Here's another installment of rationality quotes. The usual rules apply:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Actually, it was someone asking what the heck I meant by "reality fluid", to which the answer is that I don't know either which is why I always call it "magical reality fluid". I mean, I could add in something that sounded impressive and might to some degree be helpful along the lines of "It's the mind-projection-fallacy conjugate of 'probability' as it appears inside hypotheses about collections of real things in which some real things are more predicted to happen to me than others for purposes of executing post-observation Bayesian updates, like, if the squared modulus rule appearing in the Born statistics reflected the quantity present of an actual kind of stuff" but I think saying, "It's magic, which is the mind-projection-fallacy conjugate of 'I'm confused'" would be wiser in a conversation like that. I think it's very important not to create the illusion of knowing more than you do, when you try to operate at the frontiers of your own ability to be coherent. At the same time, refusing to digress into metaphysics even to demarcate the things that confuse you, even to form ideas which can be explicitly incoherent rather than implicitly incoherent, is indeed to become the slave of the unexamined thought.
I wonder if others find the notion of "magical reality fluid" a useful moniker for "I have no clear idea of what's going on here, but something does, so I cannot avoid thinking about it". I confess it does nothing for me.