Best of Rationality Quotes

129 points Rain 03 August 2010 12:56:46AM Permalink

Personally, I've been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I'm willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.

-- Patrick Nielsen Hayden

110 points [deleted] 02 May 2013 03:48:24AM Permalink

"The spatial anomaly has interacted with the tachyonic radiation in the nebula, it's interfering with our sensors. It's impossible to get a reading."

"There's no time - we'll have to take the ship straight through it!"

"Captain, I advise against this course of action. I have calculated the odds against our surviving such an action at three thousand, seven hundred and forty-five to one."

"Damn the odds, we've got to try... wait a second. Where, exactly, did you get that number from?"

"I hardly think this is the time for-"

"No. No, fuck you, this is exactly the time. The fate of the galaxy is at stake. Trillions of lives are hanging in the balance. You just pulled four significant digits out of your ass, I want to see you show your goddamn work."

"Well, I used the actuarial data from the past fifty years, relating to known cases of ships passing through nebulae that are interacting with spatial anomalies. There have been approximately two million such incidents reported, with only five hundred and forty-two incidents in which the ship in question survived intact."

"And did you at all take into account that ship building technology has improved over the past fifty years, and that ours is not necessarily an average ship?"

"Indeed I did, Captain. I weighted the cases differently based on how recent they were, and how close the ship in question was in build to our own. For example, one of the incidents with a happy ending was forty-seven years ago, but their ship was a model roughly five times our size. As such, I counted the incident as having twenty-four percent of the relevance of a standard case."

"But what of our ship's moxie? Can you take determination and drive and the human spirit into account?"

"As a matter of fact I can, Captain. In our three-year history together, I have observed that both you and this ship manage to beat the odds with a measurable regularity. To be exact, we tend to succeed twenty-four point five percent more often than the statistics would otherwise indicate - and, in fact, that number jumps to twenty-nine point two percent specifically in cases where I state the odds against our success to three significant digits or greater. I have already taken that supposedly 'unknowable' factor into account with my calculations."

"And you expect me to believe that you've memorized all these case studies and performed this ridiculously complicated calculation in your head within the course of a normal conversation?"

"Yes. With all due respect to your species, I am not human. While I freely admit that you do have greater insight into fields such as emotion, interpersonal relations, and spirituality than I do, in the fields of memory and calculation, I am capable of feats that would be quite simply impossible for you. Furthermore, if I may be perfectly frank, the entire purpose of my presence on the bridge is to provide insights such as these to help facilitate your command decisions. If you're not going to heed my advice, why am I even here?"

"Mm. And we're still sitting at three thousand seven hundred to one against?"

"Three thousand, seven hundred and forty five to one."

"Well, shit. Well, let's go around, then."

The Vulcan your Vulcan could sound like if he wasn't made of straw, I guess? Link

93 points RichardKennaway 02 February 2011 01:07:05AM Permalink

At home there was a game that all the parents played with their children. It was called, What Did You See? Mara was about Dann’s age when she was first called into her father’s room one evening, where he sat in his big carved and coloured chair. He said to her, ‘And now we are going to play a game. What was the thing you liked best today?’

At first she chattered: ‘I played with my cousin . . . I was out with Shera in the garden . . . I made a stone house.’ And then he had said, ‘Tell me about the house.’ And she said, ‘I made a house of the stones that come from the river bed.’ And he said, ‘Now tell me about the stones.’ And she said, ‘They were mostly smooth stones, but some were sharp and had different shapes.’ ‘Tell me what the stones looked like, what colour they were, what did they feel like.’

And by the time the game ended she knew why some stones were smooth and some sharp and why they were different colours, some cracked, some so small they were almost sand. She knew how rivers rolled stones along and how some of them came from far away. She knew that the river had once been twice as wide as it was now. There seemed no end to what she knew, and yet her father had not told her much, but kept asking questions so she found the answers in herself. Like, ‘Why do you think some stones are smooth and round and some still sharp?’ And she thought and replied, ‘Some have been in the water a long time, rubbing against other stones, and some have only just been broken off bigger stones.’ Every evening, either her father or her mother called her in for What Did You See? She loved it. During the day, playing outside or with her toys, alone or with other children, she found herself thinking, Now notice what you are doing, so you can tell them tonight what you saw.

She had thought that the game did not change; but then one evening she was there when her little brother was first asked, What Did You See? and she knew just how much the game had changed for her. Because now it was not just What Did You See? but: What were you thinking? What made you think that? Are you sure that thought is true?

When she became seven, not long ago, and it was time for school, she was in a room with about twenty children – all from her family or from the Big Family – and the teacher, her mother’s sister, said, ‘And now the game: What Did You See?’

Most of the children had played the game since they were tiny; but some had not, and they were pitied by the ones that had, for they did not notice much and were often silent when the others said, ‘I saw . . .’, whatever it was. Mara was at first upset that this game played with so many at once was simpler, more babyish, than when she was with her parents. It was like going right back to the earliest stages of the game: ‘What did you see?’ ‘I saw a bird.’ ‘What kind of a bird?’ ‘It was black and white and had a yellow beak.’ ‘What shape of beak? Why do you think the beak is shaped like that?’

Then she saw what she was supposed to be understanding: Why did one child see this and the other that? Why did it sometimes need several children to see everything about a stone or a bird or a person?

Doris Lessing, "Mara and Dann"

75 points dspeyer 03 September 2014 05:06:19PM Permalink

A good rule of thumb might be, “If I added a zero to this number, would the sentence containing it mean something different to me?” If the answer is “no,” maybe the number has no business being in the sentence in the first place.

Randall Munroe on communicating with humans

73 points Alicorn 07 April 2011 03:08:53AM Permalink

When confronting something which may be either a windmill or an evil giant, what question should you be asking?

There are some who ask, "If we do nothing, and that is an evil giant, can we afford to be wrong?" These people consider themselves to be brave and vigilant.

Some ask "If we attack it wrongly, can we afford to pay to replace a windmill?" These people consider themselves cautious and pragmatic.

Still others ask, "With the cost of being wrong so high in either case, shouldn't we always definitively answer the 'windmill vs. giant' question before we act?" And those people consider themselves objective and wise.

But only a tiny few will ask, "Isn't the fact that we're giving equal consideration to the existence of evil giants and windmills a warning sign of insanity in ourselves?"

It's hard to find out what these people consider themselves, because they never get invited to parties.

-- PartiallyClips, "Windmill"

73 points Grognor 02 May 2012 03:42:19AM Permalink

Tags like "stupid," "bad at __", "sloppy," and so on, are ways of saying "You're performing badly and I don't know why." Once you move it to "you're performing badly because you have the wrong fingerings," or "you're performing badly because you don't understand what a limit is," it's no longer a vague personal failing but a causal necessity. Anyone who never understood limits will flunk calculus. It's not you, it's the bug.

-celandine13 (Hat-tip to Frank Adamek. In addition, the linked article is so good that I had trouble picking something to put in rationality quotes; in other words, I recommend it.)

72 points Mestroyer 06 February 2013 05:52:02AM Permalink

"If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?"

"Oh jeez. Probably."

"What!? Why!?"

"Because all my friends did. Think about it -- which scenario is more likely: every single person I know, many of them levelheaded and afraid of heights, abruptly went crazy at exactly the same time... ...or the bridge is on fire?"

Randall Munroe, on updating on other peoples beliefs.

70 points Bongo 04 July 2011 04:25:00PM Permalink

The tautological emptiness of a Master's Wisdom is exemplified in the inherent stupidity of proverbs. Let us engage in a mental experiment by way of trying to construct proverbial wisdom out of the relationship between terrestrial life, its pleasures, and its Beyond. If ones says, "Forget about the afterlife, about the Elsewhere, seize the day, enjoy life fully here and now, it's the only life you've got!" it sounds deep. If one says exactly the opposite ("Do not get trapped in the illusory and vain pleasures of earthly life; money, power, and passions are all destined to vanish into thin air - think about eternity!"), it also sounds deep. If one combines the two sides ("Bring Eternity into your everyday life, live your life on this earth as if it is already permeated by Eternity!"), we get another profound thought. Needless to add, the same goes for it's inversion: "Do not try in vain to bring together Eternity and your terrestrial life, accept humbly that you are forever split between Heaven and Earth!" If, finally, one simply gets perplexed by all these reversals and claims: "Life is an enigma, do not try to penetrate its secrets, accept the beauty of its unfathomable mystery!" the result is, again, no less profound than its reversal: "Do not allow yourself to be distracted by false mysteries that just dissimulate the fact that, ultimately, life is very simple - it is what it is, it is simply here without reason and rhyme!" Needless to add that, by uniting mystery and simplicity, one again obtains a wisdom: "The ultimate, unfathomable mystery of life resides in its very simplicity, in the simple fact that there is life."

  • Slavoj Zizek
70 points Alejandro1 01 September 2014 07:10:29PM Permalink

I’m always fascinated by the number of people who proudly build columns, tweets, blog posts or Facebook posts around the same core statement: “I don’t understand how anyone could (oppose legal abortion/support a carbon tax/sympathize with the Palestinians over the Israelis/want to privatize Social Security/insert your pet issue here)." It’s such an interesting statement, because it has three layers of meaning.

The first layer is the literal meaning of the words: I lack the knowledge and understanding to figure this out. But the second, intended meaning is the opposite: I am such a superior moral being that I cannot even imagine the cognitive errors or moral turpitude that could lead someone to such obviously wrong conclusions. And yet, the third, true meaning is actually more like the first: I lack the empathy, moral imagination or analytical skills to attempt even a basic understanding of the people who disagree with me.

In short, “I’m stupid.” Something that few people would ever post so starkly on their Facebook feeds.

--Megan McArdle

68 points [deleted] 05 April 2011 07:18:41PM Permalink

If you think that humans are nothing but Turing machines, why is it morally wrong to kill a person but not morally wrong to turn off a computer?

Your question has the form:

If A is nothing but B, then why is it X to do Y to A but not to do Y to C which is also nothing but B?

This following question also has this form:

If apple pie is nothing but atoms, why is it safe to eat apple pie but not to eat napalm which is also nothing but atoms?

And here's the general answer to that question: the molecules which make up apple pie are safe to eat, and the molecules which make up napalm are unsafe to eat. This is possible because these are not the same molecules.

Now let's turn to your own question and give a general answer to it: it is morally wrong to shut off the program which makes up a human, but not morally wrong to shut off the programs which are found in an actual computer today. This is possible because these are not the same programs.

At this point I'm sure you will want to ask: what is so special about the program which makes up a human, that it would be morally wrong to shut off the program? And I have no answer for that. Similarly, I couldn't answer you if you asked me why the molecules of apple pie are safe to eat and the those of napalm are not.

As it happens, chemistry and biology have probably advanced to the point at which the question about apple pie can be answered. However, the study of mind/brain is still in its infancy, and as far as I know, we have not advanced to the equivalent point. But this doesn't mean that there isn't an answer.

68 points Solvent 02 February 2012 06:03:59AM Permalink

And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity. The ideas Earthlings held didn’t matter for hundreds of thousands of years, since they couldn’t do much about them anyway. Ideas might as well be badges as anything.

Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

67 points RichardKennaway 01 February 2010 10:16:33AM Permalink

From a BBC interview with a retiring Oxford Don:

Don: "Up until the age of 25, I believed that 'invective' was a synonym for 'urine'."

BBC: "Why ever would you have thought that?"

Don: "During my childhood, I read many of the Edgar Rice Burroughs 'Tarzan' stories, and in those books, whenever a lion wandered into a clearing, the monkeys would leap into the trees and 'cast streams of invective upon the lion's head.'"

BBC: long pause "But, surely sir, you now know the meaning of the word."

Don: "Yes, but I do wonder under what other misapprehensions I continue to labour."

66 points JoshuaZ 03 February 2012 05:33:42AM Permalink

Doctor Slithingly watched the readout on the computer screen and rubbed his hands together. ‘Excellent,’ he muttered, his voice a thin, rasping hiss. ‘Excellent!’ He laughed to himself in a chilling falsetto. ‘Soon my plan will come to fruition. Soon I will destroy them all!’ The room resounded with the sound of his insane giggling. This was the culmination of years of research – years of testing tissue samples and creating unnatural biological hybrids – but now it was over. Now, finally, he would destroy them all – every single type and variation of leukaemia. In doing so, he would render useless the work of thousands of charitable organisations as well as denying medical professionals the world over a source of income. He would prevent the publication of hundreds of inspiring stories of survival and sacrifice which might otherwise have sold millions of copies worldwide. ‘Bwahaha!’ he laughed. ‘So long, you meddling haematological neoplasm, you!’

Joel Stickley, How To Write Badly Well

66 points westward 18 December 2013 09:05:29PM Permalink

"Finally, a study that backs up everything I've always said about confirmation bias." -Kslane, Twitter

Link

66 points James_Miller 05 September 2014 08:36:09PM Permalink

A skilled professional I know had to turn down an important freelance assignment because of a recurring commitment to chauffeur her son to a resumé-building “social action” assignment required by his high school. This involved driving the boy for 45 minutes to a community center, cooling her heels while he sorted used clothing for charity, and driving him back—forgoing income which, judiciously donated, could have fed, clothed, and inoculated an African village. The dubious “lessons” of this forced labor as an overqualified ragpicker are that children are entitled to treat their mothers’ time as worth nothing, that you can make the world a better place by destroying economic value, and that the moral worth of an action should be measured by the conspicuousness of the sacrifice rather than the gain to the beneficiary.

Steven Pinker

64 points sediment 02 June 2013 07:58:49PM Permalink

Hofstadter on the necessary strangeness of scientific explanations:

It is no accident, I would maintain, that quantum mechanics is so wildly counterintuitive. Part of the nature of explanation is that it must eventually hit some point where further probing only increases opacity rather than decreasing it. Consider the problem of understanding the nature of solids. You might wonder where solidity comes form. What if someone said to you, "The ultimate basis of this brick's solidity is that it is composed of a stupendous number of eensy weensy bricklike objects that themselves are rock-solid"? You might be interested to learn that bricks are composed of micro-bricks, but the initial question - "What accounts for solidity?" - has been thoroughly begged. What we ultimately want is for solidity to vanish, to dissolve, to disintegrate into some totally different kind of phenomenon with which we have no experience. Only then, when we have reached some completely novel, alien level will we feel that we have really made progress in explaining the top-level phenomenon.

[...]

I first saw this thought expressed in the stimulating book Patterns of Discovery by Norwood Russell Hanson. Hanson attributes it to a number of thinkers, such as Isaac Newton, who wrote, in his famous work Opticks: "The parts of all homogeneal hard Bodies which fully touch one another, stick together very strongly. And for explaining how this may be, some have invented hooked Atoms, which is begging the Question." Hanson also quotes James Clerk Maxwell (from an article entitled "Atom"): "We may indeed suppose the atom elastic, but this is to endow it with the very property for the explanation of which... the atomic constitution was originally assumed." Finally, here is a quote Hanson provides from Werner Heisenberg himself: "If atoms are really to explain the origin of color and smell of visible material bodies, then they cannot possess properties like color and smell." So, although it is not an original thought, it is useful to bear in mind that greeness disintegrates.

— from the postscript to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, in Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (his lovely book of essays from his column in Scientific American)

63 points DanielVarga 04 April 2011 09:06:57PM Permalink

It is not really a quote, but a good quip from an otherwise lame recent internet discussion:

Matt: Ok, for all of the people responding above who admit to not having a soul, I think this means that it is morally ok for me to do anything I want to you, just as it is morally ok for me to turn off my computer at the end of the day. Some of us do have souls, though.

Igor: Matt - I agree that people who need a belief in souls to understand the difference between killing a person and turning off a computer should just continue to believe in souls.

62 points MBlume 01 October 2012 07:54:31PM Permalink

Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect

--Teller (source)

61 points arundelo 05 February 2012 08:54:15PM Permalink

You are not the king of your brain. You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going "a most judicious choice, sire".

-- Steven Kaas

61 points Alejandro1 01 October 2012 08:00:01PM Permalink

This time he covered a lot more ground and was willing to talk about the mundane details of presidential existence. “You have to exercise,” he said, for instance. “Or at some point you’ll just break down.” You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”

--Michael Lewis profile of Barack Obama

61 points fortyeridania 02 November 2012 04:03:56AM Permalink

On the error of failing to appreciate your opponents three-dimensionality:

They had cliche answers but only to their self-created straw-men. To exaggerate only slightly, they had never talked to anyone who really believed, and had thought deeply about, views drastically different from their own. As a result, when they heard real arguments instead of caricatures, they had no answers, only amazement that such views could be expressed by someone who had the external characteristics of being a member of the intellectual community, and that such views could be defended with apparent cogency. Never have I been more impressed with the advice I once received: "You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do."

Source: Milton Friedman, "Schools at Chicago," from The Indispensable Milton Friedman

H/T David Henderson at EconLog

Note: The final sentence of the passage, as presented by Henderson, is missing closing quotation marks. I have added them.

61 points Eugine_Nier 02 February 2013 06:06:48AM Permalink

It’s nice to elect the right people, but that’s not the way you solve things. The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things.

-- Milton Friedman

61 points Alejandro1 04 January 2014 07:57:52PM Permalink

My friend's kid explained The Hulk to me. She said he's a big green monster and when he needs to get things done, he turns into a scientist.

--Shrtbuspdx

60 points James_Miller 02 November 2012 05:43:50PM Permalink

A Bet is a Tax on Bullshit

Alex Tabarrok

60 points RomeoStevens 06 November 2012 11:27:06PM Permalink

If any idiot ever tells you that life would be meaningless without death, Hyperion corporation recommends killing them.

--Borderlands 2

60 points Viliam_Bur 01 March 2013 03:37:40PM Permalink

Many hands make light work.

Too many cooks spoil the broth.

The optimal solution seems to be one cook with many hands.

59 points michaelkeenan 01 March 2010 11:00:15AM Permalink

"You know what they say the modern version of Pascal's Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God." - Julie from Crystal Nights by Greg Egan

59 points Oscar_Cunningham 01 June 2011 08:20:21AM Permalink

Just because you two are arguing, doesn't mean one of you is right.

Maurog: http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=9t=14222

59 points baiter 02 March 2012 12:52:37PM Permalink

"...I always rejoice to hear of your being still employ'd in experimental Researches into Nature, and of the Success you meet with. The rapid Progress true Science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the Height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the Power of Man over Matter. We may perhaps learn to deprive large Masses of their Gravity, and give them absolute Levity, for the sake of easy Transport. Agriculture may diminish its Labor and double its Produce; all Diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, not excepting even that of Old Age, and our Lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian Standard. O that moral Science were in as fair a way of Improvement, that Men would cease to be Wolves to one another, and that human Beings would at length learn what they now improperly call Humanity!"

-- Benjamin Franklin, Letter to Joseph Priestley, 8 Feb 1780

58 points Miller 01 June 2011 11:52:54PM Permalink

The megalomania of the genes does not mean that benevolence and cooperation cannot evolve, any more than the law of gravity proves that flight cannot evolve. It means only that benevolence, like flight, is a special state of affairs in need of an explanation, not something that just happens.

  • Pinker, The Blank Slate
58 points James_Miller 01 September 2011 05:13:46PM Permalink

It is a vast, and pervasive, cognitive mistake to assume that people who agree with you (or disagree) do so on the same criteria that you care about.

Megan McArdle

58 points Ezekiel 01 September 2012 11:27:29AM Permalink

"Wait, Professor... If Sisyphus had to roll the boulder up the hill over and over forever, why didn't he just program robots to roll it for him, and then spend all his time wallowing in hedonism?"

"It's a metaphor for the human struggle."

"I don't see how that changes my point."

58 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 11 April 2013 06:22:30PM Permalink

Holy Belldandy, it sounds like someone located the player character. Everyone get your quests ready!

58 points Lumifer 05 December 2014 03:50:03PM Permalink

If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.

This is what survivorship bias looks like from the inside.

57 points Zando 03 August 2013 06:50:10AM Permalink

when trying to characterize human beings as computational systems, the difference between “person” and “person with pencil and paper” is vast.

Procrastination and The Extended Will 2009

57 points Benito 03 April 2014 08:10:35PM Permalink

Comedian Simon Munnery:

Many are willing to suffer for their art; few are willing to learn how to draw.

56 points Yvain 01 September 2012 02:20:44PM Permalink

Do unto others 20% better than you expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error.

-- Linus Pauling

55 points GabrielDuquette 01 February 2012 03:34:11PM Permalink

It shouldn't be disrespectful to the complexity of the human condition to say that despair is also, often, just low blood sugar.

Alain de Botton

55 points gRR 01 May 2012 12:10:20PM Permalink

Once upon a time, there was a man who was riding in a horse drawn carriage and traveling to go take care of some affairs; and in the carriage there was also a very big suitcase. He told the driver to of the carriage to drive non-stop and the horse ran extremely fast.

Along the road, there was an old man who saw them and asked, “Sir, you seem anxious, where do you need to go?”

The man in the carriage then replied in a loud voice, “I need to go to the state of Chu.” The old man heard and laughing he smiled and said, “You are going the wrong way. The state of Chu is in the south, how come you are going to to the north?”

“That’s alright,” The man in the carriage then said, “Can you not see? My horse runs very fast.”

“Your horse is great, but your path is incorrect.”

“It’s no problem, my carriage is new, it was made just last month.”

“Your carriage is brand new, but this is not the road one takes to get to Chu.”

“Old Uncle, you don’t know,” and the man in the carriage pointed to the suitcase in the back and said, “In that suitcase there’s alot of money. No matter how long the road is, I am not afraid.”

“You have lots of money, but do not forget, The direction which you are going is wrong. I can see, you should go back the direction which you came from.”

The man in the carriage heard this and irritated said, “I have already been traveling for ten days, how can you tell me to go back from where I came?” He then pointed at the carriage driver and said, “Take a look, he is very young, and he drives very well, you needn’t worry. Goodbye!”

And then he told the driver to drive forward, and the horse ran even faster.

--Chinese Tale

55 points Delta 03 August 2012 10:41:45AM Permalink

“Ignorance killed the cat; curiosity was framed!” ― C.J. Cherryh

(not sure if that is who said it originally, but that's the first creditation I found)

54 points CronoDAS 01 March 2010 09:30:58PM Permalink

The Patrician took a sip of his beer. "I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to its day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior."

-- Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals

54 points Costanza 01 February 2011 09:31:17PM Permalink

A long one:

. . . once upon a time men lived among the giants, who were like themselves but far more powerful, and these giants always had a supply of bread, fruit, milk, and all that was necessary to sustain life, which they must have acquired in ways that cost them little, for they would always give away their goods to whoever knew how to please them. And the giants would also carry them wherever they wanted to go, provided they asked in the proper way. So it came about that men never thought of working, nor of walking, nor of building wagons or ships; instead they became natural orators, and spent all of their time watching the giants, figuring out what would please or displease them, smiling at them or imploring them with tears in their eyes; or else simply pronouncing the necessary words, which had to be memorized exactly, though they had no understanding of the changes of humor that would come over the giants, their brusque refusals, or their sudden willingness. Now, if some man, in those days, had tried to get something for himself by his own industry, they would have laughed him to scorn; for the results of his labor would have been puny beside the immense provisions the giants had amassed; and besides with one false step the giants could easily have crushed those little beginnings of labor out of existence. That is why all human wisdom came down to knowing how to speak and how to persuade; and, rather than move things about with great effort, men chose to learn what words it would take to get one of the giants to do their moving. In short, their main business, or rather their only business, was to please, and above all not to displease, their incomprehensible masters, who seemed nevertheless to be charged with nourishing them and housing them and transporting them, and who eventually carried out their duties, provided they were prayed to. This kind of existence, in which men never knew whether they were the masters or the slaves, lasted for a long time, so that the habit of asking, of hoping, of counting on those stronger than themselves left indelible traces in human nature. . . . That is why, as if they were still waiting for the return of the giants, men do not forget to pray and make offerings, though no giant has ever shown himself . . .

-- "Alain" (Émile Chartier) The Gods. A meditation on childhood.

54 points Alejandro1 06 December 2011 09:10:10PM Permalink

On the difficulties of correctly fine-tuning your signaling:

I once expressed mild surprise at the presence of a garden gnome in an upper-middle-class garden …. The owner of the garden explained that the gnome was “ironic”. I asked him, with apologies for my ignorance, how one could tell that his garden gnome was supposed to be an ironic statement, as opposed to, you know, just a gnome. He rather sniffily replied that I only had to look at the rest of the garden for it to be obvious that the gnome was a tounge-in-cheek joke.

But surely, I persisted, garden gnomes are always something of a joke, in any garden—I mean, no-one actually takes them seriously or regards them as works of art. His response was rather rambling and confused (not to mention somewhat huffy), but the gist seemed to be that while the lower classes saw gnomes as intrinsically amusing, his gnome was amusing only because of its incongruous appearance in a “smart” garden. In other words, council-house gnomes were a joke, but his gnome was a joke about council-house tastes, effectively a joke about class….

The man’s reaction to my questions clearly defined him as upper-middle, rather than upper class. In fact, his pointing out that the gnome I had noticed was “ironic” had already demoted him by half a class from my original assessment. A genuine member of the upper classes would either have admitted to a passion for garden gnomes … or said something like “Ah yes, my gnome. I’m very fond of my gnome.” and left me to draw my own conclusions.

Kate Fox, Watching the English (quoted here).

54 points Kaj_Sotala 01 March 2013 03:42:09PM Permalink

Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where you had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whether the author was telling the whole truth? If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he's writing about this subject at all.

-- Paul Graham

54 points Qiaochu_Yuan 11 April 2013 09:13:10AM Permalink

In a class I taught at Berkeley, I did an experiment where I wrote a simple little program that would let people type either "f" or "d" and would predict which key they were going to push next. It's actually very easy to write a program that will make the right prediction about 70% of the time. Most people don't really know how to type randomly. They'll have too many alternations and so on. There will be all sorts of patterns, so you just have to build some sort of probabilistic model. Even a very crude one will do well. I couldn't even beat my own program, knowing exactly how it worked. I challenged people to try this and the program was getting between 70% and 80% prediction rates. Then, we found one student that the program predicted exactly 50% of the time. We asked him what his secret was and he responded that he "just used his free will."

-- Scott Aaronson

54 points BT_Uytya 03 August 2013 01:39:05PM Permalink

The fear people have about the idea of adherence to protocol is rigidity. They imagine mindless automatons, heads down in a checklist, incapable of looking out their windshield and coping with the real world in front of them. But what you find, when a checklist is well made, is exactly the opposite. The checklist gets the dumb stuff out of the way, the routines your brain shouldn’t have to occupy itself with (Are the elevator controls set? Did the patient get her antibiotics on time? Did the managers sell all their shares? Is everyone on the same page here?), and lets it rise above to focus on the hard stuff (Where should we land?).

Here are the details of one of the sharpest checklists I’ve seen, a checklist for engine failure during flight in a single-engine Cessna airplane—the US Airways situation, only with a solo pilot. It is slimmed down to six key steps not to miss for restarting the engine, steps like making sure the fuel shutoff valve is in the OPEN position and putting the backup fuel pump switch ON. But step one on the list is the most fascinating. It is simply: FLY THE AIRPLANE. Because pilots sometimes become so desperate trying to restart their engine, so crushed by the cognitive overload of thinking through what could have gone wrong, they forget this most basic task. FLY THE AIRPLANE. This isn’t rigidity. This is making sure everyone has their best shot at survival.

-- Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto

53 points anonym 03 November 2010 06:30:42AM Permalink

If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top … that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings.

Buckminster Fuller

53 points VincentYu 01 February 2013 09:36:33PM Permalink

In Munich in the days of the great theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld (1868–1954), trolley cars were cooled in summer by two small fans set into their ceilings. When the trolley was in motion, air flowing over its top would spin the fans, pulling warm air out of the cars. One student noticed that although the motion of any given fan was fairly random—fans could turn either clockwise or counterclockwise—the two fans in a single car nearly always rotated in opposite directions. Why was this? Finally he brought the problem to Sommerfeld.

“That is easy to explain,” said Sommerfeld. “Air hits the fan at the front of the car first, giving it a random motion in one direction. But once the trolley begins to move, a vortex created by the first fan travels down the top of the car and sets the second fan moving in precisely the same direction.”

“But, Professor Sommerfeld,” the student protested, “what happens is in fact the opposite! The two fans nearly always rotate in different directions.”

“Ahhhh!” said Sommerfeld. “But of course that is even easier to explain.”

Devine and Cohen, Absolute Zero Gravity, p. 96.

53 points Cthulhoo 03 September 2013 10:49:52AM Permalink

In some species of Anglerfish, the male is much smaller than the female and incapable of feeding independently. To survive he must smell out a female as soon as he hatches. He bites into her releasing an enzime which fuses him to her permanently. He lives off her blood for the rest of his life, providing her with sperm whenever she needs it. Females can have multiple males attached. The morale is simple: males are parasites, women are sluts. Ha! Just kidding! The moral is don't treat actual animal behavior like a fable. Generally speaking, animals have no interest in teaching you anything.

Oglaf (Original comic NSFW)

53 points 27chaos 01 December 2014 08:30:07PM Permalink

If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair.

Saul Alinsky, in his Rules for Radicals.

This one hit home for me. Got a haircut yesterday. :P

52 points satt 07 August 2014 01:38:38AM Permalink

On the other hand, a Slashdot comment that's stuck in my mind (and on my hard disks) since I read it years ago:

In one respect the computer industry is exactly like the construction industry: nobody has two minutes to tell you how to do something...but they all have forty-five minutes to tell you why you did it wrong.

When I started working at a tech company, as a lowly new-guy know-nothing, I found that any question starting with "How do I..." or "What's the best way to..." would be ignored; so I had to adopt another strategy. Say I wanted to do X. Research showed me there were (say) about six or seven ways to do X. Which is the best in my situation? I don't know. So I pick an approach at random, though I don't actually use it. Then I wander down to the coffee machine and casually remark, "So, I needed to do X, and I used approach Y." I would then, inevitably, get a half-hour discussion of why that was stupid, and what I should have done was use approach Z, because of this, this, and this. Then I would go off and use approach Z.

In ten years in the tech industry, that strategy has never failed once. I think the key difference is the subtext. In the first strategy, the subtext is, "Hey, can you spend your valuable time helping me do something trivial?" while in the second strategy, the subtext is, "Hey, here's a chance to show off how smart you are." People being what they are, the first subtext will usually fail -- but the second will always succeed.

— fumblebruschi

51 points MichaelHoward 02 February 2011 11:31:14AM Permalink

I will not procrastinate regarding any ritual granting immortality.

--Evil Overlord List #230

50 points Tesseract 03 December 2010 09:21:13AM Permalink

He uses statistics as a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not for illumination.

G.K. Chesterton

50 points Bugmaster 01 December 2011 03:17:24AM Permalink

Miss Tick sniffed. "You could say this advice is priceless," she said, "Are you listening?"

"Yes," said Tiffany.

"Good. Now...if you trust in yourself..."

"Yes?"

"...and believe in your dreams..."

"Yes?"

"...and follow your star..." Miss Tick went on.

"Yes?"

"...you’ll still be beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy. Goodbye."

-- Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men

50 points satt 04 March 2013 12:42:11AM Permalink

There’s an old saying in the public opinion business: we can’t tell people what to think, but we can tell them what to think about.

— Doug Henwood

50 points B_For_Bandana 02 September 2014 01:25:28AM Permalink

Always go to other people's funerals; otherwise they won't go to yours.

Yogi Berra, on Timeless Decision Theory.

49 points Liron 04 January 2011 12:27:44AM Permalink

It's not renting a house vs. owning a house, it's renting a house vs. renting a bunch of money from the bank.

-- Salman Khan, Khan Academy

49 points DSimon 03 January 2011 06:20:37PM Permalink

In 1736 I lost one of my Sons, a fine Boy of 4 Years old, by the Smallpox taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly and still regret that I had not given it to him by Inoculation. This I mention for the Sake of Parents who omit that Operation on the Supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a Child died under it; my Example showing that the Regret may be the same either way, and that therefore the safer should be chosen.

-- Benjamin Franklin

(To provide some context: at the time, the smallpox vaccine used a live virus, and carried a non-trivial risk of death for the recipient. However, it was still safer on the whole than not being immunized.)

49 points NihilCredo 01 June 2011 03:06:46PM Permalink

A little long, but I don't see the possibility of a good cut:

“Other men were stronger, faster, younger, why was Syrio Forel the best? I will tell you now.” He touched the tip of his little finger lightly to his eyelid. “The seeing, the true seeing, that is the heart of it.

“Hear me. The ships of Braavos sail as far as the winds blow, to lands strange and wonderful, and when they return their captains fetch queer animals to the Sealord’s menagerie. Such animals as you have never seen, striped horses, great spotted things with necks as long as stilts, hairy mouse-pigs as big as cows, stinging manticores, tigers that carry their cubs in a pouch, terrible walking lizards with scythes for claws. Syrio Forel has seen these things.

“On the day I am speaking of, the first sword was newly dead, and the Sealord sent for me. Many bravos had come to him, and as many had been sent away, none could say why. When I came into his presence, he was seated, and in his lap was a fat yellow cat. He told me that one of his captains had brought the beast to him, from an island beyond the sunrise. ‘Have you ever seen her like?’ he asked of me.

“And to him I said, ‘Each night in the alleys of Braavos I see a thousand like him,’ and the Sealord laughed, and that day I was named the first sword.”

Arya screwed up her face. “I don’t understand.”

Syrio clicked his teeth together. “The cat was an ordinary cat, no more. The others expected a fabulous beast, so that is what they saw. How large it was, they said. It was no larger than any other cat, only fat from indolence, for the Sealord fed it from his own table. What curious small ears, they said. Its ears had been chewed away in kitten fights. And it was plainly a tomcat, yet the Sealord said ‘her,’ and that is what the others saw. Are you hearing?”

Arya thought about it. “You saw what was there.”

“Just so. Opening your eyes is all that is needing. The heart lies and the head plays tricks with us, but the eyes see true. Look with your eyes. Hear with your ears. Taste with your mouth. Smell with your nose. Feel with your skin. Then comes the thinking, afterward, and in that way knowing the truth.”

- George R.R. Martin, "A Game of Thrones"

49 points alex_zag_al 06 September 2012 07:56:42PM Permalink

There is something about practical things that knocks us off our philosophical high horses. Perhaps Heraclitus really thought he couldn't step in the same river twice. Perhaps he even received tenure for that contribution to philosophy. But suppose some other ancient had claimed to have as much right as Heraclitus did to an ox Heraclitus had bought, on the grounds that since the animal had changed, it wasn't the same one he had bought and so was up for grabs. Heraclitus would have quickly come up with some ersatz, watered-down version of identity of practical value for dealing with property rights, oxen, lyres, vineyards, and the like. And then he might have wondered if that watered-down vulgar sense of identity might be a considerably more valuable concept than a pure and philosophical sort of identity that nothing has.

John Perry, introduction to Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self

49 points Kaj_Sotala 01 September 2012 06:08:27PM Permalink

The person who says, as almost everyone does say, that human life is of infinite value, not to be measured in mere material terms, is talking palpable, if popular, nonsense. If he believed that of his own life, he would never cross the street, save to visit his doctor or to earn money for things necessary to physical survival. He would eat the cheapest, most nutritious food he could find and live in one small room, saving his income for frequent visits to the best possible doctors. He would take no risks, consume no luxuries, and live a long life. If you call it living. If a man really believed that other people's lives were infinitely valuable, he would live like an ascetic, earn as much money as possible, and spend everything not absolutely necessary for survival on CARE packets, research into presently incurable diseases, and similar charities.

In fact, people who talk about the infinite value of human life do not live in either of these ways. They consume far more than they need to support life. They may well have cigarettes in their drawer and a sports car in the garage. They recognize in their actions, if not in their words, that physical survival is only one value, albeit a very important one, among many.

-- David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom

49 points Matt_Caulfield 03 September 2012 10:27:36PM Permalink

Your contrarian stance against a high-status member of this community makes you seem formidable and savvy. Would you like to be allies with me? If yes, then the next time I go foraging I will bring you back extra fruit.

48 points Yvain 01 February 2010 12:21:53PM Permalink

On utility:

culturejammer: you know what pennies are AWESOME for?

culturejammer: throwing at cats

culturejammer: it only costs a single penny

culturejammer: and they'll either chase it, or get hit by it and look pissed off

culturejammer: i now use that system to value prices of things

culturejammer: for example, a thirty dollar game has to be at least as awesome as three thousand catpennies

--bash.org

48 points philh 03 September 2013 07:46:55PM Permalink

"However, there is something they value more than a man's life: a trowel."

"Why a trowel?"

"If a bricklayer drops his trowel, he can do no more work until a new one is brought up. For months he cannot earn the food that he eats, so he must go into debt. The loss of a trowel is cause for much wailing. But if a man falls, and his trowel remains, men are secretly relieved. The next one to drop his trowel can pick up the extra one and continue working, without incurring debt."

Hillalum was appalled, and for a frantic moment he tried to count how many picks the miners had brought. Then he realized. "That cannot be true. Why not have spare trowels brought up? Their weight would be nothing against all the bricks that go up there. And surely the loss of a man means a serious delay, unless they have an extra man at the top who is skilled at bricklaying. Without such a man, they must wait for another one to climb from the bottom."

All the pullers roared with laughter. "We cannot fool this one," Lugatum said with much amusement.

Ted Chiang, Tower of Babylon

48 points JQuinton 06 November 2013 06:35:10PM Permalink

A newspaper is better than a magazine. A seashore is a better place than the street. At first it is better to run than to walk. You may have to try several times. It takes some skill, but it is easy to learn. Even young children can enjoy it. Once successful, complications are minimal. Birds seldom get too close. Rain, however, soaks in very fast. Too many people doing the same thing can also cause problems. One needs lots of room. If there are no complications, it can be very peaceful. A rock will serve as an anchor. If things break loose from it, however, you will not get a second chance.

Is this paragraph comprehensible or meaningless? Feel your mind sort through potential explanations. Now watch what happens with the presentation of a single word: kite. As you reread the paragraph, feel the prior discomfort of something amiss shifting to a pleasing sense of rightness. Everything fits; every sentence works and has meaning. Reread the paragraph again; it is impossible to regain the sense of not understanding. In an instant, without due conscious deliberation, the paragraph has been irreversibly infuesed with a feeling of knowing.

Try to imagine other interpretations for the paragraph. Suppose I tell you that this is a collaborative poem written by a third-grade class, or a collage of strung-together fortune cookie quotes. Your mind balks. The presense of this feeling of knowing makes contemplating alternatives physically difficult.

Robert Burton, from On Being Certain: Believing You’re Right Even When You’re Not reminding me of Epiphany Addictions

47 points benelliott 02 February 2011 09:05:24PM Permalink

Day ends, market closes up or down, reporter looks for good or bad news respectively, and writes that the market was up on news of Intel's earnings, or down on fears of instability in the Middle East. Suppose we could somehow feed these reporters false information about market closes, but give them all the other news intact. Does anyone believe they would notice the anomaly, and not simply write that stocks were up (or down) on whatever good (or bad) news there was that day? That they would say, hey, wait a minute, how can stocks be up with all this unrest in the Middle East?

--Paul Graham

47 points philh 02 February 2013 11:22:32AM Permalink

Men in Black on guessing the teacher's password:

Zed: You're all here because you are the best of the best. Marines, air force, navy SEALs, army rangers, NYPD. And we're looking for one of you. Just one.

[...]

Edwards: Maybe you already answered this, but, why exactly are we here?

Zed: [noticing a recruit raising his hand] Son?

Jenson: Second Lieutenant, Jake Jenson. West Point. Graduate with honors. We're here because you are looking for the best of the best of the best, sir! [throws Edwards a contemptible glance]

[Edwards laughs]

Zed: What's so funny, Edwards?

Edwards: Boy, Captain America over here! "The best of the best of the best, sir!" "With honors." Yeah, he's just really excited and he has no clue why we're here. That's just, that's very funny to me.

46 points MichaelGR 30 November 2009 12:23:59AM Permalink

It has always appalled me that really bright scientists almost all work in the most competitive fields, the ones in which they are making the least difference. In other words, if they were hit by a truck, the same discovery would be made by somebody else about 10 minutes later.

--Aubrey de Grey

46 points dvasya 02 August 2011 06:39:01PM Permalink

...the discovery of computers and the thinking about computers has turned out to be extremely useful in many branches of human reasoning. For instance, we never really understood how lousy our understanding of languages was, the theory of grammar and all that stuff, until we tried to make a computer which would be able to understand language. We tried to learn a great deal about psychology by trying to understand how computers work. There are interesting philosophical questions about reasoning, and relationship, observation, and measurement and so on, which computers have stimulated us to think about anew, with new types of thinking. And all I was doing was hoping that the computer-type of thinking would give us some new ideas, if any are really needed.

-- Richard P. Feynman, Simulating Physics with Computers, International Journal of Theoretical Physics, Vol 21, Nos. 6/7, 1982

46 points Delta 05 September 2012 01:09:15PM Permalink

“A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.” ― Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey

46 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 June 2013 07:18:22PM Permalink

Single bad things happen to you at random. Iterated bad things happen to you because you're a dumbass. Related: "You are the only common denominator in all of your failed relationships."

46 points Kaj_Sotala 04 January 2014 08:03:06PM Permalink

My 5 year old came to the dinner table, and calmly announced, "There is no Santa." I was puzzled because just couple of days ago he had taken his Christmas gift from Santa (though now that I think about it, he was not totally thrilled). So I asked why he thought so. He said, "Well, for Christmas I only got the gifts I told you about; I had gone to bed and told Santa himself what I wanted without telling you to see if he is real, and none of those came through - and I was a good boy all year!"

To be sure, I asked him, "But you saw Santa at the mall?" He laughed as hard as could be, then pointed out to me, "They are people in costumes!"

-- Wen Gong

46 points Tyrrell_McAllister 02 April 2014 05:53:47PM Permalink

The mathematician and Fields medalist Vladimir Voevodsky on using automated proof assistants in mathematics:

[Following the discovery of some errors in his earlier work:] I think it was at this moment that I largely stopped doing what is called “curiosity driven research” and started to think seriously about the future.

[...]

A technical argument by a trusted author, which is hard to check and looks similar to arguments known to be correct, is hardly ever checked in detail.

[...]

It soon became clear that the only real long-term solution to the problems that I encountered is to start using computers in the verification of mathematical reasoning.

[...]

Among mathematicians computer proof verification was almost a forbidden subject. A conversation started about the need for computer proof assistants would invariably drift to the Goedel Incompleteness Theorem (which has nothing to do with the actual problem) or to one or two cases of verification of already existing proofs, which were used only to demonstrate how impractical the whole idea was.

[...]

I now do my mathematics with a proof assistant and do not have to worry all the time about mistakes in my arguments or about how to convince others that my arguments are correct.

From a March 26, 2014 talk. Slides available here.

45 points Mycroft65536 04 April 2011 02:03:38PM Permalink

Luck is statistics taken personally.

Penn Jellete

45 points RichardKennaway 01 June 2011 11:00:49AM Permalink

If the fossil record shows more dinosaur footprints in one period than another, it does not necessarily mean that there were more dinosaurs -- it may be that there was more mud.

Elise E. Morse-Gagné

45 points peter_hurford 30 November 2011 09:06:07PM Permalink

Most people don't know the basic scientific facts about happiness—about what brings it and what sustains it—and so they don't know how to use their money to acquire it. It is not surprising when wealthy people who know nothing about wine end up with cellars that aren't that much better stocked than their neighbors', and it should not be surprising when wealthy people who know nothing about happiness end up with lives that aren't that much happier than anyone else's. Money is an opportunity for happiness, but it is an opportunity that people routinely squander because the things they think will make them happy often don't.

From "If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right" by Elizabeth W. Dunn, Daniel T. Gilbert, Timothy D. Wilson in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. (http://dunn.psych.ubc.ca/files/2011/04/Journal-of-consumer-psychology.pdf)

45 points nabeelqu 05 March 2014 10:56:01AM Permalink

As burglars, they used some unusual techniques...During their casing, they had noticed that the interior door that opened to the draft board office was always locked. There was no padlock to replace...The break-in technique they settled on at that office must be unique in the annals of burglary. Several hours before the burglary was to take place, one of them wrote a note and tacked it to the door they wanted to enter: "Please don't lock this door tonight." Sure enough, when the burglars arrived that night, someone had obediently left the door unlocked. The burglars entered the office with ease, stole the Selective Service records, and left. They were so pleased with themselves that one of them proposed leaving a thank-you note on the door. More cautious minds prevailed. Miss Manners be damned, they did not leave a note.

-- Betty Medsger

44 points knb 03 May 2010 03:06:59AM Permalink

From Thomas Macaulay's 1848 History of England.

[W]e are under a deception similar to that which misleads the traveler in the Arabian desert. Beneath the caravan all is dry and bare; but far in advance, and far in the rear, is the semblance of refreshing waters... A similar illusion seems to haunt nations through every stage of the long progress from poverty and barbarism to the highest degrees of opulence and civilization. But if we resolutely chase the mirage backward, we shall find it recede before us into the regions of fabulous antiquity. It is now the fashion to place the golden age of England in times when noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which would be intolerable to a modern footman, when farmers and shopkeepers breakfasted on loaves the very sight of which would raise a riot in a modern workhouse, when to have a clean shirt once a week was a privilege reserved for the higher class of gentry, when men died faster in the purest country air than they now die in the most pestilential lanes of our towns, and when men died faster in the lanes of our towns than they now die on the coast of Guiana.

.................................

We too shall in our turn be outstripped, and in our turn be envied. It may well be, in the twentieth century, that the peasant of Dorsetshire may think himself miserably paid with twenty shillings a week; that the carpenter at Greenwich may receive ten shillings a day; that laboring men may be as little used to dine without meat as they are now to eat rye bread; that sanitary police and medical discoveries may have added several more years to the average length of human life; that numerous comforts and luxuries which are now unknown, or confined to a few, may be within the reach of every diligent and thrifty workingman. And yet it may then be the mode to assert that the increase of wealth and the progress of science have benefited the few at the expense of the many, and to talk of the reign of Queen Victoria as the time when England was truly merry England, when all classes were bound together by brotherly sympathy, when the rich did not grind the faces of the poor, and when the poor did not envy the splendor of the rich.

44 points Eugine_Nier 02 February 2011 07:21:19AM Permalink

In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality.

(...)

In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.

-- George Orwell, 1984

44 points Manfred 01 December 2011 12:05:32AM Permalink

“Should we trust models or observations?” In reply we note that if we had observations of the future, we obviously would trust them more than models, but unfortunately observations of the future are not available at this time.

Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of Climate, 2005.

44 points peter_hurford 01 January 2012 11:23:36PM Permalink

"if we offer too much silent assent about mysticism and superstition – even when it seems to be doing a little good – we abet a general climate in which skepticism is considered impolite, science tiresome, and rigorous thinking somehow stuffy and inappropriate. Figuring out a prudent balance takes wisdom.”

– Carl Sagan

44 points tingram 01 January 2012 12:38:52AM Permalink

Everyday words are inherently imprecise. They work well enough in everyday life that you don't notice. Words seem to work, just as Newtonian physics seems to. But you can always make them break if you push them far enough.

--Paul Graham, How to Do Philosophy

[surprisingly not a duplicate]

44 points gwern 01 February 2012 03:23:59PM Permalink

"He [H.G. Wells] has abandoned the sensational theory with the same honourable gravity and simplicity with which he adopted it. Then he thought it was true; now he thinks it is not true. He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four."

--Heretics, G. K. Chesterton

44 points Oscar_Cunningham 01 April 2012 02:08:01PM Permalink

I understand what an equation means if I have a way of figuring out the characteristics of its solution without actually solving it.

Paul Dirac

44 points Particleman 03 June 2013 04:04:26AM Permalink

Why is there that knee-jerk rejection of any effort to "overthink" pop culture? Why would you ever be afraid that looking too hard at something will ruin it? If the government built a huge, mysterious device in the middle of your town and immediately surrounded it with a fence that said, "NOTHING TO SEE HERE!" I'm pretty damned sure you wouldn't rest until you knew what the hell that was -- the fact that they don't want you to know means it can't be good.

Well, when any idea in your brain defends itself with "Just relax! Don't look too close!" you should immediately be just as suspicious. It usually means something ugly is hiding there.

44 points dspeyer 04 April 2014 02:26:23AM Permalink

"It is one thing for you to say, ‘Let the world burn.' It is another to say, ‘Let Molly burn.' The difference is all in the name."

-- Uriel, Ghost Story, Jim Butcher

43 points bentarm 02 March 2011 01:53:46PM Permalink

Cryonics is an experiment. So far the control group isn't doing very well.

Dr. Ralph Merkle (quoted on the Alcor website - I'm surprised this hasn't been posted before, but I can't find it in the past pages)

43 points Nominull 04 April 2011 01:35:51PM Permalink

On the plus side, bad things happening to you does not mean you are a bad person. On the minus side, bad things will happen to you even if you are a good person. In the end you are just another victim of the motivationless malice of directed acyclic causal graphs.

-Nobilis RPG 3rd edition

43 points Maniakes 02 November 2011 01:12:00AM Permalink

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

John W. Gardner

43 points AlexSchell 01 October 2012 08:39:25PM Permalink

A lot of outcomes about which we care deeply are not very predictable. For example, it is not comforting to members of a graduate school admissions committee to know that only 23% of the variance in later faculty ratings of a student can be predicted by a unit weighting of the student's undergraduate GPA, his or her GRE score, and a measure of the student's undergraduate institution selectivity -- but that is opposed to 4% based on those committee members' global ratings of the applicant. We want to predict outcomes important to us. It is only rational to conclude that if one method (a linear model) does not predict well, something else may do better. What is not rational -- in fact, it's irrational -- is to conclude that this "something else" necessarily exists and, in the absence of any positive supporting evidence, is intuitive global judgment.

Hastie Dawes, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World, pp. 67-8.

43 points gwern 03 May 2013 04:28:39PM Permalink

A great illustration of sunk cost bias.

43 points Stabilizer 05 January 2014 04:08:14PM Permalink

This morning my daughter told me that she did well on a spelling test, but she got the easiest words wrong. Of course that’s not exactly true. The words that are hardest for her to spell are the ones she in fact did not spell correctly. She probably meant that she missed the words she felt should have been easy. Maybe they were short words. Children can be intimidated by long words, even though long words tend to be more regular and thus easier to spell.

Our perceptions of what is easy are often upside-down. We feel that some things should be easy even though our experience tells us otherwise.

Sometimes the trickiest parts of a subject come first, but we think that because they come first they should be easy. For example, force-body diagrams come at the beginning of an introductory physics class, but they can be hard to get right. Newton didn’t always get them right. More advanced physics, say celestial mechanics, is in some ways easier, or at least less error-prone.

“Elementary” and “easy” are not the same. Sometimes they’re opposites. Getting off the ground, so to speak, may be a lot harder than flying.

-John D. Cook

43 points satt 10 July 2014 11:17:19PM Permalink

Charles II is said to have himself toyed with the philosophers, asking them to explain why a fish weighs more after it has died. Upon receiving various ingenious answers, he pointed out that in fact a dead fish does not weigh anything more.

— Robert Pasnau, "Why Not Just Weigh the Fish?"

43 points Zubon 03 September 2014 10:47:34PM Permalink

Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an assertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the information being imparted. But your older nerd has more self-confidence, and besides, understands that frequently people need to think out loud. And highly advanced nerds will furthermore understand that uttering declarative sentences whose contents are already known to all present is part of the social process of making conversation and therefore should not be construed as aggression under any circumstances.

-- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

42 points Alejandro1 02 October 2011 03:08:18AM Permalink

Sometimes you hear philosophers bemoaning the fact that philosophers tend not to form consensuses like certain other disciplines do (sciences in particular). But there is no great mystery to this. The sciences reward consensus-forming as long as certain procedures are followed: agreements through experimental verification, processes of peer review, etc. Philosophy has nothing like this. Philosophers are rewarded for coming up with creative reasons not to agree with other people. The whole thrust of professional philosophy is toward inventing ways to regard opposing arguments as failure, as long as those ways don't exhibit any obvious flaws. However much philosophers are interested in the truth, philosophy as a profession is not structured so as to converge on it; it is structured so as to have the maximal possible divergence that can be sustained given common conventions. We are not trained to find ways to come to agree with each other; we are trained to find ways to disagree with each other.

Brandon Watson

42 points Andy_McKenzie 01 April 2012 10:10:38PM Permalink

A few years into this book, I was diagnosed as diabetic and received a questionnaire in the mail. The insurance carrier stated that diabetics often suffer from depression and it was worried about me. One of the questions was “Do you think about death?” Yes, I do. “How often?” the company wanted to know. “Yearly? Monthly? Weekly? Daily?” And if daily, how many times per day? I dutifully wrote in, “About 70 times per day.” The next time I saw my internist, she told me the insurer had recommended psychotherapy for my severe depression. I explained to her why I thought about death all day—merely an occupational hazard—and she suggested getting therapy nonetheless. I thought, fine, it might help with the research.

The therapist found me tragically undepressed, and I asked her if she could help me design a new life that would maximize the few years that I had left. After all, one should have a different life strategy at sixty than at twenty. She asked why I thought I was going to die and why I had such a great fear of death. I said, I am going to die. It’s not a fear; it’s a reality. There must be some behavior that could be contraindicated for a man my age but other normally dangerous behavior that takes advantage of the fact that I am risking fewer years at sixty or sixty-five years of age than I was at twenty or twenty-five (such as crimes that carry a life sentence, crushing at age twenty but less so at age sixty-five). Surely psychology must have something to say on the topic. Turns out, according to my therapist, it does not. There was therapy for those with terminal illness, for the bereaved, for the about-to-be-bereaved, for professionals who dealt with terminal patients, and so on, but there was nothing for people who were simply aware that their life would come to a natural end. It would seem to me that this is a large, untapped market. The therapist advised me not to think about death.

Dick Teresi, The Undead

42 points Konkvistador 01 May 2012 01:06:48PM Permalink

For example, in many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.

--Mencius Moldbug, on belief as attire and conspicuous wrongness.

Source.

42 points MinibearRex 04 August 2013 06:07:56AM Permalink

I've got to start listening to those quiet, nagging doubts.

Calvin

42 points AspiringRationalist 01 March 2014 10:10:34PM Permalink

As the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of "normal" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.

These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.

-- Paul Graham, The Acceleration of Addictiveness

42 points WalterL 01 December 2014 08:30:37PM Permalink

The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.

-Damon Runyon

41 points Unnamed 15 June 2009 01:06:29AM Permalink

"Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede; not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people cannot count above fourteen."

-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

related: The Level Above Mine

41 points MichaelGR 03 December 2010 05:39:42PM Permalink

The Noah principle: predicting rain doesn’t count, building arks does.

-Warren E. Buffett

41 points MinibearRex 02 March 2011 03:37:42PM Permalink

"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." -Daniel J. Boorstin

41 points RichardKennaway 02 March 2011 11:56:33AM Permalink

Education is implication. It is not the things you say which children respect; when you say things, they very commonly laugh and do the opposite. It is the things you assume which really sink into them. It is the things you forget even to teach that they learn.

G. K. Chesterton, article in the Illustrated London News, 1907, collected in "The Man Who Was Orthodox", p.96.

41 points AdeleneDawner 03 August 2011 01:35:41AM Permalink
41 points cousin_it 01 May 2012 07:29:08PM Permalink

Contrarians of LW, if you want to be successful, please don't follow this strategy. Chances are that many people have raised the same possibility before, and anyway raising possibilities isn't Bayesian evidence, so you'll just get ignored. Instead, try to prove that the stuff is bullshit. This way, if you're right, others will learn something, and if you're wrong, you will have learned something.

41 points GabrielDuquette 04 November 2012 08:37:22AM Permalink

Diogenes was knee deep in a stream washing vegetables. Coming up to him, Plato said, "My good Diogenes, if you knew how to pay court to kings, you wouldn't have to wash vegetables."

"And," replied Diogenes, "If you knew how to wash vegetables, you wouldn't have to pay court to kings."

Teachings of Diogenes

41 points Stabilizer 05 February 2013 01:20:51AM Permalink

Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.

-Joel Spolsky

41 points Eugine_Nier 02 September 2013 04:46:08AM Permalink

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas Edison

40 points gwern 30 November 2009 02:04:43AM Permalink

"When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to?"

--George Bernard Shaw, A Treatise on Parents and Children (1910)

40 points MichaelGR 01 March 2010 10:26:40PM Permalink

John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

-Isaac Asimov, The Relativity of Wrong

40 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 April 2011 04:35:44AM Permalink

Look, sometimes you've just got to do things because they're awesome.

40 points scav 02 November 2011 03:36:55PM Permalink

I just noticed CVS has started stocking homeopathic pills on the same shelves with--and labeled similarly to--their actual medicine. Telling someone who trusts you that you're giving them medicine, when you know you’re not, because you want their money, isn’t just lying--it’s like an example you’d make up if you had to illustrate for a child why lying is wrong.

-- Randall, XKCD #971

40 points GabrielDuquette 02 November 2012 12:57:17AM Permalink

People say "think outside the box," as if the box wasn't a fucking great idea.

Sean Thomason

40 points RolfAndreassen 01 January 2013 09:25:47PM Permalink

"Ten thousand years' worth of sophistry doesn't vanish overnight," Margit observed dryly. "Every human culture had expended vast amounts of intellectual effort on the problem of coming to terms with death. Most religions had constructed elaborate lies about it, making it out to be something other than it was—though a few were dishonest about life, instead. But even most secular philosophies were warped by the need to pretend that death was for the best."

"It was the naturalistic fallacy at its most extreme—and its most transparent, but that didn't stop anyone. Since any child could tell you that death was meaningless, contingent, unjust, and abhorrent beyond words, it was a hallmark of sophistication to believe otherwise. Writers had consoled themselves for centuries with smug puritanical fables about immortals who'd long for death—who'd beg for death. It would have been too much to expect all those who were suddenly faced with the reality of its banishment to confess that they'd been whistling in the dark. And would-be moral philosophers—mostly those who'd experienced no greater inconvenience in their lives than a late train or a surly waiter—began wailing about the destruction of the human spirit by this hideous blight. We needed death and suffering, to put steel into our souls! Not horrible, horrible freedom and safety!"

-- Greg Egan, "Border Guards".

40 points Mestroyer 07 February 2013 09:13:19AM Permalink

I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend

Faramir, from Lord of the Rings on lost purposes and the thing that he protects

40 points Stabilizer 02 March 2013 12:54:40AM Permalink

You know something is important when you're willing to let someone else take the credit if that's what it takes to get it done.

-Seth Godin

40 points SaidAchmiz 02 July 2013 01:11:36PM Permalink

Here's the thing about air-travel-related complaints.

Air travel is really unpleasant. Oh sure, it's technologically impressive, but the actual experience is terrible: sitting in a cramped space for hours on end, being in close proximity to so many other people; the pressure changes and the noise; the long, tiring process of arriving for your flight, which often takes longer than the actual flight and is quite stressful; the humiliating and absurd security procedures, which these days look more and more like ways for the government to gratuitously exercise its power...

So we've got this really impressive means of travel, which our society seems to have conspired to make as unpleasant as humanly possible. Ok, maybe it's all excusable and inevitable, just for the sheer amazingness of "ooh, we're FLYING through the AIR and so FAST!" etc. But then, after we pay the airline such impressive amounts of money for this amazing-but-unpleasant convenience, they don't deign to even serve us good drinks?

And what do the drinks have to do with how technologically impressive flight is, anyway? Are the people responsible for the drinks also the people who build, maintain, and fly the planes? What, are the drinks the pilot's responsibility, and he just can't be bothered, what with all that keeping the plane upright that he has to do? Did the Boeing engineer have "serve good drinks" on his to-do list, but just plain didn't get to it, tired as he was from all that "making sure the wings don't fall off" he had to do? No! The people responsible for the drinks had one damn job! And they're doing it badly! And then when people complain, they have the gall to evade responsibility by attempting to take credit for all that amazing science and engineering?!

In short, the quote is analogous to:

"I mean, when you think about it, our society is pretty freaking remarkable. We have computers, and indoor plumbing, and hundreds of channels on cable. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research, blood, sweat, tears, and lives have gone into the history of all of our modern conveniences, and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies.

But look anywhere in the world, and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about being mugged.

Being mugged, people."

Yeah, "everything is amazing so why are you complaining about this unrelated bad thing" is a fallacy. At this rate, all complaints about everything, ever, are apparently unwarranted.

40 points Mestroyer 05 October 2013 06:20:28AM Permalink

The market doesn't give a shit how hard you worked. Users just want your software to do what they need, and you get a zero otherwise. That is one of the most distinctive differences between school and the real world: there is no reward for putting in a good effort. In fact, the whole concept of a "good effort" is a fake idea adults invented to encourage kids. It is not found in nature.

--Paul Graham (When I saw this quote, I thought it had to have been posted before, but googling turned up nothing.)

40 points Kaj_Sotala 04 November 2013 01:15:49PM Permalink

But there’s a big difference between “impossible” and “hard to imagine.” The first is about it; the second is about you!

-- Marvin Minsky

40 points Nornagest 06 June 2014 07:57:21PM Permalink

That joke got less funny the first time I picked up a Christian tract disguised as a $20 bill. It got a lot less funny the second.

39 points anonym 02 October 2011 02:17:17AM Permalink

Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.

Bertrand Russell

39 points wallowinmaya 01 June 2012 09:45:47PM Permalink

The categories and classes we construct are simply the semantic sugar which makes the reality go down easier. They should never get confused for the reality that is, the reality which we perceive but darkly and with biased lenses. The hyper-relativists and subjectivists who are moderately fashionable in some humane studies today are correct to point out that science is a human construction and endeavor. Where they go wrong is that they are often ignorant of the fact that the orderliness of many facets of nature is such that even human ignorance and stupidity can be overcome with adherence to particular methods and institutional checks and balances. The predictive power of modern science, giving rise to modern engineering, is the proof of its validity. No talk or argumentation is needed. Boot up your computer. Drive your car.

Razib Khan

39 points Oscar_Cunningham 01 June 2012 02:40:23PM Permalink

Then there is the famous fly puzzle. Two bicyclists start twenty miles apart and head toward each other, each going at a steady rate of 10 m.p.h. At the same time a fly that travels at a steady 15 m.p.h. starts from the front wheel of the southbound bicycle and flies to the front wheel of the northbound one, then turns around and flies to the front wheel of the southbound one again, and continues in this manner till he is crushed between the two front wheels. Question: what total distance did the fly cover ?

The slow way to find the answer is to calculate what distance the fly covers on the first, northbound, leg of the trip, then on the second, southbound, leg, then on the third, etc., etc., and, finally, to sum the infinite series so obtained. The quick way is to observe that the bicycles meet exactly one hour after their start, so that the fly had just an hour for his travels; the answer must therefore be 15 miles.

When the question was put to von Neumann, he solved it in an instant, and thereby disappointed the questioner: "Oh, you must have heard the trick before!"

"What trick?" asked von Neumann; "all I did was sum the infinite series."

An anecdote concerning von Neumann, here told by Halmos.

39 points GabrielDuquette 02 June 2012 05:40:17AM Permalink

You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.

Pearl S. Buck

Related.

39 points James_Miller 01 February 2013 07:41:37PM Permalink

You want accurate beliefs and useful emotions.

From a participant at the January CFAR workshop. I don't remember who. This struck me as an excellent description of what rationalists seek.

39 points James_Miller 01 May 2013 04:49:10PM Permalink

Unless challenged to think otherwise, people quickly move from "Phew! Dodged a bullet on that one!" to "I'm a great bullet-dodger."

Discussing the "Near-miss bias" which they define as a tendency to "take more risk after an event in which luck played a critical role in deciding the event's [favorable] outcome."

Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, page 150.

39 points dspeyer 01 March 2014 06:43:02PM Permalink

In our large, anonymous society, it's easy to forget moral and reputational pressures and concentrate on legal pressure and security systems. This is a mistake; even though our informal social pressures fade into the background, they're still responsible for most of the cooperation in society.

  • Bruce Schneier, expert in security systems
38 points Cyan 01 March 2010 04:14:28PM Permalink

My genes done gone and tricked my brain

By making fucking feel so great

That's how the little creeps attain

Their plan to fuckin' replicate

But brain's got tricks itself, you see

To get the bang but not the bite

I got this here vasectomy

My genes can fuck themselves tonight.

—The r-selectors, Trunclade, quoted in Blindsight by Peter Watts

38 points Kutta 02 July 2010 07:38:00AM Permalink

If anything of the classical supernatural existed, it would be a branch of engineering by now.

-- Steve Gilham

38 points Patrick 03 June 2011 02:13:04PM Permalink

If a process is potentially good, but 90+% of the time smart and well-intentioned people screw it up, then it's a bad process. So they can only say it's the team's fault so many times before it's not really the team's fault.

38 points summerstay 04 August 2012 02:41:24PM Permalink

Interviewer: How do you answer critics who suggest that your team is playing god here?

Craig Venter: Oh... we're not playing.

38 points NancyLebovitz 06 November 2012 02:59:40PM Permalink

Let me differentiate between scientific method and the neurology of the individual scientist. Scientific method has always depended on feedback [or flip-flopping as the Tsarists call it]; I therefore consider it the highest form of group intelligence thus far evolved on this backward planet. The individual scientist seems a different animal entirely. The ones I've met seem as passionate, and hence as egotistic and prejudiced, as painters, ballerinas or even, God save the mark, novelists. My hope lies in the feedback system itself, not in any alleged saintliness of the individuals in the system.

Robert Anton Wilson

38 points cata 02 November 2012 06:56:18PM Permalink

In which Winnie-the-Pooh tests a hypothesis about the animal tracks that he is following through the woods:

“Wait a moment,” said Winnie-the-Pooh, holding up his paw.

He sat down and thought, in the most thoughtful way he could think. Then he fitted his paw into one of the Tracks…and then he scratched his nose twice, and stood up.

“Yes,” said Winnie-the Pooh.

“I see now,” said Winnie-the-Pooh.

“I have been Foolish and Deluded,” said he, “and I am a Bear of No Brain at All.”

38 points Tenoke 08 May 2013 06:19:30PM Permalink

‘Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that in your promiscuous pursuit of women you are merely trying to assuage your subconscious fears of sexual impotence?’

‘Yes, sir, it has.’

‘Then why do you do it?’

‘To assuage my fears of sexual impotence.’

Joseph Heller, Catch-22

explaining /= explaining away

38 points Particleman 02 August 2013 06:07:05AM Permalink

In 2002, Wizards of the Coast put out Star Wars: The Trading Card Game designed by Richard Garfield.

As Richard modeled the game after a miniatures game, it made use of many six-sided dice. In combat, cards' damage was designated by how many six-sided dice they rolled. Wizards chose to stop producing the game due to poor sales. One of the contributing factors given through market research was that gamers seem to dislike six-sided dice in their trading card game.

Here's the kicker. When you dug deeper into the comments they equated dice with "lack of skill." But the game rolled huge amounts of dice. That greatly increased the consistency. (What I mean by this is that if you rolled a million dice, your chance of averaging 3.5 is much higher than if you rolled ten.) Players, though, equated lots of dice rolling with the game being "more random" even though that contradicts the actual math.

38 points Gunnar_Zarncke 02 April 2014 11:21:01AM Permalink

It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.

-- Alfred Adler

ADDED: Source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_Adler

Quoted in: Phyllis Bottome, Alfred Adler: Apostle of Freedom (1939), ch. 5

Problems of Neurosis: A Book of Case Histories (1929)

38 points Salemicus 04 September 2014 04:45:08PM Permalink

How to compose a successful critical commentary:

  1. You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.

  2. You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

  3. You should mention anything you have learned from your target.

  4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

D.C. Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. Dennett himself is summarising Anatol Rapoport.

38 points michaelkeenan 01 September 2014 10:23:50PM Permalink

A raise is only a raise for thirty days; after that, it’s just your salary.

-- David Russo

37 points simplicio 06 September 2010 06:20:05AM Permalink

I had, also, during many years followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones. Owing to this habit, very few objections were raised against my views which I had not at least noticed and attempted to answer.

-From his Autobiography, 1902.

A wonderful quote indeed. Found by guessing that it was biographical or autobiographical (it seemed a little too personal for a scientific treatise) and searching for the word "fact" in the online text of the (very readable) autobiography.

37 points Jayson_Virissimo 04 January 2011 05:46:11AM Permalink

It’s easy to lie with statistics, but it’s easier to lie without them.

-Fred Mosteller

37 points [deleted] 01 June 2011 03:58:08PM Permalink

The bulk of political discourse today is purposefully playing telephone with facts in ways that couldn't be done in the Information Age if people just had the know-how to check for themselves. Comprehending complex sentences is something that can be done by first grade, and comprehending complex concepts and issues is without a doubt something better learned in math than in English, where one learns to obfuscate concepts and issues, and to play to baser emotions. Granted, one also learns to recognize and to defend against these tactics, but it still can't hold a candle to the "mental gymnastics" referenced above. Do you realize what the world looks like if you've got a background in math? Imagine signs reading DANGER: KEEP OUT are planted everywhere, but people purposefully and proudly ignore them, treating it as laughably eccentric to have learned more than half the alphabet, approaching en masse and dragging you with them.

~From the Math It Just Bugs Me page, TV Tropes

37 points Stabilizer 02 December 2011 09:40:22AM Permalink

(Tuco is in a bubble bath. The One Armed Man enters the room)

One Armed Man: I've been looking for you for 8 months. Whenever I should have had a gun in my right hand, I thought of you. Now I find you in exactly the position that suits me. I had lots of time to learn to shoot with my left.

(Tuco kills him with the gun he has hidden in the foam)

Tuco: When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk.

--The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

37 points lukeprog 02 February 2012 07:14:13PM Permalink

Just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.

Dara OBriain

37 points GabrielDuquette 02 February 2012 12:37:31AM Permalink

The point of rigour is not to destroy all intuition; instead, it should be used to destroy bad intuition while clarifying and elevating good intuition.

Terence Tao

37 points Grognor 03 March 2012 08:57:49AM Permalink

“Stupider” for a time might not have been a real word, but it certainly points where it’s supposed to. The other day my sister used the word “deoffensify”. It’s not a real word, but that didn’t make it any less effective. Communication doesn’t care about the “realness” of language, nor does it often care about the exact dictionary definitions. Words change through every possible variable, even time. One of the great challenges of communication has always been making sure words mean the same thing to you and your audience.

-Michael Kayin OReilly

37 points Viliam_Bur 01 April 2012 08:44:32PM Permalink

I agree with the necessity of making life more fair, and disagree with the connotational noble Pocahontas lecturing a sadistic western patriarch. (Note: the last three words are taken from the quote.)

37 points Matt_Caulfield 01 December 2012 08:08:42PM Permalink

Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim.

  • David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
37 points James_Miller 01 December 2012 08:51:39PM Permalink

politicians and leaders worldwide don’t like to be associated with toilets, even state-of-the-art toilets. This sanitation stigma distorts international and national development agendas.

chairman of the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation

The quote was brought to my attention by a student in my Economics of Future Technology course who is writing on sanitation in the developing world.

37 points nabeelqu 01 January 2013 03:33:09PM Permalink

Not long ago a couple across the aisle from me in a Quiet Car talked all the way from New York City to Boston, after two people had asked them to stop. After each reproach they would lower their voices for a while, but like a grade-school cafeteria after the lunch monitor has yelled for silence, the volume crept inexorably up again. It was soft but incessant, and against the background silence, as maddening as a dripping faucet at 3 a.m. All the way to Boston I debated whether it was bothering me enough to say something. As we approached our destination a professorial-looking man who’d spoken to them twice got up, walked back and stood over them. He turned out to be quite tall. He told them that they’d been extremely inconsiderate, and he’d had a much harder time getting his work done because of them.

“Sir,” the girl said, “I really don’t think we were bothering anyone else.”

“No,” I said, “you were really annoying.”

“Yes,” said the woman behind them.

“See,” the man explained gently, “this is how it works. I’m the one person who says something. But for everyone like me, there’s a whole car full of people who feel the same way.”

-- Tim Kreider, The Quiet Ones

37 points andreas 02 February 2013 05:42:44AM Permalink

"I design a cell to not fail and then assume it will and then ask the next 'what-if' questions," Sinnett said. "And then I design the batteries that if there is a failure of one cell it won't propagate to another. And then I assume that I am wrong and that it will propagate to another and then I design the enclosure and the redundancy of the equipment to assume that all the cells are involved and the airplane needs to be able to play through that."

Mike Sinnett, Boeing's 787 chief project engineer

37 points Grognor 03 February 2013 09:59:37PM Permalink

It is because a mirror has no commitment to any image that it can clearly and accurately reflect any image before it. The mind of a warrior is like a mirror in that it has no commitment to any outcome and is free to let form and purpose result on the spot, according to the situation.

—Yagyū Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword

37 points D_Malik 04 April 2013 07:23:23AM Permalink

There once was a hare who mocked a passing tortoise for being slow. The erudite tortoise responded by challenging the hare to a race.

Built for speed, and with his pride on the line, the hare easily won - I mean, it wasn't even close - and resumed his mocking anew.

Winston Rowntree, Non-Bullshit Fables

37 points James_Miller 01 November 2013 03:19:40PM Permalink

"For my own part,” Ms. Yellen said, “I did not see and did not appreciate what the risks were with securitization, the credit ratings agencies, the shadow banking system, the S.I.V.’s — I didn’t see any of that coming until it happened.” Her startled interviewers noted that almost none of the officials who testified had offered a similar acknowledgment of an almost universal failure.

Economist and likely future chairperson of the Federal Reserve Board Janet Yellen shows the key rationality trait of being able to admit you were wrong.

37 points Vulture 05 January 2014 12:00:26AM Permalink

I spent my childhood believing I was destined to be a hero

in some far off magic kingdom.

It was too late when I realized that I was needed here.

--A Softer World

37 points Pablo_Stafforini 07 July 2014 10:28:26PM Permalink

Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, New York, 2007, p. 133

37 points dspeyer 01 November 2014 09:52:29PM Permalink

It’s easier to bear in mind that the map is not the territory when you have two different maps.

--Eric Raymond on the value of bilinguilism

37 points James_Miller 02 November 2014 12:46:09AM Permalink

I want to get the most amount of candy with the least amount of walking.

My 9-year-old son on Halloween.

36 points benelliott 02 March 2011 03:26:27PM Permalink

When things get too complicated, it sometimes makes sense to stop and wonder: Have I asked the right question?

Enrico Bombieri

36 points gwern 11 September 2011 02:53:32PM Permalink

Again and again, I’ve undergone the humbling experience of first lamenting how badly something sucks, then only much later having the crucial insight that its not sucking wouldn’t have been a Nash equilibrium.

--Scott Aaronson

36 points GabrielDuquette 01 September 2011 02:43:49PM Permalink

If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.

-- Paul Graham

36 points Automaton 02 October 2011 03:00:47AM Permalink

Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality. When you tell the truth, you have nothing to keep track of. The world itself becomes your memory, and if questions arise, you can always point others back to it. You can even reconsider certain facts and honestly change your views. And you can openly discuss your confusion, conflicts, and doubts with all comers. In this way, a commitment to the truth is naturally purifying of error.

Sam Harris, "Lying"

36 points Larks 01 December 2011 11:17:30AM Permalink

There's not point being annoyed at nature, but a precommitment to revenge is useful.

36 points scmbradley 02 February 2012 01:43:12PM Permalink

The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem, in a way that will allow a solution

– Bertrand Russell

36 points Yvain 02 April 2012 12:55:42PM Permalink

On counter-signaling, how not to do:

US police investigated a parked car with a personalized plate reading "SMUGLER". They found the vehicle, packed with 24 lb (11 kg) of narcotics, parked near the Canadian border at a hotel named "The Smugglers' Inn." Police believed the trafficker thought that being so obvious would deter the authorities.

-- The Irish Independent, "News In Brief"

36 points Oscar_Cunningham 01 June 2012 02:31:58PM Permalink

Two very different attitudes toward the technical workings of mathematics are found in the literature. Already in 1761, Leonhard Euler complained about isolated results which "are not based on a systematic method" and therefore whose "inner grounds seem to be hidden." Yet in the 20'th Century, writers as diverse in viewpoint as Feller and de Finetti are agreed in considering computation of a result by direct application of the systematic rules of probability theory as dull and unimaginative, and revel in the finding of some isolated clever trick by which one can see the answer to a problem without any calculation.

[...]

Feller's perception was so keen that in virtually every problem he was able to see a clever trick; and then gave only the clever trick. So his readers get the impression that:

  • Probability theory has no systematic methods; it is a collection of isolated, unrelated clever tricks, each of which works on one problem but not on the next one.
  • Feller was possessed of superhuman cleverness.
  • Only a person with such cleverness can hope to find new useful results in probability theory.

Indeed, clever tricks do have an aesthetic quality that we all appreciate at once. But we doubt whether Feller, or anyone else, was able to see those tricks on first looking at the problem. We solve a problem for the first time by that (perhaps dull to some) direct calculation applying our systematic rules. After seeing the solution, we may contemplate it and see a clever trick that would have led us to the answer much more quickly. Then, of course, we have the opportunity for gamesmanship by showing others only the clever trick, scorning to mention the base means by which we first found.

E. T. Jaynes "Probability Theory, The Logic of Science"

36 points mindspillage 04 July 2012 06:08:12AM Permalink

The words "I am..." are potent words; be careful what you hitch them to. The thing you're claiming has a way of reaching back and claiming you.

--A.L. Kitselman

36 points katydee 07 September 2012 02:15:02AM Permalink

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, and who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Solzhenitsyn

36 points NoisyEmpire 02 January 2013 08:01:12PM Permalink

What does puzzle people – at least it used to puzzle me – is the fact that Christians regard faith… as a virtue. I used to ask how on Earth it can be a virtue – what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence, that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid…

What I did not see then – and a good many people do not see still – was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so. For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I start thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start cutting me up before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith; on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other…

Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding onto things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian, I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable; but when I was an atheist, I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable... Unless you teach your moods "where they get off" you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of faith.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Caveat: this is not at all how the majority of the religious people that I know would use the word "faith". In fact, this passage turned out to be one of the earliest helps in bringing me to think critically about and ultimately discard my religious worldview.

36 points Zubon 03 May 2013 03:50:45AM Permalink

A lot of people gave very selflessly to build this warship so we can go out and battle the vikings, but the time has come to admit that hard work and hope are no substitute for actual knowledge and that we've made a really shitty ship. If we sail this ship against the vikings, we'll be massacred immediately.

Oglaf webcomic, "Bilge"

(Oglaf is usually NSFW, so I'm not linking, even if this particular comic has nothing worse than coarse language.)

36 points jaibot 03 May 2013 10:27:52PM Permalink

On the contrary, a sizable fraction of Oglaf's comics involve restraints.

36 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 July 2013 07:11:50PM Permalink

"If you don't know how to turn off the safety, being unable to fire the gun is the intended result."

-- NotEnoughBears

36 points aarongertler 05 February 2014 03:47:49AM Permalink

"The story of Japanese railways during the earthquake and tsunami is the story of an unceasing drumbeat of everything going right [...] The overwhelming response of Japanese engineering to the challenge posed by an earthquake larger than any in the last century was to function exactly as designed. Millions of people are alive right now because the system worked and the system worked and the system worked.

That this happened was, I say with no hint of exaggeration, one of the triumphs of human civilization. Every engineer in this country should be walking a little taller this week. We can’t say that too loudly, because it would be inappropriate with folks still missing and many families in mourning, but it doesn’t make it any less true."

--Patrick McKenzie, "Some Perspective on the Japan Earthquake"

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/03/13/some-perspective-on-the-japan-earthquake

(Disaster is not inevitable.)

36 points [deleted] 05 April 2014 05:45:29AM Permalink

Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up "What's that?"- It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said "this is a man," "this is a house," etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then?

  • Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
35 points cousin_it 22 October 2009 06:04:21PM Permalink

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

-- Winston Churchill

35 points Kyre 02 September 2010 05:41:48AM Permalink

Comic Quote Minus 37

-- Ryan Armand

Also a favourite.

35 points gwern 15 December 2010 08:05:51PM Permalink

'One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction.

At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, “Do you mean did I not operate on half the patients?” The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, “Yes, that’s what I had in mind.” Then the visitor’s fist really came down as he thundered, “Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death.”

God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, “Which half?”'

Dr. E. E. Peacock, Jr., quoted in Medical World News (September 1, 1972), p. 45, as quoted in Tufte's 1974 book Data Analysis for Politics and Policy; http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/12/the-ethics-of-random-clinical-trials.html

35 points Kutta 03 January 2011 09:17:20AM Permalink

This idea that whenever something evil happens someone particular can be blamed and punished for it, in life and in politics is hopeless.

-- Hayao Miyazaki

35 points gwern 01 February 2011 06:03:48PM Permalink

"Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered.

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time; premature optimization is the root of all evil."

--Donald Knuth (see also Amdahls law)

35 points NancyLebovitz 04 April 2011 03:58:53PM Permalink

I wonder if the default price was more like $10.

35 points kalla724 03 October 2011 06:50:07PM Permalink

"What do you think the big headlines were in 1666, the year Newton posited gravitation as a universal force, discovered that white light was composed of the colors of the spectrum, and invented differential calculus, or in 1905, the “annus mirabilis” when Einstein confirmed quantum theory by analyzing the photoelectric effect, introduced special relativity, and proposed the formulation that matter and energy are equivalent? The Great Fire of London and the Anglo-Dutch War; The Russian Revolution and the Russo-Japanese War. The posturing and squabbling of politicians and the exchange of gunfire over issues that would be of little interest or significance to anyone alive now. In other words, ephemeral bullshit. These insights and discoveries are the real history of our species, the slow painstaking climb from ignorance to understanding."

  • Tim Kreider
35 points Lightwave 01 January 2012 12:24:52PM Permalink

Do not accept any of my words on faith,

Believing them just because I said them.

Be like an analyst buying gold, who cuts, burns,

And critically examines his product for authenticity.

Only accept what passes the test

By proving useful and beneficial in your life.

-- The Buddha, Jnanasara-samuccaya Sutra

35 points Jayson_Virissimo 02 February 2012 08:59:37AM Permalink

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.

George Bernard Shaw

35 points Konkvistador 01 March 2012 09:09:23PM Permalink

False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing

--Joseph de Maistre, Les soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, Ch. I

35 points TheOtherDave 01 June 2012 03:12:50PM Permalink

I recall a math teacher in high school explaining that often, in the course of doing a proof, one simply gets stuck and doesn't know where to go next, and a good thing to do at that point is to switch to working backwards from the conclusion in the general direction of the premise; sometimes the two paths can be made to meet in the middle. Usually this results in a step the two paths join involving doing something completely mystifying, like dividing both sides of an equation by the square root of .78pi.

"Of course, someone is bound to ask why you did that," he continued. "So you look at them completely deadpan and reply 'Isn't it obvious?'"

I have forgotten everything I learned in that class. I remember that anecdote, though.

35 points Alejandro1 02 August 2012 08:52:13PM Permalink

British philosophy is more detailed and piecemeal than that of the Continent; when it allows itself some general principle, it sets to work to prove it inductively by examining its various applications. Thus Hume, after announcing that there is no idea without an antecedent impression, immediately proceeds to consider the following objection: suppose you are seeing two shades of colour which are similar but not identical, and suppose you have never seen a shade of colour intermediate between the two, can you nevertheless imagine such a shade? He does not decide the question, and considers that a decision adverse to his general principle would not be fatal to him, because his principle is not logical but empirical. When--to take a contrast--Leibniz wants to establish his monadology, he argues, roughly, as follows: Whatever is complex must be composed of simple parts; what is simple cannot be extended; therefore everything is composed of parts having no extension. But what is not extended is not matter. Therefore the ultimate constituents of things are not material, and, if not material, then mental. Consequently a table is really a colony of souls.

The difference of method, here, may be characterized as follows: In Locke or Hume, a comparatively modest conclusion is drawn from a broad survey of many facts, whereas in Leibniz a vast edifice of deduction is pyramided upon a pin-point of logical principle. In Leibniz, if the principle is completely true and the deductions are entirely valid, all is well; but the structure is unstable, and the slightest flaw anywhere brings it down in ruins. In Locke or Hume, on the contrary, the base of the pyramid is on the solid ground of observed fact, and the pyramid tapers upward, not downward; consequently the equilibrium is stable, and a flaw here or there can be rectified without total disaster.

--Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

35 points dspeyer 01 January 2013 04:37:36PM Permalink

You're better at talking than I am. When you talk, sometimes I get confused. My ideas of what's right and wrong get mixed up. That's why I'm bringing this. As soon as I start thinking it's all right to steal from our employees, I'm going to start hitting you with the stick.

later

If it makes you feel any better, I agree with your logic completely.

No, what would make me feel better is for you to stop hitting me!

--Freefall

35 points Jay_Schweikert 04 April 2013 02:18:00PM Permalink

Jack Sparrow: [after Will draws his sword] Put it away, son. It's not worth you getting beat again.

Will Turner: You didn't beat me. You ignored the rules of engagement. In a fair fight, I'd kill you.

Jack Sparrow: Then that's not much incentive for me to fight fair, then, is it? [Jack turns the ship, hitting Will with the boom]

Jack Sparrow: Now as long as you're just hanging there, pay attention. The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and what a man can't do. For instance, you can accept that your father was a pirate and a good man or you can't. But pirate is in your blood, boy, so you'll have to square with that some day. And me, for example, I can let you drown, but I can't bring this ship into Tortuga all by me onesies, savvy? So, can you sail under the command of a pirate, or can you not?

--Pirates of the Caribbean

The pirate-specific stuff is a bit extraneous, but I've always thought this scene neatly captured the virtue of cold, calculating practicality. Not that "fairness" is never important to worry about, but when you're faced with a problem, do you care more about solving it, or arguing that your situation isn't fair? What can you do, and what can't you do? Reminds me of What do I want? What do I have? How can I best use the latter to get the former?

35 points Pablo_Stafforini 01 July 2013 10:38:53PM Permalink

Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization. We filled that niche because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.

Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: the Coming Machine Intelligence Revolution, chap. 2

35 points Stabilizer 02 November 2013 01:41:02AM Permalink

A good stack of examples, as large as possible, is indispensable for a thorough understanding of any concept, and when I want to learn something new, I make it my first job to build one.

-Paul Halmos

35 points Alejandro1 02 December 2013 04:20:15PM Permalink

Most of the Headlines from a Mathematically Literate World. An example:

Our World: Hollywood Breaks Box Office Records with Explosions, Rising Stars.

Mathematically Literate World: Hollywood Breaks Box Office Records with Inflation, Rising Population.

35 points Ixiel 04 April 2014 11:14:37AM Permalink

Slartibartfast: Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I think that the chances of finding out what's actually going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, "Hang the sense of it," and keep yourself busy. I'd much rather be happy than right any day.

Arthur Dent: And are you?

Slartibartfast: Well... no. That's where it all falls down, of course.

Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

34 points RobinZ 01 April 2010 11:44:06PM Permalink

I listen to all these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness, and the opinion that I come to is that there is no polite way of asking somebody: have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion? But that’s a good question to ask. Of course we should ask that question and of course it’s going to offend people. Tough.

Daniel Dennett, interview for TPM: The Philosophers Magazine

34 points CronoDAS 04 April 2011 11:29:10PM Permalink

From a forum signature:

The fool says in his heart, "There is no God." --Psalm 14:1

It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak. --Neil Gaiman, Sandman 3:3:6

34 points Oscar_Cunningham 02 May 2011 02:02:00PM Permalink

If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong.

Paul Graham

34 points chaosmosis 04 May 2012 07:00:21PM Permalink

Being - forgive me - rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.

Albus Dumbledore

34 points Nisan 03 May 2012 11:57:16PM Permalink

"When life hands you lemons, make lemonade" = "I have water and sugar and you don't, aren't I awesome"

Steven Kaas

34 points shokwave 03 July 2012 05:09:07AM Permalink

Person: "It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you."

Robot: " ... Paranoia is such a childish emotion. You're an adult. Why aren't all your enemies dead by now?"

-- RStevens

34 points J_Taylor 03 August 2012 02:09:49AM Permalink

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience.

-- G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

34 points lukeprog 09 September 2012 01:36:00AM Permalink

A problem well stated is a problem half solved.

Charles Kettering

34 points Jayson_Virissimo 01 September 2012 08:25:27AM Permalink

Infallible, adj. Incapable of admitting error.

-L. A. Rollins, Lucifer's Lexicon: An Updated Abridgment

34 points wallowinmaya 02 September 2012 10:30:35PM Permalink

Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.

Ken Wilber

34 points GabrielDuquette 01 December 2012 03:45:57PM Permalink

"Working in mysterious ways" is the greatest euphemism for failure ever devised.

TheTweetOfGod

34 points Qiaochu_Yuan 03 January 2013 08:49:14AM Permalink

In Japan, it is widely believed that you don't have direct knowledge of what other people are really thinking (and it's very presumptuous to assume otherwise), and so it is uncommon to describe other people's thoughts directly, such as "He likes ice cream" or "She's angry". Instead, it's far more common to see things like "I heard that he likes ice cream" or "It seems like/It appears to be the case that she is angry" or "She is showing signs of wanting to go to the park."

-- TVTropes

Edit (1/7): I have no particular reason to believe that this is literally true, but either way I think it holds an interesting rationality lesson. Feel free to substitute 'Zorblaxia' for 'Japan' above.

34 points GabrielDuquette 03 February 2013 01:13:32AM Permalink

Market exchange is a pathetically inadequate substitute for love, but it scales better.

S. T. Rev

34 points Jayson_Virissimo 01 March 2013 09:19:48AM Permalink

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

-- Thomas Sowell

34 points SaidAchmiz 02 August 2013 12:38:25AM Permalink

"If it July, I desire to believe it is July. If it is August, I desire to believe it is August..."

34 points philh 08 September 2013 01:53:01AM Permalink

Fran: A million billion pounds says you’ll have nothing to show me.

Bernard: Oh, the old million billion. Why don’t we make it interesting, why don’t we say 50?

Black Books, Elephants and Hens. H/t /u/mrjack2 on /r/hpmor.

34 points Stabilizer 02 September 2013 08:57:21PM Permalink

Don't ask what they think. Ask what they do.

My rule has to do with paradigm shifts—yes, I do believe in them. I've been through a few myself. It is useful if you want to be the first on your block to know that the shift has taken place. I formulated the rule in 1974. I was visiting the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) for a weeks to give a couple of seminars on particle physics. The subject was QCD. It doesn't matter what this stands for. The point is that it was a new theory of sub-nuclear particles and it was absolutely clear that it was the right theory. There was no critical experiment but the place was littered with smoking guns. Anyway, at the end of my first lecture I took a poll of the audience. "What probability would you assign to the proposition 'QCD is the right theory of hadrons.'?" My socks were knocked off by the answers. They ranged from .01 percent to 5 percent. As I said, by this time it was a clear no-brainer. The answer should have been close to 100 percent. The next day I gave my second seminar and took another poll. "What are you working on?" was the question. Answers: QCD, QCD, QCD, QCD, QCD,........ Everyone was working on QCD. That's when I learned to ask "What are you doing?" instead of "what do you think?"

I saw exactly the same phenomenon more recently when I was working on black holes. This time it was after a string theory seminar, I think in Santa Barbara. I asked the audience to vote whether they agreed with me and Gerard 't Hooft or if they thought Hawking’s ideas were correct. This time I got a 50-50 response. By this time I knew what was going on so I wasn't so surprised. Anyway I later asked if anyone was working on Hawking's theory of information loss. Not a single hand went up. Don't ask what they think. Ask what they do.

-Leonard Susskind, Susskinds Rule of Thumb

34 points johnlawrenceaspden 03 May 2014 03:17:45PM Permalink

When another asserted something that I thought an error, I deny'd myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appear'd or seem'd to me some difference, etc.

I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engag'd in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I propos'd my opinions procur'd them a readier reception and less contradiction; I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevail'd with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right.

Benjamin Franklin

34 points Manfred 04 November 2014 02:54:10AM Permalink

In fiction, villains start with some great scheme to do something awesome, and that immediately makes them fascinating to the reader. The hero - if you're doing this poorly - sits at home and just waits for the villain to do something awesome so they can respond. This is a problem. The solution is for your heroes to have a great and awesome scheme also, that just isn't evil.

Brandon Sanderson

33 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 15 June 2009 01:17:40AM Permalink

"People are mostly sane enough, of course, in the affairs of common life: the getting of food, shelter, and so on. But the moment they attempt any depth or generality of thought, they go mad almost infallibly. The vast majority, of course, adopt the local religious madness, as naturally as they adopt the local dress. But the more powerful minds will, equally infallibly, fall into the worship of some intelligent and dangerous lunatic, such as Plato, or Augustine, or Comte, or Hegel, or Marx."

-- David Stove, What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts

33 points loqi 03 July 2009 01:24:48AM Permalink

You say that your opponent lacks humanity. It's the oldest semantic weapon there is. Think of all the categories of people who've been classified as non-human, in various cultures, at various times. People from other tribes. People with other skin colors. Slaves. Women. The mentally ill. The deaf. Homosexuals. Jews. Bosnians, Croats, Serbs, Armenians, Kurds [...]

But suppose you accuse me of 'lacking humanity.' What does that actually mean? What am I likely to have done? Murdered someone in cold blood? Drowned a puppy? Eaten meat? Failed to be moved by Beethoven's Fifth? Or just failed to have—or to seek—an emotional life identical to your own in every respect? Failed to share all your values and aspirations?

The answers is: 'any one of the above.' Which is why it's so fucking lazy. Questioning someone's 'humanity' puts them in the company of serial killers—which saves you the trouble of having to claim anything intelligent about their views.

— Greg Egan (as James Rourke), Distress

33 points MichaelHoward 01 May 2010 10:11:56AM Permalink

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.

-- Douglas Adams

33 points Lightwave 02 September 2010 10:59:12AM Permalink

When people ask me what philosophy is, I say philosophy is what you do when you don't know what the right questions are yet. Once you get the questions right, then you go answer them, and that's typically not philosophy, that's one science or another. Anywhere in life where you find that people aren't quite sure what the right questions to ask are, what they're doing, then, is philosophy.

-- Daniel Dennett

33 points RichardKennaway 05 October 2010 01:33:08PM Permalink

One thing I have advocated, without much success, is that children be taught social rules (when they are ready) in exactly the same way they are taught and teach each other games. The point is not whether the rules are right or wrong. Are the rules of 5-card stud poker or hopscotch right or wrong? It's that we're playing a certain game here, and there are rules to this game just as in any other game. If you want to be in the game, then you have to learn how to play it. Different groups of people play different games (different rules = different game), so if you want to play in different groups, you have to learn the games they play. When you develop the levels of understanding above the rule level, you'll be able to understand all games, and be able to join in anywhere. You won't be stuck knowing how to play only one game.

My problem with selling this idea is that people tend to think that their game is the only right one. In fact, being told that they are playing a game with arbitrary rules is insulting or frightening. They want to believe that the rules they know are the ones that everyone ought to play by; they even set up systems of punishment and reward to make sure that nobody tries to play a different game. They turn the game into something that is deadly serious, and so my idea simply seems frivolous instead of liberating.

William T. Powers

33 points RichardKennaway 05 October 2010 02:04:33PM Permalink

Proposition 1: All matter is composed of four elements: earth, water, air, and, fire, each having an unchanging essence, and the variety of the world resulting from their combinations.

Proposition 2: All matter is composed of about 90 elements (the cutoff depending on how many of the more unstable ones one counts), most of which are created out of hydrogen and helium in stars and their supernovas, and which, in combination, give rise to the different material substances we observe.

More abstract proposition that ignores the differences: all matter is composed of fundamental elements.

Erroneous conclusion: the ancients knew modern science!

Proposition 1: Six thousand years ago, God created the world in six days.

Proposition 2: Everything started with the Big Bang some billions of years ago.

Abstract proposition: The universe had a beginning.

Erroneous conclusion: God created the universe. Scientists just call it the Big Bang because they don't want to admit it was God.

ETA: Further example: anyone saying that all religions are fundamentally the same.

ETA: Proposition 1: Here is a hammer. It drives nails.

Proposition 2: Here is a screwdriver. It drives screws.

Abstract proposition: Here is a tool. It drives spiky metal fasteners.

Erroneous conclusion: A Manchester screwdriver.

33 points RobinZ 05 April 2011 05:04:14PM Permalink

Should we then call the original replicator molecules 'living'? Who cares? I might say to you 'Darwin was the greatest man who has ever lived', and you might say 'No, Newton was', but I hope we would not prolong the argument. The point is that no conclusion of substance would be affected whichever way our argument was resolved. The facts of the lives and achievements of Newton and Darwin remain totally unchanged whether we label them 'great' or not. Similarly, the story of the replicator molecules probably happened something like the way I am telling it, regardless of whether we choose to call them 'living'. Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use, and that the mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world. Whether we call the early replicators living or not, they were the ancestors of life; they were our founding fathers.

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene.

(cf. Disguised Queries.)

33 points childofbaud 07 April 2011 10:52:41PM Permalink

I think Donald Robert Perry said it more succinctly:

“If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think they'll hate you.”

33 points cousin_it 04 April 2011 12:11:00PM Permalink

People commonly use the word "procrastination" to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working.

-- Paul Graham

33 points sixes_and_sevens 02 December 2011 02:47:42PM Permalink

Or a warning that the Zen notion of enlightenment won't let you automate menial tasks you dislike.

33 points Jayson_Virissimo 03 September 2012 08:59:50AM Permalink

...beliefs are like clothes. In a harsh environment, we choose our clothes mainly to be functional, i.e., to keep us safe and comfortable. But when the weather is mild, we choose our clothes mainly for their appearance, i.e., to show our figure, our creativity, and our allegiances. Similarly, when the stakes are high we may mainly want accurate beliefs to help us make good decisions. But when a belief has few direct personal consequences, we in effect mainly care about the image it helps to project.

-Robin Hanson, Human Enhancement

33 points jsbennett86 02 February 2013 03:45:22AM Permalink

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

33 points Qiaochu_Yuan 01 February 2013 06:08:33PM Permalink

Things that are your fault are good because they can be fixed. If they're someone else's fault, you have to fix them, and that's much harder.

-- Geoff Anders (paraphrased)

33 points jsbennett86 02 March 2013 04:31:22AM Permalink

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 Decay." The world will be saved by a series of boring, incremental advances that chip away at those technical challenges one tedious step at a time.

But nobody wants to read about that in their morning Web browsing. We want to read that while we were sleeping, some unlikely hero saved the world. Or at least cured cancer.

David Wong — 5 Easy Ways to Spot a BS News Story on the Internet

33 points Stabilizer 01 April 2013 07:19:22PM Permalink

More specifically, one thing I learned from Terry that I was not taught in school is the importance of bad proofs. I would say "I think this is true", work on it, see that there was no nice proof, and give up. Terry would say "Here's a criterion that eliminates most of the problem. Then in what's left, here's a worse one that handles most of the detritus. One or two more epicycles. At that point it comes down to fourteen cases, and I checked them." Yuck. But we would know it was true, and we would move on. (Usually these would get cleaned up a fair bit before publication.)

-Allen Knutson on collaborating with Terence Tao

33 points James_Miller 01 April 2013 04:17:37PM Permalink

A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped. True, you occasionally face a question such as 17 × 24 = ? to which no answer comes immediately to mind, but these dumbfounded moments are rare. The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way. You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing it. Whether you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither explain nor defend.

Daniel Kahneman,Thinking, Fast and Slow

33 points Qiaochu_Yuan 03 April 2013 08:23:03PM Permalink

Dude, suckin' at something is the first step to being sorta good at something.

-- Jake the Dog (Adventure Time)

33 points ShardPhoenix 03 May 2013 10:14:51AM Permalink

Noriko: Wow, you must have a real knack for it!

Kazumi: That's not it, Miss Takaya! It takes hard work in order to achieve that.

Noriko: Hard work? You must have a knack for hard work, then!

- Gunbuster

33 points [deleted] 01 May 2013 02:43:45PM Permalink

When I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this -- it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.

I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person -- to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know that the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control.

She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happens. Nowadays there's a certain danger of the same thing happening, even in the famous field of physics. ...

-- Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!

33 points Nomad 05 October 2013 04:20:03PM Permalink

We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was also one of the winners.

Paul Graham

33 points Alejandro1 01 November 2013 01:48:51PM Permalink

Is time real? …In one sense, it’s a silly question. The “reality” of something is only an interesting issue if its a well-defined concept whose actual existence is in question, like Bigfoot or supersymmetry. For concepts like “time,” which are unambiguously part of a useful vocabulary we have for describing the world, talking about “reality” is just a bit of harmless gassing. They may be emergent or fundamental, but they’re definitely there.

Sean Carroll

33 points HungryHippo 02 December 2013 12:42:14PM Permalink

By the middle of the seventeenth century it had come to be understood that the world was enclosed in a sea of air, much as the greater part of it was covered by water. A scientist of the period, Francesco Lana, contended that a lighter-than-air ship could float upon this sea, and he suggested how such a ship might be built. He was unable to put his invention to a practical test, but he saw only one reason why it might not work:

". . . that God will never suffer this Invention to take effect, because of the many consequencies which may disturb the Civil Government of men. For who sees not, that no City can be secure against attack, since our Ship may at any time be placed directly over it, and descending down may discharge Souldiers; the same would happen to private Houses, and Ships on the Sea: for our Ship descending out of the Air to the sails of Sea-Ships, it may cut their Ropes, yea without descending by casting Grapples it may over-set them, kill their men, burn their Ships by artificial Fire works and Fire-balls. And this they may do not only to Ships but to great Buildings, Castles, Cities, with such security that they which cast these things down from a height out of Gun-shot, cannot on the other side be offended by those below."

Lana's reservation was groundless. He had predicted modern air warfare in surprisingly accurate detail—with its paratroopers and its strafing and bombing. Contrary to his expectation, God has suffered his invention to take effect. And so has Man.

  • B. F. Skinner, "Science and Human Behavior"
33 points Jayson_Virissimo 09 July 2014 05:01:31AM Permalink

We have to reinvent the wheel every once in a while, not because we need a lot of wheels; but because we need a lot of inventors.

-- Bruce Joyce, as quoted by Michael Serra in Discovering Geometry

33 points James_Miller 07 July 2014 04:19:44PM Permalink

How can you tell economists have a sense of humor? They use decimal points.

33 points dspeyer 02 September 2014 02:29:58AM Permalink

While I agree with your actual point, I note with amusement that what's worse is the people who claim they do understand: "I understand that you want to own a gun because it's a penis-substitute", "I understand that you don't want me to own a gun because you live in a fantasy world where there's no crime", "I understand that you're talking about my beauty because you think you own me", "I understand that you complain about people talking about your beauty as a way of boasting about how beautiful you are."... None of these explanations are anywhere near true.

It would be a sign of wisdom if someone actually did post "I'm stupid: I can hardly ever understand the viewpoint of anyone who disagrees with me."

32 points SilasBarta 01 September 2009 03:42:39PM Permalink

During the discussion of Pranknet on Slashdot about a month ago, I saw this comment. It reminded me of our discussions about Newcomb's problem and superrationality.

I also disagree that our society is based on mutual trust. Volumes and volumes of laws backed up by lawyers, police, and jails show otherwise.

That's called selection/observation bias. You're looking at only one side of the coin.

I've lived in countries where there's a lot less trust than here. The notion of returning an opened product to a store and getting a full refund is based on trust (yes, there's a profit incentive, and some people do screw the retailers [and the retailers their customers -- SB], but the system works overall). In some countries I've been to, this would be unfeasible: Almost everyone will try to exploit such a retailer.

When a storm knocks out the electricity and the traffic lights stop working, I've always seen everyone obeying the rules. I doubt it's because they're worried about cops. It's about trust that the other drivers will do likewise. Simply unworkable in other places I've lived in.

I've had neighbors whom I don't know receive UPS/FedEx packages for me. Again, trust. I don't think they're afraid of me beating them up.

There are loads of examples. Society, at least in the US, is fairly nice and a lot of that has to do with a common trust.

Which is why someone exploiting that trust is a despised person.

32 points Yvain 07 October 2010 07:00:04PM Permalink

Even after ten thousand explanations, a fool is no wiser, but an intelligent man requires only two thousand five hundred.

-- Brahma, Mahabharata

32 points MichaelGR 03 February 2011 02:51:58PM Permalink

The Company that needs a new machine tool is already paying for it.

-old Warner Swasey ad

32 points Alexandros 02 March 2011 11:15:08AM Permalink

Don't hate the playa, hate the game

-- Ice-T

Or, as the Urban Dictionary puts it:

Do not fault the successful participant in a flawed system; try instead to discern and rebuke that aspect of its organization which allows or encourages the behavior that has provoked your displeasure.

A meta-comment: It's always good to have an arsenal of mainstream-accessible quotes to use for those times when explaining game theory is just loo much of an inferential leap. I'd like to find more of these.

32 points gwern 02 March 2011 07:40:58PM Permalink

And is that laziness so bad? If extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, presumably ordinary claims require merely ordinary evidence...

32 points Risto_Saarelma 05 April 2011 05:48:11AM Permalink

But, there's another problem, and that is the fact that statistical and probabilistic thinking is a real damper on "intellectual" conversation. By this, I mean that there are many individuals who wish to make inferences about the world based on data which they observe, or offer up general typologies to frame a subsequent analysis. These individuals tend to be intelligent and have college degrees. Their discussion ranges over topics such as politics, culture and philosophy. But, introduction of questions about the moments about the distribution, or skepticism as to the representativeness of their sample, and so on, tends to have a chilling affect on the regular flow of discussion. While the average human being engages mostly in gossip and interpersonal conversation of some sort, the self-consciously intellectual interject a bit of data and abstraction (usually in the form of jargon or pithy quotations) into the mix. But the raison d'etre of the intellectual discussion is basically signaling and cuing; in other words, social display. No one really cares about the details and attempting to generate a rigorous model is really beside the point. Trying to push the N much beyond 2 or 3 (what you would see in a college essay format) will only elicit eye-rolling and irritation.

-- Razib Khan

32 points MichaelGR 02 June 2011 06:37:39PM Permalink

"At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”

-Milton Friedman story

32 points Tesseract 03 July 2011 04:19:04AM Permalink

It was a good answer that was made by one who when they showed him hanging in a temple a picture of those who had paid their vows as having escaped shipwreck, and would have him say whether he did not now acknowledge the power of the gods,—‘Aye,' asked he again, ‘but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?' And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happens much oftener, neglect and pass them by.

Francis Bacon

32 points GabrielDuquette 02 October 2011 04:39:44AM Permalink

There is one rule that's very simple, but not easy: observe reality and adjust.

Ran Prieur

32 points Vladimir_M 02 December 2011 05:32:21AM Permalink

Every time that a man who is not an absolute fool presents you with a question he considers very problematic after giving it careful thought, distrust those quick answers that come to the mind of someone who has considered it only briefly or not at all. These answers are usually simplistic views lacking in consistency, which explain nothing, or which do not bear examination.

-- Joseph de Maistre (St. Petersburg Dialogues, No. 7)

32 points billswift 30 November 2011 05:30:07PM Permalink

There's 2 varieties of subjectivism:

  • Hayekian subjectivism of limited knowledge, and limited reason, and error, resulting in Bayesian probabilities in the .8 range and below, with required updating, and impact on making +EV decisions...

  • Hippie subjectivism of you believe what you want to believe, and I believe what I want to believe.

Aretae

32 points Jayson_Virissimo 02 January 2012 07:11:34AM Permalink

Not everything that is more difficult is more meritorious.

-Saint Thomas Aquinas

I wish I would have memorized this quote before attending university.

*This comment was inspired by Will_Newsome's attempt to find rationality quotes in Summa Theologica.

32 points J_Taylor 01 February 2012 11:41:19PM Permalink

We are living in a material world, and I am a material girl.

--Madonna

32 points florian 01 March 2012 12:11:53PM Permalink

Making the (flawed) assumption that in a disagreement, they cannot both be wrong.

32 points Stephanie_Cunnane 04 April 2012 03:27:55AM Permalink

Another learning which cost me much to recognize, can be stated in four words. The facts are friendly.

It has interested me a great deal that most psychotherapists, especially the psychoanalysts, have steadily refused to make any scientific investigation of their therapy, or to permit others to do this. I can understand this reaction because I have felt it. Especially in our early investigations I can well remember the anxiety of waiting to see how the findings came out. Suppose our hypotheses were disproved! Suppose we were mistaken in our views! Suppose our opinions were not justified! At such times, as I look back, it seems to me that I regarded the facts as potential enemies, as possible bearers of disaster. I have perhaps been slow in coming to realize that the facts are always friendly. Every bit of evidence one can acquire, in any area, leads one that much closer to what is true. And being closer to the truth can never be a harmful or dangerous or unsatisfying thing. So while I still hate to readjust my thinking, still hate to give up old ways of perceiving and conceptualizing, yet at some deeper level I have, to a considerable degree, come to realize that these painful reorganizations are what is known as learning, and that though painful they always lead to a more satisfying because somewhat more accurate way of seeing life. Thus at the present time one of the most enticing areas for thought and speculation is an area where several of my pet ideas have not been upheld by the evidence, I feel if I can only puzzle my way through this problem that I will find a much more satisfying approximation to the truth. I feel sure the facts will be my friends.

-Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy (1961)

32 points VKS 04 April 2012 10:23:55AM Permalink

Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste. Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark, "Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think," surprise you?

  • Richard Hamming
32 points Jayson_Virissimo 01 May 2012 08:08:55AM Permalink

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

-Seneca

32 points paper-machine 01 May 2012 08:27:25AM Permalink

If there is something really cool and you can't understand why somebody hasn't done it before, it's because you haven't done it yourself.

-- Lion Kimbro, "The Anarchist's Principle"

32 points [deleted] 02 June 2012 08:40:08PM Permalink

Bit of a tangent, but something from that essay always bothered me.

I recently saw an ad for waiters saying they wanted people with a "passion for service." The real thing is not something one could have for waiting on tables.

Paul Graham

So I began to linger in my duties around Vincent's tables to observe his technique. I quickly learned that his style was to have no single style. He had a repertoire of approaches, each ready to be used under the appropriate circumstances. When the customers were a family, he was effervescent—even slightly clownish— directing his remarks as often to the children as the adults. With a young couple on a date, he became formal and a bit imperious in an attempt to intimidate the young man (to whom he spoke exclusively) into ordering and tipping lavishly. With an older, married couple, he retained the formality but dropped the superior air in favor of a respectful orientation to both members of the couple. Should the patron be dining alone, Vincent selected a friendly demeanor—cordial, conversational, and warm. Vincent reserved the trick of seeming to argue against his own interests for large parties of 8 to 12 people. His technique was veined with genius. When it was time for the first person, normally a woman, to order, he went into his act. No matter what she elected, Vincent reacted identically: His brow furrowed, his hand hovered above his order pad, and after looking quickly over his shoulder for the manager, he leaned conspiratorially toward the table to report for all to hear "I'm afraid that is not as good tonight as it normally is. Might I recommend instead the [blank] or the [blank]?" (At this point, Vincent suggested a pair of menu items that were slightly less expensive than the dish the patron had selected initially.) "They are both excellent tonight." With this single maneuver, Vincent engaged several important principles of influence. First, even those who did not take his suggestions felt that Vincent had done them a favor by offering valuable information to help them order. Everyone felt grateful, and consequently, the rule for reciprocity would work in his favor when it came time for them to decide on his gratuity. Besides hiking the percentage of his tip, Vincent's maneuver also placed him in a favorable position to increase the size of the party's order. It established him as an authority on the current stores of the house: he clearly knew what was and wasn't good that night. Moreover—and here is where seeming to argue against his own interests comes in—it proved him to be a trustworthy informant because he recommended dishes that were slightly less expensive than the one originally ordered. Rather than trying to line his own pockets, he seemed to have the customers' best interests at heart. To all appearances, he was at once knowledgeable and honest, a combination that gave him great credibility. Vincent was quick to exploit the advantage of this credible image. When the party had finished giving their food orders, he would say, "Very well, and would you like me to suggest or select wine to go with your meals?" As I watched the scene repeated almost nightly, there was a notable consistency to the customer's reaction—smiles, nods, and, for the most part, general assent.

Robert Cialdini, Influence

32 points katydee 02 September 2012 09:01:21PM Permalink

Lady Average may not be as good-looking as Lady Luck, but she sure as hell comes around more often.

Anonymous

32 points zslastman 03 September 2012 06:32:55PM Permalink

I feel like Hanson's admittedly insightful "signaling" hammer has him treating everything as a nail.

32 points fortyeridania 02 November 2012 05:25:58AM Permalink

Therefore, the first and most important duty of philosophy is to test impressions, choosing between them and only deploying those that have passed the test. You know how, with money--an area where we believe our interest to be at stake--we have developed the art of assaying, and considerable ingenuity has gone into developing a way to test if coins are counterfeit, involving our senses of sight, smell, hearing, and touch. The assayer will let the denarius drop and listen intently to its ring; and he is not satisfied to listen just once: after repeated listenings he practically acquires a musician's subtle ear. It is a measure of the effort we are prepared to expend to guard against deception when accuracy is at a premium.

When it comes to our poor mind, however, we can't be bothered; we are satisfied accepting any and all impressions, because here the loss we suffer is not obvious. If you want to know just how little concerned you are about things good and bad, and how serious about things indifferent, compare your attitude to going blind with your attitude about being mentally in the dark. You will realize, I think, how inappropriate your values really are.

Epictetus, Discourses I.20.7-12 (pages 51-52 of this edition) (original Greek, with alternate translations at the link)

Edited to correct a typo.

32 points jooyous 06 February 2013 09:57:17PM Permalink

I wept because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet, then I continued weeping because his foot problem did not actually solve my shoe problem.

-- Noah Brand

I'd prefer if this quote ended with " ... and then I got done weeping and started working on my shoe budget," but oh wells.

32 points TeMPOraL 01 June 2013 04:48:25PM Permalink

Akins Laws of Spacecraft Design are full of amazing quotes. My personal favourite:

6) (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.

(See also an interesting note from HNs btilly on this law)

32 points AlanCrowe 03 June 2013 12:47:46PM Permalink

The corollary is more useful than the theorem:-) If I wish to be less of a dumbass, it helps to know what it looks like from the inside. It looks like bad luck, so my first job is to learn to distinguish bad luck from enemy action. In Eliezer's specific example that is going to be hard because I need to include myself in my list of potential enemies.

32 points Zubon 02 July 2013 10:15:14PM Permalink

He senses in his gut that he did the right thing by showing up. As with all gut feelings, only time will tell whether this is pathetic self-delusion.

Neil Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

32 points Benito 01 August 2013 09:15:24PM Permalink

This analogy, this passage from the finite to infinite, is beset with pitfalls. How did Euler avoid them? He was a genius, some people will answer, and of course that is no explanation at all. Euler has shrewd reasons for trusting his discovery. We can understand his reasons with a little common sense, without any miraculous insight specific to genius.

  • G. Polya, Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning Vol. 1
32 points Pablo_Stafforini 02 September 2013 12:56:06PM Permalink

You should work to reduce your biases, but to say you have none is a sign that you have many.

Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t, New York, 2012, p. 451

32 points Dentin 04 September 2013 04:09:34PM Permalink

There is no glory, no beauty in death. Only loss. It does not have meaning. I will never see my loved ones again. They are permanently lost to the void. If this is the natural order of things, then I reject that order. I burn here my hopelessness, I burn here my constraints. By my hand, death shall fall. And if I fail, another shall take my place ... and another, and another, until this wound in the world is healed at last.

Anonymous, found written in the Temple at 2013 Burning Man

32 points RobbBB 02 September 2013 04:45:31AM Permalink

Fallacy names are great for chunking something already understood. The problem is that most people who appeal to them don't understand them, and therefore mis-use them. If they spoke in descriptive phrases rather than in jargon, there would be less of an illusion of transparency and people would be more likely to notice that there are discrepancies in usage.

For instance, most people don't understand that not all personal attacks are ad hominem fallacies. The quotation encourages that particular mistake, inadvertently. So it indirectly provides evidence for its own thesis.

32 points Alejandro1 01 November 2013 01:46:41PM Permalink

“What else [have you learned]?”

“Never make a decision blindfolded.”

The teacher laughed. “An impossible wish. We’re all wearing blindfolds, every moment of our lives, and they come off far less easily than this cheap piece of cloth.”

“Then what should we do, when we can’t take the blindfold off?”

“Do the best you can,” the teacher said, “and never forget that you’re wearing it.”

Math with Bad Drawings

32 points FiftyTwo 04 November 2013 10:12:55PM Permalink

Medicine is not in our nature. Show me a man who would cut someone open to remove cancer, and I will show you man who would cut someone open and entirely forget he was originally planning to remove a tumour

Exact same argument. Does it sound equally persuasive to you?

32 points lmm 03 June 2014 11:44:56AM Permalink

"I just don't have enough data to make a decision."

"Yes, you do. What you don't have is enough data for you not to have to make one"

http://old.onefte.com/2011/03/08/you-have-a-decision-to-make/

32 points AspiringRationalist 07 July 2014 12:50:45AM Permalink

Precise forecasts masquerade as accurate ones.

-- Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise

32 points grendelkhan 04 December 2014 09:48:07PM Permalink

If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.

"Murphy's Laws of Combat"

31 points James_Miller 22 October 2009 05:33:12PM Permalink

You want to learn from experience, but you want to learn from other people’s experience when you can.

Warren Buffett

31 points DaveInNYC 24 October 2009 06:53:52PM Permalink

I have met people who exaggerate the differences [between the morality of different cultures], because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of belief about facts. For example, one man said to me, "Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?" But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did-if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did. There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.

-C.S. Lewis

31 points Jayson_Virissimo 02 July 2010 05:35:48PM Permalink

Doubt, n. The philosophical device Descartes so cleverly used to prove everything he previously believed.

-L. A. Rollins, Lucifer's Lexicon

31 points DSimon 02 February 2011 06:26:12PM Permalink

Another good one:

Ist's zu Sylvester hell und klar, ist am nächsten Tag Neujahr.

"If it's bright and clear on New Year's Eve, the next day will be New Year's."

31 points CharlesR 02 May 2011 04:15:40AM Permalink

The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

-Paul Graham, Keep Your Identity Small

31 points Eugine_Nier 03 September 2011 05:36:08AM Permalink

One day, I was playing with an "express wagon," a little wagon with a railing around it, I noticed something about the way the ball moved. I went to my father and said, "Say, Pop, I noticed something. When I pull the wagon, the ball rolls to the back of the wagon. And when I'm pulling it along and I suddenly stop, the ball rolls to the front of the wagon. Why is that?"

"That, nobody knows," he said. "The general principle is that things which are moving tend to keep on moving, and things which are standing still tend to stand still, unless you push them hard. This tendency is called 'inertia,' but nobody knows why it's true." Now, that's a deep understanding. He didn't just give me the name.

-Richard Feynman

31 points JoshuaZ 01 September 2011 05:27:58PM Permalink

Related SMBC.

31 points wallowinmaya 31 October 2011 07:55:56PM Permalink

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

Voltaire

31 points Grognor 01 December 2011 04:11:53AM Permalink

What is more important in determining an (individual) organism's phenotype, its genes or its environment? Any developmental biologist knows that this is a meaningless question. Every aspect of an organism's phenotype is the joint product of its genes and its environment. To ask which is more important is like asking, Which is more important in determining the area of a rectangle, the length or the width? Which is more important in causing a car to run, the engine or the gasoline? Genes allow the environment to influence the development of phenotypes.

-Tooby and Cosmides, emphasis theirs. It occurred to someone on the Less Wrong IRC channel how good this is an isomorphism of, "You have asked a wrong question."

31 points Grognor 02 February 2012 03:29:36AM Permalink

Il est dangereux d’avoir raison dans des choses où des hommes accrédités ont tort.

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

-Voltaire (usually presented as, "It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.")

31 points peter_hurford 01 March 2012 05:19:45PM Permalink

The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.

-- Neil DeGrasse Tyson

31 points Viliam_Bur 05 April 2012 09:15:23AM Permalink

When speaking about sensory inputs, it makes sense to say that different species (even different individuals) have different ranges, so one can percieve something and other can't.

With computation it is known that sufficiently strong programming languages are in some sense equal. For example, you could speak about relative advantages of Basic, C/C++, Java, Lisp, Pascal, Python, etc., but in each of these languages you can write a simulator of the remaining ones. This means that if an algorithm can be implemented in one of these languages, it can be implemented in all of them -- in worst case, it would be implemented as a simulation of another language running its native implementation.

There are some technical details, though. Simulating another program is slower and requires more memory than the original program. So it could be argued that on a given hardware you could do a program in language X which uses all the memory and all available time, so it does not necessarily follow that you can do the same program in language Y. But on this level of abstraction we ignore hardware limits. We assume that the computer is fast enough and has enough memory for whatever purpose. (More precisely, we assume that in available time a computer can do any finite number of computation steps; but it cannot do an infinite number of steps. The memory is also unlimited, but in a finite time you can only manage to use a finite amount of memory.)

So on this level of abstraction we only care about whether something can or cannot be implemented by a computer. We ignore time and space (i.e. speed and memory) constraints. Some problems can be solved by algorithms, others can not. (Then, there are other interesting levels of abstraction which care about time and space complexity of algorithms.)

Are all programming languages equal in the above sense? No. For example, although programmers generally want to avoid infinite loops in their programs, if you remove a potential for infinite loops from the programming language (e.g. in Pascal you forbid "while" and "repeat" commands, and a possibility to call functions recursively), you lose ability to simulate programming languages which have this potential, and you lose ability to solve some problems. On the other hand, some universal programming languages seem extremely simple -- a famous example is a Turing machine. This is very useful, because it is easier to do mathematical proofs about a simple language. For example if you invent a new programming language X, all you have to do to prove its universality, is to write a Turing machine simulator, which is usually very simple.

Now back to the original discussion... Eliezer suggests that brain functionality should be likened to computation, not to sensory input. A human brain is computationally universal, because (given enough time, pen and paper) we can simulate a computer program, so all brains should be equal when optimally used (differing only in speed and use of resources). In another comment he adds that ability to compute isn't the same as ability to understand. Therefore (my conclusion) what one human can understand, another human can at least correctly calculate without understanding, given a correct algorithm.

31 points John_Maxwell_IV 07 May 2012 06:09:23PM Permalink

How a game theorist buys a car:

"Hello, my name is Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. I plan to buy the following car [list the exact model and features] today at five P.M. I am calling all of the dealerships within a fifty-mile radius of my home and I am telling each of them what I am telling you. I will come in and buy the car today at five P.M. from the dealer who gives me the lowest price. I need to have the all-in price, including taxes, dealer prep [I ask them not to prep the car and not charge me for it, since dealer prep is little more than giving you a washed car with plastic covers and paper floormats removed, usually for hundreds of dollars], everything, because I will make out the check to your dealership before I come and will not have another check with me."

From The Predictioneer's Game, page 7.

Other car-buying tips from Bueno de Mesquita, in case you're about to buy a car:

* Figure out exactly what car you want to buy by searching online before making any contact with dealerships.

* Don't be afraid to purchase a car from a distant dealership--the manufacturer provides the warranty, not the dealer.

* Be sure to tell each dealer you will be sharing the price they quote you with subsequent dealers.

* Don't take shit from dealers who tell you "you can't buy a car over the phone" or do anything other than give you their number. If a dealer is stonewalling, make it quite clear that you're willing to get what you want elsewhere.

* Arrive at the lowest-price dealer just before 5:00 PM to close the deal. In the unlikely event that the dealer changes their terms, go for the next best price.

31 points gjm 02 June 2012 10:20:41PM Permalink

It doesn't seem to me that Vincent-as-described-by-Cialdini is someone with a passion for waiting at tables; especially not the sort that could also be described as a "passion for service". If anything, he has a passion for exploiting customers, or something of the kind. I would expect someone with a genuine passion for table-waiting -- should such a person exist -- to be as reluctant to mislead customers as, say, someone with a passion for science would be to spend their life working for a partisan think tank putting out deliberately misleading white papers on controversial topics.

(To forestall political arguments: I am not implying that all think tanks are partisan, nor that all white papers put out by partisan think tanks are deliberately misleading.)

31 points peter_hurford 03 August 2012 12:17:53AM Permalink

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

Carl Sagan

31 points alex_zag_al 11 September 2012 01:13:28PM Permalink

Tropical rain forests, bizarrely, are the products of prisoner's dilemmas. The trees that grow in them spend the great majority of their energy growing upwards towards the sky, rather than reproducing. If they could come to a pact with their competitors to outlaw all tree trunks and respect a maximum tree height of ten feet, every tree would be better off. But they cannot.

Matt Ridley, in The Origins of Virtue

31 points MixedNuts 02 October 2012 06:09:59PM Permalink

Invertible fact alert!

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.

  • Men In Black

It's a lot easier to hate Creationists than to hate my landlady.

31 points SaidAchmiz 06 November 2012 11:43:50PM Permalink

Another from the same site — on free will:

"It's my fate to steal," pleaded the man who had been caught red-handed by Diogenes.

"Then it is also your fate to be beaten," said Diogenes, hitting him across the head with his staff.

31 points James_Miller 01 January 2013 05:58:51PM Permalink

The women of this country learned long ago, those without swords can still die upon them.

Éowyn explaining to Aragorn why she was skilled with a blade. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, the 2002 movie.

31 points jsbennett86 02 February 2013 03:36:42AM Permalink

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 that when they're on-the-record, top-notch scientists and engineers won't even speculate about the color of their socks without looking at their ankles. They have top-notch reputations because they're almost always right. They're almost always right because they keep their mouths shut until they've fully analyzed the data.

Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics review of The Core

31 points gryffinp 02 February 2013 10:32:43AM Permalink

I think you just independently invented the holy war.

31 points Vaniver 03 April 2013 02:05:53PM Permalink

Don’t settle. Don’t finish crappy books. If you don’t like the menu, leave the restaurant. If you’re not on the right path, get off it.

--Chris Brogan on the Sunk Cost Fallacy

31 points sixes_and_sevens 01 May 2013 06:42:45PM Permalink

It's my understanding that Marcus Aurelius no longer voices this opinion.

31 points David_Gerard 02 July 2013 04:13:17PM Permalink

Unix was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things.

  • Doug Gwyn
31 points Alejandro1 01 August 2013 08:45:40PM Permalink

It's a horrible feeling when you don't understand why you did something.

-- Dennis Monokroussos

31 points snafoo 04 August 2013 05:51:26PM Permalink

When the axe came into the woods, many of the trees said, "At least the handle is one of us.

Turkish proverb

31 points [deleted] 04 October 2013 01:47:52AM Permalink

Whenever a group of subcompetent people get together to do something, they assume they are competent enough to throw tradition and protocol out the window...

31 points EGarrett 05 February 2014 01:34:22AM Permalink

"To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth." Wittgenstein. "Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough," p. 119

31 points James_Miller 01 June 2014 09:20:25PM Permalink

"Do what you love" / "Follow your passion" is dangerous and destructive career advice. We tend to hear it from (a) Highly successful people who (b) Have become successful doing what they love. The problem is that we do NOT hear from people who have failed to become successful by doing what they love. Particularly pernicious problem in tournament-style fields with a few big winners lots of losers: media, athletics, startups. Better career advice may be "Do what contributes" -- focus on the beneficial value created for other people vs just one's own ego. People who contribute the most are often the most satisfied with what they do -- and in fields with high renumeration, make the most $. Perhaps difficult advice since requires focus on others vs oneself -- perhaps bad fit with endemic narcissism in modern culture? Requires delayed gratification -- may toil for many years to get the payoff of contributing value to the world, vs short-term happiness.

Marc Andreessen

31 points bramflakes 03 December 2014 03:56:16PM Permalink

When you hear an economist on TV "explain" the decline in stock prices by citing a slump in the market (and I have heard this pseudo-explanation more than once) it is time to turn off the television.

Thomas J. McKay, Reasons, Explanations and Decisions

31 points Jay_Schweikert 03 December 2014 04:40:11AM Permalink

All the logical work (if not all the rhetorical work) in “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” is being done by the decision about what aspects of liberty are essential, and how much safety is at stake. The slogan might work as a reminder not to make foolish tradeoffs, but the real difficulty is in deciding which tradeoffs are wise and which are foolish. Once we figure that out, we don’t need the slogan to remind us; before we figure it out, the slogan doesn’t really help us.

--Eugene Volokh, "Liberty, safety, and Benjamin Franklin"

A good example of the risk of reading too much into slogans that are basically just applause lights. Also reminds me of "The Choice between Good and Bad is not a matter of saying Good! It is about deciding which is which."

31 points VAuroch 11 November 2014 07:02:18AM Permalink

“There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened.”

-- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams

30 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 18 April 2009 01:28:35AM Permalink

Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.

-- Randall Munroe

30 points RobinZ 01 April 2010 11:44:53PM Permalink

My dad used to have an expression: "Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value."

Joe Biden, remarks delivered in Saint Clair Shores, MI, Monday, September 15, 2008

30 points anonym 03 December 2010 08:36:05AM Permalink

Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.

— John Von Neumann

30 points JamesAndrix 09 December 2010 07:28:48AM Permalink

A young boy walks into a barber shop and the barber whispers to his customer, “This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove it to you.” The barber puts a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other, then calls the boy over and asks, “Which do you want, son?” The boy takes the quarters and leaves. “What did I tell you?” said the barber. “That kid never learns!” Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream store. “Hey, son! May I ask you a question? Why did you take the quarters instead of the dollar bill?” The boy licked his cone and replied, “Because the day I take the dollar, the game is over!”

Found on /r/funny

30 points billswift 03 December 2010 05:21:36AM Permalink

A little learning is not a dangerous thing to one who does not mistake it for a great deal.

-- William A White

30 points TobyBartels 07 March 2011 02:22:17AM Permalink

Peanuts, 1961 April 2627:

Lucy: You can't drift along forever. You have to direct your thinking. For instance, you have to decide whether you're going to be a liberal or a conservative. You have to take some sort of stand. You have to associate yourself with some sort of cause.

Linus: How can a person just decide what he's going to think? Doesn't he have to think first, and then try to discover what it is that he's thought?

30 points RichardKennaway 02 March 2011 12:42:24PM Permalink

If a man proves too clearly and convincingly to himself . . . that a tiger is an optical illusion--well, he will find out he is wrong. The tiger will himself intervene in the discussion, in a manner which will be in every sense conclusive.

G. K. Chesterton (unsourced)

30 points DSimon 02 March 2011 02:55:18PM Permalink

Well, to be fair, the experimental group isn't doing a lot better either, just yet.

30 points Risto_Saarelma 04 April 2011 01:03:01PM Permalink

My friend, Tony, does prop work in Hollywood. Before he was big and famous, he would sell jewelry and such at Ren Faires and the like. One day I'm there, shooting the shit with him, when a guy comes up and looks at some of the crystals that Tony is selling. he finally zeroes in on one and gets all gaga over the bit of quartz. He informs Tony that he's never seen such a strong power crystal. Tony tells him it a piece of quartz. The buyer maintains it is an amazing power crystal and demands to know the price. Tony looks him over for a second, then says "If it's just a piece of quartz, it's $15. If it's a power crystal, it's $150. Which is is?" The buyer actually looked a bit sheepish as he said quietly "quartz", gave Tony his money and wandered off. I wonder if he thought he got the better of Tony.

-- genesplicer on Something Awful Forums, via

30 points CronoDAS 03 May 2011 09:43:26PM Permalink

"War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for?" he said.

"Dunno, sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?"

"Absol--Well, okay."

"Defending yourself from a totalitarian aggressor?"

"All right, I'll grant you that, but--"

"Saving civilization against a horde of--"

"It doesn't do any good in the long run is what I'm saying, Nobby, if you'd listen for five seconds together," said Fred Colon sharply.

"Yeah, but in the long run what does, sarge?"

-- Terry Pratchett, Thud!

30 points Tesseract 03 July 2011 04:42:28AM Permalink

Sometimes, apparently rational self-interested strategies turn out (as in the prisoners' dilemma) to be self-defeating. This may look like a defeat for rationality, but it is not. Rationality is saved by its own open-endedness. If a strategy of following accepted rules of rationality is sometimes self-defeating, this is not the end. We revise the rules to take account of this, so producing a higher-order rationality strategy. This in turn may fail, but again we go up a level. At whatever level we fail, there is always the process of standing back and going up a further level.

Quoted in The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker

30 points abcd_z 03 July 2011 05:15:40AM Permalink

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

John Maynard Keynes

30 points summerstay 04 August 2011 02:01:49PM Permalink

"A Thinking Machine! Yes, we can now have our thinking done for us by machinery! The Editor of the Common School Advocate says—" On our way to Cincinnati, a few days since, we stopped over night where a gentleman from the city was introducing a machine which he said was designed to supercede the necessity and labor of thinking. It was highly and respectably recommended, by men too in high places, and is designed for a calculator, to save the trouble of all mathematical labor. By turning the machinery it produces correct results in addition, substraction, multiplication, and division, and the operator assured us that it was equally useful in fractions and the higher mathematics." The Editor thinks that such machines, by which the scholar may, by turning a crank, grind out the solution of a problem without the fatigue of mental application, would by its introduction into schools, do incalculable injury, But who knows that such machines when brought to greater perfection, may not think of a plan to remedy all their own defects and then grind out ideas beyond the ken of mortal mind!" --- The Primitive Expounder in 1847

30 points brazzy 03 September 2011 10:47:19PM Permalink

She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it)

-- Lewis Carrol, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

Hard to believe that it hasn't show up here before...

30 points Davorak 01 September 2011 04:28:13PM Permalink

Better memory and processing power would mean that probabilistically more businessmen would realize there are good business opportunities where they saw none before. Creating more jobs and a more efficient economy, not the same economy more quickly.

ER doctors can now spend more processing power on each patient that comes in. Out of their existing repertoire they would choose better treatments for the problem at hand then they would have otherwise. A better memory means that they would be more likely to remember every step on their checklist when prepping for surgery.

It is not uncommon for people to make stupid decisions with mild to dire consequences because they are pressed for time. Everyone now thinks faster and has more time to think. Few people are pressed for time. Fewer accidents happen. Better decisions are made on average.

There are problems which are not human vs human but are human vs reality. With increased memory and processing power humanity gains an advantage over reality.

By no means is increasing memory and processing power a sliver bullet but it seems considerably more then everything only moving "much more quickly!"

Edit: spelling

30 points ciphergoth 13 October 2011 09:32:09PM Permalink

News flash, dearies: there’s lots of areas of life that aren’t ‘science’ where people do tend to get a mite hung up on particulars of what is and is not, in fact, true. Like in bookkeeping. Like in criminal investigations. Like when they’re trying to establish where their spouse was last night.

Like, in fact, in most facets of life, hundreds of times a day, even if accounting isn’t your field and you’re not the accused at a criminal trial, and you’re not even married. Getting the facts right isn’t a concern of ‘science’, specifically. It’s a general concern of human beings. Getting reality right is, frequently, indeed, rather important if you wish to stay alive. It’s not a particularly academic question whether the car is or is not coming, when you cross the road. It’s the sort of thing one likes to get right. And we don’t generally call this ‘science’, either. We call it ‘looking’.

-- AJ Milne

30 points peter_hurford 03 October 2011 06:45:23PM Permalink

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.

André Gide

30 points Nominull 02 October 2011 03:40:02AM Permalink

I think this is actually a myth. It's appealing, to us who love truth so much, to think that deviating from the path of the truth is deadly and dangerous and leads inevitably to dark side epistemology. But there is a trick to telling lies, such that they only differ from the truth in minor, difficult to verify ways. If you tell elegant lies, they will cling to the surface of the truth like a parasite, and you will be able to do almost anything with them that you could do with the truth. You just have to remember a few extra bits that you changed, and otherwise behave as a normal honest person would, given those few extra bits.

30 points Stabilizer 02 January 2012 05:58:19PM Permalink

The road to wisdom? — Well, it's plain

and simple to express:

Err

and err

and err again

but less

and less

and less.

--Piet Hein

Lesswrong!

30 points khafra 03 January 2012 05:02:23AM Permalink

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

-- H. L. Mencken, describing halo bias before it was named

30 points Stabilizer 03 February 2012 10:42:15PM Permalink

"The truth is whatever you can get away with."

"No, that’s journalism. The truth is whatever you can’t escape."

-Greg Egan, Distress

30 points [deleted] 01 March 2012 10:47:51AM Permalink

Meh. That's just hindsight bias.

All truths are easy to understand when they are revealed; what's hard is to find them out.

Galileo Galilei (translated by me)

30 points Maniakes 03 April 2012 12:51:28AM Permalink

There are big differences between "a study" and "a good study" and "a published study" and "a study that's been independently confirmed" and "a study that's been independently confirmed a dozen times over." These differences are important; when a scientist says something, it's not the same as the Pope saying it. It's only when dozens and hundreds of scientists start saying the same thing that we should start telling people to guzzle red wine out of a fire hose.

Chris Bucholz

30 points Viliam_Bur 05 July 2012 06:28:09PM Permalink

From the same page:

if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. [...] And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is

This gives me a new perspective on human insanity, or more positively, on how much relatively low-hanging fruit is out there.

30 points tastefullyOffensive 06 July 2012 04:47:33PM Permalink

Just explained the Higgs Boson to my friend even though I don't understand it myself. He was very convinced. I bet this is how religions get started.

-Rob DenBleyker

30 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 August 2012 06:00:43AM Permalink

Thank you, Professor Quirrell.

30 points peter_hurford 01 September 2012 06:19:37PM Permalink

"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his candle at mine, receives light without darkening me. No one possesses the less of an idea, because every other possesses the whole of it." - Jefferson

30 points RichardKennaway 07 November 2012 12:20:40AM Permalink

I would like to abstain from voting on them, but to do so in separate posts.

30 points Stabilizer 03 December 2012 02:13:14AM Permalink

Among a great many other things that chess teaches you is to control the initial excitement you feel when you see something that looks good. It trains you to think before grabbing, and to think just as objectively when you're in trouble. When you're making a film you have to make most of your decisions on the run, and there is a tendency to always shoot from the hip. It takes more discipline than you might imagine, to think, even for thirty seconds, in the noisy, confusing, high-pressure atmosphere of a film set. But a few seconds' thought can often prevent a serious mistake being made about something that looks good at first glance. With respect to films, chess is more useful in preventing you from making mistakes than giving you ideas. Ideas come spontaneously and the discipline required to evaluate and put them to use tends to be the real work.

-Stanley Kubrick

30 points Will_Newsome 01 January 2013 08:00:39PM Permalink

For the Greek philosophers, Greek was the language of reason. Aristotle's list of categories is squarely based on the categories of Greek grammar. This did not explicitly entail a claim that the Greek language was primary: it was simply a case of the identification of thought with its natural vehicle. Logos was thought, and Logos was speech. About the speech of barbarians little was known; hence, little was known about what it would be like to think in the language of barbarians. Although the Greeks were willing to admit that the Egyptians, for example, possessed a rich and venerable store of wisdom, they only knew this because someone had explained it to them in Greek.

— Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language

30 points DaFranker 01 March 2013 03:01:19PM Permalink

And what the hell is all this pay-to-win microtransaction crap? Life's devs should change their business model.

30 points ciphergoth 02 July 2013 12:59:11PM Permalink

“Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.” - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

30 points Alejandro1 02 August 2013 10:55:14AM Permalink

Now, now, perfectly symmetrical violence never solved anything.

--Professor Farnsworth, Futurama.

30 points CronoDAS 03 August 2013 01:48:52AM Permalink

It's ridiculous to think that video games influence children. After all, if Pac-Man had affected children born in the eighties, we'd all be running around in dark rooms, eating strange pills, and listening to repetitive electronic music.

-- Paraphrase of joke by Marcus Brigstocke

30 points ChrisPine 04 August 2013 05:28:06PM Permalink

It's a cautionary tale about Norwegian food.

30 points MattG 10 March 2014 08:57:46PM Permalink

"Consider the people who routinely disagree with you. See how confident they look while being dead wrong? That’s exactly how you look to them." - Scott Adams

30 points Jack_LaSota 11 October 2014 04:18:21AM Permalink

A novice asked master Banzen: “What separates the monk from the master?”

Banzen replied: “Ten thousand mistakes!”

The novice, not understanding, sought to avoid all error. An abbot observed and brought the novice to Banzen for correction.

Banzen explained: “I have made ten thousand mistakes; Suku has made ten thousand mistakes; the patriarchs of Open Source have each made ten thousand mistakes.”

Asked the novice: “What of the old monk who labors in the cubicle next to mine? Surely he has made ten thousand mistakes.”

Banzen shook his head sadly. “Ten mistakes, a thousand times each.”

The Codeless Code

30 points arundelo 03 December 2014 12:06:10AM Permalink

Problem is, "Fucking up when presented with surprising new situations" is actually a chronic human behavior. It's why purse snatchers are so effective -- by the time someone registers Wait, did somebody just yank my purse off my shoulder?, the snatcher is long gone.

-- Ferrett Steinmetz

29 points Randaly 03 August 2010 04:45:58AM Permalink

"Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from SCIENCE!"

~Girl Genius

29 points Morendil 01 September 2010 06:55:22AM Permalink

Writing program code is a good way of debugging your thinking.

-- Bill Venables

29 points Rain 03 September 2010 12:15:26PM Permalink

Robot: "With all your modern science, are you any closer to understanding the mystery of how a robot walks or talks?"

Farnsworth: "Yes you idiot! The circuit diagram is right in the inside of your case."

Robot: "I choose to believe what I was programmed to believe!"

-- Futurama, The Honking

29 points Alexandros 11 December 2010 11:03:27AM Permalink

if you're the smartest person in the room, go look for a room with smarter people in it.

kevinpet at Hacker News

29 points RichardKennaway 03 March 2011 10:24:00PM Permalink

What scientists have in common is not that they agree on the same theories, or even that they always agree on the same facts, but that they agree on the procedures to be followed in testing theories and establishing facts.

Bruce Gregory "Inventing Reality: Physics as Language" pp.186-187.

29 points jasonmcdowell 01 June 2011 09:23:48PM Permalink

I wish there was no illness, I don't care if an old doctor starves.

Loā Hô, a Taiwanese physician and poet.

29 points Tesseract 03 July 2011 04:25:27AM Permalink

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it.

Mark Twain

29 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 September 2011 07:42:39AM Permalink

It's a nice list, but I think the core point strikes me as liable to be simply false. I forget who it was presenting this evidence - it might even have been James Miller, it was someone at the Winter Intelligence conference at FHI - but they looked at (1) the economic gains to countries with higher average IQ, (2) the average gains to individuals with higher IQ, and concluded that (3) people with high IQ create vast amounts of positive externality, much more than they capture as individuals, probably mostly in the form of countries with less stupid economic policies.

Maybe if we're literally talking about a pure speed and LTM pill that doesn't affect at all, say, capacity to keep things in short-term memory or the ability to maintain complex abstractions in working memory, i.e., a literal speed and disk space pill rather than an IQ pill.

29 points Nisan 22 November 2011 03:02:18AM Permalink

Some years ago I was trying to decide whether or not to move to Harvard from Stanford. I had bored my friends silly with endless discussion. Finally, one of them said, “You’re one of our leading decision theorists. Maybe you should make a list of the costs and benefits and try to roughly calculate your expected utility.” Without thinking, I blurted out, “Come on, Sandy, this is serious.”

-Persi Diaconis

By the way, Diaconis stayed at Stanford. He's giving a public lecture on Nov. 30.

29 points Pfft 31 October 2011 06:24:06PM Permalink

This sounds good out of context, but I think it was actually confused. The context was a complaint that '"marriage market" theories leave love out of the equation'. But this is a false dichotomy. It could well be that people marry out of sincerely felt love, but fall in love with "older men with resources" and "younger women with adoring gazes”, as the original article had it. The cues that cause you to fall in love are not easily accessible to introspection.

More to the point, the original article was speculating about how a demographic shift that makes women wealthier than men would affect dating culture. What does it even mean to account for human emotion here? The way the problem is set up, the abstract model is the best we can hope for. In general, when discussing big trends or large groups, we don't have detailed information about the emotions of everyone involved. In that case, leaving those out of the model is not a failure of empiricism, it's just doing the best with what's available.

I think there are different contexts where this same quote makes more sense: for example you probably won't get a very good understanding of eBay auctions by assuming that everyone involved follows a simple economic model.

29 points Oscar_Cunningham 01 January 2012 03:53:09PM Permalink

...when you do have a deep understanding, you have solved the problem and it is time to do something else. This makes the total time you spend in life reveling in your mastery of something quite brief. One of the main skills of research scientists of any type is knowing how to work comfortably and productively in a state of confusion.

-Anon http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-have-an-understanding-of-very-advanced-mathematics#ans873950

(emphasis mine)

29 points Yvain 03 January 2012 02:12:29AM Permalink

I don't know if there's enough of a specific, meaningful claim there for me to disagree with, but Yvain-2012 probably would not have written those same words. Yvain-2012 would probably say he sometimes feels creeped out by the levels of signaling that go on in the skeptical community and thinks they sometimes snowball into the ridiculous, but that the result is prosocial and they are still performing a service.

(really I can only speak for Yvain-2011 at this point; my acquaintance with Yvain-2012 has been extremely brief)

29 points NancyLebovitz 02 February 2012 10:15:50AM Permalink

“I was just doing my job” or “I don’t make the rules” is not a defense if you have a history of deciding what your job actually is, and selectively breaking or bending rules.

"Heads I Win, Tails You Lose" by Venkat Rao

29 points arundelo 01 February 2012 09:46:04PM Permalink

Robert Morris has a very unusual quality: he's never wrong. It might seem this would require you to be omniscient, but actually it's surprisingly easy. Don't say anything unless you're fairly sure of it. If you're not omniscient, you just don't end up saying much.

[....] He's not just generally correct, but also correct about how correct he is.

-- Paul Graham

29 points Oscar_Cunningham 01 February 2012 09:55:36PM Permalink

A paradox arises when two seemingly airtight arguments lead to contradictory conclusions—conclusions that cannot possibly both be true. It’s similar to adding a set of numbers in a two-dimensional array and getting different answers depending on whether you sum up the rows first or the columns. Since the correct total must be the same either way, the difference shows that an error must have been made in at least one of the two sets of calculations. But it remains to discover at which step (or steps) an erroneous calculation occurred in either or both of the running sums. There are two ways to rebut an argument. We might call them countering and invalidating.

+To counter an argument is to provide another argument that establishes the opposite conclusion.

+To invalidate an argument, we show that there is some step in that argument that simply does not follow from what precedes it (or we show that the argument’s premises—the initial steps—are themselves false).

If an argument starts with true premises, and if every step in the argument does follow, then the argument’s conclusion must be true. However, invalidating an argument—identifying an incorrect step somewhere—does not show that the argument’s conclusion must be false. Rather, the invalidation merely removes that argument itself as a reason to think the conclusion true; the conclusion might still be true for other reasons. Therefore, to firmly rebut an argument whose conclusion is false, we must both invalidate the argument and also present a counterargument for the opposite conclusion.

In the case of a paradox, invalidating is especially important. Whichever of the contradictory conclusions is incorrect, we’ve already got an argument to counter it—that’s what makes the matter a paradox in the first place! Piling on additional counterarguments may (or may not) lead to helpful insights, but the counterarguments themselves cannot suffice to resolve the paradox. What we must also do is invalidate the argument for the false conclusion—that is, we must show how that argument contains one or more steps that do not follow.

Failing to recognize the need for invalidation can lead to frustratingly circular exchanges between proponents of the conflicting positions. One side responds to the other’s argument with a counterargument, thinking it a sufficient rebuttal. The other side responds with a counter- counterargument—perhaps even a repetition of the original argument— thinking it an adequate rebuttal of the rebuttal. This cycle may persist indefinitely. With due attention to the need to invalidate as well as counter, we can interrupt the cycle and achieve a more productive discussion.

Gary Drescher (Good and Real)

29 points DSimon 02 March 2012 05:50:57AM Permalink

T-Rex: Our bodies are amazing things! Check it, everyone!

We use our mouths to talk. We invent, remember and teach entire languages with which to do the talking! And if that fails, we can talk with our hands. We build planes and boats and cars and spaceships, all by either using our bodies directly, or by using instruments invented by our bodies. We compose beautiful music and tell amazing stories, all with our bodies, these fleshy bags with spooky skeletons inside.

And yet, if we have a severe enough peanut allergy, we can be killed in seconds by a friggin' legume. And hey, 70% of our planet is water, but what happens if we spend too much time in it? We drown. Game over, man!

I used to make fun of Green Lantern for being vulnerable to the color yellow. Then I choked on my orange juice one morning and nearly suffocated.

-- Dinosaur Comics

29 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 May 2012 11:38:26PM Permalink

"The Way is easy for those who have no utility function." -- Marcello Herreshoff

29 points Grognor 01 May 2012 07:15:47AM Permalink

The Disobedi-Ant

The story of the Disobedi-Ant is very short. It refused to believe that its powerful impulses to play instead of work were anything but unique expressions of its very unique self, and it went its merry way, singing, "What I choose to do has nothing to do with what any-ant else chooses to do! What could be more self-evident?"

Coincidentally enough, so went the reasoning of all its colony-mates. In fact, the same refrain was independently invented by every last ant in the colony, and each ant thought it original. It echoed throughout the colony, even with the same melody.

The colony perished.

-Douglas Hofstadter (posted with gwern's "permission")

29 points Jayson_Virissimo 03 June 2012 10:01:09AM Permalink

The greatest weariness comes from work not done.

-Eric Hoffer

29 points Mark_Eichenlaub 02 June 2012 11:52:31PM Permalink

And clearly my children will never get any taller, because there is no statistically-significant difference in their height from one day to the next.

Andrew Vickers, What Is A P-Value, Anyway?

29 points Eugine_Nier 03 September 2012 02:53:57AM Permalink

Well, his point only makes any sense when applied to the metaphor since a better answer to the question

"Wait, Professor... If Sisyphus had to roll the boulder up the hill over and over forever, why didn't he just program robots to roll it for him, and then spend all his time wallowing in hedonism?"

is:

"where would Sisyphus get a robot in the middle of Hades?"

Edit: come to think of it, this also works with the metaphor for human struggle.

29 points Alejandro1 03 September 2012 03:35:59AM Permalink

"But I tell you he couldn't have written such a note!" cried Flambeau. "The note is utterly wrong about the facts. And innocent or guilty, Dr Hirsch knew all about the facts."

"The man who wrote that note knew all about the facts," said his clerical companion soberly. "He could never have got 'em so wrong without knowing about 'em. You have to know an awful lot to be wrong on every subject—like the devil."

"Do you mean—?"

"I mean a man telling lies on chance would have told some of the truth," said his friend firmly. "Suppose someone sent you to find a house with a green door and a blue blind, with a front garden but no back garden, with a dog but no cat, and where they drank coffee but not tea. You would say if you found no such house that it was all made up. But I say no. I say if you found a house where the door was blue and the blind green, where there was a back garden and no front garden, where cats were common and dogs instantly shot, where tea was drunk in quarts and coffee forbidden—then you would know you had found the house. The man must have known that particular house to be so accurately inaccurate."

--G.K. Chesterton, "The Duel of Dr. Hirsch"

29 points RobinZ 03 September 2012 04:22:57PM Permalink

I disagree, in fact. That books strengthen the mind is baldly asserted, not supported, by this quote - the rationality point I see in it is related to comparative advantage.

29 points VincentYu 11 November 2012 01:45:03PM Permalink

Often a person uses some folk proverb to explain a behavioral event even though, on an earlier occasion, this same person used a directly contradictory folk proverb to explain the same type of event. For example, most of us have heard or said, “look before you leap.” Now there’s a useful, straightforward bit of behavioral advice—except that I vaguely remember admonishing on occasion, “he who hesitates is lost.” And “absence makes the heart grow fonder” is a pretty clear prediction of an emotional reaction to environmental events. But then what about “out of sight, out of mind”? And if “haste makes waste,” why do we sometimes hear that “time waits for no man”? How could the saying “two heads are better than one” not be true? Except that “too many cooks spoil the broth.” If I think “it’s better to be safe than sorry,” why do I also believe “nothing ventured, nothing gained”? And if “opposites attract,” why do “birds of a feather flock together”? I have counseled many students to “never to put off until tomorrow what you can do today.” But I hope my last advisee has never heard me say this, because I just told him, “cross that bridge when you come to it.”

The enormous appeal of clichés like these is that, taken together as implicit “explanations” of behavior, they cannot be refuted. No matter what happens, one of these explanations will be cited to cover it. No wonder we all think we are such excellent judges of human behavior and personality. We have an explanation for anything and everything that happens. Folk wisdom is cowardly in the sense that it takes no risk that it might be refuted.

Keith E. Stanovich, How to Think Straight About Psychology, 10th ed. (2013), 14.

ETA: Should have included the subsequent paragraph:

That folk wisdom is “after the fact” wisdom, and that it actually is useless in a truly predictive sense, is why sociologist Duncan Watts titled one of his books: Everything Is Obvious—Once You Know the Answer (2011). Watts discusses a classic paper by Lazarsfeld (1949) in which, over 60 years ago, he was dealing with the common criticism that “social science doesn’t tell us anything that we don’t already know.” Lazarsfeld listed a series of findings from a massive survey of 600,000 soldiers who had served during World War II; for example, that men from rural backgrounds were in better spirits during their time of service than soldiers from city backgrounds. People tend to find all of the survey results to be pretty obvious. In this example, for instance, people tend to think it obvious that rural men would have been used to harsher physical conditions and thus would have adapted better to the conditions of military life. It is likewise with all of the other findings—people find them pretty obvious. Lazarsfeld then reveals his punchline: All of the findings were the opposite of what was originally stated. For example, it was actually the case that men from city backgrounds were in better spirits during their time of service than soldiers from rural backgrounds. The last part of the learning exercise is for people to realize how easily they would have explained just the opposite finding. In the case of the actual outcome, people tend to explain it (when told of it first) by saying that they expected it because city men are used to working in crowded conditions and under hierarchical authority. They never realize how easily they would have concocted an explanation for exactly the opposite finding.

29 points gwern 07 November 2012 02:26:04AM Permalink

The real irony of the story is a historical context I think most readers these days miss: that when the real Plato paid court to a 'king' - Dionysius II, tyrant of Syracuse - it went very poorly. Plato was arrested, and barely managed to arrange his freedom return to Athens.

Twice.

And supposedly Plato was sold into slavery by the previous tyrant.

29 points Nominull 02 December 2012 05:03:11AM Permalink

Molten variables hiss and roar. On my mind-forge, I hammer them into the greatsword Epistemology. Many are my foes this night.

--Nate Silver Parody Twitter Account @fivethirtynate, on the night of the presidential election

29 points Eugine_Nier 02 December 2012 02:52:14AM Permalink

Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question: whether “democratic behaviour” means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.

(..)

Even if they don’t read Aristotle (that would be undemocratic) you would have thought the French Revolution would have taught them that the behaviour aristocrats naturally like is not the behaviour that preserves aristocracy. They might then have applied the same principle to all forms of government.

-- Screwtape, from "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" by C. S. Lewis.

29 points roystgnr 02 January 2013 09:24:29PM Permalink

I think, actually, scientists should kinda look into that whole 'death' thing. Because, they seem to have focused on diseases... and I don't give a #*= about them. The guys go, "Hey, we fixed your arthritis!" "Am I still gonna die?" "Yeah."

So that, I think, is the biggest problem. That's why I can't get behind politicians! They're always like, "Our biggest problem today is unemployment!" and I'm like "What about getting old and sick and dying?"

  • Norm MacDonald, Me Doing Stand Up

(a few verbal tics were removed by me; the censorship was already present in the version I heard)

29 points Eugine_Nier 05 March 2013 01:35:29AM Permalink

Somehow it seems appropriate that it's hard to track down the originator of this idea.

29 points philh 01 March 2013 07:14:03PM Permalink

"Luck" is useless as a strategy and "Hard work" is mostly useless. Prefer "Discover rules then systematically exploit them."

- patio11

29 points dspeyer 01 March 2013 07:55:35PM Permalink

I saw exactly that subtext.

The quote opens "I once had a civil argument with a woman". The author spends one noun to describe this person, and spends it on gender. It could have been "with a friend" or "with a politician" or even just "I once had a civil argument" (that the author had it with somebody is implied in the nature of argument). The antiepistimologist has exactly one characteristic: gender, and that characteristic is called out as important.

It gets worse because being bad at logic is an existing negative stereotype of women.

29 points DaFranker 03 May 2013 04:41:53PM Permalink

Well... not quite. The selection effect makes the survival number basically impossible to calculate, but regularly surviving risky scenarios seems like it would provide a bit better odds for the influence of moxie than 249:200.

At some point, if the Vulcan is smart enough, I suspect the calculation would begin to hinge more on plot twists and the odds that the story is nearing its end, as the hypothesis that they are wearing Plot Armor rises up to the forefront.

I'd also suspect that the Vulcan would realize quickly that as his prediction for the probability of success approaches 1, the odds of a sudden plot reversal that plunges them all in deep poo also approaches 1. And then the Vulcan would immediately adjust to always spouting off some random high-odds-against-us number all the time just to make sure they'd always succeed heroically.

Ow, this is starting to sound very newcomblike.

29 points James_Miller 01 May 2013 04:56:15PM Permalink

Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.

Aristotle

29 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 July 2013 09:55:48PM Permalink

If you could damage wires in a certain way and make the voices forget how to pronounce nouns, eliminate their short-term but not long-term memory, damage their color words, and so on, you would have a solid case for the wires doing internal, functional information-processing in causal arrangements which permitted the final output to be permuted in ways that corresponded to perturbing particular causal nodes. In much the same way, a calculator might be thought to be a radio if you are ignorant of its internals, but if you have a hypothesis that the calculator contains a binary half-adder and you can perturb particular transistors and see wrong answers in a way that matches what the half-adder hypothesis predicts for perturbing that transistor, you have shown the answers are generated internally rather than externally. In a world where we can directly monitor a cat's thalamus and reconstruct part of its visual processing field, the radio hypothesis is not just privileging a hypothesis without evidence, it is frantically clinging to a hypothesis with strong contrary evidence in denial of a hypothesis with detailed confirming evidence.

29 points RolfAndreassen 02 August 2013 02:48:21AM Permalink

Once there was a miser, who to save money would eat nothing but oatmeal. And what's more, he would make a great big batch of it at the start of every week, and put it in a drawer, and when he wanted a meal he would slice off a piece and eat it cold; thus he saved on firewood. Now, by the end of the week, the oatmeal would be somewhat moldy and not very appetising; and so to make himself eat it, the miser would take out a bottle of good whiskey, and pour himself a glass, and say "All right, Olai, eat your oatmeal and when you're done, you can have a dram." Then he would eat his moldy oatmeal, and when he was done he'd laugh and pour the whiskey back in the bottle, and say "Hah! And you believed that? There's one born every minute, to be sure!" And thus he had a great savings in whiskey as well.

-- Norwegian folktale.

29 points Turgurth 02 September 2013 12:11:39AM Permalink

"Not being able to get the future exactly right doesn’t mean you don’t have to think about it."

--Peter Thiel

29 points James_Miller 02 December 2013 12:59:52AM Permalink

There are tens of thousands of professional money managers. Statistically, a handful of them have been successful by pure chance. Which ones? I don't know, but I bet a few are famous.

The market doesn't care how much you paid for a stock. Or your house. Or what you think is a "fair" price.

Professional investors have better information and faster computers than you do. You will never beat them short-term trading. Don't even try.

The book Where Are the Customers' Yachts? was written in 1940, and most still haven't figured out that financial advisors don't have their best interest at heart.

The low-cost index fund is one of the most useful financial inventions in history. Boring but beautiful.

Highlights from 50 Unfortunate Truths About Investing by Morgan Housel.

29 points Kaj_Sotala 01 March 2014 05:52:25PM Permalink

The use with children of experimental [educational] methods, that is, methods that have not been finally assessed and found effective, might seem difficult to justify. Yet the traditional methods we use in the classroom every day have exactly this characteristic--they are highly experimental in that we know very little about their educational efficacy in comparison with alternative methods. There is widespread cynicism among students and even among practiced teachers about the effectiveness of lecturing or repetitive drill (which we would distinguish from carefully designed practice), yet these methods are in widespread use. Equally troublesome, new "theories" of education are introduced into schools every day (without labeling them as experiments) on the basis of their philosophical or common-sense plausibility but without genuine empirical support. We should make a larger place for responsible experimentation that draws on the available knowledge--it deserves at least as large a place as we now provide for faddish, unsystematic and unassessed informal "experiments" or educational "reforms."

-- John R. Anderson, Lynne M. Reder Herbert A. Simon: Applications and Misapplications of Cognitive Psychology to Mathematics Education

29 points Benito 08 August 2014 09:35:08PM Permalink

Hollywood is filled with feel-good messages about how robotic logic is no match for fuzzy, warm, human irrationality, and how the power of love will overcome pesky obstacles such as a malevolent superintelligent computer. Unfortunately there isn’t a great deal of cause to think this is the case, any more than there is that noble gorillas can defeat evil human poachers with the power of chest-beating and the ability to use rudimentary tools.

From the British Newspaper 'The Telegraph', and their article on Nick Bostrom's awesome new book 'Superintelligence'.

I just thought it was a great analogy. Nice to see AI as an X-Risk in the mainstream media too.

29 points KPier 27 September 2014 02:51:51AM Permalink

A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He know that she was old, and not over-well built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him to great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely though so many voyages and weathered so many storms, that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such a way he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her depature with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.

What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship, but the sincerity of his conviction can in nowise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts.

  • W.J. Clifford, the Ethics of Belief
29 points lukeprog 04 October 2014 09:28:52PM Permalink

Prominent altruists aren't the people who have a larger care-o-meter, they're the people who have learned not to trust their care-o-meters... Nobody has [a care-o-meter] capable of faithfully representing the scope of the world's problems. But the fact that you can't feel the caring doesn't mean that you can't do the caring.

Nate Soares

29 points wedrifid 03 November 2014 10:58:17AM Permalink

I want to get the most amount of candy with the least amount of walking.

My 9-year-old son on Halloween.

The Valley of Bad Rationality at work again. Improved optimisation skills and strategic awareness applied to increase the amount of candy consumed while reducing physical exercise!

28 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 July 2009 10:07:14PM Permalink

There is no real me! Don't try to find the real me! Don't try to find someone inside of me who isn't me!

-- Princess Waltz

Commentary: What's odd is not how many people think they contain other people. What's odd is how many of those people think the other person is the real one.

28 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 July 2009 10:14:44PM Permalink

When I was young, I thought the act of getting older meant, year by year, getting more sophisticated, more hard, cool, and unpitying. Less innocent.

Maybe that was a childish idea of what getting older was about. Maybe adults, mature adults, get more innocent with time, not less. Because the word "innocent" does not mean "naive," it means "not guilty."

Children do small evils to each other, schoolyard fights and insults, not because their hearts are pure, but because their powers are small. Grown-ups have more power. Some of them do great evils with that power. But what about the ones who don't? Aren't they more innocent than children, not less?

-- John C. Wright, Fugitives of Chaos

28 points RobinZ 22 October 2009 04:46:10PM Permalink

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.

-- George Bernard Shaw, writer, Nobel laureate (1856-1950)

Edit: The full citation is to his 1903 play Man and superman: a comedy and a philosophy, where the character John Tanner ("M.I.R.C., Member of the Idle Rich Class") says:

Yes, because to be treated as a boy was to be taken on the old footing. I had become a new person ; and those who knew the old person laughed at me. The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor : he took my measure anew every time he saw me, whilst all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.

28 points sketerpot 02 March 2010 12:43:39AM Permalink

He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.

-John McCarthy, on mainstream environmentalism.

As someone who regularly gets into arguments about this, I can say that he's definitely right; you wouldn't believe the amount of nonsense that can be disposed of simply by looking up the relevant numbers and doing a minute's worth of easy arithmetic.

For example, I've heard some people recently claiming that a combination of solar photovoltaics, electrolysis to produce hydrogen, and these new Bloom box fuel cells are cheaper than nuclear fission. Look up the costs of solar farms; about $3 per peak watt. Their average power output is less; we can very optimistically assume that they run at 20% of capacity on average. Efficiency losses from electrolysis and fuel cells are about 50%. Putting it all together, this would cost about $30 per watt of average power delivered. Not including the cost of the fuel cells.

A little googling will show that the total cost of building two new AP1000 reactors in Georgia is about $14 billion, and they average at least 93% of their peak power, and transmission line losses bring their average power delivered to about 1000 MW each. So their cost is about $7 per watt of average power delivered, or about 23% the cost of solar.

There's a lot of extremely harmful bullshit out there, and defeating most of it doesn't take any advanced techniques; it just takes a willingness to look up some relevant numbers and do a bit of arithmetic.

28 points Rain 02 July 2010 12:05:26AM Permalink

Nature draws no line between living and nonliving.

-- K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation

28 points Dr_Manhattan 02 March 2011 02:54:54PM Permalink

In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.

Winston Churchill

28 points benelliott 04 April 2011 10:21:55PM Permalink

And there are times when you don't get to choose whether or not you wrestle the gorilla.

28 points Patrick 01 June 2011 01:47:26PM Permalink

I didn't do the engineering, and I didn't do the math, because I thought I understood what was going on and I thought I made a good rig. But I was wrong. I should have done it.

Jamie Hyneman

28 points jimmy 04 July 2011 05:13:21AM Permalink

I had a scheme, which I still use today when somebody is explaining something that I'm trying to understand: I keep making up examples. For instance, the mathematicians would come in with a terrific theorem, and they're all excited. As they're telling me the conditions of the theorem, I construct something which fits all the conditions. You know, you have a set (one ball) – disjoint (two balls). Then the balls turn colors, grow hairs, or whatever, in my head as they put more conditions on. Finally they state the theorem, which is some dumb thing about the ball which isn't true for my hairy green ball thing, so I say, 'False!'

-Richard Feynman

28 points Manfred 02 August 2011 11:08:49PM Permalink

It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the "plan of creation" or "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact.

-- Charles Darwin

28 points Konkvistador 03 September 2011 09:07:47PM Permalink

"The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the esteem of our peers. For most people, wanting to know the truth about the world is way, way down the list. Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust."

— John Derbyshire

28 points Maniakes 02 September 2011 08:52:25PM Permalink

The church is near, but the road is icy. The bar is far away, but I will walk carefully.

-- Russian proverb

28 points Nominull 07 December 2011 11:48:59PM Permalink

Perhaps he's ultra-high-class, and is only defending the object-level irony of his garden gnome ironically.

28 points J_Taylor 04 December 2011 08:23:34AM Permalink

Nobody panics when things go "according to plan"… even if the plan is horrifying.

  • The Joker
28 points Grognor 01 May 2012 07:13:26AM Permalink

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, probably not apocryphal (at first, this comment said "possibly apocryphal since I can't find it anywhere except collections of quotes")

28 points Oligopsony 06 June 2012 07:06:56PM Permalink

So, let's say some bros of mine and I have some hand-signals for, you know, bro stuff. And one of the signals means, "Oh, shit. Here comes that girl! You know. That girl. She's coming." That signal has a particular context. Eventually, one of my bros gets tired of sloppy use of the signal, and sets about laying out specifically what situations make a girl that girl. If I used the signal in a close-but-not-quite context, he'd handle it and then pull me aside and say, "I know she and I had that thing that one time, but we never... well, it wasn't quite THAT. You know? So that signal, it freaked me out, because I thought it had to be someone else. Make sure you're using it properly, okay?" And I'd be like, "Bro. Got it."

Another friend of mine, he recognizes the sorts of situations we use the signal in have a common thread, so he begins using the hand signal for other situations, any situation that has the potential for both danger and excitement. So if someone invites us to this real sketchy bar, he'll give me the signal - "This could be bad. But what if it's not?" And I'd respond, "I see what you did there."

Maybe you see where this is going. We're hanging out one day, and some guy suggests we crash some party. Bro #2 signals, and bro #1 freaks out, looking around. And then he's like, "OH FUCK I HAVE TO CALL HER." And #2 says, "No, dude, there's no one coming. I just meant, this is like one of those situations, you know?" And they're pissed at each other because they're using the same signal to mean different things. I'm not mad, because I generally know what they each mean, but I have more context than they do.

The same thing probably happens with analytics and Continentals.

Philosophy Bro

28 points NancyLebovitz 08 August 2012 04:43:07PM Permalink

But I came to realize that I was not a wizard, that "will-power" was not mana, and I was not so much a ghost in the machine, as a machine in the machine.

Ta-nehisi Coates

28 points roland 03 August 2012 08:56:07AM Permalink

Yes -- and to me, that's a perfect illustration of why experiments are relevant in the first place! More often than not, the only reason we need experiments is that we're not smart enough. After the experiment has been done, if we've learned anything worth knowing at all, then hopefully we've learned why the experiment wasn't necessary to begin with -- why it wouldn't have made sense for the world to be any other way. But we're too dumb to figure it out ourselves! --Scott Aaronson

28 points Ezekiel 02 September 2012 01:16:02AM Permalink

My brain technically-not-a-lies to me far more than it actually lies to me.

-- Aristosophy (again)

28 points Desrtopa 04 September 2012 05:36:56PM Permalink

Unfortunately, doing bad shows is not only a route to doing good shows.

28 points Stabilizer 02 October 2012 06:46:48AM Permalink

Curiosity was framed. Avoid it at your peril. The cat's not even sick. If you don't know how it works, find out. If you're not sure if it will work, try it. If it doesn't make sense, play with it until it does. If it's not broken, break it. If it might not be true, find out. And most of all, if someone says it is none of your business, prove them wrong.

-Seth Godin

28 points James_Miller 01 December 2012 08:19:55PM Permalink

You might expect that, having learned of the existence of immortal life, man would dedicate colossal resources to learning how the immortal jellyfish performs its trick. You might expect that biotech multinationals would vie to copyright its genome; that a vast coalition of research scientists would seek to determine the mechanisms by which its cells aged in reverse; that pharmaceutical firms would try to appropriate its lessons for the purposes of human medicine; that governments would broker international accords to govern the future use of rejuvenating technology.

NYT article titled Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?

The next line of the article after the above quote is "But none of this happened."

28 points Nominull 02 December 2012 11:58:46PM Permalink

the past is a third-world country

28 points Qiaochu_Yuan 01 March 2013 08:45:09PM Permalink

It should be said about things that appear to work because of confirmation bias.

28 points DanielLC 08 April 2013 02:15:16AM Permalink

Columbus's "genius" was using the largest estimate for the size of Eurasia and the smallest estimate for the size of the world to make the numbers say what he wanted them to. As normally happens with that sort of thing, he was dead wrong. But he got lucky and it turned out there was another continent there.

28 points Alejandro1 03 July 2013 01:28:06PM Permalink

My experience as a marriage counselor taught me that for a discussion of a disagreement to be productive, the parties have to have a shared understanding of what is being debated. If a husband thinks a marital debate is about leaving the toliet seat up or not, and the wife thinks it is about why her husband never listens to, appreciates or loves her the way he should, expect fireworks and frustration. If you are in an argument that you think is about government debt and it’s going nowhere, it may be because the person you are debating isn’t really arguing about the current level of government debt. Rather, they are arguing about the size of government.

If you get into a debate that is ostensibly about the level of government debt, try the following tactic (or try it on yourself in your own mind): If your opponent says that government debt is too high and we therefore need to cut public spending, ask whether s/he has EVER favored under ANY economic conditions a nice, fat increase in public spending. If you are debating someone who says that government debt is no big deal and that we should be increasing public spending, ask if s/he has EVER favored under ANY economics conditions a big, fat cut in public spending. You are going to get a no answer most of the time; maybe almost all the time.

…Is that wrong? No, it’s just frustrating when you are arguing about one thing and the other person is arguing about something else (or, when BOTH of you are actually arguing about something other than what on the face of it you think you are arguing about). The solution?: Drop the charade and get down to business. How big government should be is an essential political argument for the members of a society to have, so why not just have it up front?

--Keith Humphreys

(I hope that the general point is appreciated instead of starting a politics discussion! I think these kind of proxy arguments are a very common failure mode in all areas of life.)

28 points James_Miller 01 July 2013 05:31:59PM Permalink

"Here are the ten major principles of rapid skill acquisition:

  1. Choose a lovable project.
  2. Focus your energy on one skill at a time.
  3. Define your target performance level.
  4. Deconstruct the skill into subskills.
  5. Obtain critical tools.
  6. Eliminate barriers to practice.
  7. Make dedicated time for practice.
  8. Create fast feedback loops.
  9. Practice by the clock in short bursts.
  10. Emphasize quantity and speed."

The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast! by Josh Kaufman.

28 points gwern 02 September 2013 02:57:16AM Permalink

Fallacy names are useful for the same reason any term or technical vocab are useful.

'But notice how you could've just you meant the quantity 1+1+1+1 without yelling "four" first! In fact, that's how all 'numbers' work. If someone is actually using a quantity, you can just give that quantity directly without being a mathematician and finding a pat little name for all of their quantities used.'

28 points RichardKennaway 02 November 2013 07:29:54PM Permalink

It’s something I learned from animal ethology. An “overdetermined” behavior is one for which there are multiple sufficient explanations. To unpack: “For every interesting behavior of animals and humans there is more than one valid and sufficient causal theory.” Evolution likes overdetermined behaviors; they serve multiple functions at once.

Eric Raymond

Google Is My Friend.

28 points RolfAndreassen 02 March 2014 12:21:46AM Permalink

Humans in general are very bad at this. The only reason capitalism works is that the losing experiments run out of money.

28 points gwern 03 April 2014 09:54:23PM Permalink

I think we can safely say there were non-Euclidean geometries involved.

28 points [deleted] 02 June 2014 05:02:51PM Permalink

Though I am glad not everyone followed this advice with regards to me, when I was (more of) an idiot. I owe those patient, sympathetic, tolerant people a great deal.

28 points dspeyer 01 September 2014 05:36:19PM Permalink

Alex Jordan, a grad student at Stanford, came up with the idea of asking people to make moral judgments while he secretly tripped their disgust alarms. He stood at a pedestrian intersection on the Stanford campus and asked passersby to fill out a short survey. It asked people to make judgments about four controversial issues, such as marriage between first cousins, or a film studio’s decision to release a documentary with a director who had tricked some people into being interviewed. Alex stood right next to a trash can he had emptied. Before he recruited each subject, he put a new plastic liner into the metal can. Before half of the people walked up (and before they could see him), he sprayed the fart spray twice into the bag, which “perfumed” the whole intersection for a few minutes. Before other recruitments, he left the empty bag unsprayed. Sure enough, people made harsher judgments when they were breathing in foul air

-- The Righteous Mind Ch 3, Jonathan Haidt

I wonder if anyone who needs to make important judgments a lot makes an actual effort to maintain affective hygiene. It seems like a really good idea, but poor signalling.

28 points Azathoth123 02 November 2014 01:13:34AM Permalink

Base Commander: Anything I do at this point will only make things worse. Anything!

Chief of Police: Many people would charge in anyway.

Base Commander: Oh, the urge to do something during an emergency is very strong. It takes training and discipline to do nothing.

Freefall by Mark Stanley.

27 points Rune 18 April 2009 09:00:18PM Permalink

Sheldon: "More wrong?" Wrong is an absolute state and not subject to gradation.

Stuart: Of course it is. It's a little wrong to call a tomato a vegetable; it's very wrong to say it's a suspension bridge.

-- The Big Bang Theory

27 points wuwei 15 June 2009 04:39:02AM Permalink

"Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson."

-- Frank Herbert, Dune

27 points Unnamed 08 January 2010 12:48:32AM Permalink

"Most haystacks do not even have a needle."

-- Lorenzo

27 points Rain 07 January 2010 11:39:22PM Permalink

In the wake of such suffering, there is no way to adequately explain the tragedy. Yet the seemingly random nature of the mass deaths has made them even harder for the survivors to understand.

"In a situation like this, it's only natural to want to assign blame," said Dr. Frederick MacDougal of the National Center for Infectious Diseases, who recently lost a third cousin to a degenerative nerve disorder. "But the disturbing thing about this case is that no one factor is at fault. People are dying for such a wide range of reasons--gunshot wounds, black-lung disease, falls down elevator shafts--that we have been unable to isolate any single element as the cause."

"No one simple explanation can encompass the enormous scope of this problem," MacDougal added. "And that's very difficult for most people to process psychologically."

[...]

Meanwhile, as the world continues to grapple with this seemingly unstoppable threat, the deaths--and the sorrow, fear and pain they have wrought--continue.

As Margaret Heller, a volunteer at a clinic in Baltimore put it, "We do everything we can. But for most of the people we try to help, the sad truth is it's only a matter of time."

-- The Onion, Millions and Millions Dead

Related: World Death Rate Holding Steady At 100 Percent

27 points Kutta 01 February 2010 02:40:35PM Permalink

Many people equate tolerance with the attitude that every belief is equally true, and that we should all simply accept this fact and go our separate ways. But I view tolerance as the willingness to come together, to face one another in the same room and hack at each other with claw hammers until the truth finally trickles out from the blood and the tears.

-- Raving Atheist, found via the Black Belt Bayesian blog (props to Steven)

27 points RichardKennaway 01 February 2010 11:53:30AM Permalink

"Intuition only works in situations where neurology and evolution has pre-equipped us with a good set of basic-level categories. That works for dealing with other humans, and for throwing things, and for a bunch of other things that do not, unfortunately, include constructing viable philosophies."

-- Eric S. Raymond

27 points anonym 01 February 2010 06:53:17AM Permalink

Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn how to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved.

Steven Pinker -- The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

27 points Oscar_Cunningham 01 June 2010 08:37:23PM Permalink

On a similar theme:

Fiction often mixes up logical with other concepts ... For one thing, authors sometimes say "illogical" when they mean "counter-intuitive." Correct logic is very often counter-intuitive, however, which is to be expected, as logic is meant to prevent errors caused by relying on intuition.

TV Tropes

27 points DSimon 03 August 2010 03:27:01AM Permalink

My hotel doesn't have a 13th floor because of superstition, but people on the 14th floor, you should know what floor you're really on. If you jump out the window, you will die sooner than you expect.

-- Mitch Hedberg (Quoted from memory)

27 points sketerpot 03 December 2010 10:25:21PM Permalink

Mitch Hedberg on the distinction between labels and the things to which they are applied:

I just bought a 2-bedroom house, but it's up to me, isn't it, how many bedrooms there are? Fuck you, real estate lady! This bedroom has a oven in it! This bedroom’s got a lot of people sitting around watching TV. This bedroom is A.K.A. a hallway.

27 points Psy-Kosh 03 February 2011 11:38:09PM Permalink

Just saw on reddit a perfect accidental metaphor: jakeredfield posted this in r/gaming:

For the people that have no played Portal yet, be warned, there may be spoilers up ahead for you.

So anyway, I am a huge fan of Portal, I love everything about the game. I bought it upon release and have played through it multiple times. My friends aren't as big of gamers as me so it took them some time to get their hands on Portal. My one friend didn't have a computer capable of running Portal so I let him play on mine.

I pulled up a chair besides him and eagerly watched him play then entire time. He loved the game. I expected him to. It's an awesome game. But here comes the WTF part...(SPOILERS AHEAD)

He go to the part at the last puzzle, right before GlaDOS tries to kill you in the fire. So then, my friend is like, "Oh, so it's one of those games where you die at the end. Haha, it was a good game." And then he immediately shuts it down. I just sat there. Shocked. In awe. I couldn't believe what I just saw. He turns to me and goes, "Good game, I'd play that again."

This is the part where I just hit him and yell, "IT WASN'T OVER YET!" He was so confused. He loaded it back up to that part and couldn't figure it out. I then pointed it out to him what he needed to do from there. He eventually fully finished the game.

Imagine what would have happened if I wasn't there? How many other people do you think only experienced the game up to this part, because they didn't have someone tell them?

What makes it even more perfect is this reply by Aleitheo:

So rather than try to see if he could live or even just die in the fire he turned off the game before he even saw the "ending"?

27 points DSimon 02 February 2011 06:20:47PM Permalink

Kräht der Hahn am Mist, ändert sich's Wetter oder es bleibt wie's ist.

-- Common German folk saying

Translates as "If the rooster crows on the manure pile, the weather will change or stay as it is." In other words, P(W|R) = P(W) when W is uncorrelated with R.

27 points gwern 01 February 2011 11:41:55PM Permalink

Downvoted because this kind of quote is the kind of snide simplistic atheism that is best left on Reddit's atheism subreddit or similar places. It has no value here; it's not even good Dark Arts.

27 points AlexMennen 08 March 2011 01:49:27AM Permalink

The discovery that the universe has no purpose need not prevent a human being from having one.

-Irwin Edman

27 points James_Miller 02 March 2011 08:55:46PM Permalink

There is some theoretical amount of honesty that is indistinguishable from mental illness...Imagine if you stopped filtering everything you said...just try to imagine yourself living without self-censorship. Wouldn't you sound crazy?

Dilbert creator Scott Adams discussing Charlie Sheen.

27 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 March 2011 08:58:24PM Permalink

"Ordinary claims require merely ordinary evidence" is an overlooked and tremendously important corollary.

27 points Dreaded_Anomaly 06 April 2011 03:27:01AM Permalink

Complex problems have simple, easy to understand wrong answers.

— Grossman's Law

27 points HonoreDB 04 April 2011 05:26:20PM Permalink

Part of the potential of things is how they break.

Vi Hart, How To Snakes

27 points Unnamed 01 June 2011 07:11:09PM Permalink

Violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more quickly. Its existence changes your destination. If you use it, you had better be prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes you to.

-hilzoy

27 points Tom_Talbot 03 August 2011 12:08:43AM Permalink

A writer on structuralism in the Times Literary Supplement has suggested that thoughts which are confused and tortuous by reason of their profundity are most appropriately expressed in prose that is deliberately unclear. What a preposterously silly idea! I am reminded of an air-raid warden in wartime Oxford who, when bright moonlight seemed to be defeating the spirit of the blackout, exhorted us to wear dark glasses. He, however, was being funny on purpose.

Peter Medawar

27 points cousin_it 03 August 2011 12:09:44AM Permalink

This sounds wrong. Biases have predictable direction, that's why they're called biases and not variance (ahem).

27 points Jayson_Virissimo 01 September 2011 04:40:38PM Permalink

The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes primitive again.

-Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy

In other words, politics is the mind killer.

27 points Raemon 06 September 2011 05:49:15PM Permalink

I recently contemplated learning to play chess better (not to make an attempt at mastery, but to improve enough so I wasn't so embarassed about how bad I was).

Most of my motivation for this was an odd signalling mechanism: People think of me as a smart person, and they think of smart people as people who are good at chess, and they are thus disappointed with me when it turns out I am not.

But in the process of learning, I realized something else: I dislike chess, as compared to say, Magic the Gathering, because chess is PURE strategy, whereas Magic or StarCraft have splashy images and/or luck that provides periodic dopamine rushes. Chess only is mentally rewarding for me at two moments: when I capture an enemy piece, or when I win. I'm not good enough to win against anyone who plays chess remotely seriously, so when I get frustrated, I just go capturing enemy pieces even though it's a bad play, so I can at least feel good about knocking over an enemy bishop.

What I found most significant, though, was the realization that this fundamental not enjoying the process of thinking out chess strategies gave me some level of empathy for people who, in general, don't like to think. (This is most non-nerds, as far as I can tell). Thinking about chess is physically stressful for me, whereas thinking about other kinds of abstract problems is fun and rewarding purely for its own sake.

27 points Nisan 03 October 2011 07:14:38PM Permalink

On the other hand, those thousands of lives cut short by violence are also the real history of our species — the misery we are climbing out of. The value of the discovery of the spectrum of light lies in its being put to use in ensuring that London never burns again.

27 points Oligopsony 31 October 2011 07:38:26PM Permalink

On precision in aesthetics, metaethics:

RS: Butt-Head, I have a question for you. I noticed that you often say, "I like stuff that's cool." But isn't that circular logic? I mean, what is the definition of "cool," other than an adjective denoting something the speaker likes?

BH: Huh-huh. Uh, did you, like, go to college?

RS: You don't have to go to college to know the definition of "redundant." What I'm saying is that essentially what you're saying is "I like stuff that I like."

B: Yeah. Huh-huh. Me, too.

BH: Also, I don't like stuff that sucks, either.

RS: But nobody likes stuff that sucks!

BH: Then why does so much stuff suck?

B: Yeah. College boy! Huh-huh, huh-huh.

-Rolling Stone, Interview with Beavis and Butt-Head

27 points gwern 02 December 2011 08:16:46PM Permalink

Economists essentially have a sophisticated lack of understanding of economics, especially macroeconomics. I know it sounds ridiculous. But the reason why I tell people they should study economics is not so they’ll know something at the end—because I don’t think we know much—but because we’re good at thinking. Economics teaches you to think things through. What you see a lot of times in economics is disdain for other's lack of thinking. You have to think about the ramifications of policies in the short run, the medium run, and the long run. Economists think they’re good at doing that, but they’re good at doing that in the sense that they can write down a model that will help them think about it—not in terms of empirically knowing what the answers are. And we have gotten so enamored of thinking things through that the fact that we don’t know anything needs to bother us more. So, yes, it’s true that the average guy on the street doesn’t understand economics, and it’s also true that we don’t understand economics. We just have a more sophisticated lack of understanding than the guy on the street.

---Culture in Economics and the Culture of Economics: Raquel Fernández in Conversation with The Straddler

27 points J_Taylor 01 January 2012 08:35:29AM Permalink

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”

  • Friedrich Nietzsche
27 points GabrielDuquette 01 February 2012 02:18:49PM Permalink

It is the most common way of trying to cope with novelty: by means of metaphors and analogies we try to link the new to the old, the novel to the familiar. Under sufficiently slow and gradual change, it works reasonably well; in the case of a sharp discontinuity, however, the method breaks down: though we may glorify it with the name 'common sense', our past experience is no longer relevant, the analogies become too shallow, and the metaphors become more misleading than illuminating.

E. W. Dijkstra

27 points wallowinmaya 01 February 2012 06:54:38PM Permalink

It is easy to be certain....One has only to be sufficiently vague.

Charles S. Peirce

27 points pedanterrific 01 March 2012 07:41:37PM Permalink

watch out folks, we got a badass over here

27 points Mark_Eichenlaub 02 April 2012 12:03:19AM Permalink

Gene Hofstadt: You people. You think money is the answer to every problem.

Don Draper: No, just this particular problem.

Mad Men, "My Old Kentucky Home"

27 points Alicorn 01 April 2012 06:09:23PM Permalink

Westerners are fond of the saying ‘Life isn’t fair.’ Then, they end in snide triumphant: ‘So get used to it!’

What a cruel, sadistic notion to revel in! What a terrible, patriarchal response to a child’s budding sense of ethics. Announce to an Iroquois, ‘Life isn’t fair,’ and her response will be: ‘Then make it fair!’

Barbara Alice Mann

27 points Mark_Eichenlaub 02 May 2012 05:34:28AM Permalink

Asked today if the Titanic II could sink, Mr Palmer told reporters: "Of course it will sink if you put a hole in it."

http://www.smh.com.au/business/clive-palmer-plans-to-build-titanic-ii-20120430-1xtrc.html

27 points rocurley 03 May 2012 11:42:32PM Permalink

Inspired by maia's post:

“When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons, what the hell am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the lemons! I’m gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!”

---Cave Johnson, Portal 2

27 points Alicorn 11 June 2012 07:09:59PM Permalink

Do you ever get the feeling that God has a plan?

And you're the only one who can stop it?

27 points Will_Newsome 03 July 2012 05:06:21AM Permalink

I often tried plays that looked recklessly daring, maybe even silly. But I never tried anything foolish when a game was at stake, only when we were far ahead or far behind. I did it to study how the other team reacted, filing away in my mind any observations for future use.

— Ty Cobb

27 points RolfAndreassen 03 July 2012 06:17:44PM Permalink

We find it difficult and disturbing to hold in our minds arguments of the form ‘On the one hand, on the other.’ If we are for capital punishment we want it to be good in all respects, with no serious drawbacks; if we are against it, we want it to be bad in all respects, with no serious advantages. We want the world of facts to dictate to us, virtually, how to act; but this it will never do. We always have to make a choice.

-- Theodore Dalrymple, article in "Library of Law and Liberty".

27 points Jayson_Virissimo 03 August 2012 01:23:26PM Permalink

Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befal himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own. To prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a man of humanity be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren, provided he had never seen them? Human nature startles with horror at the thought, and the world, in its greatest depravity and corruption, never produced such a villain as could be capable of entertaining it. But what makes this difference? When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble? When we are always so much more deeply affected by whatever concerns ourselves, than by whatever concerns other men; what is it which prompts the generous, upon all occasions, and the mean upon many, to sacrifice their own interests to the greater interests of others? It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love. It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct. It is he who, whenever we are about to act so as to affect the happiness of others, calls to us, with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it; and that when we prefer ourselves so shamefully and so blindly to others, we become the proper objects of resentment, abhorrence, and execration. It is from him only that we learn the real littleness of ourselves, and of whatever relates to ourselves, and the natural misrepresentations of self-love can be corrected only by the eye of this impartial spectator. It is he who shows us the propriety of generosity and the deformity of injustice; the propriety of resigning the greatest interests of our own, for the yet greater interests of others, and the deformity of doing the smallest injury to another, in order to obtain the greatest benefit to ourselves. It is not the love of our neighbour, it is not the love of mankind, which upon many occasions prompts us to the practice of those divine virtues. It is a stronger love, a more powerful affection, which generally takes place upon such occasions; the love of what is honourable and noble, of the grandeur, and dignity, and superiority of our own characters.

-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

27 points frostgiant 08 August 2012 02:13:24AM Permalink

The problem with Internet quotes and statistics is that often times, they’re wrongfully believed to be real.

— Abraham Lincoln

27 points Incorrect 02 August 2012 11:13:29PM Permalink

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

-- Oscar Wilde

27 points palladias 02 October 2012 07:52:35PM Permalink

“You’re saying I’ll get used to being a warlock, or whatever it is that I am.”

“You’ve always been what you are. That’s not new. What you’ll get used to is knowing it.”

Jem and Tessa, Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare

27 points Alejandro1 07 November 2012 06:20:08AM Permalink

Breaking: To surprise of pundits, numbers continue to be best system for determining which of two things is larger.

--xkcd.

27 points GabrielDuquette 01 January 2013 06:19:58PM Permalink

The first rule of human club is you don't explicitly discuss the rules of human club.

Silas Dogood

27 points ChristianKl 02 February 2013 05:07:14PM Permalink

You put them into a social enviroment where the high status people value logic and evidence. You give them the plausible promise that they can increase their status in that enviroment by increasing the amount that they value logic and evidence.

27 points Stuart_Armstrong 02 March 2013 01:53:25AM Permalink

"I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs. Christine Ladd-Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that there were no others. Coming from a logician and a solipsist, her surprise surprised me.”

Bertrand Russell

27 points etotheipi 08 April 2013 02:29:36AM Permalink

"The peril of arguing with you is forgetting to argue with myself. Don’t make me convince you: I don’t want to believe that much."

  • Even More Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays from Vectors 3.0, James Richardson

The others are quite nice too: http://www.theliteraryreview.org/WordPress/tlr-poetry/

27 points Jayson_Virissimo 03 April 2013 07:32:21AM Permalink

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance we can solve them.

-- Isaac Asimov

27 points GabrielDuquette 05 May 2013 03:49:28PM Permalink

"Your third arrest, you go to jail for life." "Why the third?" "Because in a game a guy gets three times to swing a stick at a ball."

Hunter Felt

27 points NancyLebovitz 25 June 2013 02:01:01PM Permalink

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2013/06/04/stanislaw-burzynski-versus-the-bbc/#comment-262541

The movie “Apollo 13″ does a fair job of showing how rapidly the engineers in Houston devised the kludge and documented it, but because of time contraints of course they can’t show you everything. NASA is a stickler for details. (Believe me, I’ve worked with them!) They don’t just rapid prototype something that people’s lives will depend upon. Overnight, they not only devised the scrubber adapter built from stuff in the launch manifest, they also tested it, documented it, and sent up stepwise instructions for constructing it. In a high-maturity organization, once you get into the habit of doing that, it doesn’t really take that long. Something that always puzzles me when I meet cowboy engineers who insist that process will just slow them down unacceptably. I tell them that hey, if NASA engineers could design, build, test, and document a CO2 scrubber adapter made from common household items overnight, you can damn well put in a comment when you check in your code changes.

27 points James_Miller 01 June 2013 03:15:46PM Permalink

Imagine you are sitting on this plane now. The top of the craft is gone and you can see the sky above you. Columns of flame are growing. Holes in the sides of the airliner lead to freedom. How would you react?

You probably think you would leap to your feet and yell, "Let's get the hell out of here!" If not this, then you might assume you would coil into a fetal position and freak out. Statistically, neither of these is likely. What you would probably do is far weirder......

In any perilous event, like a sinking ship or towering inferno, a shooting rampage or a tornado, there is a chance you will become so overwhelmed by the perilous overflow of ambiguous information that you will do nothing at all...

about 75 percent of people find it impossible to reason during a catastrophic event or impending doom.

You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney p 55,56, and 58.

27 points Creutzer 20 July 2013 09:28:36AM Permalink

“As I looked out into the night sky, across all those infinite stars, it made me realize how insignificant they are."

Peter Cook

Not, perhaps, a rationality quote per se, but a delightful subversion of a harmful commonplace.

27 points snafoo 04 August 2013 05:46:45PM Permalink

Some say imprisoning three women in my home for a decade makes me a monster, I say it doesn’t, and of course the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Ariel Castro (according to The Onion)

27 points lavalamp 01 August 2013 11:03:03PM Permalink

It's probably a much more accurate feeling than the opposite one, though...

27 points JonMcGuire 04 September 2013 04:03:52PM Permalink

But, of course, the usual response to any new perspective is "That can't be right, because I don't already believe it."

Eugene McCarthy, Human Origins: Are We Hybrids?

27 points XerxesPraelor 20 September 2013 05:07:43PM Permalink

There is one very valid test by which we may separate genuine, if perverse and unbalanced, originality and revolt from mere impudent innovation and bluff. The man who really thinks he has an idea will always try to explain that idea. The charlatan who has no idea will always confine himself to explaining that it is much too subtle to be explained. The first idea may be really outree or specialist; it may be really difficult to express to ordinary people. But because the man is trying to express it, it is most probable that there is something in it, after all. The honest man is he who is always trying to utter the unutterable, to describe the indescribable; but the quack lives not by plunging into mystery, but by refusing to come out of it.

G K Chesterton

27 points wedrifid 06 October 2013 08:17:44AM Permalink

By poet I would mean someone who writes poems.

27 points NoSuchPlace 07 December 2013 03:05:36AM Permalink

It's hard enough to overcome one's own misconceptions without having to think about how to get the resulting ideas past other people's. I worry that if I wrote to persuade, I'd start to shy away unconsciously from ideas I knew would be hard to sell. When I notice something surprising, it's usually very faint at first. There's nothing more than a slight stirring of discomfort. I don't want anything to get in the way of noticing it consciously.

27 points jazmt 20 January 2014 02:56:07AM Permalink

Train your tongue to say "I don't know", lest you be brought to falsehood -Babylonian Talmud

27 points brainoil 04 February 2014 12:32:52AM Permalink

"Nothing exists in contradiction to nature, only in contradiction to what we know of it." - Dana Scully, The X-Files

27 points Jayson_Virissimo 04 February 2014 05:26:01AM Permalink

Shit, if I took time out to have an opinion about everything, I wouldn't get any work done...

-- L. Bob Rife, Snow Crash

27 points Thomas 01 March 2014 04:29:55PM Permalink

He says we could learn a lot from primitive tribes. But they could learn a lot more from us!

  • Jeremy Clarkson
27 points Stabilizer 02 March 2014 12:11:14AM Permalink

Procrastination is the thief of compound interest.

-Venkatesh Rao

27 points JQuinton 01 April 2014 01:00:19PM Permalink

Now, one basic principle in all of science is GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. This principle is particularly important in statistical meta-analysis: because if you have a bunch of methodologically poor studies, each with small sample size, and then subject them to meta-analysis, what can happen is that the systematic biases in each study — if they mostly point in the same direction — can reach statistical significance when the studies are pooled. And this possibility is particularly relevant here, because meta-analyses of homeopathy invariably find an inverse correlation between the methodological quality of the study and the observed effectiveness of homeopathy: that is, the sloppiest studies find the strongest evidence in favor of homeopathy. When one restricts attention only to methodologically sound studies — those that include adequate randomization and double-blinding, predefined outcome measures, and clear accounting for drop-outs — the meta-analyses find no statistically significant effect (whether positive or negative) of homeopathy compared to placebo.

27 points roystgnr 02 May 2014 03:35:24PM Permalink

PLAYBOY: So the experiment didn’t work?

[Craig] FERGUSON: No, the experiment always works. There’s no such thing as an experiment that doesn’t work. There are only results, but results may vary. Here’s what I learned:

27 points johnlawrenceaspden 09 June 2014 11:46:13PM Permalink

“The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses"

-- Francis Bacon

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/5741-the-root-of-all-superstition-is-that-men-observe-when

27 points James_Miller 18 July 2014 02:00:07AM Permalink

A law professor who was a practicing defense attorney whom I talked with during my ordeal told me of an experiment he had done. He was at a dinner party and told people at one table that he was defending a man who was wrongly accused of molesting a child, and was met with shock and accusations of trying to free a monster. He told another table that he was defending a murder suspect whom he was convinced was guilty, and got, "Oh, that's sounds interesting. Tell me more."

Ray Atkinson on Quora

27 points Pablo_Stafforini 07 July 2014 06:16:58PM Permalink

Another possibility is that our intuitive sense of justice is a set of heuristics: moral machinery that’s very useful but far from infallible. We have a taste for punishment. This taste, like all tastes, is subtle and complicated, shaped by a complex mix of genetic, cultural, and idiosyncratic factors. But our taste for punishment is still a taste, implemented by automatic settings and thus limited by its inflexibility. All tastes can be fooled. We fool our taste buds with artificial sweeteners. We fool our sexual appetites with birth control and pornography, both of which supply sexual gratification while doing nothing to spread our genes. Sometimes, however, our tastes make fools of us. Our tastes for fat and sugar make us obese in a world of abundance. Drugs of abuse hijack our reward circuits and destroy people’s lives. To know whether we’re fooling our tastes or whether our tastes are fooling us, we have to step outside the limited perspective of our tastes: To what extent is this thing—diet soda, porn, Nutella, heroin—really serving our bests interests? We should ask the same question about our taste for punishment.

Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, New York, 2013, p. 272

27 points Pablo_Stafforini 04 August 2014 05:59:45PM Permalink

A good rule of thumb to ask yourself in all situations is, “If not now, then when?” Many people delay important habits, work and goals for some hypothetical future. But the future quickly becomes the present and nothing will have changed.

Scott Young

27 points woodside 04 December 2014 08:26:52PM Permalink

If I could convince Aubrey de Grey to cut off his beard it would increase everyones expected longevity more than any other accomplishment I'm capable of.

26 points Yvain 18 April 2009 01:26:56PM Permalink

If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world, and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

-- E. B. White

26 points Yvain 15 June 2009 09:57:40AM Permalink

"Voting in a democracy makes you feel powerful, much as playing the lottery makes you feel rich." -- Mencius Moldbug

26 points arundelo 03 July 2009 01:36:57AM Permalink

On some pitch black mornings, hearing what I knew was a cold wind howling outside, I might think, "Well, it is certainly comfortable in this bed, and maybe it wouldn't hurt if I just skipped practicing to-day." But my response to this was not to draw on something called will power, to insult or threaten myself, but to take a longer look at my life, to extend my vision, to think about the whole of my experience, to reconnect present and future, and quite specifically, to ask myself, "Do you like playing the cello or not? Would you like to play it better or not?" When I put the matter this way I could see that I enjoyed playing the cello more than I enjoyed staying in bed. So I got up. If, as sometimes happened or happens, I do stay in bed, not sleeping, not really thinking, but just not getting up, it is not because will power is weak but because I have temporarily become disconnected, so to speak, from the wholeness of my life. I am living in that Now that some people pursue so frantically, that gets harder to find the harder we look for it.

John Holt, Freedom and Beyond, p. 119

See also this comment by Z_M_Davis.

26 points ata 07 August 2009 04:50:43AM Permalink

"A witty saying proves nothing." -- Voltaire

I've always found that useful to keep in mind when reading threads like this.

26 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 November 2009 01:39:55AM Permalink

How utterly selfish of him.

26 points Nic_Smith 01 February 2010 07:43:17AM Permalink

If you can't feel secure - and teach your children to feel secure - about 1-in-610,000 nightmare scenarios - the problem isn't the world. It's you.

-- Bryan Caplan

26 points Theist 04 June 2010 11:27:54PM Permalink

"I accidentally changed my mind."

my four-year-old

26 points wiresnips 03 January 2011 08:40:04PM Permalink

Whatever elaborate, and grotesquely counter-intuitive, underpinnings there might be to familiar reality, it stubbornly continues to be familiar. When Rutherford showed that atoms were mostly empty space, did the ground become any less solid? The truth itself changes nothing.

-- Greg Egan, Quarantine

26 points MinibearRex 08 March 2011 12:17:29AM Permalink

On noticing confusion:

"Holmes," I cried, "this is impossible."

"Admirable!" he said. "A most illuminating remark. It is impossible as I state it, and therefore I must in some respect have stated it wrong.

Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Priory School

26 points wedrifid 01 June 2011 09:58:59AM Permalink

If you want to beat the market, you have to do something different from what everyone else is doing, and you have to be right.

David Bennett

26 points GabrielDuquette 01 June 2011 01:25:20PM Permalink

I cannot see that such inward convictions and feelings are of any weight as evidence of what really exists.

Charles Darwin

26 points Dreaded_Anomaly 02 June 2011 09:27:21PM Permalink

If you want to know the way nature works, we looked at it, carefully... that's the way it looks! You don't like it... go somewhere else! To another universe! Where the rules are simpler, philosophically more pleasing, more psychologically easy. I can't help it! OK! If I'm going to tell you honestly what the world looks like to the human beings who have struggled as hard as they can to understand it, I can only tell you what it looks like. And I cannot make it any simpler, I'm not going to do this, I'm not going to simplify it, and I'm not going to fake it. I'm not going to tell you it's something like a ball bearing inside a spring, it isn't. So I'm going to tell you what it really is like, and if you don't like it, that's too bad.

— Richard Feynman, the QED Lectures at the University of Auckland

26 points Thomas 04 July 2011 07:57:13PM Permalink

A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.

Daniel Dennett

26 points AlexSchell 08 September 2011 08:13:09PM Permalink

It's one thing to make lemonade out of lemons, another to proclaim that lemons are what you'd hope for in the first place.

Gary Marcus, Kluge

Relevant to deathism and many other things

26 points MinibearRex 01 September 2011 10:01:10PM Permalink

The proposition here is that the human brain is, in large part, a machine for winning arguments, a machine for convincing others that its owner is in the right - and thus a machine for convincing its owner of the same thing. The brain is like a good lawyer: given any set of interests to defend, it sets about convincing the world of their moral and logical worth, regardless of whether they in fact have any of either. Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than for virtue.

Robert Wright, The Moral Animal

26 points Yvain 22 October 2011 05:18:58PM Permalink

Don't you feel in your heart that these contradictions do not really contradict: that there is a cosmos that contains them all? The soul goes round upon a wheel of stars and all things return; perhaps Strake and I have striven in many shapes, beast against beast and bird against bird, and perhaps we shall strive for ever. But since we seek and need each other, even that eternal hatred is an eternal love. Good and evil go round in a wheel that is one thing and not many. Do you not realize in your heart, do you not believe behind all your beliefs, that there is but one reality and we are its shadows; and that all things are but aspects of one thing: a centre where men melt into Man and Man into God?'

'No,' said Father Brown.

-- G.K. Chesterton

26 points DSimon 02 October 2011 05:51:50AM Permalink

T-Rex: If I lived in the past I'd have different beliefs, because I'd have nobody modern around to teach me anything else!

FACT.

And I find it really unlikely that I would come up with all our modern good stuff on my own, running around saying "You guys! Democracy is pretty okay. Also, women are equal to men, and racism? Kind of a dick move." If I was raised by racist and sexist parents in the middle of a racist and sexist society, I'm pretty certain I'd be racist and sexist! I'm only as enlightened as I am today because I've stood on the shoulders of giants.

Right. So that raises the question: Is everyone from that period in Hell, or is Heaven overwhelmingly populated by racists?

-- T-Rex, Dinosaur Comics

26 points djcb 02 December 2011 06:48:20AM Permalink

If you hit this sign, you will hit that bridge.

-- Road sign in Griffin, Georgia, showing that sometimes it's good to have some distance between map and area.

26 points Nominull 01 December 2011 04:18:51AM Permalink

And they'll be beaten in turn by people who were in the right place at the right time, or won the genetic lottery. A little luck can make up for a lot of laziness, and working hard and learning things can just leave you digging ditches and able to quote every Simpsons episode verbatim.

26 points Jayson_Virissimo 01 December 2011 03:59:48AM Permalink

As a 911 Operator, I have spoken to hundreds of suicidal people at their very lowest moment (often with a weapon in hand). In my professional judgment, the quote is accurate for a large number of cases (obviously, there are exceptions).

26 points torekp 02 January 2012 12:50:30AM Permalink

"Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake." -- Napoleon Bonaparte

(This has been mentioned before on LW but not in a quote thread. I figured it was fair game.)

26 points FiftyTwo 03 February 2012 12:01:34PM Permalink

Science knows it doesn't know everything, otherwise it would stop.

Dara OBriain

26 points A4FB53AC 01 April 2012 03:48:12PM Permalink

A faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.

Arthur C. Clarke

26 points DanArmak 02 May 2012 04:48:51PM Permalink

Only while the island is smaller than half the world :-)

Anyway, I can always measure your shore and get any result I want.

26 points Ghatanathoah 02 May 2012 04:42:39PM Permalink

"It is indeed true that he [Hume] claims that 'reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.' But a slave, it should not be forgotten, does virtually all the work."

-Alan Carter, Pluralism and Projectivism

26 points gwern 07 May 2012 09:48:45PM Permalink

Downloading the book, pg236, you forgot one interesting detail:

One of the many baffling mysteries concerns who survives and who doesn't. "It's not who you'd predict, either," Hill, who has studied the survival rates of different demographic groups, told me. "Sometimes the one who survives is an inexperienced female hiker, while the experienced hunter gives up and dies in one night, even when it's not that cold. The category that has one of the highest survival rates is children six and under, the very people we're most concerned about." Despite the fact that small children lose body heat faster than adults, they often survive in the same conditions better than experienced hunters, better than physically fit hikers, better than former members of the military or skilled sailors. And yet one of the groups with the poorest survival rates is children ages seven to twelve. Clearly, those youngest children have a deep secret that trumps knowledge and experience.

Scientists do not know exactly what that secret is, but the answer may lie in basic childhood traits. At that age, the brain has not yet developed certain abilities. For example, small children do not create the same sort of mental maps adults do. They don't understand traveling to a particular place, so they don't run to get somewhere beyond their field of vision. They also follow their instincts. If it gets cold, they crawl into a hollow tree to get warm. If they're tired, they rest, so they don't get fatigued. If they're thirsty, they drink. They try to make themselves comfortable, and staying comfortable helps keep them alive. (Small children following their instincts can also be hard to find; in more than one case, the lost child actually hid from rescuers. One was afraid of "coyotes" when he heard the search dogs barking. Another was afraid of one-eyed monsters when he saw big men wearing headlamps. Fortunately, both were ultimately found.) The secret may also be in the fact that they do not yet have the sophisticated mental mapping ability that adults have, and so do not try to bend the map. They remap the world they're in.

Children between the ages of seven and twelve, on the other hand, have some adult characteristics, such as mental mapping, but they don't have adult judgment. They don't ordinarily have the strong ability to control emotional responses and to reason through their situation. They panic and run. They look for shortcuts. If a trail peters out, they keep going, ignoring thirst, hunger, and cold, until they fall over. In learning to think more like adults, it seems, they have suppressed the very instincts that might have helped them. But they haven't learned to stay cool. Many may not yet be self-reliant.

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Valley_of_bad_rationality ?

26 points Will_Newsome 03 July 2012 05:24:54AM Permalink

Here is a hand. How do I know? Look closely, asshole, it's clearly a hand.

Look, if you really insist on doubting that here is a hand, or anything else, there's nothing really I can say to convince you otherwise. What the tits would the world even look like if this weren't a hand? What sort of system is your doubt endorsing? After all, you can't just say "It's not true that here is a hand." You have to be endorsing some other picture of the world. [...]

So it turns out when I say things like "Here is a hand" I'm not really making a claim about the world, I'm laying down some rules for discussion. If you doubt there's a hand here, then fuck you and that's all there is to it. We can't really talk about anything now, because we can't even agree on something as simple as a goddamn hand. When we all agree here is a hand, then we can go about discussing our world in meaningful ways. Skepticism just undermines a foundation and replaces it with nothing; it[']s paralyzing. The grounds for such radical skepticism don't exist; it presupposes and relies on the very certainty it tries to undermine.

This is more practical than you realize. There are people who actually believe that the world is only 6,000 years old. What the fuck, right? But if you've ever talked with one of them, you know that they're fucking impossible to have what you consider a 'reasonable' discussion with. It's not like they don't have answers for everything, it[']s just that those answers don't make any fucking sense to you. It[']s the sort of gibberish that makes you want to scream. The problem is that you don't even play the game by the same goddamn rules. You're both certain of your positions, because those positions are logically derived from the worldview each of you endorses as your starting point, and you both look at each other's foundations and say, "Seriously, what the fuck are you talking about?" You don't even know how you would go about convincing them that you're right and they're wrong; you don't even agree on a method by which to do that.

If you flew to some part of the world where they'd never heard of an airplane or even a bird, how the fuck could you convince them you flew? They don't even know what that means. They would have all sorts of questions, and would consider your answers nonsensical or magical. When a non-believer is told that God exists, he reacts in the same way; also, a believer when he is told there is no God.

So everything we believe about the world is built on some sort of foundation. Sure, that foundation can change, but there is always something there at the base, and it is that base that enables us to talk about the world. Not everyone has the same base you do, and that has to be okay. Just know that some of your beliefs are just as unsupported as everyone else's. It's just the way it is, bro.

Philosophy Bro summarizing Wittgensteins On Certainty. (I'm not sure the summary is very true to the original but it's interesting nonetheless.)

26 points Jay_Schweikert 02 September 2012 05:48:43PM Permalink

Qhorin Halfhand: The Watch has given you a great gift. And you only have one thing to give in return: your life.

Jon Snow: I'd gladly give my life.

Qhorin Halfhand: I don’t want you to be glad about it! I want you to curse and fight until your heart’s done pumping.

--Game of Thrones, Season 2.

26 points Rhwawn 03 September 2012 12:20:30AM Permalink

Reminds me of Patton:

No man ever won a war by dying for his country. Wars were won by making the other poor bastard die for his. You don't win a war by dying for your country.

26 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 November 2012 12:29:25PM Permalink

False.

I mean, grain of truth, yes, literally true, no. You can shock the hell out of people and distinguish yourselves quite well by doing rational things.

26 points katydee 01 January 2013 01:37:48PM Permalink

The dream is damned and dreamer too if dreaming's all that dreamers do.

--Rory Miller

26 points Eugine_Nier 02 February 2013 06:51:31AM Permalink

[S]econd thoughts tend to be tentative, and people tend not to believe that they are being lied to. Their own fairmindedness makes them gullible. Upon hearing two versions of any story, the natural reaction of any casual listener is to assume both versions are slanted to favor their side, and that the truth is perhaps somewhere in the middle. So if I falsely accuse an innocent group of ten people of wrongdoing, the average bystander, if he later hears my false accusation disputed, will assume that five or six of the people are guilty, rather than assume I lied and admit that he was deceived.

-- John C Wright

26 points curiousepic 06 February 2013 02:25:23AM Permalink

Q: I was wondering what the dumbest or funniest argument you've heard against the defeat of aging?

Aubrey de Grey: Um, It's been a very very long time since I've heard a question or concern I haven't heard before, so nothing's dumb or funny anymore, it's just... tedium.

From this recent talk

26 points GabrielDuquette 01 March 2013 06:18:01PM Permalink

Shouldn't "it works like a charm" be said about things that don't work?

Jason Roy

26 points Stabilizer 02 March 2013 12:58:40AM Permalink

“Anything left on your bucket list?”

“Not dying...”

-Bill Gates in his AMA on reddit.

26 points wedrifid 08 April 2013 06:14:33AM Permalink

"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.

Moral: Just because the superior agent knows what is best for you and could give you flawless advice, doesn't mean it will not prefer to consume you for your component atoms!

26 points AlanCrowe 01 May 2013 09:35:53PM Permalink

There is, perhaps, a word missing from the English language. If Derek Lowe were speaking, instead of writing, he would put an exaggerated emphasis on the word real and native speakers of English would pick up on a special, metaphorical meaning for the word real in the phrase real boss. The idea is that there are hidden, behind the scenes connections more potent (more real?) than the overt connections.

There is a man in a suit, call him the actual boss, who issues orders. Perhaps one order is "run the toxicology tests". The actual boss is the same as the real boss so far. Perhaps another order is "and show that the compound is safe." Now power shifts to the mice. If the compound poisons the mice and they die, then the compound wasn't safe. The actual boss has no power here. It is the mice who are the real boss. They have final say on whether the compound is safe, regardless of the orders that the actual boss gave.

Derek Lowe is giving us an offshoot of an aphorism by Francis Bacon: "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." Again the point is lost if one refuses to find a poetic reading. Nature accepts no commands; there are no Harry-Potter style spells. Nature issues no commands; we do not hear and obey, we just obey. (So why is Bacon advising us to obey?)

26 points cody-bryce 02 July 2013 06:17:44PM Permalink

Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

H.L. Mencken

26 points CronoDAS 04 July 2013 07:33:31PM Permalink

There are those among us - among you, too, I observe - who glorify the wonders of the natural world with a kind of glassy-eyed fanaticism and urge a return to that purer, more innocent state. This testifies to nothing other than the fact that those who recommend the satisfactions of living in harmony with nature have never had to do it. Nature is evil. Nature is conflict, violence, betrayal; worms that crawl through the skin and breed in the gut; thorns that poison; snakes that fight in writhing, heaving masses until all lie dead from one another's poison. From nature we learned to tear the flesh off the bone and suck out the blood - and to enjoy it. Do you want to return to that state? I do not.

...

I have known Nature. I have known Civilization. Civilization is better.

-- Donna Ball (writing as Donna Boyd), The Passion

26 points Vaniver 01 July 2013 04:57:29PM Permalink

We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.

-- F. A. Hayek

26 points SaidAchmiz 03 July 2013 03:45:37PM Permalink

It seems like your comment misses the point of the Unix philosophy, which is that the designers do not undertake to know in advance exactly which user actions are "stupid" and which are "clever". Unix is supposed to be a solid framework in which you can do things; figuring out what's stupid and what's clever is left to the user. It is an expression of fundamental designer trust in the user.

26 points Stabilizer 01 July 2013 10:02:31PM Permalink

This law according to Dennett is an extension of Schanks Law:

Because people understand by finding in their memories the closest possible match to what they are hearing and use that match as the basis of comprehension, any new idea will be treated as a variant of something the listener has already thought of or heard. Agreement with a new idea means a listener has already had a similar thought and well appreciates that the speaker has recognized his idea. Disagreement means the opposite. Really new ideas are incomprehensible. The good news is that for some people, failure to comprehend is the beginning of understanding. For most, of course, it is the beginning of dismissal.

-Roger Schank

26 points RolfAndreassen 06 August 2013 03:49:17PM Permalink

He took literally five seconds for something I'd spent two weeks on, which I guess is what being an expert means

-- Graduate student of our group, recognising a level above his own in a weekly progress report

26 points shminux 02 August 2013 03:23:24AM Permalink

A man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance.

Unknown

26 points cody-bryce 02 August 2013 10:30:27PM Permalink

If Tetris has taught me anything it's that errors pile up and accomplishments disappear.

-Unknown

26 points SatvikBeri 03 September 2013 09:45:33PM Permalink

I discovered as a child that the user interface for reprogramming my own brain is my imagination. For example, if I want to reprogram myself to be in a happy mood, I imagine succeeding at a difficult challenge, or flying under my own power, or perhaps being able to levitate objects with my mind. If I want to perform better at a specific task, such as tennis, I imagine the perfect strokes before going on court. If I want to fall asleep, I imagine myself in pleasant situations that are unrelated to whatever is going on with my real life.

My most useful mental trick involves imagining myself to be far more capable than I am. I do this to reduce the risk that I turn down an opportunity just because I am clearly unqualified[...] As my career with Dilbert took off, reporters asked me if I ever imagined I would reach this level of success. The question embarrasses me because the truth is that I imagined a far greater level of success. That's my process. I imagine big.

Scott Adams

26 points MugaSofer 02 September 2013 08:44:06PM Permalink

"One of the penalties for not ruling the world is that it gets ruled by other people." - clearly superior quote

26 points Benito 12 December 2013 06:03:44PM Permalink

When I was a young untenured professor of philosophy, I once received a visit from a colleague from the Comparative Literature Department, an eminent and fashionable literary theorist, who wanted some help from me. I was flattered to be asked, and did my best to oblige, but the drift of his questions about various philosophical topics was strangely perplexing to me. For quite a while we were getting nowhere, until finally he managed to make clear to me what he had come for. He wanted "an epistemology," he said. An epistemology. Every self-respecting literary theorist had to sport an epistemology that season, it seems, and without one he felt naked, so he had come to me for an epistemology to wear--it was the very next fashion, he was sure, and he wanted the dernier cri in epistemologies. It didn't matter to him that it be sound, or defensible, or (as one might as well say) true; it just had to be new and different and stylish. Accessorize, my good fellow, or be overlooked at the party.

  • Daniel Dennett

Example of professing a belief - here, belief is a fashion statement, or something fun to whip out at parties, not a thing that actually constrains anticipation.

26 points Alejandro1 03 February 2014 03:21:43AM Permalink

A serious prophet upon predicting a flood should be the first man to climb a tree.

--Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage.

26 points lukeprog 12 March 2014 08:48:02PM Permalink

If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru, you’ll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil.

Warren Buffett

26 points Viliam_Bur 04 April 2014 10:19:42AM Permalink

There are many students who either can't, or don't want to, learn mathematical intuitions or explanations. They prefer to learn a few formulas and rules by rote, the same way they do in every other class.

Former teacher confirming this. Some students are willing to spend a lot of energy to avoid understanding a topic. They actively demand memorization without understanding... sometimes they even bring their parents as a support; and I have seen some of the parents complaining in the newspapers (where the complaints become very unspecific, that the education is "too difficult" and "inefficient", or something like this).

Which is completely puzzling for the first time you see this, as a teacher, because in every internet discussion about education, teachers are criticized for allegedly insisting on memorization without understanding, and every layman seems to propose new ideas about education with less facts and more "critical thinking". So, you get the impression that there is a popular demand for understanding instead of memorization... and you go to classroom believing you will fix the system... and there is almost a revolution against you, outraged kids refusing to hear any explanations and insisting you just tell them the facts they need to memorize for the exams, and skip the superfluous stuff. (Then you go back to internet, read more complaints about how teachers are insisting that kids memorize the stuff instead of undestanding, and you just give up any hope of a sane discussion.)

My first explanation was that understanding is the best way, but memorization can be more efficient in short term, especially if you expect to forget the stuff and never use it again after the exam. Some subjects probably are like this, but math famously is not. Which is why math is the most hated subject.

Another explanation was that the students probably never actually had an experience of understanding something, at least not in the school, so they literally don't understand what I was trying to do. Which is a horrible idea, if true, but... that wouldn't make it less true, right? Still makes me think: Didn't those kids at least have an experience of something being explained by a book, or by a popular science movie? Probably most of them just don't read such books or watch those movies. -- I wonder what would happen if I just showed the kids some TED videos; would they be interested, or would they hate it?

By the way, this seems not related to whether the topic is difficult. Even explaining how easy things work can be met by resistance. This time not because it is "too difficult", but because "we should just skip the boring simple stuff". (Of course, skipping the boring simple stuff is the best recipe to later find the more advanced stuff too difficult.) I wonder how much impact here has the internet-induced attention deficit.

26 points aarongertler 04 April 2014 05:55:35PM Permalink

"Throughout the day, Stargirl had been dropping money. She was the Johnny Appleseed of loose change: a penny here, a nickel there. Tossed to the sidewalk, laid on a shelf or bench. Even quarters.

"I hate change," she said. "It's so . . . jangly."

"Do you realize how much you must throw away in a year?" I said.

"Did you ever see a little kid's face when he spots a penny on a sidewalk?”

Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

26 points fubarobfusco 02 May 2014 03:33:05PM Permalink

This lacks a ring of truth for me.

A lot of folks seem to expect the science of human beings to reinforce their bitterness and condemnation of human nature (roughly, "people are mostly crap"). I kinda suspect that if you asked "sophisticated people" (whoever those are) to name some important psychology experiments, those who named any would come up with Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment and Milgram's obedience experiments pretty early on. Not a lot of emotional uplift there.

As for the arts — horror films where everyone dies screaming seem to be regarded as every bit as lowbrow as feel-good comedies.

26 points Risto_Saarelma 06 June 2014 04:27:40PM Permalink

But in some form or another, a lot of people believe that there are only easy truths and impossible truths left. They tend not to believe in hard truths that can be solved with technology.

Pretty much all fundamentalists think this way. Take religious fundamentalism, for example. There are lots of easy truths that even kids know. And then there are the mysteries of God, which can’t be explained. In between—the zone of hard truths—is heresy. Environmental fundamentalism works the same way. The easy truth is that we must protect the environment. Beyond that, Mother Nature knows best, and she cannot be questioned. There’s even a market version of this, too. The value of things is set by the market. Even a child can look up stock prices. Prices are easy truths. But those truths must be accepted, not questioned. The market knows far more than you could ever know. Even Einstein couldn’t outguess God, Nature, or Market.

Peter Thiel

26 points RolfAndreassen 04 August 2014 05:40:54AM Permalink

A man is walking on the moon with his eyes turned up toward space And the bright blue world that watches him reflected on his face. The whole world sees the hero there and the module crew also. But few can see the guiding team that guards him from below.

Here's a health to the man who walked the moon, and the module crew above, And the team that watches from the sky with worry, joy, and love. To all who blazed the sky-trail come raise your glasses 'round; And a health to the unknown heroes, too, who never left the ground.

Here's a health to the ship's designers, and the welders of her seams, And all who man the radar-scan to watch our dawning dreams. For all the unknown heroes, sing out to every shore: "What makes one step a giant leap is all the steps before".

Leslie Fish, musically praising the Hufflepuff virtues.

26 points jaime2000 05 August 2014 04:24:47AM Permalink

"I want information. I want to understand you. To understand what exactly I'm fighting. You can help me."

"I obviously won't."

"I will kill you if you don't help me. I'm not bluffing, Broadwings. I will kill you and you will die alone and unseen, and frankly you are far too intelligent to simply believe that the stories of ancestral halls are true. You will die and that will probably be it, and nobody will ever know if you talked or not—not that conversing with an enemy in a war you don't support is dishonorable in the first place."

"You'll let me leave if I stonewall, because you don't want to set a precedent of murdering surrendered officers."

"We'll see. Would you like another cup?"

"No."

Derpy smiled deviously. "You know, in that last battle? We didn't fly our cannon up there to the cliffs. Nope. We had Earth ponies drag them. Earth ponies are capable of astounding physical feats, you know. We're probably going to be using more mobility in our artillery deployment going forward, now that they've demonstrated how effective the concept is."

"...why did you tell me that? What would drive you to tell me that?"

"I'll ask again before I continue. Would you like to assist me, Broadwings?"

"I am a gryphon. Telling me your plans will do nothing to change that. I will not barter secrets."

She leaned back, gesturing with a hoof as she talked. "My biggest strengths are that I understand the way crowds think and that I am good at thinking up unexpected ways to solve simple problems. My army's biggest weakness is that my soldiers are inexperienced, and that unexpected developments have an inordinate effect on their morale. Also, my infantry will never be able to stand against a sustained lion charge, so I have to keep finding ways to nullify that disadvantage, and frankly I won't be able to forever."

"I don't understand. What are you doing, Mare? Why are you--"

"--my personal biggest weaknesses," she continued, her smile now malicious, "are my struggles with morality, identity, and my desire to be loved. There's also my relationship with the stallion Macintosh Apple, who is usually called Big Macintosh, with whom I spend upwards of ten hours a day, and on whom I am completely emotionally dependent. If he were to be killed, I'd probably fall apart emotionally. I also have a daughter named Dinky—not by him, mind you—who is in the Southmarch, and who I am very, very guilty about abandoning. If anything were to happen to her I might kill myself. Do you understand yet, Broadwings?"

"Mare, this is insanity. I cannot--"

"--All right then, we'll continue. I also have in this camp Sweetie Belle, Apple Bloom, and Scootaloo, three little fillies, though they're growing quite quickly now. Sweetie Belle is the writer of many propaganda songs, Apple Bloom is Big Mac's sister, who he protects like a daughter, and I believe Scootaloo has no special importance but the other two would defend her to the death. They would be quite easy to kill as well. Do you understand yet?"

"Mare! Are you mad?! Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to tell me these things? Aren't you afraid I would tell--"

"--Good," she nodded. "You're beginning to understand. Let's see. My logistics framework right now is nonexistent. I'm entirely reliant on local villages bringing me food and materiel, and on capturing food and materiel meant for your armies. My army is nowhere near as mobile as it appears, since it can only operate in areas where I have established relationships with each particular village. A bit of simple recon work would let you figure out where I can and cannot go. Do you understand yet?"

Broadwings' eyes opened and his pupils shrank with dawning recognition. "...If I came back to my army, I would use this to defeat you. If I told any other gryphon, they would use it to defeat you. You...you have..."

"Yes. I have sealed your fate; you will not see your home. I can't let you leave now. I absolutely can't. I can now either kill you or keep you prisoner until this war is over—and I don't keep useless prisoners. It's now out of my hooves. One or the other. You pick."

~emkajii, Equestria: Total War

26 points gjm 03 December 2014 11:30:44AM Permalink

I mostly agree, but I think the slogan (like, I think, many others about which similar things could be said) has some value none the less.

A logically correct but uninspiring version would go like this:

It is a common human failing to pay too much attention to safety and not enough to liberty. As a result, we (individually and corporately) will often be tempted to give up liberty in the name of safety, and in many such cases this will be a really bad tradeoff. So don't do that.

-- Not Benjamin Franklin

Franklin's slogan serves as a sort of reminder that (1) there is a frequent temptation to "give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety" and (2) this is likely a bad idea. Indeed, the actual work of figuring out when the slogan is appropriate still needs to be done, but the reminder can still be useful. And (3) because it's a Famous Saying of a Famous Historical Figure, one can fairly safely draw attention to it and maybe even be taken seriously, even in times when the powers that be are trying to portray any refusal to be terrorized as unpatriotic.

Of course Volokh is aware of the "reminder" function (as he says: "The slogan might work as a reminder") but I think he undervalues it. (He says the "real difficulty" is deciding which tradeoffs to make, but actually just noticing that there's an important tradeoff being proposed is often a real difficulty.) And, alas, its Famous Saying nature is pretty important too.

25 points RichardKennaway 15 June 2009 05:32:08AM Permalink

"What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite."

Bertrand Russell, Free Thought and Official Propaganda, in "Sceptical Essays".

25 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 15 June 2009 01:12:22AM Permalink

"I have now reigned about 50 years in victory or peace, beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In this situation, I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot. They amount to fourteen."

-- Abd Er-Rahman III of Spain, 960 AD.

25 points arundelo 03 July 2009 01:32:56AM Permalink

Numerical arithmetic should look to children like a simpler and faster way of doing things that they know how to do already, not a set of mysterious recipes for getting right answers to meaningless questions.

John Holt, How Children Fail, p. 101

See also Paul Lockhart.

25 points RobinZ 22 October 2009 04:44:32PM Permalink

[I]n my opinion nothing occurs contrary to nature except the impossible, and that never occurs.

-- Sagredo, "Two New Sciences" (1914 translation), Galileo Galilei

25 points Rain 01 February 2010 10:25:15PM Permalink

also from bash.org (made as a reply since I'm already at my 5-quote limit):

+kritical christin: you need to learn how to figure out stuff yourself..

+Christin1 how do i do that

25 points Nic_Smith 03 April 2010 02:55:18AM Permalink

I recall, for example, suggesting to a regular loser at a weekly poker game that he keep a record of his winnings and losses. His response was that he used to do so but had given up because it proved to be unlucky. - Ken Binmore, Rational Decisions

A side note: All three of the quotes I've posted are from Binmore's Rational Decisions, which I'm about a third of the way through and have found very interesting. It makes a great companion to Less Wrong -- and it's also quite quotable in spots.

25 points RichardKennaway 01 June 2010 08:45:00PM Permalink

A certain mother habitually rewards her small son with ice cream after he eats his spinach. What additional information would you need to be able to predict whether the child will: a. Come to love or hate spinach, b. Love or hate ice cream, or c. Love or hate Mother?

-- Gregory Bateson, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind"

25 points Yvain 01 September 2010 06:53:36PM Permalink

We have not solved all your problems. Each answer only led to new questions. We are still confused - but perhaps we are confused on a higher level, and about more important things.

-- seen on a hotel bulletin board

25 points [deleted] 09 October 2010 01:42:32AM Permalink

Philosopher: Can we ever be certain an observation is true?

Engineer: Yep.

Philosopher: How?

Engineer: Lookin'.

Scrollover of SMBC #1879

25 points anonym 03 November 2010 06:52:53AM Permalink

Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.

Dean Schlicter

25 points MichaelGR 03 December 2010 05:40:15PM Permalink

A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it, is committing another mistake.

-Confucius

25 points shokwave 04 December 2010 03:59:14AM Permalink

This bedroom's over in that guy's house! Sir, you have one of my bedrooms, are you aware? Do not decorate it!

And more Mitch Hedburg, illustrating how redrawing the map won't alter the territory.

25 points KrisC 03 January 2011 07:11:34PM Permalink

I used this quote to help convince a friend to vaccinate her child this past year. It worked.

25 points Tesseract 03 January 2011 09:26:36PM Permalink

The mere fact that it is possible to frame a question does not make it legitimate or sensible to do so. There are many things about which you can ask, "What is its temperature?" or "What color is it?" but you may not ask the temperature question or the color question of, say, jealousy or prayer. Similarly, you are right to ask the "Why" question of a bicycle's mudguards or the Kariba Dam, but at the very least you have no right to assume that the "Why" question deserves an answer when posed about a boulder, a misfortune, Mt. Everest, or the universe. Questions can be simply inappropriate, however heartfelt their framing.

Richard Dawkins, Gods Utility Function

25 points billswift 01 February 2011 07:45:56PM Permalink

Speed is not attained by hurrying; it is an unsought by-product of intelligent and continuous work.

-- Frederick Giesecke, et al, Technical Drawing, 8th ed

25 points billswift 02 March 2011 07:50:29PM Permalink

The most practical thing in the world is a good theory.

Helmholtz

25 points CronoDAS 05 April 2011 06:25:31PM Permalink

A fable:

In Persia many centuries ago, the Sufi mullah or holy man Nasruddin was arrested after preaching in the great square in front of the Shah's palace. The local clerics had objected to Mullah Nasruddin's unorthodox teachings, and had demanded his arrest and execution as a heretic. Dragged by palace guards to the Shah's throne room, he was sentenced immediately to death.

As he was being taken away, however, Nasruddin cried out to the Shah: "O great Shah, if you spare me, I promise that within a year I will teach your favourite horse to sing!"

The Shah knew that Sufis often told the most outrageous fables, which sounded blasphemous to many Muslims but which were nevertheless intended as lessons to those who would learn. Thus he had been tempted to be merciful, anyway, despite the demands of his own religious advisors. Now, admiring the audacity of the old man, and being a gambler at heart, he accepted his proposal.

The next morning, Nasruddin was in the royal stable, singing hymns to the Shah's horse, a magnificent white stallion. The animal, however, was more interested in his oats and hay, and ignored him. The grooms and stablehands all shook their heads and laughed at him. "You old fool", said one. "What have you accomplished by promising to teach the Shah's horse to sing? You are bound to fail, and when you do, the Shah will not only have you killed - you'll be tortured as well, for mocking him!"

Nasruddin turned to the groom and replied: "On the contrary, I have indeed accomplished much. Remember, I have been granted another year of life, which is precious in itself. Furthermore, in that time, many things can happen. I might escape. Or I might die anyway. Or the Shah might die, and his successor will likely release all prisoners to celebrate his accession to the throne".

"Or...". Suddenly, Nasruddin smiled. "Or, perhaps, the horse will learn to sing".

The original source of this fable seems to be lost to time. This version was written by Idries Shah.

25 points AndrewM 04 April 2011 07:20:13PM Permalink

We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones.

-Robert Wright, The Moral Animal

25 points RichardKennaway 02 May 2011 09:11:54PM Permalink

I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.

XKCD (the mouseover text)

For "success" and "successful" one might substitute "rationality" and "rational".

25 points gwern 07 June 2011 04:01:26PM Permalink

Reminds me of a Schneier quote that I like:

'Every time I write about the impossibility of effectively protecting digital files on a general-purpose computer, I get responses from people decrying the death of copyright.

"How will authors and artists get paid for their work?" they ask me.

Truth be told, I don't know. I feel rather like the physicist who just explained relativity to a group of would-be interstellar travelers, only to be asked: "How do you expect us to get to the stars, then?"

I'm sorry, but I don't know that, either.'

"Protecting Copyright in the Digital World", Bruce Schneier http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0108.html#7

25 points brazzy 03 June 2011 09:09:01AM Permalink

A few points come to mind:

  • Presumably they also wanted a canal and there may well be an optimum point where you maximize some sort of combined utility
  • Jobs programs, even those that create nothing particularly useful, are about giving people a sense of worth and accomplishment, otherwise you could just hand out money. Obviously futile make-work activities like the one suggested achieve the opposite of that and are, indeed, often deliberately used to punish and humiliate people.
25 points Konkvistador 23 October 2011 10:59:30AM Permalink

A decision was wise, even though it led to disastrous consequences, if the evidence at hand indicated it was the best one to make; and a decision was foolish, even though it led to the happiest possible consequences, if it was unreasonable to expect those consequences.

-- Herodotus

25 points Vaniver 05 November 2011 10:30:09PM Permalink

The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.

Gloria Steinem

25 points gwern 01 March 2012 05:58:00PM Permalink

"It's easy to think of yourself as being quite a nice person so long as you live on your own and are the only witness to yourself."

--Alain de Botton

25 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 April 2012 08:10:47PM Permalink

It surprises people like Greg Egan, and they're not entirely stupid, because brains are Turing complete modulo the finite memory - there's no analogue of that for visible wavelengths.

25 points CronoDAS 04 April 2012 03:13:41AM Permalink

"What was the Sherlock Holmes principle? 'Once you have discounted the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'"

"I reject that entirely," said Dirk sharply. "The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something that works in all respects other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable? Your instinct is to say, 'Yes, but he or she simply wouldn't do that.'"

"Well, it happened to me today, in fact," replied Kate.

"Ah, yes," said Dirk, slapping the table and making the glasses jump. "Your girl in the wheelchair -- a perfect example. The idea that she is somehow receiving yesterday's stock market prices apparently out of thin air is merely impossible, and therefore must be the case, because the idea that she is maintaining an immensely complex and laborious hoax of no benefit to herself is hopelessly improbable. The first idea merely supposes that there is something we don't know about, and God knows there are enough of those. The second, however, runs contrary to something fundamental and human which we do know about. We should therefore be very suspicious of it and all its specious rationality."

-- Douglas Adams. The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988) p.169

25 points MixedNuts 20 April 2012 05:48:27PM Permalink

Tips for dealing with people with big egos:

  • Don't insult anyone, ever. If Wagner posts, either say "Hmm, why do you believe Mendelssohn's music to be derivative?" or silently downvote, but don't call him an antisemitic piece of shit.
  • Attributing negative motivations (disliking you, wanting to win a debate, being prejudiced) counts as an insult.
  • Attributing any kind of motivation at all is pretty likely to count as an insult. You can ask about motivation, but only list positive or neutral ones or make it an open question.
  • Likewise, you can ask why you were downvoted. This very often gets people to upvote you again if they were wrong to downvote you (and if not, you get the information you want). Any further implication that they were wrong is an insult.
  • Stick closely to the question and do not involve the personalities of debaters.
  • Exception to the above: it's okay to pass judgement on a personality trait if it's a compliment. If you can't always avoid insulting people, occasionally complimenting them can help.
  • A lot of things are insults. You will slip up. This won't make people dislike you.
  • If you know what a polite and friendly tone is, have one.
  • If someone isn't polite and friendly, it means you need to be more polite and friendly.
  • If they're being very rude and mean and it's getting annoying, you can gently mention it. Still make the rest of your post polite and friendly and about the question.
  • If the "polite and about the question" part is empty, don't post.
  • If you have insulted someone in a thread - either more than once, or once and people are still hostile despite you being extra nice afterwards - people will keep being hostile in the thread and you should probably walk away from it.
  • If hostility in a thread is leaking into your mood, walk away from the whole site for a little while.
  • When you post in another thread, people will not hold any grudges against you from previous threads. Sorry for your epic quest, but we don't have much against you right now.
  • Apologies (rather than silence) are a good idea if you were clearly in the wrong and not overly tempted to add "but".

On politeness:

  • Some politeness norms are stupid and harmful and wrong, like "You must not criticize even if explicitly asked to" or "Disagreement is impolite". Fortunately, we don't have these here.
  • Some are good, like not insulting people. Insulting messages get across poorly. This happens even when people ignore the insult to answer the substance, because the message is overloaded.
  • Some are mostly local communication protocols that help but can be costly to constrain your message around. It's okay to drop them if you can't bear the cost.
  • Some are about fostering personal liking between people. They're worthwhile to people who want that and noise to people who don't.
  • Taking pains to be polite is training wheels. People who are good with words can say precisely and concisely what they mean in a completely neutral tone. People who aren't are injecting lots of accidental interpersonal content, so we need to make it harmless explicitly.

People who are exempted:

  • The aforementioned people, who will never accidentally insult anyone;
  • People whose contribution is so incredibly awesome that it compensates for being insufferable; I know of a few but none on LessWrong;
  • wedrifid, who is somehow capable of pleasant interaction while being a complete jerk.
25 points William_Kasper 06 May 2012 08:10:15PM Permalink

[Political "gaffe" stories] are completely information-free news events, and they absolutely dominate political news coverage and analysis. It's like asking your doctor if the X-rays show a tumor, and all he'll talk about is how stupid the radiologist's haircut looks. . . . ["Blast"] stories are. . . just as content-free as the "gaffe" stories. But they are popular for the same reason: There's a petty, tribal satisfaction in seeing a member of our team really put the other team in their place. And there's a rush of outrage adrenaline when the other team says something mean about us. So, instead of covering pending legislation or the impact it could have on your life, the news media covers the dick-measuring contest.

-David Wong, 5 Ways to Spot a B.S. Political Story in Under 10 Seconds

25 points RichardKennaway 09 May 2012 07:48:11AM Permalink

Saying "what kind of an idiot doesn't know about the Yellowstone supervolcano" is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time.

xkcd

25 points Nominull 03 September 2012 10:53:57PM Permalink

I agree in principle but I think this particular topic is fairly nailoid in nature.

25 points DanArmak 02 October 2012 06:07:00PM Permalink

If it doesn't make sense, play with it until it does. If it's not broken, break it.

Spoken like a true cat.

25 points Armok_GoB 02 November 2012 09:25:49PM Permalink

My impression was that it was the screwing around that was lacking.

25 points Posterity 13 December 2012 05:25:11AM Permalink

If you were taught that elves caused rain, every time it rained, you'd see the proof of elves.

Ariex

25 points TeMPOraL 02 December 2012 07:02:50PM Permalink

It has been said that the past is a foreign country. Well, it is certainly inhabited by foreigners, people whose mindset was shaped by circumstances we shy from remembering. The mother of three children who gave birth eight times. The father of four children, the last of whom cost him his wife. Our minds are largely free of such horrors, and not inured to that kind of suffering. That is the progress of technology. That is what is improving the human race.

It is a long, long ladder, and sometimes we slip, but we've never actually fallen. That is our progress.

25 points Carwajalca 29 January 2013 11:21:28AM Permalink

"I've never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive."

-- Randall Munroe, in http://what-if.xkcd.com/30/ (What-if xkcd, Interplanetary Cessna)

25 points James_Miller 01 January 2013 05:34:35PM Permalink

We cannot dismiss conscious analytic thinking by saying that heuristics will get a “close enough” answer 98 percent of the time, because the 2 percent of the instances where heuristics lead us seriously astray may be critical to our lives.

Keith E. Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought

25 points arundelo 01 February 2013 05:00:17PM Permalink

Eventually you just have to admit that if it looks like the absence of a duck, walks like the absence of a duck, and quacks like the absence of a duck, the duck is probably absent.

--Tom Chivers

25 points Rubix 02 February 2013 01:17:50AM Permalink

"In any man who dies, there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight. Not people die, but worlds die in them."

-Yevgeny Yevtushenko

25 points Kaj_Sotala 03 February 2013 10:20:44PM Permalink

Authors are deliberately excluded from all this, on the grounds that they're so in love with what's inside the book that they don't understand what the cover stuff is for. Which is advertising.

The purpose of cover art is not to show the reader what's inside the book.

It's to get his attention from across the bookstore and get him to pick the book up in the first place.

Half-naked women and muscular barbarians are very good for getting teenaged readers to at least take a look. Black and red are good, too. And spiffy hardware, like spaceships. Cut-out covers, foil, blood, all that stuff--it gets attention, and the art and marketing people really don't give a damn whether it agrees with what's inside the book.

The cover gets you to pick up the book and read the blurbs; the blurbs are supposed to convince you to actually buy it. The blurb writer doesn't care any more about accuracy than the art director did; his job is to sell the book, period. One way to do that is to skim through the book and pick out all the most lurid details.

So all this is done without the author's interference. The author might put up a fuss about the half-naked women, since everyone in the story is ninety years old and wearing dirty bathrobes the whole time. The author might object to having his sentimental tale of old age cover-blurbed, "Shocking Love Secrets of the Ancients!" Who wants to waste time arguing with him? Better to shut him out and deliver the package as a fait accompli.

-- Lawrence Watt-Evans

25 points BlueSun 03 April 2013 04:20:39PM Permalink

Something a Chess Master told me as a child has stuck with me:

How did you get so good?

I've lost more games than you've ever played.

-- Robert Tanner

25 points RichardKennaway 03 June 2013 11:04:38AM Permalink

Does Colonel Barnes? If not, he is just repeating a word he has learned to say. Rather like some people today who have learned to say "entanglement", or "signalling", or "evolution", or...

25 points satt 02 June 2013 01:41:38AM Permalink

I acknowledge respect this criticism, but for two reasons I maintain Simon had a worthwhile insight(!) here that bears on rationality:

  1. Insight, intuition recognition aren't quite the same, but they overlap greatly and are closely related.

  2. Simon's comment, although not literally true, is a fertile hypothesis that not only opens eyeholes into the black boxes of "insight" "intuition", but produces useful predictions about how minds solve problems.

I should justify those. Chapter 4 of Simon's The Sciences of the Artificial, "Remembering and Learning: Memory as Environment for Thought", is relevant here. It uses chess as a test case:

[...] one part of the grandmaster's chess skill resides in the 50,000 chunks stored in memory, and in the index (in the form of a structure of feature tests) that allows him to recognize any one of these chunks on the chess board and to access the information in long-term memory that is associated with it. The information associated with familiar patterns may include knowledge about what to do when the pattern is encountered. Thus the experienced chess player who recognizes the feature called an open file thinks immediately of the possibility of moving a rook to that file. The move may or may not be the best one, but it is one that should be considered whenever an open file is present. The expert recognizes not only the situation in which he finds himself, but also what action might be appropriate for dealing with it. [...]

When playing a "rapid transit" game, at ten seconds a move, or fifty opponents simultaneously, going rapidly from one board to the next, a chess master is operating mostly "intuitively," that is, by recognizing board features and the moves that they suggest. The master will not play as well as in a tournament, where about three minutes, on the average, can be devoted to each move, but nonetheless will play relatively strong chess. A person's skill may decline from grandmaster level to the level of a master, or from master to expert, but it will by no means vanish. Hence recognition capabilities, and the information associated with the patterns that can be recognized, constitute a very large component of chess skill.⁵ [The footnote refers to a paper in Psychological Science.]

The seemingly mysterious insights intuitions of the chessmaster derive from being able to recognize many memorized patterns. This conclusion applies to more than chess; Simon's footnote points to a champion backgammon-playing program based on pattern recognition, and a couple of pages before that he refers to doctors' reliance on recognizing many features of diseases to make rapid medical diagnoses.

From what I've seen this even holds true in maths science, where people are raised to the level of geniuses for their insights intuitions. Heres cousin_it noticing that Terry Tao's insights constitute series of incremental, well-understood steps, consistent with Tao generating insights by recognizing familiar features of problems that allow him to exploit memorized logical steps. My conversations with higher ability mathematicians physicists confirm this; when they talk through a problem, it's clear that they do better than me by being better at recognizing particular features (such as symmetries, or similarities to problems with a known solution) and applying stock tricks they've already memorized to exploit those features. Stepping out of cognitive psychology and into the sociology history of science, the near ubiquity of multiple discovery in science is more evidence that insight is the result of external cues prompting receptive minds to recognize the applicability of an idea or heuristic to a particular problem.

The reduction of insight intuition to recognition isn't wholly watertight, as you note, but the gains from demystifying them by doing the reduction more than outweigh (IMO) the losses incurred by this oversimplification. There are also further gains because the insight-is-intuition-is-recognition hypothesis results in further predictions explanations:

  • Prediction: long-term practice is necessary for mastery of a sufficiently complicated domain, because the powerful intuition indicative of mastery requires memorization of many patterns so that one can recognize those patterns.

  • Prediction: consistently learning new domain-specific patterns (so that one can recognize them later) should, with a very high probability, engender mastery of that domain. (Putting it another way: long-term practice, done correctly, is sufficient for mastery.)

  • Explanation of why "[i]n a couple of domains [chess and classical music composition] where the matter has been studied, we do know that even the most talented people require approximately a decade to reach top professional proficiency" (TSotA, p. 91).

  • Prediction: "When a domain reaches a point where the knowledge for skillful professional practice cannot be acquired in a decade, more or less, then several adaptive developments are likely to occur. Specialization will usually increase (as it has, for example, in medicine), and practitioners will make increasing use of books and other external reference aids in their work" (TSotA, p. 92).

  • Prediction: "It is probably safe to say that the chemist must know as much as a diligent person can learn in about a decade of study" (TSotA, p. 93).

  • Explanation of Eliezers experience with being deep: the people EY spoke to perceived him as deep (i.e. insightful) but EY knew his remarks came from a pre-existing system of intuitions (transhumanism and knowledge of cognitive biases) which allowed him to immediately respond to (or "complete") patterns as he recognized them.

  • Explanation of how intensive childhood training produced some famous geniuses and domain experts (the Polgár sisters, William James Sidis, John Stuart Mill, Norbert Wiener).

  • Prediction: "This accumulation of experience may allow people to behave in ways that are very nearly optimal in situations to which their experience is pertinent, but will be of little help when genuinely novel situations are presented" ("On How to Decide What to Do", p. 503).

  • Prediction: one can write a computer program that plays a game or solves a problem by mechanically recognizing relevant features of the input and making cached feature-specific responses.

I know I've gone on at length here, but your criticism deserved a comprehensive reply, and I wanted to show I wasn't just being flippant when I quoted Simon. I agree he was hyperbolic, but I reckon his hyperbole was sufficiently minor insightful as to be RQ-worthy.

25 points Viliam_Bur 03 July 2013 02:55:52PM Permalink

Most importantly, you are telling the world that anyone saying the same thing is in a risk of losing their tongue, regardless of correctness of the information.

That makes it cheaper for people to argue against the information than to argue for it.

And that increases that chance that people will finally consider him a liar.

25 points RichardKennaway 03 July 2013 02:01:48PM Permalink

any new idea will be treated as a variant of something the listener has already thought of or heard.

From a Bayesian point of view, this is as it must be. People have priors and will assess anything new as a diff (of log-odds) from those priors. Even understanding what you are saying, before considering whether to update towards it, is subject to this. You will always be understood as saying whatever interpretation of your words is the least surprising to your audience.

BTW, this is standard in natural language processing (which is what a lot of Schank's AI work was in). When a sentence is ambiguous, choose the least surprising interpretation, the one containing the least information relative to your current knowledge.

The narrower your audience's priors, the more of a struggle it will be for them to hear you; the narrower your priors, the more you will struggle to hear them.

Having shown how Schank's Law is but an instance of Bayesian inference, I trust you will all find it acceptably unsurprising. :)

25 points MinibearRex 05 August 2013 05:23:38AM Permalink

He wasn't certain what he expected to find, which, in his experience, was generally a good enough reason to investigate something.

Harry Potter and the Confirmed Critical, Chapter 6

25 points lavalamp 02 August 2013 08:22:28PM Permalink

The threat of massive perfectly symmetrical violence, on the other hand...

25 points arundelo 02 September 2013 02:44:29AM Permalink

You argue that it would be wrong to stab my neighbor and take all their stuff. I reply that you have an ugly face. I commit the "ad hominem" fallacy because I'm attacking you, not your argument. So one thing you could do is yell "OI, AD HOMINEM, NOT COOL."

[...] What you need to do is go one step more and say "the ugliness of my face has no bearing on moral judgments about whether it is okay to stab your neighbor."

But notice you could've just said that without yelling "ad hominem" first! In fact, that's how all fallacies work. If someone has actually committed a fallacy, you can just point out their mistake directly without being a pedant and finding a pat little name for all of their logical reasoning problems.

-- TychoCelchuuu on Reddit

25 points Stabilizer 03 October 2013 09:15:52PM Permalink

A majority of life's errors are caused by forgetting what one is really trying to do.

-Charlie Munger

25 points jsbennett86 03 October 2013 05:07:22AM Permalink

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

25 points pewpewlasergun 03 October 2013 06:06:56AM Permalink

“Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.”

Neal Stephenson - "Quicksilver"

25 points satt 01 December 2013 11:27:45PM Permalink

Visit with your predecessors from previous Administrations. They know the ropes and can help you see around some corners. Try to make original mistakes, rather than needlessly repeating theirs.

Donald Rumsfeld

25 points wadavis 06 January 2014 03:32:31PM Permalink

I played a defender in high school school football. In football the defender can not touch or physically interfere the receiver of a pass from the time the pass is thrown until they catch the ball, to do so is a moderate penalty for the defenders team and considered bad sportsmanship at the amateur levels. As a adolescent that identified with Lawful Good, it came naturally to see Interference as against the rules, and not to be done.

It was an enlightening moment when a mentor explained that the penalties are not there to discourage and exclude types of behavior from the game. When they explained that penalties are part of the game with clearly defined rules, just another mechanical system to be gamed. That the penalty is not a punishment for bad behavior, but the price payed to implement certain tactics.

25 points B_For_Bandana 08 February 2014 12:39:25AM Permalink

Madolyn: "Why is the last patient of the day always the hardest?"

Costigan: "Because you're tired and you don't give a shit. It's not supernatural."

The Departed

25 points CronoDAS 04 March 2014 03:07:22AM Permalink

It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. Serious-minded persons, for example, are continually condemning the habit of going to the cinema, and telling us that it leads the young into crime. But all the work that goes to producing a cinema is respectable, because it is work, and because it brings a money profit. The notion that the desirable activities are those that bring a profit has made everything topsy-turvy. The butcher who provides you with meat and the baker who provides you with bread are praiseworthy, because they are making money; but when you enjoy the food they have provided, you are merely frivolous, unless you eat only to get strength for your work. Broadly speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd; one might as well maintain that keys are good, but keyholes are bad. Whatever merit there may be in the production of goods must be entirely derivative from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them. The individual, in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of his work lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce between the individual and the social purpose of production that makes it so difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which profit-making is the incentive to industry. We think too much of production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer.

-- Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness

25 points Cyan 03 April 2014 05:59:38PM Permalink

It is, in fact, a very good rule to be especially suspicious of work that says what you want to hear, precisely because the will to believe is a natural human tendency that must be fought.

- Paul Krugman

25 points Cyan 05 May 2014 04:06:21AM Permalink

Bruno de Finetti heard of [the author's empirical Bayes method for grading tests] and he wrote to me suggesting that the student should be encouraged to state their probability for each of the possible choices. The appropriate score should be a simple function of the probability distribution and the correct answer. An appropriate function would encourage students to reply with their actual distribution rather than attempt to bluff. I responded that it would be difficult to get third graders to list probabilities. He answered that we should give the students five gold stars and let them distribute the stars among the possible answers.

- Herman Chernoff (pg 34 of Past, Present, and Future of Statistical Science, available here)

25 points B_For_Bandana 03 May 2014 02:28:58AM Permalink

One afternoon a student said "Roshi, I don't really understand what's going on. I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and everything, and Felicia got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koans and get enlightened, but I've been doing this for two years now, and the koans don't make any sense, and I don't feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me what's going on?"

"Well you see," Roshi replied, "for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It's impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse."

And the student was enlightened.

25 points arundelo 05 August 2014 05:19:21AM Permalink

That's why I'm skeptical of people who look at some catastrophic failure of a complex system and say, "Wow, the odds of this happening are astronomical. Five different safety systems had to fail simultaneously!" What they don't realize is that one or two of those systems are failing all the time, and it's up to the other three systems to prevent the failure from turning into a disaster.

-- Raymond Chen

25 points Stabilizer 04 August 2014 04:01:20AM Permalink

Surgeons finally did upgrade their antiseptic standards at the end of the nineteenth century. But, as is often the case with new ideas, the effort required deeper changes than anyone had anticipated. In their blood-slick, viscera-encrusted black coats, surgeons had seen themselves as warriors doing hemorrhagic battle with little more than their bare hands. A few pioneering Germans, however, seized on the idea of the surgeon as scientist. They traded in their black coats for pristine laboratory whites, refashioned their operating rooms to achieve the exacting sterility of a bacteriological lab, and embraced anatomic precision over speed.

The key message to teach surgeons, it turned out, was not how to stop germs but how to think like a laboratory scientist. Young physicians from America and elsewhere who went to Germany to study with its surgical luminaries became fervent converts to their thinking and their standards. They returned as apostles not only for the use of antiseptic practice (to kill germs) but also for the much more exacting demands of aseptic practice (to prevent germs), such as wearing sterile gloves, gowns, hats, and masks. Proselytizing through their own students and colleagues, they finally spread the ideas worldwide.

-Atul Gawande

25 points Azathoth123 13 September 2014 07:08:04PM Permalink

What goes unsaid eventually goes unthought.

Steve Sailer

25 points shminux 02 September 2014 04:31:59PM Permalink
25 points Salivanth 02 October 2014 11:49:31PM Permalink

The Courage Wolf looked long and slow at the Weasley twins. At length he spoke, "I see that you possess half of courage. That is good. Few achieve that."

"Half?" Fred asked, too awed to be truly offended.

"Yes," said the Wolf, "You know how to heroically defy, but you do not know how to heroically submit. How to say to another, 'You are wiser than I; tell me what to do and I will do it. I do not need to understand; I will not cost you the time to explain.' And there are those in your lives wiser than you, to whom you could say that."

"But what if they're wrong?" George said.

"If they are wrong, you die," the Wolf said plainly, "Horribly. And for nothing. That is why it is an act of courage."

  • HPMOR omake by Daniel Speyer.
25 points NancyLebovitz 07 December 2014 03:46:52PM Permalink

Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste... years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just... take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that and walk away. But that's hard.

Lois McMaster Bujold

25 points Kinsei 06 December 2014 01:18:27PM Permalink

"It’s much better to live in a place like Switzerland where the problems are complex and the solutions are unclear, rather than North Korea where the problems are simple and the solutions are straightforward."

Scott Sumner, A time for nuance

25 points Gunnar_Zarncke 01 November 2014 10:37:35PM Permalink

The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.

Mark Twain

Actually I found this in The topology of Seemingly impossible functional programs which is using topological methods to 'check' infinitely many cases in finite time. Which might even be applicable to FAI research.

25 points Strange7 03 November 2014 01:41:48PM Permalink

Marriage to Kim Kardashian is not contagious.

As far as we know! Perhaps it simply has a long incubation period, and transitive polyamory will be legally recognized some time in the 2020s.

24 points djcb 30 November 2009 07:07:05PM Permalink

Today, safe flight inside clouds is possible using gyroscopic instruments that report the airplane’s orientation without being misled by centrifugal effects. But the pilot’s spatial intuition is still active, and often contradicts the instruments. Pilots are explicitly, emphatically trained to trust the instruments and ignore intuition—precisely the opposite of the Star Wars advice—and those who fail to do so often perish.

-- Gary Drescher "Good and Real"

(I really like this quote as a counterweight to the ubiquitous cliche-advise to follow you intuition. Often, your intuition may be fooled. And, it cannot be repeated often enough, Good and Real is a must-read for LW-minded folks)

24 points RobinZ 30 November 2009 12:05:58AM Permalink

It helps to stop worrying about what you are and concentrate on what you do. If you think of a poet as a person with some special qualifications that come by nature (or divine favor), you are likely to make one of two mistakes about yourself. If you think you've got what it takes, you may fail to learn what you need to know in order to use whatever qualities you may have. On the other hand, if you think you do not have what it takes, you may give up too easily, thinking it is useless to try. A poet is someone - you, me, anyone - who writes poems. That question out of the way, now we can learn to write poems better.

Judson Jerome, The Poet's Handbook, Chap. 1 ("From Sighs and Groans to Art")

24 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 November 2009 11:39:02PM Permalink

Just a few centuries ago, the smartest humans alive were dead wrong about damn near everything. They were wrong about gods. Wrong about astronomy. Wrong about disease. Wrong about heredity. Wrong about physics. Wrong about racism, sexism, nationalism, governance, and many other moral issues. Wrong about geology. Wrong about cosmology. Wrong about chemistry. Wrong about evolution. Wrong about nearly every subject imaginable.

-- Luke Muehlhauser

24 points gwern 06 October 2010 12:23:32AM Permalink

'One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he interrupted the lesson suddenly in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row, if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit.

"Nice biscuit, don't you think," said Korzybski, while he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog's head and the words "Dog Cookies."

The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to vomit, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet.

"You see," Korzybski remarked, "I have just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter."'

(R. Diekstra, Haarlemmer Dagblad, 1993, cited by L. Derks J. Hollander, Essenties van NLP (Utrecht: Servire, 1996), p. 58)

I think of this as a rationalist parable and not so much a quote. It has a lot of personal resonance since I often had dog biscuits with my tea when I was younger.

24 points gwern 01 February 2011 06:00:54PM Permalink

"After solving a problem, humanity imagines that it finds in analogous solutions the key to all problems.

Every authentic solution brings in its wake a train of grotesque solutions."

--Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 430

24 points aausch 07 March 2011 07:28:04PM Permalink

You'll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.

-- David Foster Wallace

24 points nhamann 05 April 2011 09:22:48PM Permalink

True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer.

— David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

24 points Nominull 06 April 2011 03:40:18AM Permalink

using the word “science” in the same way you’d use the word “alakazam” doesn’t count as being smarter

-Kris Straub, Chainsawsuit artist commentary

24 points RichardKennaway 04 April 2011 10:45:00AM Permalink

I recently posted these in another thread, but I think they're worth putting here to stand on their own:

"Magic is just a way of saying 'I don't know.'"

Terry Pratchett, "Nation"

The essence of magic is to do away with underlying mechanisms. ... What makes the elephant disappear is the movement of the wand and the intent of the magician, directly. If there were any intervening processes, it would not be magic but just engineering. As soon as you know how the magician made the elephant disappear, the magic disappears and -- if you started by believing in magic -- the disappointment sets in.

William T. Powers (CSGNET mailing list, April 2005)

24 points orthonormal 07 July 2011 04:04:14PM Permalink

Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is "wishful thinking." You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself. When you have checked my figures, then, and then only, will you know whether I have that balance or not. If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic, and the doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant — but only after you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely arithmetical grounds. It is the same with all thinking and all systems of thought. If you try to find out which are tainted by speculating about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of yourself. You must first find out on purely logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break down as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go on and discover the psychological causes of the error.

C.S. Lewis, "Bulverism"

(It's not exactly correct- evidence of bias is some evidence against a belief- but not always as strong of evidence as it's assumed to be.)

24 points ciphergoth 01 November 2011 08:47:57AM Permalink

One of the strengths of Apollo 13 is that it has only good guys in it, battling together against an unforeseen, mysterious and near-lethal twist of fate.

24 points Bugmaster 06 December 2011 09:44:42PM Permalink

Ah yes, my gnome. I’m very fond of my gnome.

Oh I am so getting my own gnome, just so that I can use that phrase on people.

24 points Maniakes 03 December 2011 12:26:40AM Permalink

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

-- Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning

24 points Tesseract 01 December 2011 05:40:37PM Permalink

One of the toughest things in any science... is to weed out the ideas that are really pleasing but unencumbered by truth.

Thomas Carew

24 points gwern 04 December 2011 01:47:19PM Permalink

In the autumn of 1939, Ludwig Wittgenstein and his young Cambridge student and friend Norman Malcolm were walking along the river when they saw a newspaper vendor's sign announcing that the Germans had accused the British government of instigating a recent attempt to assassinate Hitler. When Wittgenstein remarked that it wouldn't surprise him at all if it were true, Malcolm retorted that it was impossible because "the British were too civilized and decent to attempt anything so underhand, and . . . such an act was incompatible with the British 'national character'." Wittgenstein was furious. Some five years later, he wrote to Malcolm:

"Whenever I thought of you I couldn't help thinking of a particular incident which seemed to me very important. . . . you made a remark about 'national character' that shocked me by its primitiveness. I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any . . . journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends."

--Marjorie Perloff, Wittgensteins Ladder; apparently of the many attempts, the one referred to did not actually have British backing, although some did eg. the Oster Conspiracy or Operation Foxley.

(This is the full and original quote; the emphasis is on the section which is usually paraphrased as, "What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic...if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?")

24 points Tesseract 01 February 2012 07:53:34PM Permalink

What is the aim of philosophy? To be clear-headed rather than confused; lucid rather than obscure; rational rather than otherwise; and to be neither more, nor less, sure of things than is justifiable by argument or evidence. That is worth trying for.

Geoffrey Warnock

24 points philh 02 March 2012 01:49:57AM Permalink

I don't agree that Vizzini is trying to reason in logical absolutes. He talks like he is, but he doesn't necessarily believe the things he's saying.

Man in Black: You're trying to trick me into giving away something. It won't work.

Vizzini: It has worked! You've given everything away! I know where the poison is!

My interpretation is that he really is trying to trick the man.

Later he distracts the man and swaps the glasses around; then he pretends to choose his own glass. He makes sure the man drinks first. I think he's reasoning/hoping that the man would not deliberately drink from the poisoned cup. So when the man does drink he believes his chosen cup is safe. If the man had been unwilling to drink, Vizzini would have assumed that he now held the poisoned glass, and perhaps resorted to treachery.

He's overconfident, but he's not a complete fool.

(I don't have strong confidence in this analysis, because he's a minor character in a movie.)

24 points Konkvistador 04 July 2012 05:43:39AM Permalink

We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled. But how can we be sure our senses are not being deceived at any particular time, or even all the time? Might I just be a brain in a tank somewhere, tricked all my life into believing in the events of this world by some insane computer? And does my life gain or lose meaning based on my reaction to such solipsism?

--- Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7. Activity recorded M.Y. 2302.22467. (TERMINATION OF SPECIMEN ADVISED)

From Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

24 points Daniel_Burfoot 01 September 2012 03:57:48PM Permalink

It is now clear to us what, in the year 1812, was the cause of the destruction of the French army. No one will dispute that the cause of the destruction of Napoleon's French forces was, on the one hand, their advance late in the year, without preparations for a winter march, into the depths of Russia, and, on the other hand, the character that the war took on with the burning of Russian towns and the hatred of the foe aroused in the Russian people. But then not only did no one foresee (what now seems obvious) that this was the only way that could lead to the destruction of an army of eight hundred thousand men, the best in the world and led by the best generals, in conflict with a twice weaker Russian army, inexperienced and led by inexperienced generals; not only did no one foresee this, but all efforts on the part of the Russians were constantly aimed at hindering the one thing that could save Russia, and, on the part of the French, despite Napoleon's experience and so-called military genius, all efforts were aimed at extending as far as Moscow by the end of summer, that is, at doing the very thing that was to destroy them.

  • Leo Tolstoy, "War and Peace", trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky
24 points DanielLC 10 September 2012 05:33:12AM Permalink

He bought the present ox along with the future ox. He could have just bought the present ox, or at least a shorter interval of one. This is known as "renting".

24 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 September 2012 08:41:56AM Permalink

The following quotes were heavily upvoted, but then turned out to be made by a Will Newsome sockpuppet who edited the quote afterward. The original comments have been banned. The quotes are as follows:

If dying after a billion years doesn't sound sad to you, it's because you lack a thousand-year-old brain that can make trillion-year plans.

— Aristosophy

One wish can achieve as much as you want. What the genie is really offering is three rounds of feedback.

— Aristosophy

If anyone objects to this policy response, please PM me so as to not feed the troll.

24 points CronoDAS 06 September 2012 11:05:03AM Permalink

“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write “Childhood’s End” and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.

-- Tim Kreider

The interesting part is the phrase "which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays." If we can anticipate what the morality of the future would be, should we try to live by it now?

24 points AspiringRationalist 04 October 2012 06:59:56PM Permalink

To succeed in a domain that violates your intuitions, you need to be able to turn them off the way a pilot does when flying through clouds. You need to do what you know intellectually to be right, even though it feels wrong.

-- Paul Graham

24 points Alejandro1 02 October 2012 03:24:10PM Permalink

And who shows greater reverence for mystery, the scientist who devotes himself to discovering it step by step, always ready to submit to facts, and always aware that even his boldest achievement will never be more than a stepping-stone for those who come after him, or the mystic who is free to maintain anything because he need not fear any test?

Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies

24 points Jayson_Virissimo 05 November 2012 11:56:48AM Permalink

After all, the essential point in running a risk is that the returns justify it.

-Sennett Forell, Foundation and Empire

24 points MTGandP 02 November 2012 02:11:36AM Permalink

You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people you have to do things that are arbitrary and believe things that are false.

Paul Graham

24 points GabrielDuquette 02 November 2012 02:44:03AM Permalink

There is only so much genuine originality in anyone. After that, being uncommon means indulging in pointless eccentricities or clever attempts to mock or shock.

Thomas Sowell

24 points Nominull 02 November 2012 04:08:43PM Permalink

A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.

-John Maynard Keynes

24 points Alejandro1 05 December 2012 02:03:14PM Permalink

I was once, years and years ago, falsely accused by someone of egregious dishonesty, and after I put forward evidence that the accusation was false, was told, "Let's just agree to disagree." At which, of course, I exploded; I would not be agreeing to disagree about whether I had been completely dishonest, thank you very much. And every time someone uses the phrase I am tempted to say, "We don't need to agree to disagree because we already are disagreeing." I think what gets me is that it's such an unbelievably low standard that almost anything would be more intellectually robust; why not agree to something more ambitiously intellectual, like swapping book recommendations, or having a temporary cooling-off period, or going to a third party for arbitration or advice, or anything else, really?

24 points Konkvistador 09 December 2012 07:33:05PM Permalink

In December of each year, the New York Times film critics, like film critics everywhere, write Deep Think pieces about what patterns in the movies released in the current year tell us about Trends in the Big Issues. The annual answer ought to be: Virtually nothing, because what gets released in a single year is a close to a random sample of projects that had been in the works for years and happened to come to fruition now. But that never stops the critics from pontificating on 2012: The Meaning of It All.

--Steve Sailer, here

24 points Oscar_Cunningham 02 January 2013 02:21:31PM Permalink

I don't blame them; nor am I saying I wouldn't similarly manipulate the truth if I thought it would save lives, but I don't lie to myself. You keep two books, not no books. [Emphasis mine]

The Last Psychiatrist (http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/10/how_not_to_prevent_military_su.html)

24 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 January 2013 09:07:07PM Permalink

Believing large lies is worse than small lies; basically, it's arguing against the What-The-Hell Effect as applied to rationality. Or so I presume, did not read original.

24 points Grif 02 February 2013 01:12:40AM Permalink

If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?

--Sam Harris

24 points harshhpareek 03 March 2013 08:05:37PM Permalink

The world of the manager is one of problems and opportunities. Problems are to be managed; one must understand the nature of the problem, amass resources adequate to deal with it, and "work the problem" on an ongoing basis.[...] But what if the problem can be fixed? This is not the domain of the manager.

An engineer believes most problems have solutions. The engineer isn't interested in building an organisation to cope with the problem. [...] And yet the engineer's faith in fixes often blinds him to the fact that many problems, especially those involving people, don't have the kind of complete permanent solutions he seeks.

-- John Walker, The Hackers Diet (~loc 250 on an e-reader)

24 points orthonormal 03 May 2013 10:21:34PM Permalink

And then the Vulcan would immediately adjust to always spouting off some random high-odds-against-us number all the time just to make sure they'd always succeed heroically.

Holy crap, canon!Spock is a genius rationalist after all.

24 points TheOtherDave 03 May 2013 03:18:40PM Permalink

An investigation into the shipyards, and current design paradigms, may be in order...

...as I recommended strenuously before we left dock at the beginning of this mission, since a similar analysis performed then gave approximately 8000:1 odds that before this mission was complete you would do something deeply stupid that got us all killed, no matter how strenuously I tried to instruct you in basic risk factor analysis. That having failed, I gave serious consideration to simply taking over the ship myself, which I estimate will increase by a factor of approximately 3000 the utility created by our missions (even taking into account the reduced "moxie factor", which is primarily of use during crises a sensible Captain would avoid getting into in the first place). However, I observe that my superiors in the High Command have not taken over Starfleet and the Federation, despite the obvious benefits of such a strategy. At first this led me to 83% confidence that the High Command was in possession of extremely compelling unshared evidence of the value of humanity's leadership, which at that time led me to update significantly in favor of that view myself. I have since then reduced that confidence to 76%, with a 13% confidence that the High Command has instead been subverted by hostile powers partial to humanity.

24 points maia 01 May 2013 08:08:17PM Permalink

When a problem comes along / You must whip it / Before the cream sets out too long / You must whip it / When something's goin' wrong / You must whip it

Now whip it / Into shape / Shape it up / Get straight / Go forward / Move ahead / Try to detect it / It's not too late / To whip it / Whip it good

-- Devo, on the value of confronting problems rather than letting them fester

24 points cody-bryce 02 August 2013 10:29:11PM Permalink

Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.

-Gloria Steinem

24 points Vaniver 06 August 2013 01:41:36AM Permalink

from poor/middle-class Indian

It is worth pointing out that Ramanujan, while poor, was still a Brahmin.

24 points Nomad 03 September 2013 05:28:00PM Permalink

The “I blundered and lost, but the refutation was lovely!” scenario is something lovers of truth and beauty can appreciate.

Jeremy Silman

24 points maia 02 December 2013 04:48:52PM Permalink

More of these gems, for the lazy:

Our World: Firm’s Meteoric Rise Explained by Daring Strategy, Bold Leadership

Mathematically Literate World: Firm’s Meteoric Rise Explained by Good Luck, Selection Bias

Our World: One Dead in Shark Attack; See Tips for Shark Safety Inside

Mathematically Literate World: One Dead in Tragic, Highly Unlikely Event; See Tips for Something Useful Inside

Our World: Poll Finds 2016 Candidates Neck and Neck

Mathematically Literate World: Poll Finds 2016 Predictions Futile, Absurd

24 points jsbennett86 09 January 2014 11:30:28PM Permalink

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

24 points michaelkeenan 05 January 2014 08:24:59AM Permalink

If you don't pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, it will take more of your attention than it deserves.

-- David Allen

24 points Mestroyer 04 January 2014 07:41:07PM Permalink

But losing can be upsetting, and can cause emotions to take the place of logical thinking. Below are some common “losing attitudes.” If you find yourself saying these things, consider it a red flag.

“At least I have my Code of Honor,” a.k.a. “You are cheap!”

This is by far the most common call of the scrub, and I’ve already described it in detail. The loser usually takes the imagined moral high ground by sticking to his Code of Honor, a made-up set of personal rules that tells him which moves he can and cannot do. Of course, the rules of the game itself dictate which moves a player can and cannot make, so the Code of Honor is superfluous and counterproductive toward winning. This can also take the form of the loser complaining that you have broken his Code of Honor. He will almost always assume the entire world agrees on his Code and that only the most vile social outcasts would ever break his rules. It can be difficult to even reason with the kind of religious fervor some players have toward their Code. This type of player is trying desperately to remain a “winner” any way possible. If you catch him amidst a sea of losses, you’ll notice that his Code will undergo strange contortions so that he may still define himself, somehow, as a “winner.”

David Sirlin on self-handicapping in competitive games

24 points Manfred 10 March 2014 05:38:45AM Permalink

And bits for the really important drills.

24 points arundelo 04 April 2014 02:13:10PM Permalink

Specifically, [these recent books that deal with parallel universes] argue that if some scientific theory X has enough experimental support for us to take it seriously, then we must take seriously also all its predictions Y, even if these predictions are themselves untestable (involving parallel universes, for example).

As a warm-up example, let's consider Einstein's theory of General Relativity. It's widely considered a scientific theory worthy of taking seriously, because it has made countless correct predictions -- from the gravitational bending of light to the time dilation measured by our GPS phones. This means that we must also take seriously its prediction for what happens inside black holes, even though this is something we can never observe and report on in Scientific American. If someone doesn't like these black hole predictions, they can't simply opt out of them and dismiss them as unscientific: instead, they need to come up with a different mathematical theory that matches every single successful prediction that general relativity has made -- yet doesn't give the disagreeable black hole predictions.

-- Max Tegmark, Scientific American guest blog, 2014-02-04

24 points Stabilizer 01 April 2014 08:10:10PM Permalink

How much of a disaster is this? Well, it’s never a disaster to learn that a statement you wanted to go one way in fact goes the other way. It may be disappointing, but it’s much better to know the truth than to waste time chasing a fantasy. Also, there can be far more to it than that. The effect of discovering that your hopes are dashed is often that you readjust your hopes. If you had a subgoal that you now realize is unachievable, but you still believe that the main goal might be achievable, then your options have been narrowed down in a potentially useful way.

-Timothy Gowers, on finding out a method he’d hoped would work, in fact would not.

24 points SaidAchmiz 04 April 2014 06:20:51PM Permalink

Speaking as a student: I sympathize with Benito, have myself had his sort of frustration, and far prefer understanding to memorization... yet I must speak up for the side of the students in your experience. Why?

Because the incentives in the education system encourage memorization, and discourage understanding.

Say I'm in a class, learning some difficult topic. I know there will be a test, and the test will make up a big chunk of my grade (maybe all the tests together are most of my grade). I know the test will be such that passing it is easiest if I memorize — because that's how tests are. What do I do?

True understanding in complex topics requires contemplation, experimentation, exploration; "playing around" with the material, trying things out for myself, taking time to think about it, going out and reading other things about the topic, discussing the topic with knowledgeable people. I'd love to do all of that...

... but I have three other classes, and they all expect me to read absurd amounts of material in time for next week's lecture, and work on a major project apiece, and I have no time for any of those wonderful things I listed, and I have had four hours of sleep (and god forbid I have a job in addition to all of that) and I am in no state to deeply understand anything. Memorizing is faster and doesn't require such expenditures of cognitive effort.

So what do I do? Do I try to understand, and not be able to understand enough, in time for the test on Monday, and thus fail the class? Or do I just memorize, and pass? And what good do your understanding-based teaching techniques do me, if you're still going to give me tests and base my grade on them, and if the educational system is not going to allow me the conditions to make my own way to true understanding of the material?

None. No good at all.

24 points arundelo 03 May 2014 06:27:58PM Permalink

Things like linear algebra, group theory, and probability have so many uses throughout science that learning them is like installing a firmware upgrade to your brain -- and even the math you don't use will stretch you in helpful ways.

-- Scott Aaronson

24 points NancyLebovitz 02 June 2014 06:08:16PM Permalink

Three Bayesians walk into a bar: a) what's the probability that this is a joke? b) what's the probability that one of the three is a Rabbi? c) given that one of the three is a Rabbi, what's the probability that this is a joke?

