Post quotes.
In 1736 I lost one of my Sons, a fine Boy of 4 Years old, by the Smallpox taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly and still regret that I had not given it to him by Inoculation. This I mention for the Sake of Parents who omit that Operation on the Supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a Child died under it; my Example showing that the Regret may be the same either way, and that therefore the safer should be chosen.
-- Benjamin Franklin
(To provide some context: at the time, the smallpox vaccine used a live virus, and carried a non-trivial risk of death for the recipient. However, it was still safer on the whole than not being immunized.)
So far as I'm aware, there are currently no publicly available vaccines that lack overwhelming evidence in support of their use. Researching every issue one has even the slightest doubts about is also a failure mode.
It's not renting a house vs. owning a house, it's renting a house vs. renting a bunch of money from the bank.
-- Salman Khan, Khan Academy
Upvoted. I have undergraduate commerce friends who want their degrees already so they can start on their mortgage. I asked them if they'd done a comparison with renting. They repeated the cached wisdom of "renting bad, mortgage good", and "look everyone else is doing it". I wish I had had this quote on hand - as it was I said something like "is everyone else mostly made up of commerce majors?" and didn't really get my point across.
This idea that whenever something evil happens someone particular can be blamed and punished for it, in life and in politics is hopeless.
-- Hayao Miyazaki
I've always been impressed with how so many of his movies reflect this view, without being preachy about it. Look at Princess Mononoke, for example: there are several violently conflicting sides, and most of them can be described as good, even heroic.
Indeed, Princess Mononoke is one of the least preachy eco-movies ever made, although I have a feeling that its main focus is actually not on environmentalism but on conflict resolution. To quote Miyazaki (from memory, from an awesome documentary/backstage series about Mononoke), the film is to "illustrate adult ways of thinking about issues".
The impetus for posting these Miyazaki quotes was the movie watching streak I went on recently. I've covered all of his movies except Castle of Cagliostro. I also read the Nausicaa manga, and its ending significantly upset me, to such extent that I think I will write a gratuitous Fix Fic that alters the ending to my pleasure. It upset me because nearing the ending Miyazaki constructs a pretty coherent and sensible transhumanist stance of dealing with the in-universe world and its problems, and then utterly demolishes that stance in the finale. Without going into specifics, the protagonist chooses an option that significantly increases the chance that humanity goes extinct in order to a) suspend other-optimizing by (most likely benign, maybe malicious) external forces b) eliminate medium term technological risks of moderate severity. ...
Whatever elaborate, and grotesquely counter-intuitive, underpinnings there might be to familiar reality, it stubbornly continues to be familiar. When Rutherford showed that atoms were mostly empty space, did the ground become any less solid? The truth itself changes nothing.
-- Greg Egan, Quarantine
The Three Virtues of a Programmer:
Laziness - The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it.
Impatience - The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to.
Hubris - Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about.
-- Larry Wall (Programming Perl, 2nd edition), quote somewhat abridged
The mere fact that it is possible to frame a question does not make it legitimate or sensible to do so. There are many things about which you can ask, "What is its temperature?" or "What color is it?" but you may not ask the temperature question or the color question of, say, jealousy or prayer. Similarly, you are right to ask the "Why" question of a bicycle's mudguards or the Kariba Dam, but at the very least you have no right to assume that the "Why" question deserves an answer when posed about a boulder, a misfortune, Mt. Everest, or the universe. Questions can be simply inappropriate, however heartfelt their framing.
Richard Dawkins, God's Utility Function
I see your point, but I also think it's problematic when people say "why (implication: cause-why)" instead of just saying "how".
When I hear people saying "Why did Mt. Everest form?", I can substitute "How did..." in my head, but it also makes me wonder why they used "why" in the first place. No biggie, but that's only because we know a fair bit about geology and how mountains form.
When it comes to broader questions like "Why does the universe exist?", then the equivocation problem becomes much severer. I think in that particular case, there's a good chance that the questioner is genuinely meaning to ask "purpose-and-cause-why", because the concepts of "purpose-why" and "cause-why" are equivocated (since there's no clear answer for the latter and blank spot for the former, as there is for Mt. Everest).
To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.
-- Robert A Heinlein, Notebooks of Lazarus Long
All Wars are Follies, very expensive, and very mischievous ones. When will Mankind be convinced of this, and agree to settle their Differences by Arbitration? Were they to do it, even by the Cast of a Dye, it would be better than by Fighting and destroying each other.
-- Benjamin Franklin
The unpleasant truth is that war does have one useful function: it brings peace. Let it.
-- Edward Luttwak, "Give War a Chance"
It’s neither our economy or our multimedia that I’m most concerned about, but whether the kids are lively and in good shape. I mean, as long as the people are doing fine it doesn’t matter if the nation is in poverty.
-- Hayao Miyazaki
Let us be certain of a fact before being concerned with its cause. It is true that this method is too lengthy for most people who naturally run to the cause and overlook the certitude about facts; but at last we will avoid the ridicule of finding the cause of what does not exist.
Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
Recently quoted on the web in relation to acupuncture studies.
The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.
-John F. Kennedy
Dirge without Music
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, --- but the best is lost.
The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
When somebody makes a statement you don't understand, don't tell him he's crazy. Ask him what he means.
-- H Beam Piper, Space Viking
If you show me
That, say, homeopathy works,
Then I will change my mind
I’ll spin on a fucking dime
I’ll be embarrassed as hell,
But I will run through the streets yelling
It’s a miracle! Take physics and bin it!
Water has memory!
And while its memory of a long lost drop of onion juice is Infinite
It somehow forgets all the poo it’s had in it!You show me that it works and how it works
And when I’ve recovered from the shock
I will take a compass and carve Fancy That on the side of my cock.
Tim Minchin, Storm
Dammit, how do you get line-breaks? It's a poem, but the stanzas get flowed into paragraphs.
That one seemed a little preachy and "rah-rah science" to me. I much preferred his "Fuck the Poor":
Fuck the poor!
I'm not pretending anymore
That I really give two shits about
Some kids in Bangalore.
I'm more interested in footie
Than seeing the Solomons rebuilt,
But I'll give you 50 bucks to take away my guilt.
There should be a word for the things we do not because we want to but because we want to be the kind of person who wants to.
Possibly related: Cached Selves and some of its outbound links, and Violent Acres' idea of self-brainwashing (bottom of post).
I definitely think there is great art out there that was solely designed to give people what they want; in film, someone like Chaplin comes to mind. I mean, giving people what they want is an art unto itself, but I think the real challenge in that method is finding a way to give them what they want while giving them more.
-- Jonathan Henderson
"The usual touchstone of whether what someone asserts is mere persuasion or at least a subjective conviction, i.e., firm belief, is betting. Often someone pronounces his propositions with such confident and inflexible defiance that he seems to have entirely laid aside all concern for error. A bet disconcerts him. Sometimes he reveals that he is persuaded enough for one ducat but not for ten. For he would happily bet one, but at ten he suddenly becomes aware of what he had not previously noticed, namely that it is quite possible that he has erred."
--Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (A824/B852); seen on http://kenfeinstein.blogspot.com/2011/01/kant-on-betting-and-prediction-markets.html as linked by Marginal Revolution
The new XKCD is highly relevant.
Okay, middle school students, it's the first Tuesday in February.
This means that by law and custom, we must spend the morning reading though the Wikipedia article List of Common Misconceptions, so you can spend the rest of your lives being a little less wrong.
The guests at every party you'll ever attend thank us in advance.
Subtext: I wish I lived in this universe.
You can make a small program (say, 1,000 lines) work through brute force even when breaking every rule of good style. For a larger program, this is simply not so. If the structure of a 100,000-line program is bad, you will find that new errors are introduced as fast as old ones are removed.
-- Bjarne Stroustrup
I've heard a similar aeronautical saying: Of course pigs can fly, they just need sufficient thrust.
It is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire.
-- Thucydides
Now, most people believe in reason the way they believe in cold showers; it's O.K. if you don't overdo it. Very few people are so insensitive as to go around applying logic to other people's beliefs...
...Fenwick has no understanding of such things. I think I should tell you that Fenwick enjoys reasoning. He uses his mind the way a sprinter uses his shoes: to get from one point to another with a maximum of speed and a minimum of nonsense.
--Leo Rosten, "An Infuriating Man," People I Have Known, Loved, or Admired.
The very presence of surprising false results that take some time to get refuted might give scientists the illusion that they are getting somewhere - since the field changes all the time - and bravely applying the scientific method - since we are bold enough to repudiate the fashionable hypotheses of ten years ago.
The effort to understand how an airplane flies is sometimes called "Theory of Flight." Under that name, it has a bad reputation with pilots. Most pilots think that theory is useless, that practice is what does it. Yet you can't help having a theory: whatever you do, from peeling potatoes to flying airplanes, you go on the basis of some mental image of what's what — and that's all "theory" amounts to. And if your ideas of what's what are correct, you will do it well.
