Best of Rationality Quotes
From a href="http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/07/the_practical_limits_of_knowledge.php#more"Ta Nehisi Coates/a:
blocikquoteBut I distrusted the whole game. Intuitively, I wonder about the honesty and proficiency of writers who opine on everything from Iran to education to drug policy to health care to cap and trade to race. Perhaps these people simply have more brains than me, but the catch-all nature of punditry, the need to speak on every policy topic as though one were an expert, is exactly what I hope to avoid./blockquote
Are the winners the only ones actually writing the history? We need to disabuse ourselves of this habit of saying things because they sound good. ----- Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates runs a popular culture, black issues, and history blog with a very strong rationalist approach.
What is required is less advice and more information. – Gerald M. Reaven
Found at The Healthy Skeptic.
"In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined."
Whats wrong with identifying with sports teams
A very funny video comparing identifying with a team to assuming you were there in your favorite movies.
Isn't it interesting how many of us will spend a lot of money on clothes (or for that matter, other valued possessions) we rarely use-- that beautiful cocktail dress or sharp looking shirt. But in our every day, we much prefer to wear clothes that are years old, beat up, and probably cost little when we bought them. Yes, the comfort factor plays heavily into this, but recently when I came home wearing a very nice suit and tie and couldn't WAIT to tear them off and change into some old jeans and a ten year old sweatshirt, I suddenly thought something's odd about this. An expensive suit, or a fountain pen you only use to write your name occasionally, a new car you're often worried about driving because someone might scratch it, the crazy-expensive shoes you never wear in bad weather, the fabulously delicate silk lingerie you haven't worn since buying it six months ago... the list is surprisingly long. In other words for many, we continue to pay lots of money for things that make us uncomfortable, worried, wary or worse.
We must be careful who we let define what is sustainable.
Jason Stoddard in Shine, an anthology of near-future optimistic science fiction.
What many people believe to be concentration is merely the act of thinking about concentration. A student who is told to concentrate probably will instinctively express a serious countenance and then reflect on the need to concentrate.
--Eliot Z. Cohen, The Four Emotions of Tai Chi, The Ultimate Guide to Tai Chi.
“Anyone who understands systems will know immediately that optimizing parts is not a good route to system excellence,”
From memory of recently seeing excerpts from The Polymath: The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman:
Delany spent a while living in a hotel which mostly catered to transsexuals, and he found it unnerving to not know what gender the person he was taking to was. He speculated that wanting to be sure about gender was hard-wired.
After about five weeks, he realized he'd taken elevator rides with people of non-obvious gender, and it didn't bother him at all.
In order to ask a question you must already know most of the answer. —Answerer, in Ask a Foolish Question in the anthology Citizen in Space by Robert Sheckley
Found here
"Whereas the howto is, by definition, addressed to a lay audience, it currently takes an expert on howtos to know which title in the tangled mass will deliver the goods." ---Dwight MacDonald, 1954
Cited here in an article about recalls of dangerously inaccurate how-to books.
To learn to write well is to pursue a connection between your facility with language and the content, intellectual and otherwise, of your character. I do not mean by this that people who cannot write well have no character or that writing is the only way in which people can show their character. I mean, simply, that you cannot write well if you do not make this connection, because not to make it is to fail, as a writer, in holding yourself accountable for the quality of your own thinking. Or, to put it another way, it is to fail to take your own intellect seriously. As a teacher, primarily of writing but also of literature, I measure my success not in how many A’s or B’s I give out—since grades reflect the surface of learning, not necessarily its quality—but in whether my students have begun to take on the responsibility not simply of having ideas, but of having the audacity, because we lie to our students if we do not acknowledge that it takes courage, to attempt to communicate those ideas in words compelling enough to command a reader’s attention above and beyond the fact that they were written in response to a classroom assignment…. As writers, we exercise this responsibility—we hold ourselves accountable—most obviously through the process of revision. In order for revision to be meaningful, however, in order for revision even to be possible, a writer must have a sufficient stake in what she or he is attempting to revise that the work of seeing it anew feels both worthwhile and necessary.
