to believe; and second that there is some unspoken thing in which he secretly believes, perhaps even unknown to himself.
Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
...Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
--Delmore Schwartz, "Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day"; quoted by Mike Darwin on the GRG ML
I like it when I hear philosophy in rap songs (or any kind of music, really) that I can actually fully agree with:
...I never had belief in Christ, cus in the pictures he was white
Same color as the judge that gave my hood repeated life
Sentences for little shit, church I wasn't feeling it
Why the preacher tell us everything gon be alright?
Knew what it was for, still I felt that it was wrong
Till I heard Chef call himself God in the song
And it all made sense, cus you can't do shit
But look inside the mirror once it all goes wrong
You fix your own problems, tame yo
Whatever alleged "truth" is proven by results to be but an empty fiction, let it be unceremoniously flung into the outer darkness, among the dead gods, dead empires, dead philosophies, and other useless lumber and wreckage!
Then, to continue the metaphor, we should study it by telescope from afar, not as a present and influential entity in our own sphere of existence, but rather a distant body, informative but impotent, the object of curiosity rather than devotion.
Wicked people exist. Nothing avails except to set them apart from innocent people. And many people, neither wicked nor innocent, but watchful, dissembling, and calculating of their chances, ponder our reaction to wickedness as a clue to what they might profitably do.
James Wilson
Historically, most hackers have been not only men, but men of a sort of Mannie O’Kelly-Davis “git ‘er done” variety, and that’s beginning to change now, so new norms of behavior must be adopted in order to create a welcoming and inclusive community.
- Jeff Read
I have a better idea. Let’s drive away people unwilling to adopt that “git’r'done” attitude with withering scorn, rather than waste our time pacifying tender-minded ninnies and grievance collectors. That way we might continue to actually, you know, get stuff done.
Empirically, heaping scorn on everyone and seeing who sticks around leads to lots of time wasted on flame wars.
Empirically, heaping scorn on everyone and seeing who sticks around leads to lots of time wasted on flame wars.
Straw man. The grandparent explicitly made the scorn conditional, not 'on everyone'.
Empirically, heaping scorn on everyone and seeing who sticks around
Eric Raymond isn't suggesting that. Why are you?
Linux kernel seems to me a quite well-managed operation (of herding cats, too!) that doesn't waste lots of time on flame wars.
I don't follow kernel development much. Recently, a colleague pointed me to the rdrand instruction. I was curious about Linux kernel support for it, and I found this thread: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1173350
Notice that Linus spends a bunch of time (a) flaming people and (b) being wrong about how crypto works (even though the issue was not relevant to the patch).
Is this typical of the linux-kernel mailing list? I decided to look at the latest hundred messages. I saw some minor rudeness, but nothing at that level. Of course, none of these messages were from Linus. But I didn't have to go back more than a few days to find Linus saying things like, "some ass-wipe inside the android team." Imagine if you were that Android developer, and you were reading that email? Would that make you want to work on Linux? Or would that make you want to go find a project where the leader doesn't shit on people?
Here's a revealing quote from one recent message from Linus: "Otherwise I'll have to start shouting at people again." ...
Here's my thought process upon reading this. (Initially, I assumed “git 'er done” meant something like ‘women are unimportant except as sex objects, and I misread “unwilling” as “willing”.)
- ‘How comes that guy, who when talking about sex on his blog gets mind-killed to the point of forgetting how to do high-school maths, makes so much sense everywhere else? Maybe he was saner when younger, then got worse with age, or something.’ I follow the link, expecting it to go to somewhere other than Armed and Dangerous, e.g. somewhere on catb.org.
- I notice the link does go to his blog, and to a recent post at that. ‘So he is still capable of talking sense about such topics after all?’ I notice I am confused.
- I realize he said “unwilling” not “willing”. ‘Er... Nope. He's crazy as usual.’
- Appalled at the idea that anyone, even ESR, would say anything like that in public with an almost straight face, I decide to look “git 'er done” up. ‘Oh, that makes perfect sense, and I agree with him. But that's not about sex (except insofar as the cut-through-the-bullshit communication style is less rare among men than among women), so that doesn't actually show he's not mind-killed beyond all repair.’
(A...
...Except when physically constrained, a person is least free or dignified when under the threat of punishment. We should expect that the literatures of freedom and dignity would oppose punitive techniques, but in fact they have acted to preserve them. A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment. Some ways of doing so are maladaptive or neurotic, as in the so called 'Freudian dynamisms'. Other ways include avoiding situations in which punished behaviour is likely t
How do you know that it will bring out his genius, Graff? It's never given you what you needed before. You've only had near-misses and flameouts. Is this how Mazer Rackham was trained? Actually, why isn't Mazer Rackham in charge of this training? What qualifications do you have that make you so sure your technique is the perfect recipe to make the ultimate military genius?
-- Will Wildman, analysis of Ender's Game
The world is a lot simpler than the human mind can comprehend. The mind endlessly manufactures meanings and reflects with other minds, ignoring reality. Or maybe it enhances it. Not very clear on that part, I'm human as well.
...What the Great Learning teaches is: to illustrate illustrious virtue; to renovate the people; and to rest in the highest excellence.
The point where to rest being known, the object of pursuit is then determined; and, that being determined, a calm unperturbedness may be attained to.
To that calmness there will succeed a tranquil repose. In that repose there may be careful deliberation, and that deliberation will be followed by the attainment of the desired end.
The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the world, first ordered well t
Saw this under "latest rationality quotes" and was like "man, I'm really missing the context as to how this is a rationality quote."
"If it July, I desire to believe it is July. If it is August, I desire to believe it is August..."
There are no happy endings. Endings are the saddest part, So just give me a happy middle And a very happy start.
-Shel Silverstein
When a concept is inherently approximate, it is a waste of time to try to give it a precise definition.
Sharp membership boundaries, however, often result in people forgetting the fuzziness of the concept - there are some people who vote without being responsible adults, because they can; an essay can be boring and rambling at 450 words or impressive and concise at 600; and food can be good a bit past its expiration date (it doesn't usually go in the other direction in my experience, presumably because the risk of eating spoiled food vastly outweighs the risk of mistakenly tossing out good food, so expiration dates are the very early estimates).
Also: "Fuck every cause supported by compulsory taxation, and compulsory use of fiat currency." says the same exact thing, more precisely.
Huh? No it doesn't. It says an entirely different thing.
The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence.
I've always had misgivings about this quote. In my experience about 90% of the code on a large project is an artifact of a poor requirement analysis/architecture/design/implementation. (Sendmail comes to mind.) I have seen 10,000-line packages melting away when a feature is redesigned with more functionality and improved reliability and maintainability.
An educated mind is, as it were, composed of all the minds of preceding ages.
Le Bovier de Fontenelle
An educated mind is, as it were, composed of all the minds of preceding ages.
This explains all those urges I get to burn witches, my talent at farming, all my knowledge at hunting and tracking and my outstanding knack for feudal political intrigue.
(Composition is not the relationship to previous minds that education entails. Can someone think of a better one?)
It is fashionable in the US to talk about people who are on welfare and don’t work. That is not precisely true. Yes, there are people on welfare who neither have a regular job nor look for one. But what might not be understood is that these people are working: they are navigating the labyrinthine bureaucracy and making sure they meet all the guidelines to keep the money flowing. That is work. It is just not productive work. It is a work that is the result of perverse incentives.
I see small examples everywhere I look; they're just too specific to point the way to a general solution.
It ain’t ignorance [that] causes so much trouble; it’s folks knowing so much that ain’t so.
Josh Billings
(h/t Robin Hanson)
More of an anti-death quote, but:
"“Must I accept the barren Gift?
-learn death, and lose my Mastery?
Then let them know whose blood and breath
will take the Gift and set them free:
whose is the voice and whose the mind
to set at naught the well-sung Game-
when finned Finality arrives
and calls me by my secret Name.
Not old enough to love as yet,
but old enough to die, indeed-
-the death-fear bites my throat and heart,
fanged cousin to the Pale One's breed.
But past the fear lies life for all-
perhaps for me: and, past my dread,
past loss of Mastery and life,
the S...
...Faced with the task of extracting useful future out of our personal pasts, we organisms try to get something for free (or at least at bargain price): to find the laws of the world -- and if there aren't any, to find approximate laws of the world -- anything at all that will give us an edge. From some perspectives it appears utterly remarkable that we organisms get any purchase on nature at all. Is there any deep reason why nature should tip its hand, or reveal its regularities to casual inspection? Any useful future-producer is apt to be something of a
...Sages and scientists heard those words, and fear seized them. However, they disbelieved the horrible prophecy, deeming the possibility of perdition too improbable. They lifted the starship from its bed, shattered it into pieces with platinum hammers, plunged the pieces into hard radiation, and thus the ship was turned into myriads of volatile atoms, which are always silent, for atoms have no history; they are identical, whatever origin they have, whether it be bright suns, dead planets or intelligent creatures, — virtuous or vile — for raw matter is same
Everything can be reduced to an abstraction, a puzzle, and then solved
-Ledaal Kes (Exalted Aspect Book: Air)
This... theory of female promiscuity has been championed by the anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. Hrdy has described herself as a feminist sociobiologist, and she may take a more than scientific interest in arguing that female primates tend to be "highly competitive... sexually assertive individuals." Then again, male Darwinian may get a certain thrill from saying males are built for lifelong sex-a-thons. Scientific theories spring from many sources. The only question in the end is whether they work.
Robert Wright, The Moral Animal
Science becomes an extra-neural extension of the human nervous system. We might expect the structure of the nervous system to throw some light on the structure of science; and, vice versa, the structure of science might elucidate the working of the human nervous system.
--Alfred Korzybski Science and Sanity Page 376 (1933)
Occam's razor is, of course, not an arbitrary rule nor one justified by its practical success. It simply says that unnecessary elements in a symbolism mean nothing.
Signs which serve one purpose are logically equivalent, signs which serve no purpose are logically meaningless.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.47321
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. -- G.K. Chesterson
Though the work of an apologist, I thought this was a good litany against turning oneself into a paper-clip maximiser.
The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.
-- Albert Einstein
Everybody hates the bust, but the real harm is done in the boom, with capital being diverted to things that don’t make sense, because the boom’s distortions make them seem to make sense.
I'm downvoting this quote. Read at a basic level, it supports a particular economic theory rather than a larger point of rationality.
For the record, the Austrian Business Cycle Theory is not generally accepted by mainstream economists. This isn't the place to discuss why, and it isn't the place to give ABCT the illusion of a "rational" stamp of approval.
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."
"[W]hen you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." -- Sherlock Holmes
"[W]hen you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." -- Sherlock Holmes
Technically true. Some notable 'improbable' things that remain are the chance that you screwed up your thinking or measuring somewhere or that you are hallucinating. (I agree denotatively but are wary about the connotations.)
"When you have updated on the evidence, whatever is the most probable, must be believed, even if it is uncontroversial, mundane, and doesn't make startling conversation at parties."
...Man likes complexity. He does not want to take only one step; it is more interesting to look forward to millions of steps. The one who is seeking the truth gets into a maze, and that maze interests him. He wants to go through it a thousand times more. It is just like children. Their whole interest is in running about; they do not want to see the door and go in until they are very tired. So it is with grown-up people. They all say that they are seeking truth, but they like the maze. That is why the mystics made the greatest truths a mystery, to be given on
Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.
I suppose I somewhat appreciate the sentiment. I note that labelling the killing 'murder' has already amounted to significant discretion. Killings that are approved of get to be labelled something nicer sounding.
David Chapman thinks that using LW-style Bayesianism as a theory of epistemology (as opposed to just probability) lumps together too many types of uncertainty; to wit:
Here is an off-the-top-of-my-head list of types:
inherent effective randomness, due to dynamical chaos
physical inaccessibility of phenomena
time-varying phenomena (so samples are drawn from different distributions)
sensing/measurement error
model/abstraction error
one’s own cognitive/computational limitations
I think he is correct, and LWers are overselling Bayesianism as a soluti...
I do not see why any of Chapman's examples cannot be given appropriate distributions and modeled in a Bayesian analysis just like anything else:
Dynamical chaos? Very statistically modelable, in fact, you can't really deal with it at all without statistics, in areas like weather forecasting.
Inaccessibility? Very modelable; just a case of missing data & imputation. (I'm told that handling issues like censoring, truncation, rounding, or intervaling are considered one of the strengths of fully Bayesian methods and a good reason for using stuff like JAGS; in contrast, whenever I've tried to deal with one of those issues using regular maximum-likelihood approaches it has been... painful.)
Time-varying? Well, there's only a huge section of statistics devoted to the topic of time-series and forecasts...
Sensing/measurement error? Trivial, in fact, one of the best cases for statistical adjustment (see psychometrics) and arguably dealing with measurement error is the origin of modern statistics (the first instances of least-squared coming from Gauss and other astronomers dealing with errors in astronomical measurement, and of course Laplace applied Bayesian methods to astronomy as well).
Mo...
gwern, I am curious. You do a lot of practical data analysis. How often do you use non-Bayesian methods?
Pretty frequently (if you'll pardon the pun). Almost all papers are written using non-Bayesian methods, people expect results in non-Bayesian terms, etc.
Besides that: I decided years ago (~2009) that as appealing as Bayesian approaches were to me, I should study 'normal' statistics & data analysis first - so I understood them and why I didn't want to use them before I began studying Bayesian statistics. I didn't want to wind up in a situation where I was some sort of Bayesian fanatic who could tell you how to do a Bayesian analysis but couldn't explain what was wrong with the regular approach or why Bayesian approaches were better!
(I think I'm going to be switching gears relatively soon, though: I'm working with a track coach on modeling triple-jumping performance, and the smallness of the data suggests it'll be a natural fit for a multilevel model using informative priors, which I'll want to read Gelman's textbook on, and that should be a good jumping off point.)
Elayne blinked in shock. “You would have actually done it? Just… left us alone? To fight?”
"Some argued for it," Haman said.
“I myself took that position,” the woman said. “I made the argument, though I did not truly believe it was right.”
“What?” Loial asked [...] “But why did you-“
“An argument must have opposition if it is to prove itself, my son,” she said. “One who argues truly learns the depth of his commitment through adversity. Did you not learn that trees grow roots most strongly when wind blows through them?”
Covril, The Wheel of Time
Come to think of it, if "trees grow roots most strongly when wind blows through them" because the trees with weak roots can't survive in those conditions then this would make a very bad metaphor for people.
No, it's probably accurate as stated. I don't know about trees as such, but if you try to start vegetable seedlings indoors and then transfer them outside, they'll often die in the first major wind; the solution is to get the air around them moving while they're still indoors (as with a fan), which causes them to devote resources to growing stronger root systems and stems.
Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are: