Even after ten thousand explanations, a fool is no wiser, but an intelligent man requires only two thousand five hundred.
-- Brahma, Mahabharata
One thing I have advocated, without much success, is that children be taught social rules (when they are ready) in exactly the same way they are taught and teach each other games. The point is not whether the rules are right or wrong. Are the rules of 5-card stud poker or hopscotch right or wrong? It's that we're playing a certain game here, and there are rules to this game just as in any other game. If you want to be in the game, then you have to learn how to play it. Different groups of people play different games (different rules = different game), so if you want to play in different groups, you have to learn the games they play. When you develop the levels of understanding above the rule level, you'll be able to understand all games, and be able to join in anywhere. You won't be stuck knowing how to play only one game.
My problem with selling this idea is that people tend to think that their game is the only right one. In fact, being told that they are playing a game with arbitrary rules is insulting or frightening. They want to believe that the rules they know are the ones that everyone ought to play by; they even set up systems of punishment and reward to make sure that nobody tries to play a different game. They turn the game into something that is deadly serious, and so my idea simply seems frivolous instead of liberating.
William T. Powers
I'd be concerned that this phrasing would raise more sociopaths... because that's how they think about morality.
Sociopaths and mature adults share that conception. Both of these groups of people tend to have also discovered that it is usually not in their best interest to discuss the subject with people who do not share their maturity or sociopathic nature respectively.
The reason a sociopath must arrive at the insight Powers proposes we teach earlier is that they cannot survive without it. Where a normal individual can survive (but not thrive) with a naive morality a sociopath cannot rely on the training wheels of guilt or shame to protect them from the most vicious players in the game before they work things out.
I predict that Powers' curriculum would produce no more sociopaths, make those sociopaths that are inevitable do less damage and result in a whole heap less burnt out, anti-social (or no longer pro-social) idealists.
The analogy I use in my head instead of games is languages. They both have rules, but "games" implies something fake, not productive, and not to be taken seriously. "Languages" are tools we're accustomed to using for everyday functional reasons, and it's clearer that breaking their rules arbitrarily has a more immediate detrimental effect on their purpose (communication).
The most common way I use the metaphor explicitly is during a misunderstanding with a friend. "Wait--what does X mean in Sammish? Z? Ohh, now I get it. In Relsquish, X means Y. That's why I thought you were talking about Y."
The nice thing about this model is that, in a game, you expect everyone to know the rules before you sit down to play. If someone doesn't follow them, they're either too ignorant to play or cheating. When you're talking to someone who speaks a different language from you (even if they're just different versions of English, like Sammish and Relsquish are), occasional confusion is a matter of course. When you misunderstand each other, no one has "broken" the rules; it's just a mismatch. You identify that, explain in other words, and move on, with much fewer hard feelings or blame.
Grownups have already learned the reason to follow the rules: it's what society expects, so your life will be easier and you will be able to accomplish more if you follow them. But for the most part they learned it by osmosis, intuition, and implication--as you presumably did when you grew up--because nobody made it explicit to them, either. I think that most people don't explain this to their kids because they don't understand it themselves; they've never verbalized the reason, so they're just passing on the social pressure which worked for them.
The sad thing about this is not only that it leads to parroting "courtesy" without real understanding. It's that without being able to articulate the purpose of the social contract in general, one can't evaluate the reasons for specific clauses within it. When they seem arbitrary, they're difficult to remember, and even more difficult to respect. Consciously examining the structure allows you to see patterns in it (e.g. if X is rude, putting someone in a position where they must do X is also rude), as well as compare their implied goals against your actual goals.
For example, there are a few situations where I consider a clear und...
'One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he interrupted the lesson suddenly in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row, if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit.
"Nice biscuit, don't you think," said Korzybski, while he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog's head and the words "Dog Cookies."
The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to vomit, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet.
"You see," Korzybski remarked, "I have just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter."'
(R. Diekstra, Haarlemmer Dagblad, 1993, cited by L. Derks & J. Hollander, Essenties van NLP (Utrecht: Servire, 1996), p. 58)
I think of this as a rationalist parable and not so much a quote. It has a lot of personal resonance since I often had dog biscuits with my tea when I was younger.
I did a little reading about General Semantics after running into it in SF like Frank Herbert's; my general take on it is that it's an extended reminder that 'the map is not the territory' and that we do not have access to any eternal verities or true essences but only our tentative limited observations.
Exercises like writing in E-Prime remind us of our own fallibility. We should not say 'Amanda Knox is innocent' (who are we, an omniscient god judging her entire life?) but 'Amanda Knox likely did not commit that murder and I base this probability on the following considerations...' (note that I don't hide my own subjective role by saying something like 'the probability is based on').
(I've never found E-Prime very useful because I've always been rather empiricist in philosophy outlook and aware that I should always be able to reduce my statements down to something referring to my observations, and I suspect most LWers would not find E-Prime useful or interesting for much the same reason. But I could see it being useful for normal people.)
In this specific anecdote, the students are mistaking map for territory. The biscuit is perfectly good to eat as dog food is produced to pretty sim...
I apologize for poor conversational form.
Let me try again, hopefully more nicely: You made a very strong claim with very weak evidence.
You claimed our thoughts were fundamentally affected by our language, and that someone can control how people think by tweaking the language. Your evidence was your own sense (not a paper, not even a survey) that people think differently when writing in a different programming language.
If you have more evidence, I would really like to see it, I am not just saying that to score points or to make you angry.
"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."
— Marcus Aurelius
Philosopher: Can we ever be certain an observation is true?
Engineer: Yep.
Philosopher: How?
Engineer: Lookin'.
Scrollover of SMBC #1879
To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it--the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.
... "But," says one, "I am a busy man; I have no time for the long course of study which would be necessary to make me in any degree a competent judge of certain questions, or even able to understand the nature of the arguments."
Then he should have no time to believe.
--W. K. Clifford, "The Ethics of Belief."
We live in a world where it has become "politically correct" to avoid absolutes. Many want all religions to be given the same honor, and all gods regarded as equally true and equally fictitious. But take these same people, who want fuzzy, all-inclusive thinking in spiritual matters, and put them on an airplane. You will find they insist on a very dogmatic, intolerant pilot who will stay on the "straight and narrow" glidepath so their life will not come to a violent end short of the runway. They want no fuzzy thinking here!
I'm continually amused by the abundance of quotes here on LW from sundry wingnuts and theists, some of which are quite good. We've had Jack Chick, Ted Kaczynski, CS Lewis (howdya like that reference class, Lewis), GK Chesterton, and that crazy "Einstein was wrong!" guy.
Maybe being a contrarian in anything whatsoever helps one to break through the platitudes and cached thoughts that ordinary folks seem to bog down in whenever they try to think.
There's also a certain fun challenge in looking for jewels among the fecal matter. Rationalist aphorisms by Voltaire or Russell are a regular feature of their writing, and have been quoted in books and articles for decades or centuries, but a pearl of wisdom by a fideist is a tough find and most likely unknown to other LW readers.
Heh. Of all goddamn things to be a hipster about, "rationality quotes" has got to be one hell of a weird choice.
There's also a certain fun challenge in looking for jewels among the fecal matter.
Do that with the writings of Space Tetrahedron Guy, and then all further Ultimate Space Tetrahedron Documents will have a header text SPACE TETRAHEDRON THEORY IS ENDORSED BY NIHILCREDO.
No, they don't want a dogmatic and intolerant pilot. They want an empirical pilot who trusts his observations and instruments and uses them to make the best judgement regarding how to operate the plane.
On the other hand, a dogmatic, absolutist pilot who is absolutely sure as to the best way to land the airplane under all conditions, ignores his instruments, weather conditions and data from the control towers, and never listens to his flight crew... is a recipe for disaster.
Dogmatic absolutists mistake observation, skepticism, tolerance and empiricism for "fuzzy thinking". They don't realize that their own thinking is the very opposite of scientific thinking- which is based on observation, not fixed dogmas.
Compare:
Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I'll show you a hypocrite.
I think you may have misunderstood the point Dawkins was making. It wasn't "if you're in an aeroplane, you aren't entitled to denigrate the society whose achievements made that possible". It was "If you're in an aeroplane, you aren't entitled to claim that all truth is relative, because the fact that the aeroplane stays in the air is dependent on a very particular set of notions about truth, which demonstrably work better than their rivals -- as demonstrated by the fact that our aeroplanes actually fly."
Ooh, they are insane. You can read many or all of them online. This one ("Dark Dungeons") is a favorite of mine.
Edit: As mentioned in the Wikipedia article, an earlier version of "Dark Dungeons" (the one that was my introduction to Chick tracts a couple decades ago) listed C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as occult authors whose books should be burned.
This sounds like a bad idea.
