Rationality Quotes: May 2011
It looks like, this month, I get to be the one to start the quotes thread.
Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Paul Graham
“How to Do What You Love”
The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.
-Paul Graham, Keep Your Identity Small
Nice one. I’ve thought for a while that LW could use more material on identity management, but I’m not well-read enough on the subject to write it.
This quote was timed very well.
I didn’t understand this comment until I came back with comments sorted by Old.
-- Terry Pratchett, Thud!
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
XKCD (the mouseover text)
For “success” and “successful” one might substitute “rationality” and “rational”.
.
.
Michael Anissimov
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money (1935), Book 5, Chapter 21, Section 3, pg. 298
– Staffan Angere, Theory and Reality: Metaphysics as Second Science, p. 17
Put up in a place
where it’s easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb,
it’s well to remember that
--Piet Hein
When I was eight or so I first picked up a copy of Piet Hein’s book of poems. They came with his original doodles, and, having been brought up among academics, I thought ‘He doodles just like a physicist!’ Many years later I wiki’d him and found out that he was, indeed, a physicist.
Duplicate of one posted a few hours previously. Was this supposed to be something else?
Nope; look at the context.
Richard P. Feynmann, “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”
For a complex task, agreed. For a simple task, a failure rate of 10E-5 can happen. How often do people trying to eat put their forks in their eyes rather than in their mouths? And, to consider mechanical processes… If the cpu I’m running this browser on failed every 10E5 instructions, it would fail 10E4 times a second. It doesn’t.
wouldn’t the point be that its an amount of precision that is absolutely ridiculous given almost all situations?
— Randall Munroe in today’s xkcd, Marie Curie.
I liked this half-hour talk by Ransom Stephens on the life of Emmy Noether (with a nontechnical explanation of Noether’s theorem).
You won’t be great just by sitting there of course, but I suspect great people wouldn’t be as great if they weren’t driven by an urge to achieve greatness to some extent for its own sake.
Great people also like to countersignal how their greatness was never something they had in mind, and that they are just truly dedicated to their art.
Which relates to this heuristic.
-- Avatar: The Last Airbender
A repeat but with more context this time.
I really need to generalize my search terms. Feel free to de-upvote.
-- Paul Graham
But see also:
-Isaac Asimov, The Relativity of Wrong
(This was quoted by MichaelGR in a previous quote-thread.)
Huh? Isn’t it worse to say that a statement is “not even wrong”—that’s it’s content-free and doesn’t specify a probability distribution you should move toward?
If a statement is false—that presupposes it having content of some sort, albeit wrong content. There are plenty of worse things that can be said about statements (not even wrong, for example) but these can’t be said of statements that are true or false; they can only be said of statements that have no content. So the hierarchy goes: True > False > Not Even Wrong, and false statements are better than not even wrong ones.
I was thinking of making that rebuttal myself—but realised I had been preemptively countered. Because the statement is wrong and so already ahead of those statements that qualify for the even worse charge.
Source: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
-- The Peddler’s Apprentice by Joan and Vernor Vinge
“And what are the rules? Ask me and I will strike you because you are not looking; I will have decapitated you without your knowing. One can try to formulate obscure theories to avoid playing the game or one can play the game to win.”
– Daniel Kolak, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: Translator’s Preface
(Mind, I love formulating obscure theories. Which is perhaps why I also love this quote—because it’s such a necessary reminder to myself at times.)
Isn’t this an anti-rationality quote?
I took “formulate obscure theories to avoid playing the game” as anti-epistemology, and “one can play the game to win” as instrumental rationality. You could convincingly argue that you need to formulate, test, and confirm extremely not-obscure (clear? obvious?) theories to avoid losing.
It does not seem to be. It seems to be instrumental rationality along the lines of Prince or ‘Laws of Power’.
-- David Hume
Related LessWrong post.
Kind of cheesy, but worthwhile, and ironic since it occurs in the context of a game where Gods and magic are real.
“Remember when we first met in Kvatch? I told you that I didn’t want any part of the gods’ plan. I still don’t know if there is a divine plan. But I’ve come to realize that it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we act. That we do what’s right, when confronted with evil. That’s what you did at Kvatch. It wasn’t the gods that saved us, it was you.”
--Emporer-apparent Martin Septim, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Best taken in the context of AI.
-- The Dragon’s Path by Daniel Abraham
You are an intelligent human being. Your life is valuable for its own sake. You are not second-class in the universe, deriving meaning and purpose from some other mind. You are not inherently evil — you are inherently human, possessing the positive rational potential to help make this a world of morality, peace, and joy. Trust yourself.
-- