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)

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.

Scott Young

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.

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

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.

Andrew Gelman

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

If we seek to change the inner state of an application but we cannot change its code, then we must change its inputs and hope for the best.

-- The Codeless Code, case 127.

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

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.

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.

Now, gentlemen, let us do something today which the world may talk of hereafter.

Admiral Collingwood.

Of course, refusing to examine oneself is the shortest distance to becoming an a**hole.

YorkNecromancer @ belloflostsouls

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

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.