Wolfgang Langewiesche, ''Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying'', Part I, "Wings". (via)
Next paragraph in the book:
What is wrong with "Theory of Flight," from the pilot's point of view, is not that it is theory. What's wrong is that it is the theory of the wrong thing – it usually becomes the theory of building the airplane rather than of flying it. It goes deeply – much too deeply for a pilot's needs – into problems of aerodynamics; it even gives the pilot a formula by which to calculate his lift! But it neglects those phases of flight that interest the pilot most. It often fails to show the pilot the most important fact of the art of piloting – the Angle of Attack, and how it changes in flight. And it usually fails to give him a clear understanding of the various flight conditions in which an airplane can proceed, from fast flight to mush and stall. This whole book, and especially its first chapters, are an attempt to refocus "Theory of Flight," away from things that the pilot does not need to know about, and upon the things that actually puzzle him when he flies.
This is how Vetinari thinks, his soul exulted. Plans can break down. You cannot plan the future. Only presumptuous fools plan. The wise man steers.
—Terry Pratchett, Making Money
Although thought by a madman in the book, there seems to be truth in this quote. People often seem to think of the future as a coherent, specific story not unlike the one woven by the brain from the past events. Unpleasant surprises happen when the real events inevitably deviate from those imagined.
Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.
Lewis Hyde, Alcohol and Poetry.
Via David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.
To explain - I'm finding lately that the occurrence of irony is a useful warning that something is wrong; some current, important contradiction is being papered over. Sometimes the contradiction is obvious, yes, but among people with the habit of irony, sometimes that contradiction is buried deep enough that the ironist doesn't know where the contradiction lies.
"...natural selection built the brain to survive in the world and only incidentally to understand it at a depth greater than is needed to survive. The proper task of scientists is to diagnose and correct the misalignment." -- E. O. Wilson
"The incredibly powerful and the incredibly stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views. This can be rather uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering."
--Dr. Who
Take the bettors in the racetrack experiment. Thirty seconds before putting down their money, they had been tentative and uncertain; thirty seconds after the deed, they were significantly more optimistic ans self-assured. The act of making a final decision--in this case, of buying a ticket--had been the critical factor. Once a stand had been taken, the need for consistency pressured these people to bring what they felt and believed into line with what they had already done. They simply convinced themselves that they had made the right choice and, no doubt, felt better and it all.
-Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The psychology of Persuasion, p.59
A book is like a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
"If I were not here, what would you do?" asked Holo.
"First I'd work out whether it was true or not, then I'd pretend to believe his story."
"And why is that?"
"If it's true, I can turn a profit just by going along with it. If it's a lie, then someone somewhere is up to something -- but I can still come out ahead if I keep my eyes and ears open."
"Mm. And given that I am here, and I've told you he's lying, then..."
Lawrence finally realized what had been eluding him. "Ah."
"Heh. See, there was nothing over which to agonize so. Either way you'll be pretending to accept his proposal," said Holo, grinning. Lawrence had no retort.
-- Isuna Hasikura, Spice & Wolf [tr. Paul Starr]
Behold the fool saith, “Put not all thine eggs in the one basket” — which is but a manner of saying, “Scatter your money and your attention;” but the wise man saith, “Put all your eggs in the one basket and WATCH THAT BASKET.”
— Mark Twain (in Pudd'nhead Wilson)
We must not seek to abstract from the busts of the great Greeks and Romans rules for the visible form of genius as long as we cannot contrast them with Greek blockheads.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Do not bear this single habit of mind, to think that what you say and nothing else is true. ...For a man, though he be wise, it is no shame to learn – learn many things, and not maintain his views too rigidly.
Sophocles, Antigone
Mr. Loughner said he asked the lawmaker, “How do you know words mean anything?” recalled Mr. Montanaro. He said Mr. Loughner was “aggravated” when Ms. Giffords, after pausing for a couple of seconds, “responded to him in Spanish and moved on with the meeting.”
What is to standing, as standing is to sitting?
Jumping.
What is to walking, as walking is to crawling?
Running.
What is to humans, as humans are to their pets?
Dragons.
What is to 3D movement, as 3D movement is to 2D?
4D movement.
Okay, let's get super technical. May as well, it is LW after all.
