A novice asked master Banzen: “What separates the monk from the master?”
Banzen replied: “Ten thousand mistakes!”
The novice, not understanding, sought to avoid all error. An abbot observed and brought the novice to Banzen for correction.
Banzen explained: “I have made ten thousand mistakes; Suku has made ten thousand mistakes; the patriarchs of Open Source have each made ten thousand mistakes.”
Asked the novice: “What of the old monk who labors in the cubicle next to mine? Surely he has made ten thousand mistakes.”
Banzen shook his head sadly. “Ten mistakes, a thousand times each.”
Prominent altruists aren't the people who have a larger care-o-meter, they're the people who have learned not to trust their care-o-meters... Nobody has [a care-o-meter] capable of faithfully representing the scope of the world's problems. But the fact that you can't feel the caring doesn't mean that you can't do the caring.
The Courage Wolf looked long and slow at the Weasley twins. At length he spoke, "I see that you possess half of courage. That is good. Few achieve that."
"Half?" Fred asked, too awed to be truly offended.
"Yes," said the Wolf, "You know how to heroically defy, but you do not know how to heroically submit. How to say to another, 'You are wiser than I; tell me what to do and I will do it. I do not need to understand; I will not cost you the time to explain.' And there are those in your lives wiser than you, to whom you could say that."
"But what if they're wrong?" George said.
"If they are wrong, you die," the Wolf said plainly, "Horribly. And for nothing. That is why it is an act of courage."
I believe this lesson is designed for crisis situations where the wiser person taking the time to explain could be detrimental. For example, a soldier believes his commander is smarter than him and possesses more information than he does. The commander orders him to do something in an emergency situation that appears stupid from his perspective, but he does it anyway, because he chooses to trust his commander's judgement over his own.
Under normal circumstances, there is of course no reason why a subordinate shouldn't be encouraged to ask why they're doing something.
I'm not sure that's the real reason a soldier, or someone in a similar position, should obey their leader. In circumstances that rely on a group of individuals behaving coherently, it is often more important that they work together than that they work in the optimal way. That is, action is coordinated by assigning one person to make the decision. Even if this person is not the smartest or best informed in the situation, the results achieved by following orders are likely to be better than by each individual doing what they personally think is best.
In less pressing situations, it is of course reasonable to talk things out amongst a team and see if anyone has a better idea. However even then it's common for there to be more than one good way to do something. It is usually better to let the designated leader pick an acceptable solution rather than spend a lot of time arguing about the best possible solution. And unless the chosen solution is truly awful (not just worse but actively wrong) it is usually better to go along with the leader designated solution than to go off in a different direction.
...When I was 16, I wanted to follow in my grandfathers footsteps. I wanted to be a tradesman. I wanted to build things, and fix things, and make things with my own two hands. This was my passion, and I followed it for years. I took all the shop classes at school, and did all I could to absorb the knowledge and skill that came so easily to my granddad. Unfortunately, the handy gene skipped over me, and I became frustrated. But I remained determined to do whatever it took to become a tradesman.
One day, I brought home a sconce from woodshop that looked like a paramecium, and after a heavy sigh, my grandfather told me the truth. He explained that my life would be a lot more satisfying and productive if I got myself a different kind of toolbox. This was almost certainly the best advice I’ve ever received, but at the time, it was crushing. It felt contradictory to everything I knew about persistence, and the importance of “staying the course.” It felt like quitting. But here’s the “dirty truth,” Stephen. “Staying the course” only makes sense if you’re headed in a sensible direction. Because passion and persistence – while most often associated with success – are also essential ingredients
"While there are problems with what I have proposed, they should be compared to the existing alternatives, not to abstract utopias."
Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future (page number not provided by e-reader)
The version of Windows following 8.1 will be Windows 10, not Windows 9. Apparently this is because Microsoft knows that a lot of software naively looks at the first digit of the version number, concluding that it must be Windows 95 or Windows 98 if it starts with 9.
