A remarkable, glorious achievement is just what a long series of unremarkable, unglorious tasks looks like from far away.
— Tim Urban (I think) of Wait But Why on How To Beat Procrastination
Thanks. I just read the article, so I guess I was assuming it was new and wouldn't have been quoted.
snip
Sometimes I think that I'm surrounded by idiots everywhere. Then I remind myself that that's exactly what an idiot would think.
Him: We can't go back. We don't understand everything yet.
Her: "Everything" is a little ambitious. We barely understand anything.
Him: Yeah. But that's what the first part of understanding everything looks like.
Randall Munroe - Time
Followed by:
Him: We walked along the sea for days and we didn't learn anything. Up here we're learning lots.
Her: We haven't learned why the sea rose.
Him: But maybe we were never going to.
Him: There's food and water here. I don't want to go all the way back down, walk along the sea for a few more days, then have to turn around.
Him: Maybe the sea is too big to understand. We can't answer every question.
Her: No, But I think we can answer any question.
A term that means almost anything means almost nothing. Such a term is a convenient device for those who have almost nothing to say.
Richard Mitchell - Less Than Words Can Say
Reality is one honey badger. It don’t care. About you, about your thoughts, about your needs, about your beliefs. You can reject reality and substitute your own, but reality will roll on, eventually crushing you even as you refuse to dodge it. The best you can hope for is to play by reality’s rules and use them to your benefit.
Mark Crislip - Science-Based Medicine
If you cannot examine your thoughts, you have no choice but to think them, however silly they may be.
Richard Mitchell - Less Than Words Can Say
There's something here that doesn't make sense... Let's go and poke it with a stick.
The Doctor - Doctor Who
On the presentation of science in the news:
...It's not that clean energy will never happen -- it totally will. It's just that it won't come from a wild-haired scientist running out of his basement screaming, "Eureka! I've discovered how to get limitless clean energy from common seawater!" Instead, it will come from thousands of scientists publishing unreadable studies with titles like "Assessing Effectiveness and Costs of Asymmetrical Methods of Beryllium Containment in Gen 4 Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors When Factoring for Cromulence Deca
I don't understand why we can't simply build an LFTR. I can't find anything online about why we can't just build an LFTR. I get the serious impression that what we need here is like 0.1 wild-haired scientists, 3 wild-haired nuclear engineers, 40 normal nuclear engineers, and sane politicians. And that China has sane politicians but for some reason can't produce, find, or hire the sort of wild-haired engineers who just went ahead and built a molten-salt thorium reactor at Oak Ridge in the 1960s.
From the alt-text in the above-linked comic:
Corollary: The most prolific people in the world suck 99% of the time.
The example in the comic is not a good one. Of the choices on the board, E being proportional to mc^2 is the only option where the units match. You only need to have that one idea to save yourself the trouble of having lots of other ideas.
From the alt-text in the above-linked comic:
Corollary: The most prolific people in the world suck 99% of the time.
The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
Edit: another one captured by an old thread!
Every time you read something that mentions brain chemicals or brain scans, rewrite the sentence without the sciencey portions. “Hate makes people happy.” “Women feel closer to people after sex.” “Music makes people happy.” If the argument suddenly seems way less persuasive, or the news story way less ground-breaking… well. Someone’s doing something shady.
Also from the review:
A pacemaker malfunction isn't automatically fatal. In most cases the patient's heart will still beat, although with an abnormal rhythm. The severity of a pacemaker problem depends on the type of malfunction as well as the severity of the patient's condition. EM interference can cause problems, but major problems are rare considering the amount of EM interference pacemaker patients are exposed to. Pacemakers are designed to minimize these problems. It's hard to believe that dozens of pacemaker patients with various heart conditions and different makes and models of pacemakers would simultaneously die from microwave exposure.
On scientists trying to photograph an atom's shadow:
...the idea sounds stupid. But scientists don't care about sounding stupid, which is what makes them not stupid, and they did it anyway.
Luke McKinney - 6 Microscopic Images That Will Blow Your Mind
The remark included the following as a footnote:
Even top-notch engineers and scientists will speculate wildly when they're off-the-record. We define on-the-record as those times when their written or oral communications are likely to be taken seriously and directly attributed to the scientist or engineer making them. Surely answering a direct question posed by a general would fall into this category.
...It seems that 32 Bostonians have simultaneously dropped dead in a ten-block radius for no apparent reason, and General Purcell wants to know if it was caused by a covert weapon. Of course, the military has been put in charge of the investigation and everything is hush-hush.