You start off as a baby who can't even crawl. Eventually, after much effort and encouragement from loving voices you get your feet below you and you stand up.
Now that you're standing (1) you face your first challenge: Walking. You take one leg and put most of it in front of the other, you fall. (1) Why? Because you forgot to move your foot. So you stand up again, (2) and you get your leg AND your foot in front of the other. You crash down on the dog. (2) Gotta get that balance in check, babe! Alright, so we're up again. (3) You kick that leg forward, you stick an arm out the other way to spare the dog further discomfort and splash, (3) there goes the jube jubes on the coffee table. You're in heaven! Your mom perks up from the news to see what's going on (OF COURSE she notices as soon as the candies are involved) She grabs you, yells at you for stealing candies and wonders how you got yourself in so much trouble. While she steals away your candies, you decide it's time to find more adventures. In a flash you're up on your feet (3) this time you're using the coffee table to stabilize. Your mom takes a glance over and sh...
No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.
-- Agnes de Mille
Errare humanum est, sed perseverare diabolicum.
Rough translation: To err is human, but to persist in error diabolical.
(Saw the quote in William Langewiesche's Fly By Wire; it is often attributed to Seneca on the Webs, but I can find no citation.)
"Do you know, in 900 years of time and space, I've never met anyone who wasn't important."
Doctor Who (written by Steven Moffatt)
`Wanting to know' is all there is in education.
-- Eric Laithewaite, Invitation to Engineering
I think that's a bit of an overstatement, but it is definitely the key.
Repetitions of these chores are troublesome, but it’s the very essence of any kind of job I’m aware of (…) It’s very easy to serve good ramen just once, but to keep making them well and not bore customers… it’s difficult.
--Hayao Miyazaki
..."The Fundamental Attribution Error is the reason why we love TV shows like The Dog Whisperer or Supernanny, in which seemingly irredeemable dogs and kids are tamed by outsiders who come in with a new system of discipline. At the beginning of the episodes, we're presented with a dog that bites everything in sight, or a child who won't obey the simplest of commands, and we simply can't avoid jumping to conclusions about their character: That dog is vicious. That boy is a terror. And when they're reformed, in the course of a short intervention, it blo
"Fanatics may suppose, that dominion is founded on grace, and that saints alone inherit the earth; but the civil magistrate very justly puts these sublime theorists on the same footing with common robbers, and teaches them by the severest discipline, that a rule, which, in speculation, may seem the most advantageous to society, may yet be found, in practice, totally pernicious and destructive." -- David Hume
More of an anti-fanaticism quotation, but it seems to belong.
There is no harm in being sometimes wrong — especially if one is promptly found out.
[T]he modern student has no appreciation of the modes of thinking, the prejudices, and other difficulties agains which the theory of probability had to struggle when it was new. Nowadays newspapers report on samples of public opinion, and the magic of statistics embraces all phases of life to the extent that young girls watch the statistics of their chances to get married. Thus everyone has acquired a feeling for the meaning of statements such as "the chances are three in five". Vague as it is, this intuition serves as background and guide for the first step.
William Feller, An Introduction to Probability Theory and its Applications
I can't remember the source of the quote I'm thinking of, but it goes something like this:
"People always remark that I know so much about science and so little about celebrities, but they fail to see that the two are related."
Does anyone know the original quote?
There's this:
People are always amazed by how much "free time" I have.
They're also amazed that I don't know who Ally McBeal is.
Frankly, I'm amazed that they can't make the connection."
-- Robert Wenzlaff
A large part of education is learning to use your own judgement.
-- Ardath Mayhar, Khi to Freedom
I'd say we are stubborn and hard for amateurs to manipulate, but that organized professionals can manipulate us when circumstances allow them to study a situation far more than we can. -- Robin Hanson, in response to Bryan Caplan, "Are We Stubborn or Manipulable?" Econlog
The post that he's responding to is also interesting.
We will learn an enormous amount in the very short term, quite a bit in the medium term and absolutely nothing in the long term.
-Jeremy Grantham, about the stock market/economy.
...We can add new methods to our lives regardless of age, circumstances, situation, or anything else. It simply requires a willingness to learn. A learning methods that can radically improve our lives doesn't necessarily take a lot of time.
Imagine the difference between a newborn infant and a two-year old. An infant cannot walk, talk, coordinate its body, control its bowels, eat solid food, understand language, or see very well. By two, the child is well on its way to mastering all these. That's how much learning a human can do in two years.
That same tr
Evolution has been optimising humans to learn to walk as babies; it hasn't selected (directly, or anywhere near as strongly) for ability to do Topology.
That same transformational amount of learning can take place in any similar period of time. In fact, as an adult, we can learn even faster. All it takes is commitment and willingness.
All the empirical evidence I've ever seen on the subject indicates that this is the precise opposite of the truth. Could you provide evidence to support this, please?
Our assent ought to be regulated by the grounds of probability.
-- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book 4, chapter 16
scientia potentia est
Knowledge is power.
--This quote is attributed to Sir Francis Bacon, but we don't really know.
As logic stands you couldn't meet a man
Who's from the future
But logic broke, as he appeared he spoke
About the future:
"We're not going to make it"
He explained how the end will come
You and me were never meant to be
Part of the future
All we have is now
All we've ever had was now
---The Flaming Lips, "All We Have is Now" (relevance: anthropic doomsday argument)
If you persuade yourself that you can do a certain thing, provided this thing is possible, you will do it, however difficult it may be. If, on the contrary, you imagine that you cannot do the simplest thing in the world, it is impossible for you to do it, and molehills become for you unscalable.
-- Émile Coué
This sounds like extremely naive optimism. A vast majority of games in all team sports, for instance, probably end in one team failing to do a possible thing they thought they could do.
This is more depressing than inspiring, but the final sentence is worth contemplating. It's from a review of a short book by the 19th-century economist Francis Edgeworth, showing how to begin a mathematical (utilitarian) treatment of morality.
...His style, if not obscure, is implicit, so that the reader is left to puzzle out every important sentence like an enigma. It is probable that most of the propositions are worth puzzling out, and that they would be puzzled out if some great pecuniary matter like a great lawsuit or the design for a great engineering
If you just have a single problem to solve, then fine, go ahead and use a neural network. But if you want to do science and understand how to choose architectures, or how to go to a new problem, you have to understand what different architectures can and cannot do. -- Marvin Minsky
You cannot know the body by studying the finger, and you cannot understand the universe by learning one science.
-- Lao Tzu
I was very torn about where to post this, as it includes an image. Not only is it an image, it's an animated GIF, which can be considered obnoxious for various bandwidth and aesthetic reasons. However, I felt the humour value was worth the risk, and this seems like the right thread. So here's the quote:
...The same optimization process that built your retina backward and then routed the optic cable through your field of vision, also designed your visual system to process persistent objects bouncing around in 3 spatial dimensions because that's what it took t
Procrastination isn't a disease to be cured. It's a symptom of unaligned internal goals and your self-image. You think you should be doing X, but don't like X all that much. So you don't get X done. The fix is not to make yourself do X, but to figure out what you really want and do that instead.
-- muflax (on his blog, not on LW, so it's cool, right?)
Wonderful folks, but part of their puppet show made me wince.
---Summerspeaker, "The joys of solidarity with the technophobic"
You can make a small program (say, 1,000 lines) work through brute force even when breaking every rule of good style. For a larger program, this is simply not so. If the structure of a 100,000-line program is bad, you will find that new errors are introduced as fast as old ones are removed.
Let us honor if we can
The vertical man
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.
--W.H. Auden
Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.
Dr. Manhattan, Watchmen
"Simultaneous" is a word that you use from within time, to refer to relations described by time. I don't think you'd use the word that way if you were really looking at the universe at the level of timeless physics, really seeing the whole design in every facet. (Though it is the word you'd probably use if you were a human author trying to write a character who sees the deeper reality beyond time, if you yourself don't quite see it. :P) Probably the intuition behind that is imagining looking at spacetime as something like a film reel laid out in front of you, and seeing that it's all already there, no matter what the people in any given frame seem to think. But that puts your perspective outside this universe's apparent time dimension, but inside an imagined outer timeline against which you can continue using words like "simultaneous" or "already". And that's no way to really reduce time; it's a mistake similar to trying to reduce consciousness by putting a little homunculus inside your head that watches your sensory input on a projector screen. It's reducing a black box to some visible machinery interacting with... another copy of the same black box.
I...
The comfort of the knowledge of a rise above the sky above could never parallel the challenge of an acquisition in the here & now.
-- Kay Hanley
Bother. I had a quote to post, created the thread but forgot the quote. Probably but fortunately because it was only moderately good.
Ha - that post refers to Diax's Rake, which is what happened to spur me to find the Thucydides quote in the first place!
In other news, I've invented this incredible device I call a "wheel".