--Sorry, no cite. I got this from someone who said they'd been seeing it on twitter.

24 points timujin 03 November 2014 07:33:56AM Permalink

My native language is Russian (and was also the only language I could speak before my teens). I can also speak English, and it is my primary language for thinking now (it is MUCH easier to think in English, than in Russian - Russian is horrible). The two languages do not feel like different maps. I do have some problems in conversing with Russian-speaking individuals, mostly with expressing myself (English offers so many useful features not present in Russian that I feel like an amputee when I can't use them), but I do not think that knowing the distinction helped me with rationality much. They are not different ways of seeing the world, but different ways of describing what you see. Not different maps, different map colorings, maybe.

23 points Vlad 15 June 2009 08:09:13AM Permalink

"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." Christopher Hitchens

23 points Rune 06 August 2009 03:43:35AM Permalink

"As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls."

-- M. Cartmill

23 points dclayh 30 November 2009 12:44:23AM Permalink

It's not really surprising, though, is it? Brilliant people want to have other brilliant people as their colleagues.

(In fact, one mathematician of my acquaintance said that he once dabbled in circuit design, but when his first paper in the field was received as a major achievement, he left it immediately, concluding that if he could make such a large contribution so easily, the field must be unworthy of him.)

23 points Rain 01 March 2010 09:53:48PM Permalink

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

-- Isaac Asimov

23 points Yvain 02 April 2010 12:46:16AM Permalink

"Everyone thinks they've won the Magical Belief Lottery. Everyone thinks they more or less have a handle on things, that they, as opposed to the billions who disagree with them, have somehow lucked into the one true belief system."

-- R Scott Bakker, Neuropath

23 points khafra 02 June 2010 03:59:31PM Permalink

I'm embarassed to bring this up again, because I seem to quote steven0461 too often--but, in something close to his words; "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains is likely more improbable than an error in one of your impossibility proofs."

23 points CSmith 02 July 2010 04:53:11AM Permalink

"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."

--Friedrich Nietzsche

23 points Apprentice 03 August 2010 01:15:30PM Permalink

Upon his death man must leave everything behind ... and depart forever from the world he has known. He must of necessity go to that foul land of death, a fact which makes death the most sorrowful of all events. ... Some foreign doctrines, however, teach that death should not be regarded as profoundly sorrowful. ... These are all gross deceptions contrary to human sentiment and fundamental truths. Not to be happy over happy events, not to be saddened by sorrowful events, not to show surprise at astonishing events, in a word, to consider it proper not to be moved by whatever happens, are all foreign types of deception and falsehood. They are contrary to human nature and extremely repugnant to me.

-- Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) - quoted from Blocker, Japanese Philosophy, p. 109

Motoori was as far as you can get from being a rationalist but this quote was so Yudkowskian that I felt it belonged here.

23 points Apprentice 06 October 2010 10:13:16AM Permalink

We live in a world where it has become "politically correct" to avoid absolutes. Many want all religions to be given the same honor, and all gods regarded as equally true and equally fictitious. But take these same people, who want fuzzy, all-inclusive thinking in spiritual matters, and put them on an airplane. You will find they insist on a very dogmatic, intolerant pilot who will stay on the "straight and narrow" glidepath so their life will not come to a violent end short of the runway. They want no fuzzy thinking here!

-- Jack T. Chick

23 points NihilCredo 07 October 2010 02:50:43AM Permalink

There's also a certain fun challenge in looking for jewels among the fecal matter. Rationalist aphorisms by Voltaire or Russell are a regular feature of their writing, and have been quoted in books and articles for decades or centuries, but a pearl of wisdom by a fideist is a tough find and most likely unknown to other LW readers.

Heh. Of all goddamn things to be a hipster about, "rationality quotes" has got to be one hell of a weird choice.

23 points Tesseract 05 November 2010 08:34:18PM Permalink

Kołakowski's Law, or The Law of the Infinite Cornucopia:

For any given doctrine that one wants to believe, there is never a shortage of arguments by which to support it.

Leszek Kołakowski

23 points DanArmak 04 November 2010 10:53:54PM Permalink

In 1923, England and France divided between them the previously Turkish territories of what are modern Syria, Lebanon and Israel/Palestine. They drew a pencil line on a map to mark the treaty border.

It turned out that the thickness of the pencil line itself was several hundred meters on the ground. In 1964, Israel fought a battle with Syria over that land.

People were killed because someone neglected to sharpen their pencil. That's "scribbles on a piece of paper" for you.

Ref: a book found by Google. I originally learned about this from an Israeli plaque at the Dan River preserve near the border.

23 points [deleted] 02 November 2010 08:49:16PM Permalink

From desert cliff and mountaintop we trace the wide design,

Strike-slip fault and overthrust and syn and anticline...

We gaze upon creation where erosion makes it known,

And count the countless aeons in the banding of the stone.

Odd, long-vanished creatures and their tracks shells are found;

Where truth has left its sketches on the slate below the ground.

The patient stone can speak, if we but listen when it talks.

Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the rocks.

There are those who name the stars, who watch the sky by night,

Seeking out the darkest place, to better see the light.

Long ago, when torture broke the remnant of his will,

Galileo recanted, but the Earth is moving still.

High above the mountaintops, where only distance bars,

The truth has left its footprints in the dust between the stars.

We may watch and study or may shudder and deny,

Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the sky.

By stem and root and branch we trace, by feather, fang and fur,

How the living things that are descend from things that were.

The moss, the kelp, the zebrafish, the very mice and flies,

These tiny, humble, wordless things--how shall they tell us lies?

We are kin to beasts; no other answer can we bring.

The truth has left its fingerprints on every living thing.

Remember, should you have to choose between them in the strife,

Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote life.

And we who listen to the stars, or walk the dusty grade,

Or break the very atoms down to see how they are made,

Or study cells, or living things, seek truth with open hand.

The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand.

Deep in flower and in flesh, in star and soil and seed,

The truth has left its living word for anyone to read.

So turn and look where best you think the story is unfurled.

Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.

~Catherine Faber, The Word of God

23 points [deleted] 03 December 2010 05:39:17AM Permalink

The question I ask myself like almost everyday is 'Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?'

Mark Zuckerberg

23 points DSimon 04 January 2011 05:24:29PM Permalink

The Three Virtues of a Programmer:

  • Laziness - The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it.

  • Impatience - The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to.

  • Hubris - Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about.

-- Larry Wall (Programming Perl, 2nd edition), quote somewhat abridged

23 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 January 2011 09:16:43AM Permalink

There's this:

People are always amazed by how much "free time" I have.
They're also amazed that I don't know who Ally McBeal is.
Frankly, I'm amazed that they can't make the connection."
-- Robert Wenzlaff
23 points MixedNuts 01 June 2011 09:37:14PM Permalink

I care. If illness is abolished and a doctor of any age is starving, they can stay at my place and I'll feed them. Alternately, we could raise taxes slightly to finance government-mandated programs for training and reconversion of young doctors and early retirement for old doctors.

In other words: beware of though-mindedly accepting bad consequences of overall good policies. Look for a superior alternative first.

23 points SilasBarta 01 June 2011 10:01:56PM Permalink

I agree. Unfortunately, the way it actually works is, "No, we can't allow your universal cure -- the AMA/[your country's MD association] is upset."

"No, we can't accept your free widgets -- that would cost our widgetmakers major sales."

"No, I don't want you to work for me for free -- that would put domestic servants out of jobs."

"No, I don't want to marry you -- that would hurt the income of local prostitutes."

"No, I don't want your solar radiation -- that would put our light and heat industries out of business."

Edit: Even better: "No, I don't want you to be my friend -- what about my therapist's loss of revenue?"

23 points Jayson_Virissimo 02 June 2011 12:34:21AM Permalink

In the study of reliable processes for arriving at belief, philosophers will become technologically obsolescent. They will be replaced by cognitive and computer scientists, workers in artificial intelligence, and others.

Robert Nozick, The Nature of Rationality

If you haven't read this book yet, do so. It is basically LessWrongism circa 1993.

23 points Tesseract 01 September 2011 08:48:19PM Permalink

If you want to live in a nicer world, you need good, unbiased science to tell you about the actual wellsprings of human behavior. You do not need a viewpoint that sounds comforting but is wrong, because that could lead you to create ineffective interventions. The question is not what sounds good to us but what actually causes humans to do the things they do.

Douglas Kenrick

23 points anonym 02 October 2011 01:54:31AM Permalink

The most valuable acquisitions in a scientific or technical education are the general-purpose mental tools which remain serviceable for a lifetime. I rate natural language and mathematics as the most important of these tools, and computer science as a third.

George E. Forsythe

23 points lukeprog 03 November 2011 07:45:04AM Permalink

It is better to destroy one's own errors than those of others.

Democritus

23 points Nominull 31 October 2011 03:31:51PM Permalink

Opening your eyes doesn't make a bad picture worse.

23 points Maniakes 03 December 2011 12:30:14AM Permalink

If you're tempted to respond, "But I love school, and so do all my friends. Ah, the life of the mind, what could be better?" let me gently remind you that readers of economics blogs are not a random sample of the population. Most people would hate reading this blog; you read it just for fun!

-- Bryan Caplan

23 points gwern 08 December 2011 03:59:31AM Permalink

'Tell me one last thing,' said Harry. 'Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?'

Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry's ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.

'Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?'

― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

23 points [deleted] 03 December 2011 03:05:16PM Permalink

Fujiwara no Yoshitake (954-974), a handsome nobleman, tragically died of smallpox at age 21. He left a love poem full of pathos:

Kige ga tame

oshikarazarishi

Inochi sae

Nagaku mo gana to

Omoikeru kana

For your precious sake, once I thought

I could die.

Now, I wish to live with you

a long, long time.

--Hokusai and Hiroshige

23 points SilasBarta 01 December 2011 04:29:25PM Permalink

That sounds like less of a wrong question and more of a "right question with surprising (low prior) answer". As far as the asker knew, the answer could have turned out to be, "Genes produce the same organism phenotype across virtually all environments, so genes are more important because changing them is much more likely to change the expressed phenotype than changing the environment." (and indeed, life would not be life if genes could not force some level of environment-invariance, thereby acting as a control system for a low-entropy island)

I don't see what's wrong with answering this question with "neither [i.e., they're equal], because they jointly determine phenotype, as independent changes in either have the same chance of affecting phenotype".

An example of a wrong question, by contrast, would be something like, "Which path did the electron really take?" because it posits an invalid ontology of the world as a pre-requisite. The question about phenotypes doesn't do that.

23 points PhilGoetz 06 December 2011 04:19:12AM Permalink

"I did not think; I investigated."

Wilhelm Roentgen, when asked by an interviewer what he thought on noticing some kind of light (X-ray-induced fluorescence) apparently passing through a solid opaque object. Quoted in de Solla Price, Science Since Babylon, expanded edition, p. 146.

23 points Jayson_Virissimo 02 February 2012 07:53:20AM Permalink

Already I had learned from thee that because a thing is eloquently expressed it should not be taken to be as necessarily true; nor because it is uttered with stammering lips should it be supposed false. Nor, again, is it necessarily true because rudely uttered, nor untrue because the language is brilliant. Wisdom and folly both are like meats that are wholesome and unwholesome, and courtly or simple words are like town-made or rustic vessels — both kinds of food may be served in either kind of dish.

Saint Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

23 points HonoreDB 01 March 2012 04:58:22PM Permalink

"Are you trying to tell me that there are sixteen million practicing wizards on Earth?" "Sixteen million four hundred and--" Dairine paused to consider the condition the world was in. "Well it's not anywhere near enough! Make them all wizards."

--Diane Duane, High Wizardry

23 points AspiringKnitter 05 April 2012 06:05:40AM Permalink

If this weren't Less Wrong, I'd just slink away now and pretend I never saw this, but:

I don't understand this comment, but it sounds important. Where can I go and what can I read that will cause me to understand statements like this in the future?

23 points Elithrion 03 April 2012 01:38:31AM Permalink

"What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?" This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table. Richard continued, "What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself."

Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

23 points fubarobfusco 01 May 2012 09:39:57PM Permalink

For what it's worth, some context:

JW: To what extent do you think you've become a part of the New Age movement? The stalls in the atrium tonight seemed to be concerned with a lot of New Age material, and to an extent the way you've been talking about Virtual Realities and mind expansion you seem to be almost a forerunner of the movement.

RAW: The Berkeley mob once called Leary and me "the counter-culture of the counter-culture." I'm some kind of antibody in the New Age movement. My function is to raise the possibility, "Hey, you know, some of this stuff might be bullshit."

http://media.hyperreal.org/zines/est/intervs/raw.html

Wilson had a tendency to come across as a skeptic among mystics and a mystic among skeptics.

23 points Alejandro1 05 June 2012 03:26:47PM Permalink

When I was 11, I was fascinated with a flame and I didn't know what it was. I went to a teacher and said, "What's a flame? What's going on in there?" And she said "It's oxidation." And that's all she said. And I never heard that word before, so that was like, calling it by another name.

--Alan Alda, in an interview at The Colbert Report, telling the story that gave rise to The Flame Challenge. It has been mentioned on LW before, but I thought it was worth posting it here as a perfect illustration of a Teacher's Password.

23 points [deleted] 09 July 2012 11:30:38PM Permalink

Suppose we find a society which lacks our understanding of human physiology, and that speaks a language just like English, except for one curious family of idioms. When they are tired they talk of being beset by fatigues, of having mental fatigues, muscular fatigues, fatigues in the eyes and fatigues of the the spirit. Their sports lore contains such maxims as 'too many fatigues spoils your aim' and 'five fatigues in the legs are worth ten in the arms'. When we encounter them and tell them of our science, they want to know what fatigues are. They have been puzzling over such questions as whether numerically the same fatigue can come and go and return, whether fatigues have a definite location in matter and space and time, whether fatigues are identical with some physical states or processes or events in their bodies, or are made of some sort of stuff. We can see that they are off to a bad start with these questions, but what should we tell them? One thing we can tell them is that there simply are no such things as fatigues - they have a confused ontology. We can expect them to retort: 'You don't think there are fatigues? Run around the block a few times and you'll know better! There are many things your science might teach us, but the non-existence of fatigues isn't one of them!

--Dan Dennett, Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology

23 points sketerpot 03 July 2012 01:49:20AM Permalink

Or, because running into heavy objects is a good intuition pump:

Reality is what trips you up when you run around with your eyes closed.

I think this was in a book by James P. Hogan, but a bit of Googling only reveals one or two other people quoting it but not remembering where it came from.

23 points bungula 03 August 2012 07:28:59AM Permalink

“I drive an Infiniti. That’s really evil. There are people who just starve to death – that’s all they ever did. There’s people who are like, born and they go ‘Uh, I’m hungry’ then they just die, and that’s all they ever got to do. Meanwhile I’m driving in my car having a great time, and I sleep like a baby.

It’s totally my fault, ’cause I could trade my Infiniti for a [less luxurious] car… and I’d get back like $20,000. And I could save hundreds of people from dying of starvation with that money. And everyday I don’t do it. Everyday I make them die with my car.”

Louis C.K.

23 points GabrielDuquette 04 August 2012 06:09:52PM Permalink

Take, say, physics, which restricts itself to extremely simple questions. If a molecule becomes too complex, they hand it over to the chemists. If it becomes too complex for them, they hand it to biologists. And if the system is too complex for them, they hand it to psychologists ... and so on until it ends up in the hands of historians or novelists.

Noam Chomsky

23 points lukeprog 09 September 2012 11:56:38PM Permalink

The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can’t easily be measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily isn’t important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can’t easily be measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.

Charles Handy describing the Vietnam-era measurement policies of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara

23 points VKS 04 September 2012 11:51:02PM Permalink

After I spoke at the 2005 "Mathematics and Narrative" conference in Mykonos, a suggestion was made that proofs by contradiction are the mathematician's version of irony. I'm not sure I agree with that: when we give a proof by contradiction, we make it very clear that we are discussing a counterfactual, so our words are intended to be taken at face value. But perhaps this is not necessary. Consider the following passage.

There are those who would believe that every polynomial equation with integer coefficients has a rational solution, a view that leads to some intriguing new ideas. For example, take the equation x² - 2 = 0. Let p/q be a rational solution. Then (p/q)² - 2 = 0, from which it follows that p² = 2q². The highest power of 2 that divides p² is obviously an even power, since if 2^k is the highest power of 2 that divides p, then 2^2k is the highest power of 2 that divides p². Similarly, the highest power of 2 that divides 2q² is an odd power, since it is greater by 1 than the highest power that divides q². Since p² and 2q² are equal, there must exist a positive integer that is both even and odd. Integers with this remarkable property are quite unlike the integers we are familiar with: as such, they are surely worthy of further study.

I find that it conveys the irrationality of √2 rather forcefully. But could mathematicians afford to use this literary device? How would a reader be able to tell the difference in intent between what I have just written and the following superficially similar passage?

There are those who would believe that every polynomial equation has a solution, a view that leads to some intriguing new ideas. For example, take the equation x² + 1 = 0. Let i be a solution of this equation. Then i² + 1 = 0, from which it follows that i² = -1. We know that i cannot be positive, since then i² would be positive. Similarly, i cannot be negative, since i² would again be positive (because the product of two negative numbers is always positive). And i cannot be 0, since 0² = 0. It follows that we have found a number that is not positive, not negative, and not zero. Numbers with this remarkable property are quite unlike the numbers we are familiar with: as such, they are surely worthy of further study.

  • Timothy Gowers, Vividness in Mathematics and Narrative, in Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative
23 points ChrisHallquist 03 September 2012 06:22:54AM Permalink

“Why do you read so much?”

Tyrion looked up at the sound of the voice. Jon Snow was standing a few feet away, regarding him curiously. He closed the book on a finger and said, “Look at me and tell me what you see.”

The boy looked at him suspiciously. “Is this some kind of trick? I see you. Tyrion Lannister.”

Tyrion sighed. “You are remarkably polite for a bastard, Snow. What you see is a dwarf. You are what, twelve?”

“Fourteen,” the boy said.

“Fourteen, and you’re taller than I will ever be. My legs are short and twisted, and I walk with difficulty. I require a special saddle to keep from falling off my horse. A saddle of my own design, you may be interested to know. It was either that or ride a pony. My arms are strong enough, but again, too short. I will never make a swordsman. Had I been born a peasant, they might have left me out to die, or sold me to some slaver’s grotesquerie. Alas, I was born a Lannister of Casterly Rock, and the grotesqueries are all the poorer. Things are expected of me. My father was the Hand of the King for twenty years. My brother later killed that very same king, as it turns out, but life is full of these little ironies. My sister married the new king and my repulsive nephew will be king after him. I must do my part for the honor of my House, wouldn’t you agree? Yet how? Well, my legs may be too small for my body, but my head is too large, although I prefer to think it is just large enough for my mind. I have a realistic grasp of my own strengths and weaknesses. My mind is my weapon. My brother has his sword, King Robert has his warhammer, and I have my mind… and a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.” Tyrion tapped the leather cover of the book. “That’s why I read so much, Jon Snow.”

--George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

23 points gwern 18 October 2012 05:33:06PM Permalink

The late F.W.H. Myers used to tell how he asked a man at a dinner table what he thought would happen to him when he died. The man tried to ignore the question, but on being pressed, replied: "Oh well, I suppose I shall inherit eternal bliss, but I wish you wouldn't talk about such unpleasant subjects."

--Bertrand Russell (Google Books attributes this to In praise of idleness and other essays, pg 133)

23 points arundelo 04 October 2012 12:46:48AM Permalink

This thread needs a mention of this saying: "Correlation correlates with causation because causation causes correlation." (I don't know if anyone knows who came up with this.)

23 points Alejandro1 03 October 2012 02:17:47PM Permalink

xkcd said it better:

Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.

23 points J_Taylor 03 October 2012 03:43:31AM Permalink

Will Smith don't gotta cuss in his raps to sell his records;

well I do, so fuck him and fuck you too!

--Eminem, "The Real Slim Shady"

Eminem seeks his comparative advantage and avoids self-handicapping.

23 points [deleted] 01 October 2012 08:15:19PM Permalink

… if anyone asks, I did not tell you it was ok to do math like this.

23 points shminux 06 November 2012 11:52:40PM Permalink

More often than not it hits you first.

23 points FiftyTwo 02 November 2012 04:26:05PM Permalink

While everyone else is arguing the pragmatist has googled "Scottish Sheep varieties"

23 points Alejandro1 02 November 2012 05:56:22PM Permalink

And Robin Hanson sets up a prediction market in Scottish sheep colors.

23 points Konkvistador 09 December 2012 07:24:52PM Permalink

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason. We all need to take a cold hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for what it is. ... [M]ost of the bizarre and depressing research findings [about cognitive biases] make perfect sense once you see reasoning as having evolved not to help us find the truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people.

I'm not saying we should all stop reasoning and go with our gut feelings. Gut feelings are sometimes better guides than reasoning for making consumer choices and interpersonal judgments, but they are often disastrous as a basis for public policy, science, and law. Rather, what I'm saying is that we must be wary of any /individual/'s ability to reason. We should see each individual as being limited, like a neuron. A neuron is really good at one thing: summing up the stimulation coming into its dendrites to 'decide' whether to fire a pulse along its axon. A neuron by itself isn't very smart. But if you put neurons together in the right way you get a brain; you get an emergent system that is much smarter and more flexible than a single neuron.

In the same way, each individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds, usually for intuitive reasons. We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it's so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth.

--Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind

23 points Macaulay 01 December 2012 04:52:32PM Permalink

A person is said to exhibit rational irrationality when it is instrumentally rational for him to be epistemically irrational. An instrumentally rational person chooses the best strategies to achieve his goals. An epistemically irrational person ignores and evades evidence against his beliefs, holds his beliefs without evidence or with only weak evidence, has contradictions in his thinking, employs logical fallacies in belief formation, and exhibits characteristic epistemic vices such as closed-mindedness. Epistemically irrational political beliefs can reinforce one’s self-image; boost one’s self-esteem; make one feel noble, smart, superior, safe, or comfortable; and can help achieve conformity with the group and thus facilitate social acceptance. Thus, epistemic irrationality can be instrumentally rational.

If I falsely believe the road I am crossing is free of cars, I might die. So I have a strong incentive to form beliefs about the road in a rational way. However, if I falsely believe that import quotas are good for the economy, this has no directly harmful effects. (On the contrary, the belief can have significant instrumental value. It might make me feel patriotic; serve my xenophobia; serve as an outlet to rationalize, sublimate, or redirect racist attitudes; or help me pretend to have solidarity with union workers.) … Epistemic rationality is hard and takes self-discipline.

When it comes to politics, individuals have every incentive to indulge their irrational impulses. Demand for irrational beliefs is like demand for most other goods. The lower the cost, the more will be demanded. The cost to the typical voter of voting in epistemically irrational ways is nearly zero. The cost of overcoming bias and epistemic irrationality is high. The psychological benefit of this irrationality is significant. Thus, voters demand a high amount of epistemic irrationality.

Jason Brennan, The Ethics of Voting, p.173-74

23 points Death 03 December 2012 09:35:19PM Permalink

TELL ME ABOUT IT.

23 points Konkvistador 02 January 2013 07:57:26PM Permalink

Just because someone isn't into finding out The Secrets Of The Universe like me doesn't necessarily mean I can't be friends with them.

-Buttercup Dew (@NationalistPony)

23 points Stabilizer 01 January 2013 06:29:14PM Permalink

“To succeed in a domain that violates your intuitions, you need to be able to turn them off the way a pilot does when flying through clouds. Without visual cues (e.g. the horizon) you can't distinguish between gravity and acceleration. Which means if you're flying through clouds you can't tell what the attitude of the aircraft is. You could feel like you're flying straight and level while in fact you're descending in a spiral. The solution is to ignore what your body is telling you and listen only to your instruments. But it turns out to be very hard to ignore what your body is telling you. Every pilot knows about this problem and yet it is still a leading cause of accidents. You need to do what you know intellectually to be right, even though it feels wrong.”

-Paul Graham

23 points James_Miller 01 January 2013 05:46:59PM Permalink

What You Are Inside Only Matters Because of What It Makes You Do

David Wong, 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person. Published in Cracked.com

23 points Desrtopa 06 February 2013 09:33:16PM Permalink

The first response that comes to my mind is "because if the butterfly were trying that hard to escape the kid, it would fly above the kid's reach, and the kid would give up." When I look at the scene, I see a kid chasing a butterfly, and a butterfly too stupid to realize it should flee instead of simply dodging.

Animals on the intelligence levels of butterflies (which, keep in mind, have specific mating flight patterns they use to tell other members of their species apart from things like ribbons and stray flower petals,) don't seem to even have retreat instincts, just avoidance instincts. They can't recognize persistent pursuit. A fly won't hesitate to land on a person who has been trying to swat it for minutes on end.

23 points fubarobfusco 02 February 2013 04:03:26AM Permalink

They beat you up. People who haven't specialized in logic and evidence have not therefore been idle.

23 points sketerpot 02 February 2013 06:13:42AM Permalink
23 points Qiaochu_Yuan 12 March 2013 05:07:31AM Permalink

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

-- George Bernard Shaw

23 points satt 02 April 2013 06:18:07AM Permalink

Within the philosophy of science, the view that new discoveries constitute a break with tradition was challenged by Polanyi, who argued that discoveries may be made by the sheer power of believing more strongly than anyone else in current theories, rather than going beyond the paradigm. For example, the theory of Brownian motion which Einstein produced in 1905, may be seen as a literal articulation of the kinetic theory of gases at the time. As Polanyi said:

Discoveries made by the surprising configuration of existing theories might in fact be likened to the feat of a Columbus whose genius lay in taking literally and as a guide to action that the earth was round, which his contemporaries held vaguely and as a mere matter for speculation.

― David Lamb Susan M. Easton, Multiple Discovery: The pattern of scientific progress, pp. 100-101

23 points Stabilizer 01 April 2013 07:36:20PM Permalink

One test adults use is whether you still have the kid flake reflex. When you're a little kid and you're asked to do something hard, you can cry and say "I can't do it" and the adults will probably let you off. As a kid there's a magic button you can press by saying "I'm just a kid" that will get you out of most difficult situations. Whereas adults, by definition, are not allowed to flake. They still do, of course, but when they do they're ruthlessly pruned.

-Paul Graham

23 points Kawoomba 03 May 2013 10:41:08PM Permalink

The computer is secretly making paper clips in cargo bay 2, beaming them into space when noone is looking.

I want to believe.

23 points Viliam_Bur 04 June 2013 01:18:41PM Permalink

Synonyms are not good for explaining... because there is no explanatory power in them.

23 points TheOtherDave 02 June 2013 02:50:27AM Permalink

It is perhaps worth noting that a similar comment was made by Dennett:

“The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore, so it eats it! It's rather like getting tenure.”

...in 1991 or so.

23 points AspiringRationalist 01 June 2013 11:19:51PM Permalink

Bad things don't happen to you because you're unlucky. Bad things happen to you because you're a dumbass.

  • That 70s Show
23 points SaidAchmiz 02 June 2013 10:15:18PM Permalink

What we want to find is the denominator common to all of your failed relationships, but absent from the successful relationships that other people have (the presumed question being "why do all my relationships fail, but Alice, Bob, Carol, etc. have successful ones?"). Oxygen doesn't fit the bill.

23 points dspeyer 01 July 2013 08:25:02PM Permalink

The Milky-Way galaxy is mind-bogglingly big.

Eh," you say, "100,000 light years in diameter, give or take a few."

Listen, pal: just because you can measure something in light years doesn't mean you truly understand how big it really is.

By the time you carve our galaxy up into units you have actual, personal experience with, you'll have to start using numbers that you won't live long enough to count to.

That's okay. The galaxy doesn't care. In fact, not caring is one of the things it does best.

That, and being really, really, really big.

--Howard Taylor

23 points dspeyer 01 July 2013 08:20:30PM Permalink

Sometimes the most remarkable things seem commonplace. I mean, when you think about it, jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane, it defies the gravity of an entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure, and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something, and you can only breathe because someone built you a really good tin can that has seams tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research, blood, sweat, tears, and lives have gone into the history of air travel, and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies.

But get on any flight in the country, and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about the drinks.

The drinks, people.

--Harry Dresden, Summer Knight, Jim Butcher

23 points ShardPhoenix 02 August 2013 08:26:41AM Permalink

Rin: "Even I make mistakes once in a while."

Shirou (thinking): ...This is hard. Would it be good for her if I correct her and point out that she makes mistakes often, not just once in a while?

Fate/stay night

23 points DanArmak 02 August 2013 11:03:43AM Permalink

If people in the 1500 years since the Romans had been more willing to rename months...

23 points Eugine_Nier 02 August 2013 06:22:12AM Permalink

Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them.

Reynolds law

23 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 August 2013 09:03:39PM Permalink

If you cast out all the easy strategies that don't actually work as non-'solutions', then sure, in what remains among the set of solutions, the best is often the easiest, though not easy. I can think of much harder ways to save the world and I'm not trying any of them.

23 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 August 2013 09:01:03PM Permalink

One who possesses a maximum-entropy prior is further from the truth than one who possesses an inductive prior riddled with many specific falsehoods and errors. Or more to the point, someone who endorses knowing nothing as a desirable state for fear of accepting falsehoods is further from the truth than somebody who believes many things, some of them false, but tries to pay attention and go on learning.

23 points satt 02 September 2013 01:36:41AM Permalink

I realize that if you ask people to account for 'facts,' they usually spend more time finding reasons for them than finding out whether they are true. [...] They skip over the facts but carefully deduce inferences. They normally begin thus: 'How does this come about?' But does it do so? That is what they ought to be asking.

— Montaigne, Essays, M. Screech's 1971 translation

23 points pjeby 06 November 2013 12:46:38AM Permalink

Realistically, most people have poor filters for sorting truth from fiction, and there’s no objective way to know if you’re particularly good at it or not. Consider the people who routinely disagree with you. See how confident they look while being dead wrong? That’s exactly how you look to them.

Scott Adams, in How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

23 points Stabilizer 07 December 2013 10:34:41PM Permalink

In every way that people, firms, or governments act and plan, they are making implicit forecasts about the future.

-The Economist

23 points arundelo 07 January 2014 12:26:45AM Permalink

[I]n any system that is less than 100% perfect, some effort ends up being spent on checking things that, retrospectively, turned out to be ok.

-- Andrew Gelman

23 points hairyfigment 01 March 2014 08:26:28PM Permalink

"He keeps saying, you can run, but you can't hide. Since when do we take advice from this guy?"

You got a really good point there, Rick. I mean, if the truth was that we could hide, it's not like he would just give us that information.

  • Rick and Morty.
23 points Kaj_Sotala 06 March 2014 05:06:09PM Permalink

Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily ‘true’ or ‘false’, but as ‘academic’ or ‘practical’, ‘outworn’ or ‘contemporary’, ‘conventional’ or ‘ruthless’. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous— that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.

-- C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

23 points Benito 01 April 2014 07:35:28PM Permalink

Trying to actually understand what equations describe is something I'm always trying to do in school, but I find my teachers positively trained in the art of superficiality and dark-side teaching. Allow me to share two actual conversations with my Maths and Physics teachers from school.:

(Teacher derives an equation, then suddenly makes it into an iterative formula, with no explanation of why)

Me: Woah, why has it suddenly become an iterative formula? What's that got to do with anything?

Teacher: Well, do you agree with the equation when it's not an iterative formula?

Me: Yes.

Teacher: And how about if I make it an iterative formula?

Me: But why do you do that?

Friend: Oh, I see.

Me: Do you see why it works?

Friend: Yes. Well, no. But I see it gets the right answer.

Me: But sir, can you explain why it gets the right answer?

Teacher: Ooh Ben, you're asking one of your tough questions again.

(Physics class)

Me: Can you explain that sir?

Teacher: Look, Ben, sometimesnot understanding things is a good thing.

And yet to most people, I can't even vent the ridiculousness of a teacher actually saying this; they just think it's the norm!

23 points Nisan 03 April 2014 08:42:22PM Permalink

I will only say that when I was a physics major, there were negative course numbers in some copies of the course catalog. And the students who, it was rumored, attended those classes were... somewhat off, ever after.

And concerning how I got my math PhD, and the price I paid for it, and the reason I left the world of pure math research afterwards, I will say not one word.

23 points RichardKennaway 03 November 2014 10:30:10AM Permalink

Marriage to Kim Kardashian is not contagious. The danger of Ebola is not to be measured by how many it has killed, but how many it may kill.

22 points gjm 19 April 2009 12:59:34AM Permalink

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Aristotle

22 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 18 April 2009 01:27:08AM Permalink

You cannot improve the world just by being right.

-- Confusion, Why functional programming doesnt catch on

22 points Marcello 02 July 2009 10:16:22PM Permalink

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

-- Voltaire

22 points anonym 02 May 2010 03:06:51AM Permalink

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.

-- Bertrand Russell

22 points Tyrrell_McAllister 01 May 2010 08:01:08PM Permalink

The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of the pure understanding. He did not observe that with all his efforts he made no advance—meeting no resistance that might, as it were, serve as a support upon which he could take a stand, to which he could apply his powers, and so set his understanding in motion.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (trans. Norman Kemp Smith), p. A5/B8.

22 points Kutta 01 May 2010 06:36:57AM Permalink

Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.

22 points BenAlbahari 01 June 2010 10:28:12PM Permalink

I know that most men — not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic, problems — can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty — conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives.

— Leo Tolstoy, 1896 (excerpt from "What Is Art?")

22 points [deleted] 06 October 2010 01:48:49PM Permalink

To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it--the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.

... "But," says one, "I am a busy man; I have no time for the long course of study which would be necessary to make me in any degree a competent judge of certain questions, or even able to understand the nature of the arguments."

Then he should have no time to believe.

--W. K. Clifford, "The Ethics of Belief."

22 points Yvain 07 October 2010 07:04:21PM Permalink

"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."

— Marcus Aurelius

22 points atucker 02 February 2011 01:51:35AM Permalink

Things are only impossible until they're not.

-- Jean-Luc Picard

22 points ArisKatsaris 02 February 2011 06:18:44PM Permalink

I think we could modify our sense of it to mean that if you are down to having to accept a 0.01% probability, because you've excluded everything else, then it's probably better to go back over your logic and see if there's any place you've improperly limited your hypothesis space.

Several paradigm-changing theories introduced concepts that would have previously been thought impossible (like special relativity, or many-worlds interpretation)

22 points Dreaded_Anomaly 11 March 2011 04:43:52AM Permalink

"If the wonder's gone when the truth is known, there never was any wonder." — Gregory House, M.D. ("House" Season 4, Episode 8 "You Don't Want to Know," written by Sara Hess)

22 points novalis 04 April 2011 08:57:02PM Permalink

Im not sure its a memetic hazard, but this post is one of the most Hofstadterian things outside of Hofstadter

Until this moment, I had always assumed that Eliezer had read 100% of all fiction.

22 points endoself 04 April 2011 06:44:35PM Permalink

Most people would rather die than think; many do.

– Bertrand Russell

22 points Nick_Roy 01 June 2011 06:25:51PM Permalink

The whole universe sat there, open to the man who could make the right decisions.

Frank Herbert, "Dune"

22 points Unnamed 02 June 2011 04:15:37AM Permalink

I didn't read the quote as a blanket opposition to violence. It's a warning about one thing to consider before you choose violence.

I also didn't read the quote as only being about violence. It also makes a more general point about means and ends. When you're considering an action in pursuit of a goal, you should consider the action in its own right and try to predict where it is likely to lead. Don't settle on an action just because it seems to fit with the goal. This is especially relevant when you consider using violence, coercion, manipulation, or dishonesty for a noble purpose, but it also applies more generally.

22 points innailana 04 July 2011 03:10:57AM Permalink

"When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it."

--Lois McMaster Bujold

22 points gwern 05 August 2011 05:55:09PM Permalink

"Lottery tickets should not be free. In such purely random and independent events as the lottery, the probability of having a winning number depends directly on the number of tickets you have purchased. When one evaluates the outcome of a scientific work, attention must be given not only to the potential interest of the ‘significant’ outcomes but also to the number of ‘lottery tickets’ the authors have ‘bought’. Those having many have a much higher chance of ‘winning a lottery prize’ than of getting a meaningful scientific result. It would be unfair not to distinguish between significant results of well-planned, powerful, sharply focused studies, and those from ‘fishing expeditions’ with a much higher probability of catching an old truck tyre than of a really big fish."

Stan Young, 28-Jul-07 www.NISS.org; quoted in Everything is Dangerous: A Controversy, a paper discussing epidemiology's failure to use things like the Bonferroni correction which has led to things like 80% of observed correlations failing to replicate (or only 1 out of 20 NIH randomized-trials replicating the original claim).

22 points player_03 03 August 2011 07:21:29PM Permalink

Daniel Oppenheimer's Ig Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

My research shows that conciseness is interpreted as intelligence. So, thank you.

22 points J_Taylor 04 December 2011 08:10:29AM Permalink

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

-Probably not Henry Ford

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/08/henry_ford_never_said_the_fast.html

22 points HonoreDB 10 January 2012 07:48:23PM Permalink

...some people requested that I be prohibited from studying. One time they achieved it through a very holy and simple mother superior who believed that studying would get me in trouble with the Inquisition and ordered me not to do it. I obeyed her for the three months that she was in office in as far as I did not touch a book, but as far as absolutely not studying, this was not in my power. [...] Even the people I spoke to, and what they said to me, gave rise to thousands of reflections. What was the source of all the variety of personality and talent I found among them, since they were all one species? [...] Sometimes I would pace in front of the fireplace in one of our large dormitories and notice that, though the lines of two sides were parallel and its ceiling level, to our vision it appears as though the lines are inclined toward each other and the ceiling is lower in the distance than it is nearby. From this it can be inferred that the lines of our vision run straight, but not parallel, to form the figure of a pyramid. And I wondered if that was the reason that the ancients questioned whether the earth was a sphere or not. Because although it seemed so, their vision might have deceived them, showing concave shapes where there were none. [...] Once I saw two girls playing with a top, and hardly had I seen the movement and the shape when I began, in my insane way, to consider the easy movement of the spherical shape and how long the momentum, once established, remained independent of its original cause, the distant hand of the girl. Not content with this I had flour brought and sprinkled on the floor in order to discover whether the spinning top would describe perfect circles or not. It turned out that they were not perfect circles but spirals that lost their circular shape to the degree that the top lost momentum.

Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz, 1691 (tr. Pamela Kirk Rappaport)

22 points NancyLebovitz 01 February 2012 04:50:16PM Permalink

I may say that this is the greatest factor—the way in which the expedition is equipped—the way in which every difficulty is foreseen, and precautions taken for meeting or avoiding it. Victory awaits him who has everything in order — luck, people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck.

— from *The South Pole* by Roald Amundsen
22 points taelor 01 February 2012 06:05:49PM Permalink

I am a physical object sitting in a physical world. Some of the forces of this physical world impinge on my surfaces. Light rays strike my retinas; molecules bombard my eardrums and fingertips. I strike back, emanating concentic air waves. These waves take the form of torrents of discourses about tables, people, molecules, light rays, retinas, air waves, prime numbers, infinite classes, joy and sorrow, good and evil.

--W. V. O. Quine

22 points Kyre 02 February 2012 05:11:44AM Permalink

“I choose not to believe in any gods as an act of charity,” Marcus said.

“Charity toward whom?”

“Toward the gods. Seems rude to think they couldn’t make a world better than this,”

Daniel Abraham, The Dragon's Path

22 points HonoreDB 01 February 2012 08:22:53PM Permalink

Humanity becomes more and more of an accessory every day; with increasing power comes increasing responsibility.

22 points James_Miller 01 February 2012 06:11:10PM Permalink

True, but you should first assign appropriate weights to the two categories you mention based on the expected cost of having an incorrect belief.

22 points GabrielDuquette 01 March 2012 04:56:33PM Permalink

“Anne!” Anne was seated on the springboard; she turned her head. Jubal called out, “That new house on the far hilltop — can you see what color they’ve painted it?”

Anne looked in the direction in which Jubal was pointing and answered, “It’s white on this side.”

Robert Heinlein, Stranger In A Strange Land

22 points TheOtherDave 05 March 2012 10:19:19PM Permalink

"Actually," says the stage magician, "we merely know that there exists something in Scotland which appears to be a sheep which is black on at least one side when viewed from this spot."

22 points [deleted] 03 March 2012 03:25:48PM Permalink

•••

22 points Nominull 07 March 2012 03:43:24PM Permalink

When you've eliminated the impossible, if whatever's left is sufficiently improbable, you probable haven't considered a wide enough space of candidate possibilities.

22 points lsparrish 04 April 2012 03:19:15AM Permalink

What really matters is:–

  1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn't mean anything else.

  2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don't implement promises, but keep them.

  3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean "More people died" don't say "Mortality rose."

  4. In writing. Don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, "Please will you do my job for me."

  5. Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

-- C. S. Lewis

22 points Spurlock 02 April 2012 04:45:14AM Permalink

"Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad‘Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson"

Frank Herbert, Dune

22 points Jayson_Virissimo 03 June 2012 10:11:44AM Permalink

Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.

-Charles Babbage

22 points Emile 04 June 2012 09:50:15PM Permalink

In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time someting like that happened in politics or religion.

-- Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP Keynote Address

22 points ChristianKl 02 June 2012 05:25:23PM Permalink

[About the challenge of skeptics to spread their ideas in society] In times of war we need warriors, but this isn't war. You might try to say it is, but it's not a war. We aren't trying to kill an enemy. We are trying to persuade other humans. And in times like that we don't need warriors. What we need are diplomats.

Phil Plait, Dont Be A Dick (around 23:30)

22 points RobertLumley 02 July 2012 03:15:03PM Permalink

Human behavior is economic behavior. The particulars may vary, but competition for limited resources remains a constant.

– CEO Nwabudike Morgan in Alpha Centauri

22 points RolfAndreassen 02 July 2012 04:13:44PM Permalink

For that matter—we—are chemical processes and nothing more.

While this is in some sense true, it doesn't add up to normality; it is an excuse for avoiding the actual moral issues. Humans are chemical processes; humans are morally significant; therefore at least some chemical processes have moral significance even if we don't, currently, understand how it arises, and you cannot dismiss a moral question by saying "Chemistry!" any more than you can do so by saying "God says so!"

22 points GLaDOS 06 August 2012 10:04:20AM Permalink

The findings reveal that 20.7% of the studied articles in behavioral economics propose paternalist policy action and that 95.5% of these do not contain any analysis of the cognitive ability of policymakers.

-- Niclas Berggren, source and HT to Tyler Cowen

22 points metatroll 06 August 2012 04:35:43AM Permalink

It does not! It does not! It does not! ... continued here

22 points [deleted] 02 September 2012 12:37:46AM Permalink

If I expect to be hit by a train, I certainly don't expect a ~68% survival chance. Not intuitively, anyways.

22 points imaxwell 03 September 2012 10:01:52PM Permalink

The only road to doing good shows, is doing bad shows.

  • Louis C.K., on Reddit
22 points Alicorn 01 September 2012 08:08:35PM Permalink

*cough*

"I made my walled garden safe against intruders and now it's just a walled wall." -- Aristosophy

22 points AlexMennen 04 September 2012 02:11:40AM Permalink

Discovery is the privilege of the child, the child who has no fear of being once again wrong, of looking like an idiot, of not being serious, of not doing things like everyone else.

Alexander Grothendieck

22 points RichardKennaway 12 October 2012 08:51:49AM Permalink

“But can’t you just wave your hand and make all the dirt fly away, then?”

“The trouble is getting the magic to understand what dirt is,” said Tiffany, scrubbing hard at a stain. “I heard of a witch over in Escrow who got it wrong and ended up losing the entire floor and her sandals and nearly a toe.”

Mrs. Aching backed away. “I thought you just had to wave your hands about,” she mumbled nervously.

“That works,” said Tiffany, “but only if you wave them about on the floor with a scrubbing brush.”

Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith

22 points [deleted] 02 October 2012 03:37:26AM Permalink

Understanding an idea meant entangling it so thoroughly with all the other symbols in your mind that it changed the way you thought about everything.

Greg Egan, Diaspora

22 points [deleted] 03 October 2012 05:21:53PM Permalink

Lacking sufficient inspiration, I shall reduce my perspiration until recommended ratio is met.

22 points Alejandro1 03 November 2012 02:54:30AM Permalink

In a man whose reasoning powers are good, fallacious arguments are evidence of bias.

--Bertrand Russell, "Philosophy's Ulterior Motives". (The context is Descartes' philosophy and the obviously fallacious proofs he offers of the existence of God and the external world.)

22 points simplicio 10 November 2012 09:04:46PM Permalink

If you don't think your life is more important than someone else's, sign your organ donor card and kill yourself.

(House, MD deals with moral grandstanding)

22 points GabrielDuquette 02 November 2012 02:14:36AM Permalink

What percentage of your philosophy? If your philosophy is completely unsettled daily, you're probably insane.

22 points Qiaochu_Yuan 02 December 2012 10:23:46AM Permalink

Yes, the universe is full of things waiting for our wits to grow sharp enough that we stop anthropomorphizing them...

22 points Vaniver 11 January 2013 01:32:09AM Permalink

Some may think these trifling matters not worth minding or relating; but when they consider that tho' dust blown into the eyes of a single person, or into a single shop on a windy day, is but of small importance, yet the great number of the instances in a populous city, and its frequent repetitions give it weight and consequence, perhaps they will not censure very severely those who bestow some attention to affairs of this seemingly low nature. Human felicity is produc'd not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day.

--Benjamin Franklin

22 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 February 2013 11:33:28PM Permalink

I've just come across a fascinatingly compact observation by I. J. Good:

Public and private utilities do not always coincide. This leads to ethical problems. Example - an invention is submitted to a scientific adviser of a firm...

The probability that the invention will work is p. The value to the firm if the invention is adopted and works is V, and the loss if the invention is adopted and fails is L. The value to the adviser personally if he advises the adoption of the invention and it works is v, and the loss if it fails to work is l. The losses to the firm and the adviser if he recommends the rejection of the invention are both negligible...

Then the firm's expected gain if the invention is adopted is pV - (1-p)L and the adviser's expected gain in the same circumstances is pv - (1-p)l. The firm has positive expected gain if p/(1-p) L/V, and the adviser has positive expected gain if p/(1-p) l/v.

If l/v p/(1-p) L/V, the adviser will be faced with an ethical problem, i.e. he will be tempted to act against the interests of the firm.

This is a beautifully simple recipe for a conflict of interest:

Considering absolute losses assuming failure and absolute gains conditioned on success, an adviser is incentivized to give the wrong advice, precisely when:

  • The ratio of agent loss to agent gain,
  • exceeds the odds of success versus failure
  • which in turn exceeds the ratio of principal loss to principal gain.

You can see this reflected in a lot of cases because the gains to an advisor often don't scale anywhere near as fast as the gains to society or a firm. It's the Fearful Committee Formula.

22 points Dorikka 01 February 2013 10:49:12PM Permalink

People often seem to get these mixed up, resulting in "You want useful beliefs and accurate emotions."

22 points satt 02 May 2013 02:05:24AM Permalink

For one mistake made for not knowing, ten mistakes are made for not looking.

James Alexander Lindsay

22 points RolfAndreassen 03 May 2013 12:16:01AM Permalink

One interesting thing about Ms. Dowd’s description of “hardball” political tactics is just how dainty and genteel her brass knuckle suggestions actually are. A speech, an appeal to reason: there is nothing here about lucrative contracts for political supporters, promises of sinecure jobs for politicians who lose their seats, a “blank check” for administrative backing on some obscure tax loophole that a particular politician could award to a favored client; there’s not even a delicate hint about grand jury investigations that can be stopped in their tracks or compromising photographs or wiretaps that need never see the light of day. Far be it from Ms Dowd to speak of or even hint at the kind of strategy that actual politicians think about when words like ‘hardball’ come to mind. Ms Dowd speaks of brass knuckles and then shows us a doily; at some level it speaks well of Ms. Dowd as a human being that even when she tries she seems unable to come up with an offer someone can’t refuse.

-- Walter Russell Mead, describing someone else's failure to understand what a desperate effort actually looks like.

22 points shminux 09 June 2013 07:21:58PM Permalink

you can't wait around for someone else to act. I had been looking for leaders, but I realised that leadership is about being the first to act.

Edward Snowden, the NSA surveillance whistle-blower.

22 points arborealhominid 06 June 2013 03:31:47PM Permalink

The word gentleman originally meant something recognisable: one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone 'a gentleman' you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not 'a gentleman' you were not insulting him, but giving information. There was no contradiction in saying that John was a liar and a gentleman; any more than there now is in saying that James is a fool and an M.A. But then there came people who said- so rightly, charitably, spiritually, sensitively, so anything but usefully- 'Ah, but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behaviour? Surely he is the true gentleman who behaves as a gentleman should? Surely in that sense Edward is far more truly a gentleman than John?' They meant well. To be honourable and courteous and brave is of course a far better thing than to have a coat of arms. But it is not the same thing. Worse still, it is not a thing everyone will agree about. To call a man 'a gentleman' in this new, refined sense, becomes, in fact, not a way of giving information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that he is 'a gentleman' becomes simply a way of insulting him. When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object; it only tells you about the speaker's attitude to that object. (A 'nice' meal only means a meal the speaker likes.) A gentleman, once it has been spiritualised and refined out of its old coarse, objective sense, means hardly more than a man whom the speaker likes. As a result, gentleman is now a useless word. We had lots of terms of approval already, so it was not needed for that use; on the other hand if anyone (say, in a historical work) wants to use it in its old sense, he cannot do so without explanations. It has been spoiled for that purpose.

  • C.S. Lewis (emphasis my own)
22 points Zubon 02 June 2013 08:33:40PM Permalink

Sorry? Of course he was sorry. People were always sorry. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it was. The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped. ...

Sorrow be damned, and all your plans. Fuck the faithful, fuck the committed, the dedicated, the true believers; fuck all the sure and certain people prepared to maim and kill whoever got in their way; fuck every cause that ended in murder and a child screaming.

Against a Dark Background by Iain M. Banks.

22 points lukeprog 02 September 2013 09:57:55AM Permalink

You cannot have... only benevolent knowledge; the scientific method doesn't filter for benevolence.

Richard Rhodes

22 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 September 2013 05:03:45AM Permalink

Caution in applying such a principle seems appropriate. I say this because I've long since lost track of how often I've seen on the Internet, "I lost all respect for X when they said [perfectly correct thing]."

22 points ShardPhoenix 03 December 2013 08:29:07AM Permalink

You know what they say - "Asking once will bring you temporary shame, whereas not doing so will bring you permanent shame".

They also say "Answering a question will make you feel superior for a while, whereas not doing so will give you a lifelong sense of superiority".

22 points dspeyer 02 December 2013 06:10:24AM Permalink

Mike nodded. He wasn't really surprised, though. One of the things he'd come to learn since the Ring of Fire, all the way down to the marrow of his bones, was that if the ancestors of twentieth-century human beings didn't do something that seemed logical, it was probably because it wasn't actually logical at all, once you understood everything involved. So it turned out that such notorious military numbskulls as Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Phil Sheridan, Stonewall Jackson, William Tecumseh Sherman and all the rest of them hadn't actually been idiots after all. It was easy for twentieth-century professors to proclaim loftily that Civil War generals had insisted on continuing with line formations despite the advent of the Minié ball-armed rifled musket because the dimwits simply hadn't noticed that the guns were accurate for several hundred yards. When—cluck; cluck—they should obviously have adopted the skirmishing tactics of twentieth-century infantry.

But it turned out, when put to a ruthless seventeenth-century Swedish general's test in his very rigorous notion of field exercises, that those professors of a later era had apparently never tried to stand their ground when cavalry came at them. After they fired their shot, and needed one-third of a minute—if they were adept at the business, and didn't get rattled—to have a second shot ready. In that bloody world where real soldiers lived and died, skirmishing tactics without breechloading rifles or automatic weapons were just a way to commit suicide. If the opponent had large enough forces and was willing to lose some men, at least.

-- 1634: The Baltic War, by Eric Flint and David Weber

22 points garethrees 05 January 2014 04:39:10PM Permalink

I think gwern is teasing us: there is no such quotation in Sluga's Heidegger's Crisis, or at least I cannot find it in the Google Books version. Perhaps gwern has taken the Wittgenstein/Malcolm story and swapped Britain for Germany to make a point about the universal applicability of the philosopher's rebuke.

But for what it's worth:

  • The date in the Heidegger version of the story is very suspicious: in 1939 Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty; he did not become Prime Minister until May 1940 and it is only with hindsight that we see his significance (even in 1940 most political actors seem to have thought that Lord Halifax would be a better choice for Prime Minister than Churchill).

  • The version of the anecdote featuring Wittgenstein and Malcolm is backed up by a citation to Malcolm's Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir where Malcolm quotes the letter from Wittgenstein at length. Also, the 1939 date for the original quarrel about "national character" is a better fit to this story, because in 1939 no-one could doubt the significance of Hitler, and assassination attempts on Hitler were by that point a fairly regular occurrence.

22 points shminux 03 February 2014 06:08:08PM Permalink

I’m better at tests than reality. Reality doesn’t tell you which of a million bits of information to look at.

A comment on slatestarcodex.

22 points James_Miller 01 March 2014 05:27:27PM Permalink

[A]lmost no innovative programs work, in the sense of reliably demonstrating benefits in excess of costs in replicated RCTs [randomized controlled trials]. Only about 10 percent of new social programs in fields like education, criminology and social welfare demonstrate statistically significant benefits in RCTs. When presented with an intelligent-sounding program endorsed by experts in the topic, our rational Bayesian prior ought to be “It is very likely that this program would fail to demonstrate improvement versus current practice if I tested it.”

In other words, discovering program improvements that really work is extremely hard. We labor in the dark -- scratching and clawing for tiny scraps of causal insight.

Megan McArdle quoting or paraphrasing Jim Manzi.

[Edited in response to Kaj's comment.]

22 points Salemicus 02 March 2014 10:30:49PM Permalink

On the contrary, honesty, conscientiousness, being law-abiding, etc. have powerful reputational effects. This is easily seen by the converse; look, for example, at the effect a criminal record has on chance of getting a job.

This quote only gets any mileage by equivocating on the meaning of fair. What the quote is really saying is: "If you expect the world to fulfil even modest dreams just because you try not to be a jerk, expect disappointment." But said like that, if loses all its seemingly deep wisdom. In fact, of course, if you personally fulfilled even some modest dream of a large proportion of the people on earth, you would be wealthy beyond the dreams of lucre.

22 points gwern 01 April 2014 04:56:37PM Permalink

Fairly often. One strategy I've seen is to compare meta-analyses to a later very-large study (rare for obvious reasons when dealing with RCTs) and seeing how often the confidence interval is blown; usually much higher than it should be. (The idea is that the larger study will give a higher-precision result which is a 'ground truth' or oracle for the meta-analysis's estimate, and if it's later, it will not have been included in the meta-analysis and also cannot have led the meta-analysts into Milliken-style distorting their results to get the 'right' answer.)

For example: LeLorier J, Gregoire G, Benhaddad A, Lapierre J, Derderian F. Discrepancies between meta-analyses and subsequent large randomized, controlled trials. N Engl J Med 1997;337:536e42

Results: We identified 12 large randomized, controlled trials and 19 meta-analyses addressing the same questions. For a total of 40 primary and secondary outcomes, agreement between the meta-analyses and the large clinical trials was only fair (kappa ϭ 0.35; 95% confidence interval, 0.06-0.64). The positive predictive value of the meta-analyses was 68%, and the negative predictive value 67%. However, the difference in point estimates between the randomized trials and the meta-analyses was statistically significant for only 5 of the 40 comparisons (12%). Furthermore, in each case of disagreement a statistically significant effect of treatment was found by one method, whereas no statistically significant effect was found by the other.

(You can probably dig up more results looking through reverse citations of that paper, since it seems to be the originator of this criticism. And also, although I disagree with a lot of it, Combining heterogenous studies using the random-effects model is a mistake and leads to inconclusive meta-analyses, Al khalaf et al 2010.)

22 points whales 02 April 2014 01:49:57AM Permalink

He said:

When you play bridge with beginners—when you try to help them out—you give them some general rules to go by. Then they follow the rule and something goes wrong. But if you'd had their hand you wouldn't have played the thing you told them to play, because you'd have seen all the reasons the rule did not apply.

from The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

22 points raisin 01 April 2014 03:45:37PM Permalink

Richard Feynmann claimed that he wasn't exceptionally intelligent, but that he focused all his energies on one thing. Of course he was exceptionally intelligent, but he makes a good point.

I think one way to improve your intelligence is to actually try to understand things in a very fundamental way. Rather than just accepting the kind of trite explanations that most people accept - for instance, that electricity is electrons moving along a wire - try to really find out and understand what is actually happening, and you'll begin to find that the world is very different from what you have been taught and you'll be able to make more intelligent observations about it.

http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/e3yjg/is_there_any_way_to_improve_intelligence_or_are/c153p8w

reddit user jjbcn on trying to improve your intelligence


If you're not a student of physics, The Feynman Lectures on Physics is probably really useful for this purpose. It's free for download!

http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/

It seems like the Feynman lectures were a bit like the Sequences for those Caltech students:

The intervening years might have glazed their memories with a euphoric tint, but about 80 percent recall Feynman's lectures as highlights of their college years. “It was like going to church.” The lectures were “a transformational experience,” “the experience of a lifetime, probably the most important thing I got from Caltech.” “I was a biology major but Feynman's lectures stand out as a high point in my undergraduate experience … though I must admit I couldn't do the homework at the time and I hardly turned any of it in.” “I was among the least promising of students in this course, and I never missed a lecture. … I remember and can still feel Feynman's joy of discovery. … His lectures had an … emotional impact that was probably lost in the printed Lectures.”

22 points Tenoke 07 May 2014 12:25:19PM Permalink

"Man is not going to wait passively for millions of years before evolution offers him a better brain."

--Corneliu E. Giurgea, the chemist who synthesized Piracetam and coined the term 'Nootropic'

22 points EHeller 03 June 2014 11:39:04PM Permalink

I suspect that the root of the problem goes to the fact that the universities are supposed to be both centers of research and teaching institutions.

In my estimation (having worked at several universities of various size and prestige, and more recently having consulted at all sorts of businesses) the problem is a common problem in a lot of American business/government since the 1970s/80s- the rise of professional management.

At large flagship U down the street from my house, professor labor costs have dropped markedly (the trend has been to replace tenure track lines with adjuncts and grad students as well as to increase grant overhead. In the science departments, many professors turn a net profit because grant overhead is larger than their salary costs). Enrollment is way up, tuition is way, way up. A drive to leverage university held patents has created massive profits for the university (with some absurdity along the way- a professor tried to start a company only to get a cease and desist order from a semi-conductor company. The university had sold the rights to his research to the semi-conductor company.)

And yet- the university finds itself on the verge of bankruptcy- why? Because management has exploded. The university now has a fellowship office (staffed entirely by managers who add no direct value), not one, but two bureaucratic offices devoted to education quality (how many people does it take to administer teacher feedback forms? Apparently about 20, of which several make more than 100k a year (roughly 5x an adjunct teaching a full load of 10 courses). Twenty years ago, all of the deans were tenured professors who rotated into the job for a few years, now all but one are outside hires who are deans full time. The last president they hired made an absurd amount of money, and brought with him several subordinates all making 150k+ a year. I often wonder how that negotiation went- "I need not only my salary, but I need these extra people to do the parts of the job I don't like."

The problem is insidious- you hire some managers to deal with work no one wants to do. But then, they start hiring people to deal with work THEY don't want to do, so on and so on. Pretty soon all your recent hires have nothing to do with the core competency of your business and they are eating all your profit from within. Its also damn near impossible to get rid of them, because by this point all the hiring and firing that no one wanted to deal with has become their domain.

Its not just education, I've consulted with companies that have more IT project managers than developers, that spend more money on medical benefits-management then they would have spent if they simply paid every claim that walked through the door,etc.

22 points CronoDAS 04 August 2014 08:24:52AM Permalink

The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

-- Alberto Brandolini (via David Brin)

22 points dspeyer 05 August 2014 09:34:00PM Permalink

It was a gamble: would people really take time out of their busy lives to answer other people’s questions, for nothing more than fake internet points and bragging rights?

It turns out that people will do anything for fake internet points.

Just kidding. At best, the points, and the gamification, and the focused structure of the site did little more than encourage people to keep doing what they were already doing. People came because they wanted to help other people, because they needed to learn something new, or because they wanted to show off the clever way they’d solved a problem.

...

An incredible number of people jumped at the chance to help a stranger

-- Jay Hanlon, Five year retrospective on StackOverflow

21 points billswift 20 May 2009 12:32:56AM Permalink

And when someone makes a statement you don't understand, don't tell him he's crazy. Ask him what he means.

-- H Beam Piper, "Space Viking"

21 points Vladimir_Nesov 23 October 2009 08:55:32AM Permalink

When things are hard to understand, people who suspect they're nonsense generally keep quiet.

-- Paul Graham

21 points Yvain 22 October 2009 08:53:47PM Permalink

A great many years ago, a couple of Jehovah Witnesses bit off more than they could chew with my grandmother. During the unsolicited conversation one of them remarked, "Only God can make a rainbow". To which my grandmother-who was watering her plants at the time-said, "Nonsense!", and created her own rainbow with a spray of water from the hose. Family lore has it that was the end of the conversation.

-- seen on Livejournal

21 points gwern 30 November 2009 02:05:28AM Permalink

CAESAR [recovering his self-possession]: "Pardon him. Theodotus, he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."

--George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra (1898)

21 points saliency 30 November 2009 01:26:44AM Permalink

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying." --Woody Allen

21 points Shalmanese 02 February 2010 09:47:05AM Permalink

"In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it." GK Chesterton

21 points anonym 04 April 2010 01:43:41AM Permalink

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.

Bertrand Russell

21 points Rain 01 April 2010 08:48:19PM Permalink

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

-- George Eliot

21 points Peter_de_Blanc 02 April 2010 01:13:01AM Permalink

Of course, to really see what someone values you'd have to see their budget profile across a wide range of wealth levels.

21 points gwern 02 June 2010 06:11:18PM Permalink

That's not true. He had perfectly good reasons for atomism in his context.

The ontological arguments of Parmenides (and as exposited by Melissus) lead to extremely unpalatable, if not outright contradictory, conclusions, such as there being no time or change or different entities. The arguments seem valid, and most of their premises are reasonable, but one of his most important and questionable premises is that void cannot exist.

Reject that premise and you are left with matter and void. How are matter and void distributed? Well, either matter can be indefinitely chopped up (continuous) or it must halt and be discrete at some point. The Pluralists like Anaxagoras take the former approach, but continuousness leads to its own issues with regard to change.* So to avoid issues with infinity, you must have discrete matter with size/divison limits - atoms.

So, Democritus and Leucippus are led to Atomism as the one safe path through a thicket of paradoxes and problems. Describing it as wild conjecture is deeply unfair, and, I hope, ignorant.

* One argument, if I remember it from Sextus Empiricus's Against the Physicists correctly, is that if matter really is infinitely divisible, then you should be able to divide it again and again, with void composing ever more of the original mass you started with; if you do division infinitely, then you must end up with nothing at all! That is a problem. Cantor dust would not have been acceptable to the ancient Greeks.

21 points komponisto 02 July 2010 12:07:04AM Permalink

Hunches are not bad, they just need to be allowed to die a natural death when evidence proves them wrong.

-- Steve Moore, former FBI agent

21 points Nisan 10 November 2010 08:02:18PM Permalink

Know the hair you have to get the hair you want.

-Pantene Pro-V hair care bottle

21 points DSimon 04 November 2010 08:06:19PM Permalink

Man, I'm amazing! I'm a machine that turns FOOD into IDEAS!

-- T-Rex, Dinosaur Comics #539

21 points billswift 03 January 2011 07:48:43PM Permalink

To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.

-- Robert A Heinlein, Notebooks of Lazarus Long

21 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 February 2011 02:06:20AM Permalink

I thought the punchline was going to be that the men were cats.

21 points michaelcurzi 02 March 2011 11:37:49PM Permalink

"An accumulation of facts, however large, is no more science than a pile of bricks is a house."

-Clyde Kluckhohn

21 points KenChen 05 April 2011 01:58:17PM Permalink

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

– Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

21 points Tesseract 02 May 2011 04:49:11AM Permalink

A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

21 points GabrielDuquette 02 May 2011 03:19:18AM Permalink

The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

-Richard Feynman

Quoting Feynman might be obvious for y'all, but I was living by this tidy little maxim for years and years before I found anybody to talk to about it.

21 points CSalmon 04 June 2011 01:26:27AM Permalink

Rin: What are clouds? I always thought they were thoughts of the sky or something like that. Because you can't touch them.

[ . . . ]

Hisao: Clouds are water. Evaporated water. You know they say that almost all of the water in the world will at some point of its existence be a part of a cloud. Every drop of tears and blood and sweat that comes out of you, it'll be a cloud. All the water inside your body too, it goes up there some time after you die. It might take a while though.

Rin: Your explanation is better than any of mine.

Hisao: Because it's true.

Rin: That must be it.

Katawa Shoujo

21 points MichaelGR 03 July 2011 04:39:12AM Permalink

One of the most serious problems with modern "management" is that the incentives are all wrong. Imagine that I hire a programmer and pay him by the line of code. This idea has been so thoroughly debunked that it is nearly impossible to write out the consequences without sounding cliché. Yet it happens all the time: Companies promote "Architects" who are evaluated by the weight of their "architecture." The result is stultifying and demoralizing. The architect does not work to facilitate the programmer's work, he works to produce evidence of his contribution in the form of frameworks, standards, and software process.

So, how are most managers evaluated? By the amount of "managing" they do, as measured by the amount of process they impose on their team. Evaluating a manager by the amount of managing they do is exactly the same thing as evaluating a programmer by the amount of code they write. And it produces results like you describe, where the manager works to produce evidence of their management in the form of processes and decisions from the top down, rather than facilitating the work actually being done.

-raganwald, HN, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2423236

21 points MixedNuts 03 August 2011 06:32:13AM Permalink

Alternate hypothesis: the inferior man hates knowledge because "Yay knowledge!" is associated with people like Mencken, who go around calling people things like "inferior man" because they're poor and uneducated.

21 points MichaelGR 11 September 2011 04:37:05AM Permalink

“When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”

-Steve Jobs, [Wired, February 1996]

21 points Swimmy 04 October 2011 06:33:58AM Permalink

The god we seek must rule the world according to our own will.

Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2

21 points gaffa 31 October 2011 06:41:50PM Permalink

You can't make a movie and say 'It was all a big accident' - no, it has to be a conspiracy, people plotting together. Because in a story, a story is about intention. A story is not about spontaneous order or complex human institutions which are the product of human action but not of human design - no, a story is about evil people plotting together.

21 points JenniferRM 02 November 2011 12:19:56AM Permalink

People can learn to look you in the eyes even when they're lying to you. But it's kind of like a fake smile; there are involuntary muscles up there. If you know what you're looking for, you can still tell. But what does it mean if they're looking you in the eyes and they mean it? It means that, at least in that moment, they're doing what they really believe is right. That's the definition of integrity.

That part is easy. That's not the surprising thing.

The surprising thing, to me, was that someone can have integrity and still be completely evil. It's kind of obvious in retrospect; the super-villain in an action movie can always look the hero in the eye, and he always does, just to prove it. He has integrity. Evil with integrity is more respectable, somehow, than plain evil. All it takes to have integrity is to do what you think is right, no matter how stupid that may be.

Beware of people with integrity.

-Avery Pennarun

21 points wedrifid 02 November 2011 10:17:15PM Permalink

I would never die for my beliefs because... screw that I would rather lie.

21 points Daniel_Burfoot 04 December 2011 12:06:20AM Permalink

For your precious sake, once I thought I could die.

It took me a long time to figure out this poem isn't about a recovering alcoholic.

21 points Daniel_Burfoot 04 December 2011 12:23:32AM Permalink

In the early 1970's it cost $7 to buy a share in [Warren Buffett's] company, and that same share is worth $4,900 today... That makes Buffett a wonderful investor. What makes him the greatest investor of all time is that during a certain period when he thought stocks were grossly overpriced, he sold everything and returned all the money to his partners at a sizable profit to them. The voluntary returning of money that others would gladly pay you to continue to manage is, in my experience, unique in the history of finance.

  • Peter Lynch, "One Up on Wall Street"
21 points Mark_Eichenlaub 01 February 2012 08:24:34PM Permalink

I was interested in the context here. Chesterton was referencing Wells' original belief that the classes would differentiate until the upper class ate the lower class. Wells changed his mind to believe the classes would merge.

The entire book is free on Google Books.

21 points Alejandro1 02 February 2012 05:40:03PM Permalink

... People usually don't know why they vote for the candidates they choose to vote for, and are not particularly good at assessing how something influenced that vote -- let alone how some hypothetical future event would influence them.

...if you ask voters, it turns out that some will tell you that they would be more likely, and a somewhat larger number will tell you that they'll be less likely, to vote for someone with a Trump endorsement. Hey, reporters: don't believe those polls! You can take it as a measure of what respondents think about Trump, if you care about such things, but there's no reason to believe that this kind of self-reporting about vote choice is meaningful at all, and it shouldn't be included in stories about a Trump endorsement as if it was meaningful.

...The bottom line here is that polling is a really good tool for reporters to use in many cases, but remember: what polling tells you for sure is only what people will say if they're asked a question by a pollster.

Jonathan Bernstein

21 points gwern 01 March 2012 05:57:07PM Permalink

"All logic texts are divided into two parts. In the first part, on deductive logic, the fallacies are explained; in the second part, on inductive logic, they are committed."

--Morris Raphael Cohen, quoted by Cohen in The Earth Is Round (p 0.05)

21 points satt 03 March 2012 02:53:15PM Permalink

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

21 points Stabilizer 04 March 2012 05:50:49AM Permalink

Society changes when we change what we're embarrassed about.

In just fifty years, we've made it shameful to be publicly racist.

In just ten years, someone who professes to not know how to use the internet is seen as a fool.

The question, then, is how long before we will be ashamed at being uninformed, at spouting pseudoscience, at believing thin propaganda? How long before it's unacceptable to take something at face value? How long before you can do your job without understanding the state of the art?

Does access to information change the expectation that if you can know, you will know?

We can argue that this will never happen, that it's human nature to be easily led in the wrong direction and to be willfully ignorant. The thing is, there are lots of things that used to be human nature, but due to culture and technology, no longer are.

-Seth Godin

21 points Alejandro1 02 April 2012 07:08:33PM Permalink

On politics as the mind-killer:

We’re at the point where people are morally certain about the empirical facts of what happened between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman on the basis of their general political worldviews. This isn’t exactly surprising—we are tribal creatures who like master narratives—but it feels as though it’s gotten more pronounced recently, and it’s almost certainly making us all stupider.

-- Julian Sanchez (the whole post is worth reading)

21 points Nornagest 01 April 2012 10:59:04PM Permalink

Agree that that looks an awful lot like an abuse of the noble savage meme. Barbara Alice Mann appears to be an anthropologist and a Seneca, so that's at least two points where she should really know better -- then again, there's a long and more than somewhat suspect history of anthropologists using their research to make didactic points about Western society. (Margaret Mead, for example.)

Not sure I entirely agree re: fairness. "Life's not fair" seems to me to succinctly express the very important point that natural law and the fundamentals of game theory are invariant relative to egalitarian intuitions. This can't be changed, only worked around, and a response of "so make it fair" seems to dilute that point by implying that any failure of egalitarianism might ideally be traced to some corresponding failure of morality or foresight.

21 points NancyLebovitz 02 May 2012 03:49:35PM Permalink

The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.

Wikiquotes: Huston Smith Wikipedia: Ralph Washinton Sockman

21 points MichaelGR 03 May 2012 05:33:52PM Permalink

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea...

  • Antoine de Saint Exupery
21 points Pavitra 13 June 2012 02:20:58AM Permalink

Every creative act is open war against The Way It Is. What you are saying when you make something is that the universe is not sufficient, and what it really needs is more you. And it does, actually; it does. Go look outside. You can’t tell me that we are done making the world.

Tycho

21 points DanielLC 04 August 2012 02:39:48AM Permalink

… and I’d get back like $20,000. And I could save hundreds of people from dying of starvation with that money.

According to GiveWell, you could save ten people with that much.

21 points Ezekiel 03 September 2012 03:14:29PM Permalink

Don't think you can fuck with people a lot more powerful than you are and get away with it.

I'm no expert, but that seems to be the moral of a lot of Greek myths.

21 points TheOtherDave 02 November 2012 01:14:18PM Permalink

Previously approximated here.

I still habitually complete this joke with:

"Actually," says the stage magician, "we merely know that there exists something in Scotland which appears to be a sheep which is black on at least one side when viewed from this spot."

Though I'm now tempted to add:

"Hmph," snorts the cognitive psychologist. "Such presumption. An event occurred that we experienced as the perception of a black sheep, only one side of which was visible, standing on what we believed to be a field in Scotland."

21 points Wrongnesslessness 05 November 2012 09:53:16AM Permalink

The inhabitants of Florence in 1494 or Athens in 404 BCE could be forgiven for concluding that optimism just isn't factually true. For they knew nothing of such things as the reach of explanations or the power of science or even laws of nature as we understand them, let alone the moral and technological progress that was to follow when the Enlightenment got under way. At the moment of defeat, it must have seemed at least plausible to the formerly optimistic Athenians that the Spartans might be right, and to the formerly optimistic Florentines that Savonarola might be. Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilization or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.

David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

21 points Alejandro1 05 December 2012 03:57:39AM Permalink

One in four Americans has an opinion about an imaginary debt plan

A new poll from Public Policy Polling found that an impressive 39 percent of Americans have an opinion about the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan.

Before you start celebrating the new, sweeping reach of the 2010 commission’s work, consider this: Twenty-five percent of Americans also took a stance on the Panetta-Burns plan.

What’s that? You’re not familiar with Panetta-Burns? That’s probably because its “a mythical Clinton Chief of Staff/former western Republican Senator combo” that PPP dreamed up to test how many Americans would profess to have an opinion about a policy that did not exist. They found one in four voters to do just that.

Panetta-Burns’ nonexistent policy proposals were supported by 8 percent and opposed by 17 percent of the voters surveyed. Simpson-Bowles’ real policy proposals had stronger favorables, with 23 percent support and 16 percent opposition.

21 points Multiheaded 02 January 2013 04:21:17AM Permalink

This article greatly annoyed me because of how it tells people to do the correct practical things (Develop skills! Be persistent and grind! Help people!) yet gives atrocious and shallow reasons for it - and then Wong says how if people criticize him they haven't heard the message. No, David, you can give people correct directions and still be a huge jerk promoting an awful worldview!

He basically shows NO understanding of what makes one attractive to people (especially romantically) and what gives you a feeling of self-worth and self-respect. What you "are" does in fact matter - both to yourself and to others! - outside of your actions; they just reveal and signal your qualities. If you don't do anything good, it's a sign of something being broken about you, but just mechanically bartering some product of your labour for friendship, affection and status cannot work - if your life is in a rut, it's because of some deeper issues and you've got to resolve those first and foremost.

This masochistic imperative to "Work harder and quit whining" might sound all serious and mature, but does not in fact has the power to make you a "better person"; rather, you'll know you've changed for the better when you can achieve more stuff and don't feel miserable.

I wanted to write a short comment illustrating how this article might be the mirror opposite of some unfortunate ideas in the "Seduction community" - it's "forget all else and GIVE to people, to obtain affection and self-worth" versus "forget all else and TAKE from people, to obtain affection and self-worth" - and how, for a self-actualized person, needs, one's own and others', should dictate the taking and giving, not some primitive framework of barter or conquest - but I predictably got too lazy to extend it :)

21 points Antadil 02 March 2013 11:18:53PM Permalink

I remember asking a wise man, once,

'Why do men fear the dark?'

'Because darkness' he told me, 'is ignorance made visible.'

'And do men despise ignorance?', I asked.

'No!', he said, 'they prize it above all things - all things! - but only so long as it remains invisible.'

– R. Scott Bakker: The Judging Eye

21 points RichardKennaway 10 April 2013 07:00:22PM Permalink

BOSWELL. 'Sir Alexander Dick tells me, that he remembers having a thousand people in a year to dine at his house: that is, reckoning each person as one, each time that he dined there.' JOHNSON. 'That, Sir, is about three a day.' BOSWELL. 'How your statement lessens the idea.' JOHNSON. 'That, Sir, is the good of counting. It brings every thing to a certainty, which before floated in the mind indefinitely.'

From Boswell's Life of Johnson. HT to a commenter on the West Hunter blog.

21 points gwern 03 May 2013 04:27:55PM Permalink

Well, since Conscientiousness is heritable to a substantial degree, perhaps she inherited her knack for hard work.

21 points Stabilizer 03 May 2013 08:22:31PM Permalink

Why do you say that? Many times, you say something publicly, it then becomes part of your identity, and after that there is a subconscious force that tries to make sure that your future actions and words are in line with what you said earlier.

21 points BT_Uytya 03 June 2013 09:34:39AM Permalink

Baroque Cycle by Neal Stphenson proves to be a very good, intelligent book series.

“Why does the tide rush out to sea?”

“The influence of the sun and the moon.”

“Yet you and I cannot see the sun or the moon. The water does not have senses to see, or a will to follow them. How then do the sun and moon, so far away, affect the water?”

“Gravity,” responded Colonel Barnes, lowering his voice like a priest intoning the name of God, and glancing about to see whether Sir Isaac Newton were in earshot.

“That’s what everyone says now. ’Twas not so when I was a lad. We used to parrot Aristotle and say it was in the nature of water to be drawn up by the moon. Now, thanks to our fellow-passenger, we say ‘gravity.’ It seems a great improvement. But is it really? Do you understand the tides, Colonel Barnes, simply because you know to say ‘gravity’?”

Daniel Waterhouse and Colonel Barnes in Solomon’s Gold

21 points khafra 03 June 2013 11:28:58AM Permalink

Corollaries: The more of a dumbass you are, the less well you can recognize common features in iterated bad things. So dumbasses are, subjectively speaking, just unlucky.

21 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 June 2013 12:55:12PM Permalink

Though you can still find subjects who don't know the outcome, ask them for their predictions, and compare those predictions with subjects who are told the outcome to find the size of the hindsight bias.

21 points ygert 03 July 2013 09:42:13AM Permalink

"Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is false."

21 points malcolmocean 01 August 2013 11:11:59PM Permalink

Saw this under "latest rationality quotes" and was like "man, I'm really missing the context as to how this is a rationality quote."

21 points Alejandro1 03 August 2013 01:34:22PM Permalink

So Tetris is really an anti-procrastination learning tool? Hmmm, wonder why that doesn't sound right….

21 points jsbennett86 11 September 2013 06:03:45AM Permalink

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

21 points snafoo 05 September 2013 02:22:22PM Permalink

Yeah.

It's like when those stupid car buffs say "Hmmm...yeah, transmission fluid" when telling each other what they think is wrong rather than "It sounds like the part that changes the speed and torque with which the wheels turn with respect to the engine isn't properly lubricated and able to have the right hydraulic pressure, so you should add some green oil product."

-rekam

21 points Eugine_Nier 04 October 2013 02:53:15AM Permalink

the mass of an object never seems to change: a spinning top has the same weight as a still one. So a “law” was invented: mass is constant, independent of speed. That “law” is now found to be incorrect. Mass is found to increase with velocity, but appreciable increases require velocities near that of light. A true law is: if an object moves with a speed of less than one hundred miles a second the mass is constant to within one part in a million. In some such approximate form this is a correct law. So in practice one might think that the new law makes no significant difference. Well, yes and no. For ordinary speeds we can certainly forget it and use the simple constant-mass law as a good approximation. But for high speeds we are wrong, and the higher the speed, the more wrong we are.

Finally, and most interesting, philosophically we are completely wrong with the approximate law. Our entire picture of the world has to be altered even though the mass changes only by a little bit. This is a very peculiar thing about the philosophy, or the ideas, behind the laws. Even a very small effect sometimes requires profound changes in our ideas.

Richard Feynman Lectures on Physics

21 points lukeprog 14 November 2013 12:55:08AM Permalink

God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot predict, the courage to predict the things I can, and the wisdom to buy index funds.

Nate Silver

(h/t Rob Wiblin)

21 points malcolmocean 01 November 2013 11:01:56AM Permalink

"Next time you’re in a debate, ask yourself if someone is on offense or defense. If they’re neither, then you know you have someone you can learn from"

Julien Smith

21 points adamzerner 21 December 2013 05:52:32PM Permalink

"A problem well put, is half solved." - John Dewey

21 points Vaniver 06 December 2013 04:55:38PM Permalink

That depends, how were their reviews on Silk Road? :P

21 points Jayson_Virissimo 13 December 2013 05:19:34AM Permalink

I wonder what the story would sound like if told from the perspective of the literary theorist. Perhaps a story about how philosophers like to go on and on about truth and rationality, but when pressed by a relatively intelligent interlocutor, can't even supply you with something as basic as a theory of knowledge?

21 points RichardKennaway 04 February 2014 08:37:55AM Permalink

On the other hand:

The Stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.

Jonathan Swift

21 points cousin_it 16 April 2014 10:22:07AM Permalink

Being wrong about something feels exactly the same as being right about something.

-- many different people, most recently user chipaca on HN

21 points aarongertler 16 May 2014 01:13:23AM Permalink

“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer.”

― Douglas Adams

21 points SaidAchmiz 04 May 2014 12:14:30AM Permalink

Dawkins, in arguments with theists, homeopaths, etc., is not trying to convince his interlocutors; nor are most of the other well-known atheist public figures. The aim to convince bystanders — the private atheist who is unsure whether to "come out", the theist who's all but lost his faith but isn't sure whether atheism is a position one may take publicly, the person who's lukewarm on religious arguments but has always had a rather benign and respectful view of religion, etc.

In private conversations with someone whose opinions are of concern to you, Franklin's advice make sense. The public arguments of Dawkins Co. are more akin to performances than conversations. I think he achieves his aim admirably. I, for one, have little interest in watching people get on a public stage and have exchanges laden with "in certain cases or circumstances..." and other such mealy-mouthed nonsense.

21 points Mestroyer 05 May 2014 08:52:19AM Permalink

Actually, if you do this with something besides a test, this sounds like a really good way to teach a third-grader probabilities.

21 points Mestroyer 04 May 2014 03:38:21AM Permalink

we're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands. But we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers, but we're not going to kill Today.

Captain James Tiberius Kirk dodging an appeal to nature and the what the hell effect, to optimize for consequences instead of virtue.

21 points elharo 01 May 2014 09:53:13AM Permalink

The brutal truth is that reality is indifferent to your difficulty in finding enough subjects. It’s like astronomy: To study things that are small and distant in the sky you need a huge telescope. If you only have access to a few subjects, you need to study bigger effects, and maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

-- Joseph P. Simmons, The Reformation: Can Social Scientists Save Themselves

21 points rationalnoodles 02 June 2014 11:46:14AM Permalink

DON’T RESPOND TO IDIOTS.

...

Arguing with idiots has the game-theoretic structure of a dollar-auction. Whoever gets in the last argument wins. Add to this the asymmetry that someone with low epistemic standarts can make up some nonsense argument in five minutes, while it takes you an hour to prove that it is nonsense. At which point the other guy will make up some new nonsense.

Medivh

edit: If you decide to reply, please read the original comment on SSC for context.

21 points gwern 17 July 2014 12:22:19AM Permalink

"Independence is for the very few, it is a privilege of the strong. Whoever attempts it enters a labyrinth, and multiplies a thousandfold the dangers of life. Not least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes lonely, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. If he fails, this happens so far from the comprehension of men that they cannot sympathise nor pity."

--29, Part 2: The Free Spirit, Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil- Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future

21 points Torello 02 October 2014 01:39:31AM Permalink

"While there are problems with what I have proposed, they should be compared to the existing alternatives, not to abstract utopias."

Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future (page number not provided by e-reader)

21 points Stabilizer 03 October 2014 10:24:12PM Permalink

The version of Windows following 8.1 will be Windows 10, not Windows 9. Apparently this is because Microsoft knows that a lot of software naively looks at the first digit of the version number, concluding that it must be Windows 95 or Windows 98 if it starts with 9.

Many think this is stupid. They say that Microsoft should call the next version Windows 9, and if somebody’s dumb code breaks, it’s their own fault.

People who think that way aren’t billionaires. Microsoft got where it is, in part, because they have enough business savvy to take responsibility for problems that are not their fault but that would be perceived as being their fault.

-John D. Cook

21 points johnswentworth 03 November 2014 02:41:11AM Permalink

Someone should write a post called "Open Problems in Self-Improvement".

20 points Rune 21 May 2009 02:24:57AM Permalink

"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."

-- H. L. Mencken

20 points RichardKennaway 02 July 2009 10:05:51PM Permalink

"Experiment and theory often show remarkable agreement when performed in the same laboratory."

-- Daniel Bershader

20 points RobinZ 06 August 2009 01:05:22PM Permalink

No one has ever announced that because determinism is true thermostats do not control temperature.

Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, qtd. in Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room

20 points RobinZ 06 August 2009 01:04:15PM Permalink

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Whitehead, Alfred North (1861 - 1947), An Introduction to Mathematics.

20 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 August 2009 04:05:53AM Permalink

Better our hypotheses die for our errors than ourselves.

-- Karl Popper

20 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 November 2009 11:44:45PM Permalink

Your calendar never lies. All we have is our time. The way we spend our time is our priorities, is our "strategy." Your calendar knows what you really care about. Do you?

-- Tom Peters, HT Ben Casnocha

20 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 November 2009 11:47:31PM Permalink

Sounds like I'd better change that.

20 points Rain 01 February 2010 12:44:08PM Permalink

One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

I will maintain a realistic assessment of my strengths and weaknesses. Even though this takes some of the fun out of the job, at least I will never utter the line "No, this cannot be! I AM INVINCIBLE!!!" (After that, death is usually instantaneous.)

I will be neither chivalrous nor sporting. If I have an unstoppable superweapon, I will use it as early and as often as possible instead of keeping it in reserve.

If my advisors ask "Why are you risking everything on such a mad scheme?", I will not proceed until I have a response that satisfies them.

I will see a competent psychiatrist and get cured of all extremely unusual phobias and bizarre compulsive habits which could prove to be a disadvantage.

I will never build a sentient computer smarter than I am.

-- Peters Evil Overlord List on how to be a less wrong fictional villain

20 points MichaelGR 01 March 2010 10:27:23PM Permalink

Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.

--Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline (2009), p 216

20 points Rain 01 March 2010 09:54:29PM Permalink

In an universe full of inanimate material, sentient beings are gods.

-- spire3661, in a Slashdot post

20 points RobinZ 05 April 2010 03:16:59PM Permalink

You don't have to believe everything you think.

Seen on bumper sticker, via ^zhurnaly.

20 points Kaj_Sotala 01 May 2010 08:51:41PM Permalink

(In a thread where people were asked whether or not they had a religious experience of "feeling God"):

I had something similar to feeling God, I suppose, except it was in essence the exact opposite. I was in a forest one summer, and I looked up at the sunlight shining through the leaves, and suddenly it felt like I could see each and every individual leaf in the forest and trace the path of each photon that poured through them, and I remember thinking over and over, in stunned amazement, "the world is sufficient. The world is sufficient."

I'd never thought much about religion before that, but that experience made me realize that the material world was entire orders of magnitude more beautiful than any of the tawdry religious fantasies people came up with, and it felt unspeakably tragic that anyone would ever reject this, our most incredible universe, for spiritual pipe-dreams. In a way, you might say I felt the lack of god, and it felt like glory.

-- Axiomatic

20 points RichardKennaway 01 June 2010 10:06:41PM Permalink

When you interact with someone, you may think, I will do this, so that they will do that, or think such-and-such, or feel thus-and-so; but what is actually going on for them may bear no resemblance to the model of them that you have in your head. If your model is wrong at the meta-level -- you are wrong about how people work -- then you will either notice that you have difficulty dealing with people at all, or not notice that the problem is with you and get resentful at everyone else for not behaving as you expect them to.

Here, Mrs. B.F. Skinner imagines that she is reinforcing the behaviour that she desires, of eating spinach, by providing the reinforcer, ice-cream. Or is she really punishing the consumption of ice-cream by associating it with spinach? Or associating herself with an unpleasant situation? Or any number of other possibilities.

20 points MichaelGR 06 July 2010 02:49:03PM Permalink

From the Wikipedia article about perverse incentives:

In Hanoi, under French colonial rule, a program paying people a bounty for each rat pelt handed in was intended to exterminate rats. Instead, it led to the farming of rats.

and

19th century palaeontologists traveling to China used to pay peasants for each fragment of dinosaur bone (dinosaur fossils) that they produced. They later discovered that peasants dug up the bones and then smashed them into multiple pieces to maximise their payments.

20 points Jayson_Virissimo 03 August 2010 02:38:38AM Permalink

The fact that you are giving money to charity does not mean that you need not try to find out whether that charity is a fraud or not.

-C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

20 points Rain 03 August 2010 12:56:20AM Permalink

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

-- William James

20 points thomascolthurst 03 September 2010 11:28:42PM Permalink

Someone once quoted Shakespeare to the philosopher W. V. O. Quine: "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." To which Quine is said to have responded: "Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth."

Reported by Chet Raymo

20 points NihilCredo 01 September 2010 10:51:33AM Permalink

I was about to reply that apparently Marcus Aurelius had never put his hand on a burning stove, but then I remembered that he had probably been taught about Mucius Scaevola about a million times.

20 points Rain 05 October 2010 05:37:38PM Permalink

The singularity is my retirement plan.

-- tocomment, in a Hacker News post

20 points PeterS 03 November 2010 05:22:17AM Permalink

Rule I

We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

To this purpose the philosophers say that Nature does nothing in vain, and more is in vain when less will serve; for Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.

Rule II

Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes.

As to respiration in a man and in a beast; the descent of stones in Europe and in America; the light of our culinary fire and of the sun; the reflection of light in the earth, and in the planets.

Rule III

The qualities of bodies, which admit neither intensification nor remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to all bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever.

For since the qualities of bodies are only known to us by experiments, we are to hold for universal all such as universally agree with experiments; and such as are not liable to diminution can never be quite taken away. We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which is wont to be simple, and always consonant to itself. . .

Rule IV

In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses that may be imagined, till such time as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to exceptions.

This rule we must follow, that the argument of induction may not be evaded by hypotheses.

Isaac Newton, Philosophiae naturalis: Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy

20 points RichardKennaway 02 November 2010 09:43:19PM Permalink

The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.

H.L. Mencken, Minority Report.

20 points billswift 03 December 2010 05:16:54AM Permalink

In the Information Age, the first step to sanity is FILTERING. Filter the information; extract the knowledge.

Filter first for substance. Filter second for significance. These filters protect against advertising.

Filter third for reliability. This filter protects against politicians.

Filter fourth for completeness. This filter protects from the media.

-- Marc Stielger, David's Sling

20 points Jack 03 February 2011 11:08:42PM Permalink

But unlike sex you shouldn't change positions just for fun and novelty.

20 points Nominull 04 March 2011 05:08:06AM Permalink

It's terrible not being able to be happy even though you're not wrong.

-Kaname Madoka, Puella Magi Madoka Magica

20 points Alexandros 02 March 2011 01:16:33PM Permalink

When said in first person, it can feel like a dodge.

However, when used as a third-person response to retorts like "politicians have got to stop being so corrupt!", I find it fits just fine, and it is in this context that I posted it. (also, notice that the elaboration is in third person)

20 points Dreaded_Anomaly 06 July 2011 02:33:34AM Permalink

"Aaron, you always criticize religious people for adhering to their beliefs... but the beliefs you have about evolution, global warming, or the lack of god are just as passionate as any fundamentalist. How are you any better?"

"There's one big difference. I know what it would take for me to change my mind."

— Raymond and Aaron, Calamities of Nature

20 points Nic_Smith 03 July 2011 03:01:50PM Permalink

"Death is the termination of life, not a creature with a scythe who has a just claim to the lives he takes. (Death hates to be anthropomorphized.)" -- Ben Best, Cryonics − Frequently Asked Questions

20 points MixedNuts 04 August 2011 02:13:34PM Permalink

That's a bit freaky. If someone predicted the Singularity 150 years ago, it suggests current "Singularity imminent!" predictions are far off. We snicker at "thinking machine" applied to a simple calculator, because we understand that even though arithmetic operations are sufficient to build thought, there's a long way to go from these base components to the genuine article. The analogy with current talk of intelligence is clear.

20 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 August 2011 10:23:50PM Permalink

A student study at the University of Cambridge concluded that it takes 3,481 licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.[7] Another study by Purdue University concluded that it takes an average of 364 licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop using a "licking machine", while it takes an average of 252 licks when tried by 20 volunteers. Yet another study by the University of Michigan concluded that it takes 411 licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. A 1996 study by undergraduate students at Swarthmore College concluded that it takes a median of 144 licks (range 70-222) to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.[8] Harvard Grad students created a rotating mechanical tongue and concluded 317 licks.

-- Wikipedia, on the reproducibility of scientific results

20 points Tesseract 02 August 2011 10:35:26PM Permalink

If we want to know where the truth lies in particular cases, we have to look.

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

20 points CronoDAS 24 September 2011 10:55:38PM Permalink

No matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, turn back.

-- Turkish proverb

20 points Alejandro1 02 October 2011 02:01:37AM Permalink

Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned.

Jorge Luis Borges, "The Secret Miracle".

20 points scav 03 October 2011 11:55:04AM Permalink

I honestly don't know. Let's see what happens.

-- Hans. The Troll Hunter

20 points anonym 02 October 2011 02:27:50AM Permalink

It would be an error to suppose that the great discoverer seizes at once upon the truth, or has any unerring method of divining it. In all probability the errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one. Fertility of imagination and abundance of guesses at truth are among the first requisites of discovery; but the erroneous guesses must be many times as numerous as those that prove well founded. The weakest analogies, the most whimsical notions, the most apparently absurd theories, may pass through the teeming brain, and no record remain of more than the hundredth part….

W. Stanley Jevons

20 points gwern 02 October 2011 06:01:09PM Permalink

To quote Warner's famous essay on cartoonialism, "The struggle itself...is enough to fill a character's heart. One must imagine Coyote happy."

20 points Karmakaiser 31 October 2011 01:12:50PM Permalink

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.

-Terry Pratchett, Jingo

20 points juliawise 02 November 2011 11:39:22AM Permalink

War is something we do to win. Dance is something we do either to entertain others, or for our own enjoyment. Debate teams work like this - you're assigned a position which you must argue, even if you don't believe it. The performers/debaters do it some for their own pleasure, and they attract audiences who come to be entertained. My husband and I do a lot of arguing/debate for amusement, which is more like social dance in that it's playful and designed to entertain us rather than to accomplish any other goal.

But neither of these metaphors deal with objective truth. If I win a war, a debate, or a lawsuit, it doesn't prove my point is correct. It just means I fought or argued more skillfully or impressively. In navigation, both skill and objective truth are involved. Imagine two people who are trying to reach a destination (representing truth). They need skill to figure out how to get there, and can even compete for who gets there first (as in the sport of orienteering). Or, they can collaborate to find it together. If I confidently and stylishly navigate in the wrong direction, I won't reach my destination. I can only get there by reading the signs correctly.

I would prefer serious argument to be more about truth-seeking and less about showing off or defeating the opponent.

20 points gwern 01 December 2011 08:48:36PM Permalink

"The older we become, the more important it is to use what we know rather than learn more."

--I.J. Good (as quoted in "The Problem of Thinking Too Much" by Persi Diaconis)

20 points CronoDAS 01 December 2011 04:49:01AM Permalink

Grognor: chelz: is the area of a rectangle more the length, or the width?

The width. Changing the width makes a bigger change in the area than changing the length does. (By convention, the width is defined as the smaller of the two dimensions of the rectangle.)

20 points Bugmaster 06 December 2011 07:17:46PM Permalink

-- You can look at the stars and say "they sure are pretty" without having to calculate how many light-years away each one is.

-- Not if you want to get to them someday.

-- Questionable Content #2072

20 points Jayson_Virissimo 30 November 2011 11:05:02AM Permalink

Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of my delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort.

-John Nash, A Beautiful Mind

In other words, recognizing that politics is the mind-killer helped Nash manage his paranoid-scizophrenia.

20 points Ezekiel 30 November 2011 11:03:32PM Permalink

I had a dream that I met a girl in a dying world. [...] I knew we didn't have long together. She grabbed me and spoke a stream of numbers into my ear. Then it all went away.

I woke up. The memory of the apocalypse faded to mere fancy, but the numbers burned bright in my mind. I wrote them down immediately. They were coordinates. A place and a time, neither one too far away.

What else could I do? When the day came, I went to the spot and waited.

And?

It turns out wanting something doesn't make it real.

~ Randall Munroe, xkcd #240: Dream Girl

20 points GabrielDuquette 01 January 2012 02:51:00AM Permalink

AUGUSTUS: I've had premonitions. Premonitions of death.

FABIUS MAXIMUS: We all have them.

AUGUSTUS: No, no, no. This is serious. Listen, old friend, let me tell you. Two weeks after we came back from you know where, I was in Mars Field giving a libation. A little ceremony. You remember?

FABIUS MAXIMUS: I remember, but I wasn't there.

AUGUSTUS: No? Well. nearby, there's a temple built in memory of Marcus Agrippa.

FABIUS MAXIMUS: Yes, I know it.

AUGUSTUS: An eagle circled me five times, then flew off and settled on the "A" of Agrippa's name.

FABIUS MAXIMUS: Well. Caesar...

AUGUSTUS: No, don't lie to me. It's clear what it means. It was telling me that my time had come and that I must give way to someone by the name of Agrippa.

FABIUS MAXIMUS: Postumus?

AUGUSTUS: Who else?

FABIUS MAXIMUS: Did you consult an augur?

AUGUSTUS: No. I don't need an augur.

FABIUS MAXIMUS: Well. you're not an expert on the interpretation of signs.

AUGUSTUS: Then listen to this. The following day, lightning melted the "C" on my name on a statue nearby. It struck the "C" off "Caesar". Do you follow? What does "C" mean?

FABIUS MAXIMUS: A hundred.

AUGUSTUS: A hundred. Exactly! Livia saw it. She went to an augur to find out what it meant. She wouldn't tell me, but I forced it out of her. It means that I have only a hundred days to live. I shall die in a hundred days.

(long pause)

FABIUS MAXIMUS: Or weeks.

AUGUSTUS: Eh?

FABIUS MAXIMUS: Why shouldn't it be weeks? Or months? Why shouldn't it mean that you'll live to be a hundred?

--I, Claudius, Poison Is Queen

20 points Alejandro1 05 February 2012 05:41:50AM Permalink

Any time we find that “math” disagrees with reality, the problem is never with “math”—it’s with us, for using the wrong math!

Scott Aaronson

20 points NancyLebovitz 01 February 2012 05:16:43PM Permalink

Perhaps this should be checked by comparing the number of people who say they want to annihilate a group to the number of attempts at annihilation.

20 points Jayson_Virissimo 06 March 2012 12:52:01PM Permalink

Okay, 2 comments and 3 upvotes is good enough for a quick comment but not a discussion post.

By the "hard core of transhumanism" I mean the belief that humans could use reason to obtain knowledge of the natural world that we can use in order to develop technologies that will allow us to cure sickness, eliminate the need to labor, and extend our lifespans to greater-than-human levels and that we should do these things.

During the Islamic Golden Age, many thinkers combined Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism with knowledge from indigenous craft traditions into a form of alchemy that was refined using logic and laboratory experimentation (Jābir ibn Hayyān is probably the most famous of these thinkers). These philosophers and technologists believed that their theoretical system would allow them to perform transmutation of matter (turn one element into another) unlocking the ability to create almost any "machine" or medicine imaginable. This was thought to allow them to create al ixir (elixir) of Al Khidr fame which, in principle, could extend human life indefinitely and cure any kind of disease. Also of great interest was the attainment of takwin, which is artificial, laboratory-created "life" (even including the intelligent kind). It was hoped (by some) that these artificial creations (called a homunculus by Latin speakers and analogous to the Jewish golem) could do the work of humans the way angels do Allah's work. Not only could these AIs do our work for us, they could continue our scientific enterprise. According to William Newman, these AIs or robots "...of the pseudo-Plato and Jabir traditions could not only talk - it could reveal the secrets of nature." Sound familiar?

20 points Cthulhoo 01 March 2012 10:18:27AM Permalink

When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.

Ayn Rand

20 points DanArmak 02 May 2012 11:19:32AM Permalink

Hey, I can hack and whine at the same time!

20 points tgb 05 May 2012 11:56:12PM Permalink

Love the story, but the punchline shouldn't be spoiled in the title!

20 points GabrielDuquette 03 August 2012 05:05:55PM Permalink

I propose all older works be therefore re-typeset as their creators obviously intended. It'll be like Ted Turner colorizing old movies, except the product in this case will become infinitely more consumable instead of slightly nauseating.

20 points Stabilizer 03 August 2012 09:05:32PM Permalink

It is absurd to divide people. They tend to die if you do that.

20 points Scottbert 08 August 2012 02:34:31AM Permalink

reinventing the wheel is exactly what allows us to travel 80mph without even feeling it. the original wheel fell apart at about 5mph after 100 yards. now they're rubber, self-healing, last 4000 times longer. whoever intended the phrase "you're reinventing the wheel" to be an insult was an idiot.

--rickest on IRC

20 points JQuinton 11 September 2012 02:01:34PM Permalink

"If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for 10 years plant trees. If your plan is for 100 years educate children" - Confucius

20 points simplicio 01 September 2012 04:06:40PM Permalink

...a good way of thinking about minimalism [about truth] and its attractions is to see it as substituting the particular for the general. It mistrusts anything abstract or windy. Both the relativist and the absolutist are impressed by Pilate's notorious question 'What is Truth?', and each tries to say something useful at the same high and vertiginous level of generality. The minimalist can be thought of turning his back on this abstraction, and then in any particular case he prefaces his answer with the prior injunction: you tell me. This does not mean, 'You tell me what truth is.' It means, 'You tell me what the issue is, and I will tell you (although you will already know, by then) what the truth about the issue consists in.' If the issue is whether high tide is at midday, then truth consists in high tide being at midday... We can tell you what truth amounts to, if you first tell us what the issue is.

There is a very powerful argument for minimalism about truth, due to the great logician Gottlob Frege. First, we should notice the transparency property of truth. This is the fact that it makes no difference whether you say that it is raining, or it is true that it is raining, or true that it is true that it is raining, and so on forever. But if 'it is true that' introduced some substantial, robust property of a judgment, how could this be so? Consider, for example, a pragmatism that attempts some equation between truth and utility. Then next to the judgment 'it is raining' we might have 'it is useful to believe that it is raining.' But these are entirely different things! To assess the first we direct our attention to the weather. To assess the second we direct our attention to the results of believing something about the weather - a very different investigation.

Let us return to Pilate. Where does minimalism about truth leave him? It suggests that when he asked this question, he was distracting himself and his audience from his real job, which was to find out whether to uphold certain specific historical charges against a defendant. Thus, if I am innocent, and I come before a judge, I don't want airy generalities about the nature of truth. I want him to find that I did not steal the watch if I did not steal the watch. I want him to rub his nose in the issue. I want a local judgment about a local or specific event, supposed to have happened in a particular region of time and space.

(Simon Blackburn, Truth)

20 points Grognor 04 September 2012 01:26:39AM Permalink

This reminds me of how I felt when I learned that a third of the passengers of the Hindenburg survived. Went something like this, if I recall:

Apparently if you drop people out of the sky in a ball of fire, that's not enough to kill all of them, or even 90% of them.

20 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 September 2012 07:56:47PM Permalink

"Nontrivial measure or it didn't happen." -- Aristosophy

(Who's Kate Evans? Do we know her? Aristosophy seems to have rather a lot of good quotes.)

20 points peter_hurford 01 September 2012 06:18:48PM Permalink

"In a society in which the narrow pursuit of material self-interest is the norm, the shift to an ethical stance is more radical than many people realize. In comparison with the needs of people starving in Somalia, the desire to sample the wines of the leading French vineyards pales into insignificance. Judged against the suffering of immobilized rabbits having shampoos dripped into their eyes, a better shampoo becomes an unworthy goal. An ethical approach to life does not forbid having fun or enjoying food and wine, but it changes our sense of priorities. The effort and expense put into buying fashionable clothes, the endless search for more and more refined gastronomic pleasures, the astonishing additional expense that marks out the prestige car market in cars from the market in cars for people who just want a reliable means to getting from A to B, all these become disproportionate to people who can shift perspective long enough to take themselves, at least for a time, out of the spotlight. If a higher ethical consciousness spreads, it will utterly change the society in which we live." -- Peter Singer

20 points Athrelon 02 October 2012 05:58:56PM Permalink

It is easier to love humanity than to love one's neighbor.

--Eric Hoffer, on Near/Far

20 points taelor 03 October 2012 01:39:31AM Permalink

The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.

--Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

20 points Eugine_Nier 15 November 2012 02:14:07AM Permalink

As the philosopher David Schmidtz says, if your main goal is to show that your heart is in the right place, then your heart is not in the right place.

Jason Brennan, Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know

20 points AlanCrowe 02 November 2012 01:14:14PM Permalink

Paul Krugman says something similar

(ii) Adopt the stance of rebel: There is nothing that plays worse in our culture than seeming to be the stodgy defender of old ideas, no matter how true those ideas may be. Luckily, at this point the orthodoxy of the academic economists is very much a minority position among intellectuals in general; one can seem to be a courageous maverick, boldly challenging the powers that be, by reciting the contents of a standard textbook. It has worked for me!

(Very close to the end of Ricardos Difficult Idea] )

20 points gwern 04 November 2012 03:26:33AM Permalink

"The boundary between these 2 classes [the Eloi Morlocks] is more porous than I've made it sound. I'm always running into regular dudes - construction workers, auto mechanics, taxi drivers, galoots in general - who were largely aliterate until something made it necessary for them to become readers and start actually thinking about things. Perhaps they had to come to grips with alcoholism, perhaps they got sent to jail, or came down with a disease, or suffered a crisis in religious faith, or simply got bored. Such people can get up to speed on particular subjects quite rapidly. Sometimes their lack of a broad education makes them over-apt to go off on intellectual wild goose chases, but, hey, at least a wild goose chase gives you some exercise."

--Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning Was... the Commandline

The last project that I worked on with [Richard Feynman] was in simulated evolution. I had written a program that simulated the evolution of populations of sexually reproducing creatures over hundreds of thousands of generations. The results were surprising in that the fitness of the population made progress in sudden leaps rather than by the expected steady improvement. The fossil record shows some evidence that real biological evolution might also exhibit such "punctuated equilibrium," so Richard and I decided to look more closely at why it happened. He was feeling ill by that time, so I went out and spent the week with him in Pasadena, and we worked out a model of evolution of finite populations based on the Fokker Planck equations. When I got back to Boston I went to the library and discovered a book by Kimura on the subject, and much to my disappointment, all of our "discoveries" were covered in the first few pages. When I called back and told Richard what I had found, he was elated. "Hey, we got it right!" he said. "Not bad for amateurs."

From Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine

20 points almkglor 07 December 2012 09:29:17AM Permalink

"It's frightening to think that you might not know something, but more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what is going on." - Amos Tversky

20 points GabrielDuquette 01 December 2012 03:46:47PM Permalink

how are opinions like assholes? I've trained mine to be uncommonly elastic and accepting of new things

ponchopeligroso

20 points RichardKennaway 13 January 2013 08:11:24PM Permalink

"Just because you no longer believe a lie, does not mean you now know the truth."

Mark Atwood

20 points SaidAchmiz 02 January 2013 09:46:16PM Permalink

Perhaps because at that point, one is not faced with the prospect of spending several hours in close proximity to people with whom one has had an unpleasant social interaction.

20 points Alicorn 11 January 2013 03:08:53AM Permalink

He tells her that the earth is flat -

He knows the facts, and that is that.

In altercations fierce and long

She tries her best to prove him wrong.

But he has learned to argue well.

He calls her arguments unsound

And often asks her not to yell.

She cannot win. He stands his ground. The planet goes on being round.

--Wendy Cope, He Tells Her from the series ‘Differences of Opinion’

20 points [deleted] 02 February 2013 06:28:04PM Permalink

That reminds me of http://xkcd.com/690/.

Also:

If one group of editors were to say the Earth is flat and another group were to say it is round, it would not benefit Wikipedia for the groups to compromise and say the Earth is shaped like a calzone.

-- Raymond Arritt

(Quoting this before dinner is making me hungry.)

20 points Alicorn 02 March 2013 01:07:37AM Permalink

...these things are possible. And because they're possible we have to think of them so they don't surprise us later. We have to think of them so that if the worst does come, we'll already know how to live in that universe.

-- Miro, in Xenocide by Orson Scott Card

20 points AlanCrowe 04 April 2013 11:43:53AM Permalink

I've read your link to John Leslie with both curiosity and bafflement.

17 x 24 is not perhaps the best example of a question for which no answer comes immediately to mind. Seventeen has the curious property that 17 x 6 = 102. (The recurring decimal 1/6 = 0.166666... hints to us that 17 x 6 = 102 is just the first of a series of near misses on a round number, 167 x 6 = 1002, 1667 x 6 = 10002, etc). So multiplying 17 by any small multiple of 6 is no harder than the two times table. In particular 17 x 24 = 17 x (6 x 4) = (17 x 6) x 4 = 102 x 4 = 408.

17 x 23 might have served better, were it not for the curious symmetry around the number 20, with 17 = 20 - 3 while 23 = 20 + 3. One is reminded of the identity (x + y)(x - y) = x^2 - y^2 which is often useful in arithmetic and tells us at once that 17 x 23 = 20 x 20 - 3 x 3 = 400 - 9 = 391.

17 x 25 has a different defect as an example, because one can hardly avoid apprehending 25 as one quarter of 100, which stimulates the observation that 17 = 16 + 1 and 16 is full of yummy fourness. 17 x 25 = (16 + 1) x 25 = (4 x 4 + 1) x 25 = 4 x 4 x 25 + 1 x 25 = 4 x 100 + 25 = 425.

17 x 26 is a better example. Nature has its little jokes. 7 x 3 = 21 therefore 17 x 13 = (1 + 7) x (1 + 3) = (1 + 1) + 7 x 3 = 2 + 21 = 221. We get the correct answer by outrageously bogus reasoning. And we are surely puzzled. Why does 21 show up in 17 x 13? Aren't larger products always messed up and nasty? (This is connected to 7 + 3 = 10). Any-one who is in on the joke will immediately say 17 x 26 = 17 x (13 x 2) = (17 x 13) x 2 = 221 x 2 = 442. But few people are.

Some people advocate cultivating a friendship with the integers. Learning the multiplication table, up to 25 times 25, by the means exemplified above, is part of what they mean by this.

Others, full of sullen resentment at the practical usefulness of arithmetic, advocate memorizing ones times tables by the grimly efficient deployment of general purpose techniques of rote memorization such as the Anki deck. But who in this second camp sees any need to go beyond ten times ten?

Does John Leslie have a foot in both camps? Does he set the twenty-five times table as the goal and also indicate rote memorization as the means?

20 points gjm 03 May 2013 10:11:27PM Permalink

I find myself wondering whether that pun was the original impetus for the comic. (If so, I commend the artist's restraint, which isn't something one can often say about Oglaf.)

20 points RolfAndreassen 06 May 2013 05:08:42PM Permalink

But if the question is "Has this caused you to revise downward your estimate of the value of health insurance?" the answer has to obviously be yes. Anyone who answers differently is looking deep into their intestinal loops, not the Oregon study. You don't have to revise the estimate to zero, or even a low number. But if you'd asked folks before the results dropped what we'd expect to see if insurance made people a lot healthier, they'd have said "statistically significant improvement on basic markers for the most common chronic diseases. The fact that we didn't see that means that we should now say that health insurance, or at least Medicaid, probably doesn't make as big a difference in health as we thought.

-- Megan McArdle, trying to explain Bayesian updates and the importance of making predictions in advance, without referring to any mathematics.

20 points wedrifid 03 May 2013 01:01:43PM Permalink

You shouldn't trust people who claim to know 4 digits of accuracy for a forcast like this.

You shouldn't trust a human person who makes that claim. But if we are using 'person' in a way that includes the steel-Vulcan from the quote then yes, you should.

The uncertainity involved in the calculation has to be greater.

It is all uncertainty. There is no particular reason to doubt the steel-Vulcan's ability to calibrate 'meta' uncertainties too.

In the face of all the other evidence about the relative capabilities of the species in question that the character in question is implied to have it would be an error to overvalue the heuristic "don't trust people who fail to signal humility via truncating calculations". The latter is, after all, merely a convention. Given the downsides of that convention (it inevitably makes predictions worse) it is relatively unlikely that the Vulcans would have the same traditions regarding significant figure expression.

20 points Pablo_Stafforini 02 May 2013 06:19:16PM Permalink

Ownership is not limited to material things. It can also apply to points of view. Once we take ownership of an idea—whether it’s about politics or sports—what do we do? We love it perhaps more than we should. We prize it more than it is worth. And most frequently, we have trouble letting go of it because we can’t stand the idea of its loss. What are we left with then? An ideology—rigid and unyielding.

Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, New York, 2008, pp. 138-139

20 points TheOtherDave 02 June 2013 07:40:22PM Permalink

I wouldn't call it a punchline, exactly... I mean, it's not a joke. But in the comic it's likely a parent and child talking, and the subtext I infer is that parenting is a process of giving one's children the tools with which to construct superior solutions to life problems.

20 points DanielLC 03 June 2013 03:25:40AM Permalink

Considering the "mad scientists" keep building stuff, perhaps the question is "Why do people keep calling mad engineers mad scientists?"

20 points Zubon 03 July 2013 11:03:03PM Permalink

Xander: Yep, vampires are real. A lot of 'em live in Sunnydale. Willow 'll fill you in.

Willow: I know it's hard to accept at first.

Oz: Actually, it explains a lot.

One of the stronger examples of Bayesian updating in fiction, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 2, episode 13

20 points [deleted] 01 July 2013 09:53:59PM Permalink

“The wonder and horror of epidemiology, is that it’s not enough to just measure one thing very accurately. To get the right answer, you may have to measure a great many things very accurately.”

-- Jerry Avorn, quoted here.

20 points Vaniver 01 July 2013 04:56:28PM Permalink

I wish that I may never think the smiles of the great and powerful a sufficient inducement to turn aside from the straight path of honesty and the convictions of my own mind.

-- David Ricardo

20 points PhilGoetz 16 July 2013 02:48:18PM Permalink

I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

  • Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett, quoted here
20 points Eugine_Nier 02 September 2013 04:15:32AM Permalink

If you don’t study philosophy you’ll absorb it anyway, but you won’t know why or be able to be selective.

idontknowbut@gmail.com

20 points Vaniver 13 November 2013 03:51:46AM Permalink

When the tech geeks raised concerns about their ability to deliver the website on time, they are reported to have been told “Failure is not an option.” Unfortunately, this is what happens when you say “failure is not an option”: You don’t develop backup plans, which means that your failure may turn into a disaster.

From an article about Obamacare.

20 points JQuinton 26 December 2013 02:41:46PM Permalink

Saying "everyone is equally to blame" is great if you want to sound reasonable and paint yourself as a moderate voice in a debate, but it doesn't really work if you actually want to be correct.

From a commenter called "ThisIsMyRealName" over at Slate

20 points cousin_it 16 January 2014 10:46:11PM Permalink

People will call it immoral until they can afford it

-- blindcavefsh on reddit.com/r/futurology

I like this quote because it can serve as a replacement for "power corrupts" and also applies to things like embryo selection, so it seems to be pointing to something more general.

20 points Pfft 10 February 2014 05:43:22PM Permalink

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

--Mike Tyson

20 points Jayson_Virissimo 18 March 2014 09:18:23PM Permalink

The same persons who cry down Logic will generally warn you against Political Economy. It is unfeeling, they will tell you. It recognises unpleasant facts. For my part, the most unfeeling thing I know of is the law of gravitation: it breaks the neck of the best and most amiable person without scruple, if he forgets for a single moment to give heed to it. The winds and waves too are very unfeeling. Would you advise those who go to sea to deny the winds and waves – or to make use of them, and find the means of guarding against their dangers? My advice to you is to study the great writers on Political Economy, and hold firmly by whatever in them you find true; and depend upon it that if you are not selfish or hard-hearted already, Political Economy will not make you so.

-- John Stuart Mill

20 points Jayson_Virissimo 04 April 2014 01:24:36AM Permalink

Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore.

-- Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson

20 points somnicule 09 April 2014 11:13:15AM Permalink

“Even if it's not your fault, it's your responsibility.”

20 points RichardKennaway 10 June 2014 08:33:27AM Permalink

The quote is true to Bacon's thought, and its expression much improved in the repetition. Here is the nearest to it I can find in Bacon's works on Gutenberg:

For this purpose, let us consider the false appearances that are imposed upon us by the general nature of the mind, beholding them in an example or two; as first, in that instance which is the root of all superstition, namely, that to the nature of the mind of all men it is consonant for the affirmative or active to affect more than the negative or privative. So that a few times hitting or presence countervails ofttimes failing or absence, as was well answered by Diagoras to him that showed him in Neptune's temple the great number of pictures of such as had escaped shipwreck, and had paid their vows to Neptune, saying, "Advise now, you that think it folly to invocate Neptune in tempest." "Yea, but," saith Diagoras, "where are they painted that are drowned?"

Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning

20 points NancyLebovitz 08 June 2014 06:47:11PM Permalink

Let your aim be to come at truth, not to conquer your opponent. So you never shall be at a loss in losing the argument, and gaining a new discovery.

Arthur Martine, quoted by Daniel Dennett

20 points John_Maxwell_IV 07 September 2014 01:56:45AM Permalink

Often, one of these CEOs will operate in a way inconsistent with Thorndike's major thesis and yet he'll end up praising the CEO anyway. In poker, we'd call this the "won, didn't it?" fallacy-- judging a process by the specific, short-term result accomplished rather than examining the long-term result of multiple iterations of the process over time.

This Amazon.com review.

20 points arundelo 04 September 2014 03:53:27PM Permalink

Hacker School has a set of "social rules [...] designed to curtail specific behavior we've found to be destructive to a supportive, productive, and fun learning environment." One of them is no feigning surprise:

The first rule means you shouldn't act surprised when people say they don't know something. This applies to both technical things ("What?! I can't believe you don't know what the stack is!") and non-technical things ("You don't know who RMS is?!"). Feigning surprise has absolutely no social or educational benefit: When people feign surprise, it's usually to make them feel better about themselves and others feel worse. And even when that's not the intention, it's almost always the effect. As you've probably already guessed, this rule is tightly coupled to our belief in the importance of people feeling comfortable saying "I don't know" and "I don't understand."

I think this is a good rule and when I find out someone doesn't know something that I think they "should" already know, I instead try to react as in xkcd 1053 (or by chalking it up to a momentary maladaptive brain activity change on their part, or by admitting that it's probably not that important that they know this thing). But I think "feigning surprise" is a bad name, because when I'm in this situation, I'm never pretending to be surprised in order to demonstrate how smart I am, I am always genuinely surprised. (Surprise means my model of the world is about to get better. Yay!)

20 points RolfAndreassen 02 September 2014 12:17:19AM Permalink

"I mean, my lord Salvara, that your own expectations have been used against you. You have a keen sense for men of business, surely. You've grown your family fortune several times over in your brief time handling it. Therefore, a man who wished to snare you in some scheme could do nothing wiser than to act the consummate man of business. To deliberately manifest all your expectations. To show you exactly what you expected and desired to see."

"It seems to me that if I accept your argument," the don said slowly, "then the self-evident truth of any legitimate thing could be taken as grounds for its falseness. I say Lukas Fehrwight is a merchant of Emberlain because he shows the signs of being so; you say those same signs are what prove him counterfeit. I need more sensible evidence than this."

-- Scott Lynch, "The Lies of Locke Lamora", page 150.

20 points dspeyer 02 October 2014 02:53:36PM Permalink

Lord Vetinari, as supreme ruler of Ankh-Morpork, could in theory summon the Archchancellor of Unseen University to his presence and, indeed, have him executed if he failed to obey.

On the other hand Mustrum Ridcully, as head of the college of wizards, had made it clear in polite but firm ways that he could turn him into a small amphibian and, indeed, start jumping around the room on a pogo stick.

Alcohol bridged the diplomatic gap nicely. Sometimes Lord Vetinari invited the Archchancellor to the palace for a convivial drink. And of course the Archchancellor went, because it would be bad manners not to. And everyone understood the position, and everyone was on their best behaviour, and thus civil unrest and slime on the carpet were averted.

-- Interesting Times, Terry Pratchett

20 points James_Miller 15 December 2014 07:01:03PM Permalink

Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why.

Paul Graham

20 points Salemicus 01 December 2014 07:50:06PM Permalink

Geographers crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect that beyond this lies nothing but sandy deserts full of wild beasts, and unapproachable bogs.

Plutarch, from Life of Theseus.

19 points Pablo_Stafforini 18 April 2009 10:00:18PM Permalink

I wish to propose for the reader’s favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

Bertrand Russell, ‘Introduction’, in Sceptical Essays, London, 1928

19 points Furcas 18 April 2009 10:11:19PM Permalink

When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.

-- Richard Dawkins

19 points infotropism 18 April 2009 09:43:52PM Permalink

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

Charles Babbage

19 points wuwei 15 June 2009 04:15:12AM Permalink

"Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do. ... Science advances whenever an Art becomes a Science. And the state of the Art advances too because people always leap into new territory once they have understood more about the old."

-- Donald Knuth

19 points anonym 30 November 2009 01:40:26AM Permalink

In general, we are least aware of what our minds do best.

— Marvin Minsky

19 points Rain 01 February 2010 12:41:11PM Permalink

As we know,

There are known knowns.

There are things

We know we know.

We also know

There are known unknowns.

That is to say

We know there are some things

We do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns,

The ones we don't know

We don't know.

-- Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

19 points [deleted] 13 February 2010 01:32:32AM Permalink

"You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right." --Randall Munroe, in the alt-text of xkcd 701

19 points RichardKennaway 01 April 2010 10:04:50PM Permalink

When I look around and think that everything's completely and utterly fucked up and hopeless, my first thought is "Am I wearing completely and utterly fucked up and hopeless-colored glasses?"

Crap Mariner (Lawrence Simon)

19 points Kaj_Sotala 02 July 2010 12:36:22AM Permalink

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny..."

-- Isaac Asimov

19 points SilasBarta 02 July 2010 05:30:41PM Permalink

I was actually starting another article that presents a solution (well, a research program) for qualia. [1] The idea is this:

The concept of qualia becomes mysterious when we have a situation in which sensory data (edit: actually, cognition of the sensory data) is incommensurable (not comparable) between beings. So the key question is, when would this situation arise?

If you have two identical robots with idential protocols, you have no qualia problem. They can directly exchange their experiences and leave no question about whether "my red" is "your red".

But here's the kicker: imagine if the robots don't use identical protocols. Imagine that they instead simply use themselves to collect and retain as much information about their experiences as physically possible. They optimize "amount I remember".

In that case, they will use every possible trick to make efficient use of what they have, no longer limited by the protocols. So they will eventually use "encoding schemes" for which there is no external rulebook; the encoding is implicitly "decompressed" by their overall functionality. They have not left a "paper trail" that someone else can use and make sense of (without significant reverse engineering effort).

In that case, you can no longer directly port one's experience over into the other's. To each other, the encoding looks like meaningless garbage. But if they're still alive, they can still achieve some level of commensurability. They can look at the same uniform surface and ask each other, "how does your photo-modality respond to this thingamajig?" [2] They can then synchronize internal experiences across each other and have a common conception of "red", even as it still may differ from what exactly the other robot is doing internally upon receiving red-data.

(And they can further constrain the environment to make sure they are talking about the same thing if e.g. one robot has tightly-coupled sensory cognition in which sensation of color varies with acoustics of the environment.)

This, I claim, is the status of humans with respect to each other: We have very similar general "body plans" but also use a no-holds-barred, standards-free method for creating (encoding) memories that puts up a severe -- but partially circumventable -- barrier to comparing internal experiences.

(Oh, and since you guys are probably still wondering: even I wouldn't fault you for failing to explain color a blind man. The best I would expect is that you can say, "Alright, you know how smelling is different from hearing? Well, seeing is as different from both of those as they are from each other.")

[1] Yes, I start a lot of articles but don't finish them ... have about three times as many in progress as I have posted.

[2] Remember: even though they have different internal experiences, they can still tell that a particular observation depends on a particular sensor by turning it on and off, and thus meaningfully talking about how their cognition relates to a particular sensor.

19 points RichardKennaway 05 October 2010 12:37:58PM Permalink

Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess.

Rene Descartes.

19 points simplicio 06 October 2010 06:57:11PM Permalink

I'm continually amused by the abundance of quotes here on LW from sundry wingnuts and theists, some of which are quite good. We've had Jack Chick, Ted Kaczynski, CS Lewis (howdya like that reference class, Lewis), GK Chesterton, and that crazy "Einstein was wrong!" guy.

Maybe being a contrarian in anything whatsoever helps one to break through the platitudes and cached thoughts that ordinary folks seem to bog down in whenever they try to think.

19 points MBlume 11 November 2010 02:12:02AM Permalink

When I was halfway through my Ph.D. I formulated a hypothesis: The proximate challenge that keeps you from graduating is that you have to write a thesis. But the ultimate challenge to getting your Ph.D. is this: You somehow have to learn to understand, deep down, that all your romantic notions about the Ph.D. are bunk, that you will be exactly the same person on the day after you get it that you were the day before, and that you need to stop waiting for the day when you feel like a god and just write something down and get on with life.

It may take you years to accept this, and it may drive you to drink, but after you get to that point you can graduate.

Only then will you be able to live with the fact that your thesis looks like crap to you. Your thesis will always look like crap to you. Either you will have figured out absolutely everything and your thesis will look incredibly boring to you, because you've moved on, or -- vastly more likely -- your thesis will look woefully incomplete because, geez, there is so much that you couldn't figure out, and you're just so stupid!

Or, most likely of all, you will think both of these things at the same time.

Similarly: Being the world's foremost expert on a particular scientific problem is a lot less exciting in real life than it seems in the movies. In fact, being on the frontier of science feels like being totally, hopelessly lost and confused. Why this came as a surprise to me I'll never know.

--mechanical_fish on Hacker News. Emphasis mine. source

19 points gwern 24 December 2010 06:08:58PM Permalink

"Claude Shannon once told me that as a kid, he remembered being stuck on a jigsaw puzzle. His brother, who was passing by, said to him: "You know: I could tell you something."

That's all his brother said.

Yet that was enough hint to help Claude solve the puzzle. The great thing about this hint... is that you can always give it to yourself."

--Manuel Blum, Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student

19 points DSimon 10 February 2011 08:20:54PM Permalink

You know in those stories where there's this immortal guy and they talk about how bored they are and how boring life is after 5000 years or whatever? I am going to call something.

I am going to call SHENANIGANS.

You know who writes those stories? MORTALS. Folks using some of their PRECIOUS, FINITE LIFE to write a made-up story in which an imaginary person keeps going on about how being immortal is actually sucky and how they're totes jealous that others get to die someday!

Ridiculous!

And kinda sad!

-- Todays Dinosaur Comic

19 points billswift 02 March 2011 07:57:01PM Permalink

Thinking allows us to anticipate ill consequences without suffering them.

Roger Peters, Practical Intelligence

19 points pjeby 02 March 2011 04:36:59PM Permalink

Given the context, I stand by my interpretation.

Er, that context doesn't sound like "I'm a puppet of the system" to me at all. It sounds more like, "don't be mad at me because I'm successful and you're not ("Actin' like a brother done did somethin' wrong cause he got his game tight"); if you have to be mad at something, be mad at the rules which elevate some and lower others ("some come up and some get done up"), by requiring us to risk much to gain great rewards ("If you out for mega cheddar, you got to go high risk"). Otherwise, work on improving your own performance ("tighten your aim"), rather than envying my success ("act like you don't see me / You wanna be me")."

Given that most of the song is bragging about his past actions and willingness to take more such actions in the future, it certainly doesn't sound like a declaration of helplessness. Heck, for a rap song, it's practically self-improvement advice. ;-)

19 points Giles 04 April 2011 06:10:57PM Permalink

Wow, anchoring! That one didn't even occur to me!

19 points Thomas 18 June 2011 08:46:31AM Permalink

Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.

  • Laurence J. Peter
19 points sketerpot 03 June 2011 08:02:11PM Permalink

Man, that site is a funny time sink. Not the best source of rationality quotes, but there are a few that sort of count.

Greatgreen: I'm going to fail :(

NumberGuy: think positively

Greatgreen: I'm going to fail :)

19 points RichardKennaway 04 July 2011 09:07:37PM Permalink

This puts in a new light Bohr's saying that "It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth." (Source.)

19 points MinibearRex 03 July 2011 07:37:40PM Permalink

"When someone pulls a gun on you, what are your options?"

"Do what they say or get shot."

Wrong. You take their gun, or pull out a bigger gun, or call their bluff, or do any one of 146 other things."

-Suits (TV show)

19 points sketerpot 14 August 2011 09:22:20PM Permalink

Our headlines are splashed with crime, yet for every criminal there are 10,000 honest decent kindly men. If it were not so, no child would live to grow up, business could not go on from day to day. Decency is not news; it is buried in the obituaries -- but it is a force stronger than crime.

-- Robert Heinlein, on selection bias. From this big list of quotes.

19 points Daniel_Burfoot 03 August 2011 03:30:15AM Permalink

It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.

-Czeslaw Milosz, "The Captive Mind" (first sentence)

19 points gwern 03 September 2011 02:34:35AM Permalink

How about http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/are-the-wealthiest-countries-the-smartest-countries.html ?

They found that intelligence made a difference in gross domestic product. For each one-point increase in a country’s average IQ, the per capita GDP was $229 higher. It made an even bigger difference if the smartest 5 percent of the population got smarter; for every additional IQ point in that group, a country’s per capita GDP was $468 higher.

Citing "Cognitive Capitalism: The impact of ability, mediated through science and economic freedom, on wealth". (PDF not immediately available in Google.)

EDIT: efm found the PDF: http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/hsw/psychologie/professuren/entwpsy/team/rindermann/publikationen/11PsychScience.pdf

Or http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/converging.pdf :

Economic models of the loss caused by small intelligence decrements due to lead in drinking water predict significant effects of even a few points decrease (Salkever 1995; Muir and Zegarac 2001). Because the models are roughly linear for small changes, they can be inverted to estimate societal effects of improved cognition. The Salkever model estimates the increase in income due to one more IQ point to be 2.1% for men and 3.6% for women. (Herrnstein and Murray 1994) estimate that a 3% increase in overall IQ would reduce the poverty rate by 25%, males in jail by 25%, high-school dropouts by 28%, parentless children by 20%, welfare recipients by 18%, and out-of-wedlock births by 25%.

EDITEDIT: high IQ predicts superior stock market investing even after the obvious controls. High IQ types are also more likely to trust the stock market enough to participate more in it

19 points Guswut 05 October 2011 05:17:00PM Permalink

Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.

Robert A. Heinlein

19 points gwern 10 October 2011 05:00:42PM Permalink
"We know this much
Death is an evil;
we have the gods'
word for it; they too
would die if death
were a good thing"

--Sappho #7; trans. Barnard (seen on http://www.nada.kth.se/%7Easa/Quotes/immortality )

19 points peter_hurford 31 October 2011 04:20:46PM Permalink

Expert estimates of probability are often off by factors of hundreds or thousands. [...] I used to be annoyed when the margin of error was high in a forecasting model that I might put together. Now I view it as perhaps the single most important piece of information that a forecaster provides. When we publish a forecast on FiveThirtyEight, I go to great lengths to document the uncertainty attached to it, even if the uncertainty is sufficiently large that the forecast won’t make for punchy headlines.

Nate Silver

19 points Alejandro1 01 November 2011 01:25:25AM Permalink

Consider an instance close to hand: arguments on the Internet. Whether the discussion is about abortion or the definition of atheism or the advisability of tax cuts, one might think that the longer the debate continues, the more ideas would emerge. In fact, the reverse is the case. A couple of scientists discussing the proper taxonomy of flesh flies will entertain many options, but thousands of people talking about God will endlessly repeat the same rhetorical moves.

Jim Harrison

19 points DSimon 05 December 2011 02:04:14AM Permalink

Unlike programs, computers must obey the laws of physics.

-- Alan J. Perlis, in the foreword to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

19 points bungula 30 November 2011 04:11:16PM Permalink

"I just read a pop-science book by a respected author. One chapter, and much of the thesis, was based around wildly inaccurate data which traced back to ... Wikipedia. To encourage people to be on their toes, I'm not going to say what book or author."

-Randall Munroe, xkcd

19 points baiter 01 December 2011 10:34:19PM Permalink

God created the Earth, but the Dutch created the Netherlands.

-- Dutch proverb

19 points HonoreDB 18 February 2012 09:45:08PM Permalink

Luck is opportunity plus preparation plus luck.

--Jane Espenson

19 points arundelo 11 February 2012 06:22:39PM Permalink

Any time you say something is "more likely" than something else, that an explanation is "improbable," or "almost certainly true," or "implausible," and so on, you are making mathematical statements. Any time something is "more" than something else, that's math.

-- Richard Carrier

19 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 15 February 2012 05:10:39AM Permalink

The Market Economics Fairy is pleased with you! She blesses you with sparkles from her wand!

19 points Maniakes 02 February 2012 12:41:11AM Permalink

"Today we will be dragoons, until we are told otherwise"

"Where are our horses, then?"

"We must imagine them."

"Imaginary horses are much slower than the other kind."

Neal Stephenson, The Confusion

19 points Woodbun 04 March 2012 12:02:38PM Permalink

"One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority'. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.)"

-Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World

19 points Random832 13 April 2012 08:41:37PM Permalink

The other day I was thinking about Discworld, and then I remembered this and figured it would make a good rationality quote...

[Vimes] distrusted the kind of person who'd take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, "Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fell on hard times," and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man's boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he'd been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!

-- Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay

19 points John_Maxwell_IV 02 April 2012 06:10:24AM Permalink

It took me years to learn not to feel afraid due to a perceived status threat when I was having a hard time figuring something out.

A good way to make it hard for me to learn something is to tell me that how quickly I understand it is an indicator of my intellectual aptitude.

19 points cousin_it 16 May 2012 11:51:40PM Permalink

The Patrician steepled his hands and looked at Vimes over the top of them.

"Let me give you some advice, Captain," he said.

"Yes, sir?"

"It may help you make some sense of the world."

"Sir."

"I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people," said the man. "You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides. "

He waved his thin hand towards the city and walked over to the window.

"A great rolling sea of evil," he said, almost proprietorially. "Shallower in some places, of course, but deeper, oh, so much deeper in others. But people like you put together little rafts of rules and vaguely good intentions and say, this is the opposite, this will triumph in the end. Amazing!" He slapped Vimes good-naturedly on the back.

"Down there," he said, "are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathesomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no. I'm sorry if this offends you,'' he added, patting the captain's shoulder, "but you fellows really need us."

"Yes, sir?" said Vimes quietly.

"Oh, yes. We're the only ones who know how to make things work. You see, the only thing the good people are good at is overthrowing the bad people. And you're good at that, I'll grant you. But the trouble is that it's the only thing you're good at. One day it's the ringing of the bells and the casting down of the evil tyrant, and the next it's everyone sitting around complaining that ever since the tyrant was overthrown no-one's been taking out the trash. Because the bad people know how to plan. It's part of the specification, you might say. Every evil tyrant has a plan to rule the world. The good people don't seem to have the knack."

"Maybe. But you're wrong about the rest!" said Vimes. "It's just because people are afraid, and alone-" He paused. It sounded pretty hollow, even to him.

He shrugged. "They're just people," he said. "They're just doing what people do. Sir."

Lord Vetinari gave him a friendly smile. "Of course, of course," he said. "You have to believe that, I appreciate. Otherwise you'd go quite mad. Otherwise you'd think you're standing on a feather-thin bridge over the vaults of Hell. Otherwise existence would be a dark agony and the only hope would be that there is no life after death. I quite understand."

(...)

After a while he made a few pencil annotations to the paper in front of him and looked up.

"I said," he said, "that you may go."

Vimes paused at the door.

"Do you believe all that, sir?" he said. "About the endless evil and the sheer blackness?"

"Indeed, indeed," said the Patrician, turning over the page. "It is the only logical conclusion."

"But you get out of bed every morning, sir?"

"Hmm? Yes? What is your point?"

"I'd just like to know why, sir."

"Oh, do go away, Vimes. There's a good fellow."

-- Terry Pratchett, "Guards! Guards!"

I really like the character of Lord Vetinari. He's like a more successful version of Quirrell from HPMOR who decided that it's okay to have cynical beliefs but idealistic aims.

19 points VKS 08 June 2012 11:13:33AM Permalink

I am reminded of a commentary on logic puzzles of a certain kind; it was perhaps in a letter to Martin Gardner, reprinted in one of his books. The puzzles are those about getting about on an island where each native either always tells the truth or always lies. You reach a fork in the road, for example, and a native is standing there, and you want to learn from him, with one question, which way leads to the village. The “correct” question is “If I asked you if the left way led to the village, would you say yes?” But why should the native’s concept of lying conform to our own logical ideas? If the native is a liar, it means he wants to fool you, and your logical trickery will not work. The best you can do is say something like “Did you hear they are giving away free beer in the village today?” and see which way the native runs. You follow him, even if he says something like “Ugh, I hate beer!” since then he probably really is lying.

  • Alexandre Borovik, quoting an unidentified colleague, paraphrasing another unidentified source, possibly Martin Gardner quoting a letter he got.
19 points fubarobfusco 03 July 2012 02:01:54AM Permalink

My model of Eliezer says: "You can launch AGI, but only once."

19 points Stabilizer 05 August 2012 11:19:45PM Permalink

I don't think winners beat the competition because they work harder. And it's not even clear that they win because they have more creativity. The secret, I think, is in understanding what matters.

It's not obvious, and it changes. It changes by culture, by buyer, by product and even by the day of the week. But those that manage to capture the imagination, make sales and grow are doing it by perfecting the things that matter and ignoring the rest.

Both parts are difficult, particularly when you are surrounded by people who insist on fretting about and working on the stuff that makes no difference at all.

-Seth Godin

19 points katydee 03 August 2012 08:35:20AM Permalink

I have always thought that one man of tolerable abilities may work great changes, and accomplish great affairs among mankind, if he first forms a good plan, and, cutting off all amusements or other employments that would divert his attention, makes the execution of that same plan his sole study and business.

