Best of Rationality Quotes
I would note that orthodox statistics and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory are just two different manifestations of a single intellectual disease, closely related to logical positivism, which has debilitated every area of theoretical science in this century. The symptoms of this disease are the loss of conceptual discrimination; i.e., the inability to distinguish between probability and frequency, between reality and our knowledge of reality, between meaning and method of testing, etc.
-- E.T. Jaynes, summarizing all of Eliezer's posts
Do stuff, read stuff, think and make up your mind. Have you actually selected an entity which you think of as "objective"? This is like having a slave port in your brain.
-- yosefk
Who stops you from inventing waterproof gunpowder?
-- Kozma Prutkov
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"
“The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.” -- Daniel Boorstin
A saint may fight against a knave. Alternatively, two knaves may fight. A dragon may be slain by St. George, or by another dragon. In the former case you are left with St. George, who deserves a reward for slaying his dragon. In the latter case you are faced with a dragon, which did only what dragons do. He was probably the bigger of the two, and now he is even bigger than that.
-- Mencius Moldbug, teaching us how to argue any point persuasively. (In this example he's talking about the Allies vs Nazi Germany.)
-- Winston Churchill