Many think this is stupid. They say that Microsoft should call the next version Windows 9, and if somebody’s dumb code breaks, it’s their own fault.
People who think that way aren’t billionaires. Microsoft got where it is, in part, because they have enough business savvy to take responsibility for problems that are not their fault but that would be perceived as being their fault.
The version of Windows following 8.1 will be Windows 10, not Windows 9. Apparently this is because Microsoft knows that a lot of software naively looks at the first digit of the version number, concluding that it must be Windows 95 or Windows 98 if it starts with 9.
Except that Windows 95 actual version number is 4.0, and Windows 98 version number is 4.1.
It seems that Microsoft has been messing with version numbers in the last years, for some unknown (and, I would suppose, probably stupid) reason: that's why Xbox One follows Xbox 360 which follows Xbox, so that Xbox One is actually the third Xbox, the Xbox with 3 in the name is the second one, and the Xbox without 1 is the first one. Isn't it clear?
Maybe I can't understand the logic behind this because I'm not a billionarie, but I'm inclined to think this comes from the same geniuses who thought that the design of Windows 8 UI made sense.
No, this is due to their own code. A shortcut in the standard developer's tools (published by Microsoft) for Windows devs bring use 'windows 9' as a shortcut to windows 95 and windows 98. This is a problem of their own making.
Lord Vetinari, as supreme ruler of Ankh-Morpork, could in theory summon the Archchancellor of Unseen University to his presence and, indeed, have him executed if he failed to obey.
On the other hand Mustrum Ridcully, as head of the college of wizards, had made it clear in polite but firm ways that he could turn him into a small amphibian and, indeed, start jumping around the room on a pogo stick.
Alcohol bridged the diplomatic gap nicely. Sometimes Lord Vetinari invited the Archchancellor to the palace for a convivial drink. And of course the Archchancellor went, because it would be bad manners not to. And everyone understood the position, and everyone was on their best behaviour, and thus civil unrest and slime on the carpet were averted.
-- Interesting Times, Terry Pratchett
I want to say "live and let live" about non-scientific views. But, then I read about measles outbreaks in countries where vaccines are free.
Zach Weinersmith (Twitter)
Related:
Rather than panicking about the single patient known to have Ebola in the US, protect yourself against a virus that kills up to 50,000 Americans every year. It's the flu, and simply getting the shot dramatically reduces your chances of becoming ill.
Erin Brodwin Business Insider
So? A 60% reduction in the chances of getting the flu is still orders of magnitude better than a 100% reduction in the chances of getting ebola. Also, herd immunity isn't all-or-nothing. I'd expect giving everyone a 60% effective flu vaccine would still reduce the the probability of getting the flu by significantly more than 60%.
Downvoted for mindless panic.
There are no measures to speak of to control the flu. It goes through the world every year and we just live with it because it's rarely fatal.
The Ebola curve is not exponential in the countries where appropriate measures were taken, Nigeria and Senegal: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/30/ebola-over-in-nigeria/16473339/ Clearly the US can do at least as well.
While Ebola might mutate to become airborne and spread like flu, and there is a real risk of that, there is little indication of it having happened. Until then the comparison with the Spanish Flu is silly. It's not nearly as contagious.
Your linked post in the underground medic is pretty bad. The patient contracted Ebola on Sep 15, most people become contagious 8-10 days later, so the flight passengers on Sep 20 are very likely OK. There is no indication that the official story is grossly misleading. There are bound to be a few more cases showing up in the next week or so, just as there were with SARS, but with the aggressive approach taken now the odds of it spreading wide are negligible, given that Nigeria managed to contain a similar incident.
My guess is that the total number of cases with the Dallas vector will be under a dozen or so, with <40% fatalities. I guess we'll see.
"You know, esoteric, non-intuitive truths have a certain appeal – once initiated, you’re no longer one of the rubes. Of course, the simplest and most common way of producing an esoteric truth is to just make it up."