-- Benjamin Franklin

19 points RichardKennaway 03 August 2012 01:45:23PM Permalink

And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident [as the destruction of China] had happened.

Now that we are informed of disasters worldwide as soon as they happen, and can give at least money with a few mouse clicks, we can put this prediction to the test. What in fact we see is a very great public response to such disasters as the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.

19 points Viliam_Bur 04 August 2012 01:50:46PM Permalink

Oscar Wilde vary most == I was scary Voldemort

It does not make sense, but it still is some evidence pointing at Oscar Wilde.

19 points [deleted] 08 August 2012 07:57:10PM Permalink

That's not what "reinventing the wheel" (when used as an insult) usually means. I guess that the inventor of the tyre was aware of the earlier types of wheel, their advantages, and their shortcomings. Conversely, the people who typically receive this insult don't even bother to research the prior art on whatever they are doing.

19 points Ezekiel 03 September 2012 05:54:26AM Permalink

Now someone just has to write a book entitled "The Rationality of Sisyphus", give it a really pretentious-sounding philosophical blurb, and then fill it with Grand Theft Robot.

19 points RomanDavis 01 September 2012 10:30:40PM Permalink

Attachment? This! Is! SIDDHARTHA!

Is that you? That's ingenious.

For more rational flavor:

Live dogmatic, die wrong, leave a discredited corpse.

This should be the summary for entangled truths:

To find the true nature of a thing, find the true nature of all other things and look at what is left over.

how to seem and be deep:

Blessed are those who can gaze into a drop of water and see all the worlds and be like who cares that's still zero information content.

Dark Arts:

The master said: "The master said: "The master said: "The master said: "There is no limit to the persuasive power of social proof.""""

More Dark arts:

One wins a dispute, not by minimising potential counterarguments' plausibility, but by maximising their length.

Luminosity:

Have you accepted your brain into your heart?

19 points prase 02 September 2012 09:35:19PM Permalink

As it is probably intended, the more reminders like this I read, the more ethical I should become. As it actually works, the more of this I read, the less I become interested in ethics. Maybe I am extraordinarily selfish and this effect doesn't happen to most, but it should be at least considered that constant preaching of moral duties can have counterproductive results.

19 points Viliam_Bur 03 September 2012 09:18:02AM Permalink

I suspect it's because authors of "ethical remainders" are usually very bad at understanding human nature.

What they essentially do is associate "ethical" with "unpleasant", because as long as you have some pleasure, you are obviously not ethical enough; you could do better by giving up some more pleasure, and it's bad that you refuse to do so. The attention is drawn away from good things you are really doing, to the hypothetical good things you are not doing.

But humans are usually driven by small incentives, by short-term feelings. The best thing our rationality can do is better align these short-term feelings with out long-term goals, so we actually feel happy when contributing to our long-term goals. And how exactly are these "ethical remainders" contributing to the process? Mostly by undercutting your short-term ethical motivators, by always reminding you that what you did was not enough, therefore you don't deserve the feelings of satisfaction. Gradually they turn these motivators off, and you no longer feel like doing anything ethical, because they convinced you (your "elephant") that you can't.

Ethics without understanding human nature is just a pile of horseshit. Of course that does not prevent other people from admiring those who speak it.

19 points thomblake 09 October 2012 08:22:02PM Permalink

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains is often more improbable than your having made a mistake in one of your impossibility proofs.

-Steven Kaas (via)

19 points Jayson_Virissimo 03 October 2012 01:22:57AM Permalink

The truth is out there, but so are the lies.

-Dana Scully, The X-Files, Season 1, Episode 17

19 points Eugine_Nier 02 October 2012 12:44:21AM Permalink

Lastly, there is an attitude not unknown in the crisis against which I should particularly like to protest. I should address my protest especially to those lovers and pursuers of Peace who, very short-sightedly, have occasionally adopted it. I mean the attitude which is impatient of these preliminary details about who did this or that, and whether it was right or wrong. They are satisfied with saying that an enormous calamity, called War, has been begun by some or all of us; and should be ended by some or all of us. To these people this preliminary chapter about the precise happenings must appear not only dry (and it must of necessity be the driest part of the task) but essentially needless and barren. I wish to tell these people that they are wrong; that they are wrong upon all principles of human justice and historic continuity: but that they are specially and supremely wrong upon their own principles of arbitration and international peace.

These sincere and high-minded peace-lovers are always telling us that citizens no longer settle their quarrels by private violence; and that nations should no longer settle theirs by public violence. They are always telling us that we no longer fight duels; and need no longer wage wars. In short, they perpetually base their peace proposals on the fact that an ordinary citizen no longer avenges himself with an axe. But how is he prevented from revenging himself with an axe? If he hits his neighbour on the head with the kitchen chopper, what do we do? Do we all join hands, like children playing Mulberry Bush, and say "We are all responsible for this; but let us hope it will not spread. Let us hope for the happy day when he shall leave off chopping at the man's head; and when nobody shall ever chop anything for ever and ever." Do we say "Let byegones be byegones; why go back to all the dull details with which the business began; who can tell with what sinister motives the man was standing there within reach of the hatchet?" We do not. We keep the peace in private life by asking for the facts of provocation, and the proper object of punishment. We do go into the dull details; we do enquire into the origins; we do emphatically enquire who it was that hit first. In short we do what I have done very briefly in this place.

-- G. K. Chesterton, "The Appetite of Tyranny", arguing against pretending to be wise

19 points Nominull 02 November 2012 03:35:17PM Permalink

I'd like everyone to be far more skeptical of those who are instinctively skeptical of math.

19 points Fyrius 07 December 2012 02:10:09PM Permalink

Long quote to make a simple point, but relevant. (Context: this is from a Star Wars novel, so it's fiction.)

A death hollow is a low point where the heavier-than-air toxic gases that roll downslope from the volcanoes can pool.

The corpse of a hundred-kilo tusker lay just within its rim, its snout only a meter below the clear air that could have saved it. Other corpses littered the ground around it: rot crows and jacunas and other small scavengers I didn't recognize, lured to their deaths by the jungle's false promise of an easy meal.

I said something along these lines to Nick. He laughed and called me a Balawai fool.

"There's no false promise," he'd said. "There's no promise at all. The jungle doesn't promise. It exists. That's all. What killed those little ruskakks wasn't a trap. It was just the way things are."

Nick says that to talk of the jungle as a person-to give it the metaphoric aspect of a creature, any creature-that's a Balawai thing. That's part of what gets them killed out here.

It's a metaphor that shades the way you think: talk of the jungle as a creature, and you start treating it like a creature. You start thinking you can outsmart the jungle, or trust it, overpower it or befriend it, deceive it or bargain with it.

And then you die.

"Not because the jungle kills you. You get it? Just because it is what it is." These are Nick's words. "The jungle doesn't do anything. It's just a place. It's a place where many, many things live... and all of them die. Fantasizing about it - pretending it's something it's not - is fatal. That's your free life lesson for the day," he told me. "Keep it in mind."

I will.

  • Mace Windu, in Shatterpoint by Matthew Stover
19 points ygert 01 January 2013 05:29:18PM Permalink

I was rereading HP Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu lately, and the quote from the Necronomicon jumped out at me as a very good explanation of exactly why cryonics is such a good idea.

(Full disclosure: I myself have not signed up for cryonics. But I intend to sign up as soon as I can arrange to move to a place where it is available.)

The quote is simply this:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.

19 points GabrielDuquette 02 February 2013 01:19:39AM Permalink

Saw kid tryin' to catch a butterfly, got me wonderin why I didn't see a butterfly trying desperately to fly away from a kid

thefolksong

19 points Vaniver 06 February 2013 11:50:07PM Permalink

Benjamin Franklin's method of learning to write well is summarized here. His version:

A question was once, somehow or other, started between Collins and me, of the propriety of educating the female sex in learning, and their abilities for study. He was of opinion that it was improper, and that they were naturally unequal to it. I took the contrary side, perhaps a little for dispute's sake. He was naturally more eloquent, had a ready plenty of words; and sometimes, as I thought, bore me down more by his fluency than by the strength of his reasons. As we parted without settling the point, and were not to see one another again for some time, I sat down to put my arguments in writing, which I copied fair and sent to him. He answered, and I replied. Three or four letters of a side had passed, when my father happened to find my papers and read them. Without entering into the discussion, he took occasion to talk to me about the manner of my writing; observed that, though I had the advantage of my antagonist in correct spelling and pointing (which I ow'd to the printing-house), I fell far short in elegance of expression, in method and in perspicuity, of which he convinced me by several instances. I saw the justice of his remark, and thence grew more attentive to the manner in writing, and determined to endeavor at improvement.

About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator. It was the third. I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try'd to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them. But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in recollecting and using them, which I thought I should have acquired before that time if I had gone on making verses; since the continual occasion for words of the same import, but of different length, to suit the measure, or of different sound for the rhyme, would have laid me under a constant necessity of searching for variety, and also have tended to fix that variety in my mind, and make me master of it. Therefore I took some of the tales and turned them into verse; and, after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again. I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language, and this encouraged me to think I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitious. My time for these exercises and for reading was at night, after work or before it began in the morning, or on Sundays, when I contrived to be in the printing-house alone, evading as much as I could the common attendance on public worship which my father used to exact on me when I was under his care, and which indeed I still thought a duty, though I could not, as it seemed to me, afford time to practise it.

19 points Kawoomba 02 March 2013 06:24:36AM Permalink

As long as others know and believe in such concepts, it is important that your child learns about them from a trustworthy source, before being introduced to such concepts by fairy-believers.

19 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 June 2013 10:00:31PM Permalink

"When two planes collided just above a runway in Tenerife in 1977, a man was stuck, with his wife, in a plane that was slowly being engulfed in flames. He remembered making a special note of the exits, grabbed his wife's hand, and ran towards one of them. As it happened, he didn't need to use it, since a portion of the plane had been sheared away. He jumped out, along with his wife and the few people who survived. Many more people should have made it out. Fleeing survivors ran past living, uninjured people who sat in seats literally watching for the minute it took for the flames to reach them." - http://io9.com/the-frozen-calm-of-normalcy-bias-486764924

19 points Pablo_Stafforini 02 June 2013 02:40:27AM Permalink

Th[e] strategy [of preferring less knowledge and intelligence due to their high cognitive costs] is exemplified by the sea squirt larva, which swims about until it finds a suitable rock, to which it then permanently affixes itself. Cemented in place, the larva has less need for complex information processing, whence it proceeds to digest part of its own brain (its cerebral ganglion). Academics can sometimes observe a similar phenomenon in colleagues who are granted tenure.

Nick Bostrom

19 points B_For_Bandana 01 June 2013 08:45:22PM Permalink

Stepan Arkadyevitch subscribed to a liberal paper, and read it. It was not extreme in those views, but advocated those principles the majority held. And though he was not really interested in science or art or politics, he strongly adhered to such views on all those subjects as the majority, including his paper, advocated, and he changed them only when the majority changed them; or more correctly, he did not change them, but they themselves imperceptibly changed in him.

Stepan Arkadyevitch never chose principles or opinions, but these principles and opinions came to him, just as he never chose the shape of a hat or coat, but took those that others wore. And, living as he did in fashionable society, through the necessity of some mental activity, developing generally in a man's best years, it was as indispensable for him to have views as to have a hat. If there was any reason why he preferred liberal views rather than the conservative direction which many of his circle followed, it was not because he found a liberal tendency more rational, but because he found it better suited to his mode of life.

The liberal party declared that everything in Russia was wretched; and the fact was that Stepan Arkadyevitch had a good many debts and was decidedly short of money. The liberal party said that marriage was a defunct institution and that it needed to be remodeled, and in fact domestic life afforded Stepan Arakadyevitch very little pleasure, and compelled him to lie, and to pretend, which was contrary to his nature. The liberal party said, or rather allowed it to be understood, that religion is only a curb on the barbarous portion of the community, and in fact Stepan Arkadyevitch could not bear the shortest prayer without pain in his knees, and he could not comprehend the necessity of all these high-sounding words about the other world when it was so very pleasant to live in this one.

  • Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

The personal is political!

19 points Roxolan 02 June 2013 06:52:39AM Permalink

Would the static look any different if it was 0% though?

19 points Username 02 July 2013 07:19:10PM Permalink

You can also turn that around.

To succeed is human; to really make a difference requires a computer.

Suffice to say that AGI is a really big lever.

19 points ShardPhoenix 02 August 2013 08:28:32AM Permalink

But, Senjougahara, can I set a condition too? A condition, or, well, something like a promise. Don't ever pretend you can see something that you can't, or that you can't see something that you can. If our viewpoints are inconsistent, let's talk it over. Promise me.

Bakemonogatari

19 points johnlawrenceaspden 08 September 2013 04:53:03PM Permalink

When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it. This is knowledge.

Confucius, Analects

19 points RolfAndreassen 03 October 2013 05:29:05AM Permalink

"I didn't go spiralling down. Because there is no abyss. There is no yawning chasm waiting to swallow us up, when we learn that there is no god, that we're animals like any other animal, that the universe has no purpose, that our souls are made of the same stuff as water and sand."

I said, "There are two thousand cultists on this island who believe otherwise."

Michael shrugged. "What do you expect from moral flat-Earthers, if not fear of falling?"

-- Greg Egan, "Distress".

19 points Strilanc 03 November 2013 06:26:02PM Permalink

Sometimes it's disturbing how good Sean Carrol is at articulating my thoughts. Especially when it pertains to, as above, the philosophy of science. Here's another:

We should not think of the big bang as the beginning of the universe. We should think of it as the end [of] our [current] understanding of what is happening.

19 points JackV 02 December 2013 04:14:39PM Permalink

I guess "unknown knowns" are the counterpoint to "unknown unknowns" -- things it never occurred to you to consider, but didn't. Eg. "We completely failed to consider the possibility that the economy would mutate into a continent-sized piano-devouring shrimp, and it turned out we were right to ignore that."

19 points lukeprog 07 January 2014 05:46:00PM Permalink

[This] paper will be something of an exercise in saying the obvious, but on this topic it is worth saying the obvious first so that less obvious things can be said from there.

David Chalmers

19 points Wesmaster160 06 January 2014 10:41:02PM Permalink

There are lots of mysteries in the world. But the truth is that maybe... those things aren't all that mysterious at all... Maybe they're just things I don't know about yet. And that's why they seem mysterious.

--Your partner in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity

19 points MattG 10 March 2014 08:54:26PM Permalink

"This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution." - Daniel Kahneman

19 points malcolmocean 01 March 2014 03:35:08PM Permalink

Allow me to express now, once and for all, my deep respect for the work of the experimenter and for his fight to wring significant facts from an inflexible Nature, who says so distinctly "No" and so indistinctly "Yes" to our theories.

— Hermann Weyl

(quoted in Science And Sanity, by Alfred Korzybski, of "the map is not the territory" fame)

19 points roryokane 18 April 2014 01:26:11AM Permalink

“If only there were irrational people somewhere, insidiously believing stupid things, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and mock them. But the line dividing rationality and irrationality cuts through the mind of every human being. And who is willing to mock a piece of his own mind?”

(With apologies to Solzhenitsyn).

– Said Achmiz, in a comment on Slate Star Codex’s post “The Cowpox of Doubt”

19 points redlizard 15 May 2014 02:58:04AM Permalink

Even with measurements in hand, old habits are hard to shake. It’s easy to fall in love with numbers that seem to agree with you. It’s just as easy to grope for reasons to write off numbers that violate your expectations. Those are both bad, common biases. Don’t just look for evidence to confirm your theory. Test for things your theory predicts should never happen. If the theory is correct, it should easily survive the evidential crossfire of positive and negative tests. If it’s not you’ll find out that much quicker. Being wrong efficiently is what science is all about.

-- Carlos Bueno, Mature Optimization, pg. 14. Emphasis mine.

19 points Torello 01 May 2014 11:33:48PM Permalink

Accident, n. An inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws.

  • Ambrose Bierce, The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary, complied and edited by Ernest J. Hopkins
19 points dspeyer 02 June 2014 06:28:30PM Permalink

I think the idea is something like: the probability of rolling 12 on fair 2d6 is 1/36, but the probability of fair dice being used when kings gamble for territory is far lower.

19 points Jayson_Virissimo 09 July 2014 04:56:08AM Permalink

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.

-- Niels Bohr, A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations

19 points lukeprog 24 September 2014 07:06:10AM Permalink

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.

J.S. Mill

19 points JQuinton 07 October 2014 04:41:37PM Permalink

When I was 16, I wanted to follow in my grandfathers footsteps. I wanted to be a tradesman. I wanted to build things, and fix things, and make things with my own two hands. This was my passion, and I followed it for years. I took all the shop classes at school, and did all I could to absorb the knowledge and skill that came so easily to my granddad. Unfortunately, the handy gene skipped over me, and I became frustrated. But I remained determined to do whatever it took to become a tradesman.

One day, I brought home a sconce from woodshop that looked like a paramecium, and after a heavy sigh, my grandfather told me the truth. He explained that my life would be a lot more satisfying and productive if I got myself a different kind of toolbox. This was almost certainly the best advice I’ve ever received, but at the time, it was crushing. It felt contradictory to everything I knew about persistence, and the importance of “staying the course.” It felt like quitting. But here’s the “dirty truth,” Stephen. “Staying the course” only makes sense if you’re headed in a sensible direction. Because passion and persistence – while most often associated with success – are also essential ingredients of futility.

That’s why I would never advise anyone to “follow their passion” until I understand who they are, what they want, and why they want it. Even then, I’d be cautious. Passion is too important to be without, but too fickle to be guided by. Which is why I’m more inclined to say, “Don’t Follow Your Passion, But Always Bring it With You.”

19 points alienist 11 December 2014 04:05:50AM Permalink

Why is Publius Scipio Nasica a "good guy"? His opposition to Carthage's destruction was based on his idea that without a strong external enemy Rome will descend into decadence.

Well, it did.

19 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 December 2014 10:34:14PM Permalink

I think all the work here is done by determining what actually constitutes a precipice.

18 points CronoDAS 20 May 2009 04:22:05AM Permalink

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." - Peter Drucker

18 points steven0461 22 July 2009 08:55:27PM Permalink

“Do as I say, not as I do:” this is considered the very motto of hypocrisy. But does anyone believe that having a good character is as easy as wanting it? If virtue is as difficult as other excellences, there must be few or none who are perfectly virtuous. If the rest of us are not even to talk about virtue or express admiration for it, how shall anyone improve? A hypocrite is one who claims virtue beyond what he possesses, not one who recommends virtue beyond what he claims. If a man’s principles are no better than his character, it is less likely to be a sign of an exemplary character than a sign of debased principles.

-- Mark Thompson

18 points RichardKennaway 22 October 2009 11:48:39PM Permalink

"There is a superstition in avoiding superstition, when men think to do best if they go furthest from the superstition formerly received."

-- Francis Bacon

18 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 October 2009 04:16:51PM Permalink

Moral language persuades best when opinions are not yet formed, which is why writers of children’s literature can get away with saying things like, “Mr. Billings was an awful, horrible man with a heart of stone.” This sounds like a line from a children’s book because it employs persuasive methods that, though appropriate for children, would insult the intelligence of most adult readers.

Most moral discourse is the conversational equivalent of children’s literature. Disputants speak to one another—or, rather, at one another—as if their interlocutors failed to pay adequate attention on the day elementary morality was explained. Unaware of the projective nature of value, they marvel at their opponents’ blindness, their utter failure to see what is so perfectly obvious. Not knowing what else to do, they scold their opponents as if they were children, and scold them as if they were belligerent children when they fail to respond the first time.

What to do about this? Take a cue from good writers. Stick to the facts. Keep evaluative language to a minimum, and get rid of the most overtly judgmental, moralistic language.

-- Joshua Greene, The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality And What To Do About It

18 points MichaelGR 07 January 2010 09:52:09PM Permalink

If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first four sharpening the axe. - Abraham Lincoln

18 points anonym 01 February 2010 06:51:49AM Permalink

Thinking is skilled work. It is not true that we are naturally endowed with the ability to think clearly and logically--without learning how, or without practicing.... People with untrained minds should no more expect to think clearly and logically than people who have never learned and never practiced can expect to find themselves good carpenters, golfers, bridge-players, or pianists.

Alfred Mander -- Logic for the Millions

18 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 February 2010 12:40:01AM Permalink

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to close it again on something solid.

-- G.K. Chesterton

18 points Rain 01 April 2010 08:48:00PM Permalink

Any technique, however worthy and desirable, becomes a disease when the mind is obsessed with it.

-- Bruce Lee

18 points Thomas 02 April 2010 04:52:20PM Permalink

Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: 'My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.' The stranger is a theologian.

  • Denis Diderot
18 points Rain 01 April 2010 08:47:41PM Permalink

The word agnostic is actually used with the two distinct meanings of personal ignorance and intrinsic unknowability in the same context. They are distinguished when necessary with a qualifier.

WEAK agnosticism: I have no fucking idea who fucked this shit up.

STRONG agnosticism: Nobody has any fucking idea who fucked this shit up.

There is a certain confusion with weak atheism which could (and frequently does) arise, but that is properly reserved for the category of theological noncognitivists,

WEAK atheism: What the fuck do you mean with this God shit?

STRONG atheism: Didn't take any God to fuck this shit up.

which is different again from weak theism.

WEAK theism: Somebody fucked this shit up.

STRONG theism: God fucked this shit up.

An interesting cross-categorical theological belief not easily represented above is

DEISM: God set this shit up and it fucked itself.

-- Snocone, in a Slashdot post

18 points Rain 01 May 2010 02:22:03PM Permalink

We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock. The significance of our lives and our fragile realm derives from our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning.

-- Carl Sagan

18 points matt 03 June 2010 12:36:49PM Permalink

Silas, you're making strong arguments but mixing in emotion that makes it harder for your interlocutor to change their mind.

18 points Rain 02 July 2010 12:05:14AM Permalink

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.

-- Plutarch

18 points MarcTheEngineer 02 July 2010 03:41:55PM Permalink

"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."

Robert A. Heinlein

18 points Kazuo_Thow 03 August 2010 03:56:18AM Permalink

... the history of mathematics is a history of horrendously difficult problems being solved by young people too ignorant to know that they were impossible.

-- Freeman Dyson, Birds and Frogs

18 points Kyre 02 September 2010 05:40:12AM Permalink

Comic Quote Minus 13

-- Ryan Armand

Sometimes I see something that just seems to hit the bullseye deeply in the centre, and sticks there, quivering.

18 points teageegeepea 02 September 2010 02:13:29AM Permalink

I've linked to a quote from Daniel Ellsberg at Overcoming Bias, but it seemed relevant enough here to excerpt the bits that caught my eye:

First, you'll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn't, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn't even guess

[...]

you will forget there ever was a time when you didn't have it, and you'll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don't....and that all those other people are fools

[...]

you'll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information [...] But that takes a while to learn. In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn't have these clearances. Because you'll be thinking as you listen to them: 'What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?' And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening.

[...]

You will deal with a person who doesn't have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you'll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You'll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you'll become something like a moron. You'll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.

18 points Jayson_Virissimo 01 September 2010 07:50:13AM Permalink

There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.

-G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

18 points cata 06 October 2010 07:25:11PM Permalink

One of my mentors once gave me a list of obvious things to check when stuff doesn't work. Funny, years later I still need this list:

  1. It worked. No one touched it but you. It doesn't work. It's probably something you did.

  2. It worked. You made one change. It doesn't work. It's probably the change you made.

  3. It worked. You promoted it. It doesn't work. Your testing environment probably isn't the same as your production environment.

  4. It worked for these 10 cases. It didn't work for the 11th case. It was probably never right in the first place.

  5. It worked perfectly for 10 years. Today it didn't work. Something probably changed.

edw519, Hacker News, on debugging.

I always need that list, too.

18 points gjm 07 October 2010 01:46:49AM Permalink

I think you may have misunderstood the point Dawkins was making. It wasn't "if you're in an aeroplane, you aren't entitled to denigrate the society whose achievements made that possible". It was "If you're in an aeroplane, you aren't entitled to claim that all truth is relative, because the fact that the aeroplane stays in the air is dependent on a very particular set of notions about truth, which demonstrably work better than their rivals -- as demonstrated by the fact that our aeroplanes actually fly."

Some context that may be helpful.

18 points anonym 03 November 2010 06:46:09AM Permalink

If you haven’t found something strange during the day, it hasn’t been much of a day.

John Archibald Wheeler

18 points MichaelGR 03 January 2011 09:31:43PM Permalink

The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.

-Nassim Nicholas Taleb

18 points aausch 07 February 2011 04:25:37PM Permalink

As they say in Discworld, we are trying to unravel the Mighty Infinite using a language which was designed to tell one another where the fresh fruit was.

-- Terry Pratchett

18 points steven0461 06 February 2011 09:16:23PM Permalink

Some in their discourse desire rather commendation of wit, in being able to hold all arguments, than of judgment, in discerning what is true; as if it were a praise to know what might be said, and not what should be thought.

Francis Bacon

18 points TheOtherDave 02 February 2011 02:51:27AM Permalink

Sometimes not even then.

18 points Thomas 01 February 2011 10:45:33PM Permalink

Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Give a man a fishing rod and he'll sell it for a fish.

  • ???
18 points scav 03 March 2011 10:28:44AM Permalink

EDMUND

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,

when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit

of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our

disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as

if we were villains by necessity; fools by

heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and

treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,

liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of

planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,

by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion

of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish

disposition to the charge of a star!

Wm. Shakspere King Lear

18 points Psy-Kosh 03 March 2011 04:28:25AM Permalink

More precisely, an uncertain value of 'dead'.

18 points Nominull 03 March 2011 04:00:43AM Permalink

The classical theorists resemble Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world who, discovering that in experience straight lines apparently parallel often meet, rebuke the lines for not keeping straight as the only remedy for the unfortunate collisions which are occurring. Yet, in truth, there is no remedy except to throw over the axiom of parallels and to work out a non-Euclidean geometry.

-John Maynard Keynes, on models of unemployment that seemed nice on paper but did not measure up to the real world.

18 points soreff 04 April 2011 10:10:52PM Permalink

Does that mean one can answer "Do you believe in magic?" with "No, but I believe in the existence of opaque proprietary APIs"?

18 points wedrifid 04 April 2011 01:03:35PM Permalink

People commonly use the word "procrastination" to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working.

What exactly would Paul Graham call reading Paul Graham essays online when I should be working?

18 points Kutta 04 April 2011 05:29:14PM Permalink

The correct question to ask about functions is not „What is a rule?” or „What is an association?” but „What does one have to know about a function in order to know all about it?” The answer to the last question is easy – for each number x one needs to know the number f(x) (…)

– M. Spivak: Calculus

18 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 May 2011 07:25:14PM Permalink

So there wasn't anything especially related to explicit rationality in the quote. Or rather, it wasn't extraordinarily rational enough to make up for its extraordinary politicalness.

18 points advancedatheist 01 June 2011 08:13:16PM Permalink

From Space Viking, by H. Beam Piper:

"Young man," Harkaman reproved, "the conversation was between Lord Trask and myself. And when somebody makes a statement you don't understand, don't tell him he's crazy. Ask him what he means. What do you mean, Lord Trask?"

Source:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20728/20728-h/20728-h.htm

18 points Desrtopa 03 July 2011 11:01:09PM Permalink

Of course, lots of those things, including "pull out a bigger gun," fall under the practical category of "get shot."

18 points lukeprog 01 September 2011 12:04:59PM Permalink

The rule that human beings seem to follow is to engage the brain only when all else fails - and usually not even then.

David Hull, Science and Selection: Essays on Biological Evolution and the Philosophy of Science

18 points Vladimir_Nesov 06 October 2011 12:05:04AM Permalink

Truths were carved from the identical wood as were lies — words — and so sank or floated with equal ease. But since truths were carved by the World, they rarely appeased Men and their innumerable vanities.

-- Drusas Achamian, in "The White-Luck Warrior" by R. Scott Bakker

18 points ShardPhoenix 03 October 2011 08:33:20AM Permalink

He wanted to find fault with the idea but couldn't quite do it on the spur of the moment. He filed it away for later discrediting

The Magician King by Lev Grossman

18 points brazzy 03 October 2011 10:33:23AM Permalink

Or a mathematician.

18 points RobinZ 01 November 2011 10:01:44PM Permalink

Arlene died a few hours after I got there. A nurse came in to fill out the death certificate, and went out again. I spent a little more time with my wife. Then I looked at the clock I had given her seven years before, when she had first become sick with tuberculosis. It was something which in those days was very nice: a digital clock whose numbers would change by turning around mechanically. The clock was very delicate and often stopped for one reason or another - I had to repair it from time to time - but I kept it going for all those years. Now, it had stopped once more - at 9:22, the time on the death certificate!

I remembered the time I was in my fraternity house at MIT when the idea came into my head completely out of the blue that my grandmother was dead. Right after that there was a telephone call, just like that. It was for Pete Bernays - my grandmother wasn't dead. So I remembered that, in case somebody told me a story that ended the other way. I figured that such things can sometimes happen by luck - after all, my grandmother was very old - although people might think they happened by some sort of supernatural phenomenon.

Arlene had kept this clock by her bedside all the time she was sick, and now it stopped the moment she died. I can understand how a person who half believes in the possibility of such things, and who hasn't got a doubting mind - especially in a circumstance like that - doesn't immediately try to figure out what happened, but instead explains that no one touched the clock, and there was no possibility of explanation by normal phenomena. The clock simply stopped. It would become a dramatic example of these fantastic phenomena.

I saw that the light in the room was low, and then I remembered that the nurse had picked up the clock and turned it toward the light to see the face better. That could easily have stopped it.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, "Los Alamos from Below" (third chapter of Part 3)

18 points Xom 01 November 2011 08:14:06PM Permalink

In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.

~ Orwell

18 points Unnamed 01 December 2011 05:50:07PM Permalink

Gray, K., Wegner, D. M. (2008). The sting of intentional pain. Psychological Science, 19(12), 1260-1262. pdf

18 points TheOtherDave 02 December 2011 04:21:12PM Permalink

...or another way of saying "it all adds up to normal."

18 points NancyLebovitz 04 January 2012 10:04:36PM Permalink

Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.

Francis Bacon

18 points cousin_it 09 January 2012 04:32:27PM Permalink

Chu-p’ing Man studied the art of killing dragons under Crippled Yi. It cost him all the thousand pieces of gold he had in his house, and after three years he'd mastered the art, but there was no one who could use his services. - Chuang Tzu

So he decided to teach others the art of kiling dragons. - René Thom

18 points quinox 01 January 2012 01:46:52AM Permalink

"Is it hard?"

"Not if you have the right attitudes. It’s having the right attitudes that’s hard."

-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

18 points GLaDOS 06 January 2012 09:42:21AM Permalink

In questions of this appalling magnitude, I find the best way to "overcome bias" is often to find perspectives which seem to make each answer obvious. Once we recognize that both A and B are obviously true, and A is inconsistent with B, we are in the right mindset for actual thought.

--Mencius Moldbug

18 points gwern 01 January 2012 01:28:47AM Permalink

"When picking fruit, an excellent first choice is the low-hanging ladderfruit. It is especially delicious."

--Frank Adamek

18 points tingram 01 January 2012 12:39:11AM Permalink

Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.

--Bruce Lee

18 points David_Gerard 05 January 2012 08:50:56AM Permalink

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov

"While developing his theory on the centres of origin of cultivated plants, Vavilov organized a series of botanical-agronomic expeditions, collected seeds from every corner of the globe, and created in Leningrad the world's largest collection of plant seeds. This seedbank was diligently preserved even throughout the 28-month Siege of Leningrad, despite starvation; one of Nikolai's assistants starved to death surrounded by edible seeds."

18 points RobinZ 04 February 2012 12:17:40AM Permalink

I’ve very often made mistakes in my physics by thinking the theory isn’t as good as it really is, thinking that there are lots of complications that are going to spoil it — an attitude that anything can happen, in spite of what you’re pretty sure should happen.

Richard Feynman, in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, chapter entitled "Mixing Paints".

18 points scmbradley 02 February 2012 01:41:43PM Permalink

Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which isn't there

-E.H. Gombrich

18 points Oscar_Cunningham 01 February 2012 09:51:09PM Permalink

Paradoxes, like optical illusions, are often used by psychologists to reveal the inner workings of the mind, for paradoxes stem from (and amplify) dormant clashes among implicit sets of assumptions.

Judea Pearl (Causality)

18 points Konkvistador 05 February 2012 04:29:03PM Permalink

The tendency toward generalization doesn’t bother me in an of itself, rather, I’m focused on whether the proposition is true. But the hypocrisy gets tiresome sometimes, as people will fluidly switch from a cognitive style which accepts generalization to one which rejects it. A stereotype is often a generalization whose robustness you don’t want to accept. Negative generalities need context when they’re unpalatable, but no qualification is necessary when their truth is congenial.

--Razib Khan, here

18 points Stephanie_Cunnane 10 March 2012 10:32:20PM Permalink

Some environments are worse than irregular. Robin Hogarth described "wicked" environments, in which professionals are likely to learn the wrong lessons from experience. He borrows from Lewis Thomas the example of a physician in the early twentieth century who often had intuitions about patients who were about to develop typhoid. Unfortunately, he tested his hunch by palpating the patient's tongue, without washing his hands between patients. When patient after patient became ill, the physician developed a sense of clinical infallibility. His predictions were accurate--but not because he was exercising professional intuition!

--Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow

18 points ShardPhoenix 06 March 2012 09:55:47AM Permalink

Past me is always so terrible, even when I literally just finished being him.

18 points Will_Newsome 02 March 2012 09:55:32AM Permalink

If you want to know how decent people can support evil, find a mirror.

Mencius Moldbug, A gentle introduction to Unqualified Reservations (part 2) (yay reflection!)

18 points Alejandro1 02 March 2012 01:36:55AM Permalink

The reason you can't rigidly separate positive from normative economics is that you can't rigidly separate claims of fact from claims of value in general. Human language is too laden with thick concepts that mix the two. The claim that someone is a "slut" or a "bitch", for example, melds together factual claims about a woman's behavior with a lot of deeply embedded normative concepts about what constitutes appropriate behavior for a woman. The claim that financial markets are "efficient" is both an effort to describe their operation and a way of valorizing them. The idea of a "recession" or "full employment" or "potential output" all embed certain ideas about what would constitute a normal arrangement of human economic activity (...) You could try to rigorously purge your descriptions of the economy of anything that vaguely smells of a thick moral concept, but you'd find yourself operating with an impoverished vocubulary unable to describe human affairs in any kind of reasonable way.

--Matt Yglesias

18 points gwern 01 March 2012 05:58:13PM Permalink

"Hope always feels like it's made up of a set of reasons: when it's just sufficient sleep and a few auspicious hormones."

--Alain de Botton

18 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 March 2012 08:10:32AM Permalink

With the great historical exception of quantum mechanics.

18 points VKS 03 April 2012 07:51:55AM Permalink

Pedantry and mastery are opposite attitudes toward rules. To apply a rule to the letter, rigidly, unquestioningly, in cases where it fits and in cases where it does not fit, is pedantry. ... To apply a rule with natural ease, with judgment, noticing the cases where it fits, and without ever letting the words of the rule obscure the purpose of the action or the opportunities of the situation, is mastery.

  • George Pólya, How to Solve It
18 points Multiheaded 06 April 2012 08:20:31PM Permalink

[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades.

However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarized version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time," Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.

(George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf)

(well, we have videogames now, yet... we gotta make them better! more vicseral!)

18 points Spurlock 02 April 2012 03:32:25PM Permalink

Interesting article about a study on this effect:

Dweck’s researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score—by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning—by about 20 percent.

Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

18 points Eugine_Nier 01 April 2012 07:40:33PM Permalink

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

G. K. Chesterton

18 points fubarobfusco 05 May 2012 09:04:29PM Permalink

Another quote from the same piece, just before that para:

Once you start to think of mistakes as deterministic rather than random, as caused by "bugs" (incorrect understanding or incorrect procedures) rather than random inaccuracy, a curious thing happens.

You stop thinking of people as "stupid."

I really, really like this. Thanks for posting it!

To elucidate the "bug model" a bit, consider "bugs" not in a single piece of software, but in a system. The following is drawn from my professional experience as a sysadmin for large-scale web applications, but Ive tried to make it clear:

Suppose that you have a web server; or better yet, a cluster of servers. It's providing some application to users — maybe a wiki, a forum, or a game. Most of the time when a query comes in from a user's browser, the server gives a good response. However, sometimes it gives a bad response — maybe it's unusually slow, or it times out, or it gives an error or an incomplete page instead of what the user was looking for.

It turns out that if you want to fix these sorts of problems, considering them merely to be "flakiness" and stopping there is not enough. You have to actually find out where the errors are coming from. "Flaky web server" is an aggregate property, not a simple one; specifically, it is the sum of all the different sources of error, slowness, and other badness — the disk contention; the database queries against un-indexed tables; the slowly failing NIC; the excess load from the web spider that's copying the main page ten times a second looking for updates; the design choice of retrying failed transactions repeatedly, thus causing overload to make itself worse.

There is some fact of the matter about which error sources are causing more failures than others, too. If 1% of failed queries are caused by a failing NIC, but 90% are caused by transactions timing out due to slow database queries to an overloaded MySQL instance, then swapping the NIC out is not going to help much. And two flaky websites may be flaky for completely unrelated reasons.

Talking about how flaky or reliable a web server is lets you compare two web servers side-by-side and decide which one is preferable. But by itself it doesn't let you fix anything. You can't just point at the better web server and tell the worse one, "Why can't you be more like your sister?" — or rather, you can, but it doesn't work. The differences between the two do matter, but you have to know which differences matter in order to actually change things.

To bring the analogy back to human cognitive behavior: yes, you can probably measure which of two people is "more rational" than the other, or even "more intelligent". But if someone wants to become more rational, they can't do it by just trying to imitate an exemplary rational person — they have to actually diagnose what kinds of not-rational they are being, and find ways to correct them. There is no royal road to rationality; you have to actually struggle with (or work around) the specific bugs you have.

18 points john_ku 05 May 2012 12:48:46PM Permalink

If the difficulty of a physiological problem is mathematical in essence, ten physiologists ignorant of mathematics will get precisely as far as one physiologist ignorant of mathematics and no further.

Norbert Wiener

18 points maia 03 May 2012 09:12:09PM Permalink

"If God gives you lemons, you find a new God."

-- Powerthirst 2: Re-Domination

18 points Mark_Eichenlaub 02 May 2012 05:29:43AM Permalink

I don't think we can get much more specific without starting to be mistaken.

Paul Graham, "Is It Worth Being Wise?" http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html

18 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 June 2012 10:07:31PM Permalink

Upvoted for the "related".

18 points Stabilizer 05 July 2012 08:53:15AM Permalink

A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren't flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.

-Marvin Minsky

Thinking of your brain (and yourself) like an instrument to played might be useful for instrumental rationality.

18 points Alicorn 05 August 2012 07:18:30PM Permalink

My knee had a slight itch. I reached out my hand and scratched the knee in question. The itch was relieved and I was able to continue with my activities.

-- The dullest blog in the world

18 points [deleted] 11 September 2012 10:07:40AM Permalink

To use an analogy, if you attend a rock concert and take a box to stand on then you will get a better view. If others do the same, you will be in exactly the same position as before. Worse, even, as it may be easier to loose your balance and come crashing down in a heap (and, perhaps, bringing others with you).

-- Iain McKay et al., An Anarchist FAQ, section C.7.3

18 points RobinZ 04 September 2012 01:01:39AM Permalink

I don't think he's punished for disobeying, I think he's compelled to act. He can think about doing something else, he can want to do something else, he can decide to do something else ... but what he does is push the boulder.

18 points gwern 01 September 2012 07:14:46PM Permalink

Citation for this was hard; the closest I got was Etzioni's 1962 The Hard Way to Peace, pg 110. There's also a version in the 1998 Linus Pauling on peace: a scientist speaks out on humanism and world survival : writings and talks by Linus Pauling; this version goes

I have made a modern formulation of the Golden Rule: "Do unto others 20 percent better than you would be done by - the 20 percent is to correct for subjective error."

18 points RobinZ 03 September 2012 09:03:23PM Permalink

In other words: expect Lady Mode, not Lady Mean.

18 points taelor 14 September 2012 07:16:44AM Permalink

Oh, right, Senjōgahara. I've got a great story to tell you. It's about that man who tried to rape you way back when. He was hit by a car and died in a place with no connection to you, in an event with no connection to you. Without any drama at all. [...] That's the lesson for you here: You shouldn't expect your life to be like the theater.

-- Kaiki Deishū, Episode 7 of Nisemonogatari.

18 points mrglwrf 11 September 2012 07:00:03PM Permalink

You know those people who say "you can use numbers to show anything" and "numbers lie" and "I don't trust numbers, don't give me numbers, God, anything but numbers"? These are the very same people who use numbers in the wrong way.

"Junior", FIRE JOE MORGAN

18 points RichardKennaway 01 September 2012 04:03:28PM Permalink

Nothing can be soundly understood

If daylight itself needs proof.

Imām al-Ḥaddād (trans. Moṣṭafā al-Badawī), "The Sublime Treasures: Answers to Sufi Questions"

18 points RobinZ 02 September 2012 10:31:15PM Permalink

xkcd reference.

Not to mention the remarks of Mark Twain on a fundraiser he attended once:

Well, Hawley worked me up to a great state. I couldn't wait for him to get through [his speech]. I had four hundred dollars in my pocket. I wanted to give that and borrow more to give. You could see greenbacks in every eye. But he didn't pass the plate, and it grew hotter and we grew sleepier. My enthusiasm went down, down, down - $100 at a time, till finally when the plate came round I stole 10 cents out of it. [Prolonged laughter.] So you see a neglect like that may lead to crime.

18 points GabrielDuquette 03 October 2012 04:07:44PM Permalink

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man misunderstand correlation versus causation.

cogentanalysis

18 points roland 16 November 2012 06:08:58PM Permalink

In the way that skepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many ways consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.

--Carl Sagan

18 points arborealhominid 19 November 2012 01:49:02AM Permalink

If I have a Grand Unified Theory Of Everything, it's this: I believe that people always do things that make sense to them. Hard as it is to believe with all the hurting out there, almost nobody hurts others just to be a jerk. So if you want to change human behavior on a grand scale, you can't tell people "stop being a jerk." You have to dissect and then recreate their models of the world until being a jerk doesn't make sense.

Cliff Pervocracy

18 points [deleted] 02 November 2012 11:38:01AM Permalink

An astronomer, a physicist and a mathematician are on a train in Scotland. The astronomer looks out of the window, sees a black sheep standing in a field, and remarks, "How odd. Scottish sheep are black." "No, no, no!" says the physicist. "Only some Scottish sheep are black." The mathematician rolls his eyes at his companions' muddled thinking and says, "In Scotland, there is at least one sheep, at least one side of which appears to be black from here."

(This version is from Wikipedia.)

18 points Nick_Tarleton 07 November 2012 07:56:04AM Permalink

"Because they were hypocrites," Finkle-McGraw said, after igniting his calabash and shooting a few tremendous fountains of smoke into the air, "the Victorians were despised in the late twentieth century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefandous conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves-they took no moral stances and lived by none."

"So they were morally superior to the Victorians-" Major Napier said, still a bit snowed under. "-even though-in fact, because-they had no morals at all." There was a moment of silent, bewildered head-shaking around the copper table.

"We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy," Finkle-McGraw continued. "In the late-twentieth-century Weltanschauung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception-he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy. Of course, most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it's a spirit-is-willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing."

"That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code," Major Napier said, working it through, "does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code."

"Of course not," Finkle-McGraw said. "It's perfectly obvious, really. No one ever said that it was easy to hew to a strict code of conduct. Really, the difficulties involved-the missteps we make along the way are what make it interesting. The internal, and eternal, struggle, between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power."

— Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age

18 points Raemon 04 November 2012 07:21:06PM Permalink

"Oh, sorry, I have this condition where I don't see or hear anything I disagree with."

"I had no idea that being human was a disease."

"A bad one! Everyone who contracts it eventually dies!"

Something Positive

18 points RobinZ 04 November 2012 04:08:11AM Permalink

I would like to upvote the Feynman quote. I am not interested in upvoting the Stephenson quote. I think it would be better if these quotes were in separate comments, as recommended in the post.

18 points SaidAchmiz 02 December 2012 08:34:25PM Permalink

It is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if the cat is not there.

— Confucius, allegedly (quoted in The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed)

Edit: The rationality relevance might need some explanation. The way I've seen this aphorism used is this: it's sometimes hard to distinguish between a task that's achievable but very difficult (and that it therefore might make sense to spend time/effort on), and a task that is impossible (and thus is a complete waste of time/effort).

If you spend some time searching for the cat in the dark room, you might not find it. Is that because finding it is difficult (after all, this is what you might quite plausibly expect, if you assume that the cat is there), or because the cat is not there and you're wasting your time?

18 points Mestroyer 17 December 2012 01:50:10PM Permalink

If you are hiding in a basement from the Nazis, this isn't true. If you are going to be tortured for the whereabouts of people hiding from the Nazis, you should also avert your eyes and avoid finding out where they are hiding. The fact that instrumental and epistemic rationality are sometimes at odds is another tragic truth.

18 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 18 December 2012 08:57:26AM Permalink

Just remember, most people most of the time are not about to learn the location of a refugee just before being tortured by Nazis.

18 points Jayson_Virissimo 02 January 2013 10:06:26AM Permalink

It is not an epistemological principle that one might as well hang for a sheep as for a lamb.

-Bas van Fraassen, The Scientific Image

18 points David_Gerard 02 January 2013 12:52:06AM Permalink

In general, though, that argument is the Galileo gambit and not a very good argument.

18 points CronoDAS 06 February 2013 08:15:45PM Permalink

Real artists ship.

-- Steve Jobs

(The Organization Formerly Known as SIAI had this problem until relatively recently. Eliezer worked, but he never published anything.)

18 points simplicio 04 February 2013 11:35:34PM Permalink

You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

I don't think this is empirically true, though. Suppose I believe strongly that violent crime rates are soaring in my country (Canada), largely because I hear people talking about "crime being on the rise" all the time, and because I hear about murders on the news. I did not reason myself into this position, in other words.

Then you show me some statistics, and I change my mind.

In general, I think a supermajority of our starting opinions (priors, essentially) are held for reasons that would not pass muster as 'rational,' even if we were being generous with that word. This is partly because we have to internalize a lot of things in our youth and we can't afford to vet everything our parents/friends/culture say to us. But the epistemic justification for the starting opinions may be terrible, and yet that doesn't mean we're incapable of having our minds changed.

18 points jsbennett86 13 February 2013 11:34:58PM Permalink

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.

Ozy Frantz - Brain Chemicals are not Fucking Magic

18 points Kawoomba 06 February 2013 10:26:25AM Permalink

A sharp knife is nothing without a sharp eye.

Klingon proverb.

18 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 February 2013 05:25:27AM Permalink

Good things come to those who steal them.

-- Magnificent Sasquatch

18 points Kaj_Sotala 03 February 2013 10:16:24PM Permalink

According to a single counter-intuitive (and therefore more likely to make headlines), unreplicated study.

18 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 February 2013 11:44:25PM Permalink

Studies show that people who try to run behind a car frequently fail to keep up, while nobody who runs in front of a car fails more than once.

18 points Cyan 08 April 2013 05:27:30AM Permalink

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.

- Kung Fu-tzu

18 points Vaniver 01 April 2013 03:16:14PM Permalink

The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills.

-- Albert Einstein

18 points twanvl 09 April 2013 11:45:37AM Permalink

If the climate skeptics want to win me over, then the way for them to do so is straightforward: they should ignore me, and try instead to win over the academic climatology community, majorities of chemists and physicists, Nobel laureates, the IPCC, National Academies of Science, etc. with superior research and arguments.

-- Scott Aaronson on areas of expertise

18 points pjeby 05 May 2013 05:24:06AM Permalink

Nowadays many educated people treat reinforcement theory as if it were something not terribly important that they have known and understood all along. In fact most people don't understand it, or they would not behave so badly to the people around them.

-- Karen Pryor, Dont Shoot the Dog!: The New Art of Teaching and Training

18 points Woodbun 05 June 2013 05:27:29AM Permalink

...the machines will do what we ask them to do and not what we ought to ask them to do. In the discussion of the relation between man and powerful agencies controlled by man, the gnomic wisdom of the folk tales has a value far beyond the books of our sociologists.

18 points OrphanWilde 03 June 2013 09:58:56AM Permalink

Ah, David Wong. A few movies in the post-9/11 era begin using terrorism and asymmetric warfare as a plot point? Proof that Hollywood no longer favors the underdog. Meanwhile he ignores... Daredevil, Elektra, V for Vendetta, X-Men, Kickass, Punisher, and Captain America, just to name the superhero movies I've seen which buck the trend he references, and within the movies he himself mentions, he intentionally glosses over 90% of the plots in order to make his point "stick." In some cases (James Bond, Sherlock Holmes) he treats the fact that the protagonists win as the proof that they weren't the underdog at all (something which would hold in reality but not in fiction, and a standard which he -doesn't- apply when it suits his purpose, a la his comments about the first three Die Hard movies being about an underdog whereas the most recent movie isn't).

Yeah. Not all that impressed with David Wong. His articles always come across as propaganda, carefully and deliberately choosing what evidence to showcase. And in this case he's deliberately treating the MST3K Mantra as some kind of propaganda-hiding tool? Really?

These movies don't get made because Hollywood billionaires don't want to make movies about underdogs, as he implies - Google "underdog movie", this trope is still a mainstay of movies. They get made because they sell. To the same people consuming movies like The Chronicles of Riddick or The Matrix Trilogy. Movies which revolve around badass underdogs.

(Not that this directly relates to your quote, but I find David Wong to be consistently so deliberate about producing propaganda out of nothing that I cannot take him seriously as a champion of rationality.)

18 points Manfred 03 June 2013 06:15:21AM Permalink

Yes, it wouldn't be peaked at about 3 GHz. Since television only goes up to about 1 GHz, this means more noise at higher channels after accounting for other sources.

18 points Arkanj3l 05 August 2013 03:04:37AM Permalink

From Jacques Vallee, Messengers of Deception...

'Then he posed a question that, obvious as it seems, had not really occurred to me: “What makes you think that UFOs are a scientific problem?”

I replied with something to the effect that a problem was only scientific in the way it was approached, but he would have none of that, and he began lecturing me. First, he said, science had certain rules. For example, it has to assume that the phenomena it is observing is natural in origin rather than artificial and possibly biased. Now the UFO phenomenon could be controlled by alien beings. “If it is,” added the Major, “then the study of it doesn’t belong to science. It belongs to Intelligence.” Meaning counterespionage. And that, he pointed out, was his domain. *

“Now, in the field of counterespionage, the rules are completely different.” He drew a simple diagram in my notebook. “You are a scientist. In science there is no concept of the ‘price’ of information. Suppose I gave you 95 per cent of the data concerning a phenomenon. You’re happy because you know 95 per cent of the phenomenon. Not so in intelligence. If I get 95 per cent of the data, I know that this is the ‘cheap’ part of the information. I still need the other 5 percent, but I will have to pay a much higher price to get it. You see, Hitler had 95 per cent of the information about the landing in Normandy. But he had the wrong 95 percent!”

“Are you saying that the UFO data we us to compile statistics and to find patterns with computers are useless?” I asked. “Might we be spinning our magnetic tapes endlessly discovering spurious laws?”

“It all depends on how the team on the other side thinks. If they know what they’re doing, there will be so many cutouts between you and them that you won’t have the slightest chance of tracing your way to the truth. Not by following up sightings and throwing them into a computer. They will keep feeding you the information they want you to process. What is the only source of data about the UFO phenomenon? It is the UFOs themselves!”

Some things were beginning to make a lot of sense. “If you’re right, what can I do? It seems that research on the phenomenon is hopeless, then. I might as well dump my computer into a river.”

“Not necessarily, but you should try a different approach. First you should work entirely outside of the organized UFO groups; they are infiltrated by the same official agencies they are trying to influence, and they propagate any rumour anyone wants to have circulated. In Intelligence circles, people like that are historical necessities. We call them ‘useful idiots’. When you’ve worked long enough for Uncle Sam, you know he is involved in a lot of strange things. The data these groups get is biased at the source, but they play a useful role.

“Second, you should look for the irrational, the bizarre, the elements that do not fit...Have you ever felt that you were getting close to something that didn’t seem to fit any rational pattern yet gave you a strong impression that it was significant?”'

18 points gwern 06 August 2013 09:58:41PM Permalink

The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Productivity of American Mathematicians comes to mind as an interesting recent natural experiment where the floodgate of Russian mathematical talent was unleashed after the collapse of the USSR and many of them successfully rose in America despite academic math being a zero-sum game; consistent with meritocracy.

18 points arborealhominid 05 September 2013 12:08:47AM Permalink

Another good one from the same source:

Truth can be sliced and analyzed in 100 different ways and it will always remain true.

Falsehood on the other hand can only be sliced a few different ways before it becomes increasingly obvious that it is false.

18 points Eugine_Nier 04 October 2013 02:37:33AM Permalink

IF you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or being hated, don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;

If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

If--, by Rudyard Kipling

18 points Bundle_Gerbe 01 November 2013 11:26:39AM Permalink

The theme of this book, then, must be the coming to consciousness of uncertain inference. The topic may be compared to, say, the history of visual perspective. Everyone can see in perspective, but it has been a difficult and long-drawn-out effort of humankind to become aware of the principles of perspective in order to take advantage of them and imitate nature. So it is with probability. Everyone can act so as to take a rough account of risk, but understanding the principles of probability and using them to improve performance is an immense task.

James Franklin, The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal

18 points NancyLebovitz 04 November 2013 01:36:55PM Permalink

Any man can learn to learn from the wise once he can find them: but learn to learn from a fool and all the world’s your faculty.

--John Ciardi

18 points BlueSun 02 December 2013 03:16:14PM Permalink

The "known knowns" quote got made fun of a lot, but I think it's really good out of context:

"There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know."

Also, every time I think of that I try to picture the elusive category of "unknown knowns" but I can't ever think of an example.

18 points shminux 03 December 2013 10:56:59PM Permalink

Scott Aaronson after looking into the JFK assassination conspiracy evidence:

Before I started reading, if someone forced me to guess, maybe I would’ve assigned a ~10% probability to some sort of conspiracy. Now, though, I’d place the JFK conspiracy hypothesis firmly in Moon-landings-were-faked, Twin-Towers-collapsed-from-the-inside territory. Or to put it differently, “Oswald as lone, crazed assassin” has been added to my large class of “sanity-complete” propositions: propositions defined by the property that if I doubt any one of them, then there’s scarcely any part of the historical record that I shouldn’t doubt.

18 points Eugine_Nier 03 December 2013 01:00:37AM Permalink

All appearances to the contrary, the managers involved in this debacle aren't dumb. But they come from a background -- law and politics -- where arguments often take the place of reality, and plausibility can be as good as, or better than, truth.

What engineers know that lawyers and politicians often don't is that in the world of things, as opposed to people, there's no escaping the sharp teeth of reality. But in law, and especially politics, inconvenient facts are merely inconvenient, something to be rationalized away.

Glenn Reynolds

18 points hairyfigment 13 March 2014 08:51:11PM Permalink

A: Maybe an Air Nomad Avatar will understand where I'm coming from...(simulates Yangchen)...

Y: Avatar Aang, I know that you are a gentle spirit. And the monks have taught you well. But this isn't about you. This is about the world.

A: But the monks taught me I had to detach myself from the world so my spirit could be free!

Y: ...Here is my wisdom for you: selfless duty calls for you to sacrifice your own spiritual needs, and do whatever it takes to protect the world.

  • Avatar: The last airbender
18 points CCC 07 March 2014 10:40:21AM Permalink

The demon is not just lying at random - the demon is lying with the purpose of getting a certain reaction (in this case, getting the human to subscribe to the philosophy of materialism). The original quote is advice on how to use the human's cognitive biases against him, in order to better achieve that goal.

The point of the quote isn't materialism. That could be replaced with any other philosophy, quite easily. The point of the quote is that, for many people, subscribing to a philosophy isn't about whether that philosophy is true at all; it's more about whether that philosophy is popular, or cool, or daring.

The point isn't to mock the demon, or the materialist. The point is to highlight a common human cognitive mistake.

18 points Benito 02 April 2014 06:15:24PM Permalink

“I propose we simply postpone the worrisome question of what really has a mind, about what the proper domain of the intentional stance is. Whatever the right answer to that question is—if it has a right answer—this will not jeopardize the plain fact that the intentional stance works remarkably well as a prediction method in these other areas, almost as well as it works in our daily lives as folk psychologists dealing with other people. This move of mine annoys and frustrates some philosophers, who want to blow the whistle and insist on properly settling the issue of what a mind, a belief, a desire is before taking another step. Define your terms, sir! No, I won’t. That would be premature. I want to explore first the power and the extent of application of this good trick, the intentional stance. Once we see what it is good for, and why, we can come back and ask ourselves if we still feel the need for formal, watertight definitions. My move is an instance of nibbling on a tough problem instead of trying to eat (and digest) the whole thing from the outset. “Many of the thinking tools I will be demonstrating are good at nibbling, at roughly locating a few “fixed” points that will help us see the general shape of the problem. In Elbow Room (1984a), o compared my method to the sculptor’s method of roughing out the form in a block of marble, approaching the final surfaces cautiously, modestly, working by successive approximation. Many philosophers apparently cannot work that way and have to secure (or so they think) the utterly fixed boundaries of their problems and possible solutions before they can venture any hypotheses.”

-Daniel Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Chapter 18 "The Intentional Stance" [Bold is original]

Reminded me of the idea of 'hacking away at the edges'.

18 points Lumifer 01 April 2014 05:13:57PM Permalink

if I was able to overcome this aversion and math was as fun as playing video games

Good video games are designed to be fun, that is their purpose. Math, um, not so much.

18 points James_Miller 01 April 2014 10:57:23PM Permalink

“Anything outside yourself, this you can see and apply your logic to it." She said. "But it’s a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, those things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan. We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual, deep-seated thing that’s really chewing on us.”

Jessica speaking to Thufir Hawat in Frank Herbert's Dune

18 points tristanhaze 04 May 2014 01:37:28AM Permalink

For my part, I've found the economic notions of opportunity cost and marginal utility to be like this.

18 points Jayson_Virissimo 09 July 2014 05:05:00AM Permalink

If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance.

-- Orville Wright, http://wrightbrothers.info/quotes.php

18 points James_Miller 06 July 2014 05:37:35PM Permalink

Show me a republic, ancient or modern, in which there have been no decorations. Some people call them baubles. Well, it is by such baubles that one leads men.

Napoleon who would have approved of gamification.

18 points Skeptityke 07 July 2014 03:12:34PM Permalink

The part after it was about how bad guys tend to be like people who have overspecialized in a less useful skill. You will never be able to beat them at what they do, but you don't need to. Said in the context of a very under-powered protagonist. Time for the rest of the quote, though it makes less and less sense as time goes on.

Everyone who will ever oppose you in life is a crazy, burly dude with a spoon, and you will never be able to outspoon them. Even the powerful people, they’re just spooning harder and more vigorously than everyone else, like hungry orphan children eating soup. Except the soup is power. I’ll level with you here: I have completely lost track of this analogy.

18 points RichardKennaway 04 September 2014 04:17:53PM Permalink

I dunno. I feel like "I don't understand how anyone could believe X" is a much, much better position to take on issues than "I know exactly why my opponents disagree with me! It is because they are stupid and evil!" The former at least opens the possibility that your opponents believe things for good reasons that you don't understand -- which is often true!

I am imagining the following exchange:

"I don't understand how anyone could believe X!"

"Great, the first step to understanding is noticing that you don't understand. Now, let me show you why X is true..."

I suspect that most people saying the first line would not take well to hearing the second.

18 points gjm 03 October 2014 12:52:17PM Permalink

Quite right, too.

Being able to take paper and pens home from the workplace to work is clearly useful and beneficial to the business. It's plainly not worth a business's time to track such things punctiliously unless its employees are engaging in large-scale pilfering (e.g., selling packs of printer paper) because the losses are so small. It's plainly not worth an employee's time to track them either for the same reason. (And similarly not worth an employee's time worrying about whether s/he has brought papers or pens into work from home and left them there.)

The optimal policy is clearly for no one to worry about these things except in cases of large-scale pilfering.

(In large businesses it may be worth having a formal rule that just says "no taking things home from the office" and then ignoring small violations, because that makes it feasible to fight back in cases of large-scale pilfering without needing a load of lawyering over what counts as large-scale. Even then, the purpose of that rule should be to prevent serious violations and no one should feel at all guilty about not keeping track of what paper and pens are whose. I suspect the actual local optimum in this vicinity is to have such a rule and announce explicitly that no one will be looking for, or caring about, small benign violations. But that might turn out to spoil things legally in the rare cases where it matters.)

Lest I be thought self-serving, I will remark that I'm pretty sure my own net flux of Stuff is very sizeably into, not out of, work.

18 points skeptical_lurker 03 December 2014 10:54:49PM Permalink

... the lateral thinker who finds a new route forward, the hedonist who bungee jumps off the edge, and the engineer who builds a bridge.

(Of course, there might not be another route to find, the bungee jumping could get you killed, and a bridge might not be cost-effective, but I'd like to at least consider a third way out of a dilemma)

17 points wuwei 15 June 2009 05:59:42AM Permalink

"One can measure the importance of a scientific work by the number of earlier publications rendered superfluous by it."

-- David Hilbert

17 points RichardKennaway 15 June 2009 05:48:24AM Permalink

"The seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency."

-- Alhazen (Abū Alī al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haitham)

17 points Kaj_Sotala 10 August 2009 07:22:53PM Permalink

I forget if I've posted this before, but:

"I've noticed that the press tends to be quite accurate, except when they're writing on a subject I know something about." -- Keith F. Lynch

17 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 August 2009 03:50:52AM Permalink

Consequentialism: The belief that doing the right thing makes the world a better place.

-- DanielLC

17 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 August 2009 04:07:44AM Permalink

Freedom is understood in contrast to its various opposites. I can be free as opposed to being presently coerced. I can be free as opposed to being under some other person's general control. I can be free as opposed to being subject to delusions or insanity. I can be free as opposed to being ruled by the state in denial of ordinary personal liberties. I can be free as opposed to being in jail or prison. I can be free as opposed to living under unusually heavy personal obligations. I can be free as opposed to being burdened by bias or prejudice. I can even be free (or free spirited) as opposed to being governed by ordinary social conventions. The question that needs to be asked, and which hardly ever is asked, is whether I can be free as opposed to being causally determined. Given that some kind of causal determinism is presupposed in the very concept of human action, it would be odd if this were so. Why does anyone think that it is?

-- David Hill

17 points Patrick 23 October 2009 12:33:43AM Permalink

"Thus Aristotle laid it down that a heavy object falls faster than a light one does. The important thing about this idea is not that he was wrong, but that it never occurred to Aristotle to check it." Albert Szent-Györgyi de Nagyrápolt, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

17 points RichardKennaway 22 October 2009 11:51:02PM Permalink

"Everything is open to questioning. That does not mean all answers are equally valid."

-- Kelvin Throop

17 points roland 22 October 2009 07:12:43PM Permalink

People often lack the discipline to adhere to a superior strategy that doesn't "feel" right. Reasoning in a way that sometimes "feels" wrong takes discipline.

-- Michael Bishop, Epistemology and the psychology of human judgement

17 points Sniffnoy 14 February 2010 07:15:51AM Permalink

On parsimony:

If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.

--John von Neumann, at the first national meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery

17 points dclayh 01 February 2010 10:50:42PM Permalink

That is not dead which can eternal lie,/ And with strange aeons even Death may die.

—H.P. Lovecraft, clearly talking about cryonic preservation

17 points roland 03 March 2010 05:43:15AM Permalink

...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

-- Herbert Simon 1971

17 points Kaj_Sotala 01 March 2010 06:28:11PM Permalink

(posted in the right thread this time)

People constantly ignore my good advice by contributing to the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, CARE, and public radio all in the same year--as if they were thinking, "OK, I think I've pretty much wrapped up the problem of heart disease; now let's see what I can do about cancer."

--- Steven Landsburg (original link by dclayh)

17 points MichaelGR 05 April 2010 06:35:25AM Permalink

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."

-- Clay Shirky

17 points Rain 01 April 2010 08:47:27PM Permalink

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.

-- Jack Handey's Deep Thoughts

17 points Rain 01 May 2010 02:21:41PM Permalink

I've always believed that the mind is the best weapon.

-- John Rambo, Rambo: First Blood Part II

17 points JenniferRM 03 May 2010 02:25:22AM Permalink

The first person to come to mind for me was Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege who is famous for basically inventing symbolic logic (specifically, predicate logic with quantified variables). He spent an enormous amount of time working on the thesis that the results of mathematics flow rather directly from little more than the rules of logic plus set theory. He aimed to provide a constructive proof of this thesis.

Bertrand Russell discovered a logical flaw (now called Russell's paradox) in Frege's first book containing the constructive proof when the second book in his series was already in press and communicated it to Frege. Russell wrote of Frege's reaction in a bit of text I recall reading in a textbook on symbolic logic but found duplicated in this document with more details from which I quote:

As I think about acts of integrity and grace, I realise there is nothing in my knowledge to compare with Frege's dedication to truth. His entire life's work was on the verge of completion, much of his work had been ignored to the benefit of men infinitely less capable, his second volume was about to be published, and upon finding that his fundamental assumption was in error, he responded with intellectual pleasure clearly submerging any feelings of personal disappointment. It was almost superhuman and a telling indication of that of which men are capable if their dedication is to creative work and knowledge instead of cruder efforts to dominate and be known.

I don't think science generally lives up to its own ideals... but as I grow older and more cynical I find myself admiring the mere fact that it has those ideals and that every so often I find examples of people living up to them :-)

17 points sketerpot 04 August 2010 07:10:17PM Permalink

If you do experiments and you're always right, then you aren't getting enough information out of those experiments. You want your experiment to be like the flip of a coin: You have no idea if it is going to come up heads or tails. You want to not know what the results are going to be.

-- Peter Norvig, in an interview about being wrong. When I saw this, I thought it sounded a lot like entropy pruning in decision trees, where you don't even bother asking questions that won't make you update your probability estimates significantly. Then I remembered that Norvig was the co-author of the AI textbook that I had learned about decision trees from. Interesting interview.

17 points Randaly 04 September 2010 03:01:09AM Permalink

"Test Your God.... Test[s] cannot harm a God of Truth, but will destroy fakes. Fake gods refuse test[s]."

~ Dr. Gene Ray

17 points RichardKennaway 01 September 2010 07:30:30AM Permalink

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

17 points Alicorn 05 October 2010 09:46:49PM Permalink

I think the local version would be something like, "May my strength as a rationalist give me the ability to discern what I can and cannot change, and the determination to make a desperate effort at the latter when remaining uncertainty allows that this has the highest expected utility."

17 points NihilCredo 06 October 2010 06:01:07PM Permalink

...

...

...reason #7 I love LessWrong: when they want to improve audience comprehension, people have to translate from English to mathematical formulas instead of the reverse.

17 points RichardKennaway 05 October 2010 12:41:05PM Permalink

On the same theme as the previous one:

I've begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It's there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, a lovely day. There is no mystery, no one asks for money, I don't have to dress up, and there is no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to "God" are all answered at about the same 50-percent rate.

George Carlin

17 points [deleted] 03 November 2010 05:21:09AM Permalink

Getting caught up in style and throwing away victory is something for the lower ranks to do. Captains can't even think about doing such a carefree thing. Don't try to be a good guy. It doesn't matter who owes who. From the instant they enter into a war, both sides are evil.

Related to: Politics, Protection

17 points Alicorn 12 December 2010 03:31:23AM Permalink

"Look! Can your fortunetelling explain that?!"

"Ha! Can your science explain why it rains?"

"YES! Yes, it can!"

  • Avatar: the Last Airbender
17 points DSimon 03 January 2011 06:18:39PM Permalink

All Wars are Follies, very expensive, and very mischievous ones. When will Mankind be convinced of this, and agree to settle their Differences by Arbitration? Were they to do it, even by the Cast of a Dye, it would be better than by Fighting and destroying each other.

-- Benjamin Franklin

17 points Kutta 03 January 2011 09:18:45AM Permalink

It’s neither our economy or our multimedia that I’m most concerned about, but whether the kids are lively and in good shape. I mean, as long as the people are doing fine it doesn’t matter if the nation is in poverty.

-- Hayao Miyazaki

17 points purpleposeidon 04 February 2011 08:50:11AM Permalink

The following reminded me of Arguments as Soldiers:

Statistics for the enemy. Anecdotes for the friend. -- Zach Weiner

I'm sorry to have not found his blog sooner.

17 points Kazuo_Thow 02 February 2011 06:05:08AM Permalink

Apathy on the individual level translates into insanity at the mass level.

-- Douglas Hofstadter

17 points Jayson_Virissimo 02 February 2011 12:10:49AM Permalink

Statistics is applied philosophy of science.

A. P. Dawid

17 points sketerpot 02 February 2011 05:01:00AM Permalink

Go not to the elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.

-- Frodo Baggins, conveying one of the many wise sayings that Hobbits chuck around daily. The elf he was talking with thought it was hilarious, but refused to simply agree or disagree with it.

17 points gwern 01 February 2011 05:52:07PM Permalink

"I submit that claims about God are of this latter sort. There’s simply no reason to take them more seriously than one does claims about witches or ghosts. The idea that one needs powerful philosophical theories to settle such issues I like to call the “philosophy fallacy.”

We will see that people are particularly prey to it in religious discussions, both theist and atheist alike; indeed, atheists often get trapped into doing far more, far riskier philosophy than they need."

--Georges Rey, Meta-atheism: Religious Avowal as Self-deception (2009)

(First version seen on http://www.strangedoctrines.com/2008/09/risky-philosophy.html but quote from an expanded paper.)

17 points mwengler 02 February 2011 08:14:22PM Permalink

Better to teach the child the difference between programming a computer, proving a theorem, and writing an essay.

17 points fubarobfusco 02 March 2011 11:25:09PM Permalink

This point was made long ago by J.L. Austin in (I believe) Sense and Sensibilia. Austin points out several things about "real", among them that "real" is substantive-hungry: You can't answer "Is such-and-so real?" without asking first, "Is it a real what?"

A decoy duck is not a real duck, but it is a real decoy -- whereas a rubber duck is not a real decoy; and a decoy coot might be mistaken for a decoy duck if you know little of waterfowl, but isn't a real decoy duck.

There is no sense of "real" that applies to all substantives that we would describe as real. The word makes sense only in contrast to specific ways of being unreal: being a forgery, a toy, an hallucination, a fictional character, an exaggeration, a case of mistaken identity, a doctored picture, etc. It is these negative concepts, and not the concept of "real", that actually do all the explanatory work. "Real" is both ambiguous and negative.

17 points Risto_Saarelma 12 June 2011 05:30:47PM Permalink

The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke remarked that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Clarke was referring to the fantastic inventions we might discover in the future or in our travels to advanced civilizations. However, the insight also applies to self-perception. When we turn our attention to our own minds, we are faced with trying to understand an unimaginably advanced technology. We can't possibly know (let alone keep track of) the tremendous number of mechanical influences on our behavior because we inhabit an extraordinarily complicated machine. So we develop a shorthand, a belief in the causal efficacy of our conscious thoughts. We believe in the magic of our own causal agency.

  • Daniel M. Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will
17 points servumtuum 06 June 2011 09:37:47PM Permalink

The essence of wisdom is to remain suspicious of what you want to be true.

-Jon K. Hart

17 points phaedrus 02 June 2011 12:26:26AM Permalink

‎"We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself." --Chris Mooney

17 points MichaelGR 02 June 2011 06:36:26PM Permalink

"The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in war."

--WSJ article about Navy SEALs

17 points Jonathan_Graehl 05 June 2011 02:40:05AM Permalink

No man has wit enough to reason with a fool.

Proyas (fictional character - author: R. Scott Bakker)

17 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 September 2011 09:57:56AM Permalink

mental model of Michael Vassar saysThis strikes me as a nerdism. If you don't find less intelligent people easier to manipulate, you must be working on sympathetic models of them instead of causal ones. I expect that experience would cure this, and after a few months of empirical practice and updating on the task of reasoning with fools, you would find it was actually easier to get them to do whatever you wanted - if you could manage to actually try a lot of different things and notice what worked, instead of being incredulous and indignant at their apparent reasoning errors./Vassar

17 points sketerpot 14 August 2011 08:38:14PM Permalink

From Wintersmith, on the ability to notice confusion rather than rationalizing:

"And now I shall tell you something vitally important. It is the secret of my long life.”

Ah, thought Tiffany, and she leaned forward.

“The important thing,” said Miss Treason, “is to stay the passage of the wind. You should avoid rumbustious fruits and vegetables. Beans are the worst, take it from me.”

“I don’t think I understand—” Tiffany began.

“Try not to fart, in a nutshell.”

“In a nutshell I imagine it would be pretty unpleasant!” said Tiffany nervously. She couldn’t believe she was being told this.

“This is no joking matter,” said Miss Treason. “The human body only has so much air in it. You have to make it last. One plate of beans can take a year off your life. I have avoided rumbustiousness all my days. I am an old person and that means what I say is wisdom!” She gave the bewildered Tiffany a stern look. “Do you understand, child?”

Tiffany’s mind raced. Everything is a test! “No,” she said. “I’m not a child and that’s nonsense, not wisdom!”

The stern look cracked into a smile. “Yes,” said Miss Treason. “Total gibberish. But you’ve got to admit it’s a corker, all the same, right? You definitely believed it, just for a moment? The villagers did last year. You should have seen the way they walked about for a few weeks! The strained looks on their faces quite cheered me up!"

17 points SilasBarta 03 August 2011 02:27:52AM Permalink

About the intersection of math and politics through the mind of a child, Bob Murphy relates this story about his six-year-old son Clark:

Clark: Daddy why can’t there be a biggest number?

Bob: Because no matter how big a number is, there is always a bigger number.

Clark (puzzled): Why?

Bob: OK, let’s say a guy comes up to me and says, “Hey, I know the biggest number!” Then I would say, “Oh yeah, what is it?” And the guy would tell me, “It’s a billion billion.” But then I would just add 1 to it, and say, “A ha, a billion billion and 1 is a bigger number. So you made a mistake when you said you thought of the biggest number.”

Clark (after a pause): What guy are you talking about?

Bob: Just any guy. I’m saying, if anybody tries to think of the biggest number, I’ll always be able to do that trick–where I add 1 to it–so they can’t do it. They’ll always lose.

Clark: What if a girl asks you?

[I ran through the same thing with a girl asking me...]

Clark: OK I want to tell the story!

Bob: Sure go ahead.

Clark: So what if a guy came up to me and said, “Hey Clark, I know the biggest number! It’s 100 billion!” Then I would say, “No, 100 billion and 1 is bigger! You’re wrong!”

Bob: Right, good job. So he didn’t really think of the biggest number after all, did he?

Clark: No.

Bob: And you can always do that.

Clark: OK let me tell it again with Sam [name possibly changed--a kid from his class].

Bob: OK.

Clark: So what if Sam came up to me and said, “Hey Clark, I know the biggest number. It’s 50 googol.” But I would say, “No Sam you’re wrong! 50 googol and 1 is bigger!” But Sam gets mad so he would start shouting and say, “I DID TOO THINK OF THE BIGGEST NUMBER CLARK!!”

And I know we're not supposed to quote ourselves, but you rarely get an opportunity to use a line like this:

I guess you already tried explaining to Clark that the cardinality of the natural numbers is invariant under transformations of largest number proponent?

17 points CronoDAS 24 September 2011 10:56:02PM Permalink

If we don't change our direction, we're likely to end up where we're headed.

-- Chinese proverb

17 points RobertLumley 03 October 2011 03:47:41PM Permalink

What good fortune for those in power that people do not think.

Adolph Hitler

17 points Thomas 02 October 2011 09:38:21AM Permalink

If the Coyote orders all those gizmos then why doesn't he just order food?

  • Unknown
17 points James_Miller 02 October 2011 03:09:21AM Permalink

Three proposed derogatory labels from Dilbert creator Scott Adams:

Labelass: A special kind of idiot who uses labels as a substitute for comprehension.

Binarian: A special kind of idiot who believes that all people who hold a different view from oneself have the same views as each other.

Masturdebator: One who takes pleasure in furiously debating viewpoints that only exist in the imagination.

17 points ArisKatsaris 01 November 2011 11:01:13PM Permalink

If I let go of a hammer on a planet that has a positive gravity, I need not see it fall to know that it has in fact fallen. [...] Gentlemen, human beings have characteristics just as inanimate objects do.

-Spock, Court Martial, Star Trek: The Original Series

17 points Nominull 31 October 2011 05:29:21PM Permalink

Writers of all stripes enjoy engaging in the most cynical readings of human behavior because they think it makes them appear hyper-rational. But in fact here is a perfect example of how trying to achieve that makes you irrational. Human emotion is real. It is an observable phenomenon. It observably influences behavior. Therefore to fail to account for it when discussing coupling and relationships is the opposite of cold rationality; it is in fact a failure of empiricism.

-L'Hote on Kate Bolick's "All the Single Ladies"

17 points Dr_Manhattan 02 December 2011 03:09:16PM Permalink

Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions - Daniel Kahneman

17 points RichardKennaway 09 December 2011 10:25:17AM Permalink

"With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."

John von Neumann

17 points gwern 01 January 2012 01:28:20AM Permalink

"Don't ask whether predictions are made, ask whether predictions are implied."

--Steven Kaas

17 points gwern 01 January 2012 07:58:04PM Permalink

"The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death"

--1 Corinthians 15:26

(I wonder what Eliezer would've made of it - as far as I know, he never read Deathly Hallows and so never read about the tombstone.)

17 points gwern 01 February 2012 03:38:37PM Permalink

"Our moods are so unstable because we are only chemicals in a saline solution - not entries in a ledger or words in a book."

--Alain de Botton

17 points gwern 01 February 2012 07:03:13PM Permalink

To explain: the Outside View is a powerful tool, but one sometime should reject it based on even more powerful factors from the Inside View, where one can be sure that one is in a new (or at least, different) reference class from the one being used in the Outside View. Of course, one may want to reject it based just on one like one's views...

This sometimes leads to a back-and-forth series of arguments over burdens of proof dubbed 'reference class tennis' where the two sides argue over what is the correct reference class which will either support or undermine a particular claim (is AGI in the reference class of "additional incremental innovation", which would undermine claims of significant danger/reward, or entire "regime changes", which would support the same claims? This is the game of reference class tennis which Eliezer and Hanson are arguing their way through in the link and related links).

Kaas is humorously parodying a side using an Outside View involving the Neo-Sumerian Empire, replying to the other side making the commonsense position - yours too ('what lessons?') - that the quasi-literate agricultural Neo-Sumerian Empire from 3000 years ago is not in any reference class that matters to us, and implying that the speaker is writing the other side off as rationalizing and excuse-seeking. The parody works because we agree that in this case, the Outside View is not applicable or its weak evidence is overwhelmed by Inside View evidence about how different the Neo-Sumerian Empire is from any contemporary societies or organizations or processes, and this reminds us that often Outside View arguments simply may not work (eg. arguments from evolutionary psychology, which draw from time periods and societies even more distant from and less like our own than the Neo-Sumerian Empire).

And now that I've explained it entirely, I can no longer find it funny. I hope you're happy.

17 points Vaniver 15 February 2012 12:10:30AM Permalink

From the blog post:

No event organizer or ticket seller has solved scalping completely.

It seems pretty easy to solve: auction off all the tickets.

17 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 15 February 2012 10:02:20AM Permalink

It improves the chance that further Market Economics will happen by rewarding people who produce it. It goes without saying that Market Economics is a terminal value to the Market Economics Fairy. If she was just interested in profit, she'd be starting a hedge fund instead of going around telling people about Market Economics.

17 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 11 February 2012 06:56:28PM Permalink

Latest news: Burning Man blames game theory for their failure to understand basic supply and demand, hugely underprices tickets, 2/3 of buyers left in cold, Market Economics Fairy cries.

17 points NexH 06 March 2012 02:19:52PM Permalink

When it comes to rare probabilities, our mind is not designed to get things quite right. For the residents of a planet that may be exposed to events no one has yet experienced, that is not good news.

 --Daniel Kahneman, *Thinking, fast and slow*
17 points Stabilizer 01 March 2012 09:29:18AM Permalink

To be a good diagnostician, a physician needs to acquire a large set of labels for diseases, each of which binds an idea of the illness and its symptoms, possible antecedents and causes, possible developments and consequences, and possible interventions to cure or mitigate the illness. Learning medicine consists in part of learning the language of medicine. A deeper understanding of judgments and choices also requires a richer vocabulary than is available in everyday language. The availability of a diagnostic label for [the] bias... makes it easier to anticipate, recognize and understand.

-Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

17 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 March 2012 02:15:31AM Permalink

"I don't know if we've sufficiently analyzed the situation if we're thinking storming Azkaban is a solution."

17 points Stephanie_Cunnane 05 April 2012 04:09:46AM Permalink

I believe I am accurate in saying that educators too are interested in learnings which make a difference. Simple knowledge of facts has its value. To know who won the battle of Poltava, or when the umpteenth opus of Mozart was first performed, may win $64,000 or some other sum for the possessor of this information, but I believe educators in general are a little embarrassed by the assumption that the acquisition of such knowledge constitutes education. Speaking of this reminds me of a forceful statement made by a professor of agronomy in my freshman year in college. Whatever knowledge I gained in his course has departed completely, but I remember how, with World War I as his background, he was comparing factual knowledge with ammunition. He wound up his little discourse with the exhortation, "Don't be a damned ammunition wagon; be a rifle!"

-Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy (1961)

17 points EditedToAdd 02 April 2012 04:51:17PM Permalink

But, the hard part comes after you conquer the world. What kind of world are you thinking of creating?

Johan Liebert, Monster

17 points Rhwawn 06 April 2012 07:54:30PM Permalink

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and, in effect, increases the mental power of the race.

Alfred North Whitehead, “An Introduction to Mathematics” (thanks to Terence Tao)

17 points Alejandro1 03 April 2012 05:01:58PM Permalink

‘I’m exactly in the position of the man who said, ‘I can believe the impossible, but not the improbable.’’

‘That’s what you call a paradox, isn’t it?’ asked the other.

‘It’s what I call common sense, properly understood,’ replied Father Brown. ’It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don’t understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it’s only incredible.

-G. K. Chesterton, The Curse of the Golden Cross

17 points dvasya 01 April 2012 04:01:25PM Permalink

Our minds contain processes that enable us to solve problems we consider difficult. "Intelligence" is our name for whichever of those processes we don't yet understand.

Some people dislike this "definition" because its meaning is doomed to keep changing as we learn more about psychology. But in my view that's exactly how it ought to be, because the very concept of intelligence is like a stage magician's trick. Like the concept of "the unexplored regions of Africa," it disappears as soon as we discover it.

-- Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind

17 points John_Maxwell_IV 08 May 2012 01:13:43AM Permalink

I have personally purchased Toyotas, Hondas, and a Volkswagen this way. Some of my students at NYU have taken up this method and bought cars this way too... They and I have always beat the price quoted on the Internet with this method.

He further claims to have once saved $1,200 over the price quoted on the Internet for a car he negotiated for his daughter, who was 3000 miles away at the time.

Apparently being a game theory expert does not prevent one from being a badass negotiator.

Why did you guess otherwise?

17 points MichaelGR 03 May 2012 05:32:32PM Permalink

“Smart people learn from their mistakes. But the real sharp ones learn from the mistakes of others.”

― Brandon Mull, Fablehaven

17 points baiter 01 May 2012 01:07:24PM Permalink

My function is to raise the possibility, 'Hey, you know, some of this stuff might be bullshit.'

-- Robert Anton Wilson

17 points CaveJohnson 13 June 2012 03:00:40PM Permalink

In general, nothing is more difficult than not pretending to understand.

--Nicolás Gómez Dávila, source

17 points James_Miller 01 June 2012 04:34:51PM Permalink

“My other piece of advice, Copperfield,” said Mr. Micawber, “you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (HT Cafe Hayek.)

17 points Nominull 08 July 2012 08:01:12PM Permalink

I never felt I was studying the stupidity of mankind in the third person. I always felt I was studying my own mistakes.

-Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics

17 points TheOtherDave 03 July 2012 07:47:23PM Permalink

Doing the same thing over and over again in the hopes of eventually getting a different result is, I'm told, one definition of insanity.

It is also, in my experience, an important aspect of physical therapy.

17 points Alicorn 06 August 2012 04:40:11AM Permalink

Since Mischa died, I've comforted myself by inventing reasons why it happened. I've been explaining it away ... But that's all bull. There was no reason. It happened and it didn't need to.

-- Erika Moen

17 points cousin_it 16 August 2012 05:35:13PM Permalink

If cats looked like frogs we’d realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are.

-- Terry Pratchett, "Lords and Ladies"

17 points Zvi 01 September 2012 09:10:38PM Permalink

Subway ad: "146 people were hit by trains in 2011. 47 were killed."

Guy on Subway: "That tells me getting hit by a train ain't that dangerous."

  • Nate Silver, on his Twitter feed @fivethirtyeight
17 points radical_negative_one 02 September 2012 04:25:22PM Permalink

I'm guessing that even if you survive, your quality of life is going to take a hit. Accounting for this will probably bring our intuitive expectation of harm closer to the actual harm.

17 points Konkvistador 04 September 2012 08:39:45AM Permalink

Neither side of the road is inherently superior to the other, so we should all choose for ourselves on which side to drive. #enlightenment

--Kate Evans on Twitter

17 points wedrifid 03 October 2012 11:21:26AM Permalink

And most of all, if someone says it is none of your business, prove them wrong.

I'm going to adopt at different social strategy and not be the obnoxiously nosy guy with no boundaries. Some things I'm curious about really aren't my business and actively seeking to uncover information that people try to keep secret is usually a personal (and often legal) violation. The terms 'industrial espionage' and 'stalking' both spring to mind.

Curiosity didn't kill the cat. The redneck with the gun killed it for tresspassing.

17 points Jay_Schweikert 01 October 2012 08:27:21PM Permalink

Frodo: Those that claim to oppose the Enemy would do well not to hinder us.

Faramir: The Enemy? (turns over body of an enemy soldier) His sense of duty was no less than yours, I deem. You wonder what his name is, where he came from, and if he was really evil at heart. What lies or threats led him on this long march from home, and if he'd not rather have stayed there... in peace. War will make corpses of us all.

-- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (extended edition)

17 points Nominull 02 October 2012 02:38:13AM Permalink

Well they're maybe a little more admirable than some other types of worker. Let's not go overboard here.

17 points Stabilizer 04 November 2012 07:09:05AM Permalink

"Look,” [Deutsch] went on, “I can’t stop you from writing an article about a weird English guy who thinks there are parallel universes. But I think that style of thinking is kind of a put-down to the reader. It’s almost like saying, If you’re not weird in these ways, you’ve got no hope as a creative thinker. That’s not true. The weirdness is only superficial."

New Yorker article on David Deutsch

(I saw this on Scott Aaronsons blog)

17 points ArisKatsaris 14 November 2012 06:39:11PM Permalink

"Men have forgotten God" - "Men have lost certain beliefs and practices that strengthened social stability, and thus provided (despite their actual falsehood or even ridiculousness) a certain local optimum." ?

17 points VKS 03 December 2012 06:50:16AM Permalink

Truth comes out of error more easily than out of confusion.

-Francis Bacon

17 points NancyLebovitz 17 January 2013 03:43:04AM Permalink

I keep coming back to the essential problem that in our increasingly complex society, we are actually required to hold very firm opinions about highly complex matters that require analysis from multiple fields of expertise (economics, law, political science, engineering, others) in hugely complex systems where we must use our imperfect data to choose among possible outcomes that involve significant trade offs. This would be OK if we did not regard everyone who disagreed with us as an ignorant pinhead or vile evildoer whose sole motivation for disagreeing is their intrinsic idiocy, greed, or hatred for our essential freedoms/people not like themselves. Except that there actually are LOTS of ignorant pinheads and vile evildoers whose sole motivation etc., or whose self-interest is obvious to everyone but themselves.

osewalrus

17 points HalMorris 02 January 2013 09:58:44AM Permalink

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

  • Mark Twain - Life on the Mississippi

(If you wonder where "two hundred and forty-two miles" shortening of the river came from, it was the straightening of its original meandering path to improve navigation)

17 points Kindly 07 January 2013 03:42:13AM Permalink

Then for the first time it dawned on him that classing all drowthers together made no more sense than having a word for all animals that can't stand upright on two legs for more than a minute, or all animals with dry noses. What possible use could there be for such classifications? The word "drowther" didn't say anything about people except that they were not born in a Westil Family. "Drowther" meant "not us," and anything you said about drowthers beyond that was likely to be completely meaningless. They were not a "class" at all. They were just... people.

Orson Scott Card, The Lost Gate

17 points AspiringRationalist 01 January 2013 09:16:14PM Permalink

The ideas of the Hasids are scientifically and morally wrong; the fashion, food and lifestyle are way stupid; but the community and family make me envious.

-- Penn Jilette

17 points [deleted] 04 February 2013 01:55:07AM Permalink

Been making a game of looking for rationality quotes in the super bowl

"It's only weird if it doesn't work" --Bud Light Commercial

Only a rationality quote out of context, though, since the ad is about superstitious rituals among sports fans. My automatic mental reply is "well that doesn't work"

17 points Vaniver 01 February 2013 09:27:35PM Permalink

If you're not making quantitative predictions, you're probably doing it wrong.

--Gabe Newell during a talk. The whole talk is worthwhile if you're interested in institutional design or Valve.

17 points NancyLebovitz 02 April 2013 11:13:32AM Permalink

The way to deal with uncertainty is to analyze it into components. Most people who are reluctant to do something have about eight different reasons mixed together in their heads, and don't know themselves which are biggest. Some will be justified and some bogus, but unless you know the relative proportion of each, you don't know whether your overall uncertainty is mostly justified or mostly bogus.

--Paul Graham, same essay

17 points wedrifid 11 April 2013 05:16:30AM Permalink

WAYS TO KILL 2 BIRDS W/ 1 STONE

  • Radioactive stone in nest.
  • Use stone to seal off the air supply to a cage of birds.
  • Economist: Sell a precious stone (diamond? Ruby?). Use the proceeds to purchase several dozen chickens. The purchase produces an expected number of bird deaths equal to approximately the number of chickens purchased through tiny changes at the margins, making chicken farming and slaughter slightly more viable.
  • Omega: Use stone to kill the dog that would have killed the cat that will now kill 40 birds over its extended lifespan.
17 points Cyan 03 May 2013 04:53:55AM Permalink
17 points CCC 04 May 2013 02:40:35PM Permalink

The steel-Vulcan in the original quote admits that humans have an edge in the field of interpersonal relations. I imagine that's why the Vulcans let the humans lead; because the humans are capable of persuading all the other races in the Federation to go along with this whole 'federation' idea, and leave the Vulcans more-or-less alone as long as they share some of their research results.

Or, to put it another way; Vulcan High Command has managed to foist off the boring administration work onto the humans, in exchange for mere unimportant status, and is not eager to have it land back on their laps again.

Of course, some Vulcans do think that a Vulcan-led empire would be an improvement over a human-led one. The last batch to think that went off and formed the Romulan Empire. The Vulcans and the Romulans are currently running a long-term, large-scale experiment to see which paradigm creates a more lasting empire in practice. (They don't tell the other races that it's all a political experiment, of course. They might not be great at interpersonal realtions, but they have found out in the past that that is a very bad idea).

17 points Qiaochu_Yuan 27 May 2013 02:31:46AM Permalink

We would all like to believe that if we win something it is because of our skill, but if we lose it is because of the good luck or cheating of our opponent. This is nowhere more apparent than in the game of backgammon. A good opponent will play in such a way that the dice rolls having highest probability will be "good rolls" for them on their next turn, enabling them to take the other player's pieces, consolidate their position, etc. However, since there is an element of randomness, when these rolls actually come up it is very difficult even for me to believe that my opponent's fortune is due to their skill rather than their luck. Whenever I am being consistently beaten by an opponent I have to fight very hard to make myself believe that there is actually something wrong with my play and figure out how to correct it.

This phenomenon is nowhere more apparent than in computer backgammon. Computer backgammon is essentially a solved problem. Unlike Chess or Go, the best neural network algorithms that run even on modest hardware will consistently beat most human players, and perhaps draw with the best in the world. In fact, we have learnt rather a lot from these algorithms. Many rules of thumb that were believed for years by most decent players have been overturned by computer simulations. Computers tend to play backgammon markedly more aggressively than is natural for a human, but we can show that they are nevertheless doing the right thing. If you are not an extremely high level player, playing against a good computer algorithm feels weird if you are used to playing against humans.

One of the most annoying results of this is that it is impossible to obtain a reliable user generated rating of a backgammon program. For example, GNU Backgammon is one of the two or three best algorithms in the world and an under-appreciated gem of the GNU project as a whole. A full 50% of the user reviews on the Ubuntu software centre accuse the program of cheating by fixing the dice rolls and give it a 1 or 2 star review. It is hilarious how many of these reviews include comments like they "know how to play" or have been "playing for a long time" as if this were evidence to support their claim. The rest of the reviews are by people who know better and they all give it 4 or 5 stars (4 is reasonable due to a few user interface quirks, but the algorithm itself is worth a 5). As a result, the averaged rating is only 3 stars, even though this is widely acknowledged as one of the three best backgammon programs in the world. It doesn't cheat because it doesn't have to, and it actually gives you mechanisms for checking that it is not cheating, e.g. entering dice rolls manually and a tutor mode that will correct your bad plays.

This phenomenon is repeated absolutely everywhere that user reviews of backgammon programs are available. On the Google Play store, I have seen this even on a program with an absolutely crappy algorithm that I can consistently beat on expert level as well as on decent ones that are backed by GNUbg. As a result, it is absolutely impossible to find out which are the good backgammon programs if you don't already know, since they all get a low average rating.

-- Matthew Leifer

17 points lukeprog 14 May 2013 08:45:43PM Permalink

Philosophy... is what you have to do until you figure out what questions you should have been asking in the first place.

Daniel Dennett

17 points jaibot 03 May 2013 08:37:14PM Permalink

I figure it works better about 80% of the time, so I'm going to go with it.

17 points pjeby 01 May 2013 08:11:29PM Permalink

When I argue with reality, I lose -- but only 100 percent of the time.

-- Byron Katie, Loving What Is

17 points tingram 03 June 2013 05:23:24AM Permalink

It is said, for example, that a man ten times regrets having spoken, for the once he regrets his silence. And why? Because the fact of having spoken is an external fact, which may involve one in annoyances, since it is an actuality. But the fact of having kept silent! Yet this is the most dangerous thing of all. For by keeping silent one is relegated solely to oneself, no actuality comes to a man's aid by punishing him, by bringing down upon him the consequences of his speech. No, in this respect, to be silent is the easy way. But he who knows what the dreadful is, must for this very reason be most fearful of every fault, of every sin, which takes an inward direction and leaves no outward trace. So it is too that in the eyes of the world it is dangerous to venture. And why? Because one may lose. But not to venture is shrewd. And yet, by not venturing, it is so dreadfully easy to lose that which it would be difficult to lose in even the most venturesome venture, and in any case never so easily, so completely as if it were nothing...one's self. For if I have ventured amiss--very well, then life helps me by its punishment. But if I have not ventured at all--who then helps me?

--Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

17 points Estarlio 12 June 2013 10:30:01PM Permalink

"Oh, you could do it all by magic, you certainly could. You could wave a wand and get twinkly stars and a fresh-baked loaf. You could make fish jump out of the sea already cooked. And then, somewhere, somehow, magic would present its bill, which was always more than you could afford.

That’s why it was left to wizards, who knew how to handle it safely. Not doing any magic at all was the chief task of wizards - not “not doing magic” because they couldn’t do magic, but not doing magic when they could do and didn’t. Any ignorant fool can fail to turn someone else into a frog. You have to be clever to refrain from doing it when you knew how easy it was.

There were places in the world commemorating those times when wizards hadn’t been quite as clever as that, and on many of them the grass would never grow again."

-- Terry Prachett, Going Postal

17 points elharo 03 July 2013 10:00:50AM Permalink

When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.

Tyrion Lannister in George R.R. Martin's A Clash of Kings

17 points AShepard 01 July 2013 11:56:09PM Permalink

If (as those of us who make a study of ourselves have been led to do) each man, on hearing a wise maxim immediately looked to see how it properly applied to him, he would find that it was not so much a pithy saying as a whiplash applied to the habitual stupidity of his faculty of judgment. But the counsels of Truth and her precepts are taken to apply to the generality of men, never to oneself; we store them up in our memory not in our manners, which is most stupid and unprofitable.

Michel de Montaigne, Essays, "On habit"

17 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 August 2013 05:01:11PM Permalink

This phrase was explicitly in my mind back when I was generalizing the "notice confusion" skill.

17 points sixes_and_sevens 04 September 2013 12:39:28AM Permalink

How have I been reading Oglaf for so long without knowing about the epilogues?

17 points SaidAchmiz 02 September 2013 03:08:22PM Permalink

That's not even an example of the ad hominem fallacy.

"You have an ugly face, so you're wrong" is ad hominem. "You have an ugly face" is not. It's just a statement. Did the speaker imply the second part? Maybe... but probably not. It was probably just an insulting rejoinder.

Insults, i.e. "Attacking you, not your argument", is not what ad hominem is. It's a fallacy, remember? It's no error in reasoning to call a person ugly. Only when you conclude from this that they are wrong do you commit the fallacy.

So:

A: It's wrong to stab your neighbor and take their stuff.

B: Your face is ugly.

A: The ugliness of my face has no bearing on moral...

B, interrupting: Didn't say it does! Your face is still ugly!

17 points Eugine_Nier 02 September 2013 04:44:42AM Permalink

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

Plato

17 points roland 05 November 2013 08:22:03PM Permalink

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.

-- Peter Drucker

17 points lukeprog 15 January 2014 01:20:18AM Permalink

Thus the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again.

Joseph Schumpeter

17 points whales 13 January 2014 08:58:20AM Permalink

It’s tempting to judge what you read: "I agree with these statements, and I disagree with those." However, a great thinker who has spent decades on an unusual line of thought cannot induce their context into your head in a few pages. It’s almost certainly the case that you don’t fully understand their statements. Instead, you can say: "I have now learned that there exists a worldview in which all of these statements are consistent." And if it feels worthwhile, you can make a genuine effort to understand that entire worldview. You don't have to adopt it. Just make it available to yourself, so you can make connections to it when it's needed.

Bret Victor, reflecting on Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together by Bruno Latour

17 points bbleeker 04 March 2014 12:54:48PM Permalink

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.

--H. L. Mencken

17 points Weedlayer 10 March 2014 06:55:56AM Permalink

This quote reminded me of a quote from an anime called Kaiji, albeit your quote is much more succinct.

Normally, those people would never wake up from their fantasy worlds. They live meaningless lives. They waste their precious days over nothing. No matter how old they get, they'll continue to say, "My real life hasn't started yet. The real me is still asleep, so that's why my life is such garbage." They continue to tell themselves that. They continue. And they age. Then die. And on their deathbeds, they will finally realize: the life they lived was the real thing. People don't live provisional lives, nor do they die provisional deaths. That's a simple fact! The problem... is whether they realize that simple fact.

  • Yukio Tonegawa in Kaiji
17 points aarongertler 04 April 2014 05:56:29PM Permalink

So as to keep the quote on its own, my commentary:

This passage (read at around age 10) may have been my first exposure to an EA mindset, and I think that "things you don't value much anymore can still provide great utility for other people" is a powerful lesson in general.

17 points Mestroyer 01 April 2014 08:20:23PM Permalink

This quote seems like it's lumping every process for arriving at beliefs besides reason into one. "If you don't follow the process I understand and is guaranteed not to produce beliefs like that, then I can't guarantee you won't produce beliefs like that!" But there are many such processes besides reason, that could be going on in their "hearts" to produce their beliefs. Because they are all opaque and non-negotiable and not this particular one you trust not to make people murder Sharon Tate, does not mean that they all have the same probability of producing plane-flying-into-building beliefs.

Consider the following made-up quote: "when you say you believe something is acceptable for some reason other than the Bible said so, you have completely justified Stalin's planned famines. You have justified Pol Pot. If it's acceptable for for you, why isn't it acceptable for them? Why are you different? If you say 'I believe that gays should not be stoned to death and the Bible doesn't support me but I believe it in my heart', then it's perfectly okay to believe in your heart that dissidents should be sent to be worked to death in Siberia. It's perfectly okay to believe because your secular morality says so that all the intellectuals in your country need to be killed."

I would respond to it: "Stop lumping all moralities into two classes, your morality, and all others. One of these lumps has lots of variation in it, and sub-lumps which need to be distinguished, because most of them do not actually condone gulags"

And likewise I respond to Penn Jilette's quote: "Stop lumping all epistemologies into two classes, yours, and the one where people draw beliefs from their 'hearts'. One of these lumps has lots of variation in it, and sub-lumps which need to be distinguished, because most of them do not actually result in beliefs that drive them to fly planes into buildings."

The wishful-thinking new-age "all powerful force of love" faith epistemology is actually pretty safe in terms of not driving people to violence who wouldn't already be inclined to it. That belief wouldn't make them feel good. Though of course, faith plus ancient texts which condone violence can be more dangerous, though as we know empirically, for some reason, people driven to violence by their religions are rare these days, even coming from religions like that.

17 points Vulture 03 May 2014 09:17:23PM Permalink

[N]ature is constantly given human qualities. Wordsworth wrote that “nature never did betray the heart that loved her.” Mother Nature has comforted us in every culture on earth. In the 20th and 21st centuries, some environmentalists claimed that the entire earth is a single ecosystem, a “superorganism” in the language of Gaia.

I would argue that we have been fooling ourselves. Nature, in fact, is mindless. Nature is neither friend nor foe, neither malevolent nor benevolent.

Nature is purposeless. Nature simply is. We may find nature beautiful or terrible, but those feelings are human constructions. Such utter and complete mindlessness is hard for us to accept. We feel such a strong connection to nature. But the relationship between nature and us is one-sided. There is no reciprocity. There is no mind on the other side of the wall. That absence of mind, coupled with so much power, is what so frightened me...

-- Alan Lightman

17 points satt 01 May 2014 11:09:26PM Permalink

Nothing is so obvious that it’s obvious.

Errol Morris

17 points James_Miller 01 June 2014 09:26:32PM Permalink

Every time a mosquito dies, the world becomes a better place.

Glenn Reynolds

From Wikipedia "Various species of mosquitoes are estimated to transmit various types of disease to more than 700 million people annually in Africa, South America, Central America, Mexico, Russia, and much of Asia, with millions of resultant deaths. At least two million people annually die of these diseases, and the morbidity rates are many times higher still."

Related: lets eliminate species of mosquitoes that bite humans.

17 points eli_sennesh 03 June 2014 07:14:10AM Permalink

I'd love to see Taleb actually prove his assertion here, rather than expecting his readers' cynicism and bitterness to do the work of evidence.

17 points wedrifid 18 July 2014 03:32:27AM Permalink

He told another table that he was defending a murder suspect whom he was convinced was guilty, and got, "Oh, that's sounds interesting. Tell me more."

My shock as an observer would have been the gross breach of confidentiality. Is that revelation grounds for a lawsuit, a criminal offense or merely grounds for disbarment? Regardless, it would have been a gross ethical violation on the same order of either of the other two offenses. Undermining the justice system like that is Evil (just an evil that is on the other end of the visceral disgust spectrum than the molestation.)

17 points Salemicus 08 July 2014 07:28:51PM Permalink

The point is that even the Good Samaritan had to have the money to help, otherwise he too would have had to pass on the other side.

Margaret Thatcher, CPC Lecture.

17 points Benito 05 August 2014 12:50:36PM Permalink

But if that were the case, then moral philosophers - who reason about ethical principles all day long - should be more virtuous than other people. Are they? The philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel tried to find out. He used surveys and more surreptitious methods to measure how often moral philosophers give to charity, vote, call their mothers, donate blood, donate organs, clean up after themselves at philosophy conferences, and respond to emails purportedly from students. And in none of these ways are moral philosophers better than other philosophers or professors in other fields.

Schwitzgebel even scrounged up the missing-book lists from dozens of libraries and found that academic books on ethics, which are presumably mostly borrowed by ethicists, are more likely to be stolen or just never returned than books in other areas of philosophy. In other words, expertise in moral reasoning does not seem to improve moral behavior, and it might even make it worse (perhaps by making the rider more skilled at post hoc justification). Schwitzgebel still has yet to find a single measure on which moral philosophers behave better than other philosophers.

  • Jonathon Haidt, discussing the idea that ethical reasoning causes good behaviour, in his book 'The Righteous Mind'.

I found the book-stealing thing quite funny, although I imagine that some of the results described could be explained by popularity; if more people get into / like ethics, then there are more people who might steal library books, more antisocial people who don't respond to emails, etc. This hasn't been demonstrated to my knowledge though, and I'm otherwise inclined to believe that people who spend their days thinking about ethics in the abstract, are simply better at coming up with rationales for their instinctive feelings. Joshua Greene says rights are an example of this, where we need a dictum against whatever our emotions are telling us is despicable, even though we can't find any utilitarian justification for it.

17 points dspeyer 05 September 2014 04:10:03PM Permalink

For the opposite claim: If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing With Made-Up Statistics:

Remember the Bayes mammogram problem? The correct answer is 7.8%; most doctors (and others) intuitively feel like the answer should be about 80%. So doctors – who are specifically trained in having good intuitive judgment about diseases – are wrong by an order of magnitude. And it “only” being one order of magnitude is not to the doctors’ credit: by changing the numbers in the problem we can make doctors’ answers as wrong as we want.

So the doctors probably would be better off explicitly doing the Bayesian calculation. But suppose some doctor’s internet is down (you have NO IDEA how much doctors secretly rely on the Internet) and she can’t remember the prevalence of breast cancer. If the doctor thinks her guess will be off by less than an order of magnitude, then making up a number and plugging it into Bayes will be more accurate than just using a gut feeling about how likely the test is to work. Even making up numbers based on basic knowledge like “Most women do not have breast cancer at any given time” might be enough to make Bayes Theorem outperform intuitive decision-making in many cases.

I tend to side with Yvain on this one, at least so long as your argument isnt going to be judged by its appearence. Specifically on the LHC thing, I think making up the 1 in 1000 makes it possible to substantively argue about the risks in a way that "there's a chance" doesn't.

17 points devas 02 September 2014 09:08:56AM Permalink

it would probably be some kind of weird signalling game, maybe. On the other hand, posting:"I don't understand how etc etc, please, somebody explain to me the reasoning behind it" would be a good strategy to start debating and opening an avenue to "convert" others

17 points jaime2000 01 September 2014 12:30:35PM Permalink

A Verb Called Self

I am the playing, but not the pause.

I am the effect, but not the cause.

I am the living, but not the cells.

I am the ringing, but not the bells.

I am the animal, but not the meat.

I am the walking, but not the feet.

I am the pattern, but not the clothes.

I am the smelling, but not the rose.

I am the waves, but not the sea

Whatever my substrate, my me is still me.

I am the sparks in the dark that exist as a dream -

I am the process, but not the machine.

~Jennifer Diane "Chatoyance" Reitz, Friendship Is Optimal: Caelum Est Conterrens

17 points James_Miller 05 December 2014 06:14:53PM Permalink

Agreed. His fundraising might be benefiting from a strategy that increases the variance of peoples' opinions of him even if it also lowers this mean.

17 points NancyLebovitz 08 December 2014 02:56:54PM Permalink

You may be right, but I'm also inclined to include that it's fun to draw monsters.

17 points 27chaos 01 December 2014 08:25:59PM Permalink

I know that all revolutions must have ideologies to spur them on. That in the heat of conflict these ideologies tend to be smelted into rigid dogmas claiming exclusive possession of the truth, and the keys to paradise, is tragic. Dogma is the enemy of human freedom. Dogma must be watched for and apprehended at every turn and twist of the revolutionary movement. The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice.

Saul Alinsky, in his Rules for Radicals.

17 points Gunnar_Zarncke 01 November 2014 11:12:29PM Permalink

Personality problems and pattern ordered by difficulty to change according to Seligman:

  • Panic - Curable

  • Specific Phobias - Almost Curable

  • Sexual Dysfunctions - Marked Relief

  • Social Phobia - Moderate Relief

  • Agoraphobia - Moderate Relief

  • Depression - Moderate Relief

  • Sex Role - Moderate Change

  • Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder - Moderate/Mild Relief

  • Sexual Preferences - Moderate/Mild Cange [*]

  • Anger - Mild/Moderate Relief

  • Everyday Anxiety - Mild/Moderate Relief

  • Alcohol Dependency - Mild Relief

  • Overweight - Temporary Change

  • Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) - Marginal Relief [except for rape which shows Moderate Relief]

  • Sexual Orientation - Probably Unchangeable [*]

  • Sexual Identity - Unchangeable [*]

From 'What You Can Change and What You Can't*' by Seligman pg. 244 of the reviewed ('vintage') edition of 2006, explicitly confirmed to be still state of the art.

Just read the book and thought this table to be quite quote-worthy even though it isn't prosaic.

* These terms have specific and possibly somewhat non-standard definitions in the book. Seligman gives a convincing theory for formation of aspects of sexuality of different 'depth' (a core concept of Seligman) based on biological facts around expression of genes and hormones. See chapter 11.

16 points gjm 19 April 2009 01:07:40AM Permalink

Most things are, in fact, slippery slopes. And if you start backing off from one thing because it's a slippery slope, who knows where you'll stop?

Sean M Burke

16 points caiuscamargarus 18 April 2009 11:27:25PM Permalink

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

Philip K. Dick

16 points Furcas 18 April 2009 07:41:19PM Permalink

To say that you're agnostic about something can mean two things: That you're not 100% certain, or that you're (approximately) 50% certain. If you're using the first meaning, nothing you've said is wrong... but it is extremely pedantic. It's true we can't be 100% certain that there is no God, but it's also true that we can't be 100% certain about any of our beliefs except perhaps mathematical truths. Would you go around saying you're agnostic about the possibility that Obama is Satan in disguise, or the possibility that the keyboard in front of you is actually a specimen of an as-of-yet undiscovered species of animals with keyboard-mimicry capabilities? Of course you wouldn't. So why would you bother mentioning your agnosticism about God?

Of course, there are some people who really are agnostic about God, in the second sense of 'agnostic'. They're wrong, but at least they're not being pedantic.

What annoys atheists like me is those who take advantage of the dual meaning of 'agnostic' to make us look like overconfident fools: They'll say that no one can know "with absolute certainty" that God doesn't exist and that it is therefore arrogant to believe that he doesn't exist. To someone who hasn't come to terms with the inherently probabilistic nature of knowledge, this can sound like a convincing argument, but to the rest of us it can be rather infuriating.

16 points XFrequentist 18 April 2009 06:59:50PM Permalink

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." -- Richard Feynman

16 points Henrik_Jonsson 15 June 2009 05:14:57AM Permalink

Once again, we are saddled with a Stone Age moral psychology that is appropriate to life in small, homogeneous communities in which all members share roughly the same moral outlook. Our minds trick us into thinking that we are absolutely right and that they are absolutely wrong because, once upon a time, this was a useful way to think. It is no more, though it remains natural as ever. We love our respective moral senses. They are as much a part of us as anything. But if we are to live together in the world we have created for ourselves, so unlike the one in which our ancestors evolved, we must know when to trust our moral senses and when to ignore them.

--Joshua Greene

16 points KatjaGrace 04 July 2009 09:00:22PM Permalink

If they are false they are small violations of truth and thus inconsequential.

16 points hegemonicon 06 August 2009 05:30:25AM Permalink

Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it pisses on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper. So I keep trying to gently bring my mind back to what is really there to be seen, maybe to be seen and noted with a kind of reverence. Because if I don't learn to do this, I think I'll keep getting things wrong.

-Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

16 points ajayjetti 11 August 2009 11:17:10PM Permalink

Alice came to a fork in the road. "Which road do I take?" she asked. "Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat. "I don't know," Alice answered. "Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter." ~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

16 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 September 2009 10:02:33PM Permalink

That had better be a long conversation, a very wise person, and one damned lost field you were studying for ten years.

16 points loqi 22 October 2009 05:31:07PM Permalink

Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning.

-- Edsger Dijkstra

16 points Kaj_Sotala 01 December 2009 01:50:04PM Permalink

As a rule, people judged themselves according to their intentions and others according to results. In study after study, individuals ranked themselves as more charitable, more compassionate, more conscientious than others, not because they in fact were - but because they wanted to be these things and were almost entirely blind to the fact that others wanted the same. Intentions were all important when it came to self-judgement, and pretty much irrelevant when it came to judging others. The only exceptions, it turned out, were loved ones.

That was what it meant to be a 'significant' other: to be included in the circle of delusions that everyone used to exempt themselves.

-- Scott Bakker, Neuropath

16 points RobinZ 29 November 2009 11:57:11PM Permalink

"My style" sure makes a great crutch for putting off learning how to draw better, doesn't it?

Egypt "peganthyrus" Urnash, comment thread, a quick drawing lesson, July 17, 2008

16 points alyssavance 30 November 2009 04:11:02AM Permalink

I don't buy a lot of that, at least if we're referring to the 18th century.

  • The founders of America knew damn well that there were no such things as gods, at least not ones that actively intervened in any way we could detect.

  • They were wrong about some details of astronomy, but they had most of the basic outlines right (Lagrange's works describe the celestial mechanics of the solar system in quite some detail).

  • The theories of classical mechanics were known and well understood. Quantum mechanics and relativity weren't, of course, but I am hesitant to refer to this as people being wrong, as there were very few observations available to them which required these to be explained (the perihelion advance of Mercury, for instance, wasn't discovered until 1859).

  • The 18th century view of cosmology was essentially ours, except that it lacked knowledge about how it was organized on a larger scale (galaxies within clusters within superclusters and all that) due to the lack of sufficiently powerful telescopes, and many supposed the universe to be infinite instead of beginning with the Big Bang.

  • The structure of democratic government invented during this period works pretty darn well, by comparison with everything that came before. There have, for instance, been no wars in Western Europe for sixty years, something that has never happened before.

  • Lavoisier and Lomonosov's theories of chemistry were, in fact, largely correct. The periodic table wasn't known, but there was no widely used wrong system of grouping the elements.

  • The full theory of evolution was not known (people still believed in spontaneous generation, for instance), but the idea that groups of similar species arose from a common ancestor by descent with modification was widely known and accepted.

The proper extrapolation from this is not "everything you know is wrong", but "there are lots of things you don't know, and lots of non-technical things you 'know' are wrong."

16 points MichaelGR 30 November 2009 12:21:53AM Permalink

Politicians compete to bribe voters with their own money.

--Adapted from something in The Economist (sorry, they don't have bylines)

16 points Cyan 07 January 2010 09:17:15PM Permalink

This conception of debate as combat is, in fact, probably the main reason why the Social Text editors fell for my parody. Acting not as intellectuals seeking the truth, but as self-appointed generals in the "Science Wars'', they apparently leapt at the chance to get a "real'' scientist on their "side''. Now, ruing their blunder, they must surely feel a kinship with the Trojans.

But the military metaphor is a mistake; the Social Text editors are not my enemies.

- Alan Sokal (hat tip)

16 points Tom_Talbot 01 February 2010 07:11:06PM Permalink

"If the tool you have is a hammer, make the problem look like a nail."

Steven W. Smith, The Scientist and Engineers Guide to Digital Signal Processing

16 points gregconen 01 February 2010 05:50:19PM Permalink

More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows you how good people are at evaluating risk.

Bruce Schneier

16 points Yvain 01 February 2010 12:24:51PM Permalink

In our public medical personas, we often act as though morality consisted only in following society's conventions: we do this not so much out of laziness but because we recognize that it is better that the public think of doctors as old-fashioned or stupid, than that they should think us evil.

-- The Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine

16 points Kevin 01 February 2010 08:38:40PM Permalink

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.

-- Isaac Asimov via Salvor Hardin, Foundation

16 points Matt_Duing 02 March 2010 03:47:45AM Permalink

"It is said that those who appreciate legislation and sausages should not see them being made. The same is true for human emotions." -- Steven Pinker

16 points gaffa 01 March 2010 05:20:03PM Permalink

…it is fatally easy to read a pattern into stochastically generated data.

-- John Maynard Smith (The Causes of Extinction, 1989)

16 points CaptainOblivious2 03 April 2010 02:23:54AM Permalink

"All things end badly - or else they wouldn't end"

  • Brian Flanagan (Tom Cruise), Cocktail, 1988. He was referring to relationships, but it's actually a surprisingly general rule.
16 points Seth_Goldin 03 June 2010 03:40:44AM Permalink

There is no such thing as absolute certainty, but there is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human life.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

He seems to have understood that 0 and 1 are not probabilities.

16 points torekp 03 July 2010 11:36:36AM Permalink

Idealists of all schools, aristocrats and bourgeois, theologians and physicians, politicians and moralists, religionists, philosophers, or poets, not forgetting the liberal economists - unbounded worshippers of the ideal, as we know - are much offended when told that man, with his magnificent intelligence, his sublime ideas, and his boundless aspirations, is, like all else existing in the world, nothing but matter, only a product of vile matter.

We may answer that the matter of which materialists speak, matter spontaneously and eternally mobile, active, productive, matter chemically or organically determined and manifested by the properties or forces, mechanical, physical, animal, and intelligent, which necessarily belong to it - that this matter has nothing in common with the vile matter of the idealists. The latter, a product of their false abstraction, is indeed a stupid, inanimate, immobile thing, incapable of giving birth to the smallest product, a caput mortuum, an ugly fancy in contrast to the beautiful fancy which they call God; as the opposite of this supreme being, matter, their matter, stripped by that constitutes its real nature, necessarily represents supreme nothingness.

--Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State

Reminded me of some posts here by Academician.

16 points RichardKennaway 03 August 2010 07:54:49AM Permalink

When I was a young man about to go out into the world, my father says to me a very valuable thing. He says to me like this... "Son," the old guy says, "I am sorry that I am not able to bank roll you to a very large start, but not having any potatoes which to give you, I am now going to stake you to some very valuable advice. One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to come to you and show you a nice, brand new deck of cards on which the seal has not yet been broken. This man is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of the deck and squirt cider in your ear. Now son, do not bet this man, for as sure as you stand there, you are going to wind up with an earful of cider."

-- Sky Masterson, a character in Guys and Dolls

16 points DSimon 03 August 2010 03:47:34PM Permalink

Young Agatha Clay: But how can they protect me if they aren't here? That's illogical.

Uncle Barry: Um...It's science.

Young Agatha Clay: Ah. You mean you'll explain when I have a sufficiently advanced educational background.

16 points James_Miller 01 September 2010 02:52:25PM Permalink

Like all dreamers, I confused disenchantment with truth. (Jean-Paul Sartre)

16 points scav 05 January 2011 09:25:10AM Permalink

If you show me

That, say, homeopathy works,

Then I will change my mind

I’ll spin on a fucking dime

I’ll be embarrassed as hell,

But I will run through the streets yelling

It’s a miracle! Take physics and bin it!

Water has memory!

And while its memory of a long lost drop of onion juice is Infinite

It somehow forgets all the poo it’s had in it!

You show me that it works and how it works

And when I’ve recovered from the shock

I will take a compass and carve Fancy That on the side of my cock.

Tim Minchin, Storm

Dammit, how do you get line-breaks? It's a poem, but the stanzas get flowed into paragraphs.

16 points lukeprog 12 February 2011 03:30:48PM Permalink

If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.

Paul Graham

16 points khafra 02 February 2011 02:32:19PM Permalink

"Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible. The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks." -- Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective

16 points Vladimir_Nesov 02 February 2011 11:37:34AM Permalink

I saw a creepy hospice volunteer search ad on the street a few days ago. It said something along the lines of "They will be grateful to you for the rest of their lives." Like an inappropriate joke.

16 points NancyLebovitz 15 March 2011 06:25:02PM Permalink

It's better to be lucky than smart, but it's easier to be smart twice than lucky twice

16 points ata 04 March 2011 10:25:22PM Permalink

Not to know is bad; not to wish to know is worse.

— Wolof proverb

16 points MartinB 02 March 2011 02:18:07PM Permalink

Reminds me of the proposed double blind studies about the effectiveness of parachutes in preventing injuries while falling from great heights.

16 points RichardKennaway 02 March 2011 12:20:59PM Permalink

Don't hate the playa, hate the game

Disagree. This is just a get out of jail free card, a universal excuse. Don't blame me, blame the system / my genes / my memes / my parents / determinism / indeterminism...

16 points Matt_Duing 05 April 2011 02:13:41AM Permalink

The most important relic of early humans is the modern mind.

-Steven Pinker

16 points taserian 04 April 2011 07:47:05PM Permalink

On perseverance:

It's a little like wrestling a gorilla. You don't quit when you're tired, you quit when the gorilla is tired.

-- Robert Strauss

(Although the reference I found doesn't say which Robert Strauss it was)

I think it goes well with the article Make an Extraordinary Effort.

16 points JGWeissman 07 April 2011 03:13:04AM Permalink

But only a tiny few will ask, "Isn't the fact that we're giving equal consideration to the existence of evil giants and windmills a warning sign of insanity in ourselves?"

And then there's the fact that we are giving much more consideration to the existence of evil giants than to the existence of good giants.

16 points Yvain 05 April 2011 11:36:38PM Permalink

Story kind of bothers me. Yeah, you can get someone to pretend not to believe something by offering a fiscal reward, but that doesn't prove anything.

If I were a geologist and correctly identified the crystal as the rare and valuable mineral unobtainite which I had been desperately seeking samples of, but Tony stubbornly insisted it was quartz - and if Tony then told me it was $150 if it was unobtainite but $15 if it was quartz - I'd call it quartz too if it meant I could get my sample for cheaper. So what?

16 points NickiH 05 April 2011 08:10:20PM Permalink

what is so special about the program which makes up a human, that it would be morally wrong to shut off the program?

We haven't figured out how to turn it back on again. Once we do, maybe it will become morally ok to turn people off.

16 points Emile 04 April 2011 08:19:24PM Permalink

"But these two snakes can't talk because this one speaks in parseltongue and that one speaks in Python"

Damn, why didn't I discover those before ...

16 points Thomas 02 May 2011 07:36:46PM Permalink

Nature is fucked up, and anyone who argues otherwise has not actually seen nature in action.

Michael Anissimov

16 points MarkusRamikin 08 June 2011 03:26:07PM Permalink

"Attack and absorb the data that attack produces!"

-Tylwyth Waff in Heretics of Dune

(Hi. I'm new.)

16 points NancyLebovitz 06 June 2011 01:21:30PM Permalink

If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin. - Ivan Turgenev

16 points RichardKennaway 01 June 2011 11:08:54AM Permalink

If you have ten minutes unscheduled and the phone isn't ringing, what do you do? What do you start?

Seth Godin

16 points wedrifid 01 June 2011 10:55:38PM Permalink

"No, I don't want to marry you -- that would hurt the income of local prostitutes."

That is a brilliant line. Now I'm trying to work out how to create a circumstance in which to use it.

16 points Alicorn 01 June 2011 10:27:55PM Permalink
16 points NancyLebovitz 08 June 2011 10:00:01PM Permalink

"Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering."

-- Gary Snyder (bOING bOING #9, 1992)

I don't have a strong feeling about the accuracy of the percentage, but the general point sounds plausible.

16 points Nic_Smith 02 August 2011 08:05:28PM Permalink

I think that people use a rule of thumb when deciding what things in life are worth learning. Most people seek knowledge in one of the following three categories:

  • What many other people learn (calculus, C++, and so on)
  • What is easy to learn (hula-hooping, Ruby, and so on)
  • What has value that is easy to appreciate (thermonuclear physics, for example, or that ridiculously loud whistle where you stick your fingers in your mouth) -- Land of Lisp. Conrad Barski.
16 points gwern 03 September 2011 06:28:06PM Permalink

"Asking a question is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime. "

--Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, 2006, p. 255

16 points crazy88 04 September 2011 07:29:46AM Permalink

Ralph Hull made a reasonable living as a magician milking a card trick he called "The Tuned Deck"...Hull enjoyed subjecting himself to the scrutiny of colleagues who attempted to eliminate, one by one, various explanations by depriving him of the ability to perform a particular sleight of hand. But the real trick was over before it had even begun, for the magic was not in clever fingers but in a clever name. The blatantly singular referent cried out for a blatantly singular explanation, when in reality The Tuned Deck was not one trick but many. The search for a single explanation is what kept this multiply determined illusion so long a mystery.

--Nicholas Epley, "Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making"

16 points SilasBarta 03 October 2011 05:55:39PM Permalink

Hm, that gives me an idea: study lying as a computational complexity problem. Just as we can study how much computing power it takes to distinguish random data from encrypted data, we can study how much computing power it takes to formulate (self-serving) hypotheses that take too much effort to distinguish from the truth.

Just a thought...

(Scott Aaronson's paper opened my eyes on the subject.)

16 points p4wnc6 04 October 2011 04:06:03AM Permalink

Most people who quote Einstein’s declaration that “God does not play dice” seem not to realize that a dice-playing God would be an improvement over the actual situation

-Scott Aaronson, from here

16 points [deleted] 03 October 2011 03:36:44AM Permalink

If the ancients were so wise, why are they dead?

-- Discordian saying

16 points MarkusRamikin 02 October 2011 09:29:07AM Permalink

Binarian: A special kind of idiot who believes that all people who hold a different view from oneself have the same views as each other.

That's something I have to occasionally remind myself not to be, as an atheist.

16 points Alejandro1 31 October 2011 08:03:56PM Permalink

From the same post:

One might expect it [our gut-feel sense] to be especially bad in the case of presidential primaries. There have been only about 15 competitive nomination contests since we began picking presidents this way in 1972. Some of them — like the nominations of George McGovern in 1972 and Jimmy Carter in 1976 — are dismissed by experts if their outcomes did not happen to agree with their paradigm of how presidents are chosen. (Another fundamental error: when you have such little data, you should almost never throw any of it out, and you should be especially wary of doing so when it happens to contradict your hypothesis.)

16 points kalla724 02 November 2011 08:34:16PM Permalink

The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it.

-Alan Saporta

16 points djcb 01 November 2011 09:48:31PM Permalink

The nurse recorded the time of death, 9:21 P.M. He discovered, oddly, that the clock had halted at that moment —just the sort of mystical phenomenon that appealed to unscientific people. Then an explanation occurred to him. He knew the clock was fragile, because he had repaired it several times, and he decided that the nurse must have stopped it by picking it up to check the time in the dim light.

[ James Gleick - Genius - The work and Life of Richard Feynman; this is a really chilling passage, which describes the moments just after Feynman's wife has passed away, which devastated him. Somehow, this struck me.]

16 points RichardKennaway 12 December 2011 02:23:21PM Permalink
16 points RobinZ 02 December 2011 03:27:23AM Permalink

Anatole France is probably better known for saying, "La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain" - or, in English, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

16 points RichardKennaway 30 November 2011 11:16:58PM Permalink

It turns out wanting something doesn't make it real.

Except that in this case it did.

16 points SilasBarta 01 December 2011 11:14:14PM Permalink

Possibly it's making a subtle equivocation between "earth" and "land", that is, the Dutch obtained a lot of what is now the Netherlands by extracting underwater land from the sea (or used to, something like that). It's not just saying that the Dutch "created their nation" in the sense of laws and whatnot, but actually "made" the land for it.

My guess, anyway.

16 points Jayson_Virissimo 30 November 2011 11:39:36AM Permalink

The man, who in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.

-Voltaire, Cato

16 points CharlieSheen 25 January 2012 11:55:12PM Permalink

It’s not a good idea for members of the faith-based community like Hitchens to proclaim things like: Science proves we’re all genetically equal, so therefore you shouldn’t be beastly toward people of other races. The obvious flaw in this strategy is that eventually people will figure out that you are lying about what the science of genetics says, and therefore, by your own logic, that discredits the perfectly valid second half of your assertion.

--Steve Sailer

16 points Konkvistador 08 January 2012 05:03:52PM Permalink

... if anyone thinks they can get an accurate picture of anyplace on the planet by reading news reports, they're sadly mistaken.

--Bruce Schneier

16 points [deleted] 05 February 2012 02:52:23AM Permalink

This is why science and mathematics are so much fun; You discover things that seem impossible to be true, and then get to figure out why it's impossible for them NOT to be.

-Vi Hart, Doodling in Math: Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant- Part 3 of 3

16 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 16 February 2012 02:45:04AM Permalink

Well now you've proved that the Market Economics Fairy should quit her job and found a startup aimed at roboticizing sparkle production. I hope you're happy.

16 points Jayson_Virissimo 06 March 2012 01:44:48PM Permalink

Not that I know of, but you would think they would have since they were familiar with how badly you could end up screwing yourself dealing with Jinn even though they would do exactly what you tell them to (literally). There are a great many Arabic texts that historians of science have yet to take a look at. Who knows, maybe we'll luck out and find the solution to the FAI problem in some library in Turkey.

16 points gyokuro 02 March 2012 04:39:18AM Permalink

"I've never ever felt wise," Derk said frankly. "But I suppose it is a tempation, to stare into distance and make people think you are."

"It's humbug," said the dragon. "It's also stupid. It stops you learning more."

Diana Wynne Jones, Dark Lord of Derkholm

16 points ArisKatsaris 07 March 2012 11:08:18PM Permalink

-So what do you think happens after we die?

-The acids and lifeforms living inside your body eat their way out, while local detritivores eat their way in. Why?

-No, no, no, what happens to you?

-Oh, you guys mean the soul.

-Exactly.

-Is that in the body?

-Yes!

-The acids and lifeforms eat their way out, while local detritivores eat their way in.

--SMBC Theater - Death

16 points cousin_it 07 March 2012 09:28:34AM Permalink

'Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like, guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting "Gotcha". It wouldn't have made any difference if they hadn't eaten it.'

'Why not?'

'Because if you're dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end.'

-- Douglas Adams

16 points peter_hurford 01 March 2012 05:22:16PM Permalink

Also, they could be wrong about whether they actually disagree.

16 points [deleted] 05 April 2012 04:05:43PM Permalink

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2074

It shocked the hell out of me, too.

16 points Vaniver 01 April 2012 11:20:25PM Permalink

For those who feel deeply about contemporary politics, certain topics have become so infected by considerations of prestige that a genuinely rational approach to them is almost impossible.

-George Orwell

16 points wedrifid 21 April 2012 06:05:17AM Permalink

I feel vaguely like Will_Newsome, now. I wonder if that's a good thing.

Start to worry if you begin to feel morally obliged to engage in activity 'Z' that neither you, Sam or Pat endorse but which you must support due to acausal social allegiance with Bink mediated by the demon X(A/N)th, who is responsible for UFOs, for the illusion of stars that we see in the sky and also divinely inspired the Bhagavad-Gita.

16 points gwern 08 May 2012 01:23:32AM Permalink

Typically people describing clever complex schemes involving interacting with many other people do not actually do them. Mesquita has previously tripped some flags for me (publishing few of his predictions), so I had no reason to give him special benefit of the doubt.

16 points Alejandro1 02 May 2012 07:33:52PM Permalink

The word problem may be an insidious form of question-begging. To speak of the Jewish problem is to postulate that the Jews are a problem; it is to predict (and recommend) persecution, plunder, shooting, beheading, rape, and the reading of Dr. Rosenberg's prose. Another disadvantage of fallacious problems is that they bring about solutions that are equally fallacious. Pliny (Book VIII of Natural History) is not satisfied with the observation that dragons attack elephants in the summer; he ventures the hypothesis that they do it in order to drink the elephants' blood, which, as everyone knows, is very cold.

-- Jorge Luis Borges, "Dr. Américo Castro is Alarmed"

16 points sixes_and_sevens 03 May 2012 09:29:42PM Permalink

"Well it's alright for you, Confucius, living in 5th Century feudal China. Between all the documentation I have to go through at work, and all the blogs I'm following while pretending to work, and all the textbooks I have to get through before my next assignment deadline, I don't have time to read!"

16 points Mark_Eichenlaub 02 May 2012 05:33:38AM Permalink

If you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.

Paul Graham “What You’ll Wish You’d Known” http://paulgraham.com/hs.html

16 points Tyrrell_McAllister 01 May 2012 08:18:34PM Permalink

Good memory. The original reads:

Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny.

16 points gjm 02 June 2012 10:39:04PM Permalink

Note that xkcd 759 is about something subtly different: you work from both ends and then, when they don't meet in the middle, try to write the "solution" in such a way that whoever's marking it won't notice the jump.

I know someone who did that in an International Mathematical Olympiad. (He used an advanced variant of the technique, where you arrange for the jump to occur between two pages of your solution.) He got 6/7 for that solution, and the mark he lost was for something else. (Which was in fact correct, but you will appreciate that no one was inclined to complain about it.)

16 points pkkm 02 June 2012 07:04:03AM Permalink

People who do great things look at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's compellingly mysterious.

Paul Graham, What Youll Wish Youd Known

16 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 July 2012 08:45:06PM Permalink

"Buddhism IS different. It's the followers who aren’t."

-- A Dust Over India.

Commentary: Reading this made me realize that many religions genuinely are different from each other. Christianity is genuinely different from Judaism, Islam is genuinely different from Christianity, Hinduism is genuinely different from all three. It's religious people who are the same everywhere; not the same as each other, obviously, but drawn from the same distribution. Is this true of atheistic humanists? Of transhumanists? Could you devise an experiment to test whether it was so, would you bet on the results of that experiment? Will they say the same of LessWrongers, someday? And if so, what's the point?

Now that I think on it, though, there might be a case for scientists being drawn from a different distribution, or computer programmers, or for that matter science fiction fans (are those all the same distributions as each other, I wonder?). It's not really hopeless.

16 points alex_zag_al 09 August 2012 04:56:43AM Permalink

perhaps the better advice, then, is "when things aren't working, consider the possibility that it's because your efforts are not going into what matters, rather than assuming it is because you need to work harder on the issues you're already focusing on"

16 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 August 2012 05:04:58PM Permalink

"Silver linings are like finding change in your couch. It's there, but it never amounts to much."

-- http://www.misfile.com/?date=2012-08-10

16 points GabrielDuquette 03 August 2012 04:35:02PM Permalink

Why did people in olden times hate paragraphs so much?

16 points shminux 07 September 2012 06:19:58PM Permalink

But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, and who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

If only it were a line. Or even a vague boundary between clearly defined good and clearly defined evil. Or if good and evil were objectively verifiable notions.

16 points lukeprog 22 September 2012 01:28:25PM Permalink

The problem with any ideology is that it gives the answer before you look at the evidence.

Bill Clinton

16 points wedrifid 08 September 2012 09:31:05AM Permalink

The following quotes were heavily upvoted, but then turned out to be made by a Will Newsome sockpuppet who edited the quote afterward. The original comments have been banned. The quotes are as follows:

Defection too far. Ban Will.

16 points RolfAndreassen 06 September 2012 04:24:08PM Permalink

If we can anticipate what the morality of the future would be, should we try to live by it now?

Not if it's actually the same morality, but depends on technology. For example, strong prohibitions on promiscuity are very sensible in a world without cheap and effective contraceptives. Anyone who tried to live by 2012 sexual standards in 1912 would soon find they couldn't feed their large horde of kids. Likewise, if robots are doing all the work, fine; but right now if you just redistribute all money, no work gets done.

16 points Matt_Caulfield 03 September 2012 03:55:04PM Permalink

It may be of course that savages put food on a dead man because they think that a dead man can eat, or weapons with a dead man because they think a dead man can fight. But personally I do not believe that they think anything of the kind. I believe they put food or weapons on the dead for the same reason that we put flowers, because it is an exceedingly natural and obvious thing to do. We do not understand, it is true, the emotion that makes us think it is obvious and natural; but that is because, like all the important emotions of human existence it is essentially irrational.

  • G. K. Chesterton
16 points DanielVarga 10 October 2012 10:49:46PM Permalink

I love uncertainty. In many situations I'd rather try something just to see what happens. I'm the character that gets killed first in every horror movie, but that's fine with me, since life is not generally like a horror movie.

Noah Smith

16 points Alejandro1 06 October 2012 03:35:52PM Permalink

I prefer this sort of distant, reductionist, structural approach to analysing the race because there's little reason to believe in the validity of the implicit theories or "models" lurking behind pundits' gut judgments. When I heard Mr Romney's 47% comments, I thought "Oooh, he's toast!" and then I stopped myself and acknowledged that I actually have no rational basis for believing that his remarks would in the final analysis hurt Mr Romney at all. What percentage of undecided or weakly-decided swing-state voters ever caught wind of Mr Romney's embarrassing chat? I didn't know! Of those who became aware of it, how many cared? I didn't know! So why did I think "Oooh, he's toast!" Because I am human, and I make most judgments and decisions on the basis of crackpot hunches, the underlying logic of which is almost completely inscrutable to me.

--Will Wilkinson

16 points arundelo 02 October 2012 01:58:29AM Permalink

My wife and I, since we'd been in lock-down with each other, oh, these past nine years, have developed a bit of shorthand. If one of us says something the other has heard so many times before that tears of boredom flow, the victim has a right to protest. The victim says, "That's on the tape." As in, that's on your tape -- the list of stories and obsessions you've rewound so often I could sing along with them in my sleep.

-- Mark Schone

16 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 October 2012 01:00:46AM Permalink

This belief seems to me very convenient for the brilliant, implying that they got where they are by hard work and properly deserve everything they have. Of course brilliant people also have to put in hard work, but their return on investment is much higher than many other contenders who may have put in even more work for lower total returns. Just-world hypothesis; life is not this fair. And while I do go about preaching the virtue of Hufflepuff, I also go about saying that people should try to Huffle where they have comparative advantage.

16 points Nisan 03 November 2012 06:34:57AM Permalink

And then she said, "Ha ha ha, I figured out how to remove the closing quotation mark! From now on, the whole future is my story!

-Aristosophy. I like to think this is about the Robots Rebellion.

16 points GabrielDuquette 01 December 2012 03:44:40PM Permalink

Keep your solutions close, and your problems closer.

afoolswisdom

16 points GabrielDuquette 01 December 2012 05:29:20PM Permalink

Nobody likes to face the more painful question, What Made the Dogs Want to Leave?