Without examining anything, Keyes takes about five seconds to surmise that the victims all died from malfunctioning pacemakers and the malfunction was definitely not due to a secret weapon. We're supposed to be impressed, but our experience with real scientists and engineers indicates t
The remark included the following as a footnote:
Even top-notch engineers and scientists will speculate wildly when they're off-the-record. We define on-the-record as those times when their written or oral communications are likely to be taken seriously and directly attributed to the scientist or engineer making them. Surely answering a direct question posed by a general would fall into this category.
Thanks. I didn't wanna post this much, but I was rather too attached to the passage to cut anything else out. Helps to have other eyes.
...But when we have these irrational beliefs, these culturally coded assumptions, running so deep within our community and movement, how do we actually change that? How do we get people to further question themselves when they’ve already become convinced that they’re a rational person, a skeptic, and have moved on from irrationality, cognitive distortion and bias?
Well I think what we need to do is to change the fundamental structure and values of skepticism. We need to build our community and movement around slightly different premises.
As it has stood in the
In every branch of knowledge the progress is proportional to the amount of facts on which to build, and therefore to the facility of obtaining data.
— James Clerk Maxwell
"Clear language engenders clear thought, and clear thought is the most important benefit of education." - Richard Mitchell, The Graves of Academe
Yes, you're right. You can defeat the paradox on mathematical grounds, without having to appeal to physics. But Zeno could have defeated it on his own without using any math, simply by realizing that his metaphor was not paying rent.
The telling of this paradox I most remember says, "Between point A and point B, there are an infinite number of points through which the arrow must pass. So it must take the arrow an infinite amount of time to pass through those points. How can the arrow get from point A to point B?"
This is the problem with mapping a mathematical metaphor onto reality: it doesn't always work. If the metaphor disagrees with the observation that the arrow does get from point A to point B, then it's not doing useful work.
In fact, modern physics tells us there is a s...
...Who first called Reason sweet, I don't know. I suspect that he was a man with very few responsibilities, no children to rear, and no payroll to meet. An anchorite with heretical tendencies, maybe, or the idle youngest son of a wealthy Athenian. The dictates of Reason are often difficult to figure out, rarely to my liking, and profitable only by what seems a happy but remarkably unusual accident. Mostly, Reason brings bad news, and bad news of the worst sort, for, if it is truly the word of Reason, there is no denying it or weaseling out of its demands wit
Good point, and I didn't think of that when I said I couldn't see making your beliefs pay rent was of any use here. Of course, a Himba scientist and a Western scientist might still say, "We know the wavelength of the light diffracting off the sky. But is it blue or black?" This may just be a result of how an algorithm feels from inside.
I was sure that I had picked out the different square, only to find I was wrong. Looking back, I can't see any difference, really (and I suspect the original one I saw was due to a shadow on the screen). Nevertheless, the scientists do say that there is a difference between the square the Himba picked and the others. Some people can see weird things, like the polarization of light, so it's not a stretch to imagine they are more sensitive to different aspects of light than we are, and less sensitive to things like hue. I really wish the clip explained what the difference they were seeing was.
If the Himba were to design a color wheel, I wonder what it would look like.
While I was writing this post, I changed where I was going with the map/territory thing, and that led to me confusing myself. I'm not sure what I was thinking originally, other than that it seemed quite significant at the time.
True. New words help to highlight new distinctions, but you have to have a distinction for the word to apply to before it is useful. Otherwise, it either refers to nothing at all or the same distinction that another word illustrates.
Asking what color the sky is may show cultural differences (for example, many many cultures use the same words for blue and green, though they're perfectly capable of pointing out the difference between the two), but the demonstration with the colored squares suggests something different is going on with the Himba.
So the Himba ...
There was an atheist picnic at the park where I work. They were celebrating the rapture that was supposed to take place back in May (needless to say, they weren't too surprised when the rapture was called off). I got to speak with a few people, but most of the meetup groups were rather far for me to drive to on a regular basis.
Thanks for the links. I'm located in the DFW metroplex, but I could make a drive to a meetup elsewhere once in a while.
My name's Joshua Bennett, and I also came here after reading the Harry Potter fanfiction. I made a commitment to pursuing rationality after reading Richard Mitchell's book The Gift of Fire, and seeing even a fictional example of applied rational thinking got me excited. I know that, despite my best efforts, I am a terribly irrational person; I want to fix that.
In the past year or so I've thrown off (among other things) my fundamentalist Christian beliefs in pursuit of truth, and I now call myself an atheist and anti-theist. When people ask how I lost my fa...
Joel Spolsky