To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods
-- Robert Heinlein (http://tmaas.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/robert-heinlein-quotes.html)
"Put simply, the truth about all those good decisions you plan to make sometime in the future, when things are easier, is that you probably won't make them once that future rolls around and things are tough again."
Sendhil Mullaainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity, p. 215
“Nobody supposes that the knowledge that belongs to a good cook is confined to what is or may be written down in a cookery book.” - Michael Oakeshott, "Rationalism in Politics"
"What we assume to be 'normal consciousness' is comparatively rare, it's like the light in the refrigerator: when you look in, there you are ON but what's happening when you don't look in?"
Keith Johnstone, Impro - Improvisation and the Theatre
To summarize Twitter and my Facebook feed this morning: “The Ebola virus proves everything I already believed about politics.” You might find this surprising. The Ebola virus is not running for office. It does not have a policy platform, or any campaign white papers on burning issues. It doesn’t even vote. So how could it neatly validate all our preconceived positions on government spending, immigration policy, and the proper role of the state in our health care system? Stranger still: How could it validate them so beautifully on both left and right?
The words out of your mouth will literally be ignored, misheard, or even contorted to the opposite of what they mean, if that’s what it takes to preserve the listener’s misconception
Scott Aaronson on why quantum computers don't speed up computations by parallelism, a popular misconception.
The misconception isn't exactly that quantum computers speed up computations by parallelism. They kinda do. The trouble is that what they do isn't anything so simple as "try all the possibilities and report on whichever one works" -- and the real difference between that and what they can actually do is in the reporting rather than the trying.
Of course that means that useful quantum algorithms don't look like "try all the possibilities", but they can still be viewed as working by parallelism. For instance, Grover's search algorithm starts off with the system in a superposition that's symmetrical between all the possibilities, and each step changes all those amplitudes in a way that favours the one we're looking for.
For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not in any way disagreeing with Scott Aaronson here: The naive conception of quantum computation as "just like parallel processing, but the other processors are in other universes" is too naive and leads people to terribly overoptimistic expectations of what quantum computers can do. I just think "quantum computers don't speed up computations by parallelism" is maybe too simple in the other direction.
[EDITED to remove a spurious "not"]
Still, it was possible that he could close in and thus block the Frenchman's blade.
No. Would he consider such a move if he did not have three ounces of fifteen-percent-alcohol purple passion in his bloodstream? No. Forget it.
Philip Jose Farmer's character, "Richard Francis Burton," The magic labyrinth
...The chief trick to making good mistakes is not hide them -- especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of art, which in a way they are. The fundamental reaction to any mistake ought to be this: "Well, I won't do that again!" Natural selection doesn't actually think this thought; it just wipes out the goofers before they can reproduce; natural selection won't do that again, at least not as often. Animals that can learn -- learn not to make that noise, touch that wire, eat that food -- have something with a similar selective force in their brains. We human beings carry matters to a much more swift and efficient level. We can actually think that thought, reflecting on what we have just done: "Well, I won't do that again!" And when we reflect, we confront directly the problem that must be solved by any mistake-maker: what, exactly, is that? What was it about what I just did that got me into all this trouble? The trick is to take advantage of the particular details of the mess you've made, so that your next attempt
The winner worldview is that you have responsibility for your own life and it is irrelevant who is at fault if the people at fault can't or won't fix the problem. I've noticed over the course of my life that winners ignore questions of blame and fault and look for solutions they can personally influence. Losers blame others for their problems and expect that to produce results.
Scott Adams musing on what that woman in the Manhattan harassment video could do.
This actually clashes with the idea of heroic responsibility, a popular local notion. I guess it depends on what your values are.
...if people use data and inferences they can make with the data without any concern about error bars, about heterogeneity, about noisy data, about the sampling pattern, about all the kinds of things that you have to be serious about if you’re an engineer and a statistician—then you will make lots of predictions, and there’s a good chance that you will occasionally solve some real interesting problems. But you will occasionally have some disastrously bad decisions. And you won’t know the difference a priori. You will just produce these outputs and hope for t
The humans aren't doing what the math says. The humans must be broken.