TheThomason

16 points Eugine_Nier 02 December 2012 02:46:02AM Permalink

A Google search attributes this to Gen. Omar Bradley.

16 points simplicio 02 January 2013 08:59:46PM Permalink

Lambs are young sheep; they have less meat less wool.

The punishment for livestock rustling being identical no matter what animal is stolen, you should prefer to steal a sheep rather than a lamb.

16 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 January 2013 09:29:29AM Permalink

"A stupid person can make only certain, limited types of errors. The mistakes open to a clever fellow are far broader. But to the one who knows how smart he is compared to everyone else, the possibilities for true idiocy are boundless."

-- Steven Brust, spoken by Vlad, in Iorich

16 points Mass_Driver 25 January 2013 10:00:41PM Permalink

I once heard a story about the original writer of the Superman Radio Series. He wanted a pay rise, his employers didn't want to give him one. He decided to end the series with Superman trapped at the bottom of a well, tied down with kryptonite and surrounded by a hundred thousand tanks (or something along these lines). It was a cliffhanger. He then made his salary demands. His employers refused and went round every writer in America, but nobody could work out how the original writer was planning to have Superman escape. Eventually the radio guys had to go back to him and meet his wage demands. The first show of the next series began "Having escaped from the well, Superman hurried to..." There's a lesson in there somewhere, but I've no idea what it is.

-http://writebadlywell.blogspot.com/2010/05/write-yourself-into-corner.html

I would argue that the lesson is that when something valuable is at stake, we should focus on the simplest available solutions to the puzzles we face, rather than on ways to demonstrate our intelligence to ourselves or others.

16 points GabrielDuquette 01 January 2013 06:21:03PM Permalink

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.* *Not a controlled experiment

lanyard

16 points MugaSofer 02 January 2013 05:30:24PM Permalink

Deep wisdom indeed. Some people believe the wrong things, and some believe the right things, some people believe both, some people believe neither.

16 points shokwave 05 March 2013 09:17:16AM Permalink

On consciousness:

"Forget about minds," he told her. "Say you've got a device designed to monitor—oh, cosmic rays, say. What happens when you turn its sensor around so it's not pointing at the sky anymore, but at its own guts?"

He answered himself before she could: "It does what it's built to. It measures cosmic rays, even though it's not looking at them any more. It parses its own circuitry in terms of cosmic-ray metaphors, because those feel right, because they feel natural, because it can't look at things any other way. But it's the wrong metaphor. So the system misunderstands everything about itself. Maybe that's not a grand and glorious evolutionary leap after all. Maybe it's just a design flaw."

-- Blindsight, by Peter Watts

16 points shminux 02 March 2013 08:52:56AM Permalink

But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential.

No, the trial was.

16 points Luke_A_Somers 01 March 2013 02:52:13PM Permalink

Can I get mad at the programmers of video games when the game is poorly balanced or designed, or simply broken?

Can I get mad at a video game that implements an agent?

16 points Oscar_Cunningham 11 April 2013 11:27:21PM Permalink

My bet is that the student had many digits of pi memorised and just used their parity.

16 points Eugine_Nier 05 April 2013 04:33:42AM Permalink

It also helps to be fictional, or at least sufficiently removed from the target audience that they perceive you in far mode.

16 points Manfred 11 April 2013 12:53:48AM Permalink

To this, the skeptics might respond: but of course we can’t win over the mainstream scientific community, since they’re all in the grip of an evil left-wing conspiracy or delusion! Now, that response is precisely where “the buck stops” for me, and further discussion becomes useless. If I’m asked which of the following two groups is more likely to be in the grip of a delusion — (a) Senate Republicans, Freeman Dyson, and a certain excitable string-theory blogger, or (b) virtually every single expert in the relevant fields, and virtually every other chemist and physicist who I’ve ever respected or heard of — well then, it comes down to a judgment call, but I’m 100% comfortable with my judgment.

-- Scott Aaronson in the next paragraph

16 points player_03 08 April 2013 06:25:20AM Permalink

When I was a Christian, and when I began this intense period of study which eventually led to my atheism, my goal, my one and only goal, was to find the best evidence and argument I could find that would lead people to the truth of Jesus Christ. That was a huge mistake. As a skeptic now, my goal is very similar - it just stops short. My goal is to find the best evidence and argument, period. Not the best evidence and argument that leads to a preconceived conclusion. The best evidence and argument, period, and go wherever the evidence leads.

--Matt Dillahunty

16 points Leonhart 02 April 2013 04:23:17PM Permalink

Before remembering the older definition of "incredible" that is presumably meant, I parsed this as "Like all great rationalists you believed in things that were twice as awesome as theology"; and thought "Only twice?".

16 points Jayson_Virissimo 02 May 2013 01:06:05AM Permalink

With numbers you can do anything you like. Suppose I have the sacred number 9 and I want to get a number 1314, date of the execution of Jaques de Molay - a date dear to anyone who, like me, professes devotion ot the Templar tradition of knighthood. What do I do? I multiply 9 by one hundred and forty-six, the fateful day of the destruction of Carthage. How did I arrive at this? I divided thirteen hundred and fourteen by two, three, et cetera, until I found a satisfying date. I could also have divided thirteen hundred and fourteen by 6.28, the double of 3.14 and I would have got two hundred and nine. That is the year Attulus I, king of Pergamon, ascended the throne. You see?

Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum (1989)

16 points arborealhominid 03 May 2013 01:13:52PM Permalink

One of the biggest tasks, according to Gardner, was tracking information and beliefs back to their roots. This is always important, but especially in a field as rich in hearsay as herbal medicine. One little piece of information, or an unsubstantiated report, can grow and become magnified, quickly becoming an unquestioned truism. She used as an example the truism that the extracts of the herb Ginkgo Biloba might cause dangerous bleeding. Everyone says it can. The journalists say it. The doctors say it. The herbalists say it. Even I say it! It's nearly impossible to read a scientific paper on Ginkgo that doesn't mention this alleged danger. But why do we say it - where did the information come from? Turns out, there was one case report - of a single person - who couldn't clot efficiently after taking Ginkgo. Another 178 papers were published that mentioned this danger, citing only this one report. Those 178 papers were cited by over 4,100 other papers. So now we have almost 4-and-a-half thousand references in the scientific literature - not to mention the tens of thousands of references in the popular press - to the dangers of Ginkgo, all traceable back to a single person whose bleeding may or may not have been attributable to the herb.

-Adam Stark

16 points [deleted] 03 May 2013 12:03:52PM Permalink

it is often better to pull numbers out of your arse and use them to make a decision, than to pull a decision out of your arse.

-- Paul Crowley

16 points James_Miller 01 June 2013 03:24:39PM Permalink

you would be foolish to accept what people believed for “thousands of years” in many domains of natural science. When it comes to the ancients or the moderns in science always listen to the moderns. They are not always right, but overall they are surely more right, and less prone to miss the mark. In fact, you may have to be careful about paying too much attention to science which is a generation old, so fast does the “state of the art” in terms of knowledge shift.

Razib Khan

16 points Alejandro1 02 June 2013 05:37:52PM Permalink

"I call that 'the falling problem'. You encounter it when you first study physics. You realize that, if you were ever dropped from a plane without a parachute, you could calculate with a high degree of accuracy how long it's take to hit the ground, your speed, how much energy you'll deposit into the earth. And yet, you would still be just as dead as a particularly stupid gorilla dropped the same distance. Mastery of the nature of reality grants you no mastery over the behavior of reality. I could tell you your grandpa is very sick. I could tell you what each cell is doing wrong, why it's doing wrong, and roughly when it started doing wrong. But I can't tell them to stop."

"Why can't you make a machine to fix it?"

"Same reason you can't make a parachute when you fall from the plane."

"Because it's too hard?"

"Nothing is too hard. Many things are too fast."

(beat)

"I think I could solve the falling problem with a jetpack. Can you try to get me the parts?"

"That's all I do, kiddo."

--SMBC

16 points bouilhet 02 July 2013 11:22:27PM Permalink

The conscientious. - It is more comfortable to follow one's conscience than one's reason: for it offers an excuse and alleviation if what we undertake miscarries--which is why there are always so many conscientious people and so few reasonable ones.

-- Nietzsche

16 points Kawoomba 02 July 2013 01:30:23PM Permalink

You're using this remarkable set of interacting or interdependent components of interlinked hypertext documents in a global system of interconnected computer networks powered by a flow of electric charge to whine about a rationality quote! How quaint.

16 points PhilGoetz 16 July 2013 02:50:30PM Permalink

There's more pressure on a vet to get it right. People say "it was god's will" when granny dies, but they get angry when they lose a cow.

  • Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett again
16 points grendelkhan 05 July 2013 09:55:57PM Permalink

"You're like an infant!" Tosco sneered. "Still humming at night about your poor lost momma and the terrible thing men do to their cos? Grow up and face the real world."

"I have," Carlo replied. "I faced it, and now I'm going to change it."

Greg Egan, The Eternal Flame, ch. 38

16 points dspeyer 02 July 2013 03:07:18AM Permalink

They are different because when we pack the spaceship with fuel, we control with reasonable certainty whether they make a safe landing or not. As for our millions-of-years descendants, it's very hard to make any statement about us effecting them with 51% confidence (except, "we shouldn't exterminate ourselves").

A lot of what looks like time discounting is really uncertainty discounting.

16 points Unnamed 06 August 2013 03:33:41AM Permalink

Ross Sicoly (1979). Egocentric Biases in Availability and Attribution.

In the study, the spouses actually estimated their contributions by making a slash mark on a line segment which had endpoints labelled "primarily wife" and "primarily husband". The experimenters set it up this way, rather than asking for numerical percentages, for ethical reasons. In pilot testing using percentages, they "found that subjects were able to remember the percentages they recorded and that postquestionnaire comparisons of percentages provided a strong source of conflict between the spouses." (p. 325)

16 points Kaj_Sotala 05 August 2013 08:24:08PM Permalink

Old man: Gotcha! So you do collect answers after all!

Eye: But of course! Everybody does! You need answers to base decisions on. Decisions that lead to actions. We wouldn't do much of anything, if we were always indecisive!

All I am saying is that I see no point in treasuring them! That's all!

Once you see that an answer is not serving its question properly anymore, it should be tossed away. It's just their natural life cycle. They usually kick and scream, raising one hell of a ruckus when we ask them to leave. Especially when they have been with us for a long time.

You see, too many actions have been based on those answers. Too much work and energy invested in them. They feel so important, so full of themselves. They will answer to no one. Not even to their initial question!

What's the point if a wrong answer will stop you from returning to the right question. Although sometimes people have no questions to return to... which is usually why they defend them, with such strong conviction.

That's exactly why I am extra cautious with all these big ol' answers that have been lying around, long before we came along. They bully their way into our collection without being invited by any questions of our own. We accept them just because they have satisfied the questions of so many before us... seeking the questions which fits them instead...

My favorite kind of answers are those that my questions give birth to. Questions that I managed to keep safe long enough to do so. These baby answers might seem insignificant in comparison at first, but they are of a much better quality.

16 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 September 2013 04:58:31AM Permalink

...oh crap, I'm going to have to reread the whole thing, aren't I.

16 points AndHisHorse 03 September 2013 11:17:19AM Permalink

Not necessarily a great metric; working on the second-most-probable theory can be the best rational decision if the expected value of working on the most probable theory is lower due to greater cost or lower reward.

16 points jimmy 03 September 2013 01:47:02AM Permalink

"To know thoroughly what has caused a man to say something is to understand the significance of what he has said in its very deepest sense." -Willard F. Day

16 points Pavitra 04 September 2013 05:57:17PM Permalink

Part of that seems to be from HPMOR. I'm not sure where the rest comes from.

16 points Eugine_Nier 02 September 2013 08:16:25PM Permalink

Another bad indication is when we feel sorry for people applying for the program. We used to fund people because they seemed so well meaning. We figured they would be so happy if we accepted them, and that they would get their asses kicked by the world if we didn't. We eventually realized that we're not doing those people a favor. They get their asses kicked by the world anyway.

Paul Graham

16 points Jiro 30 September 2013 12:41:50AM Permalink

Sorry, this is nonsense. It's not hard to Google up a copy of the FCC rules. http://www.fcc.gov/guides/obscenity-indecency-and-profanity :

"The FCC has defined broadcast indecency as “language or material that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory organs or activities.”

I am fairly sure that "I’m going to rape your 8-year-old daughter with a trained monkey" would count as describing sexual activities in patently offensive terms, and would not be allowed when direct use of swear words would not be allowed. Just because you don't use a list of words doesn't mean that what you say will be automatically allowed.

Furthermore, the Wikipedia page on the seven words ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_dirty_words ) points out that " The FCC has never maintained a specific list of words prohibited from the airwaves during the time period from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., but it has alleged that its own internal guidelines are sufficient to determine what it considers obscene." It points out cases where the words were used in context and permitted.

In other words, this quote is based on a sound-bite distortion of actual FCC behavior and as inaccurate research, is automatically ineligible to be a good rationality quote.

16 points James_Miller 04 October 2013 03:07:24AM Permalink

I suspect that many traditions and protocols promote competent decision making. Do you think that, say, the U.S. military would do better in Afghanistan if President Obama issued an order declaring "when in battle ignore all considerations of tradition and protocol"? Group coordination is hard, organizations put a huge amount of effort into it, and traditions and protocols often reflect their best practices.

16 points Eugine_Nier 04 October 2013 02:56:50AM Permalink

You can't trust your intuitions [in this domain]. I'm going to give you a set of rules here that will get you through this process if anything will. At certain moments you'll be tempted to ignore them. So rule number zero is: these rules exist for a reason. You wouldn't need a rule to keep you going in one direction if there weren't powerful forces pushing you in another.

Paul Graham

16 points Alejandro1 03 October 2013 01:53:00PM Permalink

header: funtime activity: casually accusing people of machiavellianism.

man: i’m hungry. we should buy lunch.

woman: OH, so you’re saying THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS?

--Zack Weinersmith, SMBC rejected ideas

16 points Lethalmud 06 December 2013 03:40:25PM Permalink

As a side note, never take pills from strange people in empty werehouses who found you on the internet.

16 points Mestroyer 04 January 2014 10:18:46PM Permalink

Competitive games like Go are most enjoyable when people all agree on the same rules, when losing grants you no excuses to salvage pride at the cost of the victor. For this to work, the rules must be unambigious. You either broke them and are a cheater and the match is invalid, or you exploited them and won fairly. Subjective codes of honor are extremely ambigious. My competitive game of choice (though I rarely play it these days) is Warcraft III, and the online community associated with it is rife with these kind of "codes of honor" (mostly in the mid levels of the skill hierarchy, or "ladder"; the low skill people are trying to learn, the high skill people got that way because they don't self-handicap, but the mid skill people want to imagine themselves as high skill people but with honor). I have seen several of these codes of honor. I once followed one. Examples are: "No mortar/sorceress, no mass chimera, no hero worker harass, no air worker harass no tower rushes, no tower/tank, no mass batriders, no mass raiders". There is never a clear line between honorable and dishonorable behavior. How many mortars and sorceresses do you have to have before it's mortar/sorceress? etc.

A game where you win by inching closer to "dishonorable" behavior is no fun. In addition, Warcraft III players will note that the majority of prohibited strategies are mainstays of the orc and human races. The game is already patched by Blizzard to make the races balanced in professional play, and professionals do not self-handicap. So taking them out of the game would strengthen night-elf and undead players.

And I can attest that beating a "scrub" with a strategy they deem dishonorable and hearing them protest is extremely fun. I can also attest that being a scrub and running into players who don't abide by your "code of honor" is not fun at all. I have even been a scrub and ran into other scrubs who had different "codes of honor", such that we were each violating each others, and that is sort of fun for the victor (if they are hypocritical enough to think that their code is the "correct" one, while laughing at the other one for their code's arbitrariness) and very unfun for the loser.

Besides enjoyment, there is another goal of gaming that you get by playing to win, which is self-improvement. If you allow yourself to think that you lost because you are good and honorable, then you will think about your choices during the game and your thought processes and ask "what can I improve?". And there are transferable Slytherin skills to learn from gaming, such as deceit, modeling your opponent's mind, and searching with (as Quirrell would say) "censors off" for ways to win. Scrubs don't only hurt their own development, but if there are enough of them, they hurt the development of their opponents. You can't really test "Is this a good stratregy" against a scrub, because often it will be a bad strategy but it's against their code so they won't have learned the counter to it, and it will work on them. There are players who do nothing but play anti-scrub strategies to exploit this, but they are also missing out on most of the depth of the game because that's not how you beat high-level players.

But for a related point, see this.

16 points Jayson_Virissimo 05 February 2014 04:36:11AM Permalink

Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.

-- José Ortega y Gasset

16 points WalterL 03 February 2014 05:08:58PM Permalink

You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.

  • Napoleon Bonaparte
16 points MattG 10 March 2014 08:53:54PM Permalink

"Luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always easy to identify a small change in the story that would have turned a remarkable achievement into a mediocre outcome." - Daniel Kahneman

16 points elharo 13 March 2014 11:08:10AM Permalink

May I make a general request to people posting quotes? Please include not just the author's name but sufficient information to enable a reader to find the relevant quote. This doesn't necessarily have to be full MLA format; but a title, journal or book name if from a print source, page number or URL, and date would be helpful. Hyperlinked URLs are excellent if available but do not substitute for the rest of this information since these threads will likely outlive the location of some of the sources.

Doing so enables the reader not just to get a brief hit of rationality but to say, "Gee, that's interesting. I'd like to learn more," and read further in the source.

In fact, why don't we add a fifth bullet point to the header:

  • Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the original source of the quote
16 points Eugine_Nier 02 April 2014 01:10:14AM Permalink

I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.

G. K. Chesterton, attributed.

16 points eli_sennesh 06 April 2014 02:17:35PM Permalink

I don't see how that's any different from all the other age groups ;-).

16 points Tyrrell_McAllister 01 June 2014 08:33:14PM Permalink

To know what questions may reasonably be asked is already a great and necessary proof of sagacity and insight. For if a question is absurd in itself and calls for an answer where none is required, it not only brings shame on the propounder of the question, but may betray an incautious listener into absurd answers, thus presenting, as the ancients said, the ludicrous spectacle of one man milking a he-goat and the other holding a sieve underneath.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (trans. Norman Kemp Smith), p. A58/B82.

16 points NancyLebovitz 12 August 2014 03:15:08PM Permalink

In addition to the specific advice, this is an excellent example of rationality because it's about getting the best from people as they are rather than being resentful because they aren't behaving as they would if they were ideally rational.

16 points seez 14 September 2014 01:33:40AM Permalink

A conversation between me and my 7-year-old cousin:

Her: "do you believe in God?"

Me: "I don't, do you?"

Her: "I used to but, then I never really saw any proof, like miracles or good people getting saved from mean people and stuff. But I do believe in the Tooth Fairy, because ever time I put a tooth under my pillow, I get money out in the morning."

16 points hhadzimu 03 December 2014 11:13:25PM Permalink

Damon Runyon clearly has not considered point spreads.

16 points William_Quixote 04 December 2014 07:32:39PM Permalink

there is a familiar phenomenon here, in which a certain kind of would-be economic expert loves to cite the supposed lessons of economic experiences that are in the distant past, and where we actually have only a faint grasp of what really happened. Harding 1921 “works” only because people don’t know much about it; you have to navigate through some fairly obscure sources to figure out [what actually happened]. And the same goes even more strongly — let’s say, XII times as strongly — when, say, [Name] starts telling us about the Emperor Diocletian. The point is that the vagueness of the information, and even more so what most people [think they] know about it, lets such people project their prejudices onto the past and then claim that they’re discussing the lessons of experience.

Paul Krugman on the use of examples to obscure rather than clarify

16 points lukeprog 01 December 2014 11:27:14PM Permalink

Rationalizations are more important than sex... Have you ever gone a week without a rationalization?

  • Jeff Goldblum's character in The Big Chill
16 points Salemicus 11 December 2014 02:43:17PM Permalink

What does it say about us that (I would guess) most well educated westerners know about the "Carthage must be destroyed" quote but not the "Carthage must be saved" one?

It says that we care about the real as opposed to the imaginary. That is entirely to our credit.

Regardless of what may be considered moral, Carthage was destroyed. Educated people who wish to understand ancient history therefore naturally wish to learn of Cato's anti-Carthaginian campaign, precisely because it was successful. In addition, Cato the Elder was considered a model of behaviour by subsequent generations of Romans, in a way that Corculum was not, therefore to understand ancient Rome we have to understand the behaviour they valourised.

Similarly, Fumimaro Konoe is not nearly as famous as Hideki Tojo. This is not because educated Westerners favour Tojo's foreign policy, but because Tojo won the debate and Japan went to war.

16 points Weedlayer 03 November 2014 05:01:06PM Permalink

Also more than have died from UFAI. Clearly that's not worth worrying over either.

I'm not terrified of Ebola because it's been demonstrated to be controllable in fairly developed counties, but as a general rule this quote seems incredibly out of place on less wrong. People here discuss the dangers of things which have literally never happened before almost every day.

15 points Steve_Rayhawk 15 June 2009 12:21:54AM Permalink

Practically anything can go faster than Disc light, which is lazy and tame, unlike ordinary light. The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles—kingons, or possibly queons—that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that point, the bar closed.

-- Terry Pratchett, Mort, on mind-projection fallacy intuitions (and/or on Jack Sarfatti's theories of superluminal signaling)

15 points wuwei 04 July 2009 02:33:44AM Permalink

There is a mathematical style in which proofs are presented as strings of unmotivated tricks that miraculously do the job, but we found greater intellectual satisfaction in showing how each next step in the argument, if not actually forced, is at least something sweetly reasonable to try. Another reason for avoiding [pulling] rabbits [out of the magicians's hat] as much as possible was that we did not want to teach proofs, we wanted to teach proof design. Eventually, expelling rabbits became another joy of my professional life.

-- Edsger Dijkstra

Edit: Added context to "rabbits" in brackets.

15 points KatjaGrace 03 July 2009 07:03:33AM Permalink

"Philosophy triumphs easily over past and future evils; but present evils triumph over it."

-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld

15 points RichardKennaway 02 July 2009 10:45:38PM Permalink

The Mathemagician nodded knowingly and stroked his chin several times. "You'll find," he remarked gently, "that the only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that's hardly worth the effort."

-- Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

15 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 July 2009 10:08:21PM Permalink

I don't know how many people I've met who hold beliefs like "in three card stud a four is more likely to come up after an eight than a six." What the fuck? Is the concept of random that hard to grasp?

-- Alphadominance

15 points JohannesDahlstrom 02 July 2009 10:02:28PM Permalink

The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.

-- Terry Pratchett, 'Hogfather'

15 points MBlume 04 July 2009 10:30:45PM Permalink

"I'm writing a book on magic," I explain, and I'm asked, "Real magic?" By real magic people mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts, and supernatural powers. "No," I answer. "Conjuring tricks, not real magic."

Real magic, in other words, refers to the magic that is not real, while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic.

-from Net of Magic, by Lee Siegel

15 points gwern 02 July 2009 11:54:04PM Permalink

"It is the mark of an instructed mind to rest assured with that degree of precision that the nature of the subject admits, and not to seek exactness when only an approximation of the truth is possible."

--Aristotle

15 points Nick_Tarleton 25 October 2009 05:25:33AM Permalink

Well, bad enough weather in an agricultural society is murder.

15 points ABranco 01 December 2009 03:52:12AM Permalink

I will repeat this point again until I get hoarse: a mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point. —Nicholas Nassim Taleb

15 points CannibalSmith 01 February 2010 10:08:52PM Permalink

Something is missing here, a fourth term: [..] the unknown knowns - things we don't know that we know. That's the unconscious! That's ideology!

-- Slavoj Žižek @ Google

15 points Rain 01 February 2010 12:42:53PM Permalink

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

-- Mark Twain, excerpt from The War Prayer

15 points anonym 01 February 2010 06:50:31AM Permalink

Million-to-one odds happen eight times a day in New York.

Penn Jillette

15 points Seth_Goldin 20 March 2010 05:45:56PM Permalink

"As one shocked 42-year-old manager exclaimed in the middle of a self-reflective career planning exercise, 'Oh, no! I just realized I let a 20-year-old choose my wife and my career!'"

-- Douglas T. Hall, Protean Careers of the 21st Century

15 points steven0461 02 March 2010 11:51:17PM Permalink

The man who lies to others has merely hidden away the truth, but the man who lies to himself has forgotten where he put it.

old Arab proverb, according to this page, which is itself interesting

15 points thomblake 02 March 2010 05:04:43PM Permalink

You're thinking of Mohs Scale of Mineral Hardness. AngryParsley was referring to Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness, neither of which should be confused with Mohs Scale of Rock and Metal Hardness.

15 points sketerpot 03 May 2010 07:52:24PM Permalink

"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to misattribute it to Voltaire."

-Voltaire

(The phrase was written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall as a summary of Voltaire's attitude toward free speech. Since then, people started attributing it to Voltaire himself, and the myth has spread far and wide, as nobody really checks to see if he actually said that. Hearing something somewhere is plenty of evidence for most people, most of the time, and the conviction gets more solid over time. Which brings me to my second rationality quote, from Winston Churchill: "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.")

15 points Matt_Duing 02 June 2010 04:03:17AM Permalink

"It's wonderful how much we suck compared to us ten years from now!"

-- Michael Blume

15 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 June 2010 10:13:11AM Permalink

I've asked this question before, but where the hell does the high-quality rationality on TV Tropes come from?

15 points josht 08 July 2010 09:30:39AM Permalink

A recent one from Linux Weekly News that gives insight into rationality:

Side note: when a respected information source covers something where you have on-the-ground experience, the result is often to make you wonder how much fecal matter you've swallowed in areas outside your own expertise. -- Rusty Russell

15 points Alan 05 July 2010 04:22:00AM Permalink

What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.

--Anatole France

15 points Peter_de_Blanc 02 July 2010 01:17:12PM Permalink

Lightning was the weapon of Zeus. Now it can be controlled by electrical engineers.

The Aztecs thought the sun was a god. Now plasma physicists can produce light via similar means.

15 points Yvain 03 August 2010 10:13:43PM Permalink

I don't know; the more Less Wrong I read, the more I start to think Lovecraft was on to something.

Delving too far in our search for knowledge is likely to awaken vast godlike forces which are neither benevolent nor malevolent but horrifyingly indifferent to humanity. Some of these forces may be slightly better or worse than others, but all of them could and would swat our civilization away like a mosquito. Such forces may already control other star systems.

The only defense against such abominations is to study the arcane knowledge involved in summoning or banishing these entities; however, such knowledge is likely to cause its students permanent psychological damage or doom them to eternities of torture.

15 points WrongBot 03 August 2010 04:26:10AM Permalink

Please don't delete comments. It makes it hard to understand orphaned replies. Adding an [Edit: Withdrawn] at the end of the comment serves the same purpose, but maintains conversational continuity.

15 points gwern 01 September 2010 01:03:57PM Permalink

Yep.

'116. You think you know when you can learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.'

"Epigrams in Programming", by Alan J. Perlis; ACM's SIGPLAN publication, September, 1982

15 points Morendil 01 September 2010 10:18:39AM Permalink

Yes! I'm happy that at least one person clicks on that.

The software industry is currently held back by a conception of programming-as-manual-labor, consisting of semi-mechanically turning a specification document into executable code. In fact it's much closer to "the art of improving your understanding of some business domain by expressing the details of that domain in a formal notation". The resulting program isn't quite a by-product of that activity - it's important, though not nearly as important as distilling the domain understanding.

15 points Morendil 01 September 2010 03:31:31PM Permalink

And by the same token, we'll know we've nailed AI not when we have written a program that can have that conversation... but when we have written down an account of how we are able to have that conversation, to such a level of detail that there's nothing left to explain.

Writing a program which solves the Towers of Hanoi is not too hard. Proving, given a formalization of the ToH, various properties of a program that solves it, isn't too hard. But looking at a bunch of wooden disks slotted on pegs and coming up with an interpretation of that situation which corresponds to the abstract scheme we know as "Towers of Hanoi"... That's where the fun is.

15 points sark 07 September 2010 03:52:55AM Permalink

House: There's never any proof. Five different doctors come up with five different diagnoses based on the same evidence.

Cuddy: You don't have any evidence. And nobody knows anything, huh? How is it you always think you're right?

House: I don't. I just find it hard to operate on the opposite assumption.

15 points N_MacDonald 12 October 2010 09:30:14AM Permalink

No, they don't want a dogmatic and intolerant pilot. They want an empirical pilot who trusts his observations and instruments and uses them to make the best judgement regarding how to operate the plane.

On the other hand, a dogmatic, absolutist pilot who is absolutely sure as to the best way to land the airplane under all conditions, ignores his instruments, weather conditions and data from the control towers, and never listens to his flight crew... is a recipe for disaster.

Dogmatic absolutists mistake observation, skepticism, tolerance and empiricism for "fuzzy thinking". They don't realize that their own thinking is the very opposite of scientific thinking- which is based on observation, not fixed dogmas.

15 points XiXiDu 04 November 2010 12:37:19PM Permalink

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).

15 points Automaton 03 December 2010 07:42:32AM Permalink

“On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.”

--Nietzsche

15 points RichardKennaway 06 January 2011 08:27:38PM Permalink

Let us be certain of a fact before being concerned with its cause. It is true that this method is too lengthy for most people who naturally run to the cause and overlook the certitude about facts; but at last we will avoid the ridicule of finding the cause of what does not exist.

Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

Recently quoted on the web in relation to acupuncture studies.

15 points RichardKennaway 02 February 2011 01:41:35AM Permalink

People who have been living with serious problems for a long time find it hard to imagine that there's been a solution within their reach all along. For the short term, it's easier to go on putting up with the problem than it is to change one's expectations.

paulwl (quoted here)

ETA: I thought this had the smell of Usenet about it, and on Google Groups I found the original, written by one Alex Clark here. paulwl is actually the person he was replying to.

BTW, there's quite a bit of rationality (and irrationality) on that newsgroup on the subject of people looking for relationships (mostly men looking for women), from way back when. I don't know if 1996 predates the sort of PUA that has been talked about on LW.

15 points MichaelGR 03 February 2011 02:52:24PM Permalink

Life is tough, but it's tougher if you're stupid.

-John Wayne, Sands of Iwo Jima (1949)

15 points MichaelGR 03 February 2011 02:50:58PM Permalink

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

-Mark Twain

15 points orthonormal 05 February 2011 10:30:59PM Permalink

Quirrell is not just Eliezer's HPMOR character, he is also probably his LW sock-puppet!

Oh, come on. It's obviously been the other way around all along.

15 points djcb 03 March 2011 06:23:18AM Permalink

while enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere, on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disaster.

  • Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)

[ In The Intelligent Investor, Benjamin Graham, who was Warren Buffett's mentor, shares his views on investing for a wider audience. I like the rationalist, no-nonsense approach he takes (as seen in this quote) esp. in a field like this ]

15 points RichardKennaway 06 March 2011 11:28:47PM Permalink

Outrage is fine if it leads to effective action. If it doesn't, it's just a hobby.

William T. Powers

15 points Cyan 07 March 2011 04:17:55PM Permalink

What exactly qualifies some physical systems to play the role of 'measurer'? Was the wavefunction of the world waiting to jump for thousands of millions of years until a single-celled living creature appeared? Or did it have to wait a little longer, for some better qualified system... with a PhD?

John Stewart Bell, "Against Measurement" in Physics World, 1990.

15 points CronoDAS 05 March 2011 01:50:12AM Permalink

In the middle of every silver lining there is a big black cloud.

-- Alonzo Fyfe

15 points Desrtopa 04 April 2011 08:13:24PM Permalink

I kind of feel like a scenario is not a great starting point for talking about perseverance when it's likely to result in your immediately getting your arms ripped off.

There are times when it's important to persevere, and times when it's important to know what not to try in the first place.

15 points Oscar_Cunningham 14 April 2011 11:44:56AM Permalink

Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.

Paul Graham "What Ive learned from Hacker News"

15 points mispy 05 April 2011 03:08:38AM Permalink

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.

-- Richard Feynman

(I don't think he originally meant this in the context of overcoming cognitive bias, but it seems to apply well to that too.)

15 points Oscar_Cunningham 06 June 2011 10:23:16PM Permalink

Sometimes smart people believe weird things because they're actually, y'know, true.

15 points loqi 01 June 2011 06:54:15PM Permalink

If you can't think intuitively, you may be able to verify specific factual claims, but you certainly can't think about history.

Well, maybe we can't think about history. Intuition is unreliable. Just because you want to think intelligently about something doesn't mean it's possible to do so.

Jewish Atheist, in reply to Mencius Moldbug

15 points fubarobfusco 02 June 2011 02:27:12AM Permalink

Heinlein's spaceships relied on human beings doing orbital calculations on slide-rules and calling out orders to one another to direct the ship — "Brennschluss!" — to avoid disaster. Today, there are serious projects to move ground automobiles out of direct human control as a safety measure.

Asimov's robots, and the renegade computers on Star Trek, dealt with conflicting evidence so poorly that they could be permanently broken by receiving malicious data. Today's software engineers would call that a denial-of-service attack or "query of death", and fix it.

The real world has much higher standards for safety and reliability than fiction does!

15 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 December 2011 05:36:47AM Permalink

This is one of the more brilliant illustrations I've seen, and I suspect that what it illustrates is that the Deep Wisdom of a statement is mostly the cumulative Deep Wisdom points scored by each deep-sounding concept. Thus, reversing the meaning of a sentence has little effect on its Deep Wisdom points, so long as the same concepts are being invoked.

15 points Nominull 04 August 2011 04:14:24PM Permalink

Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes.

-Bruce Sterling, cyberpunk author

15 points paper-machine 10 August 2011 03:09:58PM Permalink

Advancing a career in science is not the same as advancing science.

-- John D. Cook, in a tweet.

15 points Raemon 03 August 2011 04:54:24AM Permalink

Upvoted because it provoked interesting thoughts, even though I disagree with it.

I can actually say in advance which irrational things I am likely to do on a given day. (For example, be up at 1 AM posting on Less Wrong instead of sleeping). If I know enough about a person to know their goals and approximate level of education as relates to those goals, I usually also know enough to have a sense of what types of irrational things they tend to do.

15 points MixedNuts 03 August 2011 06:27:09AM Permalink

Because the mechanisms for encoding goals, planning, and updating on new information are completely different. They may malfuction in both cases, but you'll be better off looking at how it's supposed to work and how it fails than making a surface anaology with humans. Otherwise either you've just said "Both of these things break sometimes" or you're going to run off and predict economic fluctuations by analogy to mood swings or something.

15 points Konkvistador 13 September 2011 10:27:34PM Permalink
[The] art is long,
life is short,
opportunity fleeting,
experiment dangerous,
judgment difficult.

Considering the beast that some hope to kill by sharpening people's mind-sticks on LW, this sounds applicable wouldn't you agree?

15 points GabrielDuquette 01 September 2011 02:38:27PM Permalink

On practical questions of urgent importance we must make up our minds one way or the other even when we know that the evidence is incomplete. To refuse to make up our minds is equivalent to deciding to leave things as they are (which is just as likely as any other to be the wrong solution).

-- Robert H. Thouless

15 points lukeprog 01 September 2011 12:12:13PM Permalink

Imagine that everyone in North America took [a cognitive enhancement pill] before retiring and then woke up the next morning with more memory capacity and processing speed... I believe that there is little likelihood that much would change the next day in terms of human happiness. It is very unlikely that people would be better able to fulfill their wishes and desires the day after taking the pill. In fact, it is quite likely that people would simply go about their usual business - only more efficiently. If given more memory capacity and processing speed, people would, I believe: carry on using the same ineffective medical treatments because of failure to think of alternative causes; keep making the same poor financial decisions because of overconfidence; keep misjudging environmental risks because of vividness; play host to the [tempting bad ideas] of Ponzi and pyramid schemes; [and] be wrongly influenced in their jury decisions by incorrect testimony about probabilities... The only difference would be that they would be able to do all of these things much more quickly!

Keith Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss

15 points MarkusRamikin 01 September 2011 10:31:19AM Permalink

Easily.

Realizing far-reaching consequences of an idea is only easy in hindsight, otherwise I think it's a matter of exceptional intelligence and/or luck. There's an enormous difference between, on the one hand, noticing some limited selection and utilising it for practical benefits - despite only having a limited, if any, understanding of what you're doing - and on the other hand realizing how life evolved into complexity from its simple beginnings, in the course of a difficult to grasp period of time. Especially if the idea has to go up against well-entrenched, hostile memes.

I don't know if this has a name, but there seems to exit a trope where (speaking broadly) superior beings are unable to understand the thinking and errors of less advanced beings. I first noticed it when reading H. Fast's The First Men, where this exchange between a "Man Plus" child and a normal human occurs:

"Can you do something you disapprove of?" "I am afraid I can. And do." "I don't understand. Then why do you do it?"

It's supposed to be about how the child is so advanced and undivided in her thinking, but to me it just means "well then you don't understand how the human mind works".

In short, I find this trope to be a fallacy. I'd expect an advanced civilisation to have a greater, not lesser, understanding of how intelligence works, its limitations, and failure modes in general.

15 points Alejandro1 03 October 2011 01:10:57AM Permalink

According to certain versions, Chuck Jones and his team established a set of rules for the cartoon (such as "The audience's sympathy must remain with the Coyote" and "Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote's greatest enemy"). One of them is supposed to have been:

The Coyote could stop anytime—IF he were not a fanatic. (Repeat: "A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim." —George Santayana).

15 points grendelkhan 07 October 2011 03:29:50PM Permalink

The least evil is still evil. The least monstrous is still monstrous

When, as will happen, you are yourself forced to choose between two bad things, then choose the lesser of the evils and choose it boldly. That will be the right choice and, if circumstances are truly as circumscribed as you believe them to be, that will be the right thing to do in that situation.

But it still won't be a good thing. It isn't a good thing and cannot be made good.

Fred Clarke, August 9

15 points [deleted] 02 November 2011 02:28:00PM Permalink

The point of the story is that it illustrates the power of precommitment; Odysseus made a choice in advance not to steer towards the rocks even though he knew that when the opportunity would arise he would want to steer towards them.

Why he wanted to be lashed to the mast instead of stooping his ears with wax I guess was because he desired to hear the "sweet singing".

15 points Pfft 31 October 2011 02:46:39PM Permalink

[,,,]we don't just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions and we defend our own. We gain and lose ground. We plan and use strategies. If we find a position indefensible, we can abandon it and take a new line of attack. Many of the things we do in arguing are partially structured by the concept of war. Though there is no physical battle, there is a verbal battle, and the structure of an argument--attack, defense, counter-attack, etc.---reflects this. It is in this sense that the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor is one that we live by in this culture; its structures the actions we perform in arguing. Try to imagine a culture where arguments are not viewed in terms of war, where no one wins or loses, where there is no sense of attacking or defending, gaining or losing ground. Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently.

-George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By.

15 points kateblu 09 December 2011 03:42:02AM Permalink

"If a theory has a lot of parameters, you adjust their values to fit a lot of data, and your theory is not really predicting those things, just accommodating them. Scientists use words like “curve fitting” and “fudge factors” to describe that sort of activity. On the other hand, if a theory has just a few parameters but applies to a lot of data, it has real power. You can use a small subset of the measurements to fix the parameters; then all other measurements are uniquely predicted. " Frank Wilczek

15 points [deleted] 03 December 2011 12:06:48AM Permalink

And the worst thing is they don't use a piston array! Making a scrolling wall of blocks is fairly easy within Minecraft and would've saved them the trouble of manually shifting all their blocks every single frame. That's easily an order of magnitude less work, and can be re-used for other stop-motion movies.

Their excuse? "We dont have the smarts"(sic). Sigh.

15 points MixedNuts 04 December 2011 06:19:54PM Permalink

Well, that makes sense. They've panicked earlier, when the plan was announced.

15 points shokwave 06 December 2011 06:00:03AM Permalink

And each individual panics! Witness the common existential crisis: execute a head-first dive into mild depression and loudly proclaim your conversion to pure hedonism. But since nobody else is currently panicking, the individual comes to mimic the standard mental state. Which may not be the correct mental state...

15 points paper-machine 30 November 2011 11:28:57AM Permalink

Or, at least, he believes it did.

15 points paper-machine 30 November 2011 05:41:40PM Permalink

The latter. I don't think Nash is a reliable narrator.

EDIT: And not merely because of his schizophrenia. Without hard data, I'd be hard-pressed to evaluate whether or not learning a mental habit increased or decreased my sanity, and that's assuming I'm sane to begin with.

15 points Psy-Kosh 17 December 2011 04:52:17AM Permalink

The way I like to put it is this: "correlation correlates with causation because causation causes correlation." :)

15 points roystgnr 03 December 2011 04:38:05PM Permalink

I think this quote is objectively accurate:

"of all would-be jumpers who were thwarted from leaping off the Golden Gate between 1937 and 1971 — an astonishing 515 individuals in all — he painstakingly culled death-certificate records to see how many had subsequently “completed.” His report, “Where Are They Now?” remains a landmark in the study of suicide, for what he found was that just 6 percent of those pulled off the bridge went on to kill themselves. Even allowing for suicides that might have been mislabeled as accidents only raised the total to 10 percent."

In other words, if you ever think you want to kill yourself, there's a 90% chance you're wrong. Behave accordingly.

15 points CaveJohnson 18 January 2012 07:36:34PM Permalink

Most people are theists not because they were "reasoned into" believing in God, but because they applied Occam's razor at too early an age. Their simplest explanation for the reason that their parents, not to mention everyone else in the world, believed in God, was that God actually existed. The same could be said for, say, Australia.

--Mencius Moldbug

15 points gwern 01 January 2012 01:24:02AM Permalink

“The general method that Wittgenstein does suggest is that of ’shewing that a man has supplied no meaning for certain signs in his sentences’.

I can illustrate the method from Wittgenstein’s later way of discussing problems. He once greeted me with the question: ‘Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis? I replied: ‘I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.’ ‘Well,’ he asked, ‘what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?’

This question brought it out that I had hitherto given no relevant meaning to ‘it looks as if’ in ‘it looks as if the sun goes round the earth’.

My reply was to hold out my hands with the palms upward, and raise them from my knees in a circular sweep, at the same time leaning backwards and assuming a dizzy expression. ‘Exactly!’ he said.”

–Elizabeth Anscombe, An Introduction To Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1959); apropos of a recent Scot Sumner blog post

15 points gwern 02 January 2012 01:16:24AM Permalink

Sun Tzu said it better; VI, 'Weak Points and Strong':

  1. Appear at points which the enemy must hasten to defend; march swiftly to places where you are not expected.
  2. An army may march great distances without distress, if it marches through country where the enemy is not.
  3. You can be sure of succeeding in your attacks if you only attack places which are undefended. You can ensure the safety of your defense if you only hold positions that cannot be attacked.
  4. Hence that general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skillful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.
15 points peter_hurford 01 January 2012 11:28:16PM Permalink

More accurate:

A man said to the universe: "Sir, I exist!"

The universe says nothing.

15 points katydee 06 January 2012 06:00:17AM Permalink

A few Google searches resolved this question for me, and proved very interesting besides. Vavilov was a Soviet botanist focused on the cultivation of efficient seeds to mitigate hunger. In World War Two, Vavilov's Leningrad seedbank came under siege by the Nazis, who apparently wanted to steal/destroy the seeds. Considering the supplies vital to Russia's long-term survival, several of the scientists swore oaths to protect the seedbank against German forces, starving foragers, and rats.

They succeeded in doing so. The scientist-guards were so loyal that many of them died of starvation despite being in a facility full of edible seeds, as well as potatoes, corn, rice, and wheat. The seedbank endured the siege and was replenished after the city was liberated.

Vavilov himself did not live to see the victory of his researchers, as he had been sent to a camp thanks to his disapproval of the scientific fraud of Lysenkoism and died (ironically, of malnutrition) before the war ended.

15 points [deleted] 08 February 2012 05:21:12PM Permalink

Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.

H. Jackson Brown

(The second-last paragraph of The Power of Agency by Lukeprog reminded me of it.)

15 points Alejandro1 01 February 2012 04:55:17PM Permalink

"Stay, 'tis just a figure!" Root laughed rather winningly, reaching out to touch Locke's shoulder.

"A faulty one," Daniel said, "for you are an alchemist."

"I am called an Alchemist. Within living memory, Daniel, everyone who studied what I—and you—study was called by that name. And most persons even today observe no distinction between Alchemy and the younger and more vigorous order of knowledge that is associated with your club."

"I am too exhausted to harry you through all of your evasions. Out of respect for your friends Mr. Locke, and for Leibniz, I shall give you the benefit of the doubt, and wish you well," Daniel said.

"God save you, Mr. Waterhouse."

"And you, Mr. Root. But I say this to you—and you as well, Mr. Locke. As I came in here I saw a map, lately taken from this house, burning in the fire. The map was empty, for it depicted the ocean—most likely, a part of it where no man has ever been. A few lines of latitude were ruled across that vellum void, and some legendary isles drawn in, with great authority, and where the map-maker could not restrain himself he drew phantastickal monsters. That map, to me, is Alchemy. It is good that it burnt, and fitting that it burnt tonight, the eve of a Revolution that I will be so bold as to call my life's work. In a few years Mr. Hooke will learn to make a proper chronometer, finishing what Mr. Huygens began thirty years ago, and then the Royal Society will draw maps with lines of longitude as well as latitude, giving us a grid— what we call a Cartesian grid, though 'twas not his idea—and where there be islands, we will rightly draw them. Where there are none, we will draw none, nor dragons, nor sea-monsters—and that will be the end of Alchemy."

Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver.

15 points kalla724 01 February 2012 09:38:43PM Permalink

Probably a duplicate, but I can't find a previous version:

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

H. L. Mencken

15 points NancyLebovitz 06 March 2012 12:15:36PM Permalink

Carefully observe those good qualities wherein our enemies excel us

Plutarch, found here

15 points Bugmaster 03 March 2012 09:54:54AM Permalink

Or, as the Language Log puts it:

The first thing to say is that the only possible way to settle a question of grammar or style is to look at relevant evidence. I suppose there really are people who believe the rules of grammar come down from some authority on high, an authority that has no connection with the people who speak and write English; but those people have got to be deranged.

15 points TheOtherDave 02 March 2012 05:38:16PM Permalink

To my way of thinking, it's quite possible for me to be fully responsible for a chain of events (for example, if they would not have occurred if not for my action, and I was aware of the likelihood of them occurring given my action, and no external forces constrained my choice so as to preclude acting differently) and for other people upstream and downstream of me to also be fully responsible for that chain of events. This is no more contradictory than my belief that object A is to the left of object B from one perspective and simultaneously to the right of object A from another. Responsibility is not some mysterious fluid out there in the world that gets portioned out to individuals, it's an attribute that we assign to entities in a mental and/or social model.

You seem to be claiming that models wherein total responsibility for an event is conserved across the entire known causal chain are superior to mental models where it isn't, but I don't quite see why i ought to believe that.

15 points Alejandro1 01 March 2012 06:23:41PM Permalink

The demons told me that there is a hell for the sentimental and the pedantic. They are abandoned in an endless palace, more empty than full, and windowless. The condemned walk about as if searching for something, and, as we might expect, they soon begin to say that the greatest torment consists in not participating in the vision of God, that moral suffering is worse than physical suffering, and so on. Then the demons hurl them into the sea of fire, from where no one will ever take them out.

Adolfo Bioy Casares (my translation)

15 points FiftyTwo 03 April 2012 09:47:12PM Permalink

Another good one from Don Draper:

I hate to break it to you, but there is no big lie, there is no system, the universe is indifferent.

15 points FiftyTwo 03 April 2012 09:31:53PM Permalink

I know a lot of scientists as well as laymen are scornful of philosophy - perhaps understandably so. Reading academic philosophy journals often makes my heart sink too. But without exception, we all share philosophical background assumptions and presuppositions. The penalty of _not _ doing philosophy isn't to transcend it, but simply to give bad philosophical arguments a free pass.

David Pearce

15 points Oscar_Cunningham 01 April 2012 02:07:43PM Permalink

You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.

Marvin Minsky

15 points arundelo 04 April 2012 02:51:32PM Permalink

His partner Teller says the same thing here:

Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest. My partner, Penn, and I once produced 500 live cockroaches from a top hat on the desk of talk-show host David Letterman. To prepare this took weeks. We hired an entomologist who provided slow-moving, camera-friendly cockroaches (the kind from under your stove don't hang around for close-ups) and taught us to pick the bugs up without screaming like preadolescent girls. Then we built a secret compartment out of foam-core (one of the few materials cockroaches can't cling to) and worked out a devious routine for sneaking the compartment into the hat. More trouble than the trick was worth? To you, probably. But not to magicians.

Edit: That trick is 19 minutes and 50 seconds into this video.

15 points Spurlock 02 April 2012 04:44:28AM Permalink

“The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance. ”

-St Augustine of Hippo

15 points Konkvistador 23 May 2012 05:45:15PM Permalink
Is it fair to say you're enjoying the controversy you've started?
Thiel: I don't enjoy being contrarian.
Yes you do. *laughs*
Thiel: No, I think it is much more important to be right than to be contrarian.

--Peter Thiel, on 60 Minutes

15 points komponisto 01 May 2012 03:05:58PM Permalink

[S]top whining and start hacking.

-- Paul Graham

(Arguably a decent philosophy of life, if a bit harshly expressed for my taste.)

15 points AlexMennen 06 June 2012 04:31:12PM Permalink

The present impossibility of giving a scientific explanation is no proof that there is no scientific explanation. The unexplained is not to be identified with the unexplainable, and the strange and extraordinary nature of a fact is not a justification for attributing it to powers above nature.

-The Catholic Encyclopedia

15 points GabrielDuquette 02 June 2012 05:26:51AM Permalink

Problem solving is hunting; it is savage pleasure and we are born to it.

Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

15 points ChristianKl 05 June 2012 01:45:04PM Permalink

I don't think that the idea that politicians don't change their position has much basis in reality. There are a lot of people who complain about politicians flip-flopping.

When a politician speaks publically, he usually doesn't speak about his personal decision but about a position that's a consensus of the group for which the politician speaks. He might personally disagree with the position and try to change the consensus internally. It's still his role to be responsible for the position of the group to which he belongs. In the end the voter cares about what the group of politicians do. What laws do they enact? Those laws are compromises and the politicians stand for the compromise even when they personally disagree with parts of it.

A scientist isn't supposed to be responsible for the way his experiments turn out.

And if you take something like the Second Vatican Council there's even change of positions in religion.

15 points JoshuaZ 02 June 2012 11:12:05PM Permalink

A lot more people have heard of Michael Jordan than have heard of Norman Borlaug. Yet Borlaug is one of the few humans on the planet who can be personally credited with saving millions of lives. Who one has heard of is not likely to be highly correlated with what impact people have had.

15 points aausch 05 August 2012 07:52:35PM Permalink

Did you teach him wisdom as well as valor, Ned? she wondered. Did you teach him how to kneel? The graveyards of the Seven Kingdoms were full of brave men who had never learned that lesson

-- Catelyn Stark, A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin

15 points Nornagest 08 August 2012 06:25:32AM Permalink

Can't speak to any fictional dark lords, but the real-life equivalent seems more prone to deciding that there is an evil, which is true evil, and which is manifest upon the world in the person of those guys over there.

At least, that's what the rhetoric pretty consistently says. Either a given dark-lordish individual is a very good liar or actually believes it, and knowing what we do about ideology and the prevalence of sociopathy I'm inclined to default to the latter.

(I wouldn't say that Oscar Wilde and others with his interaction style particularly resemble dark lords, though.)

15 points thomblake 08 August 2012 09:01:19PM Permalink

To go along with what army1987 said, "reinventing the wheel" isn't going from the wooden wheel to the rubber one. "Reinventing the wheel" is ignoring the rubber wheels that exist and spending months of RD to make a wooden circle.

For example, trying to write a function to do date calculations, when there's a perfectly good library.

15 points cata 03 September 2012 11:10:45PM Permalink

Does the order of the two terminal conditions matter? / Think about it.

Does the order of the two terminal conditions matter? / Try it out!

Does the order of the two previous answers matter? / Yes. Think first, then try.

  • Friedman and Felleisen, The Little Schemer
15 points katydee 02 September 2012 06:51:54PM Permalink

When we were first drawn together as a society, it had pleased God to enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which we once esteemed truths, were errors; and that others, which we had esteemed errors, were real truths. From time to time He has been pleased to afford us farther light, and our principles have been improving, and our errors diminishing.

Now we are not sure that we are arrived at the end of this progression, and at the perfection of spiritual or theological knowledge; and we fear that, if we should once print our confession of faith, we should feel ourselves as if bound and confin'd by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive farther improvement, and our successors still more so, as conceiving what we their elders and founders had done, to be something sacred, never to be departed from.

Michael Welfare, quoted in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

15 points taelor 03 September 2012 04:42:35AM Permalink

Answer: Because the Greek gods are vindictive as fuck, and will fuck you over twice as hard when they find out that you wriggled out of it the first time.

15 points Omegaile 03 September 2012 08:35:56PM Permalink

Not always, since:

The average human has one breast and one testicle

Des McHale

In other words, the average of a distribution is not necessarily the most probable value.

15 points MileyCyrus 03 September 2012 03:11:36AM Permalink

Lol, my professor would give a 100% to anyone who answered every exam question wrong. There were a couple people who pulled it off, but most scored 010.

15 points katydee 13 September 2012 05:07:40AM Permalink

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.

Ernest Hemingway

15 points buybuydandavis 03 September 2012 10:45:47AM Permalink

I think he's mischaracterizing the issue.

Beliefs serve multiple functions. One is modeling accuracy, another is signaling. It's not whether the environment is harsh or easy, it's which function you need. There are many harsh environments where what you need is the signaling function, and not the modeling function.

15 points RomanDavis 01 September 2012 10:51:42PM Permalink

She's got to be from here, here's learning biases can hurt people:

Heuristics and biases research: gaslighting the human race?

Cryonics:

"Are you signed up for Christonics?" "No, I'm still prochristinating."

I'm starting to think this is someone I used to know from tvtropes.

15 points gwern 02 September 2012 11:23:49PM Permalink

I think that's actually a really terrible bit of arguing.

There are only two logically possible explanations: random chance, or design.

We can stop right there. If we're all the way back at solipsism, we haven't even gotten to defining concepts like 'random chance' or 'design', which presume an entire raft of external beliefs and assumptions, and we surely cannot immediately say there are only two categories unless, in response to any criticism, we're going to include a hell of a lot under one of those two rubrics. Which probability are we going to use, anyway? There are many more formalized versions than just Kolmogorov's axioms (which brings us to the analytic and synthetic problem).

And much of the rest goes on in a materialist vein which itself requires a lot of further justification (why can't minds be ontologically simple elements? Oh, your experience in the real world with various regularities has persuaded you that is inconsistent with the evidence? I see...) Even if we granted his claims about complexity, why do we care about complexity? And so on.

Yes, if you're going to buy into a (very large) number of materialist non-solipsist claims, then you're going to have trouble making a case in such terms for solipsism. But if you've bought all those materialist or externalist claims, you've already rejected solipsism and there's no tension in the first place. And he doesn't do a good case of explaining that at all.

15 points peter_hurford 01 September 2012 06:16:01PM Permalink

"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us." - Sagan

15 points gwern 06 October 2012 12:49:25AM Permalink

Despite the difficulty of exact Bayesian inference in complex mathematical models, the essence of Bayesian reasoning is frequently used in everyday life. One example has been immortalized in the words of Sherlock Holmes to his friend Dr. Watson: “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” (Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four, 1890, Ch. 6). This reasoning is actually a consequence of Bayesian belief updating, as expressed in Equation 4.4. Let me re-state it this way: “How often have I said to you that when p(D|θ_i ) = 0 for all i!=j, then, no matter how small the prior p(θ_j ) 0 is, the posterior p(θ_j |D) must equal one.” Somehow it sounds better the way Holmes said it.

--Kruschke 2010, Doing Bayesian Data Analysis, pg56-57

15 points RichardKennaway 03 October 2012 01:16:34PM Permalink

Other people's maps are part of my territory.

15 points MBlume 01 October 2012 07:56:20PM Permalink

I can pick up a mole (animal) and throw it. Anything I can throw weighs one pound. One pound is one kilogram.

--Randal Munroe, A Mole of Moles

15 points BlazeOrangeDeer 02 October 2012 08:04:52AM Permalink

From the stories I expected the world to be sad

And it was.

And I expected it to be wonderful.

It was.

I just didn't expect it to be so big.

-- xkcd: Click and Drag

15 points beoShaffer 12 November 2012 05:17:09AM Permalink

I've never heard more different explanations for anything parents tell kids than why they shouldn't swear. Every parent I know forbids their children to swear, and yet no two of them have the same justification. It's clear most start with not wanting kids to swear, then make up the reason afterward.

-Paul Graham in The Lies We Tell Kids

15 points lukeprog 12 November 2012 03:39:32AM Permalink

Slogans like “practice random acts of kindness” feel good and are easy to put into practice. But if we don’t take our activism more seriously than that, our motive is probably a desire to feel good about ourselves, to help ourselves or those close to us, or to act out our self-identity. The endpoint of authentic compassion is a desire to do the most good that one can, to be as effective as possible in creating a world with less suffering and destruction and more joy. Figuring out how we can do the most good takes careful thought over a long period of time, and it means moving into new and possibly uncomfortable areas of advocacy. But the importance of taking our activism seriously and approaching it from this utilitarian perspective cannot be overstated. It will mean a difference between life and death, between happiness and suffering, for thousands of people, for thousands of acres of the ecosystem, and for tens of thousands of animals.

Nick Cooney, Change of Heart

15 points BerryPick6 06 November 2012 03:08:10PM Permalink

Recognizing the startling resurgence in realism, Don Philahue (of The Don Philahue Show) invited a member of Realists Anonymous to bare his soul on television. After a brief introduction documenting the spread of realism, Philahue turned to his guest:

DP: What kinds of realism were you into, Hilary?

H: The whole bag, Don. I was a realist about logical terms, abstract entities, theoretical postulates - you name it.

DP: And causality, what about causality?

H: That too, Don. (Audience gasps.)

DP: I'm going to press you here, Hilary. Did you at any time accept moral realism?

H: (staring at feet): Yes.

DP: What effect did all this realism have on your life?

H: I would spend hours aimlessly wandering the streets, kicking large stones and shouting, "I refute you thus!" It's embarrassing to recall.

DP: There was worse, wasn't there Hilary?

H: I can't deny it, don. (Audience gasps.) Instead of going to work I would sit at home fondling ashtrays and reading voraciously about converging scientific theories. I kept a copy of "Hitler: A Study in Tyranny" hidden in the icebox, and when no one was around I would take it our and chant "The Nazis were bad. The Nazis were really bad."

-- A dialogue by Philip Gasper

15 points khafra 05 November 2012 12:12:52PM Permalink

"Reality Injection Attack" would make a great name for a mathcore band.

15 points Luke_A_Somers 07 November 2012 02:46:50PM Permalink

"

15 points JoshuaZ 03 December 2012 12:07:26AM Permalink

The past is in some respects worse than a third world country. In the United States around 1900, the life expectancy ranged from around 50 climbing steadily to reach around 60 around 1930 (curiously the Great Depression didn't cause a slump in life expectancy, although the rate of growth did slow). Source with related data(pdf). But, if one looks at current life expectancy in many countries in the developing world, most countries exceed the US-1900 numbers. Similar comparisons can be made for literacy and many other metrics of success. The middling developing countries today are better in many ways than most of the US was in 1900.

15 points katydee 02 December 2012 08:15:19AM Permalink

Do not read written works and think, "This is the Way." Written works are like the gate to approach the Way. Thus, there are people who remain ignorant of the Way regardless of how much they have learned and how many Chinese characters they know. Though they face the pages and read as skillfully as though they were annotating the ancients, they are ignorant of the truth and so do not make the Way their own.

— Yagyū Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword

15 points Will_Newsome 01 December 2012 05:13:57PM Permalink

When you have run the length of various practices and none of those practices remain in your mind, that very lack of mind itself is the heart of "all things." When you have exhaustively learned the various practices and techniques and made great effort in disciplined training, there will be action in your arms, legs, and body but none in your mind; you will have distanced yourself from training, but will not be in opposition to it, and you will have freedom in whatever techniques you perform. You yourself will be unaware of where your mind is, and neither demons nor heresies will be able to find it.

— Yagyū Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword

15 points Armok_GoB 03 December 2012 09:35:25PM Permalink

The universe is full of sharp things, waiting to skewer us.

No idea what I got the sudden urge to respond with that.

15 points roystgnr 02 January 2013 09:16:53PM Permalink

"This is how it sometimes works", I would have said. Anything more starts to sound uncomfortably close to the lurkers support me in email.

15 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 January 2013 09:12:57PM Permalink

"Two roads diverged in a wood. I took the one less traveled by, and had to eat bugs until the park rangers rescued me."

15 points James_Miller 02 February 2013 07:38:10PM Permalink

An accurate emotion = "I'm angry because I should be angry because she is being really, really mean to me."

A useful emotion = "Showing empathy towards someone being mean to me will minimize the cost to me of others' hostility."

15 points xv15 11 February 2013 04:34:07PM Permalink

Closeness in the experiment was reasonably literal but may also be interpreted in terms of identification with the torturer. If the church is doing the torturing then the especially religious may be more likely to think the tortured are guilty. If the state is doing the torturing then the especially patriotic (close to their country) may be more likely to think that the tortured/killed/jailed/abused are guilty. That part is fairly obvious but note the second less obvious implication–the worse the victim is treated the more the religious/patriotic will believe the victim is guilty. ... Research in moral reasoning is important because understanding why good people do evil things is more important than understanding why evil people do evil things.

-Alex Tabarrok

15 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 February 2013 11:13:04PM Permalink

I agree subject to the specification that each such observation must look substantially more like the absence of a duck then a duck. There are many things we see which are not ducks in particular locations. My shoe doesn't look like a duck in my closet, but it also doesn't look like the absence of a duck in my closet. Or to put it another way, my sock looks exactly like it should look if there's no duck in my closet, but it also looks exactly like it should look if there is a duck in my closet.

15 points Eugine_Nier 05 February 2013 01:22:59AM Permalink

Of a proposed course of action He wants men, so far as I can see, to ask very simple questions; is it righteous? is it prudent? is it possible? Now if we can keep men asking "Is it in accordance with the general movement of our time? Is it progressive or reactionary? Is this the way that History is going?" they will neglect the relevant questions. And the questions they do ask are, of course, unanswerable; for they do not know the future, and what the future will be depends very largely on just those choices which they now invoke the future to help them to make.

-- Screwtape, The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

15 points GabrielDuquette 02 February 2013 01:18:28AM Permalink

Judge a book by its cover. The author and publisher selected that design to represent the book's content and tone. #MoreSensibleSayings

ShittingtonUK

15 points Andreas_Giger 02 February 2013 03:40:32PM Permalink

You don't "judge" a book by its cover; you use the cover as additional evidence to more accurately predict what's in the book. Knowing what the publisher wants you to assume about the book is preferable to not knowing.

15 points philh 01 March 2013 07:09:20PM Permalink

Single data point: when I read "I once had a a civil argument with a woman", it immediately felt sexist to me. I think I half-expected something about "how men think versus how women think". The whole thing doesn't feel sexist to me, just that opening.

(I do not necessarily endorse that feeling.)

15 points MixedNuts 01 March 2013 11:25:04PM Permalink

Yeah, but have you seen the graphics? And the NPC AI? I think the physics engine might be buggy though.

15 points Jayson_Virissimo 01 April 2013 11:33:50PM Permalink

Focusing is about saying no.

-- Steve Jobs

15 points AlanCrowe 09 April 2013 06:13:12PM Permalink

Longer version from here

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas there are.

—Steve Jobs, interviewed in Fortune, March 7, 2008

15 points [deleted] 15 April 2013 04:03:14PM Permalink

not serious

“You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar.” “You can catch even more with manure; what's your point?”

--Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory

/not serious

15 points SilasBarta 01 May 2013 05:17:41PM Permalink

I was pleasantly surprised to see this elegant phrasing of a (Machian?) rationalist principle in popular culture:

"There's an axiom in my business [i.e. law]: 'A difference that makes no difference is no difference.'"

-- Joe Adama in the TV series Caprica

15 points ArisKatsaris 05 May 2013 05:16:31PM Permalink

It's often a good habit to keep track of seemingly identical concepts separately, just in case you're wrong and they're not identical.

-- aristosophy

15 points AlanCrowe 01 May 2013 02:17:44PM Permalink

And I told her that no matter what the org chart said, my real bosses were a bunch of mice in cages and cells in a dish, and they didn’t know what the corporate goals were and they couldn’t be “Coached For Success”, the way that poster on the wall said.

15 points jaibot 03 May 2013 08:34:18PM Permalink

...how are we supposed to tell people about this rule?

Edit: Aw, I thought it was funny.

15 points novalis 07 June 2013 06:33:30PM Permalink

"It’s actually hard to see when you’ve fucked up, because you chose all your actions in a good-faith effort and if you were to run through it again you’ll just get the same results. I mean, errors-of-fact you can see when you learn more facts, but errors-of-judgement are judged using the same brain that made the judgement in the first place." - Collin Street

15 points Qiaochu_Yuan 15 June 2013 07:52:18PM Permalink

This is a nice calculation with a fairly simple causal diagram. The basic point is that if you think people are repeatedly hired either for their looks or for being a good worker, then among the pool of people who are repeatedly hired, looks and good work are negatively correlated.

15 points DanArmak 03 July 2013 07:10:27PM Permalink

A car can be driven on the road, or it can go onto a sidewalk and kill pedestrians and the driver. In comparison, a train or trolley can't easily go off its rails.

Is a car misdesigned because it is an open-ended, unconstrained tool? Not necessarily; you must weigh the costs of other possibilities against their benefits.

Unix is deliberately built as a general open-ended collection of tools. It enables many more things to be done than other systems which start by presuming a list of things the user wants to do. And some of the things it enables are mostly harmful, although they too are sometimes useful. It's not misdesigned; it makes a design tradeoff that is the correct one in some situations, and not in others.

15 points DSherron 01 July 2013 11:58:16PM Permalink

That honestly seems like some kind of fallacy, although I can't name it. I mean, sure, take joy in the merely real, that's a good outlook to have; but it's highly analogous to saying something like "Average quality of life has gone up dramatically over the past few centuries, especially for people in major first world countries. You get 50-90 years of extremely good life - eat generally what you want, think and say anything you want, public education; life is incredibly great. But talk to some people, I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about [starving kid in Africa|environmental pollution|dying peacefully of old age|generally any way in which the world is suboptimal]."

That kind of outlook not only doesn't support any kind of progress, or even just utility maximization, it actively paints the very idea of making things even better as presumptuous and evil. It does not serve for something to be merely awe-inspiring; I want more. I want to not just watch a space shuttle launch (which is pretty cool on its own), but also have a drink that tastes better than any other in the world, with all of my best friends around me, while engaged in a thrilling intellectual conversation about strategy or tactics in the best game ever created. While a wizard turns us all into whales for a day. On a spaceship. A really cool spaceship. I don't just want good; I want the best. And I resent the implication that I'm just ungrateful for what I have. Hell, what would all those people that invested the blood, sweat, and tears to make modern flight possible say if they heard someone suggesting that we should just stick to the status quo because "it's already pretty good, why try to make it better?" I can guarantee they wouldn't agree.

15 points MagnetoHydroDynamics 03 July 2013 12:51:40PM Permalink

All magic is science! You just don't know what you're doing, so you call it magic! And well, it's... Ridiculous.

Princess Bubblegum in Adventure Time.

15 points DanArmak 03 July 2013 07:04:30PM Permalink

This isn't an ancient pre-scientific text; it was written in 2011. I completely disagree with the claim that:

I’m not asserting that the brain is like a radio—that is, that we’re receptacles picking up signals from elsewhere, and that our neural circuitry needs to be in place to do so—but I am pointing out that it could be true. There is nothing in our current science that rules this out. Knowing as little as we do at this point in history, we must retain concepts like this in the large filing cabinet of ideas that we cannot yet rule in favor of or against.

There's also nothing in our current science that rules out a teapot orbiting the sun. That does not mean a hypothesis with no evidence for it should be elevated to the level of serious discussion.

There is no reason to think the brain could possibly be receiving "marching orders" from elsewhere, and we absolutely should discard this concept and rule firmly against it. And the same goes for any other equally unfounded ideas that this is an allegory for.

ideas always need to be proposed and nurtured as possibilities until evidence weighs in one way or another.

No, because there is an infinity of ideas you could consider. You must wait until evidence weighs sufficiently in favor of some one idea to elevate it above the others, before considering it at all.

15 points [deleted] 02 August 2013 09:20:45PM Permalink

What I mean by this is that if you rolled a million dice, your chance of averaging 3.5 is much higher than if you rolled ten.

The chance of averaging exactly 3.5 would be a hell of a lot smaller. The chance of averaging between 3.45 and 3.55 would be larger, though.

15 points Panic_Lobster 14 August 2013 06:28:36AM Permalink

Karl Popper used to begin his lecture course on the philosophy of science by asking the students simply to 'observe'. Then he would wait in silence for one of them to ask what they were supposed to observe. [...] So he would explain to them that scientific observation is impossible without pre-existing knowledge about what to look at, what to look for, how to look, and how to interpret what one sees. And he would explain that, therefore, theory has to come first. It has to be conjectured, not derived.

David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

15 points philh 10 August 2013 11:48:06PM Permalink

"But think how small he is," said the Black Panther, who would have spoiled Mowgli if he had had his own way. "How can his little head carry all thy long talk?"

"Is there anything in the jungle too little to be killed? No. That is why I teach him these things, and that is why I hit him, very softly, when he forgets."

Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

15 points Polina 05 August 2013 11:47:45AM Permalink

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

George Bernard Shaw

15 points Eugine_Nier 04 August 2013 05:43:25AM Permalink

And anyone that’s been involved in philanthropy eventually comes to that point. When you try to help, you try to give things, you start to have the consequences. There’s an author Bob Lupton, who really nails it when he says that when he gave something the first time, there was gratitude; and when he gave something a second time to that same community, there was anticipation; the third time, there was expectation; the fourth time, there was entitlement; and the fifth time, there was dependency. That is what we’ve all experienced when we’ve wanted to do good. Something changes the more we just give hand-out after hand-out. Something that is designed to be a help actually causes harm.

Peter Greer

15 points ialdabaoth 04 August 2013 08:07:01PM Permalink

There are surprisingly few MRI machines or DNA sequencers in cotton fields and sweatshops. Paraphrasing the original quote from Stephen Jay Gould: The problem is not how good we are at detecting talent; it's where we even bother to look for it.

15 points Wes_W 04 September 2013 05:20:52AM Permalink

Nah, the wiki makes it much easier.

15 points arundelo 26 September 2013 05:17:23PM Permalink

We have this shared concept that there's some baseline level of effort, at which point you've absolved yourself of finger-pointing for things going badly. [.... But t]here are exceptional situations where the outcome is more important than what you feel is reasonable to do.

-- Tim Evans-Ariyeh

15 points NancyLebovitz 13 September 2013 12:49:38PM Permalink

Personally, a huge breakthrough for me was realizing I could view social situations as information-gathering opportunities (as opposed to pass-fail tests). If something didn't work - that wasn't a fail, it was DATA. If something did work... also data. I could experiment! People's reactions weren't eternal judgments about my worth, but interesting feedback on the approach I had chosen that day.

parodie

15 points Salemicus 03 September 2013 07:20:38PM Permalink

[This claim] is like the thirteenth stroke of a crazy clock, which not only is itself discredited but casts a shade of doubt over all previous assertions.

A. P. Herbert, Uncommon Law.

15 points Salemicus 04 September 2013 01:36:55PM Permalink

I agree. It strengthens your point to note that, although the quote is normally used seriously, the author intended it mischievously. In context, the "thirteenth stroke" is a defendant, who has successfully rebutted all the charges against him, making the additional claim that "this [is] a free country and a man can do what he likes if he does nobody any harm."

This "crazy" claim convinces the judge to convict him anyway.

15 points Salemicus 03 September 2013 07:11:37PM Permalink

A man who has made up his mind on a given subject twenty-five years ago and continues to hold his political opinions after he has been proved to be wrong is a man of principle; while he who from time to time adapts his opinions to the changing circumstances of life is an opportunist.

A. P. Herbert, Uncommon Law.

15 points lavalamp 23 September 2013 09:42:20PM Permalink

You asked us to make them safe, not happy!

--"Adventure Time" episode "The Businessmen": the zombie businessmen are explaining why they are imprisoning soft furry creatures in a glass bowl.

15 points Estarlio 04 September 2013 11:10:25PM Permalink

Foundations matter. Always and forever. Regardless of domain. Even if you meticulously plug all abstraction leaks, the lowest-level concepts on which a system is built will mercilessly limit the heights to which its high-level “payload” can rise. For it is the bedrock abstractions of a system which create its overall flavor. They are the ultimate constraints on the range of thinkable thoughts for designer and user alike. Ideas which flow naturally out of the bedrock abstractions will be thought of as trivial, and will be deemed useful and necessary. Those which do not will be dismissed as impractical frills — or will vanish from the intellectual landscape entirely. Line by line, the electronic shanty town grows. Mere difficulties harden into hard limits. The merely arduous turns into the impossible, and then finally into the unthinkable.

[...]

The ancient Romans could not know that their number system got in the way of developing reasonably efficient methods of arithmetic calculation, and they knew nothing of the kind of technological paths (i.e. deep-water navigation) which were thus closed to them.

15 points JQuinton 04 September 2013 03:47:11PM Permalink

Somebody could give me this glass of water and tell me that it’s water. But there’s a lot of clear liquids out there and I might actually have a real case that this might not be water. Now most cases when something like a liquid is in a cup it’s water.

A good way to find out if it’s water is to test if it has two hydrogens per oxygen in each molecule in the glass and you can test that. If it evaporates like water, if it tastes like water, freezes like water… the more tests we apply, the more sure we can be that it’s water.

However, if it were some kind of acid and we started to test and we found that the hydrogen count is off, the oxygen count is off, it doesn’t taste like water, it doesn’t behave like water, it doesn’t freeze like water, it just looks like water. If we start to do these tests, the more we will know the true nature of the liquid in this glass. That is how we find truth. We can test it any number of ways; the more we test it, the more we know the truth of what it is that we’re dealing with.

  • An ex-Mormon implicitly describing Bayesian updates
15 points Eugine_Nier 02 September 2013 08:09:14PM Permalink

Depending on how the violence is applied, it can also make it better.

15 points wiresnips 05 October 2013 10:38:09PM Permalink

That's not necessarily false, but it's a dangerous thing to say to yourself. Mostly when I find myself thinking it, I've just wasted a great deal of time, and I'm trying to convince myself that it wasn't really wasted. It's easy to tell myself, hard to verify, and more pleasant than thinking my time-investment was for nothing.

15 points undermind 07 November 2013 12:50:59AM Permalink

Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!

We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.

No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.

We laughed, -knowing that better men would come,

And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags

He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.

-Wilfred Owen

15 points Gvaerg 01 November 2013 09:57:14PM Permalink

"I spread the map out on the dining room table, and I held down the corners with cans of V8. The dots from where I'd found things looked like the stars in the universe. I connected them, like an astrologer, and if you squinted your eyes like a Chinese person, it kind of looked like the word 'fragile'. [...] I erased and connected the dots to make 'porte'. I had the revelation that I could connect the dots to make 'cyborg', and 'platypus', and 'boobs', and even 'Oskar', if you were extremely Chinese. I could connect them to make almost anything I wanted, which meant I wasn't getting closer to anything. And now I'll never know what I was supposed to find. And that's another reason I can't sleep."

Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (emphasis mine)

15 points hairyfigment 04 November 2013 06:34:46AM Permalink

That's why it's so important to understand how unworried I was. I wasn't $400 worth of worried, or $100 worth of worried, or even $20 worth. I wouldn't have gone to the dermatologist if I didn't have health insurance. I probably wouldn't have gone if I had insurance but it had a big deductible, or even any real co-pay. The only reason I went to have my life saved is because it cost me zero dollars.

  • Jon Schwarz, A Tiny Revolution
15 points jimmy 04 November 2013 01:04:46AM Permalink

I don't really like quotes like this. It's not that it's not true and it's not that it's not that no one commits the error it warns against.

It's that no one who is blind to fallacies due to popularity is going to notice their mistake and change - it's too easy to agree with the quote without firing up the process that would lead you to making the mistake.

Good quotes will make it easy to put yourself in either position so that you can mentally bridge the two. If you're thinking "I can't imagine how they might make that mistake!", then you won't recognize that thought process when you go through it yourself.

15 points Ishaan 01 November 2013 08:24:10PM Permalink

Tyrion is frequently put into situations where he relies on his family's reputation for paying debts.

It's a real-life Newcomb-like problem - specifically a case of Parfits Hitchhiker - illustrating the practical benefits of being seen as the sort of agent who keeps promises. It's not an ordinary quid-pro-quo because there is, in fact, no incentive for Tyrion to keep his end of the bargain once he gets what he wants other than to be seen as the sort of person who keeps his bargain.

Think it's a stretch?

15 points Lumifer 01 November 2013 08:26:09PM Permalink

It's a real-life

Ahem.

15 points Viliam_Bur 04 December 2013 01:37:37PM Permalink

We completely failed to consider the possibility that the economy would mutate into a continent-sized piano-devouring shrimp, and it turned out we were right to ignore that.

That's a survivor bias.

15 points Alejandro1 02 December 2013 12:18:04AM Permalink

Note: When treating mental patients who think they’re Samson, cut their hair before putting them in the locked ward.

--Fred Clark

15 points Cyan 17 February 2014 04:07:37PM Permalink

Heaven and Earth are heartless

treating creatures like straw dogs.

- Tao Te Ching

Su Ch'e commentary on this verse explains: "Heaven and Earth are not partial. They do not kill living things out of cruelty or give them birth out of kindness. We do the same when we make straw dogs to use in sacrifices. We dress them up and put them on the altar, but not because we love them. And when the ceremony is over, we throw them into the street, but not because we hate them."

- Straw dog in Wikipedia

15 points elharo 07 February 2014 12:40:46PM Permalink

For Popper (if not for some of his later admirers), falsifiability was not a crude bludgeon. Rather, it was the centerpiece of a richly-articulated worldview holding that millennia of human philosophical reflection had gotten it backwards: the question isn’t how to arrive at the Truth, but rather how to eliminate error. Which sounds kind of obvious, until I meet yet another person who rails to me about how empirical positivism can’t provide its own ultimate justification, and should therefore be replaced by the person’s favorite brand of cringe-inducing ugh.

--Scott Aaaronson, Retiring falsifiability? A storm in Russell’s teacup

15 points James_Miller 01 March 2014 05:23:02PM Permalink

If you're expecting the world to be fair with you because you are fair, you are fooling yourself. That's like expecting a lion not to eat you because you didn't eat him.

awesomequotes4u.com

15 points Jayson_Virissimo 05 April 2014 06:50:49AM Permalink

...the utility of a thought experiment is inversely proportional to the size of its departure from reality.

-- Daniel Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking

15 points jaime2000 01 April 2014 02:24:24PM Permalink

There is an important difference between “We don’t know all the answers yet” and “Do what feels right, man.” These questions have answers, because humans have biochemistry, and we should do our best to find them and live by the results.

~J. Stanton, The Paleo Identity Crisis: What Is The Paleo Diet, Anyway?

15 points Eugine_Nier 02 April 2014 01:21:46AM Permalink

A BS detection Heuristic.

You can tell if a discipline is BS if the degree depends severely on the prestige of the school granting it. I remember when I applied to MBA programs being told that anything outside the top 10 or 20 would be a waste of time. On the other hand a degree in mathematics is much less dependent on the shool (conditional on being above a certain level, so the heuristic would apply to the differene betwewn top 10 and top 2000 schools).

The same applies to research papers. In math and physics, a result posted on arXiv (with a minimum hurdle) is fine. In low quality fields like academic finance (where almost all academics are charlatans and all papers some form of complicated storytelling), the "prestige" of the journal is the sole criterion.

Nassim Taleb

15 points soreff 03 June 2014 04:36:45AM Permalink

And what is the probability that one of them is a Prior?

15 points shminux 02 June 2014 08:25:39PM Permalink

Having been on both sides... how do you know when you are the idiot?

15 points Lumifer 02 June 2014 04:22:21PM Permalink

I do like the old "Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience" maxim :-)

15 points James_Miller 04 August 2014 03:35:52AM Permalink

Come back with your shield - or on it.

Our kind might not be able to cooperate, but the Spartans certainly could. The Spartans were masters of hoplite phalanx warfare where often every individual would have been better off running away but collectively everyone was better off if none ran away than if all did. The above quote is what Plutarch says Spartan mothers would tell their sons before battle. (Because shields were heavy if you were going to run away you would drop it, and coming back on your shield meant you were dead.) Spreading memes to overcome collective action problems is civilization level rational.

15 points Viliam_Bur 05 September 2014 01:42:58PM Permalink

Instead of giving your employees $100 raise, give them $1200 bonus once in a year. It's the same money, but it will make them more happy, because they will keep noticing it for years.

15 points Jack_LaSota 09 September 2014 11:50:34PM Permalink

My transformation begins with me getting tired of my own bullshit.

Skeletor is Love

15 points Mass_Driver 08 September 2014 09:37:47PM Permalink

It seems to me that educated people should know something about the 13-billion-year prehistory of our species and the basic laws governing the physical and living world, including our bodies and brains. They should grasp the timeline of human history from the dawn of agriculture to the present. They should be exposed to the diversity of human cultures, and the major systems of belief and value with which they have made sense of their lives. They should know about the formative events in human history, including the blunders we can hope not to repeat. They should understand the principles behind democratic governance and the rule of law. They should know how to appreciate works of fiction and art as sources of aesthetic pleasure and as impetuses to reflect on the human condition.

On top of this knowledge, a liberal education should make certain habits of rationality second nature. Educated people should be able to express complex ideas in clear writing and speech. They should appreciate that objective knowledge is a precious commodity, and know how to distinguish vetted fact from superstition, rumor, and unexamined conventional wisdom. They should know how to reason logically and statistically, avoiding the fallacies and biases to which the untutored human mind is vulnerable. They should think causally rather than magically, and know what it takes to distinguish causation from correlation and coincidence. They should be acutely aware of human fallibility, most notably their own, and appreciate that people who disagree with them are not stupid or evil. Accordingly, they should appreciate the value of trying to change minds by persuasion rather than intimidation or demagoguery.

Steven Pinker, The New Republic 9/4/14

15 points James_Miller 02 September 2014 02:48:00PM Permalink

A heuristic shouldn't be the "least wrong" among all possible rules; it should be the least harmful if wrong.

Nassim N. Taleb

15 points James_Miller 02 October 2014 12:31:25AM Permalink

I want to say "live and let live" about non-scientific views. But, then I read about measles outbreaks in countries where vaccines are free.

Zach Weinersmith (Twitter)

Related:

Rather than panicking about the single patient known to have Ebola in the US, protect yourself against a virus that kills up to 50,000 Americans every year. It's the flu, and simply getting the shot dramatically reduces your chances of becoming ill.

Erin Brodwin Business Insider

15 points Vaniver 11 December 2014 07:13:11PM Permalink

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

--Marcel Proust

15 points Kindly 03 December 2014 09:07:47PM Permalink

I am reminded of:

"Arf arf arf! Not because arf arf! But exactly because arf NOT arf!" GK Chesterton's dog

@stevenkaas

In trying to find the above quote by wildcard searching on Google, I stumbled upon another quote of this nature by the dog's owner himself: "I want to love my neighbour not because he is I, but precisely because he is not I." There appears to be another one about science being bad not because it encourages doubt, but because it encourages credulity, but I'm unable to find the exact quote.

15 points Weedlayer 08 December 2014 07:20:11PM Permalink

Too strong.

Nobody EVER got successful from luck? Not even people born billionaires or royalty?

Nobody can EVER be happy without using intelligence? Only if you're using some definition of happiness that includes a term like "Philosophical fulfillment" or some such, which makes the issue tautological.

15 points Lumifer 11 November 2014 05:56:47PM Permalink

[Vizzini has just cut the rope The Dread Pirate Roberts is climbing up]

Vizzini: HE DIDN'T FALL? INCONCEIVABLE.

Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

15 points pgbh 14 November 2014 07:25:51AM Permalink

"I remember reading of a competition for a paper on resolution of singularities of surface; Castelnuovo and Enriques were in the committee. Beppo Levi presented his famous paper on the resolution of singularities for surfaces.

Enriques asked him for a couple of examples and was convinced; Castelnuovo was not. The discussion got heated. Enriques exclaimed 'I am ready to cut off my head if this does not work', and Castelnuovo replied 'I don't think that would prove it either.'"

-- Angelo Vistoli, mathoverflow

15 points Grok_Narok 02 November 2014 02:27:52PM Permalink

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

14 points Vladimir_Nesov 18 April 2009 10:26:10PM Permalink

One disadvantage of having a little intelligence is that one can invent myths out of his own imagination, and come to believe them. Wild animals, lacking imagination, almost never do disastrously stupid things out of false perceptions of the world about them. But humans create artificial disasters for themselves when their ideology makes them unable to perceive where their own self-interest lies.

-- E.T. Jaynes, Probability Theory as Logic [pdf].

14 points ciphergoth 18 April 2009 09:55:52AM Permalink

It's worth including the whole sentence:

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled

14 points sparrowsfall 20 May 2009 03:11:31PM Permalink

"From the inside, ideology usually looks like common sense."

--John Quiggin

http://crookedtimber.org/2009/04/22/the-ideology-that-dare-not-speak-its-name/

14 points RichardKennaway 15 June 2009 12:06:21PM Permalink

"Your superior intellects are no match for our puny weapons!"

(Variously attributed. TV Tropes says the Simpsons.)

Also variously interpreted. I take it as a caution against forgetting to actually win with one's towering genius.

14 points Lightwave 14 June 2009 11:18:30PM Permalink

"The lottery is a tax on those incapable of basic math."

-- Ambrose Bierce

14 points loqi 02 July 2009 11:43:01PM Permalink

It's pretty depressing. Not too long ago, someone I know expressed the belief that red is more likely to come up on a roulette table if the last five spins landed on black. He holds a graduate degree in computer science.

14 points Marcello 02 July 2009 11:14:31PM Permalink

Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.

-- Albert Einstein

14 points AllanCrossman 06 August 2009 06:45:21PM Permalink

Eliezer didn't say... oh sod it.

14 points Rain 01 September 2009 11:52:15PM Permalink

I am only one, but I am still one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and just because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

-Helen Keller

14 points Jayson_Virissimo 30 November 2009 01:43:26AM Permalink

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

-H. L. Mencken

14 points MichaelGR 08 January 2010 08:59:15PM Permalink

This problem affects a question close to Frances Kamm’s work: what she calls the Problem of Distance in Morality (PDM). Kamm says that her intuition consistently finds that moral obligations attach to things that are close to us, but not to thinks that are far away. According to her, if we see a child drowning in a pond and there’s a machine nearby which, for a dollar, will scoop him out, we’re morally obligated to give the machine a dollar. But if the machine is here but the scoop and child are on the other side of the globe, we don’t have to put a dollar in the machine. --Aaron Swartz

14 points bogus 01 February 2010 03:58:08PM Permalink

If [Ayn] Rand really wanted to build an individualist sub-culture, she would have done so in an evolutionarily informed way. If people naturally care about the opinions of others, jumping on people is a good way to get dishonest conformity, but a bad way to get an honest exchange of ideas. Instead, an individualist sub-culture must be built upon tolerance and honesty. I'd suggest three key norms:

  1. Don't think less of people who sincerely disagree.
  2. Do think less of people who insincerely agree.
  3. Do think less of people who think less of people who sincerely disagree.

--Bryan Caplan

Reference: Guardians of Ayn Rand

14 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 March 2010 04:02:57PM Permalink

I haven't taken this position just to be difficult. To look around, the world does appear to be flat, so I think it is incumbent on others to prove decisively that it isn't. And I don't think that burden of proof has been met yet.

-- Daniel Shenton, President of the Flat Earth Society as of 2010

14 points RichardKennaway 01 March 2010 08:56:57PM Permalink

"There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you."

-- J.K. Rowling, Harvard commencement address.

14 points RobinZ 01 April 2010 11:33:04PM Permalink

Blind alley, though. If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.

Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

14 points komponisto 01 April 2010 09:39:48PM Permalink

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

-- Christopher Hitchens

14 points SilasBarta 04 May 2010 02:23:08AM Permalink

Right on. I'm thinking about writing an "explain yourself" series that shows how you can overcome the supposed barriers to explaining your position if there's actual substance to it to begin with.

ETA: 5 upvotes so far -- sounds like a vote of confidence for such an article.

ETA2: Message heard loud and clear! I'm working on an article for submission, which may expand into a series.

14 points mattnewport 03 June 2010 06:43:52PM Permalink

If at first you don't succeed, try, try, again. Then quit. There's no use in being a damn fool about it.

-- W. C. Fields

14 points JoshuaZ 01 June 2010 07:42:42PM Permalink

Were it possible to trace the succession of ideas in the mind of Sir Isaac Newton, during the time that he made his greatest discoveries, I make no doubt but our amazement at the extent of his genius would a little subside. But if, when a man publishes his discoveries, he either through a design, or through habit, omit the intermediary steps by which he himself arrived at them, it is no wonder that his speculations confound them, and that the generality of mankind stand amazed at his reach of thought. If a man ascend to the top of a building by the help of a common ladder, but cut away most of the steps after he has done with them, leaving only every ninth of tenth step, the view of the ladder, in the condition which he has pleased to exhibit it, gives us a prodigious, but unjust view of the man who could have made use of it. But if he had intended that any body should follow him, he should have left the ladder as he constructed it, or perhaps as he found it, for it might have been a mere accident that threw it in his way... I think that the interests of science have suffered by the excessive admiration and wonder with which several first rate philosophers are considered, and that an opinion of the greater equality of mankind, in point of genius, and power of understanding, would be of real service in the present age." - Joseph Priestly, The History and present State of Electricity

The section where I've added an ellipsis is a section where he discusses Newton in more detail. That entire part of the text is worth reading. Priestly wrote the book before he did his work on the composition of air. The book is, as far as I am aware, the first attempt at actual history of science. (I'm meaning to read the whole thing at some point, but the occasionally archaic grammar makes for slow reading.)

14 points roland 01 June 2010 06:30:07PM Permalink

Conscious thought leads people to put disproportionate weight on attributes that are accessible, plausible and easy to verbalize, and therefore too little weight on other attributes. -- Ap Dijksterhuis

14 points Houshalter 01 June 2010 08:29:38PM Permalink

It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

Another Twain quote.

14 points Oscar_Cunningham 01 June 2010 08:16:43PM Permalink

...Or you've just missed something. If all you're left with is improbable you notice that you are confused. I've always thought that quote was off.

Then again, Sherlock never did miss anything.

14 points Rain 02 July 2010 12:06:30AM Permalink

A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time.

-- George Iles

14 points RichardKennaway 02 July 2010 06:50:00AM Permalink

Silas will like this one:

Menahem sighed. 'How can one explain colours to a blind man?'

'One says', snapped Rek, 'that red is like silk, blue is like cool water, and yellow is like sunshine on the face.'

-- David Gemmell "Legend"

14 points Rain 03 August 2010 12:48:23PM Permalink

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.

-- Christopher Morley

14 points simplicio 04 August 2010 05:32:50AM Permalink

On rationalization, aka the giant sucking cognitive black hole.

Though [Ben Franklin] had been a vegetarian on principle, on one long sea crossing the men were grilling fish, and his mouth started watering:

I balanc'd some time between principle and inclination, till I recollectd that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, "if you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you." So I din'd upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet.

Franklin concluded: "So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do."

-Jonathan Haidt, "The Happiness Hypothesis"

14 points ata 05 September 2010 03:29:48AM Permalink

The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with the indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

— Stanley Kubrick

14 points MC_Escherichia 05 October 2010 04:42:23PM Permalink

Either the prayer is answered, or not, so the odds must be 50%, right? :)

14 points wedrifid 06 October 2010 05:09:59PM Permalink

This sounds like a bad idea.

It does, but mostly for the same reasons that cryonics does. It's a violation of Common Sense and Sensibility. But given the beliefs that tocomment has (emphasis: not mine!) it is the wise decision for him to make. He has just bitten the bullet and actually followed through from his stated beliefs with (token verbal support of) the rational conclusion.

I think tocomment has his predictions about the future miscallibrated and has probably not accounted for his own cognitive failure modes but I suspect that people would judge him to be 'unwise' almost completely independently of whether or not they share his premised beliefs.

Basically, I think we (that is, humans) are likely to judge him as naive and foolish because he is actually acting as though his beliefs should relate to his pragmatic choices.

By way of some illustration:

  • A mainstream 'retirement plan' is probably making the same 'putting all your eggs in one basket' mistake that tocomment makes. It is by no means certain that the structures and circumstances that make conventionally wise retirement plans will remain in place. There are perhaps other more fundamental actions that should be taken to ensure future safety and wellbeing than investing in superannuation. "Creating a stash of gold somewhere" may be a little trite but "develop the kind of social and political connections and develop the skills and resources that will allow you to survive into your later years even in the face of social upheaval" is something that makes sense and has applied across all cultures and times. Yet we aren't likely to look down our noses at people who don't divert significant resources away from their 401k and into that sort of future insurance.
  • "Retirement Plans" essentially amount to saving up lots of money for use while you go through the process of physical and mental decline and then death. A plausible and sane person may actually have values such that a conventional retirement plan is a strictly irrational allocation of resources. That person is probably still going to be labelled foolish, unwise or naive despite the fact that he is acting entirely in his own best interests. ie. At worst he is weird, not stupid but will usually be lumped with the latter judgement.
14 points aausch 04 November 2010 03:17:11AM Permalink

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."

— T.H. White (The Once and Future King)

14 points [deleted] 02 November 2010 08:42:37PM Permalink

For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it. The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellences, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations; and those who travel very slowly may yet make far greater progress, provided they keep always to the straight road, than those who, while they run, forsake it.

~René Descartes, Discourse on the Method

14 points JoshuaZ 23 November 2010 11:05:24PM Permalink

Yes, and don't forget the dual result that a comathematician is a device for turning cotheorems into ffee.

14 points MichaelGR 06 November 2010 05:09:59PM Permalink

A horse that can count to ten is a remarkable horse, not a remarkable mathematician.

--Samuel Johnson

14 points Perplexed 03 November 2010 02:54:38AM Permalink

David Hume was right to predict that superstition would survive for hundreds of years after his death, but how could he have anticipated that his own work would inspire Kant to invent a whole new package of superstitions? Or that the incoherent system of Marx would move vast populations to engineer their own ruin? Or that the infantile rantings of the author of Mein Kampf would be capable of bringing the whole world to war?

Perhaps we will one day succeed in immunizing our societies against such bouts of collective idiocy by establishing a social contract in which each child is systematically instructed in Humean skepticism. Such a new Emile would learn about the psychological weaknesses to which Homo sapiens is prey, and so would understand the wisdom of treating all authorities - political leaders and social role-models, academics and teachers, philosophers and prophets, poets and pop stars - as so many potential rogues and knoves, each out to exploit the universal human hunger for social status. He would therefore appreciate the necessity of doing all of his own thinking for himself. He would understand why and when to trust his neighbors. Above all, he would waste no time yearning for utopias that are incompatible with human nature.

-- Ken Binmore, in Natural Justice, p56

14 points AlanCrowe 03 November 2010 11:22:17AM Permalink

Your comment raises a very delicate point and I'm not sure that I am tactful enough to make it clearly.

Zooming out to get a broader view so that we can notice what usually happens, rather than the memorable special case, we notice that most Germans were enthusiastic about Hitler, all the way from 1933 to 1941. It is hard to reconstruct the reasons why. Looking at the broad picture we get a clear sense of people being their own worst enemies, enthusiastically embracing a mad leader who will lead them to destruction.

The message that history is sending to Alan is: if you had been a young man in Germany in 1933 you would have idolized Hitler. There are two ways to respond to this sobering message. One is to picture myself as an innocent victim. There were plenty of innocent victims, so this is easily done, but it dodges the hard question. The other response is to embrace the LessWrong vision and to search for ways to avoid the disasters to which self-deception sentences Man.

14 points Lightwave 03 December 2010 09:09:36AM Permalink

"Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."

-- Charles Darwin

14 points WrongBot 04 January 2011 06:04:20PM Permalink

So far as I'm aware, there are currently no publicly available vaccines that lack overwhelming evidence in support of their use. Researching every issue one has even the slightest doubts about is also a failure mode.

14 points Kutta 03 January 2011 09:20:55AM Permalink

I definitely think there is great art out there that was solely designed to give people what they want; in film, someone like Chaplin comes to mind. I mean, giving people what they want is an art unto itself, but I think the real challenge in that method is finding a way to give them what they want while giving them more.

-- Jonathan Henderson

14 points ata 04 January 2011 02:59:08AM Permalink

"Simultaneous" is a word that you use from within time, to refer to relations described by time. I don't think you'd use the word that way if you were really looking at the universe at the level of timeless physics, really seeing the whole design in every facet. (Though it is the word you'd probably use if you were a human author trying to write a character who sees the deeper reality beyond time, if you yourself don't quite see it. :P) Probably the intuition behind that is imagining looking at spacetime as something like a film reel laid out in front of you, and seeing that it's all already there, no matter what the people in any given frame seem to think. But that puts your perspective outside this universe's apparent time dimension, but inside an imagined outer timeline against which you can continue using words like "simultaneous" or "already". And that's no way to really reduce time; it's a mistake similar to trying to reduce consciousness by putting a little homunculus inside your head that watches your sensory input on a projector screen. It's reducing a black box to some visible machinery interacting with... another copy of the same black box.

I don't think there's any perspective from which "Time is simultaneous" makes sense, unless our universe is actually a static block of already-computed data on the hard drive of some computer in a different reality with its own timelike dimension.

(Edit: Oh, and Dr. Manhattan is being a bit uncharitable by claiming that "humans insist" on seeing things in this limited way. Sure, I consider my lack of omniscience to be a moral failing on my part, but that doesn't mean I'm not trying to do better.)

14 points wedrifid 02 February 2011 12:18:00AM Permalink

This was wasted as a point about 'gods'. The commentary on human social instincts irrespective of belief in literal gods was far more insightful.

14 points Eneasz 02 February 2011 06:55:06PM Permalink

I guess I'm far too literal-minded. The whole time I simply assumed the giants were a normal God parable. I was rather non-plussed about the whole quote until I saw "A meditation on childhood" and then my head exploded. I don't even remember being a kid anymore.

14 points billswift 01 February 2011 07:55:18PM Permalink

Too broad a viewpoint, too philosophical an outlook paralyzes the will.

-- Robert A Heinlein, Lost Legacy

14 points Konkvistador 02 February 2011 10:40:20PM Permalink

On two occasions I have been asked, – "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

-Charles Babbage

14 points shokwave 02 February 2011 02:47:43AM Permalink

I disagree. MoR fits the same criteria ("shooting fish in a barrel") as OB/LW.

14 points shokwave 03 February 2011 08:35:01AM Permalink

It is not rational to ignore arguments because they were made by an awful person.

In academic philosophy there is a tendency to refer to "Heidegger's arguments and positions" as simply "Heidegger". (This is true of all philosophers, not just Heidegger). Popper, of course, would have been familiar with this; when I read that quote I got the distinct impression of "Heidegger's arguments are hollow and his positions are indefensible; please can we agree on this and stop discussing them?"

14 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 18 July 2011 08:27:36AM Permalink

Episode #7 of Madoka, and I'm thinking, "It's amazing how many anime problems can be solved by polyamory and the pattern theory of identity."

14 points Louie 09 March 2011 11:42:52AM Permalink

"Anything you can do, I can do meta" -Rudolf Carnap

14 points Costanza 04 March 2011 02:41:33PM Permalink

An irrationality quote from Samuel Johnson via Boswell:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."

14 points TobyBartels 03 March 2011 02:54:27AM Permalink

Stupid is as stupid does.

This is an old saying, which I learnt from the 1994 movie Forrest Gump (not otherwise a bastion of rationalism).

While we may judge people as irrational ("stupid") based on what they know (epistemic rationality, roughly), it's instrumental rationality that matters in the end.

14 points a363 08 March 2011 09:12:19AM Permalink

Can't help but twist that into "To educate a society in morals and not in mind is to educate a menace to humanity..."

14 points wedrifid 04 March 2011 07:46:53AM Permalink

Running into a pole is a drag, but never being allowed to run into a pole is a disaster. Pain is part of the price of freedom.

Daniel Kish (Human Echolocation researcher, advocate and instructor).

14 points atucker 02 March 2011 05:38:28PM Permalink

I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex.

Bertrand Russell

14 points atucker 06 April 2011 07:17:13AM Permalink

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

~ Story, used most famously in David Foster Wallace's Commencement Address at Kenyon College

14 points Apprentice 04 April 2011 03:17:38PM Permalink

Virtually everything in science is ultimately circular, so the main thing is just to make the circles as big as possible.

Richard D. Janda and Brian D. Joseph, 2003, The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, p. 111.

14 points wedrifid 01 June 2011 09:57:43AM Permalink

A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.

-- Kahlil Gibran

14 points Yvain 02 September 2011 10:36:34AM Permalink

Upvoted the original for reference to Prince of Nothing series. And upvoted this comment for the terms "sympathetic model" and "causal model", which is one of those times that having the right word for a concept you've been trying to understand is worth a month of trying to untangle things in your head.

...although now I'm not sure whether I should upvote Eliezer or Michael Vassar. It seems kind of unfair to deny Michael an upvote just because the specific instantiation of his algorithm that said this happened to be running on Eliezer's brain at the time.

14 points Desrtopa 05 August 2011 02:34:58PM Permalink

That's a bit freaky. If someone predicted the Singularity 150 years ago, it suggests current "Singularity imminent!" predictions are far off.

Could be. Just because it turned out not to be a ten year idea doesn't mean it will also turn out not to be a 170 year idea. People who thought their heavier-than-air flight ideas would bear fruit 400 years ago were wrong, but when the Wright brothers believed it, they were right.

14 points scav 03 August 2011 10:08:20AM Permalink

I confess, for my part, that I have been taken in, over and over again. I have been taken in by acquaintances, and I have been taken in (of course) by friends; far oftener by friends than by any other class of persons. How came I to be so deceived? Had I quite misread their faces? No. Believe me, my first impression of those people, founded on face and manner alone, was invariably true. My mistake was in suffering them to come nearer to me and explain themselves away.

--Hunted Down: the detective stories of Charles Dickens (Charles Dickens)

14 points AngryParsley 03 August 2011 05:00:10AM Permalink

"You could trifle with your mind, using activators and redactors from your own thought-shop, and put yourself back into the state of mind you were in before the Curia forced you to experience your victims' lives."

"Is this some sort of test or quiz? You know I shall not do that."

"Why not?"

Ironjoy started to turn away, but then stopped, turned, and answered the question. “If I were now as I was then, I would gladly change my self to remain as I was then; but I am now as I am now. The me that I am now has no desire to be any other me. Isn’t that the fundamental nature of the self?”

-- The Phoenix Exultant by John C. Wright

14 points lukeprog 16 September 2011 12:53:43AM Permalink

It is remarkable that [probability theory], which originated in the consideration of games of chance, should have become the most important object of human knowledge... The most important questions of life are, for the most part, really only problems of probability.

Laplace

14 points Thomas 05 September 2011 01:25:02PM Permalink

The investor who finds a way to make soap from peanuts has more genuine imagination than the revolutionary with a bayonet, because he has cultivated the faculty of imagining the hidden potentiality of the real. This is much harder than imagining the unreal, which may be why there are so many more utopians than inventors

  • Joe Sobran
14 points Normal_Anomaly 03 September 2011 01:08:18AM Permalink

From the day we arrive on the planet

and blinking, step into the sun

there's more to see than can ever be seen

more to do than can ever be done

--The Lion King opening song

14 points Konkvistador 04 October 2011 06:46:10PM Permalink

What misfortune for all that those in power don't either.

14 points wedrifid 03 October 2011 04:48:30AM Permalink

If the ancients were so wise, why are they dead?

Because they only had time to discover three quarters of the recipe for immortality before they died...

14 points Hey 02 November 2011 09:01:09AM Permalink

I am thinking of coding up a web app for accumulating, voting, and commenting on quotes. Kind of like bash.org but much fancier.

Is that something you guys would be interested in? If so, what features would you want?

This would be free to use of course, and the site would not lock down the data (ie it would be exportable to various formats).

I am thinking there are a lot of communities that post quotes for internal use, and might be interested in a kind of unified web site for this. My initial thought is that it would be like Reddit, where each tribe/community/subculture/topic/etc gets its own subdirectory.

14 points JenniferRM 02 November 2011 12:17:36AM Permalink

All scientists despise the ideology of 'breakthroughs' --- I mean the belief that science proceeds from one revelation to another, each one opening up a new world of understanding and advancing still farther a sharp line of demarcation between what is true and what is false. Everyone actually engaged in scientific research knows that this way of looking at things is altogether misleading, and that the frontier between understanding and bewilderment is rather like the plasma membrane of a cell as it creeps over its substratum, a pushing forward here, a retraction there --- an exploratory probing that will eventually move forward the whole body of the cell... in real life, science does not prance from one mountain top to the next.

-Peter Medawar in Does Ethology Throw Any Light on Human Behavior?

14 points RobinZ 02 December 2011 03:18:52AM Permalink

Il est dans la nature humaine de penser sagement et d'agir d'une façon absurde.

English translation: It is human nature to think wisely and to act in an absurd fashion.

Anatole France, Le livre de mon ami (1885)

14 points gwern 01 December 2011 04:35:04AM Permalink

"Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another."

--Arthur Schopenhauer

14 points Stabilizer 02 January 2012 05:36:28PM Permalink

Teaching, for me and several other people I know, serves the purpose of reveling in your mastery. In fact, Feynman said it best:

In any thinking process there are moments when everything is going good and you've got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, and so it's the greatest pain in the neck in the world. And then there are the longer period of time when not much is coming to you. You're not getting any ideas, and if you're doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can't even say "I'm teaching my class."

If you're teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn't do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can't think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of something new, you're rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.

Teaching helps me a lot in this respect, because I become very insecure sometimes when I do my research.

14 points paper-machine 05 January 2012 03:51:50AM Permalink

A critical analysis of the present global constellation -- one which offers no clear solution, no "practical" advice on what to do, and provides no light at the end of the tunnel, since one is well aware that this light might belong to a train crashing towards us -- usually meets with reproach: "Do you mean we should do nothing? Just sit and wait?" One should gather the courage to answer: "YES, precisely that!" There are situations when the only truly "practical" thing to do is to resist the temptation to engage immediately and to "wait and see" by means of a patient, critical analysis.

Slavoj Žižek, Violence, emphasis added. Admittedly not the most clear elucidation of the subject of how urgency (fabricated or otherwise) should affect ethical deliberation, but see also his essay "Jack Bauer and the Ethics of Urgency" -- if you're into that sort of thing.

14 points fortyeridania 02 January 2012 12:03:22PM Permalink

The truth is common property. You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational, and believing things that are true.

Paul Graham, Lies We Tell Kids

14 points [deleted] 01 January 2012 12:17:44AM Permalink

Science isn't just a job, it's a means of determining truth. Methods of determining truth that aren't trustworthy in the laboratory don't become trustworthy when you leave it. There is no doctrine of applying scientific methodology to every aspect of one's life, you either follow trustworthy methods of investigation or you don't, and "follow trustworthy methods of investigation" is the core of science.

~Desertopa, TVTropes Forum

14 points NancyLebovitz 04 January 2012 02:22:18AM Permalink

Bruce Lee was a martial artist, and martial arts is a field where a lot of people go by tradition rather than checking on what works.

14 points MixedNuts 02 January 2012 02:28:32AM Permalink

The next sentence is

It's not like belief in UFOs killed your pet hamster when you were a kid or something and you've had a terrible hatred of it ever since.

Skeptics will tell you that yes, it did. Belief that the Sun needs human sacrifices to rise in the morning killed their beloved big brother, and they've had a terrible hatred of it ever since. And they must slay all of its allies, everything that keeps people from noticing that Newton's laws have murder-free sunrise covered. Even belief in the Easter bunny, because the mistakes you make to believe in it are the same. That seems like a pretty good reason to be concerned with it.

14 points FiftyTwo 02 February 2012 07:54:38PM Permalink

At the point where those are the two hypothesises being considered there may be larger problems.

14 points CaveJohnson 08 February 2012 05:51:26PM Permalink

When people talk about the importance of democracy, it is never democracy as it has ever actually functioned, with the politicians that have actually been elected, and the policies that have actually been implemented. It is always democracy as people imagine it will operate once they succeed in electing "the right people" — by which they mean, people who agree almost completely with their own views, and who are consistent and incorruptible in their implementation of the resulting policies.

--Ben O'Neill, here

Considering the above quote can be used to criticize nearly any popular political position I don't think it is inherently mind-killing. Also since we all agree democracy is a good thing this isn't even very political. The original article and context obviously does make it somewhat political.

14 points taelor 12 February 2012 07:55:27PM Permalink

Paul Graham has written quite extensively of why some things are considered "threatening heresy", and other things mere eccentricity. Ultimately, he concludes that in order for something to be tabooed, it must be threatening to some group that is powerful enough to enforce the taboo, but not powerful enough that the can safely ignore what their critics say about them. Democracy is currently so entrenched in western civilization that it doesn't have to give a fuck if a few people here and there criticize it occasionally.

14 points wilder 01 February 2012 10:34:36PM Permalink

Wishing for something that is logically impossible is a sign that there is something better to wish for.

David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

14 points Eugine_Nier 04 February 2012 01:55:36AM Permalink

Also don't confuse "logically coherent" with "true".

14 points roystgnr 05 March 2012 09:55:29PM Permalink

Wait, Google says nobody's posted this joke on LessWrong before?

...

A philosopher, a scientist, and a mathematician are travelling through Scotland, gazing out the window of the train, when they see a sheep.

"Ah," says the philosopher, "I see that Scottish sheep are black."

"Well," says the scientist, "at least we see that some Scottish sheep are black."

"No," says the mathematician, "we merely know that there exists at least one sheep in Scotland which is black on at least one side."

14 points James_Miller 01 March 2012 03:22:58PM Permalink

Had no idea so much strategy was possible in Rock, Paper, Scissors? The rules of the game itself may be simple, but the human mind is not.

Natalie Wolchover

14 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 April 2012 09:33:35PM Permalink

It means nothing, although Greg Egan is quite impressed by it. Sad but true: Someone with an IQ of, say, 90 can be trained to operate a Turing machine, but will in all probability never understand matrix calculus. The belief that Turing-complete = understanding-complete is false. It just isn't stupid.

14 points Konkvistador 12 April 2012 07:39:12AM Permalink

The most fundamental form of human stupidity is forgetting what we were trying to do in the first place

--Nietzsche

14 points Bugmaster 05 April 2012 05:48:37AM Permalink

-- So... if they've got armor on, it's a battle !

-- And who told you that ?

-- A knight...

-- How'd you know he was a knight ?

-- Well... that's 'cause... he'd got armor on ?

-- You don't have to be a knight to buy armor. Any idiot can buy armor.

-- How do you know ?

-- 'Cause I sold armor.

-Game of Thrones (TV show)

14 points GabrielDuquette 08 May 2012 02:24:04PM Permalink

The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding.

Cheryl Strayed, Wild

14 points Vladimir_M 09 May 2012 02:43:56AM Permalink

From my limited experience with buying cars, as well as from theoretical considerations, this won't work because you lack the pre-commitment to buy at the price offered. Once they give you a favorable price, you can try to push it even further downwards, possibly by continuing to play the dealerships against each other. So they'll be afraid to offer anything really favorable. (The market for new cars is a confusopoly based on concealing the information about the dealers' exact profit margins for particular car models, which is surprisingly well-guarded insider knowledge. So once you know that a certain price is still profitable for them, it can only be a downward ratchet.)

The problem can be solved by making the process double-blind, i.e. by sending the message anonymously through a credible middleman, who communicates back anonymous offers from all dealers. (The identities of each party are revealed to the other only if the offer is accepted and an advance paid.) Interestingly, in Canada, someone has actually tried to commercialize this idea and opened a website that offers the service for $50 or so (unhaggle.com); I don't know if something similar exists in the U.S. or other countries. (They don't do any sort of bargaining, brokering, deal-hunting, etc. on your behalf -- just the service of double-anonymous communication, along with signaling that your interest is serious because you've paid their fee.) From my limited observations, it works pretty well.

14 points Ezekiel 04 May 2012 10:52:03PM Permalink

When scientists discuss papers:

"I don't think this inference is entirely reasonable. If you're using several non-independent variables you're liable to accumulate more error than your model accounts for."

When scientists discuss grants:

"A guy who worked at the NSF once told me if we light a candle inside this jackal skull, the funders will smile upon our hopes."

"I'll get the altar!"

~ Zach Weiner, SMBC #2559

14 points Old_Rationality 02 May 2012 11:44:04AM Permalink

The atmosphere of political parties, whether in France or England, is not congenial to the formation of an impartial judgment. A Minister, who is in the thick of a tough parliamentary struggle, must use whatever arguments he can to defend his cause without inquiring too closely whether they are good, bad, or indifferent. However good they may be, they will probably not convince his political opponents, and they can scarcely be so bad as not to carry some sort of conviction to the minds of those who are predisposed to support him.

Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt

14 points Nominull 02 May 2012 01:39:17AM Permalink

Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?

-Kurt Vonnegut

14 points MichaelGR 03 May 2012 05:31:34PM Permalink

“No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.”

  • Confucius
14 points juped 05 May 2012 03:35:29PM Permalink

Atheism is an excellent excuse for skipping church.

14 points shminux 05 June 2012 06:05:55PM Permalink

If you pay nothing for expert advise you will value it at epsilon more than nothing, if you pay five figures for it you will clear your schedule and implement recommendations within the day. In addition to this being one of consulting’s worst-kept secrets, it suggests persuasive reasons why you should probably extract a commitment out of software customers prior to giving them access for the software. Doing this will automatically make people value your software more

Patrick McKenzie, the guy who gets instrumental rationality on the gut level.

More from the same source:

I always thought I really hated getting email. It turns out that I was not a good reporter of my own actual behavior, which is something you’ll hear quite a bit if you follow psychological research. (For example, something like 75% of Americans will report they voted for President Obama, which disagrees quite a bit with the ballot box. They do this partially because they misremember their own behavior and partially because they like to been seen as the type of person who voted for the winner. 99% of geeks will report never having bought anything as a result of an email. They do this because they misremember their own behavior and partially because they believe that buying stuff from “spam” is something that people with AOL email addresses do, and hence admitting that they, too, can be marketed to will cause them to lose status. The AppSumo sumo would be a good deal skinnier if that were actually the case, but geeks were all people before they were geeks, and people are statistically speaking terrible at introspection.)

14 points Swimmer963 04 June 2012 08:29:14PM Permalink

Based on a book I just read called Poor Economics by Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee and Esther Duflo, it is true that extremely poor people are much, much less able to make and follow long-term plans than rich people. They suggest it has to do with various facets of a very poor person's life (for example, the difficulty of getting loans or even opening a savings account) and also with the "willpower depletion" aspect, because the everyday lives of the poor include so many small decisions that are made automatically by the societies that rich people live. Also, their research established that poor people, even those poor enough that they can't afford enough food to eat, still spend money on short-term luxuries, like sugary tea.

Good book to read. I would recommend it.

14 points steven0461 08 June 2012 12:22:32AM Permalink

I am a Norman. It is the immemorial custom of my people to conquer our neighbours, seize their land, suppress their culture, and impose our rule as aristocrats. By the principle of cultural relativity this way of life is no worse than any other.

Brett Evill

14 points Alejandro1 04 July 2012 08:11:35AM Permalink

Religion begins by being taken for granted; after a time, it is elaborately proved; at last comes a time (the present) when the whole effort is to induce people to let it alone.

--John Stuart Mill (1854).

14 points peter_hurford 02 July 2012 07:35:13PM Permalink

I begin with the assumption that suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad. I think most people will agree about this, although one may reach the same view by different routes. I shall not argue for this view. People can hold all sorts of eccentric positions, and perhaps from some of them it would not follow that death by starvation is in itself bad. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to refute such positions, and so for brevity I will henceforth take this assumption as accepted. Those who disagree need read no further.

Peter Singer

14 points baiter 02 July 2012 11:27:14PM Permalink

"New rule: If you handle snakes to prove they won't bite you because God is real, and then they bite you -- do the math."

– Bill Maher, Real Time with Bill Maher, 6/8/2012

videoarticle

14 points Will_Newsome 03 July 2012 11:46:33AM Permalink

(An important lesson, but I wonder if it's wise to teach it in the context of politics. Among other things, I worry that the messages "boo religion!", "yay updating on evidence!", "boo religious conservatives!", "yay pointing out my enemies are inferior to me!", "yay rationality!", "yay my side for being comparatively rational!", c. will become mixed up and seen as constituting a natural category even if they objectively shouldn't be. (Related.))

14 points RobertLumley 02 July 2012 06:06:53PM Permalink

It seems like the author is defying the common usage without a reason here. The common usage of edible is "safe to eat", or more precisely "able to be eaten without killing you", and I don't see what use redefining it to mean "able to be swallowed" is. It just seems like a trite, definitional argument that is primarily about status.

14 points wedrifid 03 July 2012 07:29:17PM Permalink

Too many not-words in one sentence for me I'm afraid.

14 points TheOtherDave 03 July 2012 07:46:00PM Permalink

Reframed with more standard pronouns: if I have everyone else in my power, but not myself, then everyone else is in the power of someone I don't control.

14 points lukeprog 22 August 2012 07:03:40PM Permalink

M. Mitchell Waldrop on a meeting between physicists and economists at the Santa Fe Institute:

...as the axioms and theorems and proofs marched across the overhead projection screen, the physicists could only be awestruck at [the economists'] mathematical prowess — awestruck and appalled. They had the same objection that [Brian] Arthur and many other economists had been voicing from within the field for years. "They were almost too good," says one young physicist, who remembers shaking his head in disbelief. "lt seemed as though they were dazzling themselves with fancy mathematics, until they really couldn't see the forest for the trees. So much time was being spent on trying to absorb the mathematics that I thought they often weren't looking at what the models were for, and what they did, and whether the underlying assumptions were any good. In a lot of cases, what was required was just some common sense. Maybe if they all had lower IQs, they'd have been making some better models.”

14 points Alicorn 22 August 2012 05:09:26AM Permalink

Some critics of education have said that examinations are unrealistic; that nobody on the job would ever be evaluated without knowing when the evaluation would be conducted and what would be on the evaluation.

Sure. When Rudy Giuliani took office as mayor of New York, someone told him "On September 11, 2001, terrorists will fly airplanes into the World Trade Center, and you will be judged on how effectively you cope."

...

When you skid on an icy road, nobody will listen when you complain it's unfair because you weren't warned in advance, had no experience with winter driving and had never been taught how to cope with a skid.

-- Steven Dutch

14 points D_Malik 04 August 2012 04:15:04AM Permalink

Only the ideas that we actually live are of any value.

-- Hermann Hesse, Demian

14 points tgb 04 August 2012 02:21:12PM Permalink

Since I can't be bothered to do real research, I'll just point out that this Yahoo answer says that the quote is spoken by Lord Darlington. Oscar Wilde was a humorist and an entertainer. He makes amusing characters. His characters say amusing things.

Do not read too much into this quote and, without further evidence, I would not attribute this philosophy to Oscar Wilde himself.

(I haven't read Lady Windermere's Fan, where this if from, but this sounds very much like something Lord Henry from The Picture of Dorian Gray would say. And Lord Henry is one of the main causes of the Dorian's fall from grace in this book; he's not exactly a very positive character but certainly an entertainingly cynical one!)

14 points jslocum 17 August 2012 03:11:43PM Permalink

(Conversely, many fictions are instantiated somewhere, in some infinitesimal measure. However, I deliberately included logical impossibilities into HPMOR, such as tiling a corridor in pentagrams and having the objects in Dumbledore's room change number without any being added or subtracted, to avoid the story being real anywhere.)

In the library of books of every possible string, close to "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" and "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationalitz" is "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: Logically Consistent Edition." Why is the reality of that books' contents affected by your reticence to manifest that book in our universe?

14 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 September 2012 05:19:56AM Permalink

Er... actually the genie is offering at most two rounds of feedback.

Sorry about the pedantry, it's just that as a professional specialist in genies I have a tendency to notice that sort of thing.

14 points lukeprog 09 September 2012 11:47:06PM Permalink

...the 2008 financial crisis showed that some [mathematical finance] models were flawed. But those flaws were based on flawed assumptions about the distribution of price changes... Nassim Taleb, a popular author and critic of the financial industry, points out many such flaws but does not include the use of Monte Carlo simulations among them. He himself is a strong proponent of these simulations. Monte Carlo simulations are simply the way we do the math with uncertain quantities. Abandoning Monte Carlos because of the failures of the financial markets makes as much sense as giving up on addition and subtraction because of the failure of accounting at Enron or AIG’s overexposure in credit default swaps.

Douglas Hubbard, How to Measure Anything

14 points Alicorn 17 September 2012 05:43:03PM Permalink

I've always thought of the SkiFree monster as a metaphor for the inevitability of death.

"SkiFree, huh? You know, you can press 'F' to go faster than the monster and escape."

-- xkcd 667

14 points [deleted] 04 September 2012 06:55:38AM Permalink

"If at first you don't succeed, switch to power tools." -- The Red Green Show

14 points Konkvistador 04 September 2012 08:40:20AM Permalink

Erode irreplaceable institutions related to morality and virtue because of their contingent associations with flawed human groups #lifehacks

--Kate Evans on Twitter

14 points MixedNuts 04 September 2012 06:56:06PM Permalink

Chesterton doesn't understand the emotion because he doesn't know enough about psychology, not because emotions are deep sacred mysteries we must worship.

14 points Desrtopa 17 September 2012 10:36:04PM Permalink

I'd saying telling an interviewer you have sufficient confidence in your product to not need a backup plan is rational, actually not having one isn't.

14 points Jay_Schweikert 09 October 2012 03:36:59PM Permalink

This is a clever little exchange, and I'm generally all about munchkinry as a rationalist's tool. But as a lawyer, this specific example bothers me because it relies on and reinforces a common misunderstanding about law -- the idea that courts interpret legal documents by giving words a strict or literal meaning, rather than their ordinary meaning. The maxim that "all text must be interpreted in context" is so widespread in the law as to be a cliche, but law in fiction rarely acknowledges this concept.

So in the example above, courts would never say "well, you did 'attend' this school on one occasion, and the law doesn't say you have to 'attend' more than once, so yeah, you're off the hook." They would say "sorry, but the clear meaning of 'attend school' in this context is 'regular attendance,' because everyone who isn't specifically trying to munchkin the system understands that these words refer to that concept." Lawyers and judges actually understand the notion of words not having fixed meanings better than is generally understood.

14 points FiftyTwo 02 November 2012 04:23:44PM Permalink

"Critically consider the benefits and drawbacks of being in the box?"

14 points lukeprog 05 November 2012 08:08:07PM Permalink

I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything... but I don't see my way to your conclusion.

Thomas Huxley

14 points DSimon 02 November 2012 05:55:00AM Permalink

Remember, kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.

-- Adam Savage

14 points Omegaile 07 November 2012 12:33:08AM Permalink

I would like to upvote the Feynman quote. I am not interested in upvoting the Stephenson quote.

I would like to upvote the Stephenson quote, and not the Feynman quote.

You two talk between yourselves so that only one of you upvote the entire comment.

14 points NancyLebovitz 13 December 2012 07:11:36AM Permalink

It’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking; and it’s also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we’re not so sure about.

John Cleese

transcript

14 points Irgy 11 December 2012 10:50:45AM Permalink

Devil's advocate time:

They don't know nothing about it. They know two things. 1. It's a debt reduction plan 2. It's named after Panetta and Burns

Here are some reasons to oppose the plan, based on the above knowledge:

  • We don't need a debt reduction plan, just keep doing what we're doing and it will sort itself out.

  • I like another existing plan, and this is not that one, so I oppose it.

  • I've heard of Panetta and (s)he's a complete douchebag. Anything they've come up with is clearly junk.

  • I haven't even heard of either of them, so what the heck would they know about debt reduction?

  • They're from different parties, there's no way they could have come up with something sensible.

  • I've heard 10 different plans described, and surely this is one of them. I can't remember which one this is, but I hated all of them so I must oppose this too.

And of course you can make a very similar set of reasons to support it. Not trying to rationalise people's stupidity or make excuses for them as such, just present the opposing argument in all its glory. Ok maybe making excuses for them is exactly what I'm doing. But honestly, how many of your political opinions, as a percentage, including all those that you don't know you have until asked, are really much better than the reasons above?

14 points [deleted] 06 December 2012 12:37:13AM Permalink

"Right and wrong do exist. Just because you don't know what the right answer is — maybe there's even no way you could know what the right answer is — doesn't make your answer right or even okay. It's much simpler than that. It's just plain wrong."

--Dr. House

14 points Will_Newsome 03 January 2013 07:07:41AM Permalink

[O]ne may also focus on a single problem, which can appear in different guises in various disciplines, and vary the methods. An advantage of viewing the same problem through the lens of different models is that we can often begin to identify which features of the problem are enduring and which are artifacts of our particular methods or background assumptions. Because abstraction is a license for us to ignore information, looking at several approaches to modeling a problem can give you insight into what is important to keep and what is noise to ignore. Moreover, discovering robust features of a problem, when it happens, can reshape your intuitions.

— Gregory Wheeler, Formal Epistemology

14 points Qiaochu_Yuan 01 January 2013 10:45:50PM Permalink

If you ever decide that your life is not too high a price to pay for saving the universe, let me know. We'll be ready.

-- Kyubey (Puella Magi Madoka Magica)

14 points BerryPick6 01 January 2013 04:15:35PM Permalink

Many of our most serious conflicts are conflicts within ourselves. Those who suppose their judgements are always consistent are unreflective or dogmatic.

-- John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement.

14 points pleeppleep 02 January 2013 02:28:38AM Permalink

I intend to live forever or die trying

-- Groucho Marx

14 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 January 2013 10:17:06AM Permalink

What makes this the Galileo Gambit is that the absurdity factor is being turned into alleged support (by affective association with the positive benefits of air travel and frequent flier miles) rather than just being neutralized. Contrast to http://lesswrong.com/lw/j1/stranger_than_history/ where absurdity is being pointed out as a fallible heuristic but not being associated with positives.

14 points Multiheaded 04 February 2013 06:32:54PM Permalink

No one can be good for long if goodness is not in demand.

-- Bertold Brecht

(I'm always amused when people of opposite political views express similar thoughts on society.)


Also:

The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set some limit on infinite error.

14 points RichardKennaway 05 February 2013 08:37:54AM Permalink

if there's no corelation, there almost certainly isn't causation.

This is completely wrong, though not many people seem to understand that yet.

For example, the voltage across a capacitor is uncorrelated with the current through it; and another poster has pointed out the example of the thermostat, a topic I've also written about on occasion.

It's a fundamental principle of causal inference that you cannot get causal conclusions from wholly acausal premises and data. (See Judea Pearl, passim.) This applies just as much to negative conclusions as positive. Absence of correlation cannot on its own be taken as evidence of absence of causation.

14 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 February 2013 11:21:44PM Permalink

I cannot express how true this is, at least not without a lot of swear words.

14 points Kingoftheinternet 01 February 2013 07:47:05PM Permalink

If you are reading this book and flipping out at every third sentence because you feel I'm insulting your intelligence, then I have three points of advice for you:

  • Stop reading my book. I didn't write it for you. I wrote it for people who don't already know everything.

  • Empty before you fill. You will have a hard time learning from someone with more knowledge if you already know everything.

  • Go learn Lisp. I hear people who know everything really like Lisp.

For everyone else who's here to learn, just read everything as if I'm smiling and I have a mischievous little twinkle in my eye.

Introduction to Learn Python The Hard Way, by Zed A. Shaw

14 points fubarobfusco 01 March 2013 08:53:08PM Permalink

Interesting to contrast the connotation with:

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who gain nothing from being right.

Or:

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who have no strong reason to prefer the world in which their decisions are right, over the world in which they are wrong.

14 points Alejandro1 01 March 2013 07:17:56PM Permalink

I agree that the formal "premiss + premiss + premiss = conclusion" style of arguing is not good outside formal contexts. But still, the appropriate response would be "Your argument is wrong because it doesn't take into account D", not "that's your opinion and I have mine".

14 points khafra 19 April 2013 04:37:17PM Permalink

Amazon isn’t a store, not really. Not in any sense that we can regularly think about stores. It’s a strange pulsing network of potential goods, global supply chains, and alien associative algorithms with the skin of a store stretched over it, so we don’t lose our minds.

  • Tim Maly, pondering the increasing and poorly understood impact of algorithms on the average person's life.
14 points Eugine_Nier 10 April 2013 03:54:22AM Permalink

If the atheists what to win me over, then the way for them to do so is straightforward: they should ignore me, and try instead to win over the theology community, bishops, the Pope, pastors, denominational and non-denominational bodies, etc., with superior research and arguments.

14 points xv15 08 April 2013 03:14:10AM Permalink

I've always thought there should be a version where the hare gets eaten by a fox halfway through the race, while the tortoise plods along safely inside its armored mobile home.

14 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 April 2013 02:03:31AM Permalink

...and then adjusted our senses of the 'incredible' accordingly, so that Special Relativity seemed less incredible, and God more so.

14 points Vaniver 03 May 2013 04:31:49AM Permalink

To be exact, we tend to succeed twenty-four point five percent more often than the statistics would otherwise indicate

Well... not quite. The selection effect makes the survival number basically impossible to calculate, but regularly surviving risky scenarios seems like it would provide a bit better odds for the influence of moxie than 249:200.

Fun Bayes application: what's the likelihood ratio for the existence vs. nonexistence of moxie-based immunity to death during battle for military leaders, given the military history of Earth?

14 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 May 2013 11:25:14PM Permalink

This debate brings to mind one of the more interesting differences between the hard sciences and other fields. This occurs when you firmly believe A, someone makes a compelling argument, and within a few seconds you firmly believe not-A, to the point of arguing for not-A with even more vigor that you used for A just a few seconds ago.

-- Lou Scheffer

(Most recent example from my own life that springs to mind: "It seems incredibly improbable that any Turing machine of size 100 could encode a complete solution to the halting problem for all Turing machines of size up to almost 100... oh. Nevermind.")

14 points elharo 08 May 2013 10:58:16PM Permalink

One of the most impressive features of brains – especially human brains — is the flexibility to learn almost any kind of task that comes its way. Give an apprentice the desire to impress his master and a chicken-sexing task, and his brain devotes its massive resources to distinguishing males from females. Give an unemployed aviation enthusiast a chance to be a national hero, and his brain learns to distinguish enemy aircraft from local flyboys. This flexibility of learning accounts for a large part of what we consider human intelligence. While many animals are properly called intelligent, humans distinguish themselves in that they are so flexibly intelligent, fashioning their neural circuits to match the task at hand. It is for this reason that we can colonize every region on the planet, learn the local language we’re born into, and master skills as diverse as playing the violin, high-jumping and operating space shuttle cockpits.

David Eagleman, Incognito, p. 71

14 points Qiaochu_Yuan 05 May 2013 10:23:05PM Permalink

This is often a good idea in mathematics. Two concepts that are equivalent in some context may no longer be equivalent once you move to a more general context; for example, familiar equivalent definitions are often no longer equivalent if you start dropping axioms from set theory or logic (e.g. the axiom of choice or excluded middle).

14 points Morendil 03 May 2013 02:31:19PM Permalink

Upvoted initially because this seemed like a good example of what I've taken to calling a "leprechaun" - a fact that spreads in spite of limited empirical backing; however a quick Google search (fact-checking the fact-check, as it were) leads to this article which at the very least suggests that the second-hand story told above is somewhat exaggerated: the evidence for bleeding associated with Gingko Biloba is rather more solid than "one case report - of a single person". Upvote retracted, I'm afraid...

(ETA: also, the other story at that link makes for... interesting reading for a rationalist.)

14 points wylram 02 May 2013 12:19:25AM Permalink

No one thinks that their boss has the power to rearrange physical reality at a whim.

It is a very common feature of bad bosses that they think they have the authority to order their underlings to rearrange physical reality. This seems to be exactly what's going on in the original post.

it reads like this: "Because my job performance may be affected by the laws of physical reality, which my boss is powerless to alter, he (the boss) in fact has no power over me!"

The fact that the speaker is addressing his boss directly changes the meaning a lot. I'd read it as "No matter what official authority you have, if you order me to violate the laws of physics then the laws of physics are going to win." Referring to the mice as his "real boss" is an attempt to explain why he's constrained by the nature of reality to someone who spends a lot more time thinking about org charts than about the nature of reality.

14 points wedrifid 04 May 2013 02:08:13AM Permalink

Can someone explain to me what is going on here?

You have the honour to have provoked the introduction of a new guideline (or a more explicit and precise modified version of an existing one). The norms shall henceforth be clearer to everyone. Bravo!

14 points alexvermeer 16 June 2013 08:32:59PM Permalink

The recognition of confusion is itself a form of clarity.

T.K.V. Desikachar

14 points sediment 01 June 2013 01:53:19PM Permalink

What I have been calling nefarious rhetoric recurs in a rudimentary form also in impromptu discussions. Someone harbors a prejudice or an article of faith or a vested interest, and marshals ever more desperate and threadbare arguments in defense of his position rather than be swayed by reason or face the facts. Even more often, perhaps, the deterrent is just stubbon pride: reluctance to acknowledge error. Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right. The scientist is distinguished by a desire to be right.

— W. V. Quine, An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary (a whimsical and fun read)

14 points TheOtherDave 01 June 2013 03:48:42PM Permalink

I would still have enough to eat if my clothes fit, I would still have a home if my lawn were self-mowing, I would still be able to hear if she sang more tunefully, I would still be alive if I didn't set my alarm, etc. Taking advantage of these sorts of moments as opportunities to practice gratitude is a fine practice, but it's far better to practice gratitude for the thing I actually want (enough to eat, a home, hearing, life, etc.) than for the indicators of it I'd prefer to be rid of.

14 points Jiro 04 July 2013 09:23:48AM Permalink

I don't think the conclusion follows.

It's entirely consistent to believe that the level of something is too high and has been too high for a long time, yet to not oppose it in principle.

The correct question to detect if that's really their objection is not "have they ever thought that the level is too low"--the correct question is "would they ever under any circumstances think that the level is too low". Of course, you're not going to get as many "no" answers with that as with your original formulation.

14 points jsbennett86 12 July 2013 04:43:26AM Permalink

There's something here that doesn't make sense... Let's go and poke it with a stick.

The Doctor - Doctor Who

14 points Stabilizer 01 July 2013 10:00:15PM Permalink

On any important topic, we tend to have a dim idea of what we hope to be true, and when an author writes the words we want to read, we tend to fall for it, no matter how shoddy the arguments. Needy readers have an asymptote at illiteracy; if a text doesn't say the one thing they need to read, it might as well be in a foreign language. To be open-minded, you have to recognize, and counteract, your own doxastic hungers.

-Dennetts Law of Needy Readers, Daniel Dennett

14 points DanArmak 06 July 2013 01:28:41PM Permalink

It's very easy for a rich person to become poor: just give all you have away. It's very hard for a poor person to become rich: almost all of them try, and very few succeed.

If people found, on reflection, that being poor was better than being rich, then they would give their wealth away. We don't observe this.

Therefore I believe being rich is better, even without the benefit of personal experience.

14 points pragmatist 16 August 2013 08:48:20PM Permalink

Yes, it's wrong. In the QM formalism position is a fundamental property. However, the way physical properties work is very different from classical mechanics (CM). In CM, a property is basically a function that maps physical states to real numbers. So the x-component of momentum, for instance, is a function that takes a state as input and spits out a number as output, and that number is the value of the property for that state. Same state, same number, always. This is what it means for a property to have a well-defined value for every state.

In QM, physical properties are more complicated -- they're linear operators, if you want a mathematically exact treatment. But here's an attempt at an intuitive explanation: There are some special quantum states (called eigenstates) for which physical properties behave pretty much like they do in CM. If the particle is in one of those states, then the property takes the state as input and basically just spits out a number. Whenever the particle is in that state, you get the same number. For those states, the property does have a well-defined value.

But the problem in QM is that those are not the only states there are. There are other states as well. These states are linear combinations of the eigenstates, i.e. they correspond to sums of eigenstates (states in QM are basically just vectors, so you can sum them together). These linear combinations are not themselves eigenstates. When you input them into the property, it spits out multiple numbers, not just one. In fact it spits out all the numbers corresponding to each of the eigenstates that are summed together to form our linear combination state. So if A and B are eigenstates for which the property in question spits out numbers a and b respectively, then for the combined state A + B, the property will spit out both a and b -- two numbers, not just one.

So the property isn't just a simple function from states to numbers; for some states you end up with more than one number. And which of those numbers do you see when you make a measurement? Well, that depends on your interpretation. In collapse theories, for instance, you see one of the numbers chosen at random. In MWI, the world branches and each one of those numbers is seen on a separate branch. So there's the sense in which properties aren't well-defined in QM -- properties don't associate a unique number with every physical state. This is all pretty hand-wavey, I realize, but Griffiths is right. If you really want an understanding of what's going on, then you need to study QM in some depth.

Also, I should say that in MWI there is something to your claim that the position of a particle is emergent and not fundamental, but this is not so much because of the nature of the property. It's because particles themselves are emergent and non-fundamental in MWI. The universal wavefunction is fundamental.

14 points Joshua_Blaine 02 August 2013 05:49:04PM Permalink

The best solution to a problem is usually the easiest one.

-- GLaDOS from Portal 2

14 points NancyLebovitz 07 August 2013 03:11:37PM Permalink

And not just that, but he had more education than the poorest Indians, and probably more than the second poorest. And got his hands on a math textbook, which was probably pretty low probability.

My bet is that there aren't a lot of geniuses doing stoop labor, especially in traditional peasant situations, but there are some who would have been geniuses if they'd had enough food when young and some education.

14 points fubarobfusco 04 September 2013 09:06:04AM Permalink

The same techniques of starting fire can be used to keep your neighbor warm in the winter, or to burn your neighbor's house down.

