Best of Rationality Quotes
The introduction of suitable abstractions is our only mental aid to organize and master complexity.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
I'll start incorporating crazy counter-intuitive notions about the nature of the universe when the cold implacable hand of the universe starts shoving them down my throat, not before!
-- PZ Myers
A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere.
-- Groucho Marx
We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
Richard Feynman
You use a metaphor to describe some concept. The metaphor isn’t the thing you describe - it’s just a tool that you use. But someone takes the metaphor, and runs with it, making arguments that are built entirely on metaphor, but which bear no relation to the real underlying concept. And they believe that whatever conclusions they draw from the metaphor must, therefore, apply to the original concept.
— Mark Chu-Carroll, Metaphorical Crankery: a bad metaphor is like a steaming pile of …
I just came across this and thought it was a pretty funny dialogue: "Reality is that which does not go away upon reprogramming." (Check the first 4 comments here: Chatbot Debates Climate Change Deniers on Twitter so You Don’t Have to)
This is of course a paraphrase borrowed from Philip K. Dick's famous statement:
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. It can convince you that an argument this idiotic and this sloppy is actually profound. It can convince you to publicly make a raging jackass out of yourself, by rambling on and on, based on a stupid misunderstanding of a simplified, informal, intuitive description of something complex.
— Mark Chu-Carroll, The Danger When You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know : Good Math, Bad Math
Scooping the Loop Snooper
an elementary proof of the undecidability of the halting problem
by Geoffrey Pullum
No program can say what another will do. Now, I won't just assert that, I'll prove it to you: I will prove that although you might work till you drop, you can't predict whether a program will stop.
Imagine we have a procedure called P that will snoop in the source code of programs to see there aren't infinite loops that round and around; and P prints the word "Fine!" if no looping is found.
You feed in your code, and the input it needs, and then P takes them both and it studies and reads and computes whether things will all end as they should (as opposed to going loopy the way that they could).
Well, the truth is that P cannot possibly be, because if you wrote it and gave it to me, I could use it to set up a logical bind that would shatter your reason and scramble your mind.
Here's the trick I would use—and it's simple to do. I'd define a procedure—we'll name the thing Q— that would take any program and call P (of course!) to tell if it looped, by reading the source;
And if so, Q would simply print "Loop!" and then stop; but if no, Q would go right back up to the top, and start off again, looping endlessly back, till the universe dies and is frozen and black.
And this program called Q wouldn't stay on the shelf; I would run it, and (fiendishly) feed it itself. What behavior results when I do this with Q? When it reads its own source code, just what will it do?
If P warns of loops, Q will print "Loop!" and quit; yet P is supposed to speak truly of it. So if Q's going to quit, then P should say, "Fine!"— which will make Q go back to its very first line!
No matter what P would have done, Q will scoop it: Q uses P's output to make P look stupid. If P gets things right then it lies in its tooth; and if it speaks falsely, it's telling the truth!
I've created a paradox, neat as can be— and simply by using your putative P. When you assumed P you stepped into a snare; Your assumptions have led you right into my lair.
So, how to escape from this logical mess? I don't have to tell you; I'm sure you can guess. By reductio, there cannot possibly be a procedure that acts like the mythical P.
You can never discover mechanical means for predicting the acts of computing machines. It's something that cannot be done. So we users must find our own bugs; our computers are losers!
I came across this yesterday. The blog might also be worth a look, see for example 'A Brief History of Grammar'.
I propose that answers to questions of human value can be visualized on a “moral landscape” — a space of real and potential outcomes whose peaks correspond to states of the greatest possible wellbeing and whose valleys represent the deepest depths of suffering. Different ways of thinking and behaving — different cultural practices, ethical codes, modes of government, etc. — translate into movements across this landscape. Such changes can be analyzed objectively on many levels — ranging from biochemistry to economics — but they have their crucial realization as states and capacities of the human brain.
— Sam Harris, Edge: THE NEW SCIENCE OF MORALITY
Edit: It was of course Sam Harris who said this.
Most of the founding Zetas members–the original 40–were trained elite soldiers who received instruction in radio communications, counter-insurgency and drug-interdiction. But the Army forgot to add a few ethics lessons into the education mix. And that was a big fucking mistake.
There's no scientific reason to believe that we have free will. There's no buffer zone that we've found in any of the physical laws of how the universe works to make room for free will. There's non-determinism; but there's not choice. Choice is the introduction of something, dare I say it, supernatural: some influence that isn't part of the physical interaction, which allows some clusters of matter and energy to decide how they'll collapse a probabilistic waveform into a particular reality.
Dawkins and the Intelligent Design proponents are entirely in agreement--and, I think, entirely in error--on this crucial point: They both believe that complexity cannot arise ab initio. For the Intelligent Design people, complexity can arise only by design; for Dawkins, complexity can arise only from simplicity. But if either of these conclusions were correct, it would apply equally well to arithmetic. Not even religious people believe that arithmetic was designed by God, and not even Dawkins believes that arithmetic evolved through natural selection. Therefore Dawkins and his opponents are equally wrong.
This is a bit long for a rationality quote and isn't really a quote but short enough and worth the read: The most poetic and convincing argument for striving for posthumanity (via aleph.se).