"It is one thing to show a man that he is in error,| and another to put him in possession of the truth." (John Locke)
When the means are autonomous, they are deadly
One of the points Lesley makes is that the idea of ‘nature’ is actually a cultural construct. What do we mean when we say something is ‘natural’? I think that, in general, we mean that it hasn’t been altered or intervened with in anyway. Which is completely impossible. Everything we do changes our body in some way. Not doing something changes our body in some other way. Everything you eat becomes a part of you. And if you don’t eat, well, that has other implications. Breathing air, drinking water, wearing clothes, walking, driving, sitting, standing, sleeping, all of these things alter the body in some way. The body is always in flux, and we can’t live without taking in things from our environment, things which change us. An unaltered body is, by definition, not alive. (This is highly influenced by a presentation I recently attended by Rachael Kendrick on metabolism, and while I’m sure I’m this is an obscene misappropriation of her argument, I found it very interesting. Kendrick isn’t always entirely fat-positive, but she does an excellent critique of medial science and obesity epidemic discourse.)
The ideal ‘natural’ body is also frequently invoked in anti-fat rhetoric, particularly in the figure of the ‘caveman’. In fact, some people call for a return to this way of eating (if not this way of living). The idea is that the human body is ideally suited to a palaeolithic lifestyle and that our digestive systems work best if we eat only foods that were around 2 million years ago, and avoid all that new-fangled stuff like ‘grains’ and ‘beans’. This idea basically harnesses the discourse of evolution in the service of what amounts to a creationist argument. It posits that the ideal human design was arrived at somewhere in the deep and distant past, and has remained constant ever since. It denies evolution as an ongoing process, and most importantly, ignores the fact that the caveman body was as much a product of its environment as the modern human body is.
I think "natural" can work as a hypothesis for making things better, but it's just a hypothesis, not a source of reliable truth.
I hold that information is not neutral. Never give a (fallible) human sterile information. He will not ignore it. These models led to an increase of risk in society, period. The providers are responsible.
From Give Well:
I think the distinction between “interesting story/hypothesis” and “good case for action” is also chronically underrecognized in the world of giving.
I don't think the problem is limited to the world of giving.
An attitude of nonjudgment, patience, and compassion entices clients to let down their defenses in order to get in touch with emotional charges they have been holding in their bodies. If practitioners try to break through the resistances -- to fight with the guardian -- clients are put in a no-win situation. They then have no choice but to fight back or to shut down the part of themselves that is in charge of protection, in which case the results might be catastrophic. The guardian is betrayed by the very part of the self that needs protection, propagating a situation that is already the origin of symptoms a person is experiencing.
--- Healing from Within with Chi Nei Tsung by Gilles Marin.
Chi Nei Tsung is a Taoist system of abdominal massage. In addition to the specific subject, it may be of interest to LW because it's an example of how far careful attention to qualia can go.
In re emotional charges held in the body: Marin might take this farther into metabolism, but here's at least a partial non-woo explanation. Emotions are partly expressed through the muscles. If you are determined to not show an emotion, you have to tighten the musclesused to express it. For example, not laughing or not crying requires tightening your chest and your face.
This is probably no big deal if you're doing it some of the time in some particular situations, but if you believe those emotions may never be shown (or never shown in response to particular thoughts), then the tension becomes stabilized because you never know when those thoughts might happen.
....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.
For the young who want to by Marge Piercy
The poem is mostly about not being recognized as having a magical ability to do things until after you've succeeded. I'm just posting the link because it's more trouble than it's worth to make the line breaks show up properly.
“I was forced into a measure that no one ever adopts voluntarily: I was impelled to think. God, was it difficult! The moving about of great secret trunks. In the first exhausted halt, I wondered whether I had ever thought.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, found here.
With CJ Cherryh's Foreigner novels, I haven't had that sort of good fortune. However, I think I'm beginning to have a clue to at least one of the aspects of that grammar. What she does, leading up over a number of pages to those sections that in other writers would be identified as infodumps, is carefully build the foundation for a question -- and then, when she writes that section, she answers that question. Which means that by that time the reader is so eager for the information that it doesn't come across as an infodump at all.
There aint no such thing as government interference.
--Robert Anton Wilson
Discussion of how not to get lost in the woods