The same techniques of chemistry can be used to create remedies for diseases, or to create poisons.

The same techniques of business can be used to create mutual benefit (positive-sum exchanges; beneficial trade) or parasitism (negative-sum exchanges; rent-seeking).

The same techniques of rhetorical appeal to fear of contamination can be used to teach personal hygiene and save lives, or to teach racial purity and end them.

It isn't the knowledge that is benevolent or malevolent.

14 points gwern 10 September 2013 04:18:02PM Permalink

"...By the end of August, I was mentally drained, more drained, I think, than I had ever been. The creative potential, the capacity to solve problems, changes in a man in ebbs and flows, and over this he has little control. I had learned to apply a kind of test. I would read my own articles, those I considered the best. If I noticed in them lapses, gaps, if I saw that the thing could have been done better, my experiment was successful. If, however, I found myself reading with admiration, that meant I was in trouble."

His Master's Voice, Stanislaw Lem; p. 106 from the Northwestern University Press 3rd edition, 1999

14 points Yahooey 04 September 2013 07:55:15PM Permalink

There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is impossible.

— Jack Vance, The Languages of Pao

14 points linkhyrule5 06 September 2013 02:46:32PM Permalink

Elaborate?

14 points iDante 02 September 2013 03:08:53AM Permalink

At which point, Polly decided that she knew enough of the truth to be going on with. The enemy wasn't men, or women, or the old, or even the dead. It was just bleedin' stupid people, who came in all varieties. And no one had the right to be stupid.

  • Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
14 points Darklight 03 September 2013 08:32:41PM Permalink

I got it from the biography, "Einstein: His Life and Universe" by Walter Isaacson, page 393.

The Notes for "Chapter Seventeen: Einstein's God" on page 618 state that the quote comes from:

Einstein to the Rev. Cornelius Greenway, Nov. 20, 1950, AEA 28-894.

14 points CronoDAS 06 October 2013 01:30:37AM Permalink

You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.

-- Henry Ford

14 points NancyLebovitz 06 November 2013 05:55:38PM Permalink

"One of the miseries of life is that everybody names things a little bit wrong, and so it makes everything a little harder to understand in the world than it would be if it were named differently."

--Richard Feynman

14 points Randaly 03 November 2013 11:09:46AM Permalink

His stated point is about telling things that everybody is supposed to know.

No, that was absolutely not his point. I don't understand how you could have come away thinking that- literally the entire next paragraph directly stated the exact opposite:

Graduate students in anthropology generally don’t know those facts about average brain volume in different populations. Some of those students stumbled onto claims about such differences and emailed a physical anthropologist I know, asking if those differences really exist. He tells them ‘yep’ – I’m not sure what happens next. Most likely they keep their mouths shut. Ain’t it great, living in a free country?

More generally, that was not a tightly reasoned book/paper about brainsize. That line was a throwaway point in support of a minor example ("For example, average brain size is not the same in all human populations") on a short blog post. Arguments about the number of significant figures presented, when you don't even disagree about the overall example or the conclusion, are about as good an example of bad disagreement as I can imagine.

14 points Eugine_Nier 04 November 2013 04:12:22AM Permalink

One problem is that if we, say, start admiring people for acting in "more utilitarian" ways, what we may actually be selecting for is psychopathy.

14 points kalium 04 November 2013 07:08:24AM Permalink
  • DDT is widely used in the third world right now
  • DDT resistance in mosquitoes is rampant due to overuse
  • Current WHO regulations specify not using it where resistance is observed. Hardly the sort of regulation we have against DDT in the US (where malaria is not really a problem)
14 points BT_Uytya 07 December 2013 07:01:55PM Permalink

This was what made the fall of Iothiah so disastrous. ... Strategically, the loss of Iothiah was little more than a nuisance.

Symbolically, however…

The crisis she faced was a crisis in confidence, nothing more, nothing less. The less her subjects believed in the Empire, the less some would sacrifice, the more others would resist. It was almost arithmetic. The balance was wobbling, and all the world watched to see which way the sand would spill. She had made a resolution to act as if she believed to spite all those who doubted her as much as anything else, and paradoxically, they had all started believing with her. It was a lesson Kellhus had drummed into her countless times and one she resolved never to forget again.

To know is to have power over the world; to believe is to have power over men.

Scott R. Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior

14 points Cyan 01 December 2013 11:09:42PM Permalink

We see things not as they are but as we are, ...

- G. T. W. Patrick

14 points mwengler 04 December 2013 05:54:03PM Permalink

Working with a top secret clearance has made me much more aware of how different hardball power reality is than it is presented. Just as one might consider a predilection towards conspiracies a bias, I think I came in to that job with a bias AGAINST conspiracies. I liked believing the world is a fair place where all sorts of tricky evil secret stuff "just wouldn't be done."

I now think ( 50% probability) that the bulk of society is coddled in a belief that things are fair and the world works in a warmish fuzzish way, but that the interactions especially between states and non-state power organizations (terrorists in common usage) is essentially without rules. If you can concieve of a way to get an advantage, it will be RD'd and if it is workable it will be used.

I figure with just above 50% probability JFK was lone-assasinated purely on the basis that in 50 years with so much attention something would have broken, probably, if there was more to break. It would not matter to me much if it turned out to be a conspiracy of some sort, even if it was covered up, it would be par for the course in my current world view, either way.

Meaning I would be careful imputing too much superiority to myself over Russel, Sagan and/or Kerry purely on the basis of thinking JFK was lone-assasinated.

14 points Eugine_Nier 03 December 2013 12:56:13AM Permalink

The most important professions in the modern world may be the most reviled: advertiser, salesperson, lawyer, and financial trader. What these professions have in common is extending useful social interactions far beyond the tribe-sized groups we were evolved to inhabit (most often characterized by the Dunbar number). This commonly involves activities that fly in the face of our tribal moral instincts.

Nick Szabo

14 points Jiro 02 December 2013 01:27:30AM Permalink

I'm good at blowing bubbles with bubble gum. I have yet to charge anyone for doing it.

I suppose you could say that as long as I gain pleasure from blowing bubbles I'm not doing it "for free" but that makes the statement very trivial. Under normal interpretations of "for free", the statement is wrong because there's no demand from anyone else that I blow bubbles.

I'd correct that statement to "if you're good at something, never do it under market value", which raises the possibility that I would still do for free things like blowing bubbles that have no market value.

14 points NancyLebovitz 27 January 2014 04:50:48PM Permalink

No one ever said reality was going to be dignified.

-- Claire Dederer

14 points lukeprog 15 January 2014 01:22:48AM Permalink

The bulk of available evidence suggests that people in all societies tend to be relatively rational when it comes to the beliefs and practices that directly involve their subsistence... The more remote these beliefs and practices are from subsistence activities, the more likely they are to involve nonrational characteristics.

Robert Edgerton

14 points Sniffnoy 09 January 2014 04:42:54AM Permalink

It's good to learn from your failures, but I prefer to learn from the failures of others.

-- Jace Beleren

14 points Oligopsony 22 January 2014 08:12:53PM Permalink

I suspect this was written and is being upvoted in very different senses.

14 points CronoDAS 24 February 2014 12:07:59PM Permalink

Now life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for the training of a mere beginner. In life, we must begin to give a public performance before we have acquired even a novice's skill; and often our moments of seeming mastery are upset by new demands, for which we have acquired no preparatory facility. Life is a score that we play at sight, not merely before we have divined the intentions of the composer, but even before we have mastered our instruments; even worse, a large part of the score has been only roughly indicated, and we must improvise the music for our particular instrument, over long passages. On these terms, the whole operation seems one of endless difficulty and frustration; and indeed, were it not for the fact that some of the passages have been played so often by our predecessors that, when we come to them, we seem to recall some of the score and can anticipate the natural sequence of the notes, we might often give up in sheer despair. The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression.

-- Lewis Mumford, The Conduct of Life

14 points TsviBT 09 March 2014 05:08:18AM Permalink

The secret of life is: This is not a drill.

-The Wise Man in Darkside, a radio play by Tom Stoppard

14 points Stabilizer 09 March 2014 08:08:37AM Permalink

This is not a drill. Therefore, make sure you have drills for the really important bits.

14 points Eugine_Nier 05 March 2014 02:55:41AM Permalink

If everybody thinks you're crazy, they might have a point. But if nobody thinks you're crazy, you have surrendered to herd consensus and are being far too timid in what you allow yourself to think and say in public.

Eric Raymound

14 points johnlawrenceaspden 15 April 2014 11:43:31PM Permalink

Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much more powerful, though usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge. We are all prodigious olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make the difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is a new trick, perhaps less than 100 thousand years old. We have not yet mastered it. It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so when we do it.

Hans Moravec, Wikipedia/Moravec's Paradox

14 points IlyaShpitser 01 April 2014 10:47:57PM Permalink

You have to want to be a wizard.

14 points RichardKennaway 03 April 2014 08:55:27PM Permalink

On its own I can think of several things that these words might be uttered in order to express. A little search turns up a more extended form, with a claimed source:

My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.

Said to be by G.K. Chesterton in the New York Times Magazine of February 11, 1923, which appears to be a real thing, but one which is not online. According to this version, he is jibing at progressivism, the adulation of the latest thing because it is newer than yesterday's latest thing.

ETA: Chesterton uses the same analogy, in rather more words, here.

If I advance the thesis that the weather on Monday was better than the weather on Tuesday (and there has not been much to choose between most Mondays and Tuesdays of late), it is no answer to tell me that the time at which I happen to say so is Tuesday evening, or possibly Wednesday morning.

It is vain for the most sanguine meteorologist to wave his arms about and cry: “Monday is past; Mondays will return no more; Tuesday and Wednesday are ours; you cannot put back the clock.” I am perfectly entitled to answer that the changing face of the clock does not alter the recorded facts of the barometer.

14 points Lumifer 06 June 2014 07:40:53PM Permalink

I have to keep reminding myself that if nobody could outguess the market, then there'd be no money in trying to outguess the market, so only fools would enter it, and it would be easy to outguess.

There is the old joke about a student and a professor of economics walking on campus. The student notices a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk and starts to pick it up when the professor stops him. "Don't bother," the professor says, "it's fake. If it were real someone already would have picked it up".

14 points Jiro 02 June 2014 02:41:17PM Permalink

Maybe so, but this also assumes that you're good at determining who's an idiot. Many people are not, but think they are. So you need to consider that if you make a policy of "don't argue with idiots" widespread, it will be adopted by people with imperfect idiot-detectors. (And I'm pretty sure that many common LW positions would be considered idiocy in the larger world.)

Consider also that "don't argue with idiots" has much of the same superficial appeal as "allow the government to censor idiots". The ACLU defends Nazis for a reason, even though they're pretty obviously idiots: any measures taken against idiots will be taken against everyone else, too.

14 points Larks 08 June 2014 05:49:12PM Permalink

It is perplexing, but amusing to observe people getting extremely excited about things you don't care about; it is sinister to watch them ignore things you believe are fundamental.

Taleb, Aphorisms.

14 points shminux 18 July 2014 07:50:02PM Permalink

Always train your doubt most strongly on those ideas that you really want to be true.

Sean Carroll in his blog post describing why it is a bit premature to declare that Einstein's General Relativity has been experimentally proven to be incomplete, even if it would be very exciting if so.

14 points Pablo_Stafforini 07 July 2014 06:15:08PM Permalink

It takes […] what Berkeley calls a mind debauched by learning to carry the process of making the natural seem strange, so far as to ask for the why of any instinctive human act. To the metaphysician alone can such questions occur as: Why do we smile, when pleased, and not scowl? Why are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk to a single friend? Why does a particular maiden turn our wits so upside-down? The common man can only say, “Of course we smile, of course our heart palpitates at the sight of the crowd, of course we love the maiden, that beautiful soul clad in that perfect form, so palpably and flagrantly made from all eternity to be loved!”

William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, New York, 1890, pp. 386-387

14 points Torello 07 July 2014 04:13:59PM Permalink

No matter how dissatisfied people are with the results they are getting, they rarely question their way of trying to get results. When what we are doing is not working, we do not try doing something totally different. Instead, we try harder by doing more of what seems self-evidently the right way to proceed.

  • Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand, p. 186
14 points Skeptityke 07 July 2014 02:16:05AM Permalink

It wasn’t easier, the ghost explains, you just knew how to do it. Sometimes the easiest method you know is the hardest method there is.

It’s like… to someone who only knows how to dig with a spoon, the notion of digging something as large as a trench will terrify them. All they know are spoons, so as far as they’re concerned, digging is simply difficult. The only way they can imagine it getting any easier is if they change – digging with a spoon until they get stronger, faster, and tougher. And the dangerous people, they’ll actually try this.

-Aggy, from Prequel.

On the importance of looking for more efficient ways to do things.

14 points Viliam_Bur 07 July 2014 10:58:54AM Permalink

That's a side effect of perfecting human rationality. :D

14 points shminux 26 August 2014 09:09:12PM Permalink

is consciousness more like the weather, or is it more like multiplication?

Scott Aaronson

More context:

a perfect simulation of the weather doesn’t make it rain—at least, not in our world. On the other hand, a perfect simulation of multiplying two numbers does multiply the numbers: there’s no difference at all between multiplication and a “simulation of multiplication.” Likewise, a perfect simulation of a good argument is a good argument, a perfect simulation of a sidesplitting joke is a sidesplitting joke, etc.

Maybe the hardware substrate is relevant after all. But [...] I think the burden is firmly on those of us who suspect so, to explain what about the hardware matters and why. Post-Turing, no one gets to treat consciousness’s dependence on particular hardware as “obvious”—especially if they never even explain what it is about that hardware that makes a difference.

14 points Torello 05 September 2014 01:49:45AM Permalink
14 points Lumifer 12 September 2014 05:13:53PM Permalink

It’s as if you went into a bathroom in a bar and saw a guy pissing on his shoes, and instead of thinking he has some problem with his aim, you suppose he has a positive utility for getting his shoes wet.

Andrew Gelman

14 points asd 10 September 2014 04:03:05PM Permalink

When I visited Dieter Zeh and his group in Heidelberg in 1996, I was struck by how few accolades he’d gotten for his hugely important discovery of decoherence. Indeed, his curmudgeonly colleagues in the Heidelberg Physics Department had largely dismissed his work as too philosophical, even though their department was located on “Philosopher Street.” His group meetings had been moved to a church building, and I was astonished to learn that the only funding that he’d been able to get to write the first-ever book on decoherence came from the German Lutheran Church.

This really drove home to me that Hugh Everett was no exception: studying the foundations of physics isn’t a recipe for glamour and fame. It’s more like art: the best reason to do it is because you love it. Only a small minority of my physics colleagues choose to work on the really big questions, and when I meet them, I feel a real kinship. I imagine that a group of friends who’ve passed up on lucrative career options to become poets might feel a similar bond, knowing that they’re all in it not for the money but for the intellectual adventure.

-- Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe, Chapter 8. The Level III Multiverse, "The Joys of Getting Scooped"

14 points somnicule 08 December 2014 11:25:29PM Permalink

Isn't that the point of the quote?

14 points CCC 03 November 2014 10:37:32AM Permalink

Hmmm. I have a slightly different experience to you. I am bilingual - English/Afrikaans - though my Afrikaans was never a language I used a lot and I have a very poor grasp of it in comparison.

This has led to something interesting - if I try to think in Afrikaans, I notice a distinct difference in my thoughts. Normally, my thoughts take the form of an internal monologue (almost, but not quite, exclusively). If I try to think in Afrikaans, which has a different grammar (and importantly, a different word order) to English, then I get the distinct impression of parts of my thoughts queued up and waiting for their part of the sentence to happen. This tells me that there are more complicated things going on inside my head than I had previously thought.

...though interesting, I have not as yet found any practical use for this knowledge.

14 points jimmy 02 November 2014 07:18:44PM Permalink

The moment I realized that if I fall, that would probably be my end, I became really, really calm and detached. I picked up a good spot in the parking, with the back to the wall,, between 2 cars, and I moved there to meet them, all the time I was very focused to not get taken down and to take as many of them with me as possible. That was all I was thinking. In retrospect, I still think there were a decent amount of adrenalin circulating through my body, but in the moment I really felt zen and in complete control of myself.

Now, I don't think that's the average reaction you can expect in a combat situation, nor do I think that so much control is needed. But I've been in other critical and stressful situations (like in the middle of a forest fire, or going up the ring to fight other guys in front of a few hundred people), and I think that it's not the prospect of death or getting hurt that are most stressing, is not knowing what to do

--Bogdan M (emphasis mine)

13 points badger 18 April 2009 04:43:33AM Permalink

The greatest enemy of truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived, and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, pervasive, and unrealistic.

-- John F. Kennedy

(For those interested, I'm pulling most of these quotes from Rational Choice in an Uncertain World by Robyn Dawes, which I just began)

13 points AndySimpson 18 April 2009 07:55:05PM Permalink

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

--Aldous Huxley

13 points dreeves 18 April 2009 08:12:26PM Permalink

"Faced with the choice of changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof." -- John Kenneth Galbraith

13 points Yvain 15 June 2009 09:24:40AM Permalink

"Imagine a world where everything changes to match the state of your mind, where evidence never pushes back against your theories, where your every thought is correct simply because you think it so. Can there be any better definition of hell for a man of learning? "

-- Bradeline, Fall From Heaven

13 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 August 2009 03:52:00AM Permalink

I almost believe we are ghosts, all of us. It's not just what we inherit from our fathers and mothers that walks again in us - it's all sorts of dead old ideas and dead beliefs and things like that. They don't exactly live in us, but there they sit all the same and we can't get rid of them. All I have to do is pick up a newspaper, and I see ghosts lurking between the lines. I think there are ghosts everywhere you turn in this country - as many as there are grains of sand - and then there we all are, so abysmally afraid of the light.

-- Ibsen, 1881

13 points Kaj_Sotala 02 September 2009 05:59:39PM Permalink

"You can safely say that you have made God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." -- Reverend Robert Cromey

13 points thomblake 01 September 2009 07:55:37PM Permalink

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

-Bertrand Russell

13 points RichardKennaway 09 January 2010 09:39:30AM Permalink

"You cannot understand what a person is saying unless you understand who they are arguing with."

-- Don Symons, quoted by Tooby and Cosmides.

13 points Zack_M_Davis 07 January 2010 09:50:16AM Permalink

2 + 3 = 5, 3 + 2 = 5, 5 - 2 =3, and 5 - 3 = 2 are not four facts, but four different ways of looking at one fact. Furthermore, that fact is not a fact of arithmetic, to be taken on faith and memorized like nonsense syllables. It is a fact of nature, which children can discover for themselves, and rediscover or verify for themselves as many times as they need or want to.

The fact is this:

***** -- *** **

If you have before you a group of objects--coins or stones, for example---that looks like the group on the left, then you can make it into two groups that look like the ones on the right. Or--and this is what the two-way arrow means---if you have two groups that look like the ones on the right, you can make them into a group that looks like the one on the left.

This is not a fact of arithmetic, but a fact of nature. It did not become true only when human beings invented arithmetic. It has nothing to do with human beings. It is true all over the universe. One doesn't have to know any arithmetic to discover or verify it. An infant playing with blocks or a dog pawing at sticks might do that operation, though probably neither of them would notice that he had done it; for them, the difference between ***** and *** ** would be a difference that didn't make any difference. Arithmetic began (and begins) when human beings began to notice and think about this and other numerical facts of nature.

----John Holt, Learning All the Time

13 points Zack_M_Davis 01 February 2010 06:38:17PM Permalink

'Cause it's gonna be the future soon

And I won't always be this way

When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away

--Jonothan Coulton

13 points XiXiDu 01 February 2010 10:50:03AM Permalink

The introduction of suitable abstractions is our only mental aid to organize and master complexity.

-- Edsger W. Dijkstra

13 points RichardKennaway 01 February 2010 10:13:36AM Permalink

"We can get very confused, because we think that words must have some secret meaning that we have to figure out. They don't. They are just noises or marks, and they mean whatever experience you have learned to mean by them. People tend to use similar words in similar situations, but unless you have specifically agreed on what the words will mean, in terms of underlying experiences, there's no way to know what another person understands when you use them. The experience you attach to a word when you say it isn't automatically the same as the experience another person attaches to the same word when hearing it."

William T. Powers

13 points Jack 02 March 2010 01:07:59AM Permalink

They (Italians and other Europeans) still knew the Earth was round. Indeed, if you live near a sea port this is a very easy thing to figure out. The resistance Columbus faced was that everyone thought the world was much too big to get to the Indies in a reasonable period of time by sailing west. And of course everyone was right and Columbus had no idea what he was talking about.

Edit: And actually I'm pretty sure the authorities cerca 1492 were basing their beliefs about the size of the Earth on work done by the ancient Greeks.

13 points SilasBarta 01 March 2010 08:22:06PM Permalink

What brazil84 said. Godin sounds like he's overextrapolating from personal experience. For his claim about "it's because you've been brainwashed" to work, he would need to show that people are taking circuitous routes to standard employment in preference to viable alternate means of making a living.

Yes, there are ways to make the same money with less time or "taking orders" ... but they're hard and risky to work out. If people are wrong in these assessments, it takes a heck of a lot more than just realizing, "hey, there are other ways!" You have to know one of those other ways well enough to get it to work! To borrow from Eliezer Yudkowsky, "non-wage-slave is not an income plan".

Furthermore, his claim is heavily penalized by it's assertion of conspiracy: he's saying all your teachers "needed" you to beleive this is the natural order of things, that every professor you had believed that, that all employers (not just the businesses but the hiring managers) believed that, etc. Yes, I'm aware of the history of public education (incl. Gatto's claims about it), but Godin is going further, and saying that these people need you to believe lies.

Employers don't look for college grads because they're trying to enforce an oppressive system; they do it because the existence of the university degree option sorts applicants by ability in the most efficient, legal way. Teachers teach because of a combination of liking teaching and the benefits, not out of a deep-seated need to indoctrinate people into a 9-5 lifestyle.

Don't tell me how bad it is to have a standard job; show me the viable option! Don't assume people aren't aware of the options; show that they're viable!

With that said, Godin has a good point, but standard jobs are a bad example. A better one might be how people blur the concepts of "getting a steady income until dealth" and "not working" into the same term ("retirement"), when really they should think of them as distinct.

13 points RichardKennaway 01 April 2010 10:03:17PM Permalink

It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.

Charles Darwin, "The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals", ch.3.

13 points Jack 06 April 2010 10:16:19PM Permalink

Except that actually isn't right. You miss exactly 0% of the shots you don't take. And I'm not just being pedantic. In basketball this attitude can cost teams games. Any game of possessions (of which basketball is one) is won with efficiency. Shooting the ball means there is some chance of scoring but also some chance of missing and the ball being rebounded by the other team. When the latter happens you've lost your opportunity to score and you will never get it back. So the key to winning is to take high efficiency shots-- this means shots that are likely to go in and shots that are worth a lot of points. Now not shooting does increase the likelihood of a turnover and one can't go on not shooting forever. Moreover, quick shots before the defense is ready can often be very efficient shots. But the key is that the game is not about scoring a lot of points-- it's about scoring a lot of points efficiently. And to get good at that means cultivating a skill of waiting for the best shot, creating a better shot or deferring to more efficient teammates.

It might be that these aren't concerns in hockey: if all shots are more or less equally efficient or if a lot of points are scored of offensive rebounds "keep shooting it" might be a good message. I don't know a lot about the sport. But even hockey players aren't shooting from the other side of the rink.

Outside sports there are occasions where 'missing' is worse than 'not shooting' and if the chances of 'missing' are high enough or the cost of 'missing' sufficiently high it can be a really bad idea to 'shoot'.

13 points utilitymonster 08 May 2010 04:18:43PM Permalink

Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues which he neglects to practice; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory, as a man may be confident of the advantages of a voyage, or a journey..., without having courage or industry to undertake it, and may honestly recommend to others, those attempts which he neglects himself.

--Samuel Johnson

13 points NancyLebovitz 02 May 2010 11:02:28AM Permalink

Discussion of how not to get lost in the woods

Arg, this post is bringing back memories of all kinds of backcountry stupidity (including a fair amount of my own stupidity), so I can't resist adding a comment about GPS devices. Any navigation tool -- GPS device, map, compass, sextant, whatever -- only works if you are using the navigation tool to relate yourself to the surrounding landscape. And you should never trust maps, GPS devices, compasses, or any tool if it contradicts what you're seeing in the surrounding landscape. I own a top-notch brand of GPS device, I got a top-quality map to go inside it, and when I checked the map against a landscape I knew well, I found error after error (which is true with all maps, by the way; one of the reasons I like paper maps is that I can make notations on it when I find errors).

13 points RobinZ 01 May 2010 01:21:51PM Permalink

Edit: DUPLICATE

"Then the one called Raltariki is really a demon?" asked Tak.

"Yes—and no," said Yama. "If by 'demon' you mean a malefic, supernatural creature, possessed of great powers, life span, and the ability to temporarily assume virtually any shape—then the answer is no. This is the generally accepted definition, but it is untrue in one respect."

"Oh? And what may that be?"

"It is not a supernatural creature."

"But it is all those other things?"

"Yes."

"Then I fail to see what difference it makes whether it be supernatural or not—so long as it is malefic, possesses great powers and life span and has the ability to change its shape at will."

"Ah, but it makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy—it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either."

Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light. (h/t zhurnaly)

13 points DanielVarga 06 June 2010 05:55:56AM Permalink

I imagine that if my friend finally came to the conclusion that he were a machine, he would be infinitely crestfallen. I think he would think: "My God! How Horrible! I am only a machine!" But if I should find out I were a machine, my attitude would be totally different. I would say: "How amazing! I never before realized that machines could be so marvelous!"

(Raymond Smullyan)

I have found it in an OB comment by Zubon, but it was never posted as a rationality quote.

13 points SilasBarta 02 June 2010 08:50:50PM Permalink

What's so difficult?

For you, understanding what was asked. The question is not, "what will happen?" The question is, "What information do you need in order to know which outcome will happen?"

Can someone explain why the parent is upvoted? Is everyone just assuming that the Bateson quote is just a sarcastic, roundabout way of asking what will happen?

ETA: In case you weren't aware, cousin_it is not joking with his comment.

13 points brazzy 02 July 2010 09:37:53AM Permalink

The necessity for marking our classes has brought with it a bias for false and excessive contrast, and we never invent a term but we are at once cramming it with implications beyond its legitimate content. There is no feat of irrelevance that people will not perform quite easily in this way; there is no class, however accidental, to which they will not at once ascribe deeply distinctive qualities. The seventh sons of seventh sons have remarkable powers of insight; people with a certain sort of ear commit crimes of violence; people with red hair have souls of fire; all democratic socialists are trustworthy persons; all people born in Ireland have vivid imaginations and all Englishmen are clods; all Hindoos are cowardly liars; all curly-haired people are good-natured; all hunch-backs are energetic and wicked, and all Frenchmen eat frogs. Such stupid generalisations have been believed with the utmost readiness, and acted upon by great numbers of sane, respectable people. And when the class is one's own class, when it expresses one of the aggregations to which one refers one's own activities, then the disposition to divide all qualities between this class and its converse, and to cram one's own class with every desirable distinction, becomes overwhelming.

-- H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia

13 points DSimon 02 July 2010 10:25:36PM Permalink

When I was 14, my father was stationed in Japan. I went rock climbing with this kid from school. He fell and got injured, and I had to bring him to the hospital. We came in through the wrong entrance, and passed this guy in the hall. He was a janitor. My friend came down with an infection, and the doctors didn't know what to do. So they brought in the janitor. He was a doctor. And a Buraku - one of Japan's untouchables. His ancestors had been slaughterers, gravediggers. And this guy knew that he wasn't accepted by the staff, didn't even try. He didn't dress well. He didn't pretend to be one of them. People around that place didn't think he had anything they wanted, except when they needed him - because he was right, which meant that nothing else mattered. And they had to listen to him.

-- Dr. Greg House

13 points RichardKennaway 02 July 2010 06:48:51AM Permalink

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.

-- Mark Twain, Old Times on the Mississippi

13 points gwern 03 August 2010 04:23:00AM Permalink

This is a good example of how some areas are most concisely dealt with by ridicule.

13 points RichardKennaway 03 August 2010 07:44:31AM Permalink

Man cannot understand the perfection and imperfections of his chosen art if he cannot see the value in other arts. Following rules only permits development up to a point in technique and then the student and artist has to learn more and seek further. It makes sense to study other arts as well as those of strategy. Who has not learned something more about themselves by watching the activities of others? To learn the sword study the guitar. To learn the fist study commerce. To just study the sword will make you narrow-minded and will not permit you to grow outward.

-- Musashi, "A Book of Five Rings"

13 points Craig_Heldreth 02 September 2010 05:59:17PM Permalink

It is often said that experiments should be made without preconceived ideas. This is impossible.

--Henri Poincare, Science and Hypothesis.

13 points lionhearted 01 September 2010 11:11:02AM Permalink

Huh, I'd never heard of that. Great story. Thanks for sharing -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Mucius_Scaevola

"I am Gaius Mucius, a citizen of Rome. I came here as an enemy to kill my enemy, and I am as ready to die as I am to kill. We Romans act bravely and, when adversity strikes, we suffer bravely." He also declared that he was one of three hundred other Romans willing to give their own life to kill Porsenna.(Ab Urbe Condita, II.12) Porsenna, fearful and angry, ordered Mucius to be cast into the flames. Mucius stoically accepted this punishment, preempting Porsenna by thrusting his hand into that same fire and giving no sign of pain. Impressed by the youth's courage, Porsenna freed Mucius.

13 points Unnamed 05 October 2010 08:48:57PM Permalink

God, grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference.

-- adapted from Reinhold Niebuhr

Is this a piece of traditional deep wisdom that's actually wise?

13 points komponisto 05 October 2010 07:02:24PM Permalink

In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

-- Bertrand Russell

(Quoted, in Italian translation, on p. 174 of Amanda Knox's appeal brief.)

13 points Kobayashi 06 October 2010 11:28:21PM Permalink

"You can always reach me through my blog!" he panted. "Overpowering Falsehood dot com, the number one site for rational thinking about the future--"

  • Zendegi, by Greg Egan (2010)

Go ahead, down-vote me. It's still paradoxically-awesome to be burned in a Greg Egan novel...

13 points Vladimir_M 06 October 2010 10:49:54PM Permalink

Prompted by the discussion of Sam Harriss idea that science should provide for a universal moral code, I thought of this suitable reply given long ago:

[The] doctrine of right and wrong is perpetually disputed, both by the pen and the sword: whereas the doctrine of lines and figures is not so, because men care not in that subject what be truth, as a thing that crosses no man's ambition, profit, or lust. For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any man's right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine [would] have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

(It also provides for some interesting perspective on the current epistemological state of various academic fields that are taken seriously as a source of guidance for government policy.)

13 points Apprentice 06 October 2010 10:47:42AM Permalink

If I close my mind in fear, please pry it open.

-- Metallica

13 points MichaelGR 04 November 2010 09:10:40PM Permalink

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful, they are found because it was possible to find them. -J. Robert Oppenheimer.

13 points xamdam 03 November 2010 01:41:32PM Permalink

We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings.

Dr. Manhattan (Watchmen)

13 points wedrifid 23 December 2010 05:55:51AM Permalink

The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way. [...] Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a non-moral origin.

-- Ted Kaczynski

13 points MBlume 15 December 2010 09:53:27PM Permalink

Actually my first thought upon reading that was "follow the improbability" -- be suspicious of elements of your world-model that seem particularly well optimized in some direction if you can't see the source of the optimization pressure.

13 points gjm 03 December 2010 02:22:05PM Permalink

I think this quotation actually comes not from a real papal representative but from Brecht's play "Galileo".

(Isn't it obvious that this isn't the sort of thing a real person would be likely to say? Especially not the sort of person who would be sent to Galileo by the Pope.)

13 points Nevin 05 January 2011 05:33:20AM Permalink

The new XKCD is highly relevant.

Okay, middle school students, it's the first Tuesday in February.

This means that by law and custom, we must spend the morning reading though the Wikipedia article List of Common Misconceptions, so you can spend the rest of your lives being a little less wrong.

The guests at every party you'll ever attend thank us in advance.

Subtext: I wish I lived in this universe.

13 points MichaelGR 03 January 2011 09:33:59PM Permalink

In a strong enough wind, even turkeys can fly.

-Saying of investors

13 points gerg 03 January 2011 09:08:12PM Permalink

It is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire.

-- Thucydides

13 points fiddlemath 03 January 2011 08:51:38AM Permalink

Via David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.

To explain - I'm finding lately that the occurrence of irony is a useful warning that something is wrong; some current, important contradiction is being papered over. Sometimes the contradiction is obvious, yes, but among people with the habit of irony, sometimes that contradiction is buried deep enough that the ironist doesn't know where the contradiction lies.

13 points billswift 03 January 2011 07:44:47PM Permalink

When somebody makes a statement you don't understand, don't tell him he's crazy. Ask him what he means.

-- H Beam Piper, Space Viking

13 points orthonormal 04 January 2011 03:46:36AM Permalink

Hey, no quoting yourself.

13 points endoself 08 February 2011 10:53:58AM Permalink

After finishing dinner, Sidney Morgenbesser decides to order dessert. The waitress tells him he has two choices: apple pie and blueberry pie. Sidney orders the apple pie. After a few minutes the waitress returns and says that they also have cherry pie at which point Morgenbesser says "In that case I'll have the blueberry pie."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_of_irrelevant_alternatives

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Morgenbesser

13 points Konkvistador 03 February 2011 08:35:54PM Permalink

To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.

-Confucius

13 points MichaelGR 03 February 2011 02:51:43PM Permalink

Teachers open the door. You enter by yourself.

-Chinese proverb

13 points benelliott 01 February 2011 08:28:48PM Permalink

Admitting error clears the score and proves you wiser than before.

--Arthur Guiterman

13 points ata 01 February 2011 08:25:38PM Permalink

It's true that the question of God's existence is epistemologically fairly trivial and doesn't require its own category of justifications, and it's also true that even many atheists don't seem to notice this. But even with that in mind, it almost never actually helps in convincing people to become atheists (most theists won't respond to a crash course in Bayesian epistemology and algorithmic information theory, but they sometimes respond to careful refutation of the real reasons they believe in God), which is probably why this point is often forgotten by people who spend a lot of time arguing for atheism.

13 points aausch 04 February 2011 10:05:08PM Permalink

Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality by not dying

-- The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett

13 points billswift 01 February 2011 07:29:20PM Permalink

How emotionally entangled are you with your point of view? Test yourself - defend an opposing view, believing your life depends upon it.

-- Marc Stiegler, David's Sling

13 points avalot 02 March 2011 11:46:29PM Permalink

Thanks for the irony!

13 points Nornagest 03 March 2011 03:37:38AM Permalink

The majority of people in this world are ataxic: they cannot coordinate their mental muscles to make a purposed movement. They have no real Will, only a set of wishes, many of which contradict others. The victim wobbles from one to the other (and it is no less wobbling because the movements may occasionally be very violent), and at the end of life the movements cancel each other out. Nothing has been achieved, except the one thing of which the victim is not conscious: the destruction of his own character, the confirming of indecision.

-- Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA

Crowley's writings are an odd mixture of utter raving, self-conscious mysticism, and surprising introspective clarity. The above refers to his concept of True Will, which reads at times like an occultist's parameterization of epistemic rationality; some of his writings on meditation, too, wouldn't look too far out of place as top-level posts here.

13 points NihilCredo 05 April 2011 09:49:45PM Permalink

Note to self: do not buy stuff from Nancy Lebovitz.

13 points Giles 04 April 2011 03:10:37PM Permalink

Was the buyer sane enough to realise that it probably wasn't a power crystal, or just sane enough to realise that if he pretended it wasn't a power crystal he'd save $135?

Is that amount of raising-the-sanity waterline worth $135 to Tony?

I would guess it's guilt-avoidance at work here.

(EDIT: your thanks to Tony are still valid though!)

13 points Alicorn 07 April 2011 08:38:20PM Permalink

For a sufficiently rigorous definition of "awesome", why not?

13 points Confringus 04 April 2011 08:39:08PM Permalink

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

Douglas Adams

This quote defines my approach to science and philosophy; a phenomenon can be wondrous on its own merit, it need not be magical or extraordinary to have value.

13 points Konkvistador 02 May 2011 02:54:36AM Permalink
13 points MixedNuts 07 June 2011 12:26:32PM Permalink

Okay, so the essence of wisdom is to be exactly as suspicious of everything as you should be, the first-pass approximation of wisdom is to remain suspicious of what you want to be true, and the second-pass approximation of wisdom is to be also suspicious of current beliefs you want to be untrue.

13 points Pugovitz 07 June 2011 07:18:02PM Permalink

"Try to learn something about everything and everything about something." ~Thomas H. Huxley

One of my favorite quotes; from the father of the word "agnostic."

13 points Patrick 07 June 2011 03:45:19AM Permalink

If things are nice there is probably a good reason why they are nice: and if you do not know at least one reason for this good fortune, then you still have work to do.

Richard Askey

13 points RobertLumley 02 June 2011 12:19:35AM Permalink

"There always comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two plus two equals four is punished with death … And the issue is not a matter of what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The issue is simply whether or not two plus two equals four." – Albert Camus, The Plague

13 points wedrifid 01 June 2011 11:01:42PM Permalink

If you use it, you had better be prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes you to.

Including such destinations as "Not being the unwilling sex toy of the big bald guy while in prison". Although if you also don't use 'fraud' you may find yourself not in jail in the first place - but it's not always so simple. It also leads you to the destination "still having your food, possessions, dignity and social status in your schoolyard despite having no control of whether you wish to be subject to that environment".

13 points wedrifid 01 June 2011 11:35:51AM Permalink

Or, I could work out what I want and achieve that? There is even a time to focus on a goal over another purely because it is easier.

13 points RobinZ 05 July 2011 02:41:48AM Permalink

Including, often, "do what they say".

(Edit: This is particularly likely when they are telling you to go somewhere - "somewhere" is likely to be a place where they will be less inconvenienced by shooting you.)

13 points djcb 03 July 2011 10:28:23AM Permalink

In an article in a women’s magazine many years ago we advised the readers to buy their stocks as they bought their groceries, not as they bought their perfume.

-- Benjamin Graham The Intelligent Investor, 1949.

(I really like Graham's rational, down-to-earth approach to investing, and this quote is a good example of the kind of thinking he wants to convey)

13 points Tom_Talbot 02 August 2011 11:43:36PM Permalink

Suppose we know someone's objective and also know that half the time that person correctly figures out how to achieve it and half the time he acts at random. Since there is generally only one right way of doing things (or perhaps a few) but very many wrong ways, the "rational" behavior can be predicted but the "irrational" behavior cannot. If we predict the person's behavior on the assumption that he is rational, we will be right half the time. If we assume he is irrational, we will almost never be right, since we still have to guess which irrational thing he will do. We are better off assuming he is rational and recognizing that we will sometimes be wrong. To put the argument more generally, the tendency to be rational is the consistent (and hence predictable) element in human behavior. The only alternative to assuming rationality (other than giving up and assuming that human behavior cannot be understood and predicted) would be a theory of irrational behavior - a theory that told us not only that someone would not always do the rational thing but also which particular irrational thing he would do. So far as I know, no satisfactory theory of that sort exists.

David Friedman, Price Theory, An Intermediate Text

13 points GabrielDuquette 02 August 2011 08:43:01PM Permalink

"[I]f function is hard enough, form is forced to follow it, because there is no effort to spare for error. Wild animals are beautiful because they have hard lives."

Paul Graham

13 points printing-spoon 05 August 2011 02:34:53PM Permalink

Woot, Stockholm syndrome.

13 points Oscar_Cunningham 25 September 2011 12:27:29AM Permalink

Ian Stewart invented the game of tautoverbs. Take a proverb and manipulate it so that it's tautological. i.e. "Look after the pennies and the pennies will be looked after" or "No news is no news". There's a kind of Zen joy in forming them.

This proverb however, is already there.

13 points lukeprog 16 September 2011 12:54:43AM Permalink

The enlightened individual has learned to ask not "Is it so?" but rather "What is the probability that it is so?"

Sheldon Ross

13 points Konkvistador 03 September 2011 09:34:19PM Permalink

But naturally doing everything faster would be pretty freaking awesome in itself.

  • increased yearly economic growth (consequently higher average living standards since babies still take 9 months to make)
  • it would help everyone cram much more living into their lifespan.
  • it would help experts deal with events that aren't sped up much better. Say an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.
  • medical advances would arrive earlier meaning that lots of people who would otherwise have died might live for a few more productive (sped up!) years.

But I'm having way to much fun nitpicking so I'll just stop here. :)

13 points lionhearted 01 September 2011 11:34:16PM Permalink

I moved out of the hood for good, you blame me?

Niggas aim mainly at niggas they can't be.

But niggas can't hit niggas they can't see.

I'm out of sight, now I'm out of they dang reach.

-- Dr. Dre, "The Watcher"

13 points DanielLC 04 October 2011 04:31:12AM Permalink

"-but I think it would probably kill you."

"Comforting to know. Well, more comforting than not knowing it could kill you," I remark pointedly.

Sam Hughes

13 points sketerpot 06 October 2011 03:24:38AM Permalink

An alternate, and perhaps even more frightening hypothesis: the people in power do think, and they're doing their best.

13 points MichaelVassar 05 October 2011 02:23:17PM Permalink

Worse, you can simply let people catch you, then get angry with them and bully them into accepting your claims not to have lied out of a mix of imperfect certainty and conflict avoidance. By doing this you condition them to accept the radical form of dominance where they have the authority to tell you what you are morally entitled to believe.

13 points [deleted] 02 October 2011 09:59:19AM Permalink

Because it's not about food, but the challenge? Without the roadrunner, Wile E. is nothing. He depends on not succeeding. (Just noticed what a great role model he is.)

13 points MichaelHoward 02 October 2011 03:36:38PM Permalink

It does not do to dwell on dreams... and forget to live.

Professor Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore

13 points sixes_and_sevens 07 October 2011 03:39:53PM Permalink

They say when you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.

They underestimate me.

-A Softer World

13 points Konkvistador 09 November 2011 12:05:44AM Permalink

Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.

--Thomas Sowell

13 points Oligopsony 04 November 2011 10:04:34PM Permalink

“Tell me, Eben: how is’t, d’you think, that the planets are moved in their courses?”

“Why, said Ebenezer, “’tis that the cosmos is filled with little particles moving in vortices, each of which centers on a star; and ‘tis the subtle push and pull of these particles in our solar vortex that slides the planets along their orbs – is’t not?”

“So saith Descartes,” Burlingame smiled. “And d’you haply recall what is the nature of light?”

“If I have’t right,” replied Ebenezer, “’tis an aspect of the vortices – of the press of inward and outward forces in ‘em. The celestial fire is sent through space from the vortices by this pressure, which imparts a transitional motion to little light globules – ”

“Which Renatus kindly hatched for that occasion,” Burlingame interrupted. “And what’s more he allows his globules both a rectilinear and a rotatary motion. If only the first occurs when the globules smite our retinae, we see white light; if both, we see color. And if this were not magical enough – mirabile dictu! – when the rotatory motion surpasseth the rectilinear, we see blue; when the reverse, we see red; and when the twain are equal, we see yellow. What fantastical drivel!”

“You mean ‘tis not the truth? I must say, Henry, it sounds reasonable to me. In sooth, there is a seed of poetry in it; it hath an elegance.”

“Aye, it hath every virtue and but one small defect, which is, that the universe doth not operate in that wise.”

-John Barth, the Sot-Weed Factor

13 points GabrielDuquette 31 October 2011 06:11:05PM Permalink

Would anybody tell me if I was getting stupider?

Mike Patton

13 points jsbennett86 01 November 2011 12:53:29AM Permalink

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 without simply deciding to be irrational. Thus it is that I have discovered, and many others, I notice, have also discovered, all sorts of clever ways to convince myself that Reason is "mere" Reason, powerful and right, of course, but infinitely outnumbered by reasons, my reasons.

Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

13 points wedrifid 05 November 2011 07:49:49AM Permalink

Sweetie, if you work reaaaaly hard, and focus reaaaaly well, and there aren't that many people who are still better at what you do than you are despite your best efforts, you can be whatever you want. If you don't die.

Zach Weiner, SMBC]

13 points Teal_Thanatos 07 December 2011 11:26:57PM Permalink

I upvoted this half because I laughed and half because I now want a gnome.

13 points Bugmaster 01 December 2011 07:59:35PM Permalink

The title of the book is a good candidate for a December quote, in and of itself.

13 points shokwave 01 December 2011 04:19:40AM Permalink

chelz: shminux: are you more your dna or are you more your personality?

Grognor: chelz: is the area of a rectangle more the length, or the width?

shokwave: grognor: wow. mind if I borrow that?

shokwave: because that is just about the best 'you have asked a wrong question' statement i've ever seen

The conversation in question.

13 points Thomas 11 December 2011 03:35:40PM Permalink

Remember — there is a correlation between correlation and causation.

  • ChaosRobie on Reddit
13 points paper-machine 06 December 2011 06:34:25AM Permalink

Rejecting all organs of information therefore but my senses, I rid myself of the Pyrrhonisms with which an indulgence in speculations hyperphysical and antiphysical so uselessly occupy and disquiet the mind. A single sense may indeed be sometimes decieved, but rarely: and never all our senses together, with their faculty of reasoning. They evidence realities; and there are enough of these for all the purposes of life, without plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and phantasms. I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.

I am sure that I really know many, many, things, and none more surely than that I love you with all my heart, and pray for the continuance of your life until you shall be tired of it yourself.

Thomas Jefferson, to John Adams, August 15, 1820.

13 points J_Taylor 04 December 2011 12:04:58PM Permalink

When you choose

How much postage to use,

When you know

What's the chance it will snow,

When you bet

And you end up in debt,

Oh try as you may,

You just can't get away

From mathematics!

Tom Lehrer, Thats Mathematics

(If one were so inclined, one could give a quasi-rationalist commentary on practically every lyric in that song.)

13 points bbleeker 02 December 2011 11:11:44AM Permalink

That's also how this Dutchwoman interprets it. But of course, while it literally refers to the creation of polders, the figurative meaning is 'faith might have its place, but science and hard work are what solve problems', like PhilosophyTutor said. (With a little bit of 'Gee, aren't we Dutch GREAT?' thrown in. ;p)

13 points Alerik 06 December 2011 05:28:36PM Permalink

“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.” ― Paul Valéry

13 points Oligopsony 07 December 2011 01:37:36PM Permalink

This makes me think of one of those intellectual hipster Hegelian dialectic thingies.

Idiot: My monkeys are better than your monkeys. (Blood for the blood god, etc; Malcolm.)

Contrarian: My monkeys are better than your monkeys, because they don't say things like "My monkeys are better than your monkeys." (Secular Western cosmopolitanism, faith in progress, etc; Wittgenstein.)

Hipster: My monkeys are better than your monkeys, because they don't say things like "My monkeys are better than your monkeys, because they don't say things like 'My monkeys are better than your monkeys.'" (Postmodernism, cultural relativism, etc; Vladimir.)

It amuses me that I can think of a few trendy Continentals right now who base their appeal on working at level four.

13 points peter_hurford 30 November 2011 09:07:43PM Permalink

I think this quote unfairly trivializes the subjectively (and often objectively) harsh lives suicidal people go through.

13 points Anubhav 08 January 2012 05:16:29AM Permalink

Imagine willpower doesn't exist. That's step 1 to a better future.

Second slide of this powerpoint by Stanford's Persuasive Tech Lab.

13 points NancyLebovitz 10 January 2012 09:33:38PM Permalink

In short, they made unrealistic demands on reality and reality did not oblige them.

Cory Doctorow talking about DRM, but I think there are some wider applications.

13 points MixedNuts 02 January 2012 02:20:33PM Permalink

The ultimate theological question is: ‘Where does the Sun go at night?’.

The answer that so many civilisations agreed for so long was: ‘The Sun is driven by one of the gods, and at night it goes under the Earth to fight a battle. There is at least some risk that the god will lose this battle, and so the Sun may not rise tomorrow’. It’s something the human race understood was a cast iron fact before they knew how to cast iron. It survived as the working model twenty-five times longer than the four hundred years we’ve understood the Earth goes around the Sun.

Lance Parkin, Above us only sky

This is less a rationality quote than a "yay science" quote, but I find that impressive beyond words. For millenia that was a huge and frightening question, and then we went and answered it, and now it's too trivial to point out. We found out where the sun goes at night. I want to carve a primer on cosmology in gold letters on a mountain, entitled something in all caps along the lines of "HERE IS THE GLORY OF HUMANKIND".

13 points gwern 01 February 2012 03:27:12PM Permalink

On the Outside View:

"Of course, if you want to, you can always come up with reasons why the lessons from the Neo-Sumerian Empire don't apply to you."

--Steven Kaas

13 points Konkvistador 07 February 2012 03:20:34PM Permalink

It may be expecting too much to expect most intellectuals to have common sense, when their whole life is based on their being uncommon -- that is, saying things that are different from what everyone else is saying. There is only so much genuine originality in anyone. After that, being uncommon means indulging in pointless eccentricities or clever attempts to mock or shock.

--Thomas Sowell

13 points Jayson_Virissimo 05 March 2012 09:44:52AM Permalink

Primarily, I had the Arabic-speaking philosophical alchemists in mind, but there are others. If there is significant interest, then I will elaborate further.

13 points taelor 07 March 2012 09:00:12AM Permalink

But even as light is opposed by darkness, science and reason have their enemies. Superstition and belief in magic are as old as man himself; for the intransigence of facts and our limitations in controlling them can be powerfully hard to take. Add to this the reflection that we are in an age when it is popular to distrust whatever is seen as the established view or the Establishment, and it is no wonder that anti-rational attitudes and doctrines are mustering so much support. Still, we can understand what encourages the anti-rationalist turn without losing our zeal for opposing it. A current Continuing Education catalogue offers a course description, under the heading "Philosophy", that typifies the dark view at its darkest: "Children of science that we are, we have based our cultural patterns on logic, on the cognitive, on the verifiable. But more and more there has crept into current research and study the haunting suggestion that there are other kinds of knowledge unfathomable by our cognition, other ways of knowing beyond the limits of our logic, which are deserving of our serious attention." Now "knowledge unfathomable by our cognition" is simply incoherent, as attention to the words makes clear. Moreover, all that creeps is not gold. One wonders how many students enrolled.

-- W. V. O. Quine

13 points EllisD 02 March 2012 02:24:29PM Permalink

Whether a mathematical proposition is true or not is indeed independent of physics. But the proof of such a proposition is a matter of physics only. There is no such thing as abstractly proving something, just as there is no such thing as abstractly knowing something. Mathematical truth is absolutely necessary and transcendent, but all knowledge is generated by physical processes, and its scope and limitations are conditioned by the laws of nature.

-David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity.

13 points Nominull 02 March 2012 09:53:45AM Permalink

I found that very poignant, but I'm not sure I agree with his final claim. I think he's committing the usual mistake of claiming impossible what seems hard.

13 points bungula 01 March 2012 01:30:50PM Permalink

It's the Face of Boe. I'm absolutely certain about this, absolutely positive. Of course I'll probably turn out to be incorrect

Sam Hughes, talking about the first season finale of Doctor Who, differentiating between the subjective feeling of certainty and the actual probability estimate.

13 points VKS 03 April 2012 08:52:49PM Permalink

Don't just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the degenerate case? Where does the proof use the hypothesis?

  • Paul Halmos
13 points Stephanie_Cunnane 03 April 2012 07:51:19AM Permalink

In short, and I can't emphasize this strongly enough, a fundamental issue that any theory of psychology ultimately has to face is that brains are useful. They guide behavior. Any brain that didn't cause its owner to do useful--in the evolutionary sense--things, didn't cause reproduction.

-Robert Kurzban, Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind

13 points jsbennett86 03 April 2012 02:17:07AM Permalink

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 past, skepticism has been predicated on a belief in the power of the empirical and rational. It has been based on the premise that there is an empirical truth, and that it is knowable, and that certain tools and strategies like science and logic will allow us to reach that truth. In short, the “old guard” skepticism was based on a veneration of the rational. But the veneration of certain techniques or certain philosophies creates the problematic possibility of choosing to consider certain conclusions or beliefs to BE empirical and rational and above criticism, particularly beliefs derived from the “right” tools, and even more dangerously, to consider oneself “rational”.

...

I believe that in order to be able to question our own beliefs as well as we question those of others, we need to restructure skepticism around awareness of human limitation, irrationality and flaws. Rather than venerating the rational, and aspiring to become some kind of superhuman fully rational vulcan minds, we need to instead create a more human skepticism, built around understanding how belief operates, how we draw conclusions, and how we can cope with the human limitations. I believe we need to remove the focus from aspiring towards ridding ourselves of the irrational, and instead move the focus towards understanding how this irrationality operates and why we believe all the crazy things we believe. We need to position as our primary aspiration not the achievement of a perfect comprehending mind, but instead an ability to maintain constant hesitation and doubt, to always always ALWAYS second-guess our positions and understand that they’re being created through a flawed mind, from flawed perceptions.

Science and reason are excellent tools to allow us to cope with being crazy, irrational human beings, but it CANNOT allow us to transcend that. The instant we begin to believe that we have become A Skeptic, A Rational Person, that is when we’ve fucked up, that is when we stop practicing skepticism, stop keeping an eye out for our mistakes, and begin to imagine our irrational perceptions as perfect rational conclusions. It’s only by building a skepticism based on the practice of doubt, rather than the state of Skeptic, that we’ll truly be able to be move on from our assumptions.

13 points Blueberry 02 April 2012 07:44:37AM Permalink

It also fails in the case where the strangest thing that's true is an infinite number of monkeys dressed as Hitler. Then adding one doesn't change it.

More to the point, the comparison is more about typical fiction, rather than ad hoc fictional scenarios. There are very few fictional works with monkeys dressed as Hitler.

13 points Jayson_Virissimo 02 April 2012 09:45:47AM Permalink

The automatic pursuit of fairness might lead to perverse incentives. I have in mind some (non-genetically related) family in Mexico who don't bother saving money for the future because their extended family and neighbours would expect them to pay for food and gifts if they happen to acquire "extra" cash. Perhaps this "Western" patriarchal peculiarity has some merit after all.

13 points RomeoStevens 01 May 2012 10:42:37PM Permalink

I always use the metaphor of the fast car to distinguish between intelligence and rationality.

13 points shminux 24 May 2012 06:14:17PM Permalink

if you can’t explain how to simulate your theory on a computer, chances are excellent that the reason is that your theory makes no sense!

-- Scott Aaronson

13 points Annie0305 20 May 2012 10:13:35AM Permalink

Oh, and Paul Graham again from the same piece:

When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get the wrong answers on tests. But when people are bad at open-mindedness they don't know it.

13 points Vaniver 10 May 2012 04:07:28PM Permalink

If rational thought is useful at all, then it must be maintained as a practice. Parents must teach it to their children, teachers must teach it to their students, and people must respect each other for their rationality. If the practice of rational thought is not to be lost, some group of people, at least, will have to maintain it.

-Jonathan Baron

13 points AlexSchell 02 May 2012 02:32:49AM Permalink

[Instrumentalism about science] has a long and rather sorry philosophical history: most contemporary philosophers of science regard it as fairly conclusively refuted. But I think it’s easier to see what’s wrong with it just by noticing that real science just isn’t like this. According to instrumentalism, palaeontologists talk about dinosaurs so they can understand fossils, astrophysicists talk about stars so they can understand photoplates, virologists talk about viruses so they can understand NMR instruments, and particle physicists talk about the Higgs Boson so they can understand the LHC. In each case, it’s quite clear that instrumentalism is the wrong way around. Science is not “about” experiments; science is about the world, and experiments are part of its toolkit.

David Wallace

13 points Jayson_Virissimo 01 May 2012 07:48:47AM Permalink

Proper treatment will cure a cold in seven days, but left to itself a cold will hang on for a week.

-Henry G. Felsen

13 points Mass_Driver 02 May 2012 11:37:12PM Permalink

Has anyone tried to put Ferriss's 4-Hour Workweek plan into practice? If so, did it make you better off than you were a month ago?

EDIT: Ferriss recommends (among other things) that readers invent and market a simple product that can be sold online and manufactured in China, yielding a steady income stream that requires little or no ongoing attention. There are dozens of anecdotes on his website and in his book that basically say "I heard that idea, I tried it, it worked, and now I'm richer and happier." These anecdotes (if true) indicate that the plan is workable for at least some people. What I don't see in these anecdotes is people who say "I really didn't think of myself as an entrepreneur, but I forced myself to slog through the exercises anyway, and then it worked for me!"

So, I'm trying to elicit that latter, more dramatic kind of anecdote from LWers. It would help me decide if most of the value in Ferriss's advice lies in simply reminding born entrepreneurs that they're allowed to execute a simple plan, or if Ferriss's advice can also enable intelligent introverts with no particular grasp of the business world to cast off the shackles of office employment.

13 points CasioTheSane 05 May 2012 07:01:54PM Permalink

We're even wrong about which mistakes we're making.

-Carl Winfeld

13 points gwern 02 June 2012 04:00:25PM Permalink

Also true of, say, OCD.

13 points wedrifid 03 June 2012 01:12:15AM Permalink

Any muttonhead with money can have a nice house or car or airplane, but how many can build one?

Dean Ing, The Ransom of Black Stealth One

Exactly. Buying things is far more practical, harnessing the power of specialization and comparative advantage. Building the thing yourself is almost always the incorrect decision. Build it yourself if you are good at building that kind of thing and, more importantly, suck at doing other things that provide more (fungible) value.

13 points arundelo 05 July 2012 02:13:49PM Permalink

However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

-- Clay Shirky

13 points MixedNuts 04 July 2012 01:23:01AM Permalink

If you doubt there is a hand, I'll use it to smush a banana on your face. If you end up looking ridiculous with banana on your face, then there was in fact a hand and my foundation is better than yours. If I end up looking ridiculous trying to grab a banana of doubtful existence with no hands, I promise to admit your foundation is better than mine. If we disagree on what happens, why am I even aware of your existence?

13 points Oscar_Cunningham 02 August 2012 09:27:58PM Permalink

By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analyzing the observations that I have made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics.

M. C. Escher

13 points Never_Seen_Belgrade 05 August 2012 03:46:00PM Permalink

I think it means you're underread within that period, for what it's worth.

The voice in that quote differs from Twain's and sounds neither like a journalist, nor like a river-side-raised gentleman of the time, nor like a Nineteenth Century rural/cosmopolitan fusion written to gently mock both.

13 points TheOtherDave 16 August 2012 12:16:56AM Permalink

(nods) In the same spirit: "How many X does it take to change a lightbulb? One."

Though I am fonder of "How many of my political opponents does it take to change a lightbulb? More than one, because they are foolish and stupid."

13 points bbleeker 05 September 2012 10:37:28PM Permalink

I especially like the way he calls the enemy "the other poor bastard". And not, say, "the bastard".

13 points buybuydandavis 03 September 2012 11:04:20AM Permalink

Who was the guy who tried to bargain the gods into giving him immortality, only to get screwed because he hadn't thought to ask for youth and health as well? He ended up being a shriveled crab like thing in a jar.

My highschool english teacher thought this fable showed that you should be careful what you wished for. I thought it showed that trying to compel those with great power through contract was a great way to get yourself fucked good an hard. Don't think you can fuck with people a lot more powerful than you are and get away with it.

EDIT: The myth was of Tithonus. A goddess Eos was keeping him as a lover, and tried to bargain with Zeus for his immortality, without asking for eternal youth too. Ooops.

13 points RobinZ 04 September 2012 01:53:16AM Permalink

Actually, according to Wikipedia, only 35 out of the 97 people aboard were killed. Not enough to kill even 50% of them.

13 points lukeprog 09 September 2012 12:46:27AM Permalink

If a thing can be observed in any way at all, it lends itself to some type of measurement method. No matter how “fuzzy” the measurement is, it’s still a measurement if it tells you more than you knew before.

Douglas Hubbard, How to Measure Anything

13 points simplicio 04 September 2012 03:38:43AM Permalink

Or better, arational.

13 points NihilCredo 04 November 2012 07:37:34PM Permalink

The great thing about reality is that eventually you hit it.

Source: Andrew Sullivan in an otherwise fairly bland political post

13 points [deleted] 02 November 2012 03:11:48PM Permalink

I've heard a version in which after the mathematician speaks, the shepherd yells “Snowy White [the name of the sheep]! Stop rolling in the mud!”

13 points TsviBT 04 November 2012 04:06:07AM Permalink

“It was, of course, a grand and impressive thing to do, to mistrust the obvious, and to pin one’s faith in things which could not be seen!”

-Galen, a Roman doctor/philosopher, on Asclepiades's unwillingness to admit that the kidneys processed urine - despite Galen demonstrating the function of the kidneys to Asclepiades by, well, cutting open a live animal and pointing to the urine flowing from its kidneys to its bladder (search the page for ligatures to find Galens experiment described), among other things.

13 points lukeprog 21 November 2012 11:22:50AM Permalink

Philosophy is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat. Metaphysics is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn't there. Theology is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn't there and shouting "I found it!" Science is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat using a flashlight.

Anonymous

13 points michaelkeenan 01 December 2012 05:27:13PM Permalink

The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

-- Eden Phillpotts

13 points simplicio 03 January 2013 03:44:34PM Permalink

Interesting; is this true?

13 points beoShaffer 04 January 2013 05:59:36AM Permalink

Yes, my Japanese teacher was very insistent about it, and IIRC would even take points off for talking about someones mental state with out the proper qualifiers.

13 points John_Maxwell_IV 14 January 2013 05:10:40AM Permalink

I guess my point here is that part of the reason I stayed in Mormonism so long was that the people arguing against Mormonism were using such ridiculously bad arguments. I tried to find the most rigorous reasoning and the strongest research that opposed LDS theology, but the best they could come up with was stuff like horses in the Book of Mormon. It's so easy for a Latter-Day Saint to simply write the horse references off as either a slight mistranslation or a gap in current scientific knowledge that that kind of "evidence" wasn't worth the time of day to me. And for every horse problem there was something like Hugh Nibley's "Two Shots in the Dark" or Eugene England's work on Lehi's alleged travels across Saudi Arabia, apologetic works that made Mormon historical and theological claims look vaguely plausible. There were bright, thoughtful people on both sides of the Mormon apologetics divide, but the average IQ was definitely a couple of dozen points higher in the Mormon camp.

http://www.exmormon.org/whylft18.htm

13 points Endovior 03 January 2013 06:07:47PM Permalink

If your ends don’t justify the means, you’re working on the wrong project.

-Jobe Wilkins (Whateley Academy)

13 points Kindly 02 January 2013 02:59:53PM Permalink

Scott Derrickson is indifferent. How do I know this? I know because Scott Derrickson's skin cells are part of Scott Derrickson, and Scott Derrickson's skin cells are indifferent.

13 points gwern 07 January 2013 03:39:44AM Permalink

Lots of people in Weimar Germany got angry at the emerging fascists - and went out and joined the Communist Party. It was tough to be merely a liberal democrat.

13 points B_For_Bandana 07 February 2013 12:38:32AM Permalink

"...And then I remembered status is positional, felt superior to the footless man, and stopped weeping."

13 points Mass_Driver 02 February 2013 08:20:12AM Permalink

What's the percent chance that I'm doing it wrong?

13 points Nornagest 01 February 2013 08:35:08PM Permalink

While I pretty much agree with the quote, it doesn't provide anyone that isn't already convinced with many good reasons to believe it. Less of an unusually rational statement and more of an empiricist applause light, in other words.

In any case, a scientific conclusion needn't be inherently offensive for closer examination to be recommended: if most researchers' backgrounds are likely to introduce implicit biases toward certain conclusions on certain topics, then taking a close look at the experimental structure to rule out such bias isn't merely a good political sop but is actually good science in its own right. Of course, dealing with this properly would involve hard work and numbers and wouldn't involve decrying all but the worst studies as bad science when you've read no more than the abstract.

13 points fubarobfusco 02 February 2013 04:16:55AM Permalink

This seems to imply that science is somehow free from motivated cognition — people looking for evidence to support their biases. Since other fields of human reason are not, it would be astonishing if science were.

(Bear in mind, I use "science" mostly as the name of a social institution — the scientific community, replete with journals, grants and funding sources, tenure, and all — and not as a name for an idealized form of pure knowledge-seeking.)

13 points [deleted] 12 March 2013 11:51:54PM Permalink

"If you don't know what you want," the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don't."

― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

13 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 March 2013 07:48:59PM Permalink

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.

13 points TimS 04 March 2013 02:33:55PM Permalink

Any positive social quality -- looks, smarts, cash, power, whatever -- makes people want to compete for your attention. Some of these people are going to be assholes operating under the mistaken impression that you are a vending machine, and that if they feed you enough suck-up coins, you will dispense whatever it is they want. If you have no idea that you have Quality X that they want from you, then you have no chance of figuring out that the reason they're getting so overbearing is that you're not giving them all the X they think they deserve. People can get remarkably angry when you don't give them the thing you have no idea they're asking for. And then they get angrier if you try to tell them you're confused.

Arabella Flynn

13 points Kawoomba 01 March 2013 08:34:41PM Permalink

Wenn der Hahn kräht auf dem Mist, dann ändert sich das Wetter, oder es bleibt wie es ist.

(When the rooster crows on the dungheap, then the weather will change, or stay as it is)

-- German weather lore / farmers' rule

13 points [deleted] 02 March 2013 03:11:01PM Permalink

I wrote an email to Bill Gates after reading his answer. I suggested that he should invest in anti-ageing research and/or cryonics. Ageing is a disease that afflicts everybody, and I think it would be a far better use of his money if he pledges financial support for anti-ageing research than if he continues pouring funding into curing malaria.

In addition, he has enough clout to motivate more people to take anti-ageing seriously instead of dismissing it as wishful thinking.

13 points NancyLebovitz 05 March 2013 12:26:10AM Permalink

Popular evopsych, summed up: "Men and women are different. Humans and chimps are the same."

Cliff Pervocracy

13 points Kawoomba 11 April 2013 06:44:35PM Permalink

Just act life-like!

13 points Jayson_Virissimo 04 April 2013 10:29:34PM Permalink

I'm not sure exactly what he had in mind, but learning the multiplication tables using Anki isn't exactly rote.

Now, this may not be the case for others, but when I see a new problem like 17 x 24, I don't just keep reading off the answer until I remember it when the note comes back around. Instead, I try to answer it using mental arithmetic, no matter how long it takes. I do this by breaking the problem into easier problems (perhaps by multiplying 17 x 20 and then adding that to 17 x 4). Sooner or later my brain will simply present the answers to the intermediate steps for me to add together and only much later do those steps fade away completely and the final answer is immediately retrievable.

Doing things this way, simply as a matter of course, you develop somewhat of a feel for how certain numbers multiply and develop a kind of "friendship with the integers." Er, at least, that's what it feels like from the inside.

13 points gwern 11 April 2013 03:34:09AM Permalink

My problem with this is, that like a number of Kafka's parables, the more I think about it, the less I understand it.

There is a mouse, and a mouse-trap, and a cat. The mouse is running towards the trap, he says, and the cat says that to avoid it, all he must do is change his direction and eats the mouse. What? Where did this cat come from? Is this cat chasing the mouse down the hallway? Well, if he is, then that's pretty darn awful advice, because if the cat is right behind the mouse, then turning to avoid the trap just means he's eaten by the cat, so either way he is doomed.

Actually, given Kafka's novels, so often characterized by double-binds and false dilemmas, maybe that's the point: that all choices lead to one's doom, and the cat's true observation hides the more important observation that the entire system is rigged.

('"Alas", said the voter, "at first in the primaries the options seemed so wide and so much change possible that I was glad there was an establishment candidate to turn to to moderate the others, but as time passed the Overton Window closed in and now there is the final voting booth into which I must walk and vote for the lesser of two evils." "You need only not vote", the system told the voter, and took his silence for consent.')

On the other hand, it's a perfectly optimistic little fable if you simply replace the one word "trap" with the word "cat".

"Alas", said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the cat that I must run into."

"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.

13 points Desrtopa 05 April 2013 04:29:46AM Permalink

Well, it certainly didn't stop Jack Sparrow from being a beloved character.

You can be ruthless and popular, if you're sufficiently charismatic about it.

13 points Viliam_Bur 19 April 2013 07:14:30AM Permalink

"In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim. ... [the one] who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other; [the one] who defines thus dominates and lives; and [the one] who is defined is subjugated and may be killed."

"In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined."

-- Thomas Szasz

13 points xv15 08 April 2013 03:36:06AM Permalink

Joe Pyne was a confrontational talk show host and amputee, which I say for reasons that will become clear. For reasons that will never become clear, he actually thought it was a good idea to get into a zing-fight with Frank Zappa, his guest of the day. As soon as Zappa had been seated, the following exchange took place:

Pyne: I guess your long hair makes you a girl.

Zappa: I guess your wooden leg makes you a table.

Of course this would imply that Pyne is not a featherless biped.

Source: Robert Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

13 points wilder 02 April 2013 12:54:08PM Permalink

That on probabilistic or rational reflection one can come to believe intuitively implausible things that are as or more extraordinary than their theological counterparts. Or to mutilate Hamlet, that there are more things on earth than are dreamt of in heaven.

13 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 May 2013 08:04:38PM Permalink

And lo, Wedrifid did invent the concept of Steel Vulcan and it was good.

Do we actually have enough fictional examples of this to form a trope? (At least 3, 5 would be better.)

13 points lukeprog 14 May 2013 08:43:46PM Permalink

He who says "Better to go without belief forever than believe a lie!" merely shows his own... private horror of becoming a dupe... It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories... over enemies or over nature gained.

William James

13 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 May 2013 02:59:11AM Permalink

"I don't really understand metaphysics or why it's needed." -- Matt Simpson

"Sketch version: There is no "no metaphysics" anwser, there is only "metaphysics I just unconsciously accept" and "metaphysics I've actually thought about". You can do it well or you can do it badly but you can't not do metaphysics." -- Andrew Summitt

13 points lukeprog 08 June 2013 06:14:40PM Permalink

If you're not making mistakes, you're not taking risks, and that means you're not going anywhere. The key is to make mistakes faster than the competition, so you have more chances to learn and win.

John W. Holt (previously quoted here, but not in a Rationality Quotes thread)

13 points cody-bryce 03 June 2013 05:56:40PM Permalink

Not having all the information you need is never a satisfactory excuse for not starting the analysis.

-Akins Laws of Spacecraft Design

13 points khafra 03 June 2013 11:30:19AM Permalink

Has the life cycle of the sea squirt ever been notably used to describe something other than the reaction of an academic to tenure?

13 points [deleted] 03 June 2013 09:36:11PM Permalink

It’s hard to tell the difference between "Nobody ever complains about this car because it’s reliable" and “Nobody complains about this car because nobody buys this car."

-- Shamus Young

13 points Vaniver 02 June 2013 05:28:20PM Permalink

I'm under the impression that all EY / RH quotes are discouraged, as described in this comment tree, which suggests the following rule should be explicitly amended to be broader:

Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.

13 points DanArmak 05 July 2013 12:15:43PM Permalink

And perhaps not after that, either.

13 points ArisKatsaris 03 July 2013 09:39:37AM Permalink

If posting things said on lesswrong or OB or from HPMOR aren't in scope, it seems a little odd things said in HPMOR discussion on a forum run by you that doesn't happen to be those two is.

The idea of the rule is to not have this thread be an echo chamber for LessWrong and Yudkowsky quotes. As a sister site, Overcoming Bias falls under the same logic (though I think, given that the origin of LessWrong in OvecomingBias constantly becomes more distant in time, I wouldn't mind that rule getting relaxed for OvercomingBias more recent entries.)

But either way, I haven't seen that many lesswrong members participate in "hpmor/reddit" or that many hpmor/reddit members participate in lesswrong, so I think it makes sense to NOT ban hpmor/reddit quotes from this thread...

13 points fractalman 07 July 2013 07:34:59AM Permalink

Our PLANET is mind-numbingly big. If you don’t believe me go to the grand canyon and look down. Did I say go to the grand canyon? Make that HIKE to the grand canyon from yellowstone national park. Still not convinced? ROW across the ocean to china. Bonus points if you can hit Japan without a gps.

So in a twisted sort of sense, the milky-way galaxy is less mind-bogglingly big, because our [or at least my] built-in distance-comprehension hardware shorts out so quickly when attempting to deal with the milky way galaxy we don't really even notice it and so we switch to rigorous numbers which do not have this short-circuiting problem.

13 points Tenoke 18 July 2013 09:38:25PM Permalink

“The future is always ideal: The fridge is stocked, the weather clear, the train runs on schedule and meetings end on time. Today, well, stuff happens.”

  • Hara Estroff Marano on procrastination in Psychology Today as cited here
13 points cody-bryce 12 July 2013 02:57:16PM Permalink

When we roll our eyes at business school grads, it isn't because we don't believe in measuring anything. It's the same eyeroll that the 10 O'Clock news gets when they report the newest study linking molasses and cancer, which has nothing to do with my lack of belief in studies about cancer.

13 points gwern 02 July 2013 12:03:31AM Permalink

Roberts, naturally, has substantial interest in avoiding any criticism, and the work of people like Ioannides and the eternal life of the publication bias says that if anything, we are insufficiently critical...

13 points Salemicus 22 August 2013 11:16:10PM Permalink

Finding a good formulation for a problem is often most of the work of solving it... Problem formulation and problem solution are mutually-recursive processes.

David Chapman

13 points hylleddin 02 August 2013 09:24:40PM Permalink

The mark of a great man is one who knows when to set aside the important things in order to accomplish the vital ones.

-- Tillaume, The Alloy of Law

13 points Lumifer 19 August 2013 05:47:35PM Permalink

Aka http://demotivators.despair.com/demotivational/stupiditydemotivator.jpg

"Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never win AND never quit are idiots"

13 points wedrifid 03 August 2013 03:06:40AM Permalink

I think it's good to be well-calibrated.

It is usually best to be socially confident while making well-calibrated predictions of success. The two are only slightly related and Downey is definitely talking about the social kind of confidence.

13 points snafoo 04 August 2013 05:50:23PM Permalink

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Stephen Jay Gould

13 points shminux 16 September 2013 04:54:16PM Permalink

Rationality wakes up last:

In those first seconds, I'm always thinking some version of this: "Oh, no!!! This time is different. Now my arm is dead and it's never getting better. I'm a one-armed guy now. I'll have to start drawing left-handed. I wonder if anyone will notice my dead arm. Should I keep it in a sling so people know it doesn't work or should I ask my doctor to lop it off? If only I had rolled over even once during the night. But nooo, I have to sleep on my arm until it dies. That is so like me. What happens if I sleep on the other one tomorrow night? Can I learn to use a fork with my feet?"

Then at about the fifth second, some feeling returns to my arm and I experience hope. I also realize that if people could lose their arms after sleeping on them there wouldn't be many people left on earth with two good arms. Apparently the rational part of my mind wakes up last.

Scott Adams on waking up with a numb arm.

13 points Eugine_Nier 02 September 2013 04:48:56AM Permalink

When you have to talk yourself into something, it’s a bad sign

Paul Graham

13 points ChristianKl 03 October 2013 10:45:21AM Permalink

A number of isolated facts does not produce a science any more than a heap of bricks produces a house.

Alfred Korzybski - Science and Sanity Page 55

13 points Alejandro1 03 October 2013 01:48:39PM Permalink

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.

13 points Costanza 08 October 2013 08:51:23PM Permalink

"The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you're not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one." -Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny

13 points Eugine_Nier 04 October 2013 02:29:51AM Permalink

And yet the quote fails to communicate clearly.

13 points JackV 02 December 2013 11:59:56AM Permalink

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/11/26/welcome-to-the-era-of-big-replication/

When he studied which psychological studies were replicatable, and had to choose whether to disbelieve some he'd previously based a lot of work on, Brian Nosek said:

I choose the red pill. That's what doing science is.

(via ciphergoth on twitter)

13 points satt 02 December 2013 01:50:31AM Permalink

I'm good at blowing bubbles with bubble gum. I have yet to charge anyone for doing it.

Gum bubble fetish camming?

13 points satt 06 January 2014 07:16:21PM Permalink

I am so very good at what I do because I never really believe anything is going to work and I'm always looking for the ways the things I make will fail.

localroger

13 points lmm 07 January 2014 10:05:18PM Permalink

Yes and no. Sometimes certain things are against the rules because they risk injuring someone. I wish more sports would make explicit the difference between the rules you're allowed to break and pay the penalty and the rules you should never intentionally break, because disagreements over which category a particular rule falls into can be very vicious.

13 points spxtr 04 January 2014 10:00:19PM Permalink

The most traditional way to begin a study of quantum mechanics is to follow the historical developments--Planck's radiation law, the Einstein-Debye theory of specific heats, the Bohr atom, de Broglie's matter waves, and so forth--together with careful analyses of some key experiments such as the Compton effect, the Frank-Hertz experiment, and the Davisson-Germer-Thompson experiment. In that way we may come to appreciate how the physicists in the first quarter of the twentieth century were forced to abandon, little by little, the cherished concepts of classical physics and how, despite earlier false starts and wrong turns, the masters--Heisenberg, Schrodinger, and Dirac, among others--finally succeeded in formulating quantum mechanics as we know it today.

However, we do not follow the historical approach in this book. Instead, we start with an example that illustrates, perhaps more than any other example, the inadequacy of classical concepts in a fundamental way. We hope that by exposing the reader to a "shock treatment" at the onset, he or she may be attuned to what we might call the "quantum-mechanical way of thinking" at a very early stage.

-- Modern Quantum Mechanics by J. J. Sakurai, the standard graduate level quantum textbook. Following this quote is a discussion of the Stern-Gerlach experiment. I post this quote because it is in line with Quantum Explanations.

13 points Lumifer 07 January 2014 04:11:41PM Permalink

Carrots have no measurable positive effect on eyesight.

Even for someone who is suffering from a clinical-grade Vitamin A deficiency?

13 points Stabilizer 08 February 2014 05:53:30AM Permalink

Philosophy Bro writing as Popper:

So how does science proceed, if induction is fucked (which it is) and we can't logically determine how to have new ideas (which we can't)? Easy - just take a fucking guess. No, I don't mea- dammit, you asshole, I don't mean "guess how science works", I mean guessing just is how science works. Just start guessing shit and go from there. Of course you're going to make a couple stupid guesses at first. Seriously, some of the shit you're going to try is going to be genuinely fucked in the head. Remember when we thought heavier objects would fall faster? Boy was that wrong. But we took a guess, tried it out, and it didn't work. Instead of being whiny babies about it, scientists just took another guess and then tested that out, too. That's the process: guess, and then you test that guess. And if the test works, you're like "Huh! That was an even better guess than I thought." And the more tests it survives, the more people are like, "Great guess! I'll bet that's probably it." And then you get to a test that your guess doesn't pass, and you're like, "Welp, close but no cigar. Back to the drawing board."

We'll eliminate the fucking stupid guesses pretty quickly - it doesn't take long to show that we can't move things with our minds. Eventually, you start to build a pretty cool system of things so you can make better and better guesses. and you can totally use data to make good guesses; you don't always have to invent something completely new every time. I'm just saying that's all the data does, helps make good guesses. It doesn't prove shit.

And look! That method is deductive! What incredibly good news! You don't have to derive a universal statement from a bunch of single events, which is great because you can't; instead, you just guess a universal statement and then see if you can't find an event that breaks it. You can't get from "the sun keeps rising" to "the sun will always rise" but if one day the sun doesn't come up, you can be damn sure about "the sun does not always rise." All you need is one bad apple and you know for sure that not every apple is good, no induction needed. QED, motherfuckers.

And - AND - now we know what is and isn't science! Holy fuck I am on fire here. Not actually. Just- look, I'm solving lots of things, is my point. Scientific theories are falsifiable - they're incompatible with certain things we could observe. They predict shit, and then we see if that shit really happens. Back when we thought Newton's Laws were totally, completely true, Mercury had this weird fuck wobble in its orbit that said we should find another planet. Except we looked and no planet. And now we know for sure that Newton wasn't completely right. Einstein? He was a patent clerk for fuckssake, and he came up with a fucking incredible guess. And we just keep devising more and more complicated tests to check it out, and it keeps on passing. When it does finally fail, we'll fucking know. There won't be aaaaany confusion whatsoever. Souls? How the fuck would we go about testing for souls? "Well, we cut him open, and we didn't find a soul, so..." "Yeah, but you can't see souls! That's the whole point!" So you're saying we can't ever test for souls? That's fine, just, it means souls can't come to the science party. They're not falsifiable. You must be THIS FALSIFIABLE to ride the science ride, and souls just aren't.

13 points Vaniver 03 February 2014 06:45:58PM Permalink

But, while nothing can be done about the past, much can be done in the present to prepare for the future.

--Thomas Sowell

13 points Eugine_Nier 07 February 2014 07:56:11AM Permalink

I'm a big fan of the cognitive utility of the old phrase: "The exception that proves the rule." But then I'm kind of an exception in that regard, since anytime I mention I like that, I get deluged with logical and etymological objections.

I merely mean that an exception that is famous for being exceptional suggests a general tendency in the opposite direction. The canonical example is that Beethoven's titanic fame as a deaf composer suggests that most composers aren't deaf, while, say, the lack of obsessive publicity about painter David Hockney's late onset deafness suggests that deafness isn't all that big of a deal, one way or another, to painters. Judging from the immortal fame of Beethoven's battle with deafness, we can assume that there aren't many deaf composers, while the ho-hum response to Hockney's deafness suggests that we can't make strong quantitative assumptions about painters and deafness.

Steve Sailor

13 points wedrifid 04 February 2014 08:20:33PM Permalink

Perhaps we need a new thread: "Rationality Page Long Excerpts".

13 points RichardKennaway 04 March 2014 01:16:11PM Permalink

Related:

Just because you no longer believe a lie, does not mean you now know the truth.

13 points elharo 01 March 2014 10:57:41PM Permalink

I'm hardly an expert on the Book of Mormon, but this quote surprised me so I googled it. It appears to be an accurate quote but is not fully attributed. As best I can make out, the speaker is the antichrist (or some such evil character; not sure on the exact mythology in play here).

Failure to note that means this quote gives either an incorrect view of the Book of Mormon, or of the significance of the text, or both.

When quoting fiction, I recommend identifying both the character and the author. E.g.

Ye say that those ancient prophecies are true. Behold, I say that ye do not know that they are true.

--Korihor in the The Book of Mormon (Alma 30.24-28); Joseph Smith, 1830

Having said all that, it's still a damn good rationality quote.

13 points NancyLebovitz 04 May 2014 01:33:56PM Permalink

There is such a thing as a less mediated experience of the world.

13 points EGarrett 06 May 2014 04:39:52PM Permalink

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." -George Bernard Shaw

13 points James_Ernest 04 May 2014 06:18:56AM Permalink

Real probabilities about the structure and properties of the cosmos, and its relation to living organisms on this planet, can be reach’d only by correlating the findings of all who have competently investigated both the subject itself, and our mental equipment for approaching and interpreting it — astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and so on. The only sensible method is that of assembling all the objective scientifick data of 1931, and forming a fresh chain of partial indications bas’d exclusively on that data and on no conceptions derived from earlier and less ample arrays of data; meanwhile testing, by the psychological knowledge of 1931, the workings and inclinations of our minds in accepting, connecting, and making deductions from data, and most particularly weeding out all tendencies to give more than equal consideration to conceptions which would never have occurred to us had we not formerly harboured provisional and capricious ideas of the universe now conclusively known to be false. It goes without saying that this realistic principle fully allows for the examination of those irrational feelings and wishes about the universe, upon which idealists so amusingly base their various dogmatick speculations.

-- H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 1932-1934.

13 points SaidAchmiz 02 May 2014 12:08:58AM Permalink

critical thinking skills; knowledge of the past and other cultures; an ability to work with and interpret numbers and statistics; access to the insights of great writers and artists; a willingness to experiment, to open up to change; and the ability to navigate ambiguity.'

Some of these things are not like the others...

13 points Stabilizer 03 June 2014 12:00:31AM Permalink

Kant seems to have one of the first systematic question dissolvers:

Philosophers have never lacked zest for criticizing their predecessors. Aristotle was not always kind to Plato. Scholastics wrangled with unexcelled vigor. The new philosophy of the 17th century was frankly rude about the selfsame schoolmen. But all that is criticism of someone else. Kant began something new. He turned criticism into self-reflection. He didn’t just create the critical philosophy. He made philosophy critical of philosophy itself.

There are two ways in which to criticize a proposal, doctrine, or dogma. One is to argue that it is false. Another is to argue that it is not even a candidate for truth or falsehood. Call the former denial, the latter undoing. Most older philosophical criticism is in the denial mode. When Leibniz took issue with Locke in the Nouveaux Essais, he was denying some of the things that Locke had said. He took for granted that they were true-or-false. In fact, false. Kant’s transcendental dialectic, in contrast, argues that a whole series of antinomies arise because we think that there are true-or-false answers to a gamut of questions. There are none. The theses, antitheses, and questions are undone.

Kant was not the first philosophical undoer. The gist of Bacon undoes the methodology of scholastic thought. But Kant is assuredly the first celebrated, self-conscious, systematic undoer. Pure reason, the faculty of philosophers, outsteps its bounds and produces doctrines that are neither true nor false.

-Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology

13 points Thomas 02 June 2014 11:40:51AM Permalink

It looks like that ANY advice from highly successful people might be dangerous, since they are only a small minority of those, who also tried those same things. Most of them much less successfully.

13 points johnlawrenceaspden 05 June 2014 09:23:45PM Permalink

He's saying that one does not need to do a perfect job to win. A common failure mode is to spend ages worrying about the details while someone else's good-enough quick hack takes over the world. It's quite a resonant quote for programmers.

C and Unix obliterated their technically superior rivals. There's a whole tradition of worrying about why this happened in the still extant LISP community which was one of the principal losers. Look up 'Worse is Better' if you're interested in the details.

13 points Mass_Driver 21 July 2014 11:34:15PM Permalink

Is that revelation grounds for a lawsuit, a criminal offense or merely grounds for disbarment?

None of the above, really, unless you have so few murder cases that someone could plausibly guess which one you were referring to. I work with about 100 different plaintiffs right now, and my firm usually accepts any client with a halfway decent case who isn't an obvious liar. Under those conditions, it'd be alarming if I told you that 100 out of 100 were telling the truth -- someone's bound to be at least partly faking their injury. I don't think it undermines the justice system to admit as much in the abstract.

If you indiscreetly named a specific client who you thought was guilty, though, that could get you a lawsuit, a criminal offense, and disbarment.

13 points Roxolan 07 July 2014 06:24:41PM Permalink

Now imagine someone gives you a spade.

I'd probably call it unethical and try to get it banned.

13 points grendelkhan 18 August 2014 06:45:56PM Permalink

Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all -- no one's around to write horror stories.

Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

13 points Iydak 13 August 2014 11:57:54AM Permalink

We try things. Occasionally they even work.

Parson Gotti

13 points Vulture 01 September 2014 11:35:53PM Permalink

Haven't tried it myself, but it seems to work for Scott Alexander

13 points johnlawrenceaspden 04 October 2014 12:05:52PM Permalink

To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods

-- Robert Heinlein (http://tmaas.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/robert-heinlein-quotes.html)

13 points Torello 02 October 2014 01:22:37AM Permalink

"Put simply, the truth about all those good decisions you plan to make sometime in the future, when things are easier, is that you probably won't make them once that future rolls around and things are tough again."

Sendhil Mullaainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity, p. 215

13 points shminux 02 October 2014 05:59:19PM Permalink

Downvoted for mindless panic.

There are no measures to speak of to control the flu. It goes through the world every year and we just live with it because it's rarely fatal.

The Ebola curve is not exponential in the countries where appropriate measures were taken, Nigeria and Senegal: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/30/ebola-over-in-nigeria/16473339/ Clearly the US can do at least as well.

While Ebola might mutate to become airborne and spread like flu, and there is a real risk of that, there is little indication of it having happened. Until then the comparison with the Spanish Flu is silly. It's not nearly as contagious.

Your linked post in the underground medic is pretty bad. The patient contracted Ebola on Sep 15, most people become contagious 8-10 days later, so the flight passengers on Sep 20 are very likely OK. There is no indication that the official story is grossly misleading. There are bound to be a few more cases showing up in the next week or so, just as there were with SARS, but with the aggressive approach taken now the odds of it spreading wide are negligible, given that Nigeria managed to contain a similar incident.

My guess is that the total number of cases with the Dallas vector will be under a dozen or so, with 40% fatalities. I guess we'll see.

13 points Jay_Schweikert 18 December 2014 05:02:23AM Permalink

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation, For fear they should succumb and go astray; So when you are requested to pay up or be molested, You will find it better policy to say: --

"We never pay any-one Dane-geld, No matter how trifling the cost; For the end of that game is oppression and shame, And the nation that pays it is lost!"

--Rudyard Kipling, "Dane-Geld"

A nice reminder about the value of one-boxing, especially in light of current events.

13 points NancyLebovitz 17 December 2014 10:00:43PM Permalink

Where you are going to spend your time and your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life.

Jeff Bezos

13 points Vaniver 05 December 2014 05:28:34PM Permalink

If I could convince Aubrey de Grey to cut off his beard it would increase everyones expected longevity more than any other accomplishment I'm capable of.

This I'm not actually sure about. I think the guru look might be a net positive in his particular situation.

13 points faul_sname 04 December 2014 09:28:37AM Permalink

Seems to have worked for them.

13 points FullMeta_Rationalist 02 November 2014 02:32:22AM Permalink
max( Candy / e^Walking )

fudged with a constant of proportionality (pun intended).

13 points VAuroch 11 November 2014 07:02:01AM Permalink

Lampshading mysterious answers:

The door was the way to... to... The Door was The Way. Good. Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to.

-- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams

13 points Unnamed 01 November 2014 09:52:00PM Permalink

It is a sound maxim, and one which all close thinkers have felt, but which no one before Bentham ever so consistently applied, that error lurks in generalities: that the human mind is not capable of embracing a complex whole, until it has surveyed and catalogued the parts of which that whole is made up; that abstractions are not realities per se, but an abridged mode of expressing facts, and that the only practical mode of dealing with them is to trace them back to the facts (whether of experience or of consciousness) of which they are the expression.

Proceeding on this principle, Bentham makes short work with the ordinary modes of moral and political reasoning. These, it appeared to him, when hunted to their source, for the most part terminated in phrases. In politics, liberty, social order, constitution, law of nature, social compact, c., were the catch-words: ethics had its analogous ones. Such were the arguments on which the gravest questions of morality and policy were made to turn; not reasons, but allusions to reasons; sacramental expressions, by which a summary appeal was made to some general sentiment of mankind, or to some maxim in familiar use, which might be true or not, but the limitations of which no one had ever critically examined.

[...]

It is the introduction into the philosophy of human conduct, of this method of detail—of this practice of never reasoning about wholes until they have been resolved into their parts, nor about abstractions until they have been translated into realities—that constitutes the originality of Bentham in philosophy, and makes him the great reformer of the moral and political branch of it.

[...]

Instead of taking up their opinions by intuition, or by ratiocination from premises adopted on a mere rough view, and couched in language so vague that it is impossible to say exactly whether they are true or false, philosophers are now forced to understand one another, to break down the generality of their propositions, and join a precise issue in every dispute.

13 points TheOtherDave 12 November 2014 09:32:04PM Permalink

One of the major symptoms of my stroke was seriously truncated working memory, and I spent months both training it back and learning to work around the limitations of it.

So i agree that there are strategies that can overcome the limits of working memory,though I wouldn't describe them as "thinking more"... it was more like saving state externally on a regular basis, and developing useful habits of interacting with that saved state. More generally, it's not a question of doing the same thing for longer, it's a question of doing different things that end up taking longer. It's "thinking differently, for longer."

That being said, though, I cannot begin to describe how much smarter I felt (and seemed) when the damage began to heal and I could start doing stuff in my head again.

12 points badger 18 April 2009 04:48:59AM Permalink

Reason means truth, and those who are not governed by it take the chance that someday a sunken fact will rip the bottom out of their boat.

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr

12 points caiuscamargarus 19 April 2009 12:01:05AM Permalink

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?

Elizabeth Anscombe: I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Well what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?

12 points Rune 18 April 2009 06:42:02PM Permalink

"Science is interesting and if you don't agree, you can fuck off."

-- Richard Dawkins quoting a former editor of New Scientist magazine.

12 points anonym 15 June 2009 02:18:22AM Permalink

Knowing that one may be subject to bias is one thing; being able to correct it is another.

Jon Elster

12 points hrishimittal 03 July 2009 03:10:10PM Permalink

...you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible.This is isomorphic to the principle that you should prevent your beliefs about how things are from being contaminated by how you wish they were. Most people let them mix pretty promiscuously. The continuing popularity of religion is the most visible index of that.

-- pg

12 points JustinShovelain 02 July 2009 10:55:13PM Permalink

Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of a car is separate from the way the car is driven.

-- Edward de Bono

12 points SilasBarta 02 July 2009 08:39:51PM Permalink

"An economic transaction is a solved political problem."

--Abba Lerner

12 points anonym 01 September 2009 03:32:45PM Permalink

Reality is not optional.

Thomas Sowell

12 points RobinZ 22 October 2009 04:45:27PM Permalink

There is an unfortunate optical illusion - a variant on the Doppler effect - that besets all frauds. It's unfortunate, because it has the effect of exacerbating the pecuniary losses that fraud victims endure, by unfairly leaving them, like many rape victims, irrationally ashamed of themselves.

The Doppler principle we posit holds that as a victim approaches a swindler, he sees nothing but green lights. But as soon as he realizes that his money is gone, he spins around and beholds, as if by magic, bright red flags as far as the eye can see.

-- Roger Parloff, senior editor, "More brazen than Madoff?", Fortune, 2009-03-31

12 points ABranco 24 October 2009 03:13:44AM Permalink

It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.—Nicholas Nassim Taleb

(i.e.: don't forget to put, in your utility functions, the damn appropriate weight of those highly-improbable-but-high-negative-impact tragedies!)

12 points MichaelGR 30 November 2009 12:22:38AM Permalink

"Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite."

--Andrew S. Grove

12 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 November 2009 11:42:44PM Permalink

"Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened."

-- Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

12 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 January 2010 11:43:13PM Permalink

If you’ve never broken the bed, you’re not experimenting enough.

-- Miss HT Psych

12 points Rain 07 January 2010 11:37:36PM Permalink

A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

-- Alexander Pope

12 points Rain 07 January 2010 11:34:47PM Permalink

He must be very ignorant; for he answers every question he is asked.

-- Voltaire

12 points Unnamed 07 January 2010 05:33:41PM Permalink

"Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"

-- attributed to George Carlin

12 points [deleted] 02 February 2010 06:13:49AM Permalink

Note to self: every day, eight million things happen in New York.

12 points Mycroft65536 02 February 2010 03:36:54AM Permalink

Or at least of maintaining friendships with people who have cats.

12 points Mycroft65536 02 February 2010 03:38:24AM Permalink

Doesn't catpenny cost less than a penny (in terms of dollars spent)? You can recover most, if not all, of the pennies.

12 points RichardKennaway 01 March 2010 08:57:20PM Permalink

"Successful zealots don't argue to win. They argue to move the goalposts and to make it appear sane to do so."

-- Seth Godin

12 points sketerpot 02 March 2010 09:35:43PM Permalink

Solar power requires heavy industry to build, and that has loads of externalities. It takes up a lot of space and affects local climate and ecology. And then there's the unreliability of the sun, which can have economic consequences.

As for the nuclear externalities you mentioned, the evacuation planning and government safety things are paid for by power plant fees, and budgeted into the cost of building and operating the plants. Defending the plants is something you have to do with all forms of power generation, and I actually think you're miscalculating the risks by looking at the power plants themselves, which (in the case of nuclear) tend to be pretty beefy and well-guarded. Attacking the transmission lines would be much easier, and much harder to defend against. This goes double for wind and solar farms that are located far away from everything and have to use longer power lines.

(And really, what are the odds you'll ever have to use those evacuation plans? I'd worry more about crossing the street. No water-moderated reactor has ever had an accident that made evacuating people nearby a good idea, even after all these decades of operating them, and there are good theoretical and practical reasons to believe that it never will.)

And while we're looking at externalities, consider this: nuclear is the only option that's currently competitive with coal on a cost-per-kWh basis. Very cautious safety regulations, by holding nuclear power back, are responsible for a lot of coal emissions -- which are far more dangerous than anything people are talking about for nuclear plants. Paradoxically, our worries about nuclear safety have made us much less safe. What we have here is a widespread failure to shut up and multiply.

I really like this as a test-case for rationality, because it's important and we really can look at it probabilistically for insight.

12 points ABranco 01 March 2010 11:50:20PM Permalink

A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual" — find out how he feels about astrology. —Robert Heinlein

12 points Rain 01 March 2010 09:53:26PM Permalink

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

12 points AlexMennen 05 April 2010 06:06:58AM Permalink

An atheist walked into a bar, but seeing no bartender he revised his initial assumption and decided he only walked into a room.

http://friendlyatheist.com/2008/02/29/complete-the-atheist-joke-1/

12 points gregconen 04 April 2010 04:52:19PM Permalink

Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.

WIlliam Thomson, Lord Kelvin

12 points djcb 02 April 2010 12:20:39PM Permalink

The white line down the center of the road is a mediator, and very likely it can err substantially towards one side the other before the disadvantaged side finds advantage in denying its authority.

Source:

-- Schelling, Strategy of conflict, p144

[The book was mentioned a couple of times here on LW, and is a nice introduction to the use of game theory in geopolitics]

12 points anonym 02 May 2010 03:09:37AM Permalink

Unfortunately for the good sense of mankind, the fact of their fallibility is far from carrying the weight in their practical judgment, which is always allowed to it in theory; for while every one well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility, or admit the supposition that any opinion, of which they feel very certain, may be one of the examples of the error to which they acknowledge themselves to be liable.

-- John Stuart Mill

12 points anonym 02 May 2010 03:08:13AM Permalink

There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.

-- Alfred North Whitehead

12 points MichaelGR 01 May 2010 05:48:07PM Permalink

By definition, all but the last doomsday prediction is false. Yet it does not follow, as many seem to think, that all doomsday predictions must be false; what follow is only that all such predictions but one are false.

-Richard A. Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response, p. 13

12 points HumanFlesh 01 May 2010 08:21:23AM Permalink

Are you implying that Jesus' crucifixion was an example of suicide via cop?

12 points roland 01 June 2010 06:28:21PM Permalink

Prevent all problems and get nothing done, or accept an allowable level of small problems and focus on the big things. --Timothy Ferriss

12 points Daniel_Burfoot 02 June 2010 04:26:51AM Permalink

To a very great extent, the term science is reserved for fields that do progress in obvious ways. But does a field make progress because it is a science, or is it a science because it makes progress?

-Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

12 points Kaj_Sotala 08 July 2010 07:36:26PM Permalink

"Anyone who believes that the theory of evolution implies moral darwinism, and who also believes in the theory of gravity, has a moral duty to go jump off a cliff." -- Ari Rahikkala

12 points Kazuo_Thow 01 July 2010 10:02:12PM Permalink

This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.

-- Philip Gourevitch

12 points Morendil 03 August 2010 04:53:26PM Permalink

Nolan's Memento is also interesting from a rationalist perspective - it gives "running on untrusted hardware" a quite concrete meaning.

12 points arch1 01 September 2010 08:32:17PM Permalink

A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree of certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world is suffering. (Bertrand Russell)

12 points brazzy 01 September 2010 08:05:25AM Permalink

The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every well-bred girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can even ignore her own thoughts and her own knowledge.

-- H.G. Wells, Ann Veronica

12 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 October 2010 10:33:19AM Permalink

God grant me the strength to change the things I can,

The intelligence to know what I can change,

And the rationality to realize that God isn't the key figure here.

12 points Mass_Driver 06 October 2010 04:12:53AM Permalink

Friends, help me build the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to continually update which is which based on the best available evidence.

12 points Risto_Saarelma 07 October 2010 06:50:36AM Permalink

There's also a certain fun challenge in looking for jewels among the fecal matter.

Do that with the writings of Space Tetrahedron Guy, and then all further Ultimate Space Tetrahedron Documents will have a header text SPACE TETRAHEDRON THEORY IS ENDORSED BY NIHILCREDO.

12 points komponisto 06 October 2010 05:14:58PM Permalink

Compare:

Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I'll show you a hypocrite.

-- Richard Dawkins

12 points Yvain 07 October 2010 07:07:18PM Permalink

A neighbor came to Nasrudin, asking to borrow his donkey. "It is out on loan," the teacher replied. At that moment, the donkey brayed loudly inside the stable. "But I can hear it bray, over there." "Whom do you believe," asked Nasrudin, "me or a donkey?"

-- old Sufi parable

12 points RolfAndreassen 05 October 2010 06:09:40PM Permalink

"Ideas are tested by experiment." That is the core of science. All else is bookkeeping.

12 points Morendil 05 October 2010 11:40:36AM Permalink

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

12 points Jayson_Virissimo 03 November 2010 06:18:41PM Permalink

Long ago, when torture broke the remnant of his will, Galileo recanted, but the Earth is moving still.

What evidence is there that Galileo was tortured?

12 points Tiiba 03 December 2010 06:46:28PM Permalink

And the answer is, "Yes! I run the world's biggest honeypot for teenage idiots who want to post pics of themselves racing on a freeway with a suspended license and a beer in the cupholder."

12 points cousin_it 03 December 2010 08:11:09AM Permalink

Isn't this true for any sort of mountains that are difficult to climb, not just the mountains of truth? For example, training makes you better at lying too!

12 points nazgulnarsil 09 December 2010 04:49:02PM Permalink

"Imagine being told you were made for a purpose, and that longevity and happiness are not in the list of design objectives." -David Eubanks, Life Artificial

12 points Rain 06 December 2010 03:06:16AM Permalink

Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.

-- Laurens Van der Post

12 points MichaelGR 05 December 2010 09:49:21PM Permalink

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

-George Bernard Shaw

12 points RichardKennaway 03 December 2010 09:15:01PM Permalink

"When I start to wonder if black swans exist, I put down my copy of Mind and pick up my copy of Nature."

-- Ariadne (former columnist in New Scientist).

12 points Kutta 04 January 2011 10:39:47AM Permalink

Indeed, Princess Mononoke is one of the least preachy eco-movies ever made, although I have a feeling that its main focus is actually not on environmentalism but on conflict resolution. To quote Miyazaki (from memory, from an awesome documentary/backstage series about Mononoke), the film is to "illustrate adult ways of thinking about issues".

The impetus for posting these Miyazaki quotes was the movie watching streak I went on recently. I've covered all of his movies except Castle of Cagliostro. I also read the Nausicaa manga, and its ending significantly upset me, to such extent that I think I will write a gratuitous Fix Fic that alters the ending to my pleasure. It upset me because nearing the ending Miyazaki constructs a pretty coherent and sensible transhumanist stance of dealing with the in-universe world and its problems, and then utterly demolishes that stance in the finale. Without going into specifics, the protagonist chooses an option that significantly increases the chance that humanity goes extinct in order to a) suspend other-optimizing by (most likely benign, maybe malicious) external forces b) eliminate medium term technological risks of moderate severity.

I think Miyazaki did it to sound deep and because of some underlying deathism. The tragedy of it is that Miyazaki is not a bit stupid, probably an atheist, averts romanticized environmentalism and conservatism all the time and espouses the "uncaring universe" viewpoint. Also, he is a genuinely good-willed guy and a masterclass craftsman and artist. His films reliably make me tear up. Still, he undeniably is tangled up in the head to some extent. In the Nausicaa manga he constructs the transhumanist viewpoint a lot more coherently and logically than the viewpoint of the heroine; poor Nausicaa actually sounds there like a foil. Which is a pity because Nausicaa is a rare example of an extremely idealized main character who manages to avoid being bland and Mary Sue-ish. Because of the ending she goes from "awesome beacon of light and hope" to "she who screwed up the future".

I hope you excuse my rant about a manga that is probably read by few people; I think it has some relevance to LW as a failure-of-rationality case study. Aside from the ending it is also an excellent piece of art that I wholeheartedly recommend.

12 points [deleted] 07 January 2011 07:53:08PM Permalink

Dirge without Music

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned

With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.

Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,

A formula, a phrase remains, --- but the best is lost.

The answers quick keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,

They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled

Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

12 points Document 05 January 2011 12:41:30AM Permalink

There should be a word for the things we do not because we want to but because we want to be the kind of person who wants to.

-- A Softer World #626

Possibly related: Cached Selves and some of its outbound links, and Violent Acres' idea of self-brainwashing (bottom of post).

12 points MichaelHoward 04 January 2011 08:49:53PM Permalink

You can make a small program (say, 1,000 lines) work through brute force even when breaking every rule of good style. For a larger program, this is simply not so. If the structure of a 100,000-line program is bad, you will find that new errors are introduced as fast as old ones are removed.

-- Bjarne Stroustrup

12 points dclayh 03 January 2011 09:57:34PM Permalink

Cf. the Peter de Blanc tweet

As soon as you notice a pattern in your work, automate it.

12 points Nominull 07 January 2011 08:15:31PM Permalink

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.

-John F. Kennedy

12 points MichaelGR 03 January 2011 09:32:11PM Permalink

Take the bettors in the racetrack experiment. Thirty seconds before putting down their money, they had been tentative and uncertain; thirty seconds after the deed, they were significantly more optimistic ans self-assured. The act of making a final decision--in this case, of buying a ticket--had been the critical factor. Once a stand had been taken, the need for consistency pressured these people to bring what they felt and believed into line with what they had already done. They simply convinced themselves that they had made the right choice and, no doubt, felt better and it all.

-Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The psychology of Persuasion, p.59

12 points shokwave 04 January 2011 04:12:25AM Permalink

Jokes about "I think, therefore I am" are always amusing to students of logic, because people twist themselves in knots trying to make it seem weird, when the only thing you can do with "I think - I am" is "I am not - I think not", and "Rene Descartes died, therefore he stopped thinking" isn't funny.

12 points wnoise 03 February 2011 05:36:02AM Permalink

Excepting other humans.

12 points gwern 02 February 2011 06:21:47PM Permalink

"Great is Bankruptcy: the great bottomless gulf into which all Falsehoods, public and private, do sink, disappearing; whither, from the first origin of them, they were all doomed. For Nature is true and not a lie. No lie you can speak or act but it will come, after longer or shorter circulation, like a Bill drawn on Nature's Reality, and be presented there for payment, - with the answer, No effects.

Pity only that it often had so long a circulation: that the original forger were so seldom he who bore the final smart of it! Lies, and the burden of evil they bring, are passed on; shifted from back to back, and from rank to rank; and so land ultimately on the dumb lowest rank, who with spade and mattock, with sore heart and empty wallet, daily come in contact with reality, and can pass the cheat no further.

[...]

But with a Fortunatus' Purse in his pocket, through what length of time might not almost any Falsehood last! Your Society, your Household, practical or spiritual Arrangement, is untrue, unjust, offensive to the eye of God and man. Nevertheless its hearth is warm, its larder well replenished: the innumerable Swiss of Heaven, with a kind of Natural loyalty, gather round it; will prove, by pamphleteering, musketeering, that it is a truth; or if not an unmixed (unearthly, impossible) Truth, then better, a wholesomely attempered one, (as wind is to the shorn lamb), and works well.

Changed outlook, however, when purse and larder grow empty! Was your Arrangement so true, so accordant to Nature's ways, then how, in the name of wonder, has Nature, with her infinite bounty, come to leave it famishing there? To all men, to all women and all children, it is now indubitable that your Arrangement was false. Honour to Bankruptcy; ever righteous on the great scale, though in detail it is so cruel! Under all Falsehoods it works, unweariedly mining. No Falsehood, did it rise heaven-high and cover the world, but Bankruptcy, one day, will sweep it down, and make us free of it."

--The French Revolution: a history, by Thomas Carlyle; as quoted by Mencius Moldbug

12 points sfb 02 February 2011 06:55:56PM Permalink

A premature really powerful Optimization Process is the root of all future evil.

12 points sketerpot 03 February 2011 11:54:14PM Permalink

Sometimes they only unlock the deadbolt, and you need a friend to help push open the door. Sometimes the door is on the top of a cliff, and you need to climb up the rope of Wikipedia to get there. And so on. A lot of people who are having trouble learning something are having trouble realizing what resources they have available.

12 points sketerpot 12 September 2011 04:55:01AM Permalink

And the reasons those students don't take opportunities for help tend to be embarrassingly pathetic. Like, so embarrassing that they avoid even thinking about it, because if they made their real reason explicit, they would be pained at how dumb it is. (I've done this sot of thing myself, more times than I'm comfortable with.)

For example, I discovered that a significant fraction of the students in a certain class were afraid to ask questions of the professor because they found him scary. Now, I know the professor in question, and he's a friendly person who wishes that his students would talk to him more -- but he has an abrupt, somewhat awkward way of speaking, and an eastern European accent. Such superficial details are apparently what leaves the biggest impression on most people.

Or there are the guys who get depressed and stop coming to class for a week or two, and then keep on not coming to class because they haven't been to class for a while, and it would be hard trying to get back up to speed. I really sympathize with these guys, but that doesn't make their reasoning any saner. (A fair number of them come in at the end of a semester to flunk their final exams. Damn it all, this is painful to watch.)

Or there are the people who won't read textbooks, or Wikipedia, or whatever, because they feel like everything ought to be covered in class well enough that they can just show up every day and get a good grade. I can not think of any good pedagogical reason why this should be so, and indeed, it usually isn't.

I could go on. There are plenty more examples. But instead I think I'll just paraphrase the not-actually-evil professor from eastern Europe. "These kids," he said. "They aren't resourceful because they have never had to be resourceful. They need more adversity in life. When I was their age, I had to bribe a local official just to get a dorm room."

12 points PhilGoetz 06 February 2011 06:34:56AM Permalink

"But can people in desperate poverty be considered to be making free choices? Many say no. So, is the choice between starving and selling one’s kidney really a choice? Yes; an easy one. One of the options is awful. To forbid organ selling is to take away the better choice. If we choose to provide an even better option to the person that would be great – but it is no solution to the problem of poverty to take away what choices the poor do have absent outside help."

Katja Grace, on Metaeuphoric, Dying for a Donation

12 points Eneasz 03 February 2011 04:58:02AM Permalink

At my mother's knee I learned to view religious worship as a practice which lures people away from their duties and pleasures on earth, and breeds in them a thirst for impossible things, the chasing of which can bring no honour or delight but only bewilderment, disappointment, and insanity.

  • K. J. Bishop, "The Etched City"

(a sentiment I think applies to all super-stimuli)

12 points MichaelGR 03 February 2011 02:53:17PM Permalink

It has never mattered to me that thirty million people might think I'm wrong. The number of people who thought Hitler was right did not make him right... Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?

-- Frank Zappa, quoted from The Real Frank Zappa Book

12 points Kaj_Sotala 02 February 2011 11:33:05AM Permalink

Make a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

(Terry Pratchett, I think.)

12 points RobinZ 02 February 2011 05:38:27PM Permalink

The trouble with this quotation (besides its typo and lack of attribution) is that it says nothing but "religions are false". This is a trivial point, and this quotation does not support it. An eloquent support for a truth is worth quoting, an instructive explanation of the implications of a truth is worth quoting, but this is neither.

12 points wnoise 07 March 2011 05:00:05AM Permalink

It does on rare occasion. And then that particular subfield is no longer called philosophy.

12 points JGWeissman 04 March 2011 09:04:11PM Permalink

You would have to notice when they acheive the impossible.

Or that they make visible progress towards the impossible.

Or that they acheive interesting side projects in their down time from working on the impossible.

12 points gwern 02 March 2011 07:43:12PM Permalink

On the living/non-living part, yeah. (They're all dead.)

On the brains remaining recognizable and intact, I suspect they're doing better than even professionally embalmed and maintained corpses like Lenin or Mao are.

12 points wedrifid 07 March 2011 11:23:30AM Permalink

Dr. Cuddy: "And you're always right. And I don't mean you always think you're right. But y--you are actually always right, because that's all that matters."

House: "That doesn't even make sense. What, you want me to be wrong?"

12 points lukeprog 06 March 2011 08:23:32PM Permalink

I got your Friendly AI problem right here...

"To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society."

Theodore Roosevelt

12 points Threedee 05 March 2011 08:28:20AM Permalink

If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.

William James

12 points RobinZ 04 May 2011 02:48:38PM Permalink

Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.

John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money (1935), Book 5, Chapter 21, Section 3, pg. 298

12 points RichardKennaway 02 May 2011 09:10:18PM Permalink

If a guy tells me the probability of failure is 1 in 10E5, I know he's full of crap.

Richard P. Feynmann, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"

12 points NMJablonski 02 May 2011 05:55:56AM Permalink

So, there are people who disagree with what you posted, and may be inclined to argue about it. That, combined with the idea shared in the Paul Graham quote in this very thread (about politics frequently being used as a form of identity) leads to defensiveness, leads to rationalization, and leads to stupidity.

So, in order to avoid stupid arguments, people would prefer fewer posts like your quote on LW.

12 points Eneasz 03 May 2011 08:03:30PM Permalink

Sounds suspiciously like something a general would say even if it was untrue

12 points Alicorn 24 June 2011 01:22:42AM Permalink

"People argue against the existence of spirits and immaterial souls because they can't be explained by science. But if by definition these things are outside the scope of science, then you can't use science to prove or disprove them."

"Do these spirits and souls actually affect anything in the real world?"

"Sure."

"Then they're within the scope of science."

"Okay, let's say they don't interact at all with the world."

"Then why do we care?!?!"

--Calamities of Nature

12 points beoShaffer 12 June 2011 08:53:58PM Permalink

Tom smiled. "Yes, Don't you like that idea?" "Liking it and having it be true aren't the same thing, Tom."

-Clive Barker, Abarat

12 points RobertLumley 02 June 2011 12:21:14AM Permalink

"If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics." – Roger Bacon

12 points sketerpot 03 June 2011 07:28:52PM Permalink

Of course, that depends on how costly failure is, compared to the up-front analysis that would make failure less likely. I don't know who said "Fail fast, fail cheap," but it's a good counterpoint quote.

12 points MarkMk1 03 June 2011 05:30:14PM Permalink

Actually I think the full formula is "sweat saves blood, but brains save both". That's as rlevant today as when it was first used, which was in the British Army, around the time of the Crimean War. I think. I wasn't there.

12 points CharlesR 06 June 2011 01:09:01AM Permalink

Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for nonsmart reasons.

-- Michael Shermer

12 points Jayson_Virissimo 02 June 2011 12:56:14AM Permalink

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."

I very much dislike Einstein quotes that have nothing to do with physics or mathematics. You don't have to be an Einstein to know a false dichotomy when you see one. What about living your life as if some things are miracles and some things aren't like most people who have ever lived? Surely, if most people have done it, then it is possible.

Also, welcome to Less Wrong.

12 points arundelo 07 July 2011 02:04:33AM Permalink

Bill James was asked about the Holmes saying "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth". He responded:

That Sherlock Holmes line is very, very interesting. It's false, and extremely arrogant, and very dangerous. That's not a real way to think about the world. This concept of eliminating the impossible -- we could never do that. The whole idea of Sherlock Holmes is dangerous because it encourages people to think that -- if they're intelligent enough -- they could put all the pieces together in absolute terms. But the human mind is not sophisticated enough to do that. People are not that smart. It's not that Sherlock Holmes would need to be twice as smart as the average person; he'd have to be a billion times as smart as the average person.

12 points gwern 12 August 2011 09:01:27PM Permalink

"You cannot do only one thing."

--Garrett Hardin's 'First Law of Ecology'

(Apropos of Darwin's latest article on the difficulty of reaching useful medical results, with Vitamin E as a case-study into this maxim.)

12 points Unnamed 03 August 2011 09:13:41PM Permalink

In some contexts it makes sense to talk about errors in opposite directions canceling out but in others it does not as errors only accumulate. Suppose one person overestimates how much they'll enjoy having an iPad and buys one when they'd be better off without one, and another person underestimates how much they'll enjoy having an iPad and doesn't buy one when they'd be better off with one. Looking at the total number of iPads sold, these errors cancel out. But looking at total human welfare, the errors just add up - two people are each less happy than they could be, which is doubly bad. Similarly, if one person gets too much medical care and another gets too little, then they both lose, one from being overtreated and the other from being undertreated.

If you look at the market as a means of aggregating information (as in prediction markets) then errors can cancel out, but when you evaluate the market as a means of distributing products to people then errors just accumulate.

12 points wedrifid 05 August 2011 04:37:57AM Permalink

(Recommend not asking Eliezer that question if your intent is to maximize output. It seems to provoke an aversive reaction even if encouragement is intended.)

12 points David_Gerard 07 August 2011 10:31:48AM Permalink

Practical answer: when my daughter does this, "Why do you think?" is proving a useful reply that gets thoughtful answers.

12 points Grognor 28 September 2011 03:51:15AM Permalink

Kant was proud of having discovered in man the faculty for synthetic judgements a priori. But "How are synthetic judgements a priori possible?" How did Kant answer? By saying "By virtue of a faculty" (though unfortunately not in five words). But is that an answer? Or rather merely a repetition of the question? How does opium induce sleep? "by virtue of a faculty, namely the virtus dormitiva", replies the doctor in Molière. Such replies belong in comedy. It is high time to replace the Kantian question by another question, "Why is belief in such judgements necessary?"

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

12 points CaveJohnson 23 September 2011 09:50:22AM Permalink

One of my favorite genres in the prestige press is the Self-Refuting Article. These are articles that contain all the facts necessary to undermine the premise of the piece, but reporters, editors, and readers all conspire together in an act of collective stupidity to Not Get the Joke

--Steve Sailer

12 points lukeprog 08 September 2011 01:58:27AM Permalink

If you cannot calculate you cannot speculate on future pleasure and your life will not be that of a human, but that of an oyster or a jellyfish.

Plato, Philebus

12 points Vladimir_Nesov 05 September 2011 02:35:21PM Permalink

Echoing a utopian meme is analogous to stamping an instance of an invention, not to inventing something anew. It is inventors of utopian dreams that I doubt to be more numerous than inventors of technology.

12 points gwern 18 July 2012 03:15:38PM Permalink

Do you have to be smart to be rich? The impact of IQ on wealth, income and financial distress, Zagorsky 2007:

How important is intelligence to financial success? Using the NLSY79, which tracks a large group of young U.S. baby boomers, this research shows that each point increase in IQ test scores raises income by between $234 and $616 per year after holding a variety of factors constant. Regression results suggest no statistically distinguishable relationship between IQ scores and wealth. Financial distress, such as problems paying bills, going bankrupt or reaching credit card limits, is related to IQ scores not linearly but instead in a quadratic relationship. This means higher IQ scores sometimes increase the probability of being in financial difficulty.

One could also phrase this as: "if we control for factors which we know to because by intelligence, such as highest level of education, then mirabile dictu! intelligence no longer increases income or wealth very much!"; or, "regressions are hard, let's go shopping."

Apropos of http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2012/07/18/why-we-make-up-jobs-out-of-thin-air/

In the XXIst century within wealthy countries, people work hard primarily to gain social status. We often make the mistake of tying up wealth with social status, but most of the wealthy people we admire are also consumed by their great jobs. Celine Dion is very wealthy, yet she would still give one show every single day, including week-ends. I think most professors would feel exploited if they had to lecture every single day. Bill Gates is very wealthy and universally admired, however, as we may expect, he worked nights and week-ends as chairman of Microsoft. Every year he would read 100 papers from Microsoft employees about the state of the company.

...For many, wealth is merely a stepping stone to intense work. This may explain why people with higher IQs are not wealthier (Zagorsky, 2008): high IQ people may have an easier time getting rewarding work so they need less wealth....I used to openly worry that robots would steal our jobs and leave most of us in poverty. I have now concluded that I was underestimating the pull of prestige among human beings. We will make up jobs out of thin air if we need to.

12 points gwern 28 February 2012 11:09:29PM Permalink

Here's another one: National IQ and National Productivity: The Hive Mind Across Asia, Jones 2011

...cognitive skills—intelligence quotient scores, math skills, and the like—have only a modest influence on individual wages, but are strongly correlated with national outcomes. Is this largely due to human capital spillovers? This paper argues that the answer is yes. It presents four different channels through which intelligence may matter more for nations than for individuals: (i) intelligence is associated with patience and hence higher savings rates; (ii) intelligence causes cooperation; (iii) higher group intelligence opens the door to using fragile, high-value production technologies; and (iv) intelligence is associated with supporting market-oriented policies.

12 points kalla724 03 October 2011 07:09:13PM Permalink

The quote is indeed imperfect, but I think the sentiment it conveys is accurate.

After all, in a thousand years or so, Russian revolution and the USSR will be as important as the Mongol invasion and the Khanate of the Golden Horde are today. If we didn't get to the moon fifty years ago, there would have been some other conflict pushing some other line of advancement.

It is also, for the actual point of the quote, irrelevant who made the discoveries. The point is that in long range, the importance of those discoveries will always overshadow ephemeral political events.

12 points Konkvistador 31 October 2011 04:50:03PM Permalink

A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.

--Thomas Carlyle

12 points RobinZ 12 October 2011 01:14:49AM Permalink

This is one of those occasions when it would be wise to translate back into respectable gene language, just to reassure ourselves that we have not become too carried away with subjective metaphors.

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, ch. 8

12 points [deleted] 07 October 2011 02:33:24PM Permalink

‎"Real magic is the kind of magic that is not real, while magic that is real (magic that can actually be done), is not real magic."

-Lee Siegle

12 points anonym 02 October 2011 02:13:23AM Permalink

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.

William Lawrence Bragg

12 points Nominull 07 October 2011 04:17:23PM Permalink

The ones who do are a proper subset of the ones who think they can, and there are serious costs to being in the difference between the two sets.

12 points Desrtopa 13 January 2013 03:06:12AM Permalink

Alternate explanation: The clock stopped before his wife died, but the nurse recorded 9:21 as his wife's time of death, because she determined the time by checking the clock, not realizing it had already stopped.

12 points MinibearRex 04 November 2011 02:36:39PM Permalink

Through the discovery of Buchner, Biology was relieved of yet another fragment of mysticism. The splitting up of sugar into CO2 and alcohol is no more the effect of a "vital principle" than the splitting up of cane sugar by invertase. The history of this problem is instructive, as it warns us against considering problems beyond our reach because they have not yet found their solution.

-Jacques Loeb, 1906, on the discovery of the mechanism of glycolysis

12 points baiter 04 November 2011 02:31:09AM Permalink

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

John Adams, Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials

12 points Vladimir_M 04 December 2011 08:22:55AM Permalink

I don't think that de Maistre's "quick answers" category is supposed to include answers based on sound expertise.

People are often confused about questions to which an expert in the relevant area will give a quick and reliably correct answer. However, an expert capable of answering a technical question competently is not someone who has "considered [the question] only briefly or not at all": he is in fact someone who has spent a great deal of time and effort (along with possessing the necessary talent) on understanding a broad class of questions that subsumes the one being asked.

12 points Ezekiel 05 December 2011 07:55:04PM Permalink

Not necessarily. The human race wasn't around when "Everyone dies" was announced, so we never had the opportunity to panic properly.

12 points wedrifid 01 December 2011 05:24:13AM Permalink

You have resolved the question to the nearest available sane question but that isn't the answer to the question itself and does not make the question valid.

Come to think of it I am somewhat dubious with answering "is the area of this 1km by 1m rectangle more the 1km or the 1m?" with "the 1m". That just doesn't seem right.

12 points RobinZ 02 December 2011 05:18:05PM Permalink

I actually have a mild distrust of cognates - I don't think the connotations are necessarily preserved.

12 points Karmakaiser 01 December 2011 01:40:48AM Permalink

Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.

~Epictetus

12 points philh 02 December 2011 01:01:51PM Permalink

What made it real was (among other things) Randall posting that comic. He wanted the meetup, and chose that method to publicise it.

Wanting something isn't sufficient: desire is a force that acts upon you, not on the universe.

12 points harshhpareek 04 December 2011 07:32:21AM Permalink

The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might expect, it winds all over the place. But it doesn't do this out of frivolity. The path it has discovered is the most economical route to the sea

-- Paul Graham, "The Age of the Essay" (http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html)

12 points Jayson_Virissimo 30 November 2011 11:21:10AM Permalink

Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.

-Pierre de Beaumarchais (and usually incorrectly attributed to Voltaire)

12 points Karmakaiser 09 January 2012 04:33:02PM Permalink

"A “lie-to-children” is a statement which is false, but which nevertheless leads the child’s mind towards a more accurate explanation, one that the child will only be able to appreciate if it has been primed with the lie." "Yes, you needed to understand that” they are told, “so that now we can tell you why it isn’t exactly true." It is for the best possible reasons, but it is still a lie".”

--(The Science of Discworld, Ebury Press edition, quotes from pp 41-42)

12 points Alejandro1 03 January 2012 11:56:30PM Permalink

Prompted by Maniakes, but sufficiently different to post separately:

It cannot have escaped philosophers' attention that our fellow academics in other fields--especially in the sciences--often have difficulty suppressing their incredulous amusement when such topics as Twin Earth, Swampman, and Blockheads are posed for apparently serious consideration. Are the scientists just being philistines, betraying their tin ears for the subtleties of philosophical investigation, or have the philosophers who indulge in these exercises lost their grip on reality?

These bizarre examples all attempt to prove one "conceptual" point or another by deliberately reducing something underappreciated to zero, so that What Really Counts can shine through. Blockheads hold peripheral behavior constant and reduce internal structural details (and--what comes to the same thing--intervening internal processes) close to zero, and provoke the intuition that then there would be no mind there; internal structure Really Counts. Manthra is more or less the mirror-image; it keeps internal processes constant and reduces control of peripheral behavior to zero, showing, presumably, that external behavior Really Doesn't Count. Swampman keeps both future peripheral dispositions and internal states constant and reduces "history" to zero. Twin Earth sets internal similarity to maximum, so that external context can be demonstrated to be responsible for whatever our intuitions tell us. Thus these thought experiments mimic empirical experiments in their design, attempting to isolate a crucial interaction between variables by holding other variables constant. In the past I have often noted that a problem with such experiments is that the dependent variable is "intuition"--they are intuition pumps--and the contribution of imagination in the generation of intuitions is harder to control than philosophers have usually acknowledged.

But there is also a deeper problem with them. It is child's play to dream up further such examples to "prove" further conceptual points. Suppose a cow gave birth to something that was atom-for-atom indiscernible from a shark. Would it be a shark? What is the truth-maker for sharkhood? If you posed that question to a biologist, the charitable reaction would be that you were making a labored attempt at a joke. Suppose an evil demon could make water turn solid at room temperature by smiling at it; would demon-water be ice? Too silly a hypothesis to deserve a response. All such intuition pumps depend on the distinction spelled out by McLaughlin and O'Leary-Hawthorne between "conceptual" and "reductive" answers to the big questions. What I hadn't sufficiently appreciated in my earlier forthright response to Jackson is that when one says that the truth-maker question requires a conceptual answer, one means an answer that holds not just in our world, or all nomologically possible worlds, but in all logically possible worlds. Smiling demons, cow-sharks, Blockheads, and Swampmen are all, some philosophers think, logically possible, even if they are not nomologically possible, and these philosophers think this is important. I do not. Why should the truth-maker question cast its net this wide? Because, I gather, otherwise its answer doesn't tell us about the essence of the topic in question. But who believes in real essences of this sort nowadays? Not I.

Daniel Dennett, Get Real (emphasis added).

12 points Alicorn 06 January 2012 09:19:01PM Permalink

"This has been a good day... I haven't done a single thing that was stupid..."

"Have you done anything that was smart?"

--Peanuts (Nov. 23, 1981) by Charles Schulz

12 points Alicorn 09 January 2012 06:04:02PM Permalink

If some persons died, and others did not die, death would indeed be a terrible affliction.

--Jean de la Bruyère

12 points Maniakes 03 January 2012 08:24:54PM Permalink

I replied as follows: "What would you think of someone who said, "I would like to have a cat, provided it barked"? [...] As a natural scientist, you recognize that you cannot assign characteristics at will to chemical and biological entities, cannot demand that cats bark or water burn. Why do you suppose that the situation is different in the "social sciences?"

-- Milton Friedman

12 points Yvain 02 January 2012 05:40:15AM Permalink

More accurately, Yvain-2004

12 points kalla724 01 February 2012 09:43:58PM Permalink

Blood sugar is very closely linked to self-control, including suppression of emotion. While this may appear to be a different thing, it isn't: when you include feedback loops and association spirals, a transient, weak emotional distraction can become deep and overwhelming if normal modes of suppression fail.

See here, here and here.

12 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 16 February 2012 12:04:03AM Permalink

What do you mean? The Market Economics Fairy is way better at emitting sparkles from her wand than anyone else, and has no special talent for managing hedge funds.

12 points Armok_GoB 16 February 2012 12:11:37AM Permalink

So there is the problem: The ideal of non-discrimination is not compatible with cases where the demographics of event-goers is itself a strong influence on the quality of the event for everyone involved.

12 points Nominull 25 March 2012 08:27:54AM Permalink

Neither is Eliezer Yudkowsky.

12 points Will_Newsome 04 March 2012 12:10:37PM Permalink

The world is paved with good intentions; the road to Hell has bad epistemology mixed in.

Steven Kaas

12 points GLaDOS 01 March 2012 07:07:58PM Permalink

I have sometimes seen people try to list what a real intellectual should know. I think it might be more illuminating to list what he shouldn’t.

--Gregory Cochran, in a comment here

12 points GabrielDuquette 01 March 2012 09:11:09PM Permalink

Also good, from that comment's OP:

One of the main reasons that I shy away from modern liberalism is a strong commitment to interchangeability and identity across all individuals and populations as a matter of fact, rather than equality as a matter of legal commitment.

Razib Khan

12 points Stephanie_Cunnane 09 April 2012 02:15:40AM Permalink

From this moment forward, remember this: What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it. Efficiency is still important, but it is useless unless applied to the right things.

-Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek

12 points Klevador 14 April 2012 04:48:48AM Permalink

Any collocation of persons, no matter how numerous, how scant, how even their homogeneity, how firmly they profess common doctrine, will presently reveal themselves to consist of smaller groups espousing variant versions of the common creed; and these sub-groups will manifest sub-sub-groups, and so to the final limit of the single individual, and even in this single person conflicting tendencies will express themselves.

— Jack Vance, The Languages of Pao

12 points Viliam_Bur 03 April 2012 08:41:20AM Permalink

Is this really about fairness? Seems like different people agree that fairness is a good thing, but use different definitions of fairness. Or perhaps the word fairness is often used to mean "applause lights of my group".

For someone fairness means "everyone has food to eat", for another fairness means "everyone pays for their own food". Then proponents of one definition accuse the others of not being fair -- the debate is framed as if the problem is not different definitions of fairness, but rather our group caring about fairness and the other group ignoring fairness; which of course means that we are morally right and they are morally wrong.

12 points MixedNuts 09 April 2012 03:24:07PM Permalink

On specificity and sneaking on connotations; useful for the liberal-minded among us:

I think, with racism and sexism and 'isms' generally, there's a sort of confusion of terminology.

A "Racist1" is someone, who, like a majority of people in this society, has subconsciously internalized some negative attitudes about minority racial groups. If a Racist1 takes the Implicit Association Test, her score shows she's biased against black people, like the majority of people (of all races) who took the test. Chances are, whether you know it or not, you're a Racist1.

A "Racist2" is someone who's kind of an insensitive jerk about race. The kind of guy who calls Obama the "Food Stamp President." Someone you wouldn't want your sister dating.

A "Racist3" is a neo-Nazi. You can never be quite sure that one day he won't snap and kill someone. He's clearly a social deviant.

People use the word "Racist" for all three things, and I think that's the source of a lot of arguments. When people get accused of being racists, they evade responsibility by saying, "Hey, I'm not a Racist3!" when in fact you were only saying they were Racist1 or Racist2. But some of the responsibility is on the accusers too -- if you say "That Republican's a racist" with the implication of "a jerk" and then backtrack and change the meaning to "vulnerable to unconscious bias", then you're arguing in bad faith. Never mind that some laws and rules which were meant to protect people from Racist3's are in fact deployed against Racist2's.

-celandine13

12 points Waldheri 03 May 2012 05:57:46PM Permalink

This reminds me of the following passage from We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver:

But keeping secrets is a discipline. I never use to think of myself as a good liar, but after having had some practice I had adopted the prevaricator's credo that one doesn't so much fabricate a lie as marry it. A successful lie cannot be brought into this world and capriciously abandoned; like any committed relationship it must be maintained, and with far more devotion than the truth, which carries on being carelessly true without any help. By contrast, my lie needed me as much as I needed it, and so demanded the constancy of wedlock: Till death do us part.

12 points gwillen 15 May 2012 06:22:18AM Permalink

I am consistently impressed by the quality of the writing that comes out of Cracked, especially relative to what one might expect given its appearance.

12 points SpaceFrank 04 May 2012 08:03:04PM Permalink

When life gives you lemons, order miracle berries.

12 points Annie0305 20 May 2012 09:43:39AM Permalink

"Almost certainly, there is something wrong with you if you don't think things you don't dare say out loud."

~Paul Graham

12 points Old_Rationality 02 May 2012 11:59:39AM Permalink

His mind refused to accept a simple inference from simple facts, which were patent to all the world. The very simplicity of the conclusion was of itself enough to make him reject it, for he had an elective affinity for everything that was intricate. He was a prey to intellectual over-subtlety.

Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt

12 points mindspillage 14 May 2012 02:19:05PM Permalink

"In war you will generally find that the enemy has at any time three courses of action open to him. Of those three, he will invariably choose the fourth." —Helmuth Von Moltke

(quoted in Capturing the Potential of Outlier Ideas in the Intelligence Community, via Bruce Schneier)

12 points gwern 05 June 2012 06:22:56PM Permalink

If you pay nothing for expert advise you will value it at epsilon more than nothing, if you pay five figures for it you will clear your schedule and implement recommendations within the day.

Obviously I need to figure out how to start charging for my website!

12 points DanArmak 04 June 2012 07:20:51AM Permalink

That may be Deep Wisdom but it's surface nonsense. Propaganda contains many untruths that people end up honestly believing in. The quote effectively says "propaganda is useless if only one is brave enough to believe what they know (how?) is really true". This is simply wrong.

12 points sketerpot 04 July 2012 07:59:42PM Permalink

See also Paul Graham's essay Keep Your Identity Small, on the same subject.

12 points rocurley 03 July 2012 12:38:09AM Permalink

I find it troubling how much I want to upvote you just beause you're quoting SMAC.

12 points Vaniver 03 July 2012 12:56:18AM Permalink

Reality is the ultimate arbiter of truth. If your thoughts, beliefs, and actions aren't aligned with truth, your results will suffer.

--Steve Pavlina

12 points paper-machine 16 August 2012 10:47:22PM Permalink

The problem with therapy-- include self help and mind hacks-- is its amazing failure rate. People do it for years and come out of it and feel like they understand themselves better but they do not change. If it failed to produce both insights and change it would make sense, but it is almost always one without the other.

-- The Last Psychiatrist

12 points Delta 03 August 2012 10:24:51AM Permalink

The sentiment is correct (diligence may be more important than brilliance) but I think "all amusements and other employments" might be too absolute an imperative for most people to even try to live by. Most people will break down if they try to work too hard for too long, and changes of activity can be very important in keeping people fresh.

12 points DaFranker 03 August 2012 04:48:13PM Permalink

Paragraphs cost lines, and when each line of paper on average costs five shillings, you use as many of them as you can get away with.

12 points Alicorn 09 August 2012 12:26:50AM Permalink

It's not the end of the world. Well. I mean, yes, literally it is the end of the world, but moping doesn't help!

-- A Softer World

12 points Tyrrell_McAllister 04 August 2012 04:45:07PM Permalink

It's absurd: You tend to die.

12 points Viliam_Bur 04 August 2012 01:53:43PM Permalink

the overuse of "quantum" hurt my eyes. :(

12 points Swimmy 04 September 2012 12:44:33AM Permalink

I thought the correct answer would be, "No time for programming, too busy pushing a boulder."

Though, since the whole thing was a punishment, I have no idea what the punishment for not doing his punishment would be. Can't find it specified anywhere.

12 points Document 09 September 2012 04:18:34AM Permalink

Edited how?

12 points RichardKennaway 16 September 2012 06:10:49PM Permalink

When a precise, narrowly focused technical idea becomes metaphor and sprawls globally, its credibility must be earned afresh locally by means of specific evidence demonstrating the relevance and explanatory power of the idea in its new application.

Edward Tufte, Beautiful Evidence

12 points ChristianKl 09 September 2012 10:49:29PM Permalink

“The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.”

― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

12 points Jayson_Virissimo 01 September 2012 08:18:04AM Permalink

Conspiracy Theory, n. A theory about a conspiracy that you are not supposed to believe.

-L. A. Rollins, Lucifer's Lexicon: An Updated Abridgment

12 points MagnetoHydroDynamics 02 October 2012 06:29:25PM Permalink

Mad libs:

It is a lot easier to strong emotion vaguely defined group than to same strong emotion actual acquaintance.

12 points bbleeker 09 October 2012 11:07:48AM Permalink

Lucky him - his internal persons are friends.

12 points Vaniver 02 October 2012 01:58:53AM Permalink

My reading of the quote is that empiricism is superior to rationalism (the old philosophical schools, not the sort we discuss here). If I have a proof that my bridge will hold a thousand pounds, and it breaks under a hundred, then the experiment trumps the proof.

12 points Fyrius 04 October 2012 01:07:20PM Permalink

It's always "you can do anything" and never "you can do more than you currently believe you're capable of" with these motivational quotes.

12 points Eugine_Nier 15 November 2012 05:12:14AM Permalink

It is neither desirable nor any longer effective to try bullying people into accepting the authority of science. Instead, all members of the educated public can be invited to participate in science, in order to experience the true nature and value of scientific inquiry. This does not mean listening to professional scientists tell condescending stories about how they have discovered wonderful things, which you should believe for reasons that are too difficult for you to understand in real depth and detail. Doing science ought to mean asking your own questions, making your own investigations, and drawing your own conclusions for your own reasons. Of course it will not be feasible to advance the "cutting edge" or "frontier" of modern science without first acquiring years of specialist training. However, the cutting edge is not all there is to science, nor is it necessarily the most valuable part of science. Questions that have been answered are still worth asking again, so you can understand for yourself how to arrive at the standard answers, and possibly discover new answers or recover forgotten answers that are valuable.

Hasok Chang, Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress

12 points taelor 02 November 2012 02:47:46AM Permalink

If we see in each generation the conflict of the future against the past, the fight of what might be called progressive versus reactionary, we shall find ourselves organizing the historical story upon what is really an unfolding principle of progress, and our eyes will be fixed upon certain people who appear as the special agencies of that progress. [...] But if we see in each generation a clash of wills out of which there emerges something that probably no man ever willed, our minds become concentrated upon the process that produced such an unpredictable issue, and we are more open for an intensive study of the motions and interactions that underlie historical change. [...] The process of the historical transition will then be recognized to be unlike what the whig historian seems to assume – much less like the procedure of a logical argument and perhaps much more like the method by which a man can be imagined to work his way out of a "complex". It is a process which moves by mediations and those mediations may be provided by anything in the world – by men’s sins or misapprehensions or by what we can only call fortunate conjunctures. Very strange bridges are used to make the passage from one state of things to another; we may lose sight of them in our surveys of general history, but their discovery is the glory of historical research. History is not the study of origins; rather it is the analysis of all the mediations by which the past was turned into our present.

-- Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History

12 points DanArmak 02 November 2012 04:02:02PM Permalink

You can shock many people by doing some rational things - those preselected for not being done by most people already, and also those that are explicitly counter to important irrational things that many people do. And these specific rational actions have an availability bias. Conversely, once something is "normal", it's not a highly available mental example of "especially rational".

But can you really shock many people by doing a randomly selected rational thing? By giving the right answer on a test? By choosing the deal that gains you the most money? By choosing a profession, a friend, a place to live, based on expectations of happiness? By choosing medical treatment based on scientific evidence? By doing something because it's fun?

It might shock people that the choice is in fact rational; they may disagree that the deal you chose will earn you the most money. But when people agree about predictions, why would they be shocked by most rational choices? I think a random (but doable) irrational act is much more shocking than a random rational one.

12 points Alejandro1 02 November 2012 04:21:15PM Permalink

"Meh", says the trivialist. "Scottish sheep are black. Scottish sheep are white. Scottish sheep are black and white. Scottish sheep are purple octopuses. And I don't even need to look out the window."

12 points Snowyowl 02 November 2012 01:57:23PM Permalink

They came impressively close considering they didn't have any giant shoulders to stand on.

12 points fortyeridania 02 November 2012 07:11:52AM Permalink

On confirmation bias

If a man objects to truths that are all too evident, it is no easy task finding arguments that will change his mind. This is proof neither of his own strength nor of his teacher's weakness. When someone caught in an argument hardens to stone, there is just no more reasoning with them.

Epictetus, Discourses I.5.1-2 (page 15 of this edition) (original Greek, with alternate translations at the link)

12 points [deleted] 02 December 2012 11:14:59AM Permalink

Pecunia non olet.

Vespasian

12 points Alicorn 04 December 2012 02:54:54AM Permalink

"...they have all these experts' predictions about the year 2000 and I kid you not they are fucking psychotic. Just not even close, like oh we'll be growing cars in vats and having nuclear wars with China and then black rainbows will drain the earth of its oxygen and kill everyone except our moon colonists. Experts. I mean people cannot predict shit. We think we can and we fucking can't."

12 points SaidAchmiz 02 December 2012 07:26:34AM Permalink

"Well, how about this — that man, unlike animals, is a creature who experiences an insurmountable need for knowledge? I've read that somewhere."

"So have I," said Valentine. "But the trouble is that man, or in any case the common man, easily overcomes this need for knowledge of his. It seems to me that he doesn't have such a need at all. There's a need to understand, but knowledge is not required for that. The God hypothesis, for instance, gives one an unparalleled ability to understand absolutely everything, while discovering absolutely nothing... Give a person a highly simplified model of the world and interpret any event on the basis of this simplified model. Such an approach required no knowledge. A few memorized formulas plus some so-called intuition, so-called practical acumen, and so-called common sense."

Roadside Picnic, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky

12 points GLaDOS 10 January 2013 07:10:30PM Permalink

While truths last forever, taboos against them can last for centuries.

--"Sid" a commenter from HalfSigmas blog

12 points someonewrongonthenet 03 January 2013 01:57:40AM Permalink

Erm...when I was a lot younger, when I considered doing something wrong or told a lie I had the vague feeling that someone was keeping tabs. Basically, when weighing utilities I greatly upped the probability that someone would somehow come to know of my wrongdoings, even when it was totally implausible. That "someone" was certainly not God or a dead ancestor or anything supernatural...it wasn't even necessarily an authority figure.

Basically, the superstition was that someone who knew me well would eventually come to find out about my wrongdoing, and one day they would confront me about it. And they'd be greatly disappointed or angry.

I'm ashamed to say that in the past I might have actually done actions which I myself felt were immoral, if it were not for that superstitious feeling that my actions would be discovered by another individual. It's hard to say in retrospect whether the superstitious feeling was the factor that pushed me back over that edge.

Note that I never believed the superstition...it was more of a gut feeling.

I'm older now and am proud to say that I haven't given serious consideration to doing anything which I personally feel is immoral for a very, very long time. So I do not know whether I still carry this superstition. It's not really something I can test empirically.

I think part of it is that as I grew older my mind conceptually merged "selfish desire" and "morality" neatly into one single "what is the sum total of my goals" utility function construct (though I wasn't familiar with the term "utility function" at the time).

This shift occurred sometime in high school, and it happened around the same time that I overcame mind-body dualism at a gut level. Though I've always had generally atheist beliefs, it wasn't until this shift that I really understood the implications of a logical universe.

Once these dichotomies broke down, I no longer felt the temptation to "give in" to selfish desire, nor was I warded off by "guilt" or the superstitious fear. I follow morals because I want to follow them, since they are a huge part of my utility function. Once my brain understood at a gut level that going against my morality was intrinsically against my interests, I stopped feeling any temptation to do immoral actions for selfish reasons. On the flip side, the shift also allows be to be selfish without feeling guilty. It's not that I'm a "better person" thanks to the shift in gut instinct...it's more that my opposing instincts don't fight with each other by using temptation, fear, and guilt anymore.

I think there is something about that "shift" experience I described (anecdote indicates that a lot of smart people go through this at some point in life, but most describe it in less than articulate spiritual terms) which permanently alters your gut feelings about reality, morality, and similar topics in philosophy.

I'm guessing those who answered "never" either did not carry the illusions in question to begin with and therefore did not require a shift in thought, or they did not factor in how they felt pre-shift into their introspection.

12 points shminux 02 January 2013 09:54:47PM Permalink

No one wants to appear rude, of course. As this was almost the end of the ride, the person who rebuked them minimized the time he'd have to endure in the company of people who might consider him rude because of his admonishment, whether or not they agree with him. I wonder if this is partly a cultural thing.

12 points MixedNuts 02 January 2013 02:36:07PM Permalink

The original quote has nothing to do with life extension/immortality for humans. It just happens to be an argument for cryonics, and it seems to be a valid one: death as failure to preserve rather than cessation of activity, mortality as a problem rather than a fixed rule.

12 points [deleted] 01 January 2013 08:20:35PM Permalink

If you'd have told a 14th-century peasant that there'd be a huge merchant class in the future who would sit in huge metal cylinders eating meals and drinking wine while the cylinders hurtled through the air faster than a speeding arrow across oceans and continents to bring them to far-flung business opportunities, the peasant would have classified you as insane. And he'd have been wrong to the tune of a few gazillion frequent-flyer miles.

-- someone on Usenet replying to someone deriding Kurzweil

12 points NoisyEmpire 02 January 2013 07:26:46PM Permalink

While affirming the fallacy-of-composition concerns, I think we can take this charitably to mean "The universe is not totally saturated with only indifference throughout, for behold, this part of the universe called Scott Derrickson does indeed care about things."

12 points shminux 07 February 2013 12:04:51AM Permalink

the Fearful Committee Formula.

Which is not nearly as common as the reverse, the Reckless Adviser Formula, when the personal loss to the adviser is so low and the potential personal gain is so high, they recommend adoption even when the expected gain for the company is negative.

12 points [deleted] 07 February 2013 04:41:21PM Permalink

Aubrey de Grey being an immortalist himself, I'm assuming the irony to be unintentional?

12 points Kindly 01 February 2013 07:44:07PM Permalink

Were all stars to disappear or die,

I should learn to look at an empty sky

And feel its total darkness sublime,

Though this might take me a little time.

W. H. Auden, "The More Loving One"

12 points scav 07 February 2013 04:13:25PM Permalink

But I've never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.

-- Randall Munroe

12 points simplicio 04 March 2013 11:36:56PM Permalink

A leader is best when people barely know that he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him. Fail to honor people, They fail to honor you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say, "We did this ourselves."

Tao Te Ching

12 points Eugine_Nier 02 March 2013 07:42:55AM Permalink

You can't possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It's a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we've been building them for 100 years, it's very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works – it's even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential.

-- Freeman Dyson

12 points Alejandro1 01 March 2013 03:36:40PM Permalink

I once had a civil argument with [someone], in which I laid out my position in the usual way: “Premiss + premiss + premiss = conclusion.” She responded: “Well, that’s your opinion; you have yours, and I have mine.” I pointed out that no, I wasn’t asserting an opinion, I was making an argument based on facts and logic. Either my facts are wrong, or my logic is. She looked at me like I had lost my mind.

--Rod Dreher

(Post slightly edited in response to comments below)

12 points whowhowho 03 March 2013 11:31:59PM Permalink

If you're here, you've got time.

12 points wedrifid 04 April 2013 01:21:25PM Permalink

How did you get so good?

I've lost more games than you've ever played.

Which is of course a different question to "What should I do to get good at Chess?" which is all about deliberate practice with a small proportion of time devoted to playing actual games.

12 points MugaSofer 08 April 2013 07:34:12PM Permalink

Yes, actually. He believed the true dimensions of the Earth would conform to his interpretation of a particular Bible verse (thwo-thirds of the earth should be land, and one-third water, so the Ocean had to be smaller than believed) and fudged the numbers to fit.

12 points GabrielDuquette 11 April 2013 04:41:54AM Permalink

WAYS TO KILL 2 BIRDS W/ 1 STONE

1 Ricochet

2 Retrieve, rethrow

3 Line up birds precisely

4 Huge boulder

5 Use lovebirds, 2nd dies of grief

Ken Jennings

12 points DaFranker 02 April 2013 01:17:30PM Permalink

Most of quantum physics and relativity are certainly intuitively weirder than Jesus turning water into wine, self-replicating bread or a body of water splitting itself to create a passage.

I mean, our physics say it's technically possible to make machines that do all of this. Without magic. Using energy collected in space and sent to Earth using beams of light. Although we probably wouldn't use beams of light because that's inefficient.

12 points michaelkeenan 01 May 2013 04:48:52PM Permalink

Don't you understand anything about commitment, about being a pro, about sticking with what you say you wanna be? You don't do it just when you feel good. You don't do it just when you're not tired. You don't do it just when it's sunny. You do it every day of your life. You do it when it hurts to do it, when it's the last thing in the world that you wanna do, when there are a million reasons not to do it. You do it because you're a professional.

-- Teddy Atlas

12 points CCC 03 May 2013 02:19:48PM Permalink

If I had to guess, I'd say that it's often better because picking a few random numbers leads to actually thinking about the decision for at least half a minute.

12 points tingram 03 June 2013 01:25:56AM Permalink

From the remarkable opening chapter of Consciousness Explained:

One should be leery of these possibilities in principle. It is also possible in principle to build a stainless-steel ladder to the moon, and to write out, in alphabetical order, all intelligible English conversations consisting of less than a thousand words. But neither of these are remotely possible in fact and sometimes an impossibility in fact is theoretically more interesting than a possibility in principle, as we shall see.

--Daniel Dennett

12 points SaidAchmiz 03 June 2013 03:41:07PM Permalink

Of course, "bad things", and even more so "iterated bad things", have to be viewed relative to expectations, and at the proper level of abstraction. Explanation:

Right level of abstraction

"I punched myself in the face six times in a row, and each time, it hurt. But this is not mere bad luck! I conclude that I am bad at self-face-punching! I must work on my technique, such that I may be able to punch myself in the face without ill effect." This is the wrong conclusion. The right conclusion is "abstain from self-face-punching".

Substitute any of the following for "punching self in face":

  • Extreme sports
  • Motorcycle riding
  • Fad diets
  • Prayer

Right expectations

"I've tried five brands of water, and none of them tasted like chocolate candy! My water-brand-selection algorithm must be flawed. I will have to be even more careful about picking only the fanciest brands of water." Again this is the wrong conclusion. The right conclusion is "This water is just fine and there was nothing wrong with my choice of brand. I simply shouldn't have such ridiculous expectations."

Substitute any of the following for "brands of water" / "taste like chocolate candy":

  • Sex partners / knew all the ways to satisfy my needs without me telling them
  • Computer repair shops / fixed my computer for free after I spilled beer on it, and also retrieved all my data [full disclosure: deep-seated personal gripe]
  • Diets / enabled me to lose all requisite weight and keep it off forever
12 points taelor 08 June 2013 04:36:24AM Permalink

The hidden thought embedded in most discussions of conspiracy theories is this: The world is being controlled by evil people; so, if we can get rid of them, the world can revert to control by good people, and things will be great again. This thought is false. The world is not controlled by any group of people – evil or good – and it will not be. The world is a large, chaotic mess. Those groups which do exert some control are merely larger pieces in the global mix.

-- Paul Rosenberg

12 points Bruno_Coelho 01 June 2013 07:13:25PM Permalink

Students are often quite capable of applying economic analysis to emotionally neutral products such as apples or video games, but then fail to apply the same reasoning to emotionally charged goods to which similar analyses would seem to apply. I make a special effort to introduce concepts with the neutral examples, but then to challenge students to ask wonder why emotionally charged goods should be treated differently.

-- R. Hanson

12 points Osiris 02 June 2013 01:12:42PM Permalink

This is yet another reason why a God that answers prayers is far, far crueler than an indifferent Azathoth. Imagine the weight of guilt that must settle on a person if they prayed for the wrong thing and God answered!

On another note, that girl must not be very picky, if God has to destroy a whole city to keep her a virgin...(please don't blast me for this!)

12 points Kaj_Sotala 02 July 2013 04:28:54AM Permalink

The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.

-- Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism

12 points Zubon 09 July 2013 11:19:17PM Permalink

[As the] percentage of the US population carrying cameras everywhere they go, every waking moment of their lives [has gone from "almost none" to "almost all,"] in the last few years, with very little fanfare, we've conclusively settled the questions of flying saucers, lake monsters, ghosts, and Bigfoot.

xkcd explains that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence .

12 points Qiaochu_Yuan 05 July 2013 11:07:40PM Permalink

This advice really only applies in contexts where the risks of failure substantially outweigh the rewards of success. This isn't true in many contexts; if they're approximately equally balanced, it makes sense to attempt to work slightly above your level of competence in order to improve your skill, and if the rewards of success substantially outweigh the risks of failure it makes sense to be even more risk-loving.

12 points wedrifid 22 July 2013 05:48:25PM Permalink

Anna Salamon (paraphrase)

Do we allow quotes from lesswrong users and CFAR instructors now?

A policy that disallows Robin Hanson quotes but permits quotes from Anna Salamon would seem peculiar to me.

12 points anonym 21 August 2013 02:23:44AM Permalink

The opposite intellectual sin to wanting to derive everything from fundamental physics is holism which makes too much of the fact that everything is ultimately connected to everything else. Sure, but scientific progress is made by finding where the connections are weak enough to allow separate theories.

-- John McCarthy

12 points Estarlio 05 August 2013 02:53:40PM Permalink

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”

  • “Silver Blaze” (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
12 points shminux 19 August 2013 04:36:20PM Permalink

If your parents made you practice the flute for 10,000 hours, and it wasn't your thing, you aren't an expert. You're a victim.

The most important skill involved in success is knowing how and when to switch to a game with better odds for you.

Scott Adams

12 points Eugine_Nier 04 August 2013 06:13:25AM Permalink

So, in a business setting, you’ve got to provide value to your customers so that they pay for the goods and services that you’re providing. Philanthropy is unfortunate in that the people that your customer base is made of oftentimes are the people that are writing the checks to support you. The people that are writing the donation checks are what keep organizations in business oftentimes. The people that are receiving the services, then, are oftentimes not paying for the services, and therefore their voice is not heard. And so within the nonprofit space, we’ve created a system where he/she who tells the best story is the one that’s rewarded. There’s an incentive to push down the stories that are not of positive impact. There’s the incentive to pretend that there are no negative things that happen, there’s the incentive to make sure that our failures are never made public, and there’s the disconnected between who’s paying for the service and who’s receiving the services. When you disconnect those two aspects, you do not have accountability that acts in the best interest of the people who are receiving what we are all trying to do, which is just to help in places of great need.

Peter Greer

12 points KnaveOfAllTrades 05 August 2013 11:31:57AM Permalink

I sometimes find that telling my Inner Lazy that it can decide—after I've done the first one—between whether to continue a series of tasks or to stop and be Lazy gets me to do the whole series of tasks. Despite having noticed explicitly that in practice this 'decision delay strategy' leads to the whole series getting done, it still works, and rather seems like tricking my Inner Lazy to transition into/hand the reins over to into my Inner Agent.

12 points jsbennett86 14 September 2013 09:41:19PM Permalink

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

12 points shminux 05 September 2013 09:15:14PM Permalink

Examples?

12 points Desrtopa 12 September 2013 02:18:57PM Permalink

If you ignore differences in probability of outcome, you'll end up conflating arguments of enormously difficult meaningful content. For instance, both of the above also have the same structure as

Aw, you broke your leg? Well, who told you to jump off the roof of a three story building?

That an argument have the same structure need not imply that they be equally valid, if the implications of the premises are different.

Getting raped may be a possible consequence of walking into a room with a friend without a means to defend oneself, but it's by no means a probable consequence, and we have to weigh risks against the limitations precautions impose on us. If the odds of rape in that circumstance were, say, a predictable eighty percent, then for all that the advice pattern matches to the widely condemned act of "victim shaming," walking into the room without a means of self defense was a bad idea (disregarding for the sake of an argument of course everything that led to that risk arising in the first place.)

12 points RolfAndreassen 03 October 2013 03:45:33PM Permalink

While this is true, it's often the case that you have to start by collecting the isolated facts, just as you'd start building a house by buying some number of bricks.

12 points Daniel_Burfoot 06 October 2013 05:58:01PM Permalink

What strikes me most about this quote is how well Stephenson understands the psychology of his audience.

12 points wadavis 03 October 2013 10:50:21PM Permalink

...I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

Abraham Lincoln, Letter to Horace Greeley

12 points ShardPhoenix 06 October 2013 01:25:35AM Permalink

The interesting part of Moore's Law is the fact that it's even possible. If there was a Moore's Law for the speed of motor vehicles it would soon fail regardless of how hard anyone tried to make it true.

12 points Mestroyer 11 November 2013 09:43:38PM Permalink

I was once at a meetup, and there were some people there new to LessWrong. After listening to a philosophical argument between two long-time meetup group members, where they agreed on a conclusion that was somewhere between their original positions, a newcomer said "sounds like a good compromise," to which one of the old-comers (?) said "but that has nothing to do with whether it's true... in fact now that you point that out I'm suspicious of it."

Later in the meetup, an argument ended with another conclusion that sounded like a compromise. I pointed it out. One of the arguers was horrified to agree with me that compromising was exactly what he was doing.

Is this actually a failure mode though, if you only "compromise" with people you respect intellectually? In retrospect, this sounds kind of like an approximation to Aumann agreement.

12 points Eugine_Nier 02 November 2013 10:58:12PM Permalink

Someone I know at TAC opined that everyone knows this stuff, and talking about it is just mean. I think he is mistaken: you have to state important facts every so often, or nobody knows them anymore.

West Hunter

12 points RichardKennaway 03 November 2013 08:30:39AM Permalink

Would experimenting on little girls actually help that much?

...

The answer is not obviously biased towards "experiment on little girls.". In fact, I'd say it's still biased towards "experiment on mice."

So your answer is that in fact it would not work. That is a reasonable response to an outrageous hypothetical. Yet James A. Donald suggested a realistic scenario, and beside it, the arguments you come up with look rather weak.

Would experimenting on little girls actually help that much? Also consider that many people consider a child's life more valuable than an adult one

Given the millions killed by malaria and at most thousands of experimental subjects, it takes a heavy thumb on the scales of this argument to make the utilitarian calculation come out against.

...evade legal problems and deal with psychological costs...

This is a get-out-of-utilitarianism-free card. A real utilitarian simply chooses the action of maximum utility. He would only pay a psychological cost for not doing that. When all are utilitarians the laws will also be utilitarian, and an evaluation of utility will be the sole criterion applied by the courts.

You are not a utilitarian. Neither is anyone else. This is why there would be psychological costs and why there are legal obstacles. You feel obliged to pretend to be a utilitarian, so you justify your non-utilitarian repugnance by putting it into the utilitarian scales.

caring for little humans is significantly more expensive then caring for little mice

But not any more expensive than caring for chimpanzees. Where, of course, "care for" does not mean "care for", but means "keep sufficiently alive for experimental purposes".

This looks like motivated reasoning. The motivation, to not torture little children, is admirable. But it is misapplied.

Morality isn't like physics

Can you expand on what you see as the differences?

12 points SaidAchmiz 05 November 2013 11:38:26PM Permalink

I upvoted this comment, but I want to add an important caveat. Whether, and how much, you trust your own judgment over that of an expert should depend at least in part on the degree to which you think your situation is unusual.

The IT guy wants you to shut up and go away, but (if in fact he is an expert and not a trained monkey reading a script) he's not going to spout random nonsense at you just to get you to leave. He's going to tell you things relevant to what is, in his experience, the usual situation.

Consider well whether you're sure your problem is some special snowflake. The IT guy has seen a lot of issues. Sometimes he can, before you finish your first sentence, know exactly what your problem is and how to fix it, and if he sounds bored when he tells you "just reboot it", that doesn't mean that he's wrong. If it costs you little, try his advice first.

12 points Adele_L 05 November 2013 02:55:20AM Permalink

No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

I've counted 7 from you.

12 points philh 02 December 2013 03:43:57PM Permalink

He had predicted modern air warfare in surprisingly accurate detail—with its paratroopers and its strafing and bombing.

Not really relevant, but this seems like an overstatement. Paratroopers and bombing I can see, but strafing doesn't seem to be mentioned, and I'm not aware that using airborne grapples to overturn ships has ever happened (my understanding is that the weight ratios wouldn't cooperate).

He also seems to be predicting that only one side in any given conflict will have airships, and assuming that everyone else will just keep doing what they were doing before instead of developing strategies and technologies to defend against this new threat.

12 points Vaniver 10 December 2013 12:18:00AM Permalink

Why, because I cannot help feeling that you are now saying what is not quite consistent or accordant with what you were saying at first about rhetoric. And I am afraid to point this out to you, lest you should think that I have some animosity against you, and that I speak, not for the sake of discovering the truth, but from jealousy of you.

Now if you are one of my sort, I should like to cross-examine you, but if not I will let you alone. And what is my sort? you will ask. I am one of those who are very willing to be refuted if I say anything which is not true, and very willing to refute any one else who says what is not true, and quite as ready to be refuted as to refute-I for I hold that this is the greater gain of the two, just as the gain is greater of being cured of a very great evil than of curing another.

--Socrates in Gorgias (Paragraph break mine, to make it slightly less of a wall of text. This has shown up before, in a somewhat different form.)

12 points Eugine_Nier 04 December 2013 06:44:34AM Permalink

Interestingly, advertiser, lawyers, and financial traders all have in common that they are agents who play zero-sum or almost zero-sum games on behalf of someone.

Not nearly as much as you think, the game is in a sense locally zero sum, but it greatly benefits the wider system if the right person wins. Hint: consider what would happen if court cases or the resource allocation problems implicit in stock trading were decided by coin flips.

Also contrast with warriors, they really do engage in almost zero-sum games on behalf of someone else, and their game is much less optimized to increase the odds of the right side wining, and yet they're generally considered valiant heroes. The reason being that they were necessary even in the tribal period, so our instincts have evolved to take them into account.

12 points Stabilizer 14 January 2014 08:33:01PM Permalink

As we saw, the E1A team [at Fermilab] found for some time that there were no neutral currents---they wrote letters saying so, even drafting a paper to that effect. By late 1973 they had a great deal riding on that claim. A consensus that neutral currents did not exist would have vindicated their earlier caution; they would have refuted CERN and denied the Europeans priority. For all these reasons it is stunning to reread Cline’s [a leading member of E1A] memorandum of 10 December 1973 that began with the simple statement, “At present, I do not see how to make this effect go away.” With those words Cline gave up his career-long commitment to the nonexistence of neutral currents. “Interest” had to bow to the linked assemblage of ideas and empirical results that rendered the old beliefs untenable, even if they were still “logically possible”.

[...]

Microphysical phenomena [...] are not simply observed; they are mediated by layers of experience, theory and causal stories that link background effects to their tests. But the mediated quality of effects and entities does not necessarily make them pliable; experimental conclusions have a stubbornness not easily canceled by theory change. And it is this solidity in the face of altering conditions that impresses the experimenters themselves---even when theorists dissent.

-Peter Galison, How Experiments End.

A major concept he introduces in this chapter is the stubbornness of empirical reality.

12 points TheAncientGeek 06 January 2014 08:49:52PM Permalink

"Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also how to unknow." Sir Richard Francis Burton.

12 points Mestroyer 23 January 2014 10:34:31PM Permalink

Probably written in the sense: "If you were really strong of mind, you'd will yourself into believing because I just threw an infinity into your expected value calculations", and upvoted in the sense: "Atheism is evidence of strength of mind, but it's become too common to serve as a really good test." (I know I've heard this idea on LessWrong before, I can't remember where though).

12 points RichardKennaway 08 January 2014 09:38:22AM Permalink

Solve the halting problem.

12 points Vaniver 05 January 2014 03:46:08PM Permalink

Hmmm. This looks almost identical to an anecdote involving Wittgenstein and Malcolm (among other places, repeated here), with the names and nationalities changed. Any idea which is the original?

12 points RichardKennaway 03 February 2014 01:01:54PM Permalink

I find it rather unlikely that he ever said that. Google turns up only unattributed repetitions.

Wikipedia and Wikiquote require quotes to be attributed using reliable sources. I think the rationality quotes threads should adopt the same standard.

12 points Jayson_Virissimo 20 March 2014 08:31:28PM Permalink

For men imagine that their reason governs words, while, in fact, words react upon the understanding; and this has rendered philosophy and the sciences sophistical and inactive. Words are generally formed in a popular sense, and define things by those broad lines which are most obvious to the vulgar mind; but when a more acute understanding or more diligent observation is anxious to vary those lines, and to adapt them more accurately to nature, words oppose it. Hence the great and solemn disputes of learned men often terminate in controversies about words and names...

-- Francis Bacon, Novum Organum

12 points Kaj_Sotala 06 March 2014 11:00:11PM Permalink

The second is a straw man argument, and given that this is CS Lewis putting words in the mouth of Satan, I read this as the straw man argument.

That sounds to me like you're assuming that Lewis wrote the book so that he could put the devil to say strawmannish things, in order to mock the devil. Which is not the case at all - the demon writing the letters is much more similar to MoR!Quirrel, displaying a degree of rationality-mixed-with-cynicism which it uses to point out ways by which the lives of humans can be made miserable, or by which humans make their own lives miserable. Much of it can be read as a treatise on various biases and cognitive mistakes to avoid, made more compelling by them being explained by someone who wants those mistakes to be exploited for actively harming people.

12 points Dagon 17 April 2014 03:39:25PM Permalink

But understanding human limitations does not mean we can overcome them. It only means we can’t pretend they don’t exist. It should point us toward humility, not hubris.

Yuval Levin in the National Review

12 points lukeprog 09 April 2014 02:02:46AM Permalink

There is nothing that can be said by mathematical symbols and relations which cannot also be said by words. The converse, however, is false. Much that can be and is said by words cannot be put into equations — because it is nonsense.

Clifford Truesdell

12 points Baughn 02 April 2014 09:09:08PM Permalink

Well - law is, in a strict sense, entirely about convincing other humans that your interpretation is correct.

Whether or not it actually is correct in a formal sense is entirely screened off by that prime requirement, and so you probably shouldn't be surprised that all methods used by humans to convince other humans, in the absence of absolute truth, are applied. :)

12 points Torello 04 May 2014 04:25:15AM Permalink

Every 100 million years or so, an asteroid or comet the size of a mountain smashes into the earth, killing nearly everything that lives. If ever we needed proof of Nature’s indifference to the welfare of complex organisms such as ourselves, there it is. The history of life on this planet has been one of merciless destruction and blind, lurching renewal.

Sam Harris, Mother Nature is Not Our Friend, in response to the Edge Annual Question 2008

http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/the-edge-annual-question-20081#sthash.IBMyMOQN.dpuf

12 points David_Gerard 06 May 2014 08:10:00AM Permalink

The joke was that this is precisely what a liberal arts degree was meant to be; the main problem is that liberal arts degrees haven't kept up with the times.

12 points TobyBartels 12 May 2014 02:57:38AM Permalink

Don't just tell me what you'd like to be true.

This is from Greg Egan's 1999 novel Teranesia; since there are no hits for ‘Teranesia’ in the Google custom search, I'm inferring that it hasn't been posted before.

Here's a little background. This is a spoiler for some events early in the novel, but it is early; it's not a spoiler for the really big stuff (not even in this chapter). So Prabir lives alone with his father (‘Baba’) and mother (and baby sister Madhusree who is not in this scene), and their garden has been sown with mines for some very interesting reasons that needn't concern us, and Baba has discovered this by being blown up by one. But he's still alive, so mother and Prabir have laid a ladder atop some boxes across the garden, and she's crawled along the ladder to rescue Baba without setting off more mines. But this is harder than anticipated.

She turned to Prabir. “I'm going to try sitting down, so I can get Baba on to the ladder. But then I might not be able to stand up with him, to carry him. If I leave him on the ladder and walk back to my end, do you think the two of us could carry the ladder to the side of the garden with Baba on it—like a stretcher?”

Prabir replied instantly, “Yes, we can do it.”

His mother looked away, angry for a moment. She said, “I want you to think about it. Don't just tell me what you'd like to be true.”

Chastened, Prabir obeyed her. Half his father's weight. More than twice as much as Madhusree's. He believed he was strong enough. But if he was fooling himself, and dropped the ladder …

He said, “I'm not sure how far I could carry him without resting. But I could slide the crate along the ground with me—kick it along with one foot. Then if I had to stop, I could rest the ladder on it.”

His mother considered this. “All right. That's what we'll do.” She shot him a half-smile, shorthand for all the reassuring words that would have taken too long to speak.

(taken from the American hardback edition, pages 5051)

[Edit: grammar in the text written by me]

12 points EHeller 04 June 2014 01:48:46AM Permalink

At private companies the bureaucracy is constrained by market pressures

I disagree- you'd be amazed how inefficient you can be and still be profitable. Lots of very large companies are being strangled by their bureaucracy even while remaining at least somewhat profitable (generally the existence of a huge company is all-in-itself a barrier to entry for competitors). I've worked for a surprising number of companies that have the basic problem of "I used to be very profitable, but now I find I'm slightly less profitable despite selling more products at higher margins." Even worse, I've seen attempts to solve the problem derailed by the same management apparatus.

A former boss was fond of blaming MBAs. He had a saying something along the lines of- the core problem with MBAs is the idea that you can good at "business" without being good at any particular business. MBAs march in, say "we need to quantify these decisions" and add a ton of process (which invites the managers in). A decade later, they notice that despite generally better conditions they aren't as profitable, they higher some big data consultants to come in and we say things like "you are spending $x+100 dollars to better quantify decisions that are only worth $x, and thats not even counting all the time you waste for all the paperwork that the process requires."

12 points wedrifid 19 July 2014 01:54:40AM Permalink

The immediately preceding paragraph:

People wrongly accused of murder will have the charges dropped if the victim walks in the courtroom and testifies that it didn't happen. Accused child molesters get convicted even when the victim says that it didn't happen.

This is true. I hope the implied claim is "either people think differently about child molestation accusations than murder accusations OR necromancy is not possible".

12 points Jayson_Virissimo 16 July 2014 08:21:17PM Permalink

What is the first business of one who practices philosophy? To get rid of self-conceit. For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows.

-- Epictetus, Discourses

12 points Stabilizer 07 July 2014 02:09:21AM Permalink

The distinction between precision and accuracy is one of the most useful distinctions I've learnt.

If your goal is to get at the truth, then accuracy is always the primary goal, and precision secondary. Indeed, it is quite dangerous to aim for precision first. This was also captured by Knuth, "premature optimization is the root of all evil."

Unfortunately, most people are convinced more easily by precision than by accuracy. Politicians and false prophets often employ this trick. Precision reflects confidence. Also, it is trivial to very whether a statement is precise; but incredibly difficult to verify if it is accurate.

12 points EGarrett 20 July 2014 06:16:31PM Permalink

"One of the most important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand described as 'that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you're right.' If you don't have that, if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide." -Saul Alinsky

12 points RichardKennaway 06 July 2014 11:45:08AM Permalink

Ahem.

12 points somervta 17 August 2014 10:25:28AM Permalink

I don't suppose you have a source for the quote? (at this point, my default is to disbelieve any attribution of a quote unknown to me to Einstein)

12 points devas 05 August 2014 10:37:41AM Permalink

This sounds like something from Schelling's strategy of conflict, although I haven't read it

12 points Lumifer 04 September 2014 02:58:43PM Permalink

I speaks to anchoring and evaluating incentives relative to an expected level.

Basically, receiving a raise is seen as a good thing because you are getting more money than a month ago (anchor). But after a while you will be getting the same amount of money as a month ago (the anchor has moved) so there is no cause for joy.

12 points Azathoth123 18 September 2014 05:10:18AM Permalink

Yet none of these sights [of the Scottish Highlands] had power, till a recent period, to attract a single poet or painter from more opulent and more tranquil regions. Indeed, law and police, trade and industry, have done far more than people of romantic dispositions will readily admit, to develope in our minds a sense of the wilder beauties of nature. A traveller must be freed from all apprehension of being murdered or starved before he can be charmed by the bold outlines and rich tints of the hills. He is not likely to be thrown into ecstasies by the abruptness of a precipice from which he is in imminent danger of falling two thousand feet perpendicular; by the boiling waves of a torrent which suddenly whirls away his baggage and forces him to run for his life; by the gloomy grandeur of a pass where he finds a corpse which marauders have just stripped and mangled; or by the screams of those eagles whose next meal may probably be on his own eyes.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, History of England

Frankly, the whole passage Steve Sailer quotes at the link is worth reading.

12 points Zubon 03 September 2014 10:43:35PM Permalink

"You sound awfully sure of yourself, Waterhouse! I wonder if you can get me to feel that same level of confidence."

Waterhouse frowns at the coffee mug. "Well, it's all math," he says. "If the math works, why then you should be sure of yourself. That's the whole point of math."

-- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

12 points Vulture 02 September 2014 04:26:30PM Permalink

People who are often misunderstood: 6% geniuses; 94% garden-variety nonsense-spouters

-- David Malki !

12 points Omegaile 04 September 2014 02:10:30AM Permalink

I know that. People are so lame. Not me though. I am one of the genius ones.

12 points Lumifer 17 October 2014 04:12:43PM Permalink

"You know, esoteric, non-intuitive truths have a certain appeal – once initiated, you’re no longer one of the rubes. Of course, the simplest and most common way of producing an esoteric truth is to just make it up."

West Hunter

12 points James_Miller 14 October 2014 02:42:01PM Permalink

To summarize Twitter and my Facebook feed this morning: “The Ebola virus proves everything I already believed about politics.” You might find this surprising. The Ebola virus is not running for office. It does not have a policy platform, or any campaign white papers on burning issues. It doesn’t even vote. So how could it neatly validate all our preconceived positions on government spending, immigration policy, and the proper role of the state in our health care system? Stranger still: How could it validate them so beautifully on both left and right?

Megan McArdle

12 points Salemicus 09 December 2014 01:58:44PM Permalink

Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense.

Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, Reflections on Exile

12 points LyleN 20 November 2014 02:59:00PM Permalink

With the truth, all given facts harmonize; but with what is false, the truth soon hits a wrong note.

-- Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics, pointing out entangled truths and contagious lies

12 points VAuroch 12 November 2014 08:03:26AM Permalink

I always feel a bit bad for Vizzini. His plan is very well thought-out and sensible; he's just in the entirely wrong genre for those qualities to be remotely relevant to its success.

It doesn't help that up to that point, the genre looks like one where it should work. Obviously the character's timeline could make it more obvious, but from ours it isn't.

12 points Lumifer 03 November 2014 05:30:26PM Permalink

Scepticism is directed not at things, but at claims. And claims about things difficult to measure should face increased scepticism.

11 points steven0461 22 April 2009 01:55:28PM Permalink

There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.

--Daniel Dennett

11 points badger 18 April 2009 11:10:46PM Permalink

We're descended from the indignant, passionate tellers of half truths who in order to convince others, simultaneously convinved themselves. Over generations success had winnowed us out, and with success came our defect, carved deep in the genes like ruts in a cart track—when it didn't suit us we couldn't agree on what was in front of us. Believing is seeing. That's why there are divorces, border disputes and wars, and why this statue of the Virgin Mary weeps blood and that one of Ganesh drinks milk. And that was why metaphysics and scince were such courageous enterprises, such startling inventions, bigger than the wheel, bigger than agriculture, human artifacts set right against the grain of human nature.

-- Ian McEwan, Enduring Love (1998, p. 181)

11 points Rune 18 April 2009 06:31:26PM Permalink

"People will then often say, 'But surely it's better to remain an Agnostic just in case?' This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I've been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would choose not to worship him anyway.)" -- Douglas Adams

11 points dreeves 18 April 2009 08:07:10PM Permalink

"They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -- Carl Sagan

11 points scav 20 May 2009 12:12:24PM Permalink

"The trouble with trying to be more stupid than you really are is that you very often succeed" - C.S.Lewis The Magician's Nephew

11 points HughRistik 15 June 2009 06:38:28PM Permalink

It's easy to put down the shallow concerns of life, but in a way they are what life is about. Deeper concerns that don't connect in any way to economic wealth, social status, physical pleasure, etc., are not really deep but pointless. The shallow concerns all pertain to the lowest common denominator of human life because they really are the basic fabric of everyone's life. They're concerns that everyone shares and that everyone can easily understand.

—Ben Kovitz, Shallowness

11 points jscn 16 June 2009 04:21:08AM Permalink

It's a wonderful thing to be clever, and you should never think otherwise, and you should never stop being that way. But what you learn, as you get older, is that there are a few million other people in the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever you do with your life will certainly be lost - swallowed up in the ocean - unless you are doing it with like-minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward. That is why the world is divided into tribes.

-- Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age

I neglected to record from which character the quote came.

11 points NancyLebovitz 04 July 2009 02:44:55PM Permalink

By Ta Nehisi Coates

But 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.

11 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 July 2009 10:05:57PM Permalink

Defects of empirical knowledge have less to do with the ways we go wrong in philosophy than defects of character do: such things as the simple inability to shut up; determination to be thought deep; hunger for power; fear, especially the fear of an indifferent universe.

-- David Stove, What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts

11 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 July 2009 10:09:35PM Permalink

All truth is not, indeed, of equal importance; but if little violations are allowed, every violation will in time be thought little.

-- Samuel Johnson

11 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 July 2009 11:33:00PM Permalink

Surely, to label a statement "vague" is a higher order of insult than to call it "wrong". Newton was wrong but at least he was not vague.

11 points Cyan 06 August 2009 05:29:24PM Permalink

"The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning. ... Perception is inference."[emphasis added]

- Atul Gawande

11 points XFrequentist 06 August 2009 03:25:20AM Permalink

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.

-- Richard Feynman The Character of Physical Law

11 points thomblake 14 August 2009 03:09:11PM Permalink

Albert grunted. "Do you know what happens to lads who ask too many questions?"

Mort thought for a moment.

"No," he said eventually, "what?"

There was silence.

Then Albert straightened up and said, "Damned if I know. Probably they get answers, and serve 'em right."

-Terry Pratchett, Mort

11 points djcb 06 August 2009 05:15:45PM Permalink

There is no opinion so absurd that some philosopher will not express it.

-- Marcus Tullius Cicero

[ while in general I value philosophy, there is also much nonsense and, especially, little progress ]

11 points Yvain 06 August 2009 05:57:38AM Permalink

[Mathematical methods of inference] literally have no content; long division can calculate miles per gallon, or it can calculate income per capita. The statistical tools of experimental psychology were borrowed from agronomy, where they were invented to gauge the effects of different fertilizers on crop yields. The tools work just fine in psychology, even though, as one psychological statistician wrote, "we do not deal in manure, at least not knowingly."

-- Steven Pinker, How The Mind Works

11 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 September 2009 06:33:17AM Permalink

I don't believe in the supernetural. There can be knowledge for which we do not possess the Google keywords, but to speak of knowledge that cannot be Googled even in principle is nonsense.

11 points childofbaud 25 October 2009 06:35:23PM Permalink

A formula is worth a thousand pictures.

—Edsger Dijkstra

11 points anonym 24 October 2009 10:25:46PM Permalink

When I became convinced that the Universe is natural — that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light, and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world — not even in infinite space. I was free — free to think, to express my thoughts — free to live to my own ideal — free to live for myself and those I loved — free to use all my faculties, all my senses — free to spread imagination’s wings — free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope — free to judge and determine for myself — free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the “inspired” books that savages have produced, and all the barbarous legends of the past — free from the popes and priests — free from all the “called” and “set apart” — free from sanctified mistakes and holy lies — free from the fear of eternal pain — free from the winged monsters of the night — free from devils, ghosts, and gods. For the first time I was free. There were no prohibited places in all the realms of thought — no air, no space, where fancy could not spread her painted wings — no chains for my limbs — no lashes for my back — no fires for my flesh — no master’s frown or threat — no following another’s steps — no need to bow, or cringe, or crawl, or utter lying words. I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds.

And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave for the liberty of hand and brain — for the freedom of labor and thought — to those who fell in the fierce fields of war, to those who died in dungeons bound with chains — to those who proudly mounted scaffold’s stairs — to those whose bones were crushed, whose flesh was scarred and torn — to those by fire consumed — to all the wise, the good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons of men. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still.

— Robert G. Ingersoll

11 points ABranco 24 October 2009 03:59:33AM Permalink

Never underestimate the difficulty of changing false beliefs by facts. —Harvard economist Henry Rosovsky

11 points spriteless 23 October 2009 10:29:00PM Permalink

Since all things related to akrasia and self motivation are relevant here:

"As a final incentive before giving up a difficult task, try to imagine it successfully accomplished by someone you violently dislike." -K. Zenios

11 points loqi 22 October 2009 05:25:32PM Permalink

That's a terrible quote. Being wrong is the best possible outcome of an argument, as it's the one with the highest expected knowledge gain (unless you're a hardcore altruist who doesn't value their own knowledge differently from anyone else's).

11 points wedrifid 27 October 2009 12:31:13AM Permalink

That way of looking at it is attractive but I don't think it is accurate. Most of religion is the outcome of that extra 10% and definitely part of what we identify as 'person'. Rejecting religion, and other equivalent institutions is an act of rebellion of 2% against the other 8%.

11 points anonym 30 November 2009 02:03:46AM Permalink

... by natural selection our mind has adapted itself to the conditions of the external world. It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

— Henri Poincaré

11 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 January 2010 12:00:43AM Permalink

Nobody wants to die. They just want the pain to stop.

-- Tetragrammaton

11 points ciphergoth 08 January 2010 11:16:17AM Permalink

If you're doing business with a religious son-of-a-bitch, get it in writing. His word isn't worth shit. Not with the good lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.

-- William S Burroughs, Words of Advice for Young People

11 points ShardPhoenix 02 February 2010 12:59:24AM Permalink

Presumably not per unit exposure, which is the relevant measure when you're near a pig or shark. If he's talking about abstract worry, then he might have a point.

11 points gregconen 01 February 2010 03:53:24PM Permalink

I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.

Johannes Kepler

11 points RichardKennaway 01 February 2010 10:19:31AM Permalink

"People are not complicated. People are really very simple. What makes them appear complicated is our continual insistence on interpreting their behavior instead of discovering their goals."

-- Bruce Gregory

11 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 February 2010 07:49:03PM Permalink

To take advantage of professional specialization, gains from trade, capital infrastructure, comparative advantage, and economies of scale, the way grownups do it when they actually care, I'd say that the activist is the one who pays someone else to clean up the river.

11 points RichardKennaway 01 March 2010 08:56:04PM Permalink

"Death is the most terrible of all things; for it is the end, and nothing is thought to be any longer either good or bad for the dead."

-- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

The halt can manage a horse,

the handless a flock,

The deaf be a doughty fighter,

To be blind is better than to burn on a pyre:

There is nothing the dead can do.

-- Havamal

11 points Bindbreaker 01 March 2010 08:07:19PM Permalink

"One thousand five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was flat... and fifteen minutes ago, you knew people were alone on this planet. Think about what you'll know tomorrow." -- Agent K, "Men in Black"

11 points MrHen 02 March 2010 08:33:13PM Permalink

She was talking to students at Harvard.

11 points djcb 01 May 2010 01:56:11PM Permalink

Men ought to know that from nothing else but the brain comes joy, delights, laughter, and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency, and lamentations. And by this, in an especial manner, we acquire wisdom and knowledge, and see and hear and know what are foul and what are fair, what are bad and what are good, what are sweet, and what are unsavory. ... And by the same organ we become mad and delirious, and fears and terrors assail us. ... All these things we endure from the brain. ...In these ways I am of the opinion that the brain exercises the greatest power in the man.

-- Hippocrates, On the sacred disease (ca. 4th century BCE).

[ In this and other of his writings, Hippocrates shows such an incredible early sense for rationality and against superstition that was only rarely seen in the next 2000 after that -- and in addition, he was not just a armchair philosopher, he actually put these things is practice. So, hats off for Hippocrates, even when his medicine was not without faults of course...]

11 points Rain 01 May 2010 02:22:14PM Permalink

As a species we're fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion?

-- Ollie, The Mist, 2007

11 points Matt_Duing 02 June 2010 04:15:13AM Permalink

"Sanity is conforming your thoughts to reality. Conforming reality to your thoughts is creativity."

-- Unknown

11 points RichardKennaway 01 June 2010 07:56:25PM Permalink

Despite the fact that you arrived in this world with nothing but an unborn Buddha-mind, your partiality for yourselves now makes you want to have things move in your own way. You lose your temper, become contentious, and then you think, "I haven't lost my temper. That fellow won't listen to me. By being so unreasonable he has made me lose it." And so you fix belligerently on his words and end up transforming the valuable Buddha-mind into a fighting spirit. By stewing over this unimportant matter, making the thoughts churn over and over in your mind, you may finally get your way, but then you fail in your ignorance to realize that it was meaningless for you to concern yourself over such a matter.

From The Dharma Talks of Zen Master Bankei, translated by Norman Waddell. Quoted by Torkel Franzén as a perfect description of Usenet flamewars.

11 points RichardKennaway 02 July 2010 06:59:22AM Permalink

A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than yesterday.

Jonathan Swift (also attributed to Pope)

I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.

Abraham Lincoln

11 points NancyLebovitz 02 July 2010 05:16:48PM Permalink

Shame leads to a variant on guessing the teacher's password-- an effort to not piss people off, without asking them what might be problematic. After all, you're supposed to know better than to make that mistake.

11 points djcb 03 August 2010 09:33:48PM Permalink

Superstition produces bad luck

-- Anonymous

11 points DSimon 03 August 2010 03:42:14PM Permalink

And "NihilCredo" isn't a spooky adopted name? :-)

11 points steven0461 06 August 2010 12:18:44AM Permalink

At the Mountains of Sanity

11 points CronoDAS 01 September 2010 09:38:01AM Permalink

That seems like the extreme case of "you don't really understand something until you can explain it to somebody else", which I'm sure somebody other than me must have said a long time ago.

11 points lionhearted 01 September 2010 10:44:55AM Permalink

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

-- Peter Drucker

11 points wedrifid 05 October 2010 06:57:04PM Permalink

I'd be concerned that this phrasing would raise more sociopaths... because that's how they think about morality.

Sociopaths and mature adults share that conception. Both of these groups of people tend to have also discovered that it is usually not in their best interest to discuss the subject with people who do not share their maturity or sociopathic nature respectively.

The reason a sociopath must arrive at the insight Powers proposes we teach earlier is that they cannot survive without it. Where a normal individual can survive (but not thrive) with a naive morality a sociopath cannot rely on the training wheels of guilt or shame to protect them from the most vicious players in the game before they work things out.

I predict that Powers' curriculum would produce no more sociopaths, make those sociopaths that are inevitable do less damage and result in a whole heap less burnt out, anti-social (or no longer pro-social) idealists.

11 points Nisan 06 October 2010 03:59:28AM Permalink

This sounds like a bad idea.

11 points sketerpot 03 November 2010 08:36:16PM Permalink

You're right, and I think that the reason it's so hard to make that point tactfully is because of how scary it is. If we go down that line of thought honestly, we can imagine ourselves firing up the ovens, or dragging manacled people into the belly of a slave ship, and feeling good about it. This is not a comfortable idea.

But there's another, more hopeful side to this. As MartinB points out, it's possible to understand how such monstrous acts feel to the people committing them, and train yourself to avoid making the same mistakes. This is a problem we can actually attack, as long as we can accept that our own thoughts are fallible.

(On a lighter note: how many people here regularly catch themselves using fallacious logic, and quickly correct their own thoughts? I would hope that the answer is "everyone", or at least "almost everyone". If you do this, then it shows that you're already being significantly less wrong, and it should give a fair amount of protection against crazy murderous ideologies.)

11 points NihilCredo 04 November 2010 09:08:04PM Permalink

I shared this on another website and got this comment:

Heh, that's one way to pass the Turing Test. Don't make your bot smarter, make it seek out dumb people.

11 points ata 28 December 2010 11:38:26PM Permalink

It's amazing how much "mature wisdom" resembles being too tired.

— Lazarus Long (in Time Enough For Love by Robert Heinlein)

11 points topynate 03 December 2010 06:20:06AM Permalink

"Empty arguments with words cannot (in any way) compare with a test which will show practical results."

Ma Jun, inventor or reinventor of the South Pointing Chariot and the differential gear.

11 points billswift 03 December 2010 05:15:07AM Permalink

"When in total ignorance, try anything and you will be less ignorant."

-- G.Harry Stine, A Matter of Metalaw

11 points David_Gerard 11 December 2010 09:30:54PM Permalink

Witching was turning out to be mostly hard work and really short on magic of the zap!-glingle-glingle-glingle variety. There was no school and nothing that was exactly like a lesson. But it wasn’t wise to try to learn witching all by yourself, especially if you had a natural talent. If you got it wrong, you could go from ignorant to cackling in a week ...

When you got right down to it, it was all about cackling. No one ever talked about this, though. Witches said things like “You can never be too old, too skinny, or too warty,” but they never mentioned the cackling. Not properly. They watched out for it, though, all the time.

It was all too easy to become a cackler. Most witches lived by themselves (cat optional) and might go for weeks without ever seeing another witch. In those times when people hated witches, they were often accused of talking to their cats. Of course they talked to their cats. After three weeks without an intelligent conversation that wasn’t about cows, you’d talk to the wall. And that was an early sign of cackling.

“Cackling,” to a witch, didn’t just mean nasty laughter. It meant your mind drifting away from its anchor. It meant you losing your grip. It meant loneliness and hard work and responsibility and other people’s problems driving you crazy a little bit at a time, each bit so small that you’d hardly notice it, until you thought that it was normal to stop washing and wear a kettle on your head. It meant you thinking that the fact you knew more than anyone else in your village made you better than them. It meant thinking that right and wrong were negotiable. And, in the end, it meant you “going to the dark,” as the witches said. That was a bad road. At the end of that road were poisoned spinning wheels and gingerbread cottages.

What stopped this was the habit of visiting. Witches visited other witches all the time, sometimes traveling quite a long way for a cup of tea and a bun. Partly this was for gossip, of course, because witches love gossip, especially if it’s more exciting than truthful. But mostly it was to keep an eye on one another.

Today Tiffany was visiting Granny Weatherwax, who was in the opinion of most witches (including Granny herself) the most powerful witch in the mountains. It was all very polite. No one said, “Not gone bats, then?” or “Certainly not! I’m as sharp as a spoon!” They didn’t need to. They understood what it was all about, so they talked of other things. But when she was in a mood, Granny Weatherwax could be hard work.

  • Pratchett, "Wintersmith"
11 points ata 15 December 2010 05:28:28PM Permalink

It isn't racist, it's realistic. If an entity thinks with something that we don't even call a brain, we shouldn't trust it because we have no way of knowing its motivations.

Yes, but it says "never trust", not "don't trust by default". It should be possible for non-brain-based beings to demonstrate their trustworthiness.

Edit: Also, you can't spell "REALISTIC" without "RACIST LIE". Proof by anagram. So there.

11 points AndySimpson 04 January 2011 07:01:56PM Permalink

"...natural selection built the brain to survive in the world and only incidentally to understand it at a depth greater than is needed to survive. The proper task of scientists is to diagnose and correct the misalignment." -- E. O. Wilson

11 points JohannesDahlstrom 04 January 2011 09:23:32PM Permalink

This is how Vetinari thinks, his soul exulted. Plans can break down. You cannot plan the future. Only presumptuous fools plan. The wise man steers.

—Terry Pratchett, Making Money

Although thought by a madman in the book, there seems to be truth in this quote. People often seem to think of the future as a coherent, specific story not unlike the one woven by the brain from the past events. Unpleasant surprises happen when the real events inevitably deviate from those imagined.

11 points MichaelGR 03 January 2011 09:32:45PM Permalink

Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.

-Walter Lippmann

11 points Larks 03 January 2011 07:57:17PM Permalink

Evolution has been optimising humans to learn to walk as babies; it hasn't selected (directly, or anywhere near as strongly) for ability to do Topology.

11 points jimrandomh 02 February 2011 04:06:04AM Permalink

Will_Newsome pointed out the caveat that it's only good to admit errors when actually in error. I'd add a second caveat, which is that most of the benefit from admitting an error is in the lessons learnt by retracing steps and finding where they went wrong. Each error has a specific cause - a doubt not investigated, a piece of evidence given too much or too little weight, or a bias triggered. I try to make myself stronger by identifying those causes, concretely envisioning what I should have done differently, and thinking of the reference classes where the same mistake might happen in the future.

11 points gwern 07 February 2011 12:48:39AM Permalink

"Nor let him [the ruler] ever believe that a state can always make safe choices; on the contrary, let him think that he must make only doubtful ones; because this is in the order of things, that one never tries to avoid one inconvenience without incurring another; but prudence consists of knowing how to recognize the kinds of inconveniences, and to take the least sad for good."

--Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

11 points RobinZ 02 February 2011 01:47:55AM Permalink

I think such a thread should include an expectation of deconstruction - "this is wrong and this is why".

11 points shokwave 02 February 2011 09:48:37AM Permalink

Difficult to pin down within a range of trivial-to-judge positions.

11 points gwern 02 February 2011 04:56:31AM Permalink

What is unreasonable about the analogy? All three are claims about apparently unfalsifiable super-natural entities with no normal epistemological support, and many arguments for God would seem to work as well for other such entities. (As Anselm's contemporary pointed out, his ontological argument served as well to prove the existence of perfect demons or islands or fairies.)

If you disagree, a read of the paper might be in order so you don't have to resort to accusations of the Dark Arts.

11 points kboon 03 February 2011 10:46:55AM Permalink

We've all bought and enjoyed books called 'Optical Illusions'. We all love optical illusions. But that's not what they should call the book. They should call them 'Brain Failures'. Because that what it is: a complete failure of human perception. All it takes is a few clever sketches and our brains can't figure it out.

  • Neil deGrasse Tyson

Transcribed from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAD25s53wmE

11 points MartinB 04 February 2011 05:41:33AM Permalink

I would like to get rid of one or two of them. Its painfull to see how often really inevitable things get confused with those that could at least in theory be dealt with.

11 points Perplexed 03 February 2011 02:18:09PM Permalink

surely quotes from his fiction are kosher.

I'm happy to see gems from HPMOR done up in needlepoint and hung on the metaphorical wall of the parlor. But it still smells like trayf! Consider:

Quirrell avoids the ban on quoting himself by attributing the quotation to Eliezer. And he then avoids the ban on quoting Eliezer by pointing out that Eliezer was quoting Quirrell. This is clever and slippery and rabbinical and all that, but it jumps the shark when you realize that Quirrell is not just Eliezer's HPMOR character, he is also probably his LW sock-puppet!

11 points MichaelGR 08 March 2011 06:41:38PM Permalink

Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

  • Mark Twain
11 points danlowlite 04 March 2011 03:06:00PM Permalink

Miracle Max: Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do.

Inigo Montoya: What's that?

Miracle Max: Go through his clothes and look for loose change.

11 points danlowlite 07 March 2011 02:59:01PM Permalink

It would be a miracle.

11 points BillyOblivion 05 March 2011 11:59:29AM Permalink

If it's stupid, but it works, it ain't stupid.

11 points James_K 03 March 2011 04:22:21AM Permalink

I think this quote is especially apposite when your looking at ways of reforming a system. Attributing bad policy outcomes to the perfidy of individuals is generally unhelpful in designing a solution.

11 points billswift 02 March 2011 07:22:47PM Permalink

It is discipline, the rigorous attention to detail, that distinguishes the work of a scholar from that of a dilettante.

Unfortunately I lost the source for this - anybody recognize it? It was from a book I read 12 to 15 years ago, I can't remember any more than that.

11 points Nominull 03 March 2011 05:03:25AM Permalink

Perhaps it will help to know that Andrew Hussie is a webcomic artist, and his webcomic is the golden egg in question?

It's a newcomb-like problem faced by anyone who wants to enjoy anyone else's creative output. People fear creating good things for fear that they will be expected to go on creating them.

11 points Psy-Kosh 09 April 2011 06:29:08AM Permalink

A missile silo disguised as a windmill? A helicopter in an unfortunate position? An odd and inefficient form of rotating radar antenna? A shuttle in launch position? (if one squints, they might think it's a broken windmill with the vanes having fallen off or something)

These are all just off the top of my head. Remember, if we're talking about someone who tends to, when they see a windmill, be unsure whether it's a windmill or an evil giant, there's probably a reasonable chance that they tend to get confused by other objects too, right? :)

11 points Alicorn 05 April 2011 11:42:31PM Permalink

I think the interesting part of the story is that it caused the power crystal dude to shut up about power crystals when he'd previously evinced interest in telling everyone about them. I don't think you could get the same effect for $135 from a lot of, say, missionaries.

11 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 April 2011 05:59:09AM Permalink

I can't see how a small Python script that calculates pi could assign utility to anything. It doesn't replan in a complex way that implies a utility function. It calculates bleedin' pi.

11 points dares 04 April 2011 07:52:14PM Permalink

“In life as in poker, the occasional coup does not necessarily demonstrate skill and superlative performance is not the ability to eliminate chance, but the capacity to deliver good outcomes over and over again. That is how we know Warren Buffett is a skilled investor and Johnny Chan a skilled poker player.” — John Kay, Financial Times

11 points TylerJay 05 April 2011 09:40:03PM Permalink

The north went on forever. Tyrion Lannister knew the maps as well as anyone, but a fortnight on the wild track that passed for the kingsroad up here had brought home the lesson that the map was one thing and the land quite another.

--George R. R. Martin A Game of Thrones

11 points MinibearRex 11 April 2011 04:37:20AM Permalink

I think we should keep some sort op separation between "rationality quotes" and "atheism quotes". You can stretch this to be a rationality quote, but it does require a stretch. Just because a quote argues against the existence of a god doesn't make it particularly rational.

11 points vallinder 02 May 2011 08:11:01PM Permalink

It is quite easy to show, decision-theoretically, that the greatest chance of survival generally belongs to those who have most of their beliefs about things which affect our survival ability true. Philosophy, however, is totally irrelevant to survival from an evolutionary point of view. Natural selection has no way of weeding out veridical intuitions about the basic constitution of matter, for instance, from false ones, because humans have not generally been killed before they can procreate due to having erroneous metaphysical intuitions. Or bluntly put: having a true metaphysical theory does not help you getting laid.

– Staffan Angere, Theory and Reality: Metaphysics as Second Science, p. 17

11 points cousin_it 02 May 2011 07:30:29AM Permalink

It's a mangled quote from Marx: "Freedom is the consciousness of necessity". In the Soviet Union this phrase was a staple of state ideology, and a popular folk mockery of it went like "freedom of speech is the conscious necessity to stay silent".

11 points RichardKennaway 03 June 2011 02:16:06PM Permalink

I see that I've quoted the following twice before within other comment threads, so I think it deserves a place here:

He who would be Pope must think of nothing else.

Usually cited as a Spanish proverb.

11 points beoShaffer 03 June 2011 12:40:04AM Permalink

quoted text The art of concluding from experience and observation consists in evaluating probabilities, in estimating if they are high or numerous enough to constitute proof. This type of calculation is more complicated and more difficult than one might think. It demands a great sagacity generally above the power of common people. The success of charlatans, sorcerors, and alchemists — and all those who abuse public credulity — is founded on errors in this type of calculation.

Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier, Rapport des commissaires chargés par le roi de l'examen du magnétisme animal (1784), as translated in "The Chain of Reason versus the Chain of Thumbs", Bully for Brontosaurus (1991) by Stephen Jay Gould, p. 195, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin

11 points jscn 02 June 2011 12:26:59AM Permalink

The intellect, as a means for the preservation of the individual, unfolds its chief powers in simulation; for this is the means by which the weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves, since they are denied the chance of waging the struggle for existence with horns or the fangs of beasts of prey. In man this art of simulation reaches its peak: here deception, flattering, lying and cheating, talking behind the back, posing, living in borrowed splendor, being masked, the disguise of convention, acting a role before others and before oneself—in short, the constant fluttering around the single flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law that almost nothing is more incomprehensible than how an honest and pure urge for truth could make its appearance among men. They are deeply immersed in illusions and dream images; their eye glides only over the surface of things and sees "forms"; their feeling nowhere lead into truth, but contents itself with the reception of stimuli, playing, as it were, a game of blindman's buff on the backs of things.

Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense

11 points MixedNuts 01 June 2011 03:49:29PM Permalink

This is beautiful, and inspiring. In fact, I predict LW will do better if we have an introductory post consisting of this quote and "That's our goal. Come on in and let's work on that." (would probably cause copyrighty troucle).

It's not a pure illustration, though. Maybe the others thought "Huh, that's just a regular cat. But if I say that the king might ordered me killed in the kind of way people die in Martin books. Better kiss some ass.".

11 points lessdazed 02 September 2011 09:39:41PM Permalink

I agree. The quote wasn't "No man has wit enough to manipulate a fool."

11 points MixedNuts 06 June 2011 03:17:18PM Permalink

When shall we cross ourselves?

Whenever we are about to perform a good deed, or when we see or feel that we might commit a sin.

  • Carlos Gimenez, Barrio (Context: children in a religious institution are answering catechism questions)

This sounds like a great way to prime yourself. Crossing yourself has all the wrong connotations, but a gesture meaning "I choose good." should help in general. (I like the fist-over-heart Battlestar Galactica salute.)

Having a whole set of gestures, along with pithy quotes, should prove even more effective.

11 points Leonhart 06 June 2011 11:08:22PM Permalink

Their insignia was a hand poised with fingers ready to snap.

ETA: Or is that reserved for "I choose whatever they aren't expecting"?

11 points RichardKennaway 03 June 2011 01:00:21PM Permalink

Ick.

What, in this metaphor, corresponds to fidelity and happiness in the way that skepticism corresponds to chastity? Is Santayana's idea that we should search long for The Answer, but having found it, we should turn off our skepticism, stop thinking, and sink into the warm fuzzies of faith? It reminds me of the sea squirt that eats its own brain when it has found a comfortable spot to live and no longer needs it.

11 points Yvain 03 July 2011 11:07:00PM Permalink

"I would not give a farthing for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity."

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes (quoted by Venkatesh Rao; thanks to InquilineKea)

11 points Desrtopa 08 July 2011 11:30:58PM Permalink

That doesn't sound to me like a very honest way of interpreting the quote. It's one thing to laud an appropriate degree of deference to evidence, and another to praise acceptance of a belief on little or no strong evidence.

11 points Morendil 19 August 2011 09:17:17PM Permalink

Mr. Kiku had not made up his mind about the current Secretary, but was not now thinking about him. Instead he was looking over the top-sheet synopsis for Project Cerberus, a power proposal for the research station on Pluto. A reminder light on his desk flashed and he looked up to see the door between his office and that of the Secretary dilate. The Secretary walked in, whistling Take Me Out to the Ball Game; Mr. Kiku did not recognize the tune.

He broke off. "Greetings, Henry. No, don't get up."

Mr. Kiku had not started to get up. "How do you do, Mr. Secretary? What can I do for you?"

"Nothing much, nothing much." He paused by Mr. Kiku's desk and picked up the project folder. "What are you swotting now? Cerberus, eh? Henry, that's an engineering matter. Why should we worry about it?"

"There are aspects," Mr. Kiku answered carefully, "that concern us."

"I suppose so. Budget and so forth." His eye sought the bold-faced line reading: ESTIMATED COST: 3.5 megabucks and 7.4 lives. "What's this? I can't go before the Council and ask them to approve this. It's fantastic."

"The first estimate," Mr. Kiku said evenly, "was over eight megabucks and more than a hundred lives."

"I don't mind the money, but this other. . . You are in effect asking the Council to sign death warrants for seven and fourtenths men: You can't do that, it isn't human. Say, what the deuce is four-tenths of a man anyway? How can you kill a fraction of a man?"

"Mr. Secretary," his subordinate answered patiently, "any project bigger than a schoolyard swing involves probable loss of life. But that hazard factor is low; it means that working on Project Cerberus will be safer, on the average, than staying Earthside. That's my rule of thumb."

"Eh?" The Secretary looked again at the synopsis. "Then why not say so? Put the thing in the best light and so forth?"

"This report is for my eyes. . . for our eyes, only. The report to the Council will emphasize safety precautions and will not include an estimate of deaths-which, after all, is a guess."

"Mmm, 'a guess.' Yes, of course." The Secretary put the report down, seemed to lose interest.

-- R.A. Heinlein, The Star Beast

Related to this previous discussion, in anticipation of when it is revived later.

11 points Tom_Talbot 03 August 2011 12:30:12AM Permalink

The only way to get rich from a get-rich book is to write one.

Brother Ty's seventh law

11 points [deleted] 03 August 2011 05:21:16PM Permalink

I'd very much like to be more patient, humble, energetic, experienced, diversely skilled, productive, motivated, dedicated, disciplined, courageous, self reliant, systematic, efficient, cautious, pragmatic, sociable, polite, forgiving, courteous, cooperative, uninhibited, consistent, generous, expressive, coherent, observant, imaginative, adaptable, witty, inquisitive, gracious, tranquil, impartial, and sincere. Am I missing the intent of the quote?

11 points Unnamed 03 August 2011 08:58:12PM Permalink

Even when errors are only random noise, modeling people as rational is different from modeling people as rational on average with random errors. If people are rational, that implies that someone with a dangerous job has properly taken the risks into account when choosing the job. But if people are rational on average with random errors, then the person who ends up with a dangerous job is probably someone who underestimated/underweighted the risks (which is a case of the winners curse).

11 points jimmy 02 August 2011 11:13:54PM Permalink

Because beauty in design isn't some arbitrary metric different than the good design metric. It's what it feels like when you pattern match to 'good design'.

You might notice your aesthetic tastes in something change once you understand more about their design (I certainly have), and I doubt you'd see so much interest in 'carbon fiber' stickers if carbon fiber weren't associated with strong light high tech stuff.

This 'Art' thing seems to be an obvious counterpoint, but I suspect its just beauty wireheading as a result of goodhearts law.

11 points lessdazed 04 August 2011 09:10:05PM Permalink

I think that often people believe other things that crowd out the true explanation, so in practice it isn't applied correctly to real-world phenomena. Then, perhaps they try to reintegrate everything under a unifying theory of "evolution".

Anthropomorphism, promiscuous teleology, not understanding the level of selection, absolutist ideas about fitness, belief in a certain philosophical type of progress, etc. are culprits.

After all the misconceptions are added, the only work left for evolution is to provide a label for the jumble!

11 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 August 2011 10:28:59PM Permalink

See, there you're just confirming the original quote.

11 points cousin_it 06 September 2011 08:34:05PM Permalink

This is an awesome quote that captures an important truth, the opposite of which is also an important truth :-) If I were choosing a vocation by the way its practicioners look and dress, I would never take up math or programming! And given how many people on LW are non-neurotypical, I probably wouldn't join LW either. The desire to look cool is a legitimate desire that can help you a lot in life, so by all means go join clubs whose members look cool so it rubs off on you, but also don't neglect clubs that can help you in other ways.

11 points cwillu 05 September 2011 01:43:36AM Permalink

[...] Often I find that the best way to come up with new results is to find someone who's saying something that seems clearly, manifestly wrong to me, and then try to think of counterarguments. Wrong people provide a fertile source of research ideas.

-- Scott Aaronson, Quantum Computing Since Democritus (http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec14.html)

11 points AdeleneDawner 01 September 2011 09:54:09PM Permalink

I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.

-Sam Harris

11 points NancyLebovitz 01 September 2011 02:31:36PM Permalink

I think it would take more than a day for people to get possible good effects of the change.

A better memory might enable people to realize that they have made the same mistake several times. More processing power might enable them to realize that they have better strategies in some parts of their lives than others, and explore bringing the better strategies into more areas.

11 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 23 October 2011 04:14:33PM Permalink

I so adore cliches. They create an expectation to subvert.

11 points novalis 19 October 2011 06:00:16PM Permalink

"Don’t ask yourself if something is fair. Ask someone else--a stranger in the street, for example." -Lemony Snicket

11 points NihilCredo 02 October 2011 10:09:49PM Permalink

You're not actually disagreeing with Harris. Crafting efficient lies that behave as you describe is hard, particularly on the spot during conversation. Practice helps, and having your interlocutor's trust can compensate for a lot of imperfections, but it's still a lot of work compared to just sharing everything you know

11 points JoshuaZ 03 October 2011 06:09:26PM Permalink

I don't know much about the problem in question, but there's a related open problem in number theory.

Suppose I am thinking of a positive integer from 1 to n. You know this and know n. You want to figure out my number but are only allowed to ask if my number is in some range you name. In this game it is easy to see that you can always find out my number in less than 1+log2 n questions.

But what if I'm allowed to lie k times for some fixed k (that you know). Then the problem becomes much more difficult. A general bound in terms of k and n is open.

This suggests to me that working out problems involving lying, even in toy models, can quickly become complicated and difficult to examine.

11 points Nominull 03 October 2011 03:44:48PM Permalink

Being embarrassed about your knowledge is anathema to rational conversation. You can see it in drug policy debates, where nobody talks about how relatively harmless marijuana is, for fear that people might know that they smoke it. You can see it in censorship debates, where no community member is going to stand up and say "hey, this porno doesn't violate my standards, in fact it's pretty hot". We can stand around pretending to be good people, or we can get at the truth.

I'm more willing to admit to lying here, because I trust you guys more than most people to take that admission only for what it is, and no more.

11 points Konkvistador 22 October 2011 12:48:47PM Permalink

You are not a special little snowflake, but you should act like you are. If people are going to form impressions of you it’s better they make false positive ones than true negative ones.

-- Roissy in DC

11 points grendelkhan 07 October 2011 03:35:44PM Permalink

Whether their motives were righteous or venal, highminded or base, noble or ig-, in retrospect the obvious verdict is that they were all morons--yes, even the distinguished fellows and visiting scholars at think tanks and deans of international studies schools. They were morons because the whole moral, political and practical purpose of their scheme depended on its going exactly according to plan. Which nothing ever does. The Latin phrase for this logical fallacy would be Duh. Some of them were halfway intelligent; some of them may even have been well-intentioned; but they lacked imagination, and this is a fatal flaw. What we learn from history is that it never turns out like it's supposed to. And the one thing we know for sure about the future is that it won't be like we think.

Tim Kreider, Artist's Note for The Pain

11 points [deleted] 03 October 2011 08:35:56PM Permalink

Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses. It is a faculty that man has to exercise by choice. Thinking is not an automatic function. In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one’s consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality—or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make.

Ayn Rand

11 points MarkusRamikin 02 October 2011 09:13:13AM Permalink

I've read the source and context of that and it's really not impressing me as a rational thing to do... it's a clever/smartass thing to do, but in what way did Ilyssa win? Surely she didn't expect Eric to enlighten her on the subject in some way she hadn't thought about before, and now she is "miserable about Eric", and didn't get to enjoy Hamlet.

The "I can't stop myself" says it all - she can't choose not to defect. That's not a strength.

11 points Konkvistador 22 October 2011 12:46:56PM Permalink

Jettison politics from your personal life. Jawing about political ideology is worse than useless — it’s a time suck and a trick played by your status-seeking reptilian hindbrain on your frontal lobes that does nothing to bring you more happiness OR status. Your vote really won’t matter.

--Roissy in DC

11 points Pfft 08 October 2011 12:20:01AM Permalink

engineers turn out to be by far the most religious group of all academics – 66.5 per cent, followed again by 61.7 in economics, 49.9 in sciences, 48.8 per cent of social scientists, 46.3 of doctors and 44.1 per cent of lawyers, the most sceptical of the lot.

Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, Engineers of Jihad (p.51)

11 points dlthomas 31 October 2011 06:50:43PM Permalink

Apparently he hasn't seen many Cohen brothers movies...

11 points [deleted] 02 November 2011 08:22:53AM Permalink

At sea once more we had to pass the Sirens, whose sweet singing lures sailors to their doom. I had stopped up the ears of my crew with wax, and I alone listened while lashed to the mast, powerless to steer toward shipwreck.

-- Odysseus in Odyssey

11 points MinibearRex 04 November 2011 02:45:36PM Permalink

It was implied in myths that if you listened to the Sirens (and survived), you would learn more about yourself. Curiosity about your own true nature, fighting self-deception, etc. Very much a rationalist motivation.

11 points kurokikaze 03 November 2011 08:58:34AM Permalink

Pfft. Even magenta doesnt fit in the light spectrum. Are you terrified yet? :)

11 points juliawise 01 November 2011 10:17:15PM Permalink

I think navigators (maybe orienteers?) would be a better model than than warriors or dancers.

11 points Alejandro1 31 October 2011 10:44:25PM Permalink

I want to give thanks to the divine

Labyrinth of causes and effects

For the diversity of beings

That form this singular universe,

For Reason, that will never give up its dream

Of a map of the labyrinth,

Jorge Luis Borges, “Another poem of gifts” (opening lines).

11 points RomeoStevens 02 November 2011 10:26:36AM Permalink

is that your true reason or is it a reason that allows you to assert status over those wealthier than you?

11 points lessdazed 02 December 2011 10:42:02PM Permalink

working hard and learning things can just leave you digging ditches and able to quote every Simpsons episode verbatim.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/01/geeks-lose-minds-recreate-first-level-of-super-mario-land-with/

There's homage and there's homage. And then there's three guys spending over 500 hours to recreate the first two minutes and twenty seconds of Super Mario Land using more than 18 million Minecraft blocks. The movie, made by carpenter James Wright, Joe Ciappa and a gamer known as Tempusmori, had the guys running the classic monochrome platformer in an emulator and replicating it pixel-for-wool-block-pixel inside a giant Minecraft Game Boy. The team spent approximately four weeks, working six to seven hours a day with no days off...

11 points MixedNuts 02 December 2011 05:44:18AM Permalink

[citation needed]

It doesn't seem at all uncommon for someone from domain A to present a problem and for someone from domain B to immediately reply "Oh, we have just the perfect tool for that in my field!".

11 points Alejandro1 11 December 2011 10:02:15PM Permalink

More like a causation, I'd say: causation causes correlation.

11 points Xom 30 November 2011 10:27:11PM Permalink

Perhaps you are beginning to see how essential a part of reading it is to be perplexed and know it. Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature.

~ Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

11 points Vladimir_M 06 December 2011 03:43:07PM Permalink

With all due respect, you are getting seriously mind-killed here.

Do you agree that the probability of a person accepting and following certain norms (and more generally, acting and thinking in certain ways) can be higher or lower conditional on them belonging to a specific nationality? Similarly, would you agree that the probability of a government acting in a certain way may strongly depend on the government in question? Or are these "vapid jingoistic idea[s]"?

For example, suppose I'm an American and someone warns me that the U.S. government would have me tortured to death in the public square if I called the U.S. president a rascal. I reply that while such fears would be justified in many other places and times, they are unfounded in this case, since Americans are too civilized and decent to tolerate such things, and it is in their national character to consider criticizing (and even insulting) the president as a fundamental right. What exactly would be fallacious about this reply?

Note that I accept it as perfectly reasonable if one argues that Malcolm was factually mistaken about the character of the British government. What I object to is grandstanding rhetoric and moral posturing that tries to justify what is in fact nothing more than a display of the usual human frailty in a petty politicking quarrel.

11 points hairyfigment 03 December 2011 12:17:34AM Permalink

Every properly trained wizard has heard of Abraham, the idiot apprentice who recklessly enchanted a massive diamond instead of selling it to pay someone more skilled to fix his cursed noble friend. Haven't you destroyed the bloody thing by now?

  • Raven, from Dan Shive's webcomic El Goonish Shive.
11 points Ezekiel 30 November 2011 10:45:10PM Permalink

I would take it to be about art in general rather than music specifically. It's socially acceptable for works of art to support a particular viewpoint - and try to convert their consumers to it - without supplying much evidence to show that it's actually true.

One example that will probably ring true with LWers is the strong lesson in lots of fiction that following one's "heart" is a better (more moral, or more likely to lead to success) course of action than following one's "head".

11 points Xom 30 November 2011 10:26:52PM Permalink

Every Sauron considers himself a Boromir.

~ Mencius Moldbug

11 points CaveJohnson 19 January 2012 10:59:42PM Permalink

We should venture on the study of every kind of animal without distaste; for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something beautiful.

--Aristotle

11 points Alejandro1 01 January 2012 05:26:12PM Permalink

Another great quote by Sumner in that same post:

The Great Depression was originally thought to be due to the inherent instability of capitalism. Later Friedman and Schwartz blamed it on a big drop in M2. Their view is now more popular, because it has more appealing policy implications. It’s a lot easier to prevent M2 from falling, than to repair the inherent instability of capitalism. Where there are simple policy implications, a failure to do those policies eventually becomes seen as the “cause” of the problem, even if at a deeper philosophical level “cause” is one of those slippery terms that can never be pinned down. [Bold added]

11 points wedrifid 02 January 2012 01:59:13PM Permalink

The truth is common property. You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational, and believing things that are true.

It would seem that if no other humans are behaving rationality and your group is behaving rationally then even Sesame St could tell you which of these things is not the same.

11 points imbatman 10 January 2012 11:21:33PM Permalink

"A Confucian has stolen my hairbrush! Down with Confucianism!"

-GK Chesterton (on ad hominems)

11 points Eugine_Nier 01 January 2012 08:05:18PM Permalink

As in the Roman empire age, the theoretical concepts, taken out of the theories assigning their meaning and considered instead real objects, whose existence can be apparent only to the initiated people, are used to amaze the public. In physics courses the student (now unaware of the experimental basis of heliocentrism or of atomic theory, accepted on the sole basis of the authority principle) gets addicted to a complex and mysterious mythology, with orbitals undergoing hybridization, elusive quarks, voracious and disquieting black holes and a creating Big Bang: objects introduced, all of them, in theories totally unknown to him and having no understandable relation with any phenomenon he may have access to.

Lucio Russo, The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it Had to Be Reborn

11 points fortyeridania 02 January 2012 11:45:04AM Permalink

That seems rather applause-lighty.

I think many cited quotations sound applause-lighty. They are meant to by pithy encapsulations of LW themes, after all. And I don't think that's necessarily a problem; applause lights are a problem for things that might be taken as reasoning, like posts.

11 points Maniakes 03 January 2012 11:01:32PM Permalink

There are valid quibbles and exceptions on both counts. Some breeds of cats make vocalizations that can reasonably be described as "barking", and water will burn if there are sufficient concentrations of either an oxidizer much stronger than oxygen (such as chlorine triflouride) or a reducing agent much stronger than hydrogen (such as elemental sodium).

In the general case, though, water will not burn under normal circumstances, and most cats are physiologically incapable of barking.

The point of the quote is that objects and systems do have innate qualities that shape and limit their behaviour, and that this effect is present in social systems studied by economists as well as in physical systems studied by chemists and biologists. In the original context (which I elided because politics is the mind killer, and because any particular application of the principle is subject to empirical debate as to its validity), Friedman was following up on an article about how political economy considerations incline regulatory agencies towards socially suboptimal decisions, addressing responses that assumed that the political economy pressures could easily be designed away by revising the agencies' structures.

11 points James_K 02 January 2012 03:31:11AM Permalink

Indeed. In fact there's a website: Whats the Harm? that explains what damage these beliefs cause.

11 points Grognor 16 February 2012 07:59:35AM Permalink

If we want to know if there has been a change from the start to the end dates, all we have to do is look! I’m tempted to add a dozen more exclamation points to that sentence, it is that important. We do not have to model what we can see. No statistical test is needed to say whether the data has changed. We can just look.

I have to stop, lest I become exasperated. We statisticians have pointed out this fact until we have all, one by one, turned blue in the face and passed out, the next statistician in line taking the place of his fallen comrade.

-William M. Briggs

11 points gwern 12 February 2012 11:35:54PM Permalink

"...When I was still doubtful as to his [Wittgenstein's] ability, I asked G.E. Moore for his opinion. Moore replied, 'I think very well of him indeed.' When I enquired the reason for his opinion, he said it was because Wittgenstein was the only man who looked puzzled at his lectures."

--Bertrand Russell, pg 178 Last philosophical testament: 1943-68

11 points JoachimSchipper 01 February 2012 05:13:11PM Permalink

Is this true? Naive Googling yields this, which suggests (non-authoritatively) that blood sugar and moods are indeed linked (in diabetics, but it's presumably true in the general population). However, despair is not noted and the effects generally seem milder than that (true despair is a rather powerful emotion!)

11 points paper-machine 15 February 2012 05:40:38AM Permalink

What profit does she get from dispensing sparkles?

11 points CharlieSheen 15 February 2012 02:07:24PM Permalink

Market Economics fairy should consider starting a hedge fund anyway and investing that money into a lobby group or other means of promoting Market Economics. I sincerely doubt emitting sparkles from her wand is where her comparative advantage lies.

11 points gwern 15 February 2012 12:25:26AM Permalink

You're missing the unstated corollary to this, or any other discussion of scalpers: 'and prices have to be "reasonable" for whatever demographic we claim to serve or would prefer to serve'.

Hence, you get discussions of young girl singers unhappy that all these icky old men are paying hundreds of dollars for the tickets to her concert, even though the market doesn't clear at the $40 or $60 her preteen fans can spare. (And if an organization does let the price float to its natural level of hundreds of dollars, then you get shocked articles in the newspaper on 'ticket inflation' and angry letters to the editor about how in their day you could get in for a nickel...)

11 points Eugine_Nier 10 February 2012 04:23:42AM Permalink

The same is true of people who call for a dictatorship or any non-democratic form of government. They also always imagine it will be governed by "the right people", and imagine all the things "the right people" could accomplish if freed from the need to listen to the "ignorant mob".

11 points Alicorn 01 February 2012 08:16:27PM Permalink

Death is the gods' crime.

11 points Stabilizer 06 March 2012 04:51:18AM Permalink

We have not succeeded in answering all our problems.

The answers we have found only serve

to raise a whole set of new questions.

In some ways we feel we are as confused as ever,

but we believe we are confused on a higher level

and about more important things.

-Posted outside the mathematics reading room, Tromsø University

From the homepage of Kim C. Border

11 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 March 2012 07:49:32AM Permalink

As previously stated, Harry is not a perfect rationalist.

11 points XFrequentist 02 March 2012 09:01:52PM Permalink

May the best of your todays, be the worst of your tomorrows

  • Jay-Z, Forever Young

[Taking the lyrics literally, the whole thing is a pretty sweet transhumanist anthem.]

11 points arundelo 01 March 2012 08:03:29PM Permalink

When reading, you win if you learn, not if you convince yourself that you know something the author does not know.

-- Reg Braithwaite (raganwald)

11 points Ezekiel 06 March 2012 01:01:50PM Permalink

It depends what you mean by magic. Nowadays we communicate by bouncing invisible light off the sky, which would sure as hell qualify as "magic" to someone six hundred years ago.

The issue is that "magic", in the sense that I take Minchin to be using it, isnt a solution at all. No matter what the explanation is, once you've actually got it, it's not "magic" any more; it's "electrons" or "distortion of spacetime" or "computers" or whatever, the distinction being that we have equations for all of those things.

Take the witch trials, for example - to the best of my extremely limited knowledge, most witch trials involved very poorly-defined ideas about what a witch was capable of or what the signs of a witch were. If they had known how the accused were supposed to be screwing with reality, they wouldn't have called them "witches", but "scientists" or "politicians" or "guys with swords".

Admittedly all of those can have the same blank curiosity-stopping power as "magic" to some people, but "magic" almost always does. Which is why, once you've solved the mystery, it turns out to be Not Magic.

11 points paper-machine 10 April 2012 05:48:38PM Permalink

三人成虎

Chinese proverb, "three men make a tiger", referring to a semi-mythological event during the Warring States period:

According to the Warring States Records, or Zhan Guo Ce, before he left on a trip to the state of Zhao, Pang Cong asked the King of Wei whether he would hypothetically believe in one civilian's report that a tiger was roaming the markets in the capital city, to which the King replied no. Pang Cong asked what the King thought if two people reported the same thing, and the King said he would begin to wonder. Pang Cong then asked, "what if three people all claimed to have seen a tiger?" The King replied that he would believe in it. Pang Cong reminded the King that the notion of a live tiger in a crowded market was absurd, yet when repeated by numerous people, it seemed real. As a high-ranking official, Pang Cong had more than three opponents and critics; naturally, he urged the King to pay no attention to those who would spread rumors about him while he was away. "I understand," the King replied, and Pang Cong left for Zhao. Yet, slanderous talk took place. When Pang Cong returned to Wei, the King indeed stopped seeing him.

-- Wikipedia

11 points Pavitra 05 April 2012 12:59:38PM Permalink

In the real world things are very different. You just need to look around you. Nobody wants to die that way. People die of disease and accident. Death comes suddenly and there is no notion of good or bad. It leaves, not a dramatic feeling but great emptiness. When you lose someone you loved very much you feel this big empty space and think, 'If I had known this was coming I would have done things differently.'

Yoshinori Kitase

11 points [deleted] 02 April 2012 05:13:52PM Permalink

I first encountered this in a physics newsgroup, after some crank was taking some toy model way too seriously:

Analogies are like ropes; they tie things together pretty well, but you won't get very far if you try to push them.

Thaddeus Stout Tom Davidson

(I remembered something like "if you pull them too much, they break down", actually...)

11 points tgb 01 April 2012 01:30:37PM Permalink

Who has seen the wind?

Neither I nor you:

But when the leaves hang trembling,

The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?

Neither you nor I:

But when the trees bow down their heads,

The wind is passing by.

-- Christina Rossetti, Who has seen the Wind?

11 points Kutta 01 April 2012 01:00:30PM Permalink

He who knows how to do something is the servant of he who knows why that thing must be done.

-- Isuna Hasekura, Spice and Wolf vol. 5 ("servant" is justified by the medieval setting).

11 points Pavitra 05 April 2012 01:20:41PM Permalink

In real life the major players are immune to mindreading, can communicate securely and instantaneously worldwide, and have tens of thousands of people working under them. You are, ironically, overlooking the strangeness of reality.

Conservation of detail may be a valid argument though.

11 points Alicorn 01 April 2012 09:54:15PM Permalink

I didn't think I could remove the quote from that attitude about it very effectively without butchering it. I did lop off a subsequent sentence that made it worse.

11 points Wei_Dai 20 April 2012 08:53:15PM Permalink

The phrase "social alliances" makes me uneasy with the fear that if everyone did #3, LW would degenerate into typical green vs blue debates. Can you explain a bit more why you endorse it?

11 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 May 2012 06:51:34AM Permalink

Sometimes I check the original and am surprised by how little I actually diverged from Rowling's Dumbledore.

11 points tgb 03 May 2012 01:00:10PM Permalink

If the attacker, whenever he pulls a red ball out of the urn, puts it back and keeps pulling until he gets a blue ball, the Bayesian "rational mind" will conclude that the urn is entirely full of blue balls.

Surely the actual Bayesian rational mind's conclusion is that the attacker will (probably) always show a blue ball, nothing to do with the urn at all.

11 points Snowyowl 08 May 2012 05:52:35PM Permalink

I think this conversation just jumped one of the sharks that swim in the waters around the island of knowledge.

11 points Stephanie_Cunnane 02 May 2012 05:11:15AM Permalink

Are you better off than you were one year ago, one month ago, or one week ago?

-Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek

11 points gwern 02 May 2012 02:27:29AM Permalink

Then you can commit suicide without worries.

11 points J_Taylor 03 May 2012 06:16:35PM Permalink

It is not seeing things as they are to think first of a Briareus with a hundred hands, and then call every man a cripple for only having two. It is not seeing things as they are to start with a vision of Argus with his hundred eyes, and then jeer at every man with two eyes as if he had only one. And it is not seeing things as they are to imagine a demigod of infinite mental clarity, who may or may not appear in the latter days of the earth, and then to see all men as idiots.

-G.K. Chesterton

11 points sixes_and_sevens 08 May 2012 11:08:19AM Permalink

Something a not-especially-mathsy friend of mine said a while back:

It makes me sad when I see or hear people say 'algebra and trig are pointless, you never use them in real life'.

Because what this says to me is 'I make life more difficult for myself because I don't understand how to make it simpler'.

11 points Alejandro1 04 June 2012 04:51:58PM Permalink

Aren't Graham and Dennett talking about different things entirely? Dennett is trying to help us understand better how materialism is compatible with having free will and a conscious self; his prescription here is to avoid a common pitfall, that of dismissing all "upwards" processing of perception and all "downwards" action-starting signals as "mechanical computing, not part of the self" and locating the Cartesian self at the zero-extension intersection of these two processes. It is better to think of the self as extended in both directions. When Graham says "keep your identity small", he is talking about a different sense of "identity" and "small", roughly "do not describe yourself with labels because you might become overly invested in them and lose objectivity and perspective".

11 points Alejandro1 02 June 2012 12:35:00AM Permalink

"The veil before my eyes dropped. I saw he was insincere ... a liar. I saw marriage with him would have been marriage to a worthless adventurer. I saw all this within five minutes of that meeting.” As if she heard a self-recriminatory bitterness creep into her voice again, she stopped; then continued in a lower tone. “You may wonder how I had not seen it before. I believe I had. But to see something is not the same as to acknowledge it."

-- John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman

11 points roystgnr 08 June 2012 10:20:53PM Permalink

The best similar cultural-relativity-based deduction I've read, as introduced by Wikipedia:

A story for which [Charles James] Napier is often noted involved Hindu priests complaining to him about the prohibition of Sati by British authorities. This was the custom of burning a widow alive on the funeral pyre of her husband. As first recounted by his brother William, he replied:

"Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."

11 points James_Miller 01 June 2012 07:04:37PM Permalink

It doesn't.

11 points RobertLumley 02 July 2012 03:16:55PM Permalink

Why do you insist that the human genetic code is "sacred" or "taboo"? It is a chemical process and nothing more. For that matter—we—are chemical processes and nothing more. If you deny yourself a useful tool simply because it reminds you uncomfortably of your mortality, you have uselessly and pointlessly crippled yourself.

– Chairman Sheng-ji Yang in Alpha Centauri

11 points Konkvistador 25 August 2012 10:55:45AM Permalink

To understand our civilisation, one must appreciate that the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection — the comparative increase of population and wealth — of those groups that happened to follow them. The unwitting, reluctant, even painful adoption of these practices kept these groups together, increased their access to valuable information of all sorts, and enabled them to be 'fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it' (Genesis 1:28). This process is perhaps the least appreciated facet of human evolution.

-- Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit : The Errors of Socialism (1988), p. 6

11 points [deleted] 08 August 2012 07:58:35PM Permalink

When a philosophy thus relinquishes its anchor in reality, it risks drifting arbitrarily far from sanity.

Gary Drescher, Good and Real

11 points Stabilizer 03 August 2012 04:07:02AM Permalink

But a curiosity of my type remains after all the most agreeable of all vices --- sorry, I meant to say: the love of truth has its reward in heaven and even on earth.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

11 points MichaelGR 09 August 2012 08:06:20PM Permalink

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes…

— Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”

11 points Eneasz 20 August 2012 06:56:35PM Permalink

An excerpt from Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss. Boxing is not safe.

The innkeeper looked up. "I have to admit I don't see the trouble," he said apologetically. "I've seen monsters, Bast. The Cthaeh falls short of that."

"That was the wrong word for me to use, Reshi," Bast admitted. "But I can't think of a better one. If there was a word that meant poisonous and hateful and contagious, I'd use that."

Bast drew a deep breath and leaned forward in his chair. "Reshi, the Cthaeh can see the future. Not in some vague, oracular way. It sees all the future. Clearly. Perfectly. Everything that can possibly come to pass, branching out endlessly from the current moment."

Kvothe raised an eyebrow. "It can, can it?"

"It can," Bast said gravely. "And it is purely, perfectly malicious. This isn't a problem for the most part, as it can't leave the tree. But when someone comes to visit..."

Kvothe's eyes went distant as he nodded to himself. "If it knows the future perfectly," he said slowly, "then it must know exactly how a person will react to anything it says."

Bast nodded. "And it is vicious, Reshi."

Kvothe continued in a musing tone. "That means anyone influenced by the Cthaeh would be like an arrow shot into the future."

"An arrow only hits on person, Reshi." Bast's dark eyes were hollow and hopeless. "Anyone influenced by the Cthaeh is like a plague ship sailing for a harbor." Bast pointed at the half-filled sheet Chronicler held in his lap. "If the Sithe knew that existed, they would spare no effort to destroy it. They would kill us for having heard what the Cthaeh said."

"Because anything carrying the Cthaeh's influence away from the tree..." Kvothe said, looking down at his hands. He sat silently for a long moment, nodding thoughtfully. "So a young man seeking his fortune goes to the Cthaeh and takes away a flower. The daughter of the king is deathly ill, and he takes the flower to heal her. They fall in love despite the fact that she's betrothed to the neighboring prince..."

Bast stared at Kvothe, watching blankly as he spoke.

"They attempt a daring moonlight escape," Kvothe continued. "But he falls from the rooftops and they're caught. The princess is married against her will and stabs the neighboring prince on their wedding night. The prince dies. Civil war. Fields burned and salted. Famine. Plague..."

"That's the story of the Fastingsway War," Bast said faintly.

11 points arundelo 04 August 2012 07:46:23PM Permalink

I am a strange loop and so can you!

11 points OnTheOtherHandle 19 September 2012 05:24:59AM Permalink

Let us together seek, if you wish, the laws of society, the manner in which these laws are reached, the process by which we shall succeed in discovering them; but, for God's sake, after having demolished all the a priori dogmatisms, do not let us in our turn dream of indoctrinating the people...let us not - simply because we are at the head of a movement - make ourselves into the new leaders of intolerance, let us not pose as the apostles of a new religion, even if it be the religion of logic, the religion of reason.

Pierre Proudhon, to Karl Marx

11 points CronoDAS 06 September 2012 10:51:59AM Permalink

The version I like the best is that Sisyphus keeps pushing the boulder voluntarily, because he's too proud to admit that, despite all his cleverness, there's something he can't do. (Specifically, get the boulder to stay at the top of the mountain).

11 points Decius 03 September 2012 03:26:56AM Permalink

I'm assuming a multiple-choice exam, and invalid answers don't count as 'wrong' for that purpose?

Otherwise I can easily miss the entire exam with "Tau is exactly six." or "The battle of Thermopylae" repeated for every answer. Even if the valid answers are [A;B;C;D].

11 points khafra 10 September 2012 07:06:52PM Permalink

I particularly like the reminder that I'm physics. Makes me feel like a superhero. "Imbued with the properties of matter and energy, able to initiate activity in a purely deterministic universe, it's Physics Man!"

-- GoodDamon (this may skirt the edge of the rules, since it's a person reacting to a sequence post, but a person who's not a member of LW.)

11 points chaosmosis 09 September 2012 12:34:36AM Permalink

"You're very smart. Smarter than I am, I hope. Though of course I have such incredible vanity that I can't really believe that anyone is actually smarter than I am. Which means that I'm all the more in need of good advice, since I can't actually conceive of needing any."

  • New Peter / Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind
11 points J_Taylor 02 September 2012 03:33:00AM Permalink

Major Greene this evening fell into some conversation with me about the Divinity and satisfaction of Jesus Christ. All the argument he advanced was, "that a mere creature or finite being could not make satisfaction to infinite justice for any crimes," and that "these things are very mysterious."

Thus mystery is made a convenient cover for absurdity.

  • John Adams
11 points Will_Newsome 01 September 2012 10:17:14AM Permalink

Proceed only with the simplest terms, for all others are enemies and will confuse you.

— Michael Kirkbride / Vivec, The Thirty Six Lessons of Vivec, Morrowind.

11 points Konkvistador 15 September 2012 05:58:02PM Permalink
The Perfect Way is only difficult
for those who pick and choose;
Do not like, do not dislike;
all will then be clear.
Make a hairbreadth difference,
and Heaven and Earth are set apart;
if you want the truth to stand clear before you,
never be for or against.
The struggle between "for" and "against"
is the mind's worst disease.

-- Jianzhi Sengcan

Edit: Since I'm not Will Newsome (yet!) I will clarify. There are several useful points in this but I think the key one is the virtue of keeping ones identity small. Speaking it out loud is a sort of primer, meditation or prayer before approaching difficult or emotional subjects has for me proven a useful ritual for avoiding motivated cognition.

11 points lukeprog 19 October 2012 10:54:24PM Permalink

To say our predictions are no worse than the experts’ is to damn ourselves with some awfully faint praise.

Nate Silver

11 points grendelkhan 15 October 2012 05:40:26PM Permalink

It's all fine and good to declare that you would have freed your slaves. But it's much more interesting to assume that you wouldn't have and then ask, "Why?"

--Ta-Nehisi Coates, "A Muscular Empathy"

11 points Kindly 01 October 2012 08:54:14PM Permalink

Possibly also explaining this trend in the world of academia.

11 points prase 04 October 2012 07:00:36PM Permalink

Hate is easier with a diffuse target.

Depends. A klansman may find it easy to hate "niggers" but much harder to hate his black neighbour. A literary critic who values her tolerance may it find difficult to hate an abstract group but can passionately hate her mother-in-law. I am not sure whether the difference stems from there being two different types of hate, or only from different causes of the same sort of hate.

11 points AlexMennen 02 October 2012 02:27:13AM Permalink

A common mistake is to suppose that scientists are such admirable people that they can be safely entrusted with the ultimate responsibil­ity for guiding scientific research. In fact they are no more admirable than any other type of worker. Neither selection nor self-selection tor a scientific career is based on admirableness. Though the conventions and protocols of science enforce on scientists, in comparison to astrologers and English professors—and lawyers—a high degree of objec­tivity when they are doing science, it does not follow that such indi­viduals can be depended on to be objective policy analysts. That is a role for which they are not trained (but is anyone?) and that does not impose the constraints that science imposes.

Richard Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response

11 points RichardKennaway 05 October 2012 10:44:37AM Permalink

The graveyards are full of indispensable people.

Attributed to Charles De Gaulle.

11 points chaosmosis 12 November 2012 03:17:08AM Permalink

'At my funeral, I don't want people to wear bright colors and smile and laugh fondly at the wonderful memories of the precious time we spent together on Earth. Tell them to wear black and cover their faces with ash. Tell them to weep bitter tears and rail angrily against the cruel God who took me at so young an age. Do this for me, my beloved.'

http://www.theonion.com/articles/loved-ones-recall-local-mans-cowardly-battle-with,772/

I find both the ironic and straightforward meaning of this quote to be meaningful.

11 points gwern 10 November 2012 06:53:11PM Permalink

If any man pretend to me that God hath spoken to him … immediately, and I make doubt of it, I cannot easily perceive what argument he can produce to oblige me to believe it .. For to say that God … hath spoken to him in a dream is no more than to say he dreamed that God spoke to him.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 13

11 points GabrielDuquette 02 November 2012 12:57:41AM Permalink

One swallow does not make a summer, but one swallow does prove the existence of swallows.

Anzai Simon

11 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 November 2012 12:29:52PM Permalink

If this were true, the ancient Greeks would've had science.

11 points [deleted] 03 November 2012 10:25:33AM Permalink

Yep. If nothing of what Archimedes did counts as ‘science’, you're using an overly narrow definition IMO.

11 points FiftyTwo 02 November 2012 05:06:12PM Permalink

Each morning I go through all my beliefs and randomly flip their truth values, guaranteeing maximal surprise

11 points fortyeridania 02 November 2012 04:02:33AM Permalink

I used to agree, but that part of my philosophy recently became unsettled.

11 points ChristianKl 05 December 2012 03:42:32PM Permalink

But are we asking too much when we declare that our drugs need to work through single defined targets? Beyond that, are we even asking too much when we declare that we need to understand the details of how they work at all? Many of you will have had such thoughts (and they've been expressed around here as well), but they can tend to sound heretical, especially that second one. But that gets to the real issue, the uncomfortable, foot-shuffling, rather-think-about-something-else question: are we trying to understand things, or are we trying to find drugs?

Derek Lowe, In the Pipeline

11 points DanielLC 03 December 2012 02:25:41AM Permalink

Also, third world countries can buy the used stuff we don't want anymore. The past can't do that.

11 points Mestroyer 04 December 2012 04:26:52PM Permalink

We're Nature's conscience. One day, we'll finally make it listen and realise what a monster it's been all along.

Catharine G. Evans

11 points Konkvistador 30 January 2013 12:10:07PM Permalink

Whenever you can, count.

--Sir Francis Galton

11 points simplicio 02 January 2013 09:44:48PM Permalink

Now that I am a Christian, I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable; but when I was an atheist, I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable...

Dear LWers: do you have these moods (let us gloss them as "extreme temporary loss of confidence in foundational beliefs"):

11 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 January 2013 09:34:32PM Permalink

...but why wait until they'd almost gotten to Boston?

11 points PhilipL 21 January 2013 05:20:59PM Permalink

Person 1: "I don't understand how my brain works. But my brain is what I rely on to understand how things work." Person 2: "Is that a problem?" Person 1: "I'm not sure how to tell."

-Todays xkcd

11 points Particleman 03 January 2013 05:35:04AM Permalink

"How is it possible! How is it possible to produce such a thing!" he repeated, increasing the pressure on my skull, until it grew painful, but I didn't dare object. "These knobs, holes...cauliflowers -" with an iron finger he poked my nose and ears - "and this is supposed to be an intelligent creature? For shame! For shame, I say!! What use is a Nature that after four billion years comes up with THIS?!"

Here he gave my head a shove, so that it wobbled and I saw stars.

"Give me one, just one billion years, and you'll see what I create!"

  • Stanislaw Lem, "The Sanatorium of Dr. Vliperdius" (trans. Michael Kandel)
11 points MixedNuts 02 January 2013 09:14:56PM Permalink

Two roads diverged in a wood. I took the one less traveled by, and I got to eat bugs until the park rangers kicked me out.

11 points Qiaochu_Yuan 02 February 2013 08:37:47PM Permalink

This is addressed by several Sequence posts, e.g. Why truth? And..., Dark Side Epistemology, and Focus Your Uncertainty.

Beliefs shoulder the burden of having to reflect the territory, while emotions don't. (Although many people seem to have beliefs that could be secretly encoding heuristics that, if they thought about it, they could just be executing anyway, e.g. believing that people are nice could be secretly encoding a heuristic to be nice to people, which you could just do anyway. This is one kind of not-really-anticipation-controlling belief that doesn't seem to be addressed by the Sequences.)

11 points satt 09 February 2013 05:05:01PM Permalink

Dilbert dunnit first!

(Seeing that strip again reminds me of an explanation for why teenagers in the US tend to take more risks than adults. It's not because the teenagers irrationally underestimate risks but because they see bigger benefits to taking risks.)

11 points jsbennett86 02 February 2013 03:37:42AM Permalink

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.

11 points [deleted] 05 February 2013 05:18:12PM Permalink

Three things, in no particular order:

  • I seem to recall that, in some obscure language, each noun has an agency level and in a sentence the most agenty noun is the subject by default, unless the verb is specially inflected to show otherwise: for example, “[dog] [bite] [man]” would mean ‘a man bit a dog’, regardless of word order, because the noun “[man]” has higher agency than “[dog]”.

  • Would you sooner see a tiger chasing a man, or a man running away from a tiger? If the former, it's not just the fact that butterflies are not human, it's the fact that the butterflies are small.

  • I think that, at least in the case of the lion, it would also depend on whether the two of them are moving towards the left side or the right side of my visual field. I heard that in The Great Wave off Kanagawa the boats are intended to look more agenty than the wave, but for Western people it will typically look like the other way round (due to Western languages being written from left to right), and for a Westerner to get the right effect they'd have to look at the picture in a mirror. (It works for me, at least.)

11 points jooyous 02 February 2013 09:51:31PM Permalink

This reminds me of

You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

which I believe is a paraphrasing of something Jonathan Swift said, but I'm not sure. Anyone have the original?

11 points Swimmer963 02 February 2013 01:03:42PM Permalink

No one really believes God will protect them from harm...

I have some friends who do... At least insofar as things like "I don't have to worry about finances because God is watching over me, so I won't bother trying to keep a balanced budget." Then again, being financially irresponsible (a behaviour I find extremely hard to understand and sympathize with) seems to be common-ish, and not just among people who think God will take care of their problems.

11 points GabrielDuquette 02 February 2013 01:20:29AM Permalink

People's executive functioning is largely invisible to them, and perceived in moral terms to the extent that it is visible.

S. T. Rev

11 points Desrtopa 04 March 2013 12:08:23PM Permalink

Considering that politicians get ahead by gaining the approval of their constituents, I'd think that now that America is no longer in an arms race, a politician could probably get ahead by proclaiming support for sustainable nuclear energy which does not have a chance of producing weapons.

Except for where that would mean announcing support for nuclear energy.

11 points MLS 05 March 2013 04:10:49AM Permalink

"Or, well..."

Was that subtle framing intentional?

11 points gwern 02 March 2013 02:22:07AM Permalink

If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children 'There are no fairies'; he can omit to teach them the word 'fairy'.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel § 413; via Fable of The Born-Blind-People

(Gb rkcerff guvf va zber YJl wnetba: vs lbh qvq abg nyernql xabj gur jbeq be pbaprcg snvel, jung bofreingvbaf jbhyq cevivyrtr gur fcrpvsvp ulcbgurfvf bs 'snvevrf' gb gur cbvag jurer vg jbhyq orpbzr n frevbhf cbffvovyvgl? Ubj znal ovgf jbhyq gung gnxr naq jurer jbhyq lbh trg gurz, nfvqr sebz gur zrqvn naq bgure crbcyr'f cebqhpgf?)

11 points wedrifid 02 March 2013 12:40:13PM Permalink

As long as others know and believe in such concepts, it is important that your child learns about them from a trustworthy source, before being introduced to such concepts by fairy-believers.

This is especially the case if the message is generalized. That is, if the well meaning but naive parent tries to keep their children ignorant of all things bullshit. They are deprived key critical thinking skills and the ability to comfortably interact (and reject) nonsense beliefs that will be thrust on them.

11 points fubarobfusco 01 March 2013 08:40:49PM Permalink

To me it sounds like a complaint about what are variably called "cargo-cult", "voodoo", or "superstitious" practices in IT: repeating curative procedures that are available to mind, without understanding why (or if) they ever worked, in situations where they may not have any application. There are a lot of procedures that users can learn by rote without having to know why they ever work, and that are cheap and safe enough that using them when they don't do any good isn't likely to do any harm either.

11 points ciphergoth 02 March 2013 11:12:49AM Permalink

Not sure I see that - this is about how non-computer people think about computers, not about the real behaviour of a real singularity.

11 points Dahlen 13 April 2013 09:27:06AM Permalink

How rare it is to encounter advice about the future which begins from a premise of incomplete knowledge!

─James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State

11 points xv15 08 April 2013 05:38:31AM Permalink

"Alas", said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into."

"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.

-Kafka, A Little Fable

11 points ModusPonies 03 April 2013 02:17:16PM Permalink

If you will learn to work with the system, you can go as far as the system will support you ... By realizing you have to use the system and studying how to get the system to do your work, you learn how to adapt the system to your desires. Or you can fight it steadily, as a small undeclared war, for the whole of your life ... Very few of you have the ability to both reform the system and become a first-class scientist.

—Richard Hamming

(I recommend the whole talk, which contains some great examples and many other excellent points.)

11 points Qiaochu_Yuan 03 April 2013 02:38:05AM Permalink

I like the sentiment, but Paul Graham seems to be claiming that information hazards don't exist, and that doesn't appear to be true.

11 points Yossarian 08 April 2013 07:19:07PM Permalink

The quote struck me as a poetic way of affirming the general importance of metacognition - a reminder that we are at the center of everything we do, and therefore investing in self improvement is an investment with a multiplier effect. I admit though this may be adding my own meaning that doesn't exist in the quote's context.

I've always seen that whole speech as a pretty good example of reasoning from the wrong premises: Henry V makes the argument that God will decide the outcome of the battle and so if given the opportunity to have more Englishmen fighting along side them, he would choose to fight without them since then he gets more glory for winning a harder fight and if they lose then fewer will have died. Of course he doesn't take this to the logical conclusion and go out and fight alone, but I guess Shakespeare couldn't have pushed history quite that far.

Rewatching Branaghs version recently, I keyed in on a different aspect. In his speech, Henry describes in detail all the glory and status the survivors of the battle will enjoy for the rest of their lives, while (of course) totally downplaying the fact that few of them can expect to collect on that reward. He's making a cost/benefit calculation for them and leaning heavily on the scale in the process.

Contrast with similar inspiring military speeches:

William Wallace says, "Fight and you may die. Run and you may live...for awhile. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin' to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom!" He's saying essentially the same thing as Henry, but framing it as a loss instead of a gain. Where Henry tells his soldiers what they'll gain from fighting, Wallace tells them what they'll lose if they don't. Perhaps it's telling that, unlike Henry, he doesn't get very specific. It might've been an opportunity for someone in the ranks to run a thought experiment, "What specific aspects of my life will be measurably different if we have 'freedom' versus if we don't have 'freedom'? What exactly AM I trading ALL the days for? And if I magically had that thing without the cost of potentially dying, what would my preferences be then?" Or to just notice their confusion and be able to recognize they were being loss averse and without the ability to define exactly what they were averse to losing.

Meanwhile, Maximus tells his troops, "What you do in life echoes in eternity." He's more honest and direct about the probability that you're going to die, but also reminds you that the cost/benefit analysis extends beyond your own life, the implication being that your 'honor' (reputation) affects your placement in the afterlife and (probably of more consequence) the well being of your family after your death. Life is an iterated game and sometimes you have to defect (or cooperate?) so that your children get to play at all.

And lastly, Patton says, "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his." He explicitly rejects the entire 'die for your country' framing and foists it wholly onto the enemy. It's his version of "The enemy's gate is down." He's not telling you you're not going to die, but at least he's not trying to convince you that your death is somehow a good or necessary thing.

When taken in this company, Henry actually comes across more like a villain. Of all of them, he's appealing to their desire to achieve rational interests in an irrational way without being at all upfront about their odds of actually getting what he's promising them.

11 points komponisto 13 May 2013 12:47:15AM Permalink

There are probably no more than 100 people alive that can make their way through Bach's 2nd Partita for violin.

I'm pretty sure you're underestimating that by...a lot. Fermi estimate time:

Bach's sonatas and partitas for solo violin are a cornerstone of the violin repertory. We may therefore assume that every professor of violin at a major university or conservatory has performed at least one of them at least once, just like we may assume that every professor of mathematics has studied the Lebesgue dominated convergence theorem. How many professors of violin are there? Let's just consider one country, the United States. Each state in the U.S. has at least two major public universities (typically "University of X" and "X State University", where X is the state); some have many more, and this doesn't even count private universities. Personal experience suggests that the average big state university has about one professor of violin. There are 50 states in the U.S., so that's 100 people already right there. And we have yet to count:

  • every other country in the world (including European countries like Germany where the enthusiasm for art music in general and J.S. Bach in particular is likely to be much higher);
  • private universities and conservatories in the U.S.;
  • members of the violin sections of professional symphony orchestras throughout the world (again, on average one in each U.S. state);
  • professional concert soloists (there may be more of these than you realize)
  • the students of the aforementioned professors (between 5 and 20 in a given semester, at least one of whom will typically be playing one of the sonatas or partitas that semester).

Thus, it wouldn't surprise me at all if there were at least 10,000 people alive who have performed one of the sonatas and partitas (to say nothing of those who would be capable of performing them). There are six of these works in total, so we can divide this already-conservative estimate by six to (under)estimate the number who have performed the Second Partita in particular. (This is likely an underestimate because many of them will have performed more than one -- indeed, all six, in a fair number of cases.)

A glance at the recordings available on Amazon, sorted by release date may help put things into perspective.

The estimate "no more than 100 alive who can make it through" would be much more appropriate for a difficult contemporary work (like, say, Melismata by Milton Babbitt) than a 300-year-old standard.

11 points BT_Uytya 06 May 2013 07:40:17PM Permalink

But consider: Newton has thought things that no man before has ever thought. A great accomplishment to be sure. Perhaps the greatest achievement any human mind has ever made. Very well - what does that say of Newton, and of us? Why, that his mind is framed in such a way that it can out-think anyone else's. So all hail Isaac Newton! Let us give him his due, and glorify and worship whatever generative force can frame such a mind.

Now consider Hooke. Hooke has perceived things that no man before us has ever perceived. What does that say of Hooke, and of us? That Hooke was framed in some special way? No, for just look at you, Robert - by your leave, you are stooped, asthmatic, fitful, beset by aches and ills, your eyes and ears are no better than those of men who've not perceived a thousandth part of what you have.

Newton makes his discoveries in geometrical realms, where our minds cannot go, he strolls in a walled garden filled with wonders, to which he has the only key. But you Hooke, are cheek-by-jowl with all of humanity in the streets of London. Anyone can look at the things you have looked at. But in those things you see what no one else has. You are the millionth human to look at a spark, a flea, a raindrop, the moon, and the first to see it. For anyone to say that this is less remarkable than what Newton has done, is to understand things in but a hollow and jejune way, 'tis like going to a Shakespeare play and remembering only the sword fights.

Daniel Waterhouse says to Hooke in Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver

11 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 May 2013 04:23:12PM Permalink

Actually, it was someone asking what the heck I meant by "reality fluid", to which the answer is that I don't know either which is why I always call it "magical reality fluid". I mean, I could add in something that sounded impressive and might to some degree be helpful along the lines of "It's the mind-projection-fallacy conjugate of 'probability' as it appears inside hypotheses about collections of real things in which some real things are more predicted to happen to me than others for purposes of executing post-observation Bayesian updates, like, if the squared modulus rule appearing in the Born statistics reflected the quantity present of an actual kind of stuff" but I think saying, "It's magic, which is the mind-projection-fallacy conjugate of 'I'm confused'" would be wiser in a conversation like that. I think it's very important not to create the illusion of knowing more than you do, when you try to operate at the frontiers of your own ability to be coherent. At the same time, refusing to digress into metaphysics even to demarcate the things that confuse you, even to form ideas which can be explicitly incoherent rather than implicitly incoherent, is indeed to become the slave of the unexamined thought.

11 points grendelkhan 25 May 2013 07:50:06PM Permalink

PROF. PLUM: What are you afraid of, a fate worse than death?

MRS. PEACOCK: No, just death; isn't that enough?

--Clue (1985)

11 points katydee 01 May 2013 04:08:43PM Permalink

I was told that that part was actually a reference to astrology.

11 points Pablo_Stafforini 03 May 2013 09:00:51PM Permalink

Can someone explain to me what is going on here? The comment is getting downvoted and Eliezer himself is telling me not to quote him (or so it appears--it's not clear whether he is being serious or not). Before deciding to post the comment, I read the instructions closely and it seemed clear that the quote--which comes from a published book, not from LW, OB, or HPMoR--didn't violate any of the rules. Maybe this is all obvious to those who post regularly on this section, but I am myself rather puzzled by the whole thing.

11 points Qiaochu_Yuan 03 May 2013 09:20:26PM Permalink

The spirit of the no-LW, OB, HPMoR rule is that the community shouldn't be quoting itself in quotes threads. That has a dangerous echo chamber-y feel to it.

11 points fburnaby 03 June 2013 11:22:10AM Permalink

Why Opium produces sleep: ... Because there is in it a dormitive power.

Moliere, Le Malade Imaginere (1673), Act III, sc. iii.

11 points TeMPOraL 01 June 2013 04:45:06PM Permalink

Similar thought:

16) The previous people who did a similar analysis did not have a direct pipeline to the wisdom of the ages. There is therefore no reason to believe their analysis over yours. There is especially no reason to present their analysis as yours.

-- Akins Laws of Spacecraft Design

11 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 June 2013 07:33:17PM Permalink

Rational distress-minimizers would behave differently from rational atruists. (Real people are somewhere in the middle and seem to tend toward greater altruism and less distress-minimization when taught 'rationality' by altruists.)

11 points elharo 03 June 2013 11:25:56PM Permalink

the designers of a theoretical technology in any but the most predictable of areas should identify its assumptions and claims that have not already been tested in a laboratory. They should design not only the technology but also a map of the uncertainties and edge cases in the design and a series of such experiments and tests that would progressively reduce these uncertainties. A proposal that lacks this admission of uncertainties coupled with designs of experiments that will reduce such uncertainties should not be deemed credible for the purposes of any important decision. We might call this requirement a requirement for a falsifiable design.

--Nick Szabo, Falsifiable design: A methodology for evaluting theoretical technologies

11 points Thomas 01 June 2013 11:43:02AM Permalink

I will destroy my enemies by converting them to friends!

  • Maimonides
11 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 June 2013 05:51:45PM Permalink

I prefer to quantify my lack of information and call it a prior. Then it's even better than wrong information!

11 points AlanCrowe 03 July 2013 03:46:24PM Permalink

Madmen we are, but not quite on the pattern of those who are shut up in a madhouse. It does not concern any of them to discover what sort of madness afflicts his neighbor, or the previous occupants of his cell; but it matters very much to us. The human mind is less prone to go astray when it gets to know to what extent, and in how many directions, it is itself liable to err, and we can never devote too much time to the study of our aberrations.

Bernard de Fontenelle,1686

Found in book review

11 points Estarlio 04 July 2013 10:59:11PM Permalink

Because the consequences of losing are so terrible, people tend to avoid serious fighting if they can. Being hunted - a far more likely state - is decidedly un-fun.

11 points satt 12 July 2013 12:37:16AM Permalink

People tend to roll their eyes a bit when business school grads like me start saying things about “management is measurement” and so on, but the fact is that a) if you don’t measure something, how are you going to find out whether it’s changed or not? and b) if you don’t want to find out whether something’s changing or not, in what sense can you actually claim to care about it?

Daniel Davies

11 points simplicio 15 July 2013 04:34:22PM Permalink

I'm fine with this quote as long as the conclusion is not "So let's just do science without any philosophy!"

Because usually that just means doing science with unexamined philosophical assumptions while deluding yourself that you're being objective. This goes badly; e.g., Copenhagen interpretation, neurobabble ("Libet experiment proves you have no free will!").

11 points Eugine_Nier 02 July 2013 03:47:59AM Permalink

At college in 1980, my Government Studies prof also served as Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party of Minnesota (the real one, not the DFL). We clashed over Robert Mugabe, just coming to power in Zimbabwe, he asserting it spelled salvation and I, that it spelled ruin.

I e-mailed him a year or two ago, asking if I could get a retroactive grade increase since my predictions had proven more accurate than his. His explanation was that he truly believed Mugabe was an agrarian reformer whose program of taking land from Whites to give to Blacks would benefit the country; but things just hadn't worked out as hoped.

I didn't bother to send him the famous Heinlein quote about Bad Luck. And I didn't really expect the grade change. But it certainly was satisfying to say "I told you so" 30 years later.

JD

11 points ygert 07 July 2013 08:52:31AM Permalink

I think the main thing that can be said to defend keeping the Constitution is simply that it is a Schelling point. We need some way to base our system of laws. What system do you choose? There are arguments for many options, and I'm not saying the Constitution is necessarily the best. But due to what you may perhaps call a historical accident, the Constitution is where we are now. This makes it a Schelling point for all the different options for a system to base our laws on.

11 points RolfAndreassen 03 August 2013 06:34:06PM Permalink

It's either a cautionary tale about the dangers of deceiving yourself, or a humorous look at the impossibility of actually doing so.

11 points Document 03 August 2013 02:25:30AM Permalink

I think it's good to be well-calibrated.

11 points gwern 05 August 2013 07:45:55PM Permalink

I chose Ramanujan as my example because mathematics is extremely meritocratic, as proven by how he went from poor/middle-class Indian on the verge of starving to England on the strength of his correspondence papers. If there really were countless such people, we would see many many examples of starving farmers banging out some impressive proofs and achieving levels of fame somewhat comparable to Einstein; hence the reference class of peasant-Einsteins must be very small since we see so few people using sheer brainpower to become famous like Ramanujan.

(Or we could simply point out that with average IQs in the 70s and 80s, average mathematician IQs closer to 140s - or 4 standard deviations away, even in a population of billions we still would only expect a small handful of Ramanujans - consistent with the evidence. Gould, of course, being a Marxist who denies any intelligence, would not agree.)

11 points Vaniver 05 August 2013 11:28:59PM Permalink

From his letter to G.H. Hardy:

I am already a half starving man. To preserve my brains I want food and this is my first consideration. Any sympathetic letter from you will be helpful to me here to get a scholarship either from the university or from the government.

Googling the text finds it quoted a bunch of places.

11 points gwern 11 August 2013 04:54:13PM Permalink

Oppenheimer's conjugate was jailed or executed for attempted murder, instead of being threatened with academic probation.

A gross exaggeration; execution was never in the cards for a poisoned apple which was never eaten.

Gödel's conjugate added a postscript to his proof warning that the British Royal Family were possible Nazi collaborators, which got it binned, which convinced him that all British mathematicians were in on the conspiracy.

Likewise. Goedel didn't go crazy until long after he was famous, and so your conjugate is in no way showing 'privilege'.

Newton and Turing's conjugates were murdered as teenagers on suspicion of homosexuality.

Likewise. You have some strange Whiggish conception of history where all periods were ones where gays would be lynched; Turing would not have been lynched anymore than President Buchanan would have, because so many upper-class Englishmen were notorious practicing gays and their boarding schools Sodoms and Gomorrahs. To remember the context of Turing's homosexuality conviction, this was in the same period where highly-placed gay Englishman after gay Englishman was turning out to be Soviet moles (see the Cambridge Five and how the bisexual Kim Philby nearly became head of MI6!) EDIT: pg137-144 of the Ramanujan book I've been quoting discusses the extensive homosexuality at Cambridge and its elite, and how tolerance of homosexuality ebbed and flowed, with the close of the Victorian age being particularly intolerant.

The right conjugate for Newton, by the way, reads 'and his heretical Christian views were discovered, he was fired from Cambridge - like his successor as Lucasian Professor - and died a martyr'.

I have to make these stories up because if you're poor and at all weird, flawed, or unlucky your story is rarely recorded.

The problem is, we have these stories. We have Ramanujan who by his own testimony was on the verge of starvation - and if that is not poor, then you are not using the word as I understand it - and we have William Shakespeare (no aristocrat he), and we have Epicurus who was a slave. There is no censorship of poor and middle-class Einsteins. And this is exactly what we would expect when we consider what it takes to be a genius like Einstein, to be gifted in multiple ways, to be far out on multiple distributions (giving us a highly skewed distribution of accomplishment, see the Lotka curve): we would expect a handful of outliers who come from populations with low means, and otherwise our lists to be dominated by outliers from populations with higher means, without any appeal to Marxian oppression or discrimination necessary.

11 points gattsuru 11 September 2013 04:46:13PM Permalink

Sokal's paper brought up the possibility of a morphogenetic field affecting quantum mechanics, which sounds slightly less rigorous than a Discworld joke -- Sir Pratchett can at least get the general aspects of quantum physics correctly. Likewise, Mrs. Jenna Moran's RPGs have more meaningful statements on set theory than Sokal's joking conflation of the axiom of equality and feminist/racial equality. I'd expect a lot of non-physicists would consider it unconvincing, especially if you allow them the answer "this paper makes no sense".

((I'd honestly expect false positives, more than false negatives, when asking average persons to /skeptically/ test papers on quantum mechanics for fraud. Thirty pages of math showing a subatomic particle to be charming has language barrier problems.))

The greater concern here is that the evidence Mr. McCarthy uses to support his assertions is incredibly weak. The vast majority of his list of interspecies hybrids, for example, are either intra-familiae or completely untrustworthy (some are simply appeals to legends or internet hoax, like the cabbit or dog-bear hybrids). The only example of remotely similar variation to a chimpanzee-pig hybrid while being remotely trustworthy is an alleged rabbit-rat cross, but chasing the citation shows that the claimed evidence likely had a different (and at the time of the original experiment, unknown) cause and that the fertilization never occurred. Other cases conflate mating behavior and fertility, by which definition humans should be capable of hybridizing with rubber and glass. The sheer number of untrustworthy citations -- and, more importantly, that they're mixed together with the verifiable and known good ones -- is a huge red flag.

The quote's interesting -- and correct! as anyone who's shown the double-slit experiment can show -- but there's probably better ways to say it and theories to associate it with.

11 points Jayson_Virissimo 02 September 2013 04:54:21AM Permalink

In a democratic republic of over 300 million people, whether or not you "participate in politics" has virtually no effect on whether your rulers are inferior or superior than yourself (unless "participate in politics" is a euphemism for coup d'état).

11 points Manfred 05 September 2013 09:25:25PM Permalink

Would be nice if this were true.

11 points Nomad 05 October 2013 04:22:44PM Permalink

From the same article:

I do it because it's good for the brain. To do good work you need a brain that can go anywhere. And you especially need a brain that's in the habit of going where it's not supposed to.

11 points Panic_Lobster 10 October 2013 05:35:03AM Permalink

The reason that testability is not enough is that prediction is not, and cannot be, the purpose of science. Consider an audience watching a conjuring trick. The problem facing them has much the same logic as a scientific problem. Although in nature there is no conjurer trying to deceive us intentionally, we can be mystified in both cases for essentially the same reason: appearances are not self-explanatory. If the explanation of a conjuring trick were evident in its appearance, there would be no trick. If the explanations of physical phenomena were evident in their appearance, empiricism would be true and there would be no need for science as we know it. The problem is not to predict the trick's appearance. I may, for instance predict that if a conjurer seems to place various balls under various cups, those cups will later appear to be empty; and I may predict that if the conjurer appears to saw someone in half, that person will later appear on stage unharmed. Those are testable predictions. I may experience many conjuring shows and see my predictions vindicated every time. But that does not even address, let alone solve, the problem of how the trick works. Solving it requires an explanation: a statement of the reality which accounts for the trick's appearance.

David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

11 points wedrifid 07 October 2013 06:46:44AM Permalink

You can't call them 'inventors' though, because that's not as high-status as 'poet'.

It isn't? That's... broken.

11 points pjeby 08 November 2013 12:00:12AM Permalink

It looked like nonsense to me. I stopped reading after a few sentences.

I thought it was a puzzle or riddle, so I went back and looked at it again. My first guess was that it was something to do with running, then paper airplanes (which can be made from newspaper, but not a magazine). The rock as anchor made me realize there needed to be something attached, which made me realize it was a kite.

On the other hand, I don't have any trouble seeing alternative interpretations; perhaps it's because I already tried several and came to the conclusion myself. (Or maybe it's just that I'm more used to looking at things with multiple interpretations; it's a pretty core skill to changing one's self.)

Then again, I also don't see the paragraph as infused with irreversible knowing. I read the words literally every time, and have to add words like, "for flying a kite" to the sentences in order to make the link. I could just as easily add "in bed", though, at which point the paragraph actually becomes pretty hilarious -- much like a strung-together collage of fortune cookie quotes... in bed. ;-)

11 points Eugine_Nier 03 November 2013 04:15:35AM Permalink

Quick Googling shows that there's a paper published that states that European's average cranial capacities is 1347.

That's close enough to not effect his point, or even the order. I think you're engaging in motivated continuing to avoid having to acknowledge conclusions you find uncomfortable.

Rather then describing the facts as they are he paints things as more certain than they are. I think that people who do that in an area, where false beliefs lead to people being descrimited, are in no position to complain when they some social scorn.

Do you also apply the same criticism to the (much larger number of) people how make (much larger errors) in the direction of no difference? Also, could you taboo what you mean by "descrimited". Steelmanning suggests you mean "judged according to inaccurate priors", yet you also seem be implying that inaccurately equaliterian priors aren't a problem.

11 points NancyLebovitz 06 November 2013 06:11:46PM Permalink

I think you've got a half-truth there.

Memes spread horizontally aren't selected for virulence, but memes spread generationally have at least been selected for not being utterly deadly.

11 points Desrtopa 18 December 2013 05:11:07PM Permalink

Impressive, but it does have a pretty dramatic possible failure state where Tyson's response is "I suggest we settle this by punching each other." (In deed if not in word.)

11 points James_Miller 03 December 2013 02:49:55PM Permalink

Mathematically and Economically Literate World: Rapid economic growth in India and China create record sales for low marginal cost information goods that achieve cross-cultural appeal by, for example, playing to base pleasures by displaying explosions and beautiful actors.

11 points Dan_Moore 19 December 2013 04:24:06PM Permalink

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better. -Samuel Beckett

11 points fubarobfusco 02 December 2013 05:13:10AM Permalink

Lovecraft sipped his tea, obviously framing his answer carefully. "One doesn't have to believe in Santa Claus to recognize that people will exchange presents at Christmas time. One doesn't have to believe in Yog Sothoth, the Eater of Souls, to realize how people will act who do hold that belief. It is not my intent, in any of my writings, to provide information that will lead even one unbalanced reader to try experiments that will result in the loss of human life."

— Wilson and Shea, Illuminatus!

11 points Vaniver 02 December 2013 05:44:55PM Permalink

How is this a net improvement in holding only patients who are actually insane?

A patient who believes they are Samson inaccurately believes they have a weakness: their hair being cut. By cutting their hair, you trigger their imaginary weakness, which decreases the amount that they resist, and thus you do not have to pin them down with orderlies.

11 points gjm 17 January 2014 11:47:50AM Permalink

I don't think anyone is claiming that this describes all instances where someone calls something immoral.

It's merely calling attention to two interesting phenomena: (1) envy can make people regard something as immoral when their real problem with it is that others can have it and they can't, and (2) even when someone has actual principled reasons for disapproving of something, once they are in a position to take advantage of it themselves they are liable to forget those principles.

(Perhaps those are really the same phenomenon, deep down. But they feel different enough that, e.g., it took me a while to figure out how anyone could think the quotation had anything to do with the idea that "power corrupts" because I was initially thinking only of #1 while cousin_it was referring to #2.)

11 points katydee 04 February 2014 07:50:26AM Permalink

The most important thing in life is to be free to do things. There are only two ways to insure that freedom - you can be rich or you can you reduce your needs to zero.

Colonel John Boyd

11 points eli_sennesh 03 February 2014 09:02:54AM Permalink

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

-- H.L. Mencken

11 points CasioTheSane 27 March 2014 10:32:55PM Permalink

Don't you think it would be a useful item to add to your intellectual toolkits to be capable of saying, when a ton of wet steaming bullshit lands on your head, 'My goodness, this appears to be bullshit'?

-Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

11 points CCC 08 March 2014 05:00:29AM Permalink

You correctly describe what the quote literally says, but there's a fine line between "I'm just writing a story which requires that these particular materialists be biased" and "I'm accusing materialists in general of being biased like this".

Lewis is not accusing materialists in general of having that bias - Lewis is accusing humans in general of having that bias. The idea that humans have that bias, and that that bias can be exploited to convince a human to subscribe to a given philosophy independantly of whether that philosophy is true is rather the point of the quote.

11 points MichaelHoward 15 March 2014 02:13:44AM Permalink

How many things apparently impossible have nevertheless been performed by resolute men who had no alternative but death.

-- Napoleon Bonaparte.

11 points HungryHobo 02 April 2014 12:52:10PM Permalink

A bigger danger is publication bias. collect 10 well run trials without knowing that 20 similar well run ones exist but weren't published because their findings weren't convenient and your meta-analysis ends up distorted from the outset.

11 points Ixiel 14 April 2014 03:37:41PM Permalink

If the best minds were in charge of designing a bridge, I would expect the bridge to hold up well even in a storm. If the best minds were in charge of designing an airplane, I would expect it to fly reliably. But if the best minds were in charge of something no one really knows how to do, I would be ready for a failure, albeit a failure with superb academic credentials.

Terry Coxon

11 points shminux 11 April 2014 10:34:13PM Permalink

Does this quote have any rationalist content beyond the usual anti-deathism applause light?

11 points Anders_H 24 April 2014 03:20:34PM Permalink

Neither. Obviously, the average excellence of "doctors, masters and bachelors" of the most renowned universities is higher than the average excellence of people who are self-taught. Nobody suggests that being self-taught correlates positively with excellence.

The quotation is still undoubtedly true, because there are many more individuals who are self-taught than individuals who have these credentials. It is also plausible that the variance in excellence among the self-taught is much higher. Therefore, it is trivial to identify self-taught individuals who are more knowledgeable than most highly credentialed university graduates.

In fact, as a doctoral student in applied causal inference at a fairly renowned university, I can identify several self-taught Less Wrong community members who understand causality theory better than I do.

11 points Eugine_Nier 01 May 2014 11:21:22PM Permalink

People are surely better off with the truth. Oddly enough, everyone agrees with this when it comes to the arts. Sophisticated people sneer at feel-good comedies and saccharine romances in which everyone lives happily ever after. But when it comes to science, these same people say, "Give us schmaltz!" They expect the science of human beings to be a source of emotional uplift and inspirational sermonizing.

Steven Pinker

11 points Nornagest 21 June 2014 11:58:50PM Permalink

Relevant to bounded cognition and consequentialism:

"It is better to be just than to be kind, but only good judges can be just; let those who cannot be just be kind."

-- Loyal to the Group of Seventeen, The Citadel of the Autarch, Gene Wolfe

11 points RichardKennaway 06 June 2014 04:22:14PM Permalink
11 points sixes_and_sevens 08 July 2014 09:19:17AM Permalink

"My digital photography degree from an era of obsolescent technology isn't rendered completely useless through the passage of time" is a far cry from "I can divert the course of rivers".

11 points Stabilizer 04 August 2014 11:24:33PM Permalink

Most of the time what we do is what we do most of the time.

-Daniel Willingham, Why Dont Students Like School. The point is that, quite often the reason we're doing something is that that's what we're used to doing in that situation.

Note: He attributes the quote to some other psychologists.

11 points AlanCrowe 05 September 2014 11:07:11PM Permalink

I don't see what to do about gaps in arguments. Gaps aren't random. There are little gaps where the original authors have chosen to use their limited word count on other, more delicate, parts of their argument, confident that charitable readers will be happy to fill the small gaps themselves in the obvious ways. There are big gaps where the authors have gone the other way, tip toeing around the weakest points in their argument. Perhaps they hope no-one else will notice. Perhaps they are in denial. Perhaps there are issues with the clarity of the logical structure that make it easy to whiz by the gap without noticing it.

The third perhaps is especially tricky. If you "re-express your target’s position ... clearly" you remove the obfuscation that concealed the gap. Now what? Leaving the gap in clear view creates a strawman. Attempting to fill it draws a certain amount of attention to it; you certainly fail the ideological Turing test because you are making arguments that you opponents don't make. Worse, big gaps are seldom accidental. They are there because they are hard to fill. Indeed it might be the difficulty of filling the gap that made you join the other side of the debate in the first place. What if your best effort to fill the gap is thin and unconvincing?

Example: Some people oppose the repeal of the prohibition of cannabis because "consumption will increase". When you try to make this argument clear you end up distinguishing between good-use and bad-use. There is the relax-on-a-Friday-night-after-work kind of use which is widely accepted in the case of alcohol and can be termed good-use. There is the behaviour that gets called "pissing your talent away" when it beer-based. That is bad-use.

When you try to bring clarity to the argument you have to replace "consumption will increase" by "bad-use will increase a lot and good-use will increase a little, leading to a net reduction in aggregate welfare." But the original "consumption will increase" was obviously true, while the clearer "bad+++, good+, net--" is less compelling.

The original argument had a gap (just why is an increase in consumption bad?). Writing more clearly exposes the gap. Your target will not say "Thanks for exposing the gap, I wish I'd put it that way.". But it is not an easy gap to fill convincingly. Your target is unlikely to appreciate your efforts on behalf of his case.

11 points satt 02 September 2014 03:52:09AM Permalink

It would be a sign of wisdom if someone actually did post "I'm stupid: I can hardly ever understand the viewpoint of anyone who disagrees with me."

Ah, but would it be, though?

11 points Viliam_Bur 05 September 2014 01:30:20PM Permalink

We could charitably translate "I don't understand how anyone could X" as "I notice that my model of people who X is so bad, that if I tried to explain it, I would probably generate a strawman".

11 points BenSix 07 October 2014 09:12:09PM Permalink

“Nobody supposes that the knowledge that belongs to a good cook is confined to what is or may be written down in a cookery book.” - Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics

11 points V_V 03 October 2014 10:55:22PM Permalink

The version of Windows following 8.1 will be Windows 10, not Windows 9. Apparently this is because Microsoft knows that a lot of software naively looks at the first digit of the version number, concluding that it must be Windows 95 or Windows 98 if it starts with 9.

Except that Windows 95 actual version number is 4.0, and Windows 98 version number is 4.1.

It seems that Microsoft has been messing with version numbers in the last years, for some unknown (and, I would suppose, probably stupid) reason: that's why Xbox One follows Xbox 360 which follows Xbox, so that Xbox One is actually the third Xbox, the Xbox with 3 in the name is the second one, and the Xbox without 1 is the first one. Isn't it clear?

Maybe I can't understand the logic behind this because I'm not a billionarie, but I'm inclined to think this comes from the same geniuses who thought that the design of Windows 8 UI made sense.

11 points Gondolinian 05 December 2014 03:23:41PM Permalink

That hypothetical action doesn't "work" in the sense of helping you accomplish all relevant goals, among which, I assume, is the desire to not be incarcerated. (It is also obviously highly immoral.) Put another way, if you define "work" to include something very bad happening to you, that's just "stupid."

11 points tjohnson314 17 December 2014 01:02:59AM Permalink

"You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10^12 to 1 against."

  • Ernest Rutherford
11 points Robin 07 December 2014 11:55:40PM Permalink

"As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown."

Ayn Rand

11 points Lumifer 11 December 2014 04:08:28PM Permalink

While I agree with the overall sentiment, I think it's important not to overdo this approach. Let me explain.

Consider the situation where you have a stochastic process which generates values -- for example, you're drawing random values from a certain distribution. So you draw a number and let's say it is 17.

On the one hand you did draw 17 -- that number is "real" and the rest of the distribution which didn't get realized is only "imaginary". You should care about that 17 and not about what did not happen.

On the other hand, if we're interested not just in a single sample, but in the whole process and the distribution underlying it, that number 17 is almost irrelevant. We want to understand the entire distribution and that involves parts which did not get realized but had potential to be realized. We care about them because they inform our understanding of what might happen if the process runs again and generates another value.

Similarly, if you treat history as a sequence of one-off events, you should pay attention only to what actually happened and ignore what did not. But if you want to see history as a set of long-term processes which generate many events, you're probably interested in estimating the entire shape of these processes and that includes "invisible" parts which did not actually happen but could have happened.

There are obvious methodological pitfalls here and I would recommend wielding Occam's Razor with abandon, but that should not conceal the underlying epistemic point that what did not happen could be important, too.

11 points MotivationalAppeal 07 December 2014 04:12:06PM Permalink

Pathological counter example: "Passive propulsion in vortex wakes" by Beal et al. PDF

11 points timujin 06 November 2014 07:13:20PM Permalink

Are there no instances in Russian which reveal a poorly categorized concept in English, or vice-versa?

Oh yes, there are. My personal pet peeve, there is no way to distinguish "difficulty" and "complexity" in Russian. There is even no simple way (or, at least, I don't know one) like "difficult as in how hard it is to do, not as in how hard it is to describe"). However, hard way (spending a minute explaining the difference and then using some shorthand) works perfectly with Russian-only speakers, even not very intelligent ones. They do seem to have that distinction in their maps, and sometimes even comment on how weird it is that it is impossible to spell it properly. I never saw anyone being confused by it.

My own favorite example is how stunningly ambiguous the word "why" seems after learning about finer distinctions like the "por que" vs "para que" distinction in Spanish.

BTW, Russian does have that distinction. Question words is one area in which Russian is superior, in my opinion.

For an example from today's news commentary: even some ardent feminists are surprised to learn that "Banksy" might be a woman, possibly because even if you know intellectually that English uses "he" as a neutral pronoun for a person of unknown gender, that's not always enough to prevent prose references to an unknown person as "he" from affecting you subliminally.

Oh, that reminds me. In Russian, every noun has a grammatical gender. Cabinet is male, keyboard is female and window is neuter. It DOES carry a lot of connotations that affect me in introspectively noticable ways.

Curious note: when rereading this post last time before posting, I noticed that in the very first paragraph, when I talked about distinction between complexity and difficulty, I used words "simple" and "hard" as literal antonyms without even noticing.

11 points kilobug 05 November 2014 11:01:00AM Permalink

That's often true, but there are counter-examples, like my all time favorite : the Foundation cycle. In it, especially the beginning of it (the Foundation novel and the prequels), it's truly the heroes who are doing something awesome - the Foundation and all what's associated to it - and the villains who try to prevent them (and even that is more complicated/interesting as simple "vilain").

It's also often the case in Jules Verne fiction, or in the rest of "hard scifi", be it about trans-humanism (permutation city for example) or about planetary exploration.

11 points johnswentworth 05 November 2014 06:45:01AM Permalink

Alas, no. I just saw the bottom half of that list and my physicist instincts said "ah, some nice person has provided a list of interesting and difficult unsolved problems".

11 points RichardKennaway 07 November 2014 09:10:59PM Permalink

A good one, but a duplicate.

10 points gjm 19 April 2009 01:10:57AM Permalink

Truth emerges much more readily from error than from confusion.

Francis Bacon

10 points steven0461 18 April 2009 07:16:50PM Permalink

Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen.

-- the Agnostic's Prayer, by Roger Zelazny

10 points AndySimpson 18 April 2009 07:50:55PM Permalink

...natural selection built the brain to survive in the world and only incidentally to understand it at a depth greater than is needed to survive. The proper task of scientists is to diagnose and correct the misalignment.

-E. O. Wilson

10 points Yvain 18 April 2009 12:57:56PM Permalink

Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.

-- Scott Adams

10 points Cyan 21 May 2009 05:11:46AM Permalink

Truth comes out of error more readily than out of confusion.

-- Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620)

10 points NihilCredo 20 May 2009 11:41:18AM Permalink

And when he cannot answer and stares at you dumbfounded while drooling a little,then you tell him he's crazy :)

10 points newerspeak 20 May 2009 06:19:36AM Permalink

It's a paraphrase of T.E. Lawrence:

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.

10 points brian_jaress 02 July 2009 07:29:36PM Permalink

Censure yourself, never another. Do not discuss right and wrong.

-- Zengetsu

When I first saw this, I had a negative gut reaction. The second sentence especially bothered me. Over time, I've come to like it more. I'm now at the point of wanting to follow it but usually failing to do so.

Discussions here on [akrasia][] seem to focus on procrastination, but this is my own very close number two.

10 points Psychohistorian 03 July 2009 08:05:57AM Permalink

I view it as the opposite. It seems to suggest figuring out what people are rather than throwing up our hands and calling them good/evil/crazy/etc. Kind of like this. YMMV.

10 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 August 2009 09:12:06PM Permalink

I think this should go at the top of all monthly Rationality Quotes posts as an epigraph.

10 points anonym 07 August 2009 05:27:59AM Permalink

There’s no sense in being precise when you don’t even know what you’re talking about.

John Von Neumann

10 points Rain 01 September 2009 10:49:34PM Permalink

Wisdom is not only to be acquired, but also to be utilized.

-Marcus Tullius Cicero

10 points anonym 01 September 2009 03:35:32PM Permalink

No artist tolerates reality.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

10 points PhilGoetz 23 October 2009 01:28:58AM Permalink

A good point - but also note that, when Galileo argued against Artistotelian physics in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, he set forth instead the idea of the inertial reference frame - but Galileo also never felt the need to perform an experiment to verify that his shipboard "experiments" would work as he predicted. Both the wrong conclusion, and the right conclusion, were arrived at via thought-experiment. And when Einstein took the next step by proposing the special theory of relativity, that too was a thought-experiment with no validation.

10 points caiuscamargarus 24 October 2009 11:34:47PM Permalink

The kind of epistemology that allows you to be that certain about something so false is immoral.

To wit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5cFKpjRnXE=player_embedded

10 points PhilGoetz 22 October 2009 09:15:03PM Permalink

The master mathematician sat in his private room and pushed the papers from him. His calculations were already finished. In a small white phial there still remained a little of the drug that had kept him awake and active for four long nights. Each day, serene, explicit, patient as ever, he had given his lecture to his students, and then had come back at once to this momentous calculation. His face was grave, a little drawn and hectic from his drugged activity. For some time he seemed lost in thought. Then he went to the window, and the blind went up with a click. Half way up the sky, over the clustering roofs, chimneys and steeples of the city, hung the star.

He looked at it as one might look into the eyes of a brave enemy. "You may kill me," he said after a silence. "But I can hold you--and all the universe for that matter--in the grip of this little brain. I would not change. Even now."

-- H.G. Wells, "The Star", 1897

10 points ABranco 24 October 2009 03:56:03AM Permalink

Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned. —Avicenna (980–1037 AD)

10 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 October 2009 04:13:58PM Permalink

I've never seen a UFO. When I went to places that were rumored to be haunted, nothing showed up. Two hours of intense staring didn't make my pencil move a single millimeter, and glaring at my classmate's head didn't reveal his thoughts to me, either. I couldn't help but get depressed at how normal the laws of physics were.

-- Kyon, The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi

10 points Technologos 30 November 2009 08:31:54AM Permalink

If making a major contribution seemed so easy, and would be harder in some other field, it sure would suggest that his comparative advantage in the easy field is much greater; would not that suggest that he ought to devote his efforts there, since other people have proven relatively capable in the harder fields?

10 points RobinZ 30 November 2009 12:01:15AM Permalink

Quotation - yes, but how differently persons quote! I am as much informed of your genius by what you select, as by what you originate. I read the quotation with your eyes, find a new fervent sense... For good quoting, then, there must be originality in the quoter - bent, bias, delight in the truth, only valuing the author in the measure of his agreement with the truth which we see, which he had the luck to see first. And originality, what is that? It is being; being somebody, being yourself, reporting accurately what you see are. If another's words describe your fact, use them as freely as you use the language the alphabet, whose use does not impair your originality. Neither will another's sentiment or distinction impugn your sufficiency. Yet in proportion to your reality of life perception, will be your difficulty of finding yourself expressed in others' words or deeds.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, Oct.-Nov. 1867

10 points Kutta 30 November 2009 02:08:30PM Permalink

„The hard part is actually being rational, which requires that you postpone the fun but currently irrelevant arguments until the pressing problem is solved, even perhaps with the full knowledge that you are actually probably giving them up entirely. Delaying gratification in this manner is not a unique difficulty faced by transhumanists. Anyone pursuing a long-term goal, such as a medical student or PhD candidate, does the same. The special difficulty that you will have to overcome is the difficulty of staying on track in the absence of social support or of appreciation of the problem, and the difficulty of overcoming your mind’s anti-religion defenses, which will be screaming at you to cut out the fantasy and go live a normal life, with the normal empty set of beliefs about the future and its potential.”

– Michael Vassar

10 points righteousreason 30 November 2009 01:58:26AM Permalink

"But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil." - Robert Heinlein (SISL)

10 points RichardKennaway 12 January 2010 12:17:17PM Permalink

"If I were wrong, then one would have been enough."

Einstein's reported response to the pamphlet One Hundred Authors Against Einstein.

10 points Zack_M_Davis 11 January 2010 11:48:19AM Permalink

Mathematical folklore contains a story about how Acta Quandalia published a paper proving that all partially uniform k-quandles had the Cosell property, and then a few months later published another paper proving that no partially uniform k-quandles had the Cosell property. And in fact, goes the story, both theorems were quite true, which put a sudden end to the investigation of partially uniform k-quandles.

-- Mark Jason Dominus

10 points Rain 07 January 2010 11:35:45PM Permalink

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

-- Carl Sagan

10 points Morendil 08 January 2010 08:19:10AM Permalink

[...] 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

10 points MatthewB 07 January 2010 02:06:09PM Permalink

People will torture their children with battery acid from time to time anyway -- and who among us hasn't wanted to kill and eat an albino? I sincerely hope that my "new atheist" colleagues are not so naive as to imagine that actual belief in magic might be the issue here. After all, it would be absurd to criticize witchcraft as unscientific, as this would ignore the primordial division between mythos and logos. Let me see if I have this straight: Belief in demons, the evil eye, and the medicinal value of a cannibal feast are perversions of the real witchcraft - -which is drenched with meaning, intrinsically wholesome, integral to our humanity, and here to stay. Do I have that right?

Sam Harriss reply to Karen Armstrong

10 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 February 2010 12:45:39AM Permalink

It's amazing the things people would rather have than money.

-- Garfield

10 points brian_jaress 03 February 2010 08:30:25AM Permalink

Your friend must be pretty hungry by now.

10 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 February 2010 12:46:28AM Permalink

Yeah, let me do it.

10 points XiXiDu 01 February 2010 05:26:47PM Permalink

I see this is being downvoted badly. I got it. Anyway, for those interested in the nature of reality, check out the discussion about the above quote here: http://www.thebigquestions.com/2009/12/17/non-simple-arithmetic/

I'd delete it here, but since there are comments referring to it, I won't.

10 points Amanojack 05 April 2010 08:29:09PM Permalink

This is more important than it looks. Most people's beliefs are just recorded memes that bubbled up from their subconscious when someone pressed them for their beliefs. They wonder what they believe, their mind regurgitates some chatter they heard somewhere, and they go, "Aha, that must be what I believe." Unless they take special countermeasures, humans are extremely suggestible.

10 points MichaelGR 05 April 2010 06:35:53AM Permalink

"Torture the data long enough and they will confess to anything."

--via The Economist, "a saying of statisticians".

10 points wnoise 02 April 2010 06:54:28AM Permalink

No, currently we don't. If we want our values to survive, then we must win. If we want to win, we have nothing else to place our values on besides this "apparently barren soil".

Think of it as the converse of the following Terry Pratchett dialog between Susan and Death in Hogfather:

"All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."

"REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE"

"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little- "

"YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES"

"So we can believe the big ones?"

"YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING"

"They're not the same at all!"

"YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET-- " Death waved a hand. "AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME... SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED"

"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point---"

"MY POINT EXACTLY"

10 points RobinZ 02 May 2010 05:59:39PM Permalink

Only slightly less interesting in the same comment:

I used to hike a fair amount in the White Mountains in northern New England, and I made a point of reading the accident reports in Appalachia, the annual mountaineering journal of the Appalachian Mountain Club (see www.outdoors.org/publications/appalachia/index.cfm). Every fatality of the year is presented as a case study, and analyzed in terms of what went wrong. Reading those accident reports helped me to learn that people die in the mountains at all times of the year. Knowing how to get out of the woods before hypothermia sets in could in fact save one's life. Appalachia is a great learning tool.

This matter of case studies is intensely valuable.

10 points thomblake 03 May 2010 12:38:58AM Permalink

it can't be ineffable if you're effing it.

-Vorpal

10 points CronoDAS 02 May 2010 07:14:12AM Permalink

Two comments:

1) Magic: the Gathering strategy was developed and refined almost entirely through the Internet. If you want to be a competitive Magic player, you need the Internet.

2) If you need narrow advice - "how to fix a broken faucet" is pretty narrow - than the Internet works pretty well. If you want to learn to be a plumber, yeah, the Internet kinda sucks, but if you have relatively limited needs, it works.

10 points ata 05 May 2010 07:42:36AM Permalink

Unless one of the toys in question is a cryostat. Then there's still hope.

10 points Zubon 03 June 2010 01:19:57AM Permalink

all arguments online seem to follow that format. It's like a giant straw man ate a radioactive non sequitor and began rampaging through downtown Tokyo.

-- jman3030

10 points simplicio 03 June 2010 01:19:41AM Permalink

You make a good case. I repudiate my previous statement.

10 points DSimon 03 July 2010 12:30:39AM Permalink

Speaking in terms of real pop-up boxes, you might be surprised at how easy it is for people to ignore the content of even the most blaring, attention-grabbing error messages.

A typical computer user's reaction to a pop-up box is to immediately click whatever they think will make it go away, because a pop-up box is not a message to be understood but a distraction from what they're actually trying to accomplish. A more obnoxious pop-up box just increases the user's agitation to get rid of it.

As rationalists, we try hard to avoid falling into traps like these (I'm not sure if there's a name for the fallacy of ignoring information because it's annoying, but it's not exactly a high-utility strategy), but part of the way we should do that is to design systems that encourage good habits automatically.

I like Firefox's approach; when it wants you to choose between Yes or No on an important question ("Really install this unsigned plugin?"), it actually disables the buttons on the pop-up for the first 3 seconds. You see the pop-up box, your well-honed killer instinct kicks in and attempts to destroy it by mindlessly clicking on Yes so you can get back to work already... but that doesn't work, you're surprised, and that jolt out of complacency inspires you to actually read the message.

I suspect a "Hey, have you noticed that something has penetrated the skin of your left foot?" warning might benefit from having the same mechanism.

10 points djcb 03 July 2010 10:41:26AM Permalink

Their judgment was based more upon blind wishing than upon any sound prevision; for it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy.

-- Thucydides, Greek Historian, ca. 5th century BCE (Book IV, 108)

I like Thucydides for the way he tries to explain history in terms of real-politik, people, their drives and especially without including the gods in an explanation, somewhat similar to Hippocrates.

Interestingly, a modern version of this appeared in Neal Stephenson's Anathem:

Never believe a thing simply because you want it to be true

where it's called Diax's Rake.

Anathem is a great book, I'd like to add, and quite well aligned with many of the LW themes.

10 points Kyre 02 July 2010 04:45:24AM Permalink

He who knows not and knows not that he knows not is a fool - shun him

He who knows not, and knows that he knows not is a child - teach him

He who knows, and knows not that he knows is asleep - wake him

He who knows, and knows that he knows is wise - follow him

  • Persian proverb
10 points LucasSloan 02 July 2010 04:31:21AM Permalink

I think that while this quotation is true if we take "SCIENCE!" to mean intelligent optimization pressure, it is far more likely to create affective death spirals around anything that calls itself science than get people to try to fix problems.

10 points i77 04 July 2010 10:42:13PM Permalink

"We are selfish, base animals crawling across the earth. But because we got brains, if we try real hard, we may occasionally aspire to something that is less than pure evil."

-- Gregory House

10 points WrongBot 02 July 2010 12:49:10AM Permalink

Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.

George Box

10 points WrongBot 02 July 2010 03:34:00PM Permalink

I am shamed by my failure. I will master the Search, so that the Search can not master me.

10 points khafra 02 July 2010 10:46:30AM Permalink

David: But you're a doctor--you help people!

Dr. Mordin Solus: Lots of ways to help people. Sometimes heal patients; sometimes execute dangerous people. Either way helps.

-- Mass Effect 2

10 points ata 25 August 2010 04:59:33AM Permalink

Farnsworth: My god, is it possible?

Fry: It must be possible. It's happening.

— Futurama: "The Late Philip J. Fry"

10 points Baughn 22 August 2010 02:37:43PM Permalink

On the nature of ethics:

There is no justice in the laws of Nature, Headmaster, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don't have to! We care! There is light in the world, and it is us.

~ Eliezer Yudkowsky c/o Harry Potter, Methods of Rationality chapter 39.

10 points Randaly 14 August 2010 03:15:15AM Permalink

"A joke told by Warren Buffett comes to mind: a patient, after hearing from a doctor that he has cancer, tells the doctor, “Doc, I don’t have enough money for the surgery, but maybe could I pay you to touch up the x-ray?” Hope and self-deception are not a strategy."

~ Vitaliy Katsenelson

10 points orthonormal 06 August 2010 07:00:12PM Permalink

In short, whatever emotional impulse we may have toward altruism and empathy, and to whatever extent it may be genetically hardwired, it does not obviate the need for explicit judgments about right and wrong. If it did not seem correct to act with kindness and fairness, even at a net personal cost—if there were no sensible reason for so acting, beyond a raw impulse to do so—then we would have reason to regard the raw impulse as pointlessly self-destructive—like a disposition to alcoholism or a purely visceral (so to speak) aversion to surgery—and we would have a reason to attempt to overcome it.

  • Gary Drescher, Good and Real
10 points orthonormal 03 August 2010 04:23:10PM Permalink

This "Mary's Room" argument, like the "Chinese Room" argument†, contains a subtle sleight of hand.

On the one hand, for the learning to be about just the qualia rather than about externally observable features of vision processing, the subject would need to learn immensely more than the physical properties of red light. (The standard version of Mary's Room does so, postulating Mary to also deeply understand her own visual cortex and the changes it would undergo upon being exposed to that color.) In fact, the depth of conscious theoretical understanding that this would require is far beyond any human being, and it's wrong and silly to naively map our mind-states onto those of such a mind.

On the other hand, it plays on the everyday intuition that if I've never seen the color red, but have been given a short list of facts about it and am consciously representing my limited intuition for that set of facts, that doesn't add up to the experience of seeing red.

The equivocation consists of thinking that a superhuman level of detailed understanding of (and capability to predict) the human brain can be analogized to that everyday intuition, rather than being unimaginably other to it. So I don't see that an agent who was really possessed of that level of self-understanding would necessary feel that the actual experience added an ineffable otherness to what they already knew.

That sense of ineffable otherness, IMO, comes from the levels of detail in the mental processing of color which we don't have conscious access to. Our conscious mind isn't built to understand what we're doing when we visually perceive, at the level that we actually do it-- there's no evolutionary need to communicate all the richness of color perception, so the conscious mind didn't evolve to encompass it all. And this limitation of our conscious understanding feels to us like a thing we have which cannot in principle be reduced.

† The application of this same principle to the Chinese Room argument is a trivial exercise, left to the reader.

10 points WrongBot 03 August 2010 04:46:41AM Permalink

What is it that you feel/see/touch/taste/think/etc. instead of simply acting?

Why do you group together sense perceptions (which I have) with thoughts (which I have), and call them qualia (which I don't have)?

Why is there a "you" you experience, instead of mere rote action?

How are these different?

We label these sorts of things that we use to distinguish between empty existence and our own subjective (personally observed/felt) experience.

How can existence be "empty"? Is subjective experience just sense perception? Because sense perception doesn't seem like it warrants all this mysteriousness.

The thing about humans that distinguish them from P-zombies.

That's odd. I thought the sequence on P-zombies made it pretty clear that they don't exist. Why do we need to be distinguished from confused, impossible thought experiments?

10 points apophenia 09 October 2010 11:54:34PM Permalink

"Because this is the Internet, every argument was spun in a centrifuge instantly and reduced down into two wholly enraged, radically incompatible contingents, as opposed to the natural gradient which human beings actually occupy." -Tycho, Penny Arcade

10 points tim 06 October 2010 04:57:36AM Permalink

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe," I'd have been lying!

-- René Magritte, on his painting The Treachery of Images depicting a pipe with "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe") written under it

10 points nerzhin 06 October 2010 09:04:04PM Permalink

I apologize for poor conversational form.

Let me try again, hopefully more nicely: You made a very strong claim with very weak evidence.

You claimed our thoughts were fundamentally affected by our language, and that someone can control how people think by tweaking the language. Your evidence was your own sense (not a paper, not even a survey) that people think differently when writing in a different programming language.

If you have more evidence, I would really like to see it, I am not just saying that to score points or to make you angry.

10 points Relsqui 06 October 2010 08:47:41PM Permalink

The analogy I use in my head instead of games is languages. They both have rules, but "games" implies something fake, not productive, and not to be taken seriously. "Languages" are tools we're accustomed to using for everyday functional reasons, and it's clearer that breaking their rules arbitrarily has a more immediate detrimental effect on their purpose (communication).

The most common way I use the metaphor explicitly is during a misunderstanding with a friend. "Wait--what does X mean in Sammish? Z? Ohh, now I get it. In Relsquish, X means Y. That's why I thought you were talking about Y."

The nice thing about this model is that, in a game, you expect everyone to know the rules before you sit down to play. If someone doesn't follow them, they're either too ignorant to play or cheating. When you're talking to someone who speaks a different language from you (even if they're just different versions of English, like Sammish and Relsquish are), occasional confusion is a matter of course. When you misunderstand each other, no one has "broken" the rules; it's just a mismatch. You identify that, explain in other words, and move on, with much fewer hard feelings or blame.

10 points SilasBarta 06 October 2010 05:46:16PM Permalink

That's because it's easy to misvalue assets if you're disconnected from the production process. So when you have specialized bookkeepers, others will typcially see them as ignorant of the true value of the assets, and associate this with bookkeeping per se, rather than bookkeeping with a screwy incentive structure and/or knowledge flows. Because this is the context in which most people interface with accountants, they tend to be associated with misvaluing assets. And thus:

"Beancounters didn't think a soldier's life was worth 300 [thousand dollars]." -- Batman Begins

Edit: Sorry, I forgot to translate all that: P(observe "accountant" | believe accountant misvalued assets) P(observe "accountant" | ~believe accountant misvalued assets)

10 points Risto_Saarelma 06 October 2010 03:15:35PM Permalink

I assumed that the firefighters didn't accept the offer to pay them on the spot because that would send the signal to all the other houseowners that they could skip the regular fire department fee and then make an emergency payment when their house catches fire.

10 points Swimmy 07 October 2010 10:03:44PM Permalink

5) Burning Bibles is socially considered far more disrespectful than simply calling the Bible "false." Even a scientist who treats honesty as a lexicographic preference may still try to maximize politeness or social capital afterwards.

6) A scientist who lives in a time/region when Bible-burning leads to self-burning will use the method of observation to determine that burning the Bible is a bad idea.

10 points sketerpot 02 November 2010 10:18:42PM Permalink

Not always. I know someone who narrowly avoided Auschwitz who would beg to differ; her worst enemies were definitely external.

10 points anonym 03 November 2010 06:21:09AM Permalink

Can't you say "not always" about pretty much any quote? They aren't meant to be taken as universal truths that apply to all people and all circumstances across all of time ;-).

10 points steven0461 04 November 2010 02:19:10AM Permalink

It seems LW has now sunk to the level of "my holy book can beat up your holy book".

10 points Psy-Kosh 12 December 2010 04:08:44AM Permalink

That's the thing about power, I think. To some people --those of us who have none-- anyone who has it and uses it is a villain. To those who have it, anyone who tries to stop them from using it is a villain. Because we're all the heroes of our own story, no matter what horrible things we might be doing.

Sometimes people do terrible things with the best of intentions. I don't think that makes them any less guilty. But if you understand their reasons, you might find it more difficult to condemn them out of hand. You might find it more difficult to call them villains.

On the other hand, sometimes people do terrible things with the absolute worst of intentions. But even there, I don't think they're supervillains. I think they're just people.

(emphasis added)

  • David J. Schwartz, "Superpowers"
10 points ata 11 December 2010 01:47:11AM Permalink

I pick up my spraypaint and find a swan. Soon I don't have to wonder anymore.

10 points AlanCrowe 03 December 2010 03:17:01PM Permalink

The word empty spoils the quotation. The point is that

Powerful arguments with words cannot compete with a test which will show practical results

or

Good arguments with words that lose to a test which shows practical results are reduced thereby to empty arguments.

10 points sfb 07 December 2010 05:52:51PM Permalink

"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you." -Oscar Wilde

10 points Vaniver 06 December 2010 03:04:33AM Permalink

"Any fool can have an opinion; to know what one needs to know to have an opinion is wisdom; which is another way of saying that wisdom means knowing what questions to ask about knowledge."

--Neil Postman, "Building a Bridge to the 18th Century"

10 points Kazuo_Thow 04 December 2010 06:03:10AM Permalink

The splitting of the atom has changed everything save the way men think, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

-- Albert Einstein

10 points Jordan 03 December 2010 09:37:30PM Permalink

There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free.

Robert Anton Wilson, The Trick Top Hat

10 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 15 December 2010 10:34:22AM Permalink

I can't help but ask whether you've ever found this advice personally useful, and if so, how.

10 points RobinZ 03 December 2010 02:36:07PM Permalink

(Isn't it obvious that this isn't the sort of thing a real person would be likely to say? Especially not the sort of person who would be sent to Galileo by the Pope.)

Shhh! That quote is a soldier for Our Side, don't break it! ;)

10 points michaelkeenan 03 December 2010 01:54:58PM Permalink

The quote isn't accurate. There was argument over what was being seen through the telescope, not about whether to look through it. Details from a guy who wrote a book on Galileo here.

10 points gwern 07 January 2011 04:11:49PM Permalink

"The usual touchstone of whether what someone asserts is mere persuasion or at least a subjective conviction, i.e., firm belief, is betting. Often someone pronounces his propositions with such confident and inflexible defiance that he seems to have entirely laid aside all concern for error. A bet disconcerts him. Sometimes he reveals that he is persuaded enough for one ducat but not for ten. For he would happily bet one, but at ten he suddenly becomes aware of what he had not previously noticed, namely that it is quite possible that he has erred."

--Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (A824/B852); seen on http://kenfeinstein.blogspot.com/2011/01/kant-on-betting-and-prediction-markets.html as linked by Marginal Revolution

10 points Tesseract 03 January 2011 06:54:16AM Permalink

Do not bear this single habit of mind, to think that what you say and nothing else is true. ...For a man, though he be wise, it is no shame to learn – learn many things, and not maintain his views too rigidly.

Sophocles, Antigone

10 points HonoreDB 08 January 2011 06:20:34AM Permalink

Never understood the math behind that one. Do I start off lying down?

10 points fiddlemath 03 January 2011 08:47:39AM Permalink

Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.

Lewis Hyde, Alcohol and Poetry.

10 points Psy-Kosh 03 February 2011 11:41:18PM Permalink

KanadianLogik adds:

[...] Imagine if you really were Chell, and just accepted your fate....

10 points CronoDAS 03 February 2011 07:19:37PM Permalink

Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.

-- Seth Lloyd

10 points Snowyowl 02 February 2011 08:36:52PM Permalink

In Dirk Gently's universe, a number of everyday events involve hypnotism, time travel, aliens, or some combination thereof. Dirk gets to the right answer by considering those possibilities, but we probably won't.

10 points Alicorn 02 February 2011 12:40:49PM Permalink

I think it's more elegant to say it like this: "Light a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man afire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."

10 points Quirinus_Quirrell 02 February 2011 02:10:03AM Permalink

The world around us redounds with opportunities, explodes with opportunities, which nearly all folk ignore because it would require them to violate a habit of thought ... I cannot quite comprehend what goes through people's minds when they repeat the same failed strategy over and over, but apparently it is an astonishingly rare realization that you can try something else.

-- Eliezer Yudkowsky, putting words in my other copy's mouth

10 points TheOtherDave 02 March 2011 08:01:07PM Permalink

This reminds me of "It ain't what we don't know that hurts us, it's what we know that ain't so."

Which I have seen attributed to at least half a dozen different people over the years.

10 points radical_negative_one 07 March 2011 08:56:08PM Permalink

I am taking a first-aid class at my local community college. Our instructor, a paramedic, after telling us about the importance of blood flow to the brain, and the poor prognosis for someone who is left comatose from oxygen deprivation, says:

"There are some people who say, 'But miracles can happen!' Yeah, miracles are one in a million. What number are you?"

10 points CytokineStorm 08 March 2011 04:48:25PM Permalink

Ethics is ... the art of recommending to others the sacrifices for cooperation with oneself.

The great ethicists of history share essentially the same goal: get strangers to always pick D. ...

10 points wedrifid 05 March 2011 09:03:24AM Permalink

A truly elegant argument in favour of getting hit with a baseball bat every week.

It seems to be an argument against restrictive paternalism, enforced dependence and misguided risk aversion.

The implied game analysis is something along the lines of the following:

  • Running into a pole is a drag (negative -100 utilons).
  • Living a life dependent on caretakers and restricted from most of human experience gives 50 utilons per day and results in 1 pole hit per 100 days.
  • Living a completely independent life open to most possible lifestyles and experiences is worth 1,000 utilons per day and, if you are blind, may result in running into a pole once every two days.

Within that framework he would consider anyone who limits themselves unnecessarily to be crazy (irrationally risk averse or suffering from learned helplessness) and anyone who restricts the options available to blind people under their control to be perpetrating a serious harm (through misguided but possibly well meaning paternalism).

Consider the following similar declaration:

Falling off a bike is a drag. When learning to ride children will inevitably fall off their bikes. A child never being allowing to ride is far worse than falling off a bike sometimes. Pain is part of the price of freedom.

Most people can acknowledge the deleterious effects of too much coddling of that kind and Kish emphasises that it applies in exactly the same way to blind people as well. And not just because they are deprived of the experience of mountain biking by echolocation but more importantly because it trains the coddlee to rely on caretakers rather than themselves, stifling initiative and capability in a way similar to that which Eliezer recently discussed.

10 points CuSithBell 04 March 2011 04:15:25PM Permalink

Homer: Why'd they build this ghost town so far away?

Lisa: Because they discovered gold right over there!

Homer: It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything.

The Simpsons, "Kidney Trouble"

10 points RichardKennaway 11 April 2011 08:20:31AM Permalink

Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;

whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.

Do not rebuke a mocker or he will hate you;

rebuke a wise man and he will love you.

Instruct a wise man and he will be wiser still;

teach a righteous man and he will add to his learning.

Proverbs 9:7-9

10 points ata 10 April 2011 06:23:27PM Permalink

Given complexity of value, 'evil giant' and 'good giant' should not be weighted equally; if we have no specific information about the morality distribution of giants, then as with any optimization process, 'good' is a much, much smaller target than 'evil' (if we're including apparently-human-hostile indifference).

Unless we believe them to be evolutionarily close to humans, or to have evolved under some selection pressures similar to those that produced morality, etc., in which we can do a bit better than a complexity prior for moral motivations.

(For more on this, check out my new blog, Overcoming Giants.)

10 points zaph 04 April 2011 02:27:26PM Permalink

I thank Tony for not taking the immediately self-benefiting path of profit and instead doing his small part to raise the sanity waterline.

10 points pjeby 06 April 2011 04:02:20PM Permalink

I just hoped maybe someone would try to answer these old questions given that they had such confidence in their beliefs.

This website has an entire two-year course of daily readings that precisely identifies which parts are open questions, and which ones are resolved, as well as how to understand why certain of your questions aren't even coherent questions in the first place.

This is why you're in the same position as a creationist who hasn't studied any biology - you need to actually study this, and I don't mean, "skim through looking for stuff to argue with", either.

Because otherwise, you're just going to sit there mocking the answers you get, and asking silly questions like why are there still apes if we evolved from apes... before you move on to arguments about why you shouldn't have to study anything, and that if you can't get a simple answer about evolution then it must be wrong.

However, just as in the evolutionary case, just as in the earth-being-flat case, just as in the sun-going-round-the-world case, the default human intuitions about consciousness and identity are just plain wrong...

And every one of the subjects and questions you're bringing up, has premises rooted in those false intuitions. Until you learn where those intuitions come from, why our particular neural architecture and evolutionary psychology generates them, and how utterly unfounded in physical terms they are, you'll continue to think about consciousness and identity "magically", without even noticing that you're doing it.

This is why, in the world at large, these questions are considered by so many to be open questions -- because to actually grasp the answers requires that you be able to fully reject certain categories of intuition and bias that are hard-wired into human brains

(And which, incidentally, have a large overlap with the categories of intuition that make other supernatural notions so intuitively appealing to most human beings.)

10 points Alicorn 06 April 2011 04:16:22AM Permalink

A python script that indefinitely calculates pi would think it immoral

I'm sorry what? Why would it think about morality at all? That would take valuable cycles away from the task of calculating pi.

10 points Manfred 04 April 2011 06:25:55PM Permalink

Vi Hart is so dang awesome.

10 points ata 10 April 2011 08:04:57AM Permalink

I love this passage. If a god as described in the Bible did exist, following him would be akin to following Voldemort: fidelity simply because he was powerful.

There are other similarities too. e.g. Voldemort's human form died and rose again; his (first) death was foretold in prophesy, involved a betrayal (albeit in the opposite direction), and left his followers anxiously awaiting his return; "And these signs shall follow them that believe; ... they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents..." (Mark 16:17-18); ...

So, who wants to join the First Church of Voldemort?

10 points soreff 05 May 2011 02:58:58PM Permalink

For a complex task, agreed. For a simple task, a failure rate of 10E-5 can happen. How often do people trying to eat put their forks in their eyes rather than in their mouths? And, to consider mechanical processes... If the cpu I'm running this browser on failed every 10E5 instructions, it would fail 10E4 times a second. It doesn't.

10 points Alicorn 01 June 2011 09:10:05PM Permalink

Thylacines, maybe.

10 points gwern 07 June 2011 03:59:54PM Permalink

What I really like about this quote is that I'm fairly sure the 'old doctor' is himself.

10 points Mercy 06 June 2011 11:51:22PM Permalink

"They" is the tricky bit there. Presumably some people wanted a canal, and some people other people wanted jobs, and for that matter presumably some people wanted money to go to the construction company who've got an opening for a government liaison consultant coming up in five years time. There's little reason to think the equilibrium is welfare maximising.

10 points RobertLumley 02 June 2011 01:07:21AM Permalink

Well for what it's worth, I don't think he means it literally. Or at least so exactly. My interpretation is that he is saying that you must accept a rational basis and explanation for everything, or believe that nothing can be explained - you must accept that the laws of physics apply to every one and everything, and that there are no mysterious phenomena, or you must deny the laws of physics and believe everything is mystical.

And thanks, it's a great blog. I've learned so much reading Eliezer's work. Well, perhaps learned isn't the best word. Realized may be more appropriate.

10 points SimonF 15 July 2011 10:48:35AM Permalink

Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after death? No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no. One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out "Don't you believe in anything?" "Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be."

Isaac Asimov

10 points gwern 03 July 2011 03:41:59PM Permalink

Like broken windows are not all bad.

10 points A_Priori 06 July 2011 08:18:04PM Permalink

I realize that LW participants are having fun with this, but I’m a songwriter and I feel motivated to comment.

Writing lyrics is an extreme exercise in lossy data compression. If the lyrics are going to be interesting, you must have a tremendous story or concept in mind. Then you start throwing out 95% of your precious ideas because each gestalt has to fit into 4 lines and hit the listener in the gut or the heart. The best that you can hope for is to make people feel a few emotions and ponder a few ideas.

Stevie Wonder is among the best at the craft. He had to balance precision against brevity, word flow, and many other pressures including boring his audience. So even though a line like “All you need is love” or “my humps, my humps, my lovely lady lumps” hit the mark for their particular topics, I have to adjust Stevie Wonder’s score way up for pulling off a number 1 Bilboard hit with a subject carrying a large difficulty factor.

10 points gwern 07 August 2011 03:04:26AM Permalink

Milosz is obviously talking about Communism and the philosophy it was based on. (If you haven't read The Captive Mind, it's pretty good albeit obviously dated).

The lesson is that philosophy can be Serious Business and you ignore bad philosophy at your own peril. To paraphrase the famous Trotsky paraphrase: You may not be interested in diseased Philosophy, but diseased Philosophy is interested in you.

10 points gwern 03 August 2011 04:38:24PM Permalink

That's a little opaque... I think he means: 'These war games seem like very easy problems but are actually very hard; so legislation or proposals which tackle hard problems are probably tackling really hard problems, and failure is to be expected.'

10 points Tom_Talbot 02 August 2011 11:15:38PM Permalink

The inferior man's reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex - because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meagre capacity to take in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious. So on what seem to be higher levels. No man who has not had a long and arduous education can understand even the most elementary concepts of modern pathology. But even a hind at the plough can grasp the theory of chiropractic in two lessons. Hence the vast popularity of chiropractic among the submerged - and of osteopathy, Christian Science and other such quackeries with it. They are idiotic, but they are simple - and every man prefers what he can understand to what puzzles and dismays him. The popularity of fundamentalism among the inferior orders of men is explicable in exactly the same way. The cosmogenies that educated men toy with are all inordinately complex. To comprehend their veriest outlines requires an immense stock of knowledge, and a habit of thought. It would be be as vain to try to teach the peasants or to the city proletariat as it would be to try to teach them to streptococci. But the cosmogeny of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can grasp it. It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to an ignorant man, the irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it with loud hosannas, and has one more excuse for hating his betters.

H. L. Mencken, Homo Neanderthalensis

10 points Oscar_Cunningham 04 August 2011 01:59:38PM Permalink

I can't make head or tail of this quote.

10 points Konkvistador 24 September 2011 03:35:50PM Permalink

The key is that it's adaptive. It's not that it succeeds despite the bad results of its good intentions. It succeeds because of the bad results of its good intentions.

--Mencius Moldbug

10 points RichardKennaway 10 September 2011 10:12:14PM Permalink

To say that life evolves because of an elan vital is on a par with saying that a locomotive runs because of an elan locomotif.

Julian Huxley, Darwinism To-Day

10 points listic 02 September 2011 01:42:17PM Permalink

True courage is loving life while knowing all the truth about it.

-- Sergey Dovlatov

(translation is mine; can you propose a better translation from Russian?)

10 points gwern 03 September 2011 06:46:29PM Permalink

This is related, but not the research talked about. The Terman Project apparently found that the very highest IQ cohort had many more patents than the lower cohorts, but this did not show up as massively increased lifetime income.

Compare the bottom right IQ graph with SMPY results which show the impact of ability (SAT-M measured before age 13) on publication and patent rates. Ability in the SMPY graph varies between 99th and 99.99th percentile in quintiles Q1-Q5. The variation in IQ between the bottom and top deciles of the Terman study covers a similar range. The Terman super-smarties (i.e., +4 SD) only earned slightly more (say, 15-20% over a lifetime) than the ordinary smarties (i.e., +2.5 SD), but the probability of earning a patent (SMPY) went up by about 4x over the corresponding ability range.

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/04/earnings-effects-of-personality.html

Unless we want to assume those 4x extra patents were extremely worthless, or that the less smart groups were generating positive externalities in some other mechanism, this would seem to imply that the smartest were not capturing anywhere near the value they were creating - and hence were generating significant positive externalities.

EDIT: Jones 2011 argues much the same thing - economic returns to IQ are so low because so much of it is being lost to positive externalities.

10 points Yvain 19 September 2011 06:22:15PM Permalink

I think there's a few posts by Yudkowsky that I think deserve the highest praise one can give to a philosopher's writing: That, on rereading them, I have no idea what I found so mindblowing about them the first time. Everything they say seems patently obvious now!

-- Ari Rahikkala

10 points RobinZ 01 September 2011 05:56:08PM Permalink
10 points Kingreaper 01 September 2011 07:46:46AM Permalink

Sometimes I suspect that wouldn't even occur to them as a question. That evolution might turn out to be one of those things that it's just assumed any race that had mastered agriculture MUST understand.

Because, well, how could a race use selective breeding, and NOT realise that evolution by natural selection occurs?

10 points Slackson 01 September 2011 11:47:22AM Permalink

I suspect that the intent of the original quote is that they'll assess us by our curiosity towards, and effectiveness in discovering, our origins. As Dawkins is a biologist, he is implying that evolution by natural selection is an important part of it, which of course is true. An astronomer or cosmologist might consider a theory on the origins of the universe itself to be more important, a biochemist might consider abiogenesis to be the key, and so on.

Personally, I can see where he's coming from, though I can't say I feel like I know enough about the evolution of intelligence to come up with a valid argument as to whether an alien species would consider this to be a good metric to evaluate us with. One could argue that interest in oneself is an important aspect of intelligence, and scientific enquiry important to the development of space travel, and so a species capable of travelling to us would have those qualities and look for them in the creatures they found.

This is my time posting here, so I'm probably not quite up to the standards of the rest of you just yet. Sorry if I said something stupid.

10 points novalis 20 October 2011 12:15:47AM Permalink

If you want a truly amoral reason to care, it is this: most other people do, and these are the people you will have to convince of any proposal you want to make about anything, ever. If you propose something unfair, and are called on it, you will lose status and your proposal is unlikely to be adopted.

I would be deeply surprised if you did not care at all about fairness. I tend to think that at least some regard for fairness is part of the common mental structures of humans (there's a sequence post about this but I can't find it)

10 points gwern 14 October 2011 01:46:37AM Permalink

"Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good."

--#122 Assorted Opinions and Maxims, Friedrich Nietzsche

10 points SilasBarta 03 October 2011 06:29:13PM Permalink

Are you familiar with the seemingly similar question about the prisoners, king, and coin? I don't know the name, but it goes like this:

There are n prisoners in separate rooms, each with a doorway to a central chamber (CC) that has a coin. One by one, the king takes a random prisoner into the CC (no one else can see what is going on), and asks the prisoner if the king has brought all prisoners into the CC by now. The prisoner can either answer "yes" or "I don't know". If he says the former and is wrong, all prisoners are executed. If he's right, they're released.

If If he says "I don't know", he can set the coin to heads or tails. The king may turn over the coin after a prisoner leaves (and before he brings the next in), but he may only do so a finite k number of times in total. (This is a key similarity to the number of lies in the problem you describe).

The prisoners may discuss a strategy before starting, but the king gets to listen in and learn their strategy. So long as the game continues, every prisoner will be picked inifinte times (i.e. every prisoner can always expect to get picked again).

Is it possible for the prisoners to guarantee their eventual release?

The answer is yes, and there's a known bound on how long it takes. (Got this from slashdot a long time ago.)

Edit: Found it. Heres the discussion that spawned it, and heres the thread that introduces this problem, and heres a comment with a solution. Apparently, the problem has a name it goes by.

Edit2: This also serves as a case study in how to present a problem as succinctly as possible. The only thing I got wrong about its statement was that the king chooses the order of the prisoners going into the CC (rather than it being random), although given the constraint that each prisoner is eventually brought in infinite times, and the strategy must work all the time, I don't think it changes the problem.

10 points DanielLC 03 October 2011 01:08:07AM Permalink

I think the obvious answer would be that Heaven is overwhelmingly populated by ex-racists. Once they get there, they'd have people around to teach them better stuff.

10 points gwern 28 October 2011 11:19:52PM Permalink

"I find the Law of Fives to be more and more manifest the harder I look."

--Principia Discordia (surprisingly, not quoted yet)

10 points GabrielDuquette 02 October 2011 04:43:01AM Permalink

I can't stop myself. My question was interesting, so I asked it; my arguments were valid, so I made them.

Scott Aaronson

10 points gwern 23 November 2011 03:00:52AM Permalink

That's a pretty cool paper; eg.

There is not very much variability in coin flips, and practiced magicians (including myself ) can control them pretty precisely. My colleagues at the Harvard Physics Department built me a perfect coin flipper that comes up heads every time. Most human flippers do not have this kind of control and are in the range of 51⁄2 mph and 35 to 40 rps. Where is this on Figure 1? In the units of Figure 1, the velocity is about 1⁄5—very close to the zero. However, the spin coordinate is about 40—way off the graph. Thus, the picture says nothing about real flips. However, the math behind the picture determines how close the regions are in the appropriate zone. Using this and the observed spread of the measured data allows us to conclude that coin tossing is fair to two decimals but not to three. That is, typical flips show biases such as .495 or .503.

Or:

One of the most useful things to come out of my study is a collection of the rules of thumb my friends use in their decision making. For example, one of my Ph.D. advisers, Fred Mosteller, told me, “Other things being equal, finish the job that is nearest done.” A famous physicist offered this advice: “Don’t waste time on obscure fine points that rarely occur.” I’ve been told that Albert Einstein displayed the following aphorism in his office: “Things that are difficult to do are being done from the wrong centers and are not worth doing.” Decision theorist I. J. Good writes, “The older we become, the more important it is to use what we know rather than learn more.” Galen offered this: “If a lot of smart people have thought about a problem [e.g., God’s existence, life on other planets] and disagree, then it can’t be decided.”

10 points Eugine_Nier 01 November 2011 02:00:28AM Permalink

Even if they did, would you believe them?

10 points gwern 20 November 2011 05:42:20PM Permalink

"The method of 'postulating' what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil. Let us leave them to others and proceed with our honest toil."

Bertrand Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy 1919 ( http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-construction/#Hon )

10 points peter_hurford 01 November 2011 02:23:57AM Permalink

I think, therefore I am perhaps mistaken.

Sharon Fenick

10 points kalla724 02 November 2011 08:30:48PM Permalink

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

Bertrand Russell

A common sentiment among the thoughtful, it seems.

10 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 November 2011 07:46:09PM Permalink

Is Bertrand Russell willing to die if he encounters someone with a gun who demands he agree that 2 + 2 = 5?

10 points GLaDOS 06 November 2011 04:32:00PM Permalink
We do what we must
because we can. For the good of all of us.
Except the ones who are dead.

(^_^)

10 points [deleted] 07 November 2011 03:09:07AM Permalink

Rule three of Quote Thread: You don't quote yourself on Quote Thread.

10 points Apteris 02 December 2011 12:19:35PM Permalink

Thankfully for Mr. Pratchett, you can't influence the genetic lottery or the luck fairy, so his is still valid advice. In fact, one could see "trust in yourself" et al. as invitations to "do or do not, there is no try", whereas "work hard, learn hard and don't be lazy" supports the virtue of scholarship as well as that of "know when to give up". Miss Tick is being eminently practical, and "do or do not", while also an important virtue, requires way more explanation before the student can understand it.

10 points MinibearRex 01 December 2011 05:19:09AM Permalink

The story of computers and artificial intelligence (known as AI) resembles that of flight in air and space. Until recently people dismissed both ideas as impossible - commonly meaning that they couldn't see how to do them, or would be upset if they could.

-Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation

10 points Tesseract 01 December 2011 05:39:22PM Permalink

A system for generating ungrounded but mostly true beliefs would be an oracle, as impossible as a perpetual motion machine.

(McKay Dennett 2009)

10 points lukeprog 25 January 2012 10:26:25PM Permalink

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

Bertrand Russell

10 points Patrick 23 January 2012 05:11:30PM Permalink

Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.

Terry Pratchett

10 points CharlieSheen 14 January 2012 09:18:22AM Permalink

We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.

-Winston Churchill

10 points Konkvistador 15 January 2012 08:44:11AM Permalink

Each age would do better if it studied its own faults and endeavoured to mend them instead of comparing itself with others to its own advantage.

--James Anthony Froude

10 points J_Taylor 03 January 2012 04:53:22AM Permalink

I apologize for practicing inferior epistemic hygiene. Thank you for indirectly bringing this to my attention. I knew that the quote was commonly attributed to Nietzsche, but I had never seen the original source. It would seem to be a rephrasing of this quote from The Antichrist:

The fact that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for blessedness, but that this blessedness produced by an idée fixe by no means makes the idea itself true, and the fact that faith actually moves no mountains, but instead raises them up where there were none before: all this is made sufficiently clear by a walk through a lunatic asylum.

10 points fortyeridania 02 January 2012 12:04:37PM Permalink

Songs can be Trojan horses, taking charged ideas and sneaking past the ego's defenses and into the open mind.

John Mayer, Esquire (the magazine, not the social/occupational title)

10 points lessdazed 11 February 2012 12:00:57AM Permalink

Game theory won out over good wishes.

--Burning Man organizers

10 points JoachimSchipper 11 February 2012 09:11:25PM Permalink

In this particular case, not all attendees appear to be equally valuable to the event/other attendees. Giving priority to people who've organized cool things in the last few years may make sense.

10 points David_Gerard 03 February 2012 07:33:07AM Permalink

The human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called "sciences as one would." For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride, lest his mind should seem to be occupied with things mean and transitory; things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar. Numberless, in short, are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections color and infect the understanding.

-- Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (Aphorism XLIX), 1620. (1863 translation by Spedding, Ellis and Heath. You should read the whole thing, it's all this good.)

10 points Sly 11 February 2012 08:36:01PM Permalink

I don't think everyone here would agree that democracy is a good thing.

10 points scmbradley 03 February 2012 09:25:26PM Permalink

Any logically coherent body of doctrine is sure to be in part painful and contrary to current prejudices

– Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy p. 98

Bertie is a goldmine of rationality quotes.

10 points [deleted] 05 March 2012 09:28:37PM Permalink

We've made really decent progress in only two hundred and thirty-odd years. We're ahead of schedule.

10 points Stabilizer 04 March 2012 05:54:09AM Permalink

One of the first transhumanists?

10 points Incorrect 01 March 2012 06:32:51PM Permalink

The condemned walk about as if searching for something, and, as we might expect, they soon begin to say that the greatest torment consists in not participating in the vision of God, that moral suffering is worse than physical suffering, and so on

Why don't they just play tag with each other? Sounds like it would be fun.

10 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 March 2012 05:45:14PM Permalink

My philosophy is that it's okay to be imperfect, but not so imperfect that other people notice.

10 points CasioTheSane 09 March 2012 07:51:03AM Permalink

"Sir Isaac Newton, renowned inventor of the milled-edge coin and the catflap!"

"The what?" said Richard.

"The catflap! A device of the utmost cunning, perspicuity and invention. It is a door within a door, you see, a ..."

"Yes," said Richard, "there was also the small matter of gravity."

"Gravity," said Dirk with a slightly dismissed shrug, "yes, there was that as well, I suppose. Though that, of course, was merely a discovery. It was there to be discovered." ...

"You see?" he said dropping his cigarette butt, "They even keep it on at weekends. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later. But the catflap ... ah, there is a very different matter. Invention, pure creative invention. It is a door within a door, you see."

-Douglas Adams

10 points Stephanie_Cunnane 08 March 2012 10:44:15PM Permalink

Now let's talk about efficient market theory, a wonderful economic doctrine that had a long vogue in spite of the experience of Berkshire Hathaway. In fact, one of the economists who won--he shared a Nobel Prize--and as he looked at Berkshire Hathaway year after year, which people would throw in his face as saying maybe the market isn't quite as efficient as you think, he said, "Well, it's a two-sigma event." And then he said we were a three-sigma event. And then he said we were a four-sigma event. And he finally got up to six sigmas--better to add a sigma than change a theory, just because the evidence comes in differently. [Laughter] And, of course, when this share of a Nobel Prize went into money management himself, he sank like a stone.

-Charlie Munger

10 points Konkvistador 06 March 2012 12:19:59PM Permalink

The reality is actually scarier than that if there was a big conspiracy run by an Inner Party of evil but brilliant know-it-alls, like O’Brien in “1984″ or Mustapha Mond in “Brave New World.” The reality is that nobody in charge knows much about what is going on.

--Steve Sailer, here

10 points Ezekiel 05 March 2012 10:13:09PM Permalink

Because throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be... Not Magic

-- Tim Minchin, Storm

10 points philh 01 March 2012 10:32:08PM Permalink

The Princess Bride:

Man in Black: Inhale this, but do not touch.

Vizzini: [sniffs] I smell nothing.

Man in Black: What you do not smell is called iocane powder. It is odorless, tasteless, dissolves instantly in liquid, and is among the more deadlier poisons known to man.

[He puts the goblets behind his back and puts the poison into one of the goblets, then sets them down in front of him]

Man in Black: All right. Where is the poison? The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both drink, and find out who is right... and who is dead.

[Vizzini stalls, then eventually chooses the glass in front of the man in black. They both drink, and Vizzini dies.]

Buttercup: And to think, all that time it was your cup that was poisoned.

Man in Black: They were both poisoned. I spent the last few years building up an immunity to iocane powder.

10 points RobinZ 14 April 2012 04:13:39AM Permalink

Reminded of a quote I saw on TV Tropes of a MetaFilter comment by ericbop:

Encyclopedia Brown? What a hack! To this day, I occasionally reach into my left pocket for my keys with my right hand, just to prove that little brat wrong.

10 points maia 12 April 2012 05:22:24PM Permalink

Suppose you know a golfer's score on day 1 and are asked to predict his score on day 2. You expect the golfer to retain the same level of talent on the second day, so your best guesses will be "above average" for the [better-scoring] player and "below average" for the [worse-scoring] player. Luck, of course, is a different matter. Since you have no way of predicting the golfers' luck on the second (or any) day, your best guess must be that it will be average, neither good nor bad. This means that in the absence of any other information, your best guess about the players' score on day 2 should not be a repeat of their performance on day 1. ...

The best predicted performance on day 2 is more moderate, closer to the average than the evidence on which it is based (the score on day 1). This is why the pattern is called regression to the mean. The more extreme the original score, the more regression we expect, because an extremely good score suggests a very lucky day. The regressive prediction is reasonable, but its accuracy is not guaranteed. A few of the golfers who scored 66 on day 1 will do even better on the second day, if their luck improves. Most will do worse, because their luck will no longer be above average.

Now let us go against the time arrow. Arrange the players by their performance on day 2 and look at their performance on day 1. You will find precisely the same pattern of regression to the mean. ... The fact that you observe regression when you predict an early event from a later event should help convince you that regression does not have a causal explanation.

  • Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
10 points NancyLebovitz 03 April 2012 09:47:52PM Permalink

We've reached the point where the weather is political, and so are third person pronouns.

10 points John_Maxwell_IV 02 April 2012 05:39:48AM Permalink

Don't kid yourself, just because you got the correct numerical answer to a problem is not justification that you understand the physics of the problem. You must understand all the logical steps in arriving at that solution or you have gained nothing, right answer or not.

My old physics professor David Newton (yes, apparently that's the name he was born with) on how to study physics.

10 points Konkvistador 16 April 2012 05:49:36AM Permalink

The fundamental rule of political analysis from the point of psychology is, follow the sacredness, and around it is a ring of motivated ignorance.

--Jonathan Haidt, source

10 points AspiringKnitter 02 April 2012 02:28:30AM Permalink

Don't they usually say it about situations that they could choose to change, to people who don't have the choice?

10 points MBlume 05 May 2012 08:38:10AM Permalink

Author used to post here as __, but I think her account's been deleted.

ETA: removed username as I realized this comment kind of frustrates the presumable point of the account deletion in the first place.

10 points DanArmak 02 May 2012 04:35:20PM Permalink

With perfect knowledge there would be no mystery left about the real world. But that is not what "sense of wonder and mystery" refers to. It describes an emotion, not a state of knowledge. There's no reason for it to die.

10 points tut 08 May 2012 05:55:31PM Permalink

Those who wish to appear wise among fools, among the wise seem foolish.

Quintilian

10 points Jayson_Virissimo 01 May 2012 07:58:52AM Permalink

Scientific Realism is the only philosophy that doesn't make the success of science a miracle.

-Hilary Putnam

10 points Jayson_Virissimo 01 May 2012 04:05:16PM Permalink

I claim that the success of current scientific theories is no miracle. It is not even surprising to the scientific (Darwinist) mind. For any scientific theory is born into a life of fierce competition, a jungle red in tooth and claw. Only the successful theories survive — the ones which in fact latched on to actual regularities in nature.

-Bas van Fraassen

10 points hairyfigment 03 May 2012 07:36:27AM Permalink

When somebody picks my pocket, I'm not gonna be chasing them down so I can figure out whether he feels like he's a thief deep down in his heart. I'm going to be chasing him down so I can get my wallet back.

-- illdoc1 on YouTube

10 points Vaniver 07 June 2012 10:55:44PM Permalink

One reason why research is so important is precisely that it can surprise you and tell you that your subjective convictions are wrong. If research always found what we expected, there wouldn't be much point in doing research.

--Eugene Gendlin

10 points [deleted] 03 June 2012 12:40:51AM Permalink

Humility bids us to take ourselves as we are; we do not have to be cosmically significant to be genuinely significant.

  • Patricia Churchland
10 points RolfAndreassen 02 June 2012 07:26:59PM Permalink

A reasonable start, but quite insufficient for the long run. Sixpence savings on twenty pounds income is not going to insulate you from disaster, not even with nineteenth-century money.

10 points gwern 09 June 2012 04:31:48PM Permalink

I favor any skepsis to which I may reply: 'Let us try it!' But I no longer wish to hear anything of all those things and questions that do not permit any experiment.

--Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science #51

10 points Konkvistador 04 July 2012 05:41:30AM Permalink

And here we tinker with metal, to try to give it a kind of life, and suffer those who would scoff at our efforts. But who's to say that, if intelligence had evolved in some other form in past millennia, the ancestors of these beings would not now scoff at the idea of intelligence residing within meat?

--Prime Function Aki Zeta-5, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

10 points Vaniver 03 July 2012 12:58:26AM Permalink

Many difficulties which nature throws our way, may be smoothed away by the exercise of intelligence.

--Titus Livius

10 points Ezekiel 03 July 2012 12:57:58PM Permalink

Sure. But if I handle snakes to prove they won't bite me because God is real, and they don't bite me -- you do the math.

More seriously, though: the sentiment expressed in the quote is flawed, IMHO. Evidence isn't always symmetrical. Any particular transitional fossil is reasonable evidence for evolution; not finding a particular transitional fossil isn't strong evidence against it. A person perjuring themselves once is strong evidence against their honesty; a person once declining to perjure themselves is not strong evidence in favour of their honesty; et cetera.

I think this might have something to do with the prior, actually: The stronger your prior probability, the less evidence it should take to drastically reduce it.

Edit: Nope, that last conclusion is wrong. Never mind.

10 points sketerpot 06 July 2012 05:44:07AM Permalink

Without having a date on the quote, it's hard to know exactly which three decades he's referring to,

He published that in 1993, which was about at the historic peak of violent crime in the US since 1960. The situation has improved a lot since then, but through the decades of 1960-1990, things looked pretty grim.

10 points Konkvistador 05 July 2012 06:01:13AM Permalink

Crime.

In the US at least the murder rates today are comparable to those of the 1960s only because of advances in trauma medicine.

10 points James_Miller 02 July 2012 03:29:42PM Permalink

All mushrooms are edible. But some of them you can eat only once.

From Paleohacks.

10 points NancyLebovitz 06 July 2012 06:06:44PM Permalink

I can call spirits from the vasty deep. Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?

10 points faul_sname 03 August 2012 05:32:03PM Permalink

Knowledge and information are different things. An audiobook takes up more hard disk space than an e-book, but they both convey the same knowledge.

10 points Never_Seen_Belgrade 19 August 2012 04:03:18PM Permalink

"Comparing information and knowledge is like asking whether the fatness of a pig is more or less green than the designated hitter rule." -- David Guaspari

10 points grendelkhan 29 August 2012 06:20:50PM Permalink

The math here is scary. If you spitball the regulatory cost of life for a Westerner, it's around seven million dollars. To a certain extent, I'm pretty sure that that's high because the costs of over-regulating are less salient to regulators than the costs of under-regulating, but taken at face value, that means that, apparently, thirty-five hundred poor African kids are equivalent to one American.

Hilariously, the IPCC got flak from anti-globalization activists for positing a fifteen-to-one ratio in the value of life between developed and developing nations.

10 points MixedNuts 10 August 2012 08:27:23AM Permalink

That's excellent advice for writing fiction. Audiences root for charming characters much more than for good ones. Especially useful when your world only contains villains. This is harder in real life, since your opponents can ignore your witty one-liners and emphasize your mass murders.

(This comment brought to you by House Lannister.)

10 points lukeprog 04 August 2012 10:28:30AM Permalink

Reductionism is the most natural thing in the world to grasp. It's simply the belief that "a whole can be understood completely if you understand its parts, and the nature of their sum." No one in her left brain could reject reductionism.

Douglas Hofstadter

10 points [deleted] 29 September 2012 09:57:18AM Permalink

For a hundred years or so, mathematical statisticians have been in love with the fact that the probability distribution of the sum of a very large number of very small random deviations almost always converges to a normal distribution. ... This infatuation tended to focus interest away from the fact that, for real data, the normal distribution is often rather poorly realized, if it is realized at all. We are often taught, rather casually, that, on average, measurements will fall within ±σ of the true value 68% of the time, within ±2σ 95% of the time, and within ±3σ 99.7% of the time. Extending this, one would expect a measurement to be off by ±20σ only one time out of 2 × 10^88. We all know that “glitches” are much more likely than that!

-- W.H. Press et al., Numerical Recipes, Sec. 15.1

10 points gwern 07 September 2012 03:06:49AM Permalink

In the M. Night version: his improvements are an asymptote - and Sisyphus didn't pay enough attention in calculus class to realize that the limit is just below the peak.

10 points fubarobfusco 03 September 2012 11:11:29PM Permalink

In my high school health class, for weeks the teacher touted the upcoming event: "Breast and Testicle Day!"

When the anticipated day came, it was of course the day when all the boys go off to one room to learn about testicular self-examination, and all the girls go off to another to learn about breast self-examination. So, in fact, no student actually experienced Breast and Testicle Day.

10 points [deleted] 09 September 2012 08:40:12AM Permalink

I do find some of Will Newsome's contributions interesting. OTOH, this behaviour is pretty fucked up. (I was wondering how hard it would be to implement a software feature to show the edit history of comments.)

10 points Matt_Caulfield 03 September 2012 05:40:36PM Permalink

But many people do benefit greatly from hoarding or controlling the distribution of scarce information. If you make your living off slavery instead, then of course you can be generous with knowledge.

10 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 September 2012 05:22:24AM Permalink

If you don't, you're really going to regret it in a million years.

10 points gwern 01 September 2012 05:25:57PM Permalink
10 points [deleted] 05 September 2012 08:36:08PM Permalink

He had bought a large map representing the sea, / Without the least vestige of land: / And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be / A map they could all understand.

“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators, / Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?" / So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply / “They are merely conventional signs!

“Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes! / But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank: / (So the crew would protest) “that he’s bought us the best— / A perfect and absolute blank!”

-Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the snark

10 points Eugine_Nier 27 September 2012 12:26:39AM Permalink

As far as I know, Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were indeed unusually incorruptible, and I do hate them for this trait.

Why? Because when your goal is mass murder, corruption saves lives. Corruption leads you to take the easy way out, to compromise, to go along to get along. Corruption isn't a poison that makes everything worse. It's a diluting agent like water. Corruption makes good policies less good, and evil policies less evil.

I've read thousands of pages about Hitler. I can't recall the slightest hint of "corruption" on his record. Like Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, Hitler was a sincerely murderous fanatic. The same goes for many of history's leading villains - see Eric Hoffer's classic The True Believer. Sincerity is so overrated. If only these self-righteous monsters had been corrupt hypocrites, millions of their victims could have bargained and bribed their way out of hell.

-- Bryan Caplan

10 points dspeyer 03 October 2012 05:52:44AM Permalink

It is easier to control how you relate to a theoretical group than a concrete individual. If you believe it is proper to hate Creationists, you can do so with little difficulty. If you change your mind and think it is better to pity them, you can do that.

But if you landlady has actually helped or hurt you, and you know a strong emotional response isn't actually called for, you're going to have a very hard time not liking or hating her.

10 points wedrifid 03 October 2012 11:14:28AM Permalink

What Faramir says contains wisdom but so do Frodo's words. The enemy is trying to destroy the world with some kind of epic high fantasy apocalypse. Frodo does not terminally value the death (heh) of specific foot soldiers. They may be noble and virtuous and their deaths a tragic waste. But Frodo has something to protect and also has baddass allies who return from the (mostly) dead with a wardrobe change. But he doesn't have enough power to give himself a batman-like self-handicap of using non-lethal force. Killing those who get in his way (but lamenting the necessity) is the right thing for him to do and so yes, people would do well not to hinder him.

10 points MBlume 01 October 2012 07:57:22PM Permalink

Paths are made by walking

-Franz Kafka (quoted in Joy of Clojure)

10 points Unnamed 02 October 2012 06:11:21PM Permalink

Caminante, son tus huellas

el camino, y nada más;

caminante, no hay camino,

se hace camino al andar.

Al andar se hace camino,

y al volver la vista atrás

se ve la senda que nunca

se ha de volver a pisar.

Caminante, no hay camino,

sino estelas en la mar.

-Antonio Machado

Translation:

Wanderer, your footsteps are

the road, and nothing more;

wanderer, there is no road,

the road is made by walking.

By walking one makes the road,

and upon glancing back

one sees the path

that must never be trod again.

Wanderer, there is no road—

Only wakes upon the sea.

10 points RobinZ 02 November 2012 06:17:01AM Permalink

It is somewhat amazing to me that there are people who much less concerned about their ability to recognize false reasoning than their ability to recognize counterfeit currency. It seems pathetically obvious to me that sloppiness in the former, meta level would tend to be expensive at the latter, object level - for example, you end up with people placing their trust in tools like iodine pens to detect counterfeit notes when almost no evidence exists that such a measure is effective.

10 points vallinder 06 November 2012 09:08:56AM Permalink

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

Paul Valéry

10 points NexH 02 November 2012 08:17:31AM Permalink

As we learn more and more about the solar system, the reality-check that our theories have to pass becomes more and more stringent. This is one reason why scientists have a habit of opening up old questions that everybody assumed were settled long ago, and deciding that they weren’t. It doesn’t mean the scientists are incompetent: it demonstrates their willingness to contemplate new evidence and re-examine old conclusion in its light. Science certainly does not claim to get things right, but it has a good record of ruling out ways to get things wrong.

-- The Science of Discworld, Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen

10 points Unnamed 03 November 2012 09:03:43AM Permalink

Chris Cillizza says that [...] the surge in the quantity of public polling available creates a confusing fog of numbers in which "partisans, who already live in a choose-your-own-political-reality world, can select the numbers that comply with their view of the race and pooh-pooh the data that suggest anything different."

That's true. But if you actually want to know what's happening in the race the increased poll volume makes it clearer not less clear. The sense that the polls are "all over the map" is the mistake. You need to think of each datapoint as having an associated probability distribution and then look at where they overlap. [...] The fact that we now have tons of polling that averages out to [a] conclusion means the scope for "sampling error" to throw us off is, at this point, tiny. One poll showing a lead of the current magnitude would leave us with a ton of uncertainty, but a bunch of polls makes the picture pretty clear.

10 points gwern 02 November 2012 11:14:22PM Permalink

Freeman? That's one of my favorite lines from Blake's Proverbs of Hell...

My friend the Angel climb'd up from his station into the mill; I remain'd alone, then this appearance was no more, but I found myself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moonlight hearing a harper who sung to the harp, his theme was, The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, breeds reptiles of the mind.

10 points Oligopsony 10 November 2012 02:51:18AM Permalink

"I have the same height as the Empire State Building, I just don't tower as many feet from the ground."

10 points tut 05 December 2012 09:38:15PM Permalink

I thought that "agree to disagree" had become a fixed expression meaning something like "stop discussing this for now even though we don't agree, because we have more productive things to do/talk about".

10 points thomblake 05 December 2012 09:59:56PM Permalink

Yes, but understanding that makes it harder to get annoyed at people.

10 points Jay_Schweikert 14 December 2012 05:16:31PM Permalink

I don't have any previous experience with this sort of thing, but judging from what I hear and read, I'm supposed to be asking why all this is happening, and why it's happening to me. Honestly, those questions are about the farthest thing from my mind.

Partly, that’s because they aren't hard questions. Why does our world have gravity? Why does the sun rise in the East? There are technical answers, but the metaphysical answer is simple: that’s how reality works. So too here. Only in the richest parts of the rich world of the twenty-first century could anyone entertain the thought that we should expect long, pain-free lives. Suffering and premature death (an odd phrase: what does it mean to call death "premature"?) are constant presences in the lives of most of the peoples of the Earth, and were routine parts of life for generations of our predecessors in this country—as they still are today, for those with their eyes open. Stage 4 cancers happen to middle-aged men and women, seemingly out of the blue, because that's how reality works.

As for why this is happening to me in particular, the implicit point of the question is an argument: I deserve better than this. There are two responses. First, I don't—I have no greater moral claim to be free from unwanted pain and loss than anyone else. Plenty of people more virtuous than I am suffer worse than I have, and some who don't seem virtuous at all skate through life with surprising ease. Welcome to the world. Once again, it seems to me that this claim arises from the incredibly unusual experience of a small class of wealthy professionals in the wealthiest parts of the world today. We think we live in a world governed by merit and moral desert. It isn't so. Luck, fortune, fate, providence—call it what you will, but whatever your preferred label, it has far more to do with the successes of the successful than what any of us deserves. Aristocracies of the past awarded wealth and position based on the accident of birth. Today's meritocracies award wealth and position based on the accident of being in the right place at the right time. The difference is smaller than we tend to think. Once you understand that, it’s hard to maintain a sense of grievance in the face of even the ugliest medical news. I’ve won more than my share of life's lotteries. It would seem churlish to rail at the unfairness of losing this one—if indeed I do lose it: which I may not.

The second response is simpler; it comes from the movie "Unforgiven." Gene Hackman is dying, and says to Clint Eastwood: "I don't deserve this. To die like this. I was building a house." Eastwood responds: "Deserve’s got nothing to do with it."

That gets it right, I think. It's a messed-up world, upside-down as often as it's rightside up. Bad things happen; future plans (that house Hackman was building) come to naught. Deserve's got nothing to do with it.

--William J. Stuntz, discussing his cancer diagnosis

Apologies for the length, but I wanted to include the full substantive point and hated to snip lines here and there. For what it's worth, Prof. Stuntz was a devout Christian, and the linked post went on to discuss his theological views on why "something deep within us expects, even demands moral order—in a world that shouts from the rooftops that no such order exists." Obviously I draw a different conclusion about this conflict, but I still respect that he could take such an unflinching view of how morally empty nature really is.

10 points Matt_Caulfield 01 December 2012 08:12:08PM Permalink

Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.

  • David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Edit: Yup, apparently that's a famous quote by Bradley which I read for the first time in that book. Good catch.

10 points GLaDOS 29 January 2013 07:34:17PM Permalink

I notice with some amusement, both in America and English literature, the rise of a new kind of bigotry. Bigotry does not consist in a man being convinced he is right; that is not bigotry, but sanity. Bigotry consists in a man being convinced that another man must be wrong in everything, because he is wrong in a particular belief; that he must be wrong, even in thinking that he honestly believes he is right.

-G. K. Chesterton

10 points Bugmaster 02 January 2013 09:26:16PM Permalink

I'd vote this up, but I can't shake the feeling that the author is setting up a false dichotomy. Living forever would be great, but living forever without arthritis would be even better. There's no reason why we shouldn't solve the easier problem first.

10 points PDH 03 January 2013 03:41:27PM Permalink

I had noticed it and mistakenly attributed it to the sunk cost fallacy but on reflection it's quite different from sunk costs. However, it was discovering and (as it turns out, incorrectly) generalising the sunk cost fallacy that alerted me to the effect and that genuinely helped me improve myself, so it's a happy mistake.

One thing that helped me was learning to fear the words 'might as well,' as in, 'I've already wasted most of the day so I might as well waste the rest of it,' or 'she'll never go out with me so I might as well not bother asking her,' and countless other examples. My way of dealing it is to mock my own thought processes ('Yeah, things are really bad so let's make them even worse. Nice plan, genius') and switch to a more utilitarian way of thinking ('A small chance of success is better than none,' 'Let's try and squeeze as much utility out of this as possible' etc.).

I hadn't fully grasped the extent to which I was sabotaging my own life with that one, pernicious little error.

10 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 January 2013 01:23:32PM Permalink

Er... logical fallacy of fictional evidence, maybe? I wince every time somebody cites Terminator in a discussion of AI. It doesn't matter if the conclusion is right or wrong, I still wince because it's not a valid argument.

10 points taelor 02 January 2013 03:41:07PM Permalink

It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sutained by innnumerable unbeliefs: the fanatical Japanese in Brazil refused to believe for years the evidence of Japan's defeat; the fanatical Communist refuses to believe any unfavorable reports or evidence about Russia, nor will he be disillusioned by seeing with his own eyes the cruel misery inside the Soviet promised land.

It is the true believer's ability to "shut his eyes and stop his ears" to facts that do not deserve to be either seen or heard which is the source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy. He can not be frightened by danger, nor disheartened by obstacles nor baffled by contradictions because he denies their existence. Strength of faith, as Bergson pointed out, manifests itself not in moving mountains, but in not seeing mountains to move.

-- Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

10 points blashimov 13 January 2013 07:53:31AM Permalink

I have always had an animal fear of death, a fate I rank second only to having to sit through a rock concert. My wife tries to be consoling about mortality and assures me that death is a natural part of life, and that we all die sooner or later. Oddly this news, whispered into my ear at 3 a.m., causes me to leap screaming from the bed, snap on every light in the house and play my recording of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” at top volume till the sun comes up.

-Woody Allen EDIT: Fixed formatting.

10 points JQuinton 18 February 2013 08:10:42PM Permalink

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.

William Deseriewicz

The whole speech is worth reading as one giant rationality quote

10 points Vaniver 02 February 2013 03:54:43PM Permalink

The whole quote:

If you're not making quantitative predictions, you're probably doing it wrong, or you're probably not doing it as well as you can. That's sort of become kind of critical to how we operate. You have to predict in advance. Anybody can explain anything after the fact, and it has to be quantitative or you're not being serious about how you're approaching the problem.

The problems you face might not require a serious approach; without more information, I can't say.

10 points CellBioGuy 02 February 2013 01:25:32AM Permalink

No, they selected them to sell more copies by highjacking the easier-to-press buttons of your nervous system.

10 points tingram 10 March 2013 05:57:14PM Permalink

The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown.

--George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists

10 points tingram 10 March 2013 05:50:50PM Permalink

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

--Ursula K. Le Guin {Lord Estraven}, The Left Hand of Darkness

10 points summerstay 04 March 2013 01:56:06PM Permalink

This sort of argument was surprisingly common in the 18th and 19th century compared to today. The Federalist Papers, for example, lay out the problem as a set of premises leading inexorably to a conclusion. I find it hard to imagine a politician successfully using such a form of argument today.

At least that's my impression; perhaps appeals to authority and emotion were just as common in the past as today but selection effects prevent me from seeing them.

10 points Qiaochu_Yuan 01 March 2013 06:18:59PM Permalink

This is not a good way to argue about anything except mathematics. It takes the wrong attitude towards how words work and in practice doesn't even make arguments easier to debug because there are usually implicit premises that are not easy to tease out.

For example, suppose I say "A (a thing that affects X) hasn't changed. B (a thing that affects X) hasn't changed. C (a thing that affects X) hasn't changed. Therefore, X hasn't changed." There's an implicit premise here, namely "A, B, C are the only things that affect X," which is almost certainly false. It is annoyingly easy not to explicitly write down such implicit premises, and trying to argue in this pseudo-logical style encourages that mistake among others.

(In general, I think people who have not studied mathematical logic should stop using the word "logic" entirely, but I suppose that's a pipe dream.)

10 points fubarobfusco 01 March 2013 08:46:06PM Permalink

Yep. It's a matter of what features are salient to mention.

If someone said "I once had a civil argument with a German" it would sound like they were saying that it was unusual or notable for an argument with a German to be civil; or possibly that the person's Germanness was somehow relevant to the civility of the argument — maybe they cited Goethe or something?

(On the other hand, it might be that they were trying to imply that they were well-traveled or cosmopolitan; that they've talked to people of a lot of nationalities.)

If the identity mentioned is a stereotyped group, a lot of people would tend to mentally activate the stereotype.

10 points SaidAchmiz 05 March 2013 02:32:38AM Permalink

This seems to me a form of equivocation: "different" as used in the first sentence and "the same" as used in the second sentence are not opposites. The context is different; the intended meaning (insofar as any evo-psychologists actually make such claims) is something like this:

"Men and women are more different, on average, than men and other men, and certainly more different than (some? most?) people think. The difference is sufficiently large that we cannot indiscriminately apply psychological principles and results across genders."

"Humans and chimps are closer than (some? most?) people think; in fact, sufficiently close that we can apply unexpectedly many psychological principles and results across these two species."

I don't know of anyone (even in "popular" evo-psych) who endorses the view implied in the quote, which I suppose would be something like:

"Humans are chimps are less different from each other than men and women."

In short, I think the quote mocks a strawman.

10 points Qiaochu_Yuan 03 March 2013 10:45:46PM Permalink

The wise man must have an awful lot of time on his hands, or else not come across many new ideas...

10 points Scottbert 10 March 2013 06:29:27PM Permalink

Faith is holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.

-- C.S. Lewis

10 points simplicio 01 March 2013 02:28:48PM Permalink

Too many cooks spoil the broth.

10 points Qiaochu_Yuan 01 March 2013 08:40:02PM Permalink

It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth.

10 points TheOtherDave 04 April 2013 03:25:14PM Permalink

That said, if I recognize that I'm in a group that values "fairness" as an abstract virtue, then arguing that my situation isn't fair is often a useful way of solving my problem by recruiting alliances.

10 points Document 11 April 2013 12:16:34AM Permalink

If each person counts as one for each time he dines, Alexander can only claim to have personally hosted the guests at his most recent meal; the others were guests of someone else.

10 points TheOtherDave 02 April 2013 06:00:37AM Permalink

One of the things that focusing is about is giving up pursuing good things.

Which means that if I want to focus, I need to decide which good things I'm going to say "no" to.

This may seem obvious, but after seeing many not-otherwise-stupid management structures create lists of "priorities" that encompass everything good (and consequently aren't priorities at all), I'm inclined to say that it isn't as obvious as it may seem.

10 points Larks 02 April 2013 02:36:37PM Permalink

There is nothing so disturbing to one's well-being and judgment as to see a friend get rich

Charles P Kindleberger, in Manias, Panics and Crashes; a History of Financial Crisis

10 points Osuniev 03 April 2013 08:03:02AM Permalink

I would say this is not ALWAYS true. But for the purpose of civilized discussion between human beings, it does seem like a very useful rule of thumb.

10 points TheOtherDave 07 May 2013 05:17:18PM Permalink

(nods) Yup. Of course, McArdle's claims about what people would have said before the study, if asked, are also only being made after the results are known, which as you say is a classic failure mode.

Of course, McArdle is neither passing laws nor doing research, just writing articles, so the cost of failure is low. And it's kind of nice to see someone in the mainstream (sorta) press making the point that surprising observations should change our confidence in our beliefs, which people surprisingly often overlook.

Anyway, the quality of McArdle's analysis notwithstanding, one place this sort of reasoning seems to lead us is to the idea that when passing a law, we ought to say something about what we anticipate the results of passing that law to be, and have a convention of repealing laws that don't actually accomplish the thing that we said we were passing the law in order to accomplish.

Which in principle I would be all in favor of, except for the obvious failure mode that if I personally don't want us to accomplish that, I am now given an incentive to manipulate the system in other ways to lower whatever metrics we said we were going to measure. (Note: I am not claiming here that any such thing happened in the Oregon study.)

That said, even taking that failure mode into account, it might still be preferable to passing laws with unarticulated expected benefits and keeping them on the books despite those benefits never materializing.

10 points RolfAndreassen 07 May 2013 07:38:26PM Permalink

Of course, McArdle's claims about what people would have said before the study, if asked, are also only being made after the results are known, which as you say is a classic failure mode.

I don't think that's true; if you read her original article on the subject, linked in the one I link, she quotes statistics like this:

Most of you probably have probably heard the statistic that being uninsured kills 18,000 people a year. Or maybe it's 27,000. Those figures come from an Institute of Medicine report (later updated by the Urban Institute) that was drawn from [nonrandom observational] studies.

And back in 2010, she said

I took a keen interest when, at the fervid climax of the health-care debate in mid-December, a Washington Post blogger, Ezra Klein, declared that Senator Joseph Lieberman, by refusing to vote for a bill with a public option, was apparently “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands” of uninsured people in order to punish the progressives who had opposed his reelection in 2006. In the ensuing blogstorm, conservatives condemned Klein’s “venomous smear,” while liberals solemnly debated the circumstances under which one may properly accuse one’s opponents of mass murder.

I don't think her statement is entirely post-hoc.

10 points DSimon 08 May 2013 01:05:21AM Permalink

If I throw a die and it comes up heads, I'd update in the direction of it being a very unusual die. :-)

10 points lukeprog 14 May 2013 11:58:56PM Permalink

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them — especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind...

Daniel Dennett

10 points orthonormal 04 May 2013 05:15:33PM Permalink

In practice, guessing at numbers and running a calculation actually serves as a quick second opinion on your original intuitive decision. If the numbers imply something far different from the decision that System 1 is offering, I don't immediately shrug and go with the numbers: I notice that I am confused, and flag this as something where I need to consider the reliability both of the calculation and of my basic intuition. If the calculation checks out with my original intuition, then I simply go for it.

Basically, a heuristic utility calculation is a cheap error flag which pops up more often when my intuitions are out of step with reality than when they're in step with reality. That makes it incredibly valuable.

10 points DysgraphicProgrammer 03 June 2013 02:20:29PM Permalink

A lesson here is that if you ask "Why X?" then any answer of the form "Because synonym of X" is not actually progress toward understanding.

10 points ZankerH 04 June 2013 07:50:43PM Permalink

I found your post funny... because it amused me.

10 points NancyLebovitz 03 June 2013 02:39:49PM Permalink

Why is there that knee-jerk rejection of any effort to "overthink" pop culture? Why would you ever be afraid that looking too hard at something will ruin it?

I think it's because enjoying fiction involves being in a trance, and analyzing the fiction breaks the trance. I suspect that analysis is also a trance, but it's a different sort of trance.

10 points JQuinton 04 June 2013 05:26:42PM Permalink

My sense of the proper way to determine what is ethical is to make a distinction between a smuggler of influence and a detective of influence. The smuggler knows these six principles and then counterfeits them, brings them into situations where they don’t naturally reside.

The opposite is the sleuth’s approach, the detective’s approach to influence. The detective also knows what the principles are, and goes into every situation aware of them looking for the natural presence of one or another of these principles.

  • Robert Cialdini at the blog Bakadesuyo explaining the difference between ethical persuasion and the dark arts
10 points BT_Uytya 05 June 2013 07:55:06AM Permalink

I will gladly post the rest of the conversation because it reminds me of question I pondered for a while.

"Do you understand the tides, Colonel Barnes, simply because you know to say ‘gravity’?”

“I’ve never claimed to understand them.”

“Ah, that is very wise practice.”

“All that matters is, he does,” Barnes continued, glancing down, as if he could see through the deck-planks.

“Does he then?”

“That’s what you lot have been telling everyone. Sir Isaac’s working on Volume the Third, isn’t he, and that’s going to settle the lunar problem. Wrap it all up.”

“He is working out equations that ought to agree with Mr. Flamsteed’s observations.”

“From which it would follow that Gravity’s a solved problem; and if Gravity predicts what the moon does, why, it should apply as well to the sloshing back and forth of the water in the oceans.”

“But is to describe something to understand it?”

“I should think it were a good first step.”

“Yes. And it is a step that Sir Isaac has taken. The question now becomes, who shall take the second step?”

After that they started to discuss differences between Newton's and Leibniz theories. Newton is unable to explain why gravity can go through the earth, like light through a pane of glass. Leibniz takes a more fundamental approach (roughly speaking, he claims that everything consist of cellular automata).

Daniel: “... Leibniz’s philosophy has the disadvantage that no one knows, yet, how to express it mathematically. And so he cannot predict tides and eclipses, as Sir Isaac can.”

“Then what good is Leibniz’s philosophy?”

“It might be the truth,” Daniel answered.

I find this theme of Baroque Cycle fascinating.

I was somewhat haunted by the similar question: in the strict Bayesian sense, notions of "explain" and "predict" are equivalent, but what about Alfred Wegener, father of plate tectonics? His theory of continental drift (in some sense) explained shapes of continents and archaeological data, but was rejected by the mainstream science because of the lack of mechanism of drift.

In some sense, Wegener was able to predict, but unable to explain.

One can easily imagine some weird data easily described by (and predicted by) very simple mathematical formula, but yet I don't consider this to be explanation. Something lacks here; my curiosity just doesn't accept bare formulas as answers.

I suspect that this situation arises because of the very small prior probability of formula being true. But is it really?

10 points Osiris 06 June 2013 01:35:05PM Permalink

“Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.” --Lord Byron.

All too often those who are least rational in their best moments are the greatest supporters of using one's head, if only to avoid too early a demise. I wonder how many years Lord Byron gained from rational thought, and which of the risks he took did he take because he was good at betting...

10 points simplicio 11 June 2013 10:03:40PM Permalink

Stepan is a smart chap. He has realized (perhaps unconsciously)

  • that one's political views are largely inconsequential,
  • that it's nonetheless socially necessary to have some,
  • that developing popular and coherent political views oneself is expensive,

and so has outsourced them to a liberal paper.

One might compare it to hiring a fashion consultant... except it's cheap to boot!

10 points Viliam_Bur 10 June 2013 05:46:47PM Permalink

I don't know if there are short words for this, but seems to me that some people generally assume that "things, left alone, naturally improve" and some people assume that "things, left alone, naturally deteriorate".

The first option seems like optimism, and the second option seems like pesimism. But there is a catch! In real life, many things have good aspects and bad aspects. Now the person who is "optimistic about the future of things left alone" must find a reason why things are worse than expected. (And vice versa, the person who is "pessimistic about the future of things left alone" must find a reason why things are better.) In both cases, a typical explanation is human intervention. Which means that this kind of optimism is prone to conspiracy theories. (And this kind of pessimism is prone to overestimate the benefits of human actions.)

For example, in education: For a "pessimist about spontaneous future" things are easy -- people are born stupid, and schools do a decent job at making them smarter; of course, the process is not perfect. For an "optimist about spontaneous future", children should be left alone to become geniuses (some quote by Rousseau can be used to support this statement). Now the question is, why do we have a school system, whose only supposed consequence is converting these spontaneous geniuses into ordinary people? And here you go: The society needs sheeps, etc.

Analogically, in politics: For some people, the human nature is scary, and the fact that we can have thousands or even millions of people in the same city, without a genocide happening every night, is a miracle of civilization. For other people, everything bad in the world is caused by some evil conspirators who either don't care or secretly enjoy human suffering.

This does not mean that there are no conspiracies ever, no evil people, no systems made worse by human tampering. I just wanted to point out that if you expect things to improve spontaneously (which seems like a usual optimism, which is supposedly a good thing), the consequences of your expectations alone, when confronted with reality, can drive you to conspiracy theories.

10 points shminux 10 June 2013 05:00:43PM Permalink

My dad used to run a business and whenever they needed a temp, he'd always line up 5-10 interviewees, to check out how they looked.

And then hire the ugliest.

Aside from keeping my mother off his back, he reasoned that if the temp had kept good employment, and it wasn't for her looks, she must be ok.

From the comments on the article on the jobs for good-looking.

10 points CasioTheSane 05 June 2013 06:43:48AM Permalink

The paucity of skepticism in the world of health science is staggering. Those who aren't insufferable skeptical douchebags are doing it wrong.

-Stabby the Raccoon

10 points baiter 04 July 2013 01:20:38PM Permalink

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

English proverb

10 points Pablo_Stafforini 01 July 2013 10:35:43PM Permalink

[O]ur moral judgments are less reliable than many would hope, and this has specific implications for methodology in normative ethics. Three sources of evidence indicate that our intuitive ethical judgments are less reliable than we might have hoped: a historical record of accepting morally absurd social practices; a scientic record showing that our intuitive judgments are systematically governed by a host of heuristics, biases, and irrelevant factors; and a philosophical record showing deep, probably unresolvable, inconsistencies in common moral convictions. I argue that this has the following implications for moral theorizing: we should trust intuitions less; we should be especially suspicious of intuitive judgments that t a bias pattern, even when we are intuitively condent that these judgments are not a simple product of the bias; we should be especially suspicious of intuitions that are part of inconsistent sets of deeply held convictions; and we should evaluate views holistically, thinking of entire classes of judgments that they get right or wrong in broad contexts, rather than dismissing positions on the basis of a small number of intuitive counterexamples.

Nick Beckstead, On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future, University of Rutgers, New Brunswick, 2013, p. 19

10 points wedrifid 03 July 2013 05:09:23PM Permalink

As a sister site, Overcoming Bias falls under the same logic (though I think, given that the origin of LessWrong in OvecomingBias constantly becomes more distant in time, I wouldn't mind that rule getting relaxed for OvercomingBias more recent entries.)

We succeeded in getting rid of the Overcoming Bias ban for several months a couple of years ago. Unfortunately someone reverted to an old version and since then it's stuck. Traditions are a nuisance to change.

10 points lukeprog 11 July 2013 07:42:37PM Permalink

Extinguished philosophies lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules.

John McCarthy, adapted a line by T.H. Huxley

10 points CronoDAS 02 July 2013 08:00:18AM Permalink

If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

-- Denis Healey

10 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 July 2013 12:40:21AM Permalink

I think we're looking at the wrong kind of criticism. Like, the kind of criticism you can make with almost equal ease of results that will and won't turn out to replicate later.

10 points David_Gerard 05 August 2013 08:49:23PM Permalink

I concur in the general case. But I would suggest the people complaining work in computers. I'm a Unix sysadmin; my job description is to automate myself out of existence. Checklist=shell script=JOB DONE, NEXT TASK TO ELIMINATE.

It turns out, thankfully, that work expands to fill the sysadmins available. Because even in the future, nothing works. I fully expect to be able to work to 100 if I want to.

10 points Desrtopa 04 August 2013 10:45:38PM Permalink

I think it may depend a lot on how well the action fits into your schema for reasonable behavior.

I have mild OCD. Its manifestations are usually unnoticeable to other people, and generally don't interfere with the ordinary function of my life, but occasionally lead to my engaging in behaviors that no ordinary person would consider worthwhile. The single most extreme manifestation, which still stands out in my memory, was a time when I was playing a video game, and saved my game file, then, doubting my own memory that I had saved it, did it again... and again... and again... until I had saved at least seven times, each time convinced that I couldn't yet be sure I had saved it "enough."

Afterwards, I was horrified at my own actions, because what I had just done was too obviously crazy to just handwave away.

10 points jbay 02 August 2013 02:10:09PM Permalink

But, unlike other species, we also know how not to know. We employ this unique ability to suppress our knowledge not just of mortality, but of everything we find uncomfortable, until our survival strategy becomes a threat to our survival.

[...] There is no virtue in sustaining a set of beliefs, regardless of the evidence. There is no virtue in either following other people unquestioningly or in cultivating a loyal and unquestioning band of followers.

While you can be definitively wrong, you cannot be definitely right. The best anyone can do is constantly to review the evidence and to keep improving and updating their knowledge. Journalism which attempts this is worth reading. Journalism which does not is a waste of time."

10 points RichardKennaway 05 August 2013 02:57:10PM Permalink

I agree with the thought, but I find the attribution implausible. "Finding yourself" sounds like modern pop-psych, not a phrase that GBS would ever have written. Google doesn't turn up a source.

10 points iDante 10 August 2013 10:10:52PM Permalink

To the layman, the philosopher, or the classical physicist, a statement of the form "this particle doesn't have a well-defined position" (or momentum, or x-component of spin angular momentum, or whatever) sounds vague, incompetent, or (worst of all) profound. It is none of these. But its precise meaning is, I think, almost impossible to convey to anyone who has not studied quantum mechanics in some depth.

10 points MixedNuts 04 August 2013 05:28:41PM Permalink

Betcha it'd work. I'm going to set a piece of candy in front of me, work for half an hour, and then put it back, at least once a day for a week.

10 points MixedNuts 12 August 2013 07:19:10AM Permalink

Did it once, binge-ate the candy a few hours later, bought more candy, binge-ate it again. Trying again in two weeks (or going to the doctor if still prone to binging).

10 points cody-bryce 02 August 2013 10:28:23PM Permalink

I just think it's good to be confident. If I'm not on my team why should anybody else be?

-Robert Downey Jr.

10 points gwern 06 August 2013 10:20:22PM Permalink

Yes; at this point with only 3 SNPs linked to intelligence, it's a joke to say that 'poor people aren't being sequenced and this is why we aren't detecting hidden gems'.

10 points gwern 06 August 2013 02:08:56AM Permalink

Besides his letter to Hardy, Wikipedia cites The Man Who Knew Infinity (on Libgen; it also quotes the 'half starving' passage), where the cited section reads:

Describing the obsession with college degrees among ambitious young Indians around this time, an English writer, Herbert Compton, noted how "the loaves and fishes fall far short of the multitude, and the result is the creation of armies of hungry 'hopefuls'-the name is a literal trans- lation of the vernacular generic term omedwar used in describing them- who pass their lives in absolute idleness, waiting on the skirts of chance, or gravitate to courses entirely opposed to those which education in- tended." Ramanujan, it might have seemed in 1908, was just such an omedwar. Out of school, without a job, he hung around the house in Kumbakonam.

Times were hard. One day back at Pachaiyappa's, the wind had blown off Ramanujan's cap as he boarded the electric train for school, and Ramanujan's Sanskrit teacher, who insisted that boys wear their traditional tufts covered, asked him to step back out to the market and buy one. Ramanujan apologized that he lacked even the few annas it cost. (His classmates, who'd observed his often-threadbare dress, chipped in to buy it for him.)

Ramanujan's father never made more than about twenty rupees a month; a rupee bought about twenty-five pounds of rice. Agricultural workers in surrounding villages earned four or five annas, or about a quarter rupee, per day; so many families were far worse off than Ramanujan's. But by the standards of the Brahmin professional community in which Ramanujan moved, it was close to penury.

The family took in boarders; that brought in another ten rupees per month. And Komalatammal sang at the temple, bringing in a few more. Still, Ramanujan occasionally went hungry. Sometimes, an old woman in the neighborhood would invite him in for a midday meal. Another family, that of Ramanujan's friend S. M. Subramanian, would also take him in, feeding him dosai, the lentil pancakes that are a staple of South Indian cooking. One time in 1908, Ramanujan's mother stopped by the Subramanian house lamenting that she had no rice. The boy's mother fed her and sent her younger son, Anantharaman, to find Ramanujan. Anantharaman led him to the house of his aunt, who filled him up on rice and butter.

To bring in money, Ramanujan approached friends of the family; perhaps they had accounts to post, or books to reconcile? Or a son to tutor? One student, for seven rupees a month, was Viswanatha Sastri, son ofa Government College philosophy professor. Early each morning, Ramanujan would walk to the boy's house on Solaiappa Mudali Street, at the other end of town, to coach him in algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. The only trouble was, he couldn't stick to the course material. He'd teach the standard method today and then, if Viswanatha forgot it, would improvise a wholly new one tomorrow. Soon he'd be lost in areas the boy's regular teacher never touched.

Sometimes he would fly off onto philosophical tangents. They'd be discussing the height of a wall, perhaps for a trigonometry problem, and Ramanujan would insist that its height was, of course, only relative: who could say how high it seemed to an ant or a buffalo? One time he asked how the world would look when first created, before there was anyone to view it. He took delight, too, in posing sly little problems: If you take a belt, he asked Viswanatha and his father, and cinch it tight around the earth's twenty-five-thousand-mile-Iong equator, then let it out just 271" feet-about two yards-how far off the earth's surface would it stand? Some tiny fraction of an inch? Nope, one foot.

Viswanatha Sastri found Ramanujan inspiring; other students, however, did not. One classmate from high school, N. Govindaraja Iyengar, asked Ramanujan to help him with differential calculus for his B.A. exam. The arrangement lasted all of two weeks. You can think of calculus as a set of powerful mathematical tools; that's how most students learn it and what most exams require. Or else you can appreciate it for the subtle questions it poses about the nature of the infinitesimally small and the infinitely large. Ramanujan, either unmindful of his students' practical needs or unwilling to cater to them, stressed the latter. "He would talk only of infinity and infinitesimals," wrote Govindara,ja, who was no slouch intellectually and wound up as chairman oflndia's public service commission. "I felt that his tuition [teaching] might not be of real use to me in the examination, and so I gave it up."

Ramanujan had lost all his scholarships. He had failed in school. Even as a tutor of the subject he loved most, he'd been found wanting. He had nothing.

And yet, viewed a little differently, he had everything. For now there was nothing to distract him from his notebooks-notebooks, crammed with theorems, that each day, each week, bulged wider.

10 points NancyLebovitz 04 September 2013 02:43:55PM Permalink

The merit of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, then – or its offence, depending where you stood – was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible.

John LeCarre, explaining that he didn't have insider information about the intelligence community, and if he had, he would not have been allowed to publish The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but that a great many people who thought James Bond was too implausible wanted to believe that LeCarre's book was the real deal.

10 points wedrifid 12 September 2013 11:59:53PM Permalink

There are no absolute certainties in this universe [..] is impossible.

Improbable would seem more appropriate.

10 points aausch 07 September 2013 07:13:02PM Permalink

“The first magical step you can do after a flood,” he said, “is get a pump and try to redirect water.”

-- Richard James, founding priest of a Toronto based Wicca church, quoted in a thegridto article

10 points AndHisHorse 02 September 2013 05:03:34AM Permalink

Yes, but it can be either a bad sign about what you're trying to talk yourself into, or about your state of mind. It simply means that your previous position was held strongly - not because of strong rational evidence alone, because stronger evidence can override that - the act of assimilating the information precludes talking yourself into it. If you have to talk yourself into something, it probably means that there is an irrational aspect to your attachment to the alternative.

And that irrational, often emotional attachment can be either right or wrong; were this not true, gut feeling would answer every question truthfully, and the first plausible explanation one could think of would always be correct.

10 points DanielLC 05 October 2013 10:51:42PM Permalink

It sure seems like a step up from when your time is really wasted, and you spent it all playing on the computer.

10 points Panic_Lobster 08 October 2013 03:14:54AM Permalink

When philosophers use a word—"knowledge", "being", "object", "I", "proposition", "name"—and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?—What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. You say to me: "You understand this expression, don't you? Well then—I am using it in the sense you are familiar with."— As if the sense were an atmosphere accompanying the word, which it carried with it into every kind of application.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 116-117

10 points monsterzero 04 October 2013 10:08:56PM Permalink

Human consciousness isn't optimized for anything, except maybe helping feral hominids survive in the wild.

-Charles Stross, "Rule 34"

10 points James_Miller 03 October 2013 02:11:45PM Permalink

Because of the way evolution operates, the mind consists of many, many parts, and these parts have many different functions. Because they're designed to do different things, they don't always work in perfect harmony.

Why Everyone Else Is A Hypocrite, by Robert Kurzban, p. 6.

10 points Stabilizer 05 October 2013 10:53:42PM Permalink

I prefer the translation: "Take no one's word for it."

10 points Ritalin 10 October 2013 06:09:40PM Permalink

We all grow old, don't we?

Nostalgic note: I remember back when I used to resent you for calling religion 'insanity'. Nowadays, I find it costs me strenuous effort to summon the very memory of a mindset where I could see it as anything but.

10 points gwern 06 October 2013 10:13:19PM Permalink

The point of the quote stands.

My objection here is not to the 'willpower yay!' bit, but to the multiple political digs interspersed in it, which substantially reduce the value of the quote for me, and I thought people were not noticing.

If you read his conversion story, it is clear that to say "oh well, something went wrong with his brain" is facile. He had been moving in that direction for many years. He writes of himself before that episode:

I am skeptical of his account. Everything is obvious in retrospect, and when someone is writing their conversion story, superimposing a 'journey to Catholicism' is easy. Just cherrypick.

He says he beat friends in arguments and showed their argument were bad? So what? I have beaten other LWers in arguments and show their understanding poor many times over the years, but if tomorrow I suffer brain damage and start worshipping Allah, it would be very easy for me to write 'despite being a frequent writer at transhumanist websites, I was nevertheless drifting away and routinely showing that my fellow transhumanists were horribly comically wrong about every basic point of philosophy, ethics and logic'; all it requires is a change of perspective.

We can see this hindsight on display right now in discussions of Silk Road. All over the place people are saying that the FBI knew who Ulbricht was from the start since there was a connection from his email address to an early mention of Silk Road, and how easy it would have been to de-anonymize Dread Pirate Roberts. Plausible... until we remember that no one in the world actually managed this despite intense interest by many people and organizations in SR, that if we had noticed the connection we had no good reason to believe that altoid/Ulbricht hadn't heard about SR through the Hidden Wiki or another discussion forum we simply didn't have access to or on a page that had linkrotted, that the indictments indicate that the FBI only managed to make the link much later after assigning someone fulltime to sift all Internet traces, and we're still not clear on whether they were sure DPR==Ulbricht until as late as June 2013.

(Assuming you believe that he's recounting the facts basically right. I believe Wright when he writes about his heart attack and hallucination as the reason for the conversion because it's a shockingly embarrassing way to convert, which invites even believers to write him off as believing due to neurological problems, and this has to be obvious to him; but that doesn't apply to his claims of having been tending toward Catholicism for years before.)

10 points rule_and_line 06 November 2013 02:39:09AM Permalink

The idea that a self-imposed external constraint on action can actually enhance our freedom by releasing us from predictable and undesirable internal constraints is not an obvious one. It is hard to be Ulysses.

-- Reid Hastie Robyn Dawes (Rational Choice in an Uncertain World)

The "Ulysses" reference is to the famous Ulysses pact in the Odyssey.

10 points Benito 02 November 2013 10:03:40AM Permalink

On not doing the impossible:

Ferrucci says. “We constantly underestimate—we did in the ’50s about AI, and we’re still doing it—what is really going on in the human brain.”

The question that [Douglas] Hofstadter wants to ask Ferrucci, and everybody else in mainstream AI, is this: Then why don’t you come study it?

...

Peter Norvig, one of Google’s directors of research, echoes Ferrucci almost exactly. “I thought he was tackling a really hard problem,” he told me about Hofstadter’s work. “And I guess I wanted to do an easier problem.”

-Article at The Atlantic

10 points TheAncientGeek 04 November 2013 12:09:23PM Permalink

How meaningful are figures on brain size without figures on overall body size?

10 points Jiro 05 November 2013 04:57:22PM Permalink

By that reasoning, refusing to hire someone who doesn't have good recommendations, is discrimination, because you're giving him distinguishing treatment (refusing to hire him) based on membership in a category (people who lack good recommendations).

I think you have some assumptions that you need to make explicit, after thinking them through first. (For instance, one obvious change is to replace "category" with "irrelevant category", but that won't work.)

10 points Vaniver 03 November 2013 03:56:35PM Permalink

The question would be whether the name is a better predictor of job performance than grades to distinguish people in the population of people who apply or whether the information that comes from the names adds additional predictive value.

Emphasis mine. I don't think this is the question at all, because you also have the grade information; the only question is if grades screen off evidence from names, which is your second option. It seems to me that the odds that the name provides no additional information are very low.

To the best of my knowledge, no studies have been done which submit applications where the obviously black names have higher qualifications in an attempt to determine how many GPA points an obviously black name costs an applicant. (Such an experiment seems much more difficult to carry out, and doesn't have the same media appeal.)

10 points Eugine_Nier 02 November 2013 06:12:33AM Permalink

Utilitarianism is not in our nature. Show me a man who would hold a child’s face in the fire to end malaria, and I will show you man who would hold a child’s face in the fire and entirely forget he was originally planning to end malaria.

James A. Donald

10 points Jiro 05 November 2013 05:02:37PM Permalink

I'd extend Eugene's reply and point out that both the original and modified version of the sentence are observations. As such, it doesn't matter that the two sentences are grammatically similar; it's entirely possible that one is observed and the other is not. History has plenty of examples of people who are willing to do harm for a good cause and end up just doing harm; history does not have plenty of examples of people who are willing to cut people open to remove cancer and end up just cutting people open.

Also, the phrasing "to end malaria" isn't analogous to "to remove cancer" because while the surgery only has a certain probability of working, the uncertainty in that probability is limited. We know the risks of surgery, we know how well surgery works to treat cancer, and so we can weigh those probabilities. When ending malaria (in this example), the claim that the experiment has so-and-so chance of ending malaria involves a lot more human judgment than the claim that surgery has so-and-so chance of removing cancer.

10 points wiresnips 03 November 2013 07:05:40PM Permalink

Utilitarianism isn't a description of human moral processing, it's a proposal for how to improve it.

10 points advael 18 December 2013 11:45:00PM Permalink

I'm wary of being in werehouses at all. They could turn back to people at any time!

10 points rahul 18 December 2013 04:15:59PM Permalink

One of the last of the many legendary contests won by the British philosopher A. J. Ayer was his encounter with Mike Tyson in 1987. As related by Ben Rogers in ”A. J. Ayer: A Life,” Ayer — small, frail, slight as a sparrow and then 77 years old — was entertaining a group of models at a New York party when a girl ran in screaming that her friend was being assaulted in a bedroom. The parties involved turned out to be Tyson and Naomi Campbell.

”Do you know who … I am?” Tyson asked in disbelief when Ayer urged him to desist: ”I’m the heavyweight champion of the world.”

”And I am the former Wykeham professor of logic,” Ayer answered politely. ”We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.”

So they did, while Campbell slipped away.

[Via] (http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/24/reviews/001224.24spurlit.html)

10 points Alejandro1 02 December 2013 12:23:26AM Permalink

A classic illustration of how to use (and how to not use) conditional probabilities:

"'Her foot,' says the journal, 'was small- so are thousands of feet. Her garter is no proof whatever- nor is her shoe- for shoes and garters are sold in packages. The same may be said of the flowers in her hat. One thing upon which M. Beauvais strongly insists is, that the clasp on the garter found had been set back to take it in. This amounts to nothing; for most women find it proper to take a pair of garters home and, fit them to the size of the limbs they are to encircle, rather than to try them in the store where they purchase.'

Here it is difficult to suppose the reasoner in earnest. Had M. Beauvais, in his search for the body of Marie, discovered a corpse corresponding in general size and appearance to the missing girl, he would have been warranted (without reference to the question of habiliment at all) in forming an opinion that his search had been successful. If, in addition to the point of general size and contour, he had found upon the arm a peculiar hairy appearance which he had observed upon the living Marie, his opinion might have been justly strengthened; and the increase of positiveness might well have been in the ratio of the peculiarity, or unusualness, of the hairy mark. If, the feet of Marie being small, those of the corpse were also small, the increase of probability that the body was that of Marie would not be an increase in a ratio merely arithmetical, but in one highly geometrical, or accumulative. Add to all this shoes such as she had been known to wear upon the day of her disappearance, and, although these shoes may be 'sold in packages,' you so far augment the probability as to verge upon the certain. What, of itself, would be no evidence of identity, becomes through its corroborative position, proof most sure. Give us, then, flowers in the hat corresponding to those worn by the missing girl, and we seek for nothing farther. If only one flower, we seek for nothing farther- what then if two or three, or more? Each successive one is multiple evidence- proof not added to proof, but multiplied by hundreds or thousands. Let us now discover, upon the deceased, garters such as the living used, and it is almost folly to proceed. But these garters are found to be tightened, by the setting back of a clasp, in just such a manner as her own had been tightened by Marie shortly previous to her leaving home. It is now madness or hypocrisy to doubt. … But it is not that the corpse was found to have the garters of the missing girl, or found to have her shoes, or her bonnet, or the flowers of her bonnet, or her feet, or a peculiar mark upon the arm, or her general size and appearance- it is that the corpse had each and all collectively.

--Edgar Allan Poe, "The Mystery of Marie Roget"

10 points ema 22 December 2013 06:00:40PM Permalink

If you get one bitter cucumber, asking for its cause may be a waste of time. But if you get a lot of bitter cucumbers, spending some time on changing that might give net positive utility.

10 points fubarobfusco 19 December 2013 11:56:33AM Permalink

if we stop thinking about the fact that as an abstract, general question a random human being is much more likely to be cis than trans

That said, it could also be taken as advising you not to double-count your priors by using them to discount the evidence. Imagine you've drawn a ball from an urn, and the ball looks blue to you — but your priors say that 99% of the balls in that urn are red. How much time do you want to spend questioning the validity of your color vision or the lighting before you consider that you drew a rare ball?

10 points lukeprog 15 January 2014 01:19:06AM Permalink

For it seemed to me that I could find much more truth in the reasonings that each person makes concerning matters that are important to him, and whose outcome ought to cost him dearly later on if he judged badly, than in those reasonings engaged in by a man of letters in his study, which touch on speculations that produce no effect and are of no other consequence to him except perhaps that, the more they are removed from common sense, the more pride he will take in them.

Rene Descartes

10 points Alejandro1 04 January 2014 10:30:07PM Permalink

An example in chess could be the enforcement of the touch-move rule in a "friendly" game not played under tournament conditions. Personally, I would tend to see someone who insisted on applying this rule in a friendly game when the opponent makes a mistaken touch as a bit of a jerk who cares too much about winning. I am sure this varies across different people and different chess circles though.

10 points komponisto 04 January 2014 10:36:18PM Permalink

I haven't read the whole text at the link (for which I'm grateful) yet, but I'll comment on the quoted paragraph.

I feel that music theory has gotten stuck by trying too long to find universals

More specifically, however, the problem is a confusion of universals with fundamentals. Music theory has succeeded in finding universals, but such universals by themselves aren't explanatory. If you don't know how to compose, it won't help you very much to learn that ancient flutes play the diatonic scale. And if you start doing statistical frequency analyses of local musical behavior patterns in some specific repertory, you've utterly gone off a cliff as far as explanation is concerned (at least, the kind of "explanation" that is of relevance to a prospective composer).

Music theory, as a discipline, suffers from a failure of query-hugging. My belief is that if theorists were to engage in honest introspection, they would, at the end of a (possibly quite long) chain of inference, reach the conclusion that their real goal is to devise a "programming language" for music: a set of concepts that facilitate the mental storage and manipulation of musical data. And that, if they attacked this goal directly, with conscious knowledge of what it is, music theory would (a) look very different (or rather, look a lot more like certain existing theories than others), (b) be more intellectually satisfying, and (c) be a lot more relevant to musical composition and performance.

(I'm grateful to Daniel Burfoot for the "programming language" metaphor.)

10 points Lumifer 15 January 2014 08:57:25PM Permalink

I'd like to offer a link to a blog post that looks very very rational to me. Though not in the usual-to-LW sense.

It starts like this:

One of the most consistent messages I offer here is about interactions with law enforcement, and can be expressed in two words — shut up — although "oh you dumb son of a bitch will you for the love of God shut up" might capture the flavor better.

10 points RichardKennaway 07 January 2014 01:13:29PM Permalink

I definitely think this one has been in a quotes thread before.

Here.

10 points adam_strandberg 24 February 2014 06:44:00AM Permalink

Also, this from his summary of Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra":

Humanity isn't an end, it's a fork in the road, and you have two options: "Animal" and "Superman". For some reason, people keep going left, the easy way, the way back to where we came from. Fuck 'em. Other people just stand there, staring at the signposts, as if they're going to come alive and tell them what to do or something. Dude, the sign says fucking "SUPERMAN". How much more of a clue do these assholes want?

10 points eli_sennesh 16 February 2014 07:39:52AM Permalink

Wait, hold on. You can't just flood Hell. There are people down there, apparently preserved well enough to torture for eternity without ageing (except if ageing is the torture, of course). Surely there's some way to exploit this!

Also, Hell would mean Lucifer is somewhere down there. Do you think we can dredge him up for a decent Faustian bargain? Any decent LW-er should be able to do a few things with Faust's traditional Omni-Knowledge that should render Christian-style immortal souls obsolete and unnecessary, and possibly irretrievable when Lucifer comes collecting as well.

Let's get Munchkining, people.

10 points brazil84 07 February 2014 03:00:31PM Permalink

All things being equal, I think I would rather be at loose ends than be dead.

That said, I would imagine that part of the problem is that many peoples' desire for immortality is informed partly by an instinctive reluctance to die -- as distinguished from a genuine preference for living over non-existence.

10 points MattG 10 March 2014 08:55:04PM Permalink

"Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed." - Daniel Kahneman

10 points Eugine_Nier 01 March 2014 06:54:55PM Permalink

As the marijuana legalization movement strengthens, you can see hints of how hard it is to hit the libertarian sweet spot where something is simultaneously legalized but remains rare and distasteful. People, especially young people, pick up messages from society about what is winning and what is losing more than they pick up nuanced messages. Smoking tobacco is losing so it seems reasonable to ban smoking it even in your own car while driving through a brushfire zone. Smoking marijuana is winning, so it doesn't seem like the ban on smoking in Laurel Canyon applies to dope.

Steve Sailer

10 points jaime2000 02 March 2014 10:25:24PM Permalink

Needs more context. You and I know what this quote refers to; others might not.

EDIT: Here's a non-Tweeted version of the quote. It is used again later in the book, but to quote that scene would be a spoiler.

They finally got themselves together along the wall. Ender noticed that without exception they had lined up with their heads still in the direction they had been up in the corridor. So Ender deliberately took hold of what they were treating as a floor and dangled from it upside down. "Why are you upside down, soldiers?" he demanded.

Some of them started to turn the other way.

"Attention!" They held still. "I said why are you upside down!"

No one answered. They didn't know what he expected.

"I said why does every one of you have his feet in the air and his head toward the ground!"

Finally one of them spoke. "Sir, this is the direction we were in coming out of the door."

"Well what difference is that supposed to make! What difference does it make what the gravity was back in the corridor! Are we going to fight in the corridor? Is there any gravity here?"

No sir. No sir.

"From now on, you forget about gravity before you go through that door. The old gravity is gone, erased. Understand me? Whatever your gravity is when you get to the door, remember-the enemy's gate is down. Your feet are toward the enemy's gate. Up is toward your own gate. North is that way, south is that way, east is that way, west is-what way?"

They pointed.

"That's what I expected. The only process you've mastered is the process of elimination, and the only reason you've mastered that is because you can do it in the toilet. What was the circus I saw out here! Did you call that forming up? Did you call that flying? Now everybody, launch and form up on the ceiling! Right now! Move!"

As Ender expected, a good number of them instinctively launched, not toward the wall with the door in it, but toward the wall that Ender had called north, the direction that had been up when they were in the corridor. Of course they quickly realized their mistake, but too late-they had to wait to change things until they had rebounded off the north wall.

In the meantime, Ender was mentally grouping them into slow learners and fast learners. The littlest kid, the one who had been last out of the door, was the first to arrive at the correct wall, and he caught himself adroitly. They had been right to advance him. He'd do well.

10 points johnlawrenceaspden 15 April 2014 11:44:57PM Permalink

The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four-year-old that we take for granted – recognizing a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question – in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived... As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.

Stephen Pinker, Wikipedia/Moravec's Paradox

10 points DanArmak 04 April 2014 09:18:44PM Permalink

My first explanation was that understanding is the best way, but memorization can be more efficient in short term, especially if you expect to forget the stuff and never use it again after the exam. Some subjects probably are like this, but math famously is not. Which is why math is the most hated subject.

Another explanation was that the students probably never actually had an experience of understanding something, at least not in the school, so they literally don't understand what I was trying to do.

What do you think about these other possible explanations?

  1. Some of these students really can't learn to prove mathematical theorems. If exams required real understanding of math, then no matter how much these students and their teachers tried, with all the pedagogical techniques we know today, they would fail the exams.

  2. These students really have very unpleasant subjective experiences when they try to understand math, a kind of mental suffering. They are bad at math because people are generally bad at doing very unpleasant things: they only do the absolute minimum they can get away with, so they don't get enough practice to become better, and they also have trouble concentrating at practice because the experience is a bad one. Even if they can improve with practice, this would mean they'll never practice enough to improve. (You may think that understanding something should be more fun than rote learning, and this may be true for some of them, but they never get to actually understand enough to realize this for themselves.)

  3. The students are just time-discounting. They care more about not studying now, then about passing the exam later. Or, they are procrastinating, planning to study just before the exam. An effort to understand something takes more time in the short term than just memorizing it; it only pays off once you've understood enough things.

  4. The students, as a social group, perceive themselves as opposed to and resisting the authority of teachers. They can't usually resist mandatory things: attending classes, doing homework, having to pass exams; and they resent this. Whenever a teacher tries to introduce a study activity that isn't mandatory (other teachers aren't doing it), students will push back. Any students who speak up in class and say "actually I'm enjoying this extra material/alternative approach, please keep teaching it" would be betraying their peers. This is a matter of politics, and even if a teacher introduces non-mandatory or alternative techniques that are really objectively fun and efficient, students may not perceive them as such because they're seeing them as "extra study" or "extra oppression", not "a teacher trying to help us".

10 points johnlawrenceaspden 05 April 2014 12:49:12AM Permalink

I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz., telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.

Alan Turing (from "Computing Machinery and Intelligence")

10 points Ian_S 14 April 2014 02:18:01PM Permalink

Maybe I need to include more context. This conversation occurs after the multiplication was done. This was discussing the aftermath, which had been minimized as much as the minds in question could manage. I took it to mean that, once you have made the best decision you can, there is no guarantee that you will be happy with the outcome, just that it would likely have been worse had you made any other decision.

10 points timujin 18 May 2014 08:29:07AM Permalink

“All witches are selfish, the Queen had said. But Tiffany’s Third Thoughts said: Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine! I have a duty!”

― Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men (Discworld, #30)

10 points SaidAchmiz 03 May 2014 06:05:56PM Permalink

working out what must actually have gone on

How did he know that his judgment of what actually had gone on was correct? How did he verify his conclusion?

10 points Viliam_Bur 02 May 2014 07:14:01PM Permalink

The reason why the thing can't be expressed is that it's too definite for language.

This feels like a combination of words that are supposed to sound Wisely, but don't actually make sense. (I guess Lewis uses this technique frequently.)

How specifically could being "definite" be a a problem for language? Take any specific thing, apply an arbitrary label, and you are done.

There could be a problem when a person X experienced some "qualia" that other people have never experienced, so they can't match the verbal description with anything in their experience. Or worse, they have something similar, which they match instead, even when told not to. And this seems like a situation described in the text. -- But then the problem is not having the shared experience. If they did, they would just need to apply an arbitrary label, and somehow make sure they refer to the same thing when using the label. The language would have absolutely no problem with that.

10 points DanielLC 06 June 2014 07:28:54PM Permalink

As somewhat of a libertarian, I tend to fall into that last group. I have to keep reminding myself that if nobody could outguess the market, then there'd be no money in trying to outguess the market, so only fools would enter it, and it would be easy to outguess.

10 points Torello 02 June 2014 11:42:20PM Permalink

In reply to both Nancy and Thomas:

"For Taleb, then, the question why someone was a success in the financial marketplace was vexing. Taleb could do the arithmetic in his head. Suppose that there were ten thousand investment managers out there, which is not an outlandish number, and that every year half of them, entirely by chance, made money and half of them, entirely by chance, lost money. And suppose that every year the losers were tossed out, and the game replayed with those who remained. At the end of five years, there would be three hundred and thirteen people who had made money in every one of those years, and after ten years there would be nine people who had made money every single year in a row, all out of pure luck. Niederhoffer, like Buffett and Soros, was a brilliant man. He had a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. He had pioneered the idea that through close mathematical analysis of patterns in the market an investor could identify profitable anomalies. But who was to say that he wasn’t one of those lucky nine? And who was to say that in the eleventh year Niederhoffer would be one of the unlucky ones, who suddenly lost it all, who suddenly, as they say on Wall Street, “blew up”?

-Malcom Gladwell

A magician named Derren Brown made a whole program about horse racing to illustrate the point of the above story. It's kinda interesting, but wastes more time than reading the story above.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R5OWh7luL4

10 points raisin 12 June 2014 11:37:01AM Permalink

It tells a lot about the way our brains are built that you have to consciously remind yourself of this in the course of the argument and it doesn't really come naturally.

10 points Jayson_Virissimo 17 June 2014 06:37:24AM Permalink

The irony of commitment is that it’s deeply liberating — in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around like rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life.

-- Anne Morris

10 points LizzardWizzard 27 June 2014 10:33:42AM Permalink

Three Bayesians walk into a bar: a) what's the probability that this is a joke? b) what's the probability that one of the three is a Rabbi? c) given that one of the three is a Rabbi, what's the probability that this is a joke? (c)

According to the base rate there is an evidence that this is a joke about Russia national team or Suarez bite

10 points Stabilizer 04 June 2014 06:39:36PM Permalink

I would be interested to know how well documented this "curse of success" is? Is it studied in the economic literature? When do corporations, nations, firms, individuals suffer from this curse, when do they not? When do entire industries--like universities-- suffer from the curse? When do they survive and recover? When do they go completely bust? It seems possible to find examples going both ways, so I'm guessing there's something more subtle going on.

10 points shminux 18 July 2014 05:51:08PM Permalink

This link warrants a trigger warning:

multiple heartbreaking stories of false accusations ruining innocent people's lives

10 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 18 July 2014 11:05:47PM Permalink

Good noticing of confusion, I feel slightly ashamed of not picking up on that immediately.

10 points wedrifid 18 July 2014 12:13:03PM Permalink

What is the first business of one who practices philosophy?

Publish!

10 points dspeyer 07 July 2014 08:52:17PM Permalink

I don't know the original context, but I see several possibilities:

  • If the trench really needs to get dug, and it looks like it's going to take digging night and day, then they won't care if they're standing on your toes because stepping off would distract from digging.
  • Similarly, they may conclude everyone needs to be conscripted into the spoon-gangs, including the infirm who will die there and the nerd who was about to invent shovels.
  • If they devote the time and energy to develop their spoon skills they're likely to expect public deference commensurate to their sacrifice, and may get angry when they don't get it.
  • If they do get that deference, and then shovels are developed, they may try to suppress shovels to protect their status.
10 points sixes_and_sevens 07 July 2014 02:37:46PM Permalink

I'm not sure it plays out this way in real life all that often. For example, anyone who got a digital photography degree before the year 2002 spent three years learning how to accomplish what anyone with a knock-off copy of Photoshop can learn to do in half an hour. They're not super-badass, they're just obsolete.

10 points B_For_Bandana 07 July 2014 05:33:42PM Permalink

In times like these I really have to wonder why it's never (or at least rarely, to my eye) stressed that self-awareness is probably the single most important component of a healthy life. We're constantly handed very specific definitions of good behavior, complex moral and legal codes, questionable social constructs, and so on. I don't remember ever really being told to take a step back--to step back as far as possible--and look constructively at myself. But increasingly I feel that the only dividing line between being "that guy" and being a net positive to those around you comes out of being able to look at yourself critically and build constructively.

Maybe I'm oversimplifying or assuming that introspection is simple. But for every ten groups explaining religious ideology to me, or telling me why their political candidate is best, I wish one would have told me to get out of my own head as much as possible.

10 points dspeyer 07 July 2014 09:26:08PM Permalink

Perhaps we should do what Aristotle meant to do, instead of what he did. The goal he announces in the Metaphysics seems one worth pursuing: to discover the most general truths. That sounds good. But instead of trying to discover them because they're useless, let's try to discover them because they're useful.

-- Paul Graham

10 points Manfred 08 July 2014 11:09:54PM Permalink
10 points IlyaShpitser 07 July 2014 07:27:58PM Permalink

What's worse is the converse -- where common language users attempt to redefine a precise term for their own purposes. Mathematicians aren't confused by 'perfect numbers,' but I don't even know anymore what people mean around here when they use the B word. Maybe nothing interesting?

10 points Azathoth123 12 July 2014 01:34:32AM Permalink

You still need a theory, a.k.a., a prior on the kind of data you expect to be compressing. Otherwise you run into the No Free Lunch Theorem.

10 points Ixiel 19 August 2014 12:55:58AM Permalink

Most of the time he asked questions. His questions were very good, and if you tried to answer them intelligently, you found yourself saying excellent things that you did not know you knew, and that you had not, in fact, known before. He had "educed" them from you by his question. His classes were literally "education" - they brought things out of you, they made your mind produce its own explicit ideas.

Thomas Merton, about professor Mark Van Doren

10 points jaime2000 05 August 2014 04:51:38PM Permalink

Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking. General Broadwings thinks General Derpy is bluffing, so Derpy credibly precommits herself to not releasing him by telling him information that would surely doom her army if she did. She gives up the choice of freeing Broadwings, and comes out ahead for it.

10 points Benito 04 August 2014 09:58:03AM Permalink

A good argument is like a piece of technology. Few of us will ever invent a new piece of technology, and on any given day it’s unlikely that we’ll adopt one. Nevertheless, the world we inhabit is defined by technological change. Likewise, I believe that the world we inhabit is a product of good moral arguments. It’s hard to catch someone in the midst of reasoned moral persuasion, and harder still to observe the genesis of a good argument. But I believe that without our capacity for moral reasoning, the world would be a very different place.

-Joshua Greene, “Moral Tribes”, Endnotes

10 points Viliam_Bur 05 September 2014 01:40:21PM Permalink

Related: When (Not) To Use Probabilities:

I would advise, in most cases, against using non-numerical procedures to create what appear to be numerical probabilities. Numbers should come from numbers. (...) you shouldn't go around thinking that, if you translate your gut feeling into "one in a thousand", then, on occasions when you emit these verbal words, the corresponding event will happen around one in a thousand times. Your brain is not so well-calibrated.

This specific topic came up recently in the context of the Large Hadron Collider (...) the speaker actually purported to assign a probability of at least 1 in 1000 that the theory, model, or calculations in the LHC paper were wrong; and a probability of at least 1 in 1000 that, if the theory or model or calculations were wrong, the LHC would destroy the world.

I object to the air of authority given these numbers pulled out of thin air. (...) No matter what other physics papers had been published previously, the authors would have used the same argument and made up the same numerical probabilities

10 points Vaniver 05 September 2014 06:13:35PM Permalink

It'll also be easier to reduce a bonus (because of poor performance on the part of the employee or company) than it will be to reduce a salary.

10 points DanArmak 06 September 2014 11:06:44AM Permalink

People who often misunderstand others: 6% of geniuses, 94% of garden-variety nonsense-spouters.

10 points Jack_LaSota 07 September 2014 05:01:06PM Permalink

Katara: Do you think we'll really find airbenders?

Sokka: You want me to be like you, or totally honest?

Katara: Are you saying I'm a liar?

Sokka: I'm saying you're an optimist. Same thing, basically.

-Avatar: The Last Airbender

10 points bbleeker 04 October 2014 09:10:19AM Permalink

"What we assume to be 'normal consciousness' is comparatively rare, it's like the light in the refrigerator: when you look in, there you are ON but what's happening when you don't look in?"

Keith Johnstone, Impro - Improvisation and the Theatre

10 points Salivanth 04 October 2014 05:55:52AM Permalink

I believe this lesson is designed for crisis situations where the wiser person taking the time to explain could be detrimental. For example, a soldier believes his commander is smarter than him and possesses more information than he does. The commander orders him to do something in an emergency situation that appears stupid from his perspective, but he does it anyway, because he chooses to trust his commander's judgement over his own.

Under normal circumstances, there is of course no reason why a subordinate shouldn't be encouraged to ask why they're doing something.

10 points shminux 03 October 2014 09:53:10PM Permalink

The words out of your mouth will literally be ignored, misheard, or even contorted to the opposite of what they mean, if that’s what it takes to preserve the listener’s misconception

Scott Aaronson on why quantum computers don't speed up computations by parallelism, a popular misconception.

10 points Desrtopa 06 December 2014 03:40:57PM Permalink

The problems in North Korea are not so simple with straightforward solutions, when we look at them from the perspective of the actors involved.

For the average citizen in North Korea, there are no clear avenues to political influence that don't increase rather than decrease personal risk. For the people in North Korea who do have significant political influence, from a self-serving perspective, there are no "problems" with how North Korea is run.

North Korea's problems might be simple to solve from the perspective of an altruistic Supreme Leader, but they're hard as coordination problems. Some of our societal problems in the developed world are also simple from the perspective of an altruistic Supreme Leader, but hard as coordination problems. Some of the more salient differences are that those problems didn't occur due to the actions of non altruistic or incompetent Supreme Leaders in the first place, and aren't causing mass subsistence level poverty.

10 points ChristianKl 05 December 2014 01:31:56AM Permalink

There no such thing as evidence-based decision on strategies for research funding. Nobody really knows good criteria for deciding which research should get grants to be carried out.

Aubrey de Grey among other things makes the argument that it's good to put out prices for research groups that get mices to a certain increased lifespan. That's the Methuselah Foundation’s Mprize.

Now the Methuselah Foundation worked to set up the new organ liver price that gives 1 million to the first team that creates a regenerative or bioengineered solution that keeps a large animal alive for 90 days without native liver function.

Funding that kind of research is useful whether or not certain arguments Aubrey de Grey made about “Whole Body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres” are correct. In science there's room for people proposing ideas that turn out to be wrong.

10 points Lumifer 01 December 2014 08:36:25PM Permalink

And you end up like this.

10 points elharo 09 December 2014 12:30:01PM Permalink

We're similarly shocked whenever authority figures who are supposed to know what they're doing make it plain that they don't, President Obama's healthcare launch being probably the most serious recent example. We shouldn't really be shocked, though. Because all these stories illustrate one of the most fundamental yet still under-appreciated truths of human existence, which is this: everyone is totally just winging it, all the time.

Institutions – from national newspapers to governments and politicial parties – invest an enormous amount of money and effort in denying this truth. The facades they maintain are crucial to their authority, and thus to their legitimacy and continued survival. We need them to appear ultra-competent, too, because we derive much psychological security from the belief that somewhere, in the highest echelons of society, there are some near-infallible adults in charge.

In fact, though, everyone is totally just winging it.

-- Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, May 21, 2014

10 points Sarunas 03 November 2014 11:49:00AM Permalink

I, too, sometimes find that it is easier for me to express certain ideas in English than in my native language. However, I guess, in my case the reason seems to be analogous to the reasons mentioned in Steven Pinker's article Why Academics Stink at Writing. Although it mainly talks about why academics find it difficult to express their ideas in simple words, it seems to me that if one uses predominantly English in certain settings or talking about certain subjects, then the reasons (chunking and functional fixedness) why ideas about these subjects are difficult to express in one's native language are probably similar.

Scholars lose their moorings in the land of the concrete because of two effects of expertise that have been documented by cognitive psychology. One is called chunking. To work around the limitations of short-term memory, the mind can package ideas into bigger and bigger units, which the psychologist George Miller dubbed "chunks." As we read and learn, we master a vast number of abstractions, and each becomes a mental unit that we can bring to mind in an instant and share with others by uttering its name. An adult mind that is brimming with chunks is a powerful engine of reason, but it comes at a cost: a failure to communicate with other minds that have not mastered the same chunks.

The amount of abstraction a writer can get away with depends on the expertise of his readership. But divining the chunks that have been mastered by a typical reader requires a gift of clairvoyance with which few of us are blessed. When we are apprentices in our chosen specialty, we join a clique in which, it seems to us, everyone else seems to know so much! And they talk among themselves as if their knowledge were conventional wisdom to every educated person. As we settle into the clique, it becomes our universe. We fail to appreciate that it is a tiny bubble in a multiverse of cliques. When we make first contact with the aliens in other universes and jabber at them in our local code, they cannot understand us without a sci-fi universal translator.

[...]

The second way in which expertise can make our thoughts harder to share is that as we become familiar with something, we think about it more in terms of the use we put it to and less in terms of what it looks like and what it is made of. This transition is called functional fixity. In the textbook experiment, people are given a candle, a book of matches, and a box of thumbtacks, and are asked to attach the candle to the wall so that the wax won’t drip onto the floor. The solution is to dump the thumbtacks out of the box, tack the box to the wall, and stick the candle onto the box. Most people never figure this out because they think of the box as a container for the tacks rather than as a physical object in its own right. The blind spot is called functional fixity because people get fixated on an object’s function and forget its physical makeup.

Now, if you combine functional fixity with chunking, and stir in the curse that hides each one from our awareness, you get an explanation of why specialists use so much idio­syncratic terminology, together with abstractions, metaconcepts, and zombie nouns. They are not trying to bamboozle their readers; it’s just the way they think. The specialists are no longer thinking—and thus no longer writing—about tangible objects, and instead are referring to them by the role those objects play in their daily travails. A psychologist calls the labels true and false "assessment words" because that’s why he put them there—so that the participants in the experiment could assess whether it applied to the preceding sentence. Unfortunately, he left it up to us to figure out what an "assessment word" is.

While scholars package their ideas and abstractions into chunks, in everyday language we package the connotations of words/idioms/expressions into similar implicit chunks that are hard to separate from the word/idiom/expression itself. Direct translation might not preserve all these connotations. It seems to me that while we could try to preserve some connotations that are most relevant in a given situation, we might feel uncomfortable doing so, because losing connotations feels like losing accuracy and precise meaning of what we tried to convey, even in situations where a simple paraphrase could preserve connotations that are actually relevant.

In a professional setting, functional fixedness becomes very important. It is probably the reason why so much professional jargon (outside the Anglosphere) is based on other languages, especially English.

10 points roystgnr 05 November 2014 09:09:22PM Permalink

Are there no instances in Russian which reveal a poorly categorized concept in English, or vice-versa?

I'm surprised ESR didn't bring up the difficulty of talking about "free software" in a language that doesn't distinguish "libre" from "gratuit", for example.

My own favorite example is how stunningly ambiguous the word "why" seems after learning about finer distinctions like the "por que" vs "para que" distinction in Spanish. How many creationists are subconsciously confused by the fact that "from what cause?" and "for what purpose?" are treated in English as identical questions?

You can always translate the ambiguity logically (into any sufficiently "complete" language?), but the increased awkwardness of the translation may have an effect. For an example from today's news commentary: even some ardent feminists are surprised to learn that "Banksy" might be a woman, possibly because even if you know intellectually that English uses "he" as a neutral pronoun for a person of unknown gender, that's not always enough to prevent prose references to an unknown person as "he" from affecting you subliminally.

10 points Azathoth123 07 November 2014 02:59:06AM Permalink

For an example from today's news commentary: even some ardent feminists are surprised to learn that "Banksy" might be a woman, possibly because even if you know intellectually that English uses "he" as a neutral pronoun for a person of unknown gender, that's not always enough to prevent prose references to an unknown person as "he" from affecting you subliminally.

Or possibly because the prior for the gender of the kind of person who'd the kind of things Banksy does is heavily in favor of him being male.

10 points alex_zag_al 01 November 2014 09:19:28PM Permalink

Colin Howson, talking about how Cox's theorem bears the mark of Cox's training as a physicist (source):

An alternative approach is to start immediately with a quantitative notion and think of general principles that any acceptable numerical measure of uncertainty should obey. R.T. Cox and I.J. Good, working independently in the mid nineteen-forties, showed how strikingly little in the way of constraints on a numerical measure yield the finitely additive probability functions as canonical representations. It is not just the generality of the assumptions that makes the Cox–Good result so significant: unlike some of those which have to be imposed on a qualitative probability ordering, the assumptions used by Cox and to a somewhat lesser extent Good seem to have the property of being uniformly self-evidently analytic principles of numerical epistemic probability whatever particular scale it might be measured in. Cox was a working physicist and his point of departure was a typical one: to look for invariant principles:

To consider first ... what principles of probable inference will hold however probability is measured. Such principles, if there are any, will play in the theory of probable inference a part like that of Carnot’s principle in thermodynamics, which holds for all possible scales of temperature, or like the parts played in mechanics by the equations of Lagrange and Hamilton, which have the same form no matter what system of coordinates is used in the description of motion. [Cox 1961]

10 points James_Miller 02 November 2014 12:48:54AM Permalink

This conclusory invocation to "science" w/o reference to any study is an IQ test for the American intelligentsia.

Joel S. Gehrke, Sr. on Twitter referencing American Ebola policy and fears.

10 points aarongertler 17 November 2014 05:26:01PM Permalink

Teacher: So if you could live to be any age you like, what would it be?

Boy 2: Infinity.

Teacher: Infinity, you would live for ever? Why would you like to live for ever?

Boy 2: Because you just know a lot of people and make lots of new friends because you could travel to lots of countries and everything and meet loads of new animals and everything.

--Until (documentary)

http://mosaicscience.com/extra/until-transcript

10 points [deleted] 03 November 2014 09:03:34AM Permalink

More US citizens have married Kim Kardashian than have died of Ebola.

-- a member of the scientific collaboration I'm in.