Best of Rationality Quotes
"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
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
Just because you two are arguing, doesn't mean one of you is right.
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
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.
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
It shouldn't be disrespectful to the complexity of the human condition to say that despair is also, often, just low blood sugar.
I will not procrastinate regarding any ritual granting immortality.
--Evil Overlord List #230
He uses statistics as a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not for illumination.
G.K. Chesterton
Luck is statistics taken personally.
Penn Jellete
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
“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.
"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
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]
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
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
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
"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
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." -Daniel J. Boorstin
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)
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.
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
"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)
The Noah principle: predicting rain doesn’t count, building arks does.
-Warren E. Buffett
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
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
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
If anything of the classical supernatural existed, it would be a branch of engineering by now.
-- Steve Gilham
It’s easy to lie with statistics, but it’s easier to lie without them.
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
When things get too complicated, it sometimes makes sense to stop and wonder: Have I asked the right question?
Enrico Bombieri
Just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.
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
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
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
-- Winston Churchill
If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong.
Paul Graham
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.
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
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
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
The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem, in a way that will allow a solution
– Bertrand Russell
It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.
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
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
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
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
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
Being - forgive me - rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.
Albus Dumbledore
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"
You want to learn from experience, but you want to learn from other people’s experience when you can.
Warren Buffett
The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.
-Paul Graham, Keep Your Identity Small
There is one rule that's very simple, but not easy: observe reality and adjust.
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
Voltaire
Doubt, n. The philosophical device Descartes so cleverly used to prove everything he previously believed.
-L. A. Rollins, Lucifer's Lexicon
Even after ten thousand explanations, a fool is no wiser, but an intelligent man requires only two thousand five hundred.
-- Brahma, Mahabharata
Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.
— John Von Neumann
A little learning is not a dangerous thing to one who does not mistake it for a great deal.
-- William A White
Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.
André Gide
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.")
If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.
The Company that needs a new machine tool is already paying for it.
-old Warner Swasey ad
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.
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
John Maynard Keynes
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it.
Mark Twain
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!
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?
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
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
Writing program code is a good way of debugging your thinking.
-- Bill Venables
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
"The truth is whatever you can get away with."
"No, that’s journalism. The truth is whatever you can’t escape."
-Greg Egan, Distress
It is easy to be certain....One has only to be sufficiently vague.
Charles S. Peirce
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")
The greatest weariness comes from work not done.
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.
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.
Nature draws no line between living and nonliving.
-- K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation
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
if you're the smartest person in the room, go look for a room with smarter people in it.
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)
I wish there was no illness, I don't care if an old doctor starves.
Loā Hô, a Taiwanese physician and poet.
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.
“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Do you ever get the feeling that God has a plan?
And you're the only one who can stop it?
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
"Most haystacks do not even have a needle."
-- Lorenzo
"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
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)
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.
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.
The discovery that the universe has no purpose need not prevent a human being from having one.
-Irwin Edman
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
Complex problems have simple, easy to understand wrong answers.
— Grossman's Law
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
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...
Nobody panics when things go "according to plan"… even if the plan is horrifying.
- The Joker
“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
A faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
Arthur C. Clarke
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
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
"Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from SCIENCE!"
~Girl Genius
Philosopher: Can we ever be certain an observation is true?
Engineer: Yep.
Philosopher: How?
Engineer: Lookin'.
Scrollover of SMBC #1879
A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it, is committing another mistake.
-Confucius
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
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".
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
A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.
Daniel Dennett
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
"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."
"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".
[I]n my opinion nothing occurs contrary to nature except the impossible, and that never occurs.
-- Sagredo, "Two New Sciences" (1914 translation), Galileo Galilei
"I accidentally changed my mind."
my four-year-old
The most practical thing in the world is a good theory.
Helmholtz
We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones.
-Robert Wright, The Moral Animal
Part of the potential of things is how they break.
Vi Hart, How To Snakes
I cannot see that such inward convictions and feelings are of any weight as evidence of what really exists.
Charles Darwin
The church is near, but the road is icy. The bar is far away, but I will walk carefully.
-- Russian proverb
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
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
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.
One of the toughest things in any science... is to weed out the ideas that are really pleasing but unencumbered by truth.
Thomas Carew
"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.)
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"
"Voting in a democracy makes you feel powerful, much as playing the lottery makes you feel rich." -- Mencius Moldbug
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." Christopher Hitchens
"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
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
--Friedrich Nietzsche
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
Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.
Dean Schlicter
The question I ask myself like almost everyday is 'Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?'
Mark Zuckerberg
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
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
You'll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.
-- David Foster Wallace
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
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
The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.
Gloria Steinem
Opening your eyes doesn't make a bad picture worse.
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
"A witty saying proves nothing." -- Voltaire
I've always found that useful to keep in mind when reading threads like this.
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
-- Isaac Asimov
"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
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
Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.
"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
Most people would rather die than think; many do.
– Bertrand Russell
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
It is better to destroy one's own errors than those of others.
Democritus
“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
“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
"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
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.
Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle
"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
When things are hard to understand, people who suspect they're nonsense generally keep quiet.
-- Paul Graham
Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.
Bertrand Russell
The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.
-- George Eliot
Hunches are not bad, they just need to be allowed to die a natural death when evidence proves them wrong.
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
To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.
-- Robert A Heinlein, Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Things are only impossible until they're not.
-- Jean-Luc Picard
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
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
The whole universe sat there, open to the man who could make the right decisions.
Frank Herbert, "Dune"
"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.
"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
"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)
"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
The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.
Wikiquotes: Huston Smith Wikipedia: Ralph Washinton Sockman
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
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
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"
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
-- Voltaire
"Experiment and theory often show remarkable agreement when performed in the same laboratory."
-- Daniel Bershader
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)
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
The singularity is my retirement plan.
-- tocomment, in a Hacker News post
Man, I'm amazing! I'm a machine that turns FOOD into IDEAS!
-- T-Rex, Dinosaur Comics #539
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.
"An accumulation of facts, however large, is no more science than a pile of bricks is a house."
-Clyde Kluckhohn
"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
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.
I honestly don't know. Let's see what happens.
-- Hans. The Troll Hunter
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".
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
Human behavior is economic behavior. The particulars may vary, but competition for limited resources remains a constant.
– CEO Nwabudike Morgan in Alpha Centauri
You cannot improve the world just by being right.
-- Confusion, Why functional programming doesnt catch on
"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
"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
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
Better our hypotheses die for our errors than ourselves.
-- Karl Popper
In general, we are least aware of what our minds do best.
— Marvin Minsky
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying." --Woody Allen
You don't have to believe everything you think.
Seen on bumper sticker, via ^zhurnaly.
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
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
-- William James
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.
Know the hair you have to get the hair you want.
-Pantene Pro-V hair care bottle
Thinking allows us to anticipate ill consequences without suffering them.
Roger Peters, Practical Intelligence
"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)
"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
If we want to know where the truth lies in particular cases, we have to look.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.
Robert A. Heinlein
The god we seek must rule the world according to our own will.
Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2
-- 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.
Unlike programs, computers must obey the laws of physics.
-- Alan J. Perlis, in the foreword to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"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)
"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
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
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
"There is a superstition in avoiding superstition, when men think to do best if they go furthest from the superstition formerly received."
-- Francis Bacon
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
In an universe full of inanimate material, sentient beings are gods.
-- spire3661, in a Slashdot post
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
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?"
Any technique, however worthy and desirable, becomes a disease when the mind is obsessed with it.
-- Bruce Lee
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
"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
... 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
If you haven’t found something strange during the day, it hasn’t been much of a day.
John Archibald Wheeler
The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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
Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.
- Laurence J. Peter
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)
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
God created the Earth, but the Dutch created the Netherlands.
-- Dutch proverb
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.
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
"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
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
"When picking fruit, an excellent first choice is the low-hanging ladderfruit. It is especially delicious."
Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.
--Bruce Lee
Any time we find that “math” disagrees with reality, the problem is never with “math”—it’s with us, for using the wrong math!
Past me is always so terrible, even when I literally just finished being him.
- Karkat from Homestuck by Andrew Hussie
"Hope always feels like it's made up of a set of reasons: when it's just sufficient sleep and a few auspicious hormones."
"If God gives you lemons, you find a new God."
-- Powerthirst 2: Re-Domination
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.
"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." - Peter Drucker
"One can measure the importance of a scientific work by the number of earlier publications rendered superfluous by it."
-- David Hilbert
"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.
If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first four sharpening the axe. - Abraham Lincoln
"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
-- Clay Shirky
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
I've always believed that the mind is the best weapon.
-- John Rambo, Rambo: First Blood Part II
The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.
-- Plutarch
-- Ryan Armand
Sometimes I see something that just seems to hit the bullseye deeply in the centre, and sticks there, quivering.
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
"Look! Can your fortunetelling explain that?!"
"Ha! Can your science explain why it rains?"
"YES! Yes, it can!"
- Avatar: the Last Airbender
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
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
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
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.
Apathy on the individual level translates into insanity at the mass level.
-- Douglas Hofstadter
Statistics is applied philosophy of science.
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.
- ???
It's terrible not being able to be happy even though you're not wrong.
-Kaname Madoka, Puella Magi Madoka Magica
"We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself." --Chris Mooney
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
"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 )
What good fortune for those in power that people do not think.
Adolph Hitler
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
Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions - Daniel Kahneman
"Don't ask whether predictions are made, ask whether predictions are implied."
"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.)
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)
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
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*
"I don't know if we've sufficiently analyzed the situation if we're thinking storming Azkaban is a solution."
- thatguythere47, enunciating an important general principle.
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!)
But, the hard part comes after you conquer the world. What kind of world are you thinking of creating?
Johan Liebert, Monster
Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.
G. K. Chesterton
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
“Smart people learn from their mistakes. But the real sharp ones learn from the mistakes of others.”
― Brandon Mull, Fablehaven
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
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
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
"Everything is open to questioning. That does not mean all answers are equally valid."
-- Kelvin Throop
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
Politicians compete to bribe voters with their own money.
--Adapted from something in The Economist (sorry, they don't have bylines)
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
"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
The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to close it again on something solid.
-- G.K. Chesterton
…it is fatally easy to read a pattern into stochastically generated data.
-- John Maynard Smith (The Causes of Extinction, 1989)
"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.
Like all dreamers, I confused disenchantment with truth. (Jean-Paul Sartre)
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
Not to know is bad; not to wish to know is worse.
— Wolof proverb
Nature is fucked up, and anyone who argues otherwise has not actually seen nature in action.
Michael Anissimov
"Attack and absorb the data that attack produces!"
-Tylwyth Waff in Heretics of Dune
(Hi. I'm new.)
The essence of wisdom is to remain suspicious of what you want to be true.
-Jon K. Hart
No man has wit enough to reason with a fool.
Proyas (fictional character - author: R. Scott Bakker)
If you have ten minutes unscheduled and the phone isn't ringing, what do you do? What do you start?
"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
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
The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it.
-Alan Saporta
... if anyone thinks they can get an accurate picture of anyplace on the planet by reading news reports, they're sadly mistaken.
--Bruce Schneier
Luck is opportunity plus preparation plus luck.
--Jane Espenson
Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which isn't there
-E.H. Gombrich
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
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
My function is to raise the possibility, 'Hey, you know, some of this stuff might be bullshit.'
-- Robert Anton Wilson
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
"Philosophy triumphs easily over past and future evils; but present evils triumph over it."
-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.
-- Terry Pratchett, 'Hogfather'
Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning.
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
"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
That is not dead which can eternal lie,/ And with strange aeons even Death may die.
—H.P. Lovecraft, clearly talking about cryonic preservation
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.
-- Isaac Asimov via Salvor Hardin, Foundation
"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
More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows you how good people are at evaluating risk.
Bruce Schneier
"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
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.
"It's wonderful how much we suck compared to us ten years from now!"
-- Michael Blume
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
"Test Your God.... Test[s] cannot harm a God of Truth, but will destroy fakes. Fake gods refuse test[s]."
~ Dr. Gene Ray
“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
It's better to be lucky than smart, but it's easier to be smart twice than lucky twice
In the middle of every silver lining there is a big black cloud.
-- Alonzo Fyfe
The most important relic of early humans is the modern mind.
-Steven Pinker
"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.
If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin. - Ivan Turgenev
"The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in war."
--WSJ article about Navy SEALs
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
No matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, turn back.
-- Turkish proverb
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
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
If the Coyote orders all those gizmos then why doesn't he just order food?
- Unknown
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
Wishing for something that is logically impossible is a sign that there is something better to wish for.
David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
"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
You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.
Marvin Minsky
“The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance. ”
-St Augustine of Hippo
[S]top whining and start hacking.
-- Paul Graham
(Arguably a decent philosophy of life, if a bit harshly expressed for my taste.)
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
In general, nothing is more difficult than not pretending to understand.
--Nicolás Gómez Dávila, source
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
"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
"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/
"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.
"The lottery is a tax on those incapable of basic math."
-- Ambrose Bierce
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
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
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
Million-to-one odds happen eight times a day in New York.
Penn Jillette
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
"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.
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
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
-- Christopher Hitchens
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"
It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.
Another Twain quote.
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
What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.
--Anatole France
A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time.
-- George Iles
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
A horse that can count to ten is a remarkable horse, not a remarkable mathematician.
--Samuel Johnson
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).
"Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."
-- Charles Darwin
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
Life is tough, but it's tougher if you're stupid.
-John Wayne, Sands of Iwo Jima (1949)
History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
-Mark Twain
Too broad a viewpoint, too philosophical an outlook paralyzes the will.
-- Robert A Heinlein, Lost Legacy
"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)
"Anything you can do, I can do meta" -Rudolf Carnap
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.)
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.
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
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
Carefully observe those good qualities wherein our enemies excel us
Plutarch, found here
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.
The most fundamental form of human stupidity is forgetting what we were trying to do in the first place
--Nietzsche
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
“No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.”
- Confucius
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).
"Science is interesting and if you don't agree, you can fuck off."
-- Richard Dawkins quoting a former editor of New Scientist magazine.
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)
"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
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
Consequentialism: The belief that doing the right thing makes the world a better place.
-- DanielLC
"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
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
-Bertrand Russell
"You cannot understand what a person is saying unless you understand who they are arguing with."
-- Don Symons, quoted by Tooby and Cosmides.
"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
It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.
Charles Darwin, "The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals", ch.3.
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
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"
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
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
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.
It is often said that experiments should be made without preconceived ideas. This is impossible.
--Henri Poincare, Science and Hypothesis.
There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.
-G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
"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...
If I close my mind in fear, please pry it open.
-- Metallica
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?
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.
We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings.
Dr. Manhattan (Watchmen)
In a strong enough wind, even turkeys can fly.
-Saying of investors
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
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
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
Admitting error clears the score and proves you wiser than before.
--Arthur Guiterman
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
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).
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.
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
"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.
"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."
A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.
-- Kahlil Gibran
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
"-but I think it would probably kill you."
"Comforting to know. Well, more comforting than not knowing it could kill you," I remark pointedly.
It does not do to dwell on dreams... and forget to live.
Professor Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore
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
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]
Would anybody tell me if I was getting stupider?
"Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another."
--Arthur Schopenhauer
Imagine willpower doesn't exist. That's step 1 to a better future.
Second slide of this powerpoint by Stanford's Persuasive Tech Lab.
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.
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
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
We're even wrong about which mistakes we're making.
-Carl Winfeld
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
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
Knowing that one may be subject to bias is one thing; being able to correct it is another.
Jon Elster
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
"An economic transaction is a solved political problem."
Reality is not optional.
Thomas Sowell
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!)
"Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite."
--Andrew S. Grove
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
"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
'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
The introduction of suitable abstractions is our only mental aid to organize and master complexity.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual" — find out how he feels about astrology. —Robert Heinlein
Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Successful zealots don't argue to win. They argue to move the goalposts and to make it appear sane to do so."
-- Seth Godin
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/
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
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
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
Prevent all problems and get nothing done, or accept an allowable level of small problems and focus on the big things. --Timothy Ferriss
"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
This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.
-- Philip Gourevitch
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)
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
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.)
"Ideas are tested by experiment." That is the core of science. All else is bookkeeping.
- Zombie Feynman, in xkcd 397.
"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
Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.
-- Laurens Van der Post
Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
-George Bernard Shaw
"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).
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
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
To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.
-Confucius
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
Teachers open the door. You enter by yourself.
-Chinese proverb
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
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"
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?"
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
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
"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
Advancing a career in science is not the same as advancing science.
-- John D. Cook, in a tweet.
"[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
If we don't change our direction, we're likely to end up where we're headed.
-- Chinese proverb
The enlightened individual has learned to ask not "Is it so?" but rather "What is the probability that it is so?"
Sheldon Ross
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"
"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
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
“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.” ― Paul Valéry
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)
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.
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
"A Confucian has stolen my hairbrush! Down with Confucianism!"
-GK Chesterton (on ad hominems)
"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
If some persons died, and others did not die, death would indeed be a terrible affliction.
--Jean de la Bruyère
Death is the gods' crime.
The world is paved with good intentions; the road to Hell has bad epistemology mixed in.
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
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
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
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
Proper treatment will cure a cold in seven days, but left to itself a cold will hang on for a week.
Reality is the ultimate arbiter of truth. If your thoughts, beliefs, and actions aren't aligned with truth, your results will suffer.
--Steve Pavlina
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Never underestimate the difficulty of changing false beliefs by facts. —Harvard economist Henry Rosovsky
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
... 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
If you’ve never broken the bed, you’re not experimenting enough.
He must be very ignorant; for he answers every question he is asked.
-- Voltaire
I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.
Johannes Kepler
"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
"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"
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
"Sanity is conforming your thoughts to reality. Conforming reality to your thoughts is creativity."
-- Unknown
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
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
"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.
"When in total ignorance, try anything and you will be less ignorant."
-- G.Harry Stine, A Matter of Metalaw
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
"...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
Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.
-Walter Lippmann
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
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
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.
“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
Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for nonsmart reasons.
-- Michael Shermer
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.
"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
"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)
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
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
A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.
--Thomas Carlyle
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
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
Remember — there is a correlation between correlation and causation.
- ChaosRobie on Reddit
“Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.” - Zen saying
A warning that not all hyperrationality is beneficial.
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
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.]
When reading, you win if you learn, not if you convince yourself that you know something the author does not know.
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...)
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?
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).
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!
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.
Are you better off than you were one year ago, one month ago, or one week ago?
-Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek
...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.
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
"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
All truth is not, indeed, of equal importance; but if little violations are allowed, every violation will in time be thought little.
-- Samuel Johnson
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 ]
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
Wisdom is not only to be acquired, but also to be utilized.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
A formula is worth a thousand pictures.
—Edsger Dijkstra
"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)
"If I were wrong, then one would have been enough."
Einstein's reported response to the pamphlet One Hundred Authors Against Einstein.
Nobody wants to die. They just want the pain to stop.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
-- Carl Sagan
"Torture the data long enough and they will confess to anything."
--via The Economist, "a saying of statisticians".
it can't be ineffable if you're effing it.
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
Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.
"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
"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
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
"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"
The splitting of the atom has changed everything save the way men think, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
-- Albert Einstein
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.
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
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
- Mark Twain
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?"
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?"
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
The only way to get rich from a get-rich book is to write one.
Brother Ty's seventh law
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
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?)
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
"I find the Law of Fives to be more and more manifest the harder I look."
--Principia Discordia (surprisingly, not quoted yet)
"Don’t ask yourself if something is fair. Ask someone else--a stranger in the street, for example." -Lemony Snicket
"Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good."
--#122 Assorted Opinions and Maxims, Friedrich Nietzsche
We do what we must
because we can.
For the good of all of us.
Except the ones who are dead.
(^_^)
I think, therefore I am perhaps mistaken.
Sharon Fenick
A system for generating ungrounded but mostly true beliefs would be an oracle, as impossible as a perpetual motion machine.
(McKay Dennett 2009)
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
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
Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.
Terry Pratchett
We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.
-Winston Churchill
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
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)
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.
Because throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be... Not Magic
-- Tim Minchin, Storm
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
"Almost certainly, there is something wrong with you if you don't think things you don't dare say out loud."
Those who wish to appear wise among fools, among the wise seem foolish.
Quintilian
Scientific Realism is the only philosophy that doesn't make the success of science a miracle.
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
The biggest threat to an artist is neither piracy nor obscurity. It's dicking around on the internet.
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
Humility bids us to take ourselves as we are; we do not have to be cosmically significant to be genuinely significant.
- Patricia Churchland
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
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
Many difficulties which nature throws our way, may be smoothed away by the exercise of intelligence.
--Titus Livius
All mushrooms are edible. But some of them you can eat only once.
-- Patrick Nielsen Hayden