During the conference I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I brought the paper home and said to her, "I can't understand these things that Lee and Yang are saying. It's all so complicated."
"No," she said, "what you mean is not that you can't understand it, but that you didn't invent it. You didn't figure it out your own way, from hearing the clue. What you should do is imagine you're a student again, and take this paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations. Then you'll understand it very easily."
I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to be very obvious and simple. I had been afraid to read it thinking it, was too difficult.
Richard Feynman uses the try harder in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman ("The 7 Percent Solution" in chapter 5)
A prima facie argument in favour of the efficacy of prayer is […] to be drawn from the very general use of it. The greater part of mankind, during all the historic ages, has been accustomed to pray for temporal advantages. How vain, it may be urged, must be the reasoning that ventures to oppose this mighty consensus of belief! Not so. The argument of universality either proves too much, or else it is suicidal. It either compels us to admit that the prayers of Pagans, of Fetish worshippers and of Buddhists who turn praying wheels, are recompensed in the same way as those of orthodox believers; or else the general consensus proves that it has no better foundation than the universal tendency of man to gross credulity.
Francis Galton, ‘Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer’, Fortnightly Review, vol. 12, no. 68 (August, 1872), pp. 125–135
It could just be that prayer doesn't hurt, and the combination of gratitude generally being useful and anthropomorphization being common results in people tending to pray.
So I am not sure what exactly this quote demonstrate[s]? That widespread beliefs can be wrong?
Yup. You might think that "prayer might not work even though lots of people think it does" is an entirely obvious idea, but I'm not sure it was so obvious in 1872.
(Although I notice that the argument "It must not have been obvious, or Galton wouldn't have bothered pointing it out" is uncomfortably similar to the argument Galton is refuting.)
not wrong about the actual end effect delivered in the mind
The kind of feeling-better that comes from having more fish to feed your family is not the same as the kind of feeling-better that comes from having prayed. (E.g., one will stop your children starving and the other won't.) Isn't this relevant?
I de-converted from Christianity just a few months ago. Prayer is probably what I miss most. We learned that God always hears our prayers and answers in the way that is best for us, even if the answer isn't always "yes".
In general, I'm independent, I trust my own reasoning, and I like to be in control and make decisions. Yet, even for me, it felt REALLY GOOD to believe someone all-knowing and all-loving was in control. To believe that whatever happened was part of some perfect plan that I just wasn't smart enough to understand.
yeah, that's not going to help
It won't help the situation, but it might help you to better handle the situation. The useful thing about "prayer" isn't that it actually calls down any outside help, but that it forces you to clarify your own thoughts regarding what you want and what would be useful... in much the same way that problem solving is made easier by explaining the problem to somebody else.
Verbal communication forces you to serialize your thoughts, to disassemble what may be a vague or complex structure of interconnecting impulses, ideas, mental models, etc. and then encode it in an organized stream for another mind to re-encode into a similar structure. But the process of doing this forces you to re-encode it as well.
So don't stop using a useful technique for organizing your thoughts, just because there isn't an actual mind on the other end of the encoding process (except maybe yours). Programmers have been known to "rubber duck", i.e., use a literal or figurative rubber duck as the thing to talk to. You're not going to commit some sort of atheist sin by using an imaginary sky deity as your rubber duck. Or ask the Flying Spaghetti Monster to touch you with His Noodly Appendage to grant you the clarity and wisdom you seek. The value of an invocation comes from its invoker, not its invokee.
We wanted the best, but it turned out as always.
-- Viktor Stepanovich Chernomyrdin, about economical reforms in Russia
(Not a rationality quote per se, but this is how I would start a lecture on outside view / planning fallacy.)
Which Constraints Should You Accept?
The best constraints to accept seem to be, first, the ones which actually exist.
A man must be excessively stupid, as well as uncharitable, who believes that there is no virtue but on his own side, and that there are not men as honest as himself who may differ from him in political principles.
Joseph Addison, The Spectator No. 243 (8 December 1711).
I'm upvoting for the sentiment but I don't think the quote is very accurate. It doesn't take execessive stupidity to make this mistake. It is a very common mistake made often by even very bright individuals. If it simply took excessive stupidity it wouldn't be nearly as common a problem.
Be nice to nice people
Be rude to rude people
The theory of iterated games explained in a Eurovision song.
By chance, shortly after reading Mark Friedenbach's parting message, I saw this on Seth Godin's blog:
Is it meeting your needs…
Or merely creating new wants?
Is it honoring your time or squandering your time?
Is it connecting you with those you care about, or separating you from them?
Is it exposing you or giving you a place to hide?
Is it important, or only urgent?
Is it right, or simply convenient?
Is it making things better, or merely more pressing?
Is it leveraging your work or wasting it?
What is it for?
Good questions to ask, especially of any habit one has not reexamined in a long time.
"You say that every man thinks himself to be on the good side, that every man who opposed you was deluding himself. Did you ever stop to consider that maybe you were the one on the wrong side?"
-- Vasher (from Warbreaker) explaining how that particular algorithm looks from the inside.
The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,
All centuries but this and every country but his own.
W.S. Gilbert, in The Mikado.
To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar.
-- Francis Bacon
The real problem with the interface is that it is an interface. Interfaces get in the way. I don’t want to focus my energies on an interface. I want to focus on the job…I don’t want to think of myself as using a computer, I want to think of myself as doing my job.
-- Donald A. Norman The Art of Computer-Human Design p. 120, see e.g. here
Reasonableness is, I believe, and underrated trait in research. By “reasonable,” I don’t mean a supine acceptance of the status quo, but rather a sense of the connections of the world, a sort of generalized numeracy, an openness and honesty about one’s sources of information.
At this point in my story, you might have the following question: What kind of idiot puts himself in a position to be humiliated in front of a thousand people?
It’s a fair question. The answer is a long one. It will take this entire book to answer it right. The short answer is that over the years I have cultivated a unique relationship with failure. I invite it. I survive it. I appreciate it. And then I mug the shit out of it. Failure always brings something valuable with it. I don’t let it leave until I extract that value.
-- Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big (Amazon)
...In scientific thought we adopt the simplest theory which will explain all the facts under consideration and enable us to predict new facts of the same kind. The catch in this criterion lies in the word "simplest." It is really an aesthetic canon such as we find implicit in our criticisms of poetry or painting. The layman finds such a law as
much less simple than "it oozes," of which it is the mathematical statement. The physicist reverses this judgment, and his statement is certainly the more fruitful of the two, so far as prediction
...Pedantry and mastery are opposite attitudes toward rules.
To apply a rule to the letter, rigidly, unquestioningly, in cases where it fits and in cases where it does not fit, is pedantry. Some pedants are poor fools; they never did understand the rule which they apply so conscientiously and so indiscriminately. Some pedants are quite successful; they understood their rule, at least in the beginning (before they became pedants), and chose a good one that fits in many cases and fails only occasionally.
To apply a rule with natural ease, with judgment, noticin
Our brain does not operate by the principles of logic. It operates by a selection of pattern recognition. It's a dynamic network. It's not a "if-then" logic machine. Dr. Ralph Greenspan Seeking Wisdom p. 18
“It’s not a kid’s television show,” Andy told me, “Where the antagonist makes the Machiavellian plan and then abandons that plan completely the first time it fails. People fail, they revise, they adjust parameters, they you achieve victory through persistence and hard work.”
J. C. McCrae, Pact WebSerial
“Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”
The German original is somewhat stronger:
"Ihr seid alle Idioten zu glauben, aus Eurer Erfahrung etwas lernen zu können, ich ziehe es vor, aus den Fehlern anderer zu lernen, um eigene Fehler zu vermeiden."
Since a tradition of behaviour is not susceptible of the distinction between essence and accident), knowledge of it is unavoidably knowledge of its detail: to know only the gist is to know nothing.
Father spoke again, his eyes still closed, “Reality is what’s not the voting booth and not the salad bar. When you don’t get to vote and don’t get to pick,” he spoke louder. “That’s reality.”
--John C. Wright, Somewhither
Popular [scientific] book must be strictly scientific. Care for the simplicity of writing should not result in simplification of the problem ... presenting a hypothesis as an indestructible truth, describing one hypothesis but leaving out other ones, the popularizer nurtures in the reader primitiveness of reasoning.
Ye. Lichtenstein, Editing a scientific book, 1957.
Complexity only makes it an art. It is the apparent simplicity that makes it subtle. How simple it is to declare a static hashtable, and yet how perilous! The first challenge of a Subtle Art is recognizing that it even exists in the first place.
--Master Bawan, from case 148 of the Codeless Code.
The so-called "EPR Paradox" that is not a paradox at all. (well it is if you assume a deterministic physics with hidden variables, which is just wrong; it should be called the EPR Proof that Einstein was Wrong Sometimes).
Irresolute republics never choose the right alternative unless they are driven to it, for their weakness does not allow them to arrive at a decision where there is any doubt; and, unless this doubt is removed by some compelling act of violence, they remain ever in suspense.
--Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy
The institutionizing on a large scale of any natural combination of need and motive always tends to run into technicality and to develop a tyrannical Machine with unforeseen powers of exclusion and corruption.
-- William James, The Ph.D. Octopus
Responding to an argument for skepticism:
That is to say, though, as I have said, I agree with Russell that (1), (2), and (3) are true; yet of no one even of these three do I feel as certain as that I do know for certain that this is a pencil. Nay more: I do not think it is rational to be as certain of any one of these four propositions, as of the proposition that I do know that this is a pencil.
- G.E. Moore, quote found here.
...To help you see what some of the problems with Chetty’s work is, let’s walk through the top and bottom of his new rankings of 2,478 counties. When thinking about Big Data, I’ve long found it extremely useful to look at the highest and lowest examples in detail to see what kind of patterns leap out. It’s extremely easy these days to look up facts about outliers, so more people should do it. This doesn’t seem to be a common practice among academic data analysts, however, who evidently fear contamination by bias and stereotypes. But instead they wind up suff
Depending on the perspective of the reader, this one's an attack either on faith or on explanations.
"To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible."
-St. Thomas Aquinas
Now, gentlemen, let us do something today which the world may talk of hereafter.
Of course, refusing to examine oneself is the shortest distance to becoming an a**hole.
...If a scientific hypothesis were a self-generated bright idea which owed nothing to scientific activity, then empiricism governed by hypothesis could be considered to compose a self-contained manner of activity; but this certainly is not its character. The truth is that only a man who is already a scientist can formulate a scientific hypothesis; that is, an hypothesis is not an independent invention capable of guiding scientific inquiry, but a dependent supposition which arises as an abstraction from within already existing scientific activity. Moreover, e
To have a stable social life, filter out those who get easily offended by offending them early on.
When due process fails us, we really do live in a world of terror.
-- JC Denton, Deus Ex.
May be a bad one but at least Deus Ex is an excellent game.
...Social science epistemology, afaict:
Ignore all the interesting and replicable phenomena
Find data sets that can be interpreted in isolation as Cutting Social Commentary
Wonder why your interventions never work, findings never replicate, and you can't predict anything.
How it should be done:
Separate experimental studies from social commentary. Build a corpus of replicated phenomena that need explanation
Find a-priori plausible explanatory hypotheses or laws that explain the replicated phenomena.
Favor hypotheses that predict better, are simpler,
Economists do have a large corpus of well replicated phenomena, and they do have good predictive ability. The problem is that people want economists to make predictions on subjects that are least understood, or even ones that economic theory suggests cannot be generally predicted, such as stock market movements. Sure, economists can't do that, but they (mostly) don't claim to be able to do that.
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are: