A monthly thread for posting any interesting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently on the Internet, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages.
During the discussion of Pranknet on Slashdot about a month ago, I saw this comment. It reminded me of our discussions about Newcomb's problem and superrationality.
...I also disagree that our society is based on mutual trust. Volumes and volumes of laws backed up by lawyers, police, and jails show otherwise.
That's called selection/observation bias. You're looking at only one side of the coin.
I've lived in countries where there's a lot less trust than here. The notion of returning an opened product to a store and getting a full refund is based on trust (yes, there's a profit incentive, and some people do screw the retailers [and the retailers their customers -- SB], but the system works overall). In some countries I've been to, this would be unfeasible: Almost everyone will try to exploit such a retailer.
When a storm knocks out the electricity and the traffic lights stop working, I've always seen everyone obeying the rules. I doubt it's because they're worried about cops. It's about trust that the other drivers will do likewise. Simply unworkable in other places I've lived in.
I've had neighbors whom I don't know receive UPS/FedEx packages for me. Again, trust. I don't think they'
I am only one, but I am still one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and just because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.
-Helen Keller
"You can safely say that you have made God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." -- Reverend Robert Cromey
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
-Bertrand Russell
It is better to have an approximate answer to the right question than an exact answer to the wrong question.
-- John Tukey
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them; this skill is most needed in times of stress and darkness.
-Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness
...I would roughly divide philosophies into two categories, "crazy" and "sensible". Of the two, I definitely prefer the former. Sensible philosophies are noted for their sobriety, propriety, rationality, analytic skill and other things. One definite advantage they have is that they are usually quite sensible. Crazy philosophies are characterized by their madness, spontaneity, sense of humor, total freedom from the most basic conventions of thought, amorality, beauty, divinity, naturalness, poesy, absolute honesty, freedom from inhibitions
"What's that saying?" he said, smiling crookedly. "When you've eliminated the impossible, whatever it is that remains--- "
"--- however improbable, must be the truth. Yes, the problem is, the man who wrote that believed in faeries, and that he could photograph them."
"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into." (Jonathan Swift )
A person's greatest virtue is his ability to correct his mistakes and continually make a new person of himself.
-Wang Yang-Ming
...We at the Church of Google believe the search engine Google is the closest humankind has ever come to directly experiencing an actual God (as typically defined). We believe there is much more evidence in favour of Google's divinity than there is for the divinity of other more traditional gods.
We reject supernatural gods on the notion they are not scientifically provable. Thus, Googlists believe Google should rightfully be given the title of "God", as She exhibits a great many of the characteristics traditionally associated with such Deities in a
I don't believe in the supernetural. There can be knowledge for which we do not possess the Google keywords, but to speak of knowledge that cannot be Googled even in principle is nonsense.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency, a great soul has simply nothing to do.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.
Niels Bohr
When the time comes, there is no moment for reasoning. And if you have not done your inquiring beforehand, there is most often shame. Reading books and listening to people's talk are for the purpose of prior resolution.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai
The word “philosopher” has its origins in the Greek, where its root is a “lover of wisdom.” There is no assurance that a lover of wisdom has any, just as an anglophile is not assured to have an Englishman locked in the basement.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence -- Carl Sagan
(I know this quote is very much a cliche -- but, as a realized a long time after seeing it, it is not only a nice heuristic, but it also emphasizes the bayesian, probabilistic view of knowledge over the popperian one.)
Economic growth occurs whenever people take resources and rearrange them in ways that are more valuable. A useful metaphor for production in an economy comes from the kitchen. To create valuable final products, we mix inexpensive ingredients together according to a recipe. The cooking one can do is limited by the supply of ingredients, and most cooking in the economy produces undesirable side effects. If economic growth could be achieved only by doing more and more of the same kind of cooking, we would eventually run out of raw materials and suffer from un...
Great thinkers build their edifices with subtle consistency. We do our intellectual forebears an enormous disservice when we dismember their visions and scan their systems in order to extract a few disembodied “gems”—thoughts or claims still accepted as true. These disarticulated pieces then become the entire legacy of our ancestors, and we lose the beauty and coherence of older systems that might enlighten us by their unfamiliarity—and their consequent challenge—in our fallible (and complacent) modern world.
-- Stephen Jay Gould
Elpinice was skeptical. She likes evidence. That means a well-made argument. For Greeks, the only evidence that matters is words. They are masters of making the fantastic sound plausible.
-- Gore Vidal, "Creation" (narrator Cyrus Spitama)
You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.
— Malcolm X (By Any Means Necessary)
First the sign describes reality. Then the sign replaces reality. - Last Psychiatrist, on the role of media.
'Tis with our Judgments as our Watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
Pope, Essay on Criticism
[Others] note that my 'avoidance of the standard philosophical terminology for discussing such matters' often creates problems for me; philosophers have a hard time figuring out what I am saying and what I am denying. My refusal to play ball with my colleagues is deliberate, of course, since I view the standard philosophical terminology as worse than useless — a major obstacle to progress since it consists of so many errors. – Daniel Dennett, The Message is: There is no Medium
Our pride is often increased by what we retrench from our other faults.
-- La Rochefoucauld
That had better be a long conversation, a very wise person, and one damned lost field you were studying for ten years.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
-H.P. Lovecraft
In the words of the ancients, one should make his decisions within the space of seven breaths. Lord Takanobu said, "If discrimination is long, it will spoil." Lord Naoshige said, "When matters are done leisurely, seven out of ten will turn out badly. A warrior is a person who does things quickly."
Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai
-- John Tukey
FWIW, the exact quote (from pp.13-14 of this article) is:
Your paraphrase is snappier though (as well as being less ambiguous; it's hard to tell in the original whether Tukey intends the adjectives "vague" and "precise" to apply to the questions or the answers).