Rationality Twitter is fun. Twitter's format can promote good insight porn/humor density. It might be worth capturing and voting on some of the good tweets here, because they're easy to miss and can end up seemingly buried forever. I mean for this to have a somewhat wider scope than the quotes thread. If you liked a tweet a lot for any reason this is the place for it.
You are the moon of my life. Once unattainable, then I was on you a few times, then I lost interest and ignored you and feel sorta guilty.
Had a patient today whose past medical history included "hit by trolley". Resisted urge to ask if the other ten people were okay.
Aaron Haspel (sorry, can't find the link):
Better that X guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted. Solve for X.
You are not the king of your brain. You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going "a most judicious choice, sire".
Mason Hartman made a great typographic meme of this at Pretty Rational.
I can't currently find this but I'm pretty sure it was from Peter De Blanc (spaceandgames):
I don't know why we're here, but since we are, we might as well take over the universe.
People close their minds for the same reason shopkeepers close their shops at night: they don't want to work all the time, they need a break
Oh, so when Philip Glass repeats a simple structure everywhere, it's "art", but when my robots do, suddenly it's an "existential disaster"?!
Some of the people who earn thousands of times your income don't deserve it, which is bad; and some of them do, which is worse.
Catharine G. Evans (aristophy):
This immortal galactic supermind is a stub. You can help expand it by providing the proper technology and averting human extinction.
Aaron Haspel (sorry, can't find the link):
Even the most disinterested truth-seeker is angling for a world of greater rewards for disinterested truth-seekers.
Plominism: The Christian heresy that salvation is neither by faith nor by works, but 50% hereditary and 50% based on non-shared environment
One of Will Newsome's that I liked but can't currently find (so maybe not exact):
Perfection is too hard, you wish to be merely better? Well done, have a gold star. The eternal graves of your beloved will go unmarked.
Aaron Haspel (sorry, can't find the link):
A grudging willingness to admit error does not suffice; you have to cultivate a taste for it
Mason Hartman made a typographic meme of this at Pretty Rational.
Aaron Haspel (sorry, can't find the link):
There is no universally acclaimed institution with a more dismal track record than marrying for love.
What does that have to do with rationality? I'm not aware of good published data that suggest that marrying for love doesn't work. It's more a common folk opinion.
Aaron Haspel (sorry, can't find the link):
Once you start to view human interaction as a contest to signal mating fitness, it becomes hard to view it as anything else.
I think this should be merged with the Media Thread.
Feel free to add a Twitter top level comment to the Media Thread.
ADDED: Ooops. Sorry, should have gone into the Meta comment.
Meta discussion goes here. Things like discussion of the medium, whether short sentences could have much usefulness besides sounding witty, whether this thread should actually exist or if favorites lists are good enough, etc
I agree with Gunnar_Zarncke; the purpose of this thread seems well enough covered by Rationality Quotes + Media Thread. Still, no major harm done.
I would expect most people reading this already to be familar with @aristosophy (who appears to have stopped posting some time back, but there's a lot of hilarity worth mining). I think I saw another similarly-flavoured but still active twitter feed recently, but my stupid ape brain is refusing to remind me what.
https://twitter.com/mythmenon/status/517032020996673536
Belief in free will not threatened by neuroscience
Linked article: http://www.wired.com/2014/09/belief-free-will-threatened-neuroscience/
Our collective delusion that we can fix most problems appears to be one of the many problems that we cannot fix.
https://twitter.com/mythmenon/status/517032020996673536
Belief in free will not threatened by neuroscience
Linked article: http://www.wired.com/2014/09/belief-free-will-threatened-neuroscience/