Best of Rationality Quotes
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
[...] Probability theory can tell us how our hypothesis fares relative to the alternatives that we have specified; it does not have the creative imagination to invent new hypotheses for us.
-- E.T. Jaynes, Probability Theory
The reason you feel most comfortable with a job (unless, like me, you're in the minority - a job would destroy my psyche) is that you've been brainwashed by many years of school, socialization and practice. I pick the word brainwashed carefully, because it's more than training or acclimation. It's something that's been taught to you by people who needed you to believe it was the way things are supposed to be.
-- Seth Godin
Everyone who takes basic statistics has it drilled into them that "correlation is not causation." (When I took psych. 1, the professor said he hoped that, if he were to come to us on our death-beds and prompt us with "Correlation is," we would all respond "not causation.") This is a problem, because one can infer correlation from data, and would like to be able to make inferences about causation. There are typically two ways out of this. One is to perform an experiment, preferably a randomized double-blind experiment, to eliminate accidental sources of correlation, common causes, etc. That's nice when you can do it, but impossible with supernovae, and not even easy with people. The other out is to look for correlations, say that of course they don't equal causations, and then act as if they did anyway.
-- Cosma Shalizi on Graphical Models
Let’s consider what an economist would do if he wanted to study horses. [...] What would he do? He’d go to his study and think, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’ And he’d come up with the conclusion that he’d maximize his utility.
-- Ronald Coase, quoting Ely Devons
The longer, less soundbite-y quote is also interesting:
Now what’s wrong with this situation? What’s wrong with economists acting in this sort of way? I’ll tell you a tale about an English economist, Ely Devons. I was at a conference and he said, “Let’s consider what an economist would do if he wanted to study horses.” He said, “What would he do? He’d go to his study and think, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’ And he’d come up with the conclusion that he’d maximize his utility.” That wouldn’t take us very far if we were interested in horses, but we aren’t really interested in horses at all. What Devons said was, I think, part of the problem, but not the whole of it. I think it’s not really the most important objection – the lack of realism.
What I think is important is that economists don’t study the working of the economic system. That is to say, they don’t think they’re studying any system with all its interrelationships. It is as if a biologist studied the circulation of the blood without the body. It is a pretty gory thought, but it wouldn’t get you anywhere. You wouldn’t be able to discuss the circulation of the blood in a sensible way. And that’s what happens in economics. In fact the economic system is extremely complicated. You have large firms and small firms, differentiated firms and narrowly specialized firms, vertically integrated firms and those single-stage firms; you have in addition non-profit organizations and government entities – and all bound together, all operating to form the total system. But how one part impinges on the other, how they are interrelated, how it actually works – that is not what people study. What is wrong is the failure to look at the system as the object of study.
Our actions generally satisfy us: we recognize that they are in the main coherent, and that they make appropriate, well-timed contributions to our projects as we understand them. So we safely assume them to be the product of processes that are reliably sensitive to ends and means. That is, they are rational, in one sense of that word. But that does not mean they are rational in a narrower sense: the product of serial reasoning.
-- Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained
Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement / Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément
Rough translation: "What is well understood can be told clearly, and words to express it should come easily."
ETA: it is worth pondering the converse; just because something rolls off the tongue doesn't mean it's well understood. It could be that it's only well-rehearsed.
What the quote is aimed at is work of a supposedly high intellectual caliber, which just so happens to be couched in impenetrable jargon. Far more often, that is in fact evidence of muddled thought, not that the material is "beyond me".
New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled, the humiliating question arises, "Why then are you not taking part in them?"
-- H. G. Wells
A household is a business given over to caring for small, temporarily insane people.
-- Clark Glymour, What Went Wrong: Reflections on Science by Observation
Longer version:
A household is a business given over to caring for small, temporarily insane people, a business subject to cash-flow problems, endless legal harassments, run by people who expect to have sex with each other, who occupy the same space, and who go nuts when either party has sex with anyone else. Once in marriage, a lot of people try to get out as fast as religious tradition, poverty, or devotion to children permits.
(I really like the short one for "small, temporarily insane people", but the one above will tickle many a LW reader's funny bone.)
Via CRS.
Reasoning is generally seen as a mean to improve knowledge and make better decisions. Much evidence, however, shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests rethinking the function of reasoning. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade.
-- Hugo Mercier Dan Sperber, Why do humans reason? (PDF)
(Further comment on the paper turned into a full post)
The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.
-- Daniel Dennett
Interestingly, my memory of the quote was corrupted, until I retrieved it to post here; I thought he'd said "harshest efforts"; perhaps owing to contamination from the quote That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
-- G.K. Chesterton, quoted in Jonah Lehrer's How we decide
(In the section which discusses psychopaths and notes that the "rational" part of their brains appears to be undamaged: the human brain relies on the circuitry of emotion to form moral decisions, or at any rate that's what's broken in psychopaths.)
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome return of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
-- Mark Twain
The following dialogue is excerpted from Chapter 16 of "Becoming a Technical Leader", by Jerry Weinberg (warmly recommended). It has been edited out of the post Kaj Sotala and I are working on, but I think it's worth having it somewhere around.
Some background: Jerry is interviewing Edrie, a (presumably somewhat fictionalized) senior woman engineer at a client of his. Edrie has just butted horns with a male peer over his conception of what makes a good technical leader: "we have nothing against competent unmarried women, like you, but...". But upon finding herself alone with Jerry, Edrie acknowledges that her colleague does have a point, taking Jerry somewhat by surprise.
- J: "Why do you think fathers are such good leadership material?" [...]
- E: "That's easy. It's a matter of power conversion".
- J: "Power conversion?"
- E:"Yes, you know. The ability to convert one form of power into another that you value more. Like converting water power from a stream into electric light for your house."
- J: "What does that have to do with married men being better leaders?"
- "Well, in this country, married men have an advantage over single men. They have power over a woman, which they convert into services that support them in their work. Single men have much more work to do just taking care of themselves, so they are at a disadvantage." [...]
- J: "A lot of men would see it differently. They would say that the married woman is converting her sexual power over the man into money power - a guaranteed lifetime of support." [...]
- E:"There's no contradiction in both people using power at the same time and converting it into something they both want more."
Throughout relativity, both in its original, classical form and in the attempts to create a quantum form of it, clocks play a vital role, yet nobody really asks what they are. A distinguished relativist once told me that a clock is "a device that the National Bureau of Standards confirms keeps time to a good accuracy". I felt that, as a theorist, he should be telling them, not the other way around.
-- Julian Barbour, The End of Time
-- Bill Venables