It does, but mostly for the same reasons that cryonics does. It's a violation of Common Sense and Sensibility. But given the beliefs that tocomment has (emphasis: not mine!) it is the wise decision for him to make. He has just bitten the bullet and actually followed through from his stated beliefs with (token verbal support of) the rational conclusion.
I think tocomment has his predictions about the future miscallibrated and has probably not accounted for his own cognitive failure modes but I suspect that people would judge him to be 'unwise' almost completely independently of whether or not they share his premised beliefs.
Basically, I think we (that is, humans) are likely to judge him as naive and foolish because he is actually acting as though his beliefs should relate to his pragmatic choices.
By way of some illustration:
Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess.
Rene Descartes.
One of my mentors once gave me a list of obvious things to check when stuff doesn't work. Funny, years later I still need this list:
It worked. No one touched it but you. It doesn't work. It's probably something you did.
It worked. You made one change. It doesn't work. It's probably the change you made.
It worked. You promoted it. It doesn't work. Your testing environment probably isn't the same as your production environment.
It worked for these 10 cases. It didn't work for the 11th case. It was probably never right in the first place.
It worked perfectly for 10 years. Today it didn't work. Something probably changed.
edw519, Hacker News, on debugging.
I always need that list, too.
On the same theme as the previous one:
I've begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It's there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, a lovely day. There is no mystery, no one asks for money, I don't have to dress up, and there is no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to "God" are all answered at about the same 50-percent rate.
George Carlin
Prompted by the discussion of Sam Harris's idea that science should provide for a universal moral code, I thought of this suitable reply given long ago:
[The] doctrine of right and wrong is perpetually disputed, both by the pen and the sword: whereas the doctrine of lines and figures is not so, because men care not in that subject what be truth, as a thing that crosses no man's ambition, profit, or lust. For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any man's right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine [would] have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)
(It also provides for some interesting perspective on the current epistemological state of various academic fields that are taken seriously as a source of guidance for government policy.)
"You can always reach me through my blog!" he panted. "Overpowering Falsehood dot com, the number one site for rational thinking about the future--"
Go ahead, down-vote me. It's still paradoxically-awesome to be burned in a Greg Egan novel...
That's because it's easy to misvalue assets if you're disconnected from the production process. So when you have specialized bookkeepers, others will typcially see them as ignorant of the true value of the assets, and associate this with bookkeeping per se, rather than bookkeeping with a screwy incentive structure and/or knowledge flows. Because this is the context in which most people interface with accountants, they tend to be associated with misvaluing assets. And thus:
"Beancounters didn't think a soldier's life was worth 300 [thousand dollars]." -- Batman Begins
Edit: Sorry, I forgot to translate all that: P(observe "accountant" | believe accountant misvalued assets) > P(observe "accountant" | ~believe accountant misvalued assets)
...
...
...reason #7 I love LessWrong: when they want to improve audience comprehension, people have to translate from English to mathematical formulas instead of the reverse.
God, grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference.
-- adapted from Reinhold Niebuhr
Is this a piece of traditional deep wisdom that's actually wise?
I think the local version would be something like, "May my strength as a rationalist give me the ability to discern what I can and cannot change, and the determination to make a desperate effort at the latter when remaining uncertainty allows that this has the highest expected utility."
God grant me the strength to change the things I can,
The intelligence to know what I can change,
And the rationality to realize that God isn't the key figure here.
What I like about the serenity prayer (at least the way I interpret it) is that it puts the priority on changing things; serenity is just a second-best option for things that are unchangeable.
In that respect, it's like a transhumanist slogan. With something like life extension, I want to point to the serenity prayer and say we can change this, which means we need to have the courage to change. Death at the end of the current lifespan isn't something that we should serenely accept because we can change it. The serenity prayer calls for courage and action to follow through and make those changes.
Part of the difficulty is that the wisdom to know the difference also requires the wisdom to change your mind. Once people accept that something cannot be changed, then their serenity-producing mechanisms prevent them from reconsidering the evidence and recognizing that maybe it really can (and should) be changed.
If I was going to alter the serenity prayer, that's one thing I'd add. In Alicorn's version, that means the strength as a rationalist to distinguish what I can and cannot change, and to update those categorizations as new evidence arises.
Friends, help me build the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to continually update which is which based on the best available evidence.
In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
-- Bertrand Russell
(Quoted, in Italian translation, on p. 174 of Amanda Knox's appeal brief.)
A neighbor came to Nasrudin, asking to borrow his donkey. "It is out on loan," the teacher replied. At that moment, the donkey brayed loudly inside the stable. "But I can hear it bray, over there." "Whom do you believe," asked Nasrudin, "me or a donkey?"
-- old Sufi parable
The suggestion that designers should record their wrong decisions, to avoid having them repeated, met the following response: (McClure:) "Confession is good for the soul..." (d’Agapeyeff:) "...but bad for your career."
-- Proceedings of the 1968 NATO Conference on Software Engineering
Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing 'Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!' If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it.
"Because this is the Internet, every argument was spun in a centrifuge instantly and reduced down into two wholly enraged, radically incompatible contingents, as opposed to the natural gradient which human beings actually occupy." -Tycho, Penny Arcade
The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe," I'd have been lying!
-- René Magritte, on his painting The Treachery of Images depicting a pipe with "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe") written under it
I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything, and in many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the question might mean. I might think about a little, but if I can't figure it out, then I go to something else. But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me.
-- Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
Ralph: When's Bart coming back?
Lisa: He's not. He thought he was better than the laws of probability. Anyone else think he's better than the laws of probability?
(Nelson raises his hand.)
Lisa: Well, you're not!
— The Simpsons, Season 22, Episode 3, "MoneyBART"
If you state any two propositions abstractly enough, they will appear to be the same because you subsume them under the same generalization. But this does not mean they have anything to do with each other; it means only that you prefer not to see the differences.
William T. Powers
Proposition 1: All matter is composed of four elements: earth, water, air, and, fire, each having an unchanging essence, and the variety of the world resulting from their combinations.
Proposition 2: All matter is composed of about 90 elements (the cutoff depending on how many of the more unstable ones one counts), most of which are created out of hydrogen and helium in stars and their supernovas, and which, in combination, give rise to the different material substances we observe.
More abstract proposition that ignores the differences: all matter is composed of fundamental elements.
Erroneous conclusion: the ancients knew modern science!
Proposition 1: Six thousand years ago, God created the world in six days.
Proposition 2: Everything started with the Big Bang some billions of years ago.
Abstract proposition: The universe had a beginning.
Erroneous conclusion: God created the universe. Scientists just call it the Big Bang because they don't want to admit it was God.
ETA: Further example: anyone saying that all religions are fundamentally the same.
ETA: Proposition 1: Here is a hammer. It drives nails.
Proposition 2: Here is a screwdriver. It drives screws.
Abstract proposition: Here is a tool. It drives spiky metal fasteners.
Erroneous conclusion: A Manchester screwdriver.
"The conversation eventually turned to the fact that Palanpur farmers sow their winter crops several weeks after the date at which yields would be maximized. The farmers do not doubt that earlier planting would give them larger harvests, but no one, the farmer explained, is willing to be the first to plant, as the seeds on any lone plot would be quickly eaten by birds.
I asked if a large group of farmers, perhaps relatives, had ever agreed to sow earlier, all planting on the same day to minimize the losses. 'If we knew how to do that,” he said, looking up from his hoe at me, "we would not be poor.'"
--Microeconomics, pg 39, Samuel Bowles
What is required is less advice and more information. – Gerald M. Reaven
Found at The Healthy Skeptic.
Elphaba, where I'm from, we believe all sorts of things that aren't true. We call it - "history."
A man's called a traitor - or liberator.
A rich man's a thief - or philanthropist.
Is one a crusader - or ruthless invader?
It's all in which label is able to persist.
There are precious few at ease, with moral ambiguities. So we act as though they don't exist.
A real-world example of Parfit's Hitchhiker was prominently in the news recently, about firefighters that watched a guy's house burn down because didn't buy a subscription, even though he offered to pay when they arrived at the scene (which I assume means with all the penalties for serving a non-member, etc.). The parallel to PH became clear from this exchange with a writer on Salon:
...Yes, he offered to pay, while his house burned. I can’t prove what would have happened, but the FD would probably have had to sue him to gain full reimbursement. ...
A man
I assumed that the firefighters didn't accept the offer to pay them on the spot because that would send the signal to all the other houseowners that they could skip the regular fire department fee and then make an emergency payment when their house catches fire.
The essential problem is the way health insurance works in the US. The basic function of insurance is to protect people from strongly adverse events that would put them into financial distress. Insurance companies have to charge more than an actuarially fair rate for insurance in order to make a profit. This means that it is inefficient to run small or high probability expenses through an insurance scheme. The only reason this happens in the US is the tax deductibility of insurance and the mandates on coverage in some states. This turns health insurance into an inefficient health savings scheme.
Furthermore community rating produces very adverse outcomes. By preventing insurance companies from pricing insurance policies at a different rate for each customer (thus creating an expected profit from each customer), the insurance company has an incentive to refuse cover to high risk people (i.e. those that need insurance the most) or drive them away by making their life a misery every time they try to lodge a claim. To the extent they can't do this it drives low risk people out of the market, which leave them exposed if they suddenly need emergency health care (this is especially ...
...There is no point in saying that one should not doubt or one should believe. Just to say 'I believe' does not mean that you understand and see. When a student works on a mathematical problem, he comes to a stage beyond which he does not know how to proceed, and where he is in doubt and perplexity. As long as he has this doubt, he cannot proceed. If he wants to proceed, he must resolve this doubt. And there are ways of resolving that doubt. Just to say 'I believe', or 'I do not doubt' will certainly not solve the problem. To force oneself to believe and to
From a hacker news thread on the difficulty of finding or making food that's fast, cheap and healthy.
"Former poet laureate of the US, Charles Simic says, the secret to happiness begins with learning how to cook." -- pfarrell
Reply: "Well, I'm sure there's some economics laureate out there who says that the secret to efficiency begins with comparative advantage." -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
He was at once a man of thought and a man of action - a combination as rare as it is usually deplorable. The man of action in him might have gone far had he not been ruined at the outset by the man of thought.
-- Rafael Sabatini, "The Sea-hawk"
Marijuana is death on writers. I’ve seen several go that route. Typical behavior for a long time marijuana user is as follows. He gets a story idea. He tells his friends about it, and they think it’s wonderful. He then feels as if he’s written it, published it, cashed the check and collected the awards. So he never bothers to write it down.
Alcohol can have the same effect.
-- Larry Niven
I am momentarily breaking hiatus specifically to say that you don't even need marijuana or alcohol to suffer from this. The normal human capacity for self-delusion and need for self-esteem are more than deadly enough all by themselves.
Personally, I'm still struggling to accept this lesson: that it's not enough to be a smart person who has good ideas; you need to do something that actually works. It is, in its own way, a highly counterintuitive idea, much like this notion that plausibility isn't enough, and beliefs should actually predict experimental results. I keep wanting to protest that I was morally right. Well, say that I was. In order for that moral rightness to change anything, I still need a method that really actually works, not just morally works.
Who knows truly? Who here will declare whence it arose, whence this creation? The gods are subsequent to the creation of this. Who, then, knows whence it has come into being?
Whence this creation has come into being; whether it was made or not; he in the highest heaven is its surveyor. Surely he knows, or perhaps he knows not.
Not sure if this will qualify as a rationalist quote, but these are the last few lines from the Creation Hymn in the Rig Veda, the oldest of the Hindu sacred texts & estimated to be composed around 1100 BC. I like the note of un...
I do not want to itemize the various fallacies that are commonly offered in seeking to justify cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma. In brief, they mostly proceed by arguing that the Prisoner's Dilemma is really some other game in which cooperation is not irrational. Game Theorists do not object to some other game being analyzed: only to the analysis of some other game being offered as an analysis of the Prisoner's Dilemma.
Ken Binsmore - in a critique of Gauthier's "Morals by Agreement"
Is it through grandmother or grandfather that you descend from a monkey?
-- Samuel Wilberforce
Would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather, or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence, and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion – I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.
-- T. H. Huxley
From an 1860 Oxford evolution debate (Quoted from Games, Groups and Global Good)
(Interestingly, the author, Robert May, after pr...
...The idea that science can, and should, be run according to fixed and universal rules, is both unrealistic and pernicious. It is unrealistic, for it takes too simple a view of the talents of man and of the circumstances which encourage, or cause, their development. And it is pernicious, for the attempt to enforce the rules is bound to increase our professional qualifications at the expense of our humanity. In addition, the idea is detrimental to science, for it neglects the complex physical and historical conditions which influence scientific change. It m
My philosophy requires me to believe in the things I can see as well as those I can't see. When any faith contradicts truths that are plainly visible through the window, I believe it invalidates itself.
Serion Ironcroft
I don't know - Philip K. Dick seemed to do all right. And I heard of at least one schizophrenic who tried to record the voices in her head on a tape and figured out they weren't real that way.
(I was amazed this was not on the first three pages of a google search of the site.)
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that."
Richard Feynman in cargo cult science.
Kids, you tried your best, and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.
-- Homer Simpson
Freedom is not an immutable fact graven in nature and on the heart of man. It is not inherent in man or in society, and it is meaningless to write it into law. The mathematical, physical, biological, sociological, and psychological sciences reveal nothing but necessities and determinisms on all sides. As a matter of fact, reality consists in overcoming and transcending these determinisms.
...Freedom is not static but dynamic; not a vested interest, but a prize continually to be won. The moment man stops and resigns himself, he becomes subject to determinism. He is most enslaved when he thinks he is comfortably settled in freedom.
Jacques Ellul, "The Technological Society"
The new man of science must not think that the "inquisition of nature is in any part interdicted or forbidden." Nature must be ... put "in constraint" and "moulded" by the mechanical arts. The "searchers and spies of nature" are to discover "her" plots and secrets.
I'm above average in talent, but where I think I excel is psychotic drive. All I need is for somebody to say I can't do something and this crazy switch inside me makes me attack whatever I'm doing. Psychotic drive is where I excel over people that are probably more naturally gifted.
-- Will Smith
I may not be smart enough to debate you point-for-point on this, but I have the feeling about 60% of what you say is crap.
David Letterman, To Bill O'Reilly, in discussion about the supposed War on Christmas, as quoted in "In Letterman appearance, O'Reilly repeated false claim that school changed 'Silent Night' lyrics", Media Matters for America, (2006-01-04) (From Wikiquote)
"[H]e who commands thirty legions is the most learned of all"
Favorinus explaining why he admitted that Emperor Hadrian had won their debate.
"Won't you stop citing laws to us who have our swords by our sides?" Pompey
....research is after all, asking the universe silly questions and getting silly answers until neither question nor answer are silly any more
From a discussion of authodidacticism which may be of general interest.
Some wisdom on warm fuzzies: http://www.pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF162-Executive_Decision.jpg
[Not a quote, but doesn't seem suitable for a discussion article.]
"If we are to achieve results never before accomplished, we must expect to employ methods never before attempted." --Sir Francis Bacon
From a TED talk about the remarkable low cost inventions being developed in India
..."...It is a severe prescription. And yet now, as I grin broadly and wave to the gawkers, it occurs to me that the cold rationality of his approach may be only a surface feature and that, when linked to genuine rewards, even the chilliest of systems can have a certain visceral appeal.
By projecting the achievement of extreme memory back along the forgetting curve, by provably linking the distant future — when we will know so much — to the few minutes we devote to studying today, Wozniak has found a way to condition his temperament along with his memory
[W]hat theory of morals can ever serve any useful purpose, unless it can show, by a particular detail, that all the duties, which it recommends, are also the true interest of each individual?
...[Sir Humphrey demonstrates how public surveys can reach opposite conclusions] Sir Humphrey Appleby: Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the rise in crime among teenagers?a Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Do you think there is lack of discipline and vigorous training in our Comprehensive Schools? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Do you think young people welcome some structure and leadership in their lives? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Do they respond to a challenge? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Might yo
...[Sir Humphrey demonstrates how public surveys can reach opposite conclusions]
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the rise in crime among teenagers? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Do you think there is lack of discipline and vigorous training in our Comprehensive Schools? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Do you think young people welcome some structure and leadership in their lives? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Do they respond to a challenge? Bernard Woolley: Yes. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Might you b
The meaning of life, as explained by a 12-year-old girl.
(The visuals are required to get the joke.)
"Desire is the essence of man insofar as it is conceived as determined to any action by any one of its modifications."
Baruch Spinoza
If capitalism is the evolutionary engine that leads to AI, then the advent AI cannot be separated from the larger economic consequences of AI. In my judgment, the single most realistic way to design God-AI that is friendly is to evolve such AI directly out the economy that succeeds human capitalism, i.e. as an economic servant to human needs. While this is not a guarantee of friendly AI in itself, any attempt to make AI friendly purely on the basis of absolute, unchanging principles is doomed to ultimate failure because this is exactly how human intelligence, at its best, does not work.
Mitchell Heisman, Suicide Note p315
"Everything has been said, yet few have taken notice of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not"
Raoul Vaneigem
Desire is the essence of man insofar as it is conceived as determined to any action by any one of its modifications.
Baruch Spinoza
This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.