“And therein lies the problem,” scowled the master. “Yesterday I was a fool, the week before an idiot, and last month an imbecile. Don’t show me code I might have written yesterday. Show me code as I will write it tomorrow.”
When you get to a fork in the road, take it.
(I will keep doing this. I have no shame.)
"... beware of false dichotomies. Though it's fun to reduce a complex issue to a war between two slogans, two camps, or two schools of thought, it is rarely a path to understanding. Few good ideas can be insightfully captured in a single word ending with -ism, and most of our ideas are so crude that we can make more progress by analyzing and refining them than by pitting them against each other in a winner-take-all contest."
This is a quote from memory from one of my professors in grad school:
...Last quarble, the shanklefaxes ulugled the flurxurs. The flurxurs needed ulugled because they were mofoxiliating, which caused amaliaxas in the hurble-flurble. The shakletfaxes domonoxed a wokuflok who ulugles flurxurs, because wokuflok nuxioses less than iliox nuxioses.
- When did the shaklefaxes ulugle the flurxurs?
- Why did the shaklefaxes ulugle the flurxurs?
- Who did they get to ulugle the flurxurs?
- If you were the shaklefaxes, would you have your ulugled flurxurs? Why or why not?
- Wou
Physicists, in contrast with philosophers, are interested in determining observable consequences of the hypothesis that we are a simulation.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1847 , Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation
"Information always underrepresents reality."
Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (page number not provided by e-reader)
Holmes: "What's the matter? You're not looking quite yourself. This Brixton Road affair has upset you."
Watson: "To tell the truth, it has," I said. "I ought to be more case-hardened after my Afghan experiences. I saw my own comrades hacked to pieces in Maiwand without losing my nerve."
Holmes: "I can understand. There is a mystery about this which stimulates the imagination; where there is no imagination there is no horror ."
Chesterton's fence is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. The quotation is from Chesterton’s 1929 book The Thing, in the chapter entitled "The Drift from Domesticity":
...In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road.
One big problem with Chesterton's Fence is that since you have to understand the reason for something before getting rid of it, if it happens not to have had a reason, you'll never be permitted to get rid of it.
Germany’s plans in the event of a two front war [WW I] were the results of years of study on the part of great soldiers, the German General Staff. That those plans failed was not due to any unsoundness on the part of the plans, but rather due to the fact that the plans could not be carried out by the field armies.
An official Army War College publication, 1923
While reverse stupidity isn't intelligence, learning how others rationalize failure can help us recognize our own mistakes.
Edited to reflect hydkyll's comment.
How do you know it's a German Army War College publication? Reasons for my doubt:
"Ellis Bata" doesn't sound at all like a German name.
There was no War College in Germany in 1923. There were some remains of the Prussian Military Academy, but the Treaty of Versailles forbid work being done there. The academy wasn't reactivated until 1935.
The academy in Prussia isn't usually called "Army War College". However, there are such academies in Japan, India and the US.
I read the quote to mean that it's silly to claim that a plan is perfect when it's actually unworkable.
The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, Part I (trans. by Bernard Frechtman).
Cf. Rationality is Systematized Winning and Rationality and Winning.
What if the polls prove to have no bias? Our model shows Republicans as about 75 percent likely to win a Senate majority. This may seem confusing: Doesn’t the official version of FiveThirtyEight’s model have Republicans as about 60 percent favorites instead? Yes, but some of the 40 percent chance it gives Democrats reflects the possibility that the polls will have a Republican bias. If the polls were guaranteed to be unbiased, that would would make Republicans more certain of winning.
"If we take everything into account — not only what the ancients knew, but all of what we know today that they didn't know — then I think that we must frankly admit that we do not know. But, in admitting this, we have probably found the open channel."
Richard Feynman, "The Value of Science," public address at the National Academy of Sciences (Autumn 1955); published in What Do You Care What Other People Think (1988); republished in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman (1999) edited by Jeffrey Robbins.
Thankfully, they have ways of verifying historical facts so this [getting facts wrong] doesn't happen too much. One of them is Bayes' Theorem, which uses mathematical formulas to determine the probability that an event actually occurred. Ironically, the method is even useful in the case of Bayes' Theorem itself. While most people attribute it to Thomas Bayes (1701 - 1761), there are a significant number who claim it was discovered independently of Bayes - and some time before him - by a Nicholas Saunderson. This gives researchers the unique opportunity to use Bayes' Theorem to determine who came up with Bayes' Theorem. I love science.
John Cadley, Funny You Should Say That - Toastmaster magazine
...Slytherin, the hat had almost put him in, and his similarity to Slytherin's heir Riddle himself had commented on. But he was beginning to think this wasn't because he had "un-Gryffindor" qualities that fit only in Slytherin, but because the two houses - normally pictured as opposites - were in some fundamental ways quite similar.
Ravenclaws in battle, he had no doubt, would cooly plan the sacrifice of distant strangers to achieve an important objective, though that cold logic could collapse in the face of sacrificing family instead. Hufflepuffs w
Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all "part of the plan". But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!
-- Joker, The Dark Knight
...[T]here are several references to previous flights; the acceptance and success of these flights are taken as evidence of safety. But erosion and blowby are not what the des
...One of the things about the online debate over e-piracy that particularly galled me was the blithe assumption by some of my opponents that the human race is a pack of slavering would-be thieves held (barely) in check by the fear of prison sentences.
Oh, hogwash.
Sure, sure - if presented with a real "Devil's bargain," most people will at least be tempted. Eternal life. . . a million dollars found lying in the woods. . .
Heh. Many fine stories have been written on the subject! But how many people, in the real world, are going to be tempted to steal
How many people, in the real world, are going to be tempted to steal a few bucks?
Quite a lot, in my experience. I've seen so many well-paid people fired for fiddling their expenses over trivial amounts. Eric Flint, as befits a fiction author, makes a rhetorically compelling case though!
Quite right, too.
Being able to take paper and pens home from the workplace to work is clearly useful and beneficial to the business. It's plainly not worth a business's time to track such things punctiliously unless its employees are engaging in large-scale pilfering (e.g., selling packs of printer paper) because the losses are so small. It's plainly not worth an employee's time to track them either for the same reason. (And similarly not worth an employee's time worrying about whether s/he has brought papers or pens into work from home and left them there.)
The optimal policy is clearly for no one to worry about these things except in cases of large-scale pilfering.
(In large businesses it may be worth having a formal rule that just says "no taking things home from the office" and then ignoring small violations, because that makes it feasible to fight back in cases of large-scale pilfering without needing a load of lawyering over what counts as large-scale. Even then, the purpose of that rule should be to prevent serious violations and no one should feel at all guilty about not keeping track of what paper and pens are whose. I suspect the actual local optimum in this vicin...
This post is right on the money. Transaction costs are real and often wind up being deceptively higher than you anticipate.
It would definitely be a rationality quote if it went on to quote the part where Eric Flint decided to test his hypothesis by putting some of his books online, for free, and watching his sales numbers.
If you kick a ball, about the most interesting way you can analyze the result is in terms of the mechanical laws of force and motion. The coefficients of inertia, gravity, and friction are sufficient to determine its reaction to your kick and the ball's final resting place, even if you can 'bend it like Beckham'. But if you kick a large dog, such a mechanical analysis of vectors and resultant forces may not prove as salient as the reaction of the dog as a whole. Analyzing individual muscles biomechanically likewise yields an incomplete picture of human movement experience.
Thomas W. Myers in Anatomy Trains - Page 3
"What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it! / Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."
-- John Anster in a "very free translation" of Faust from 1835. (http://www.goethesociety.org/pages/quotescom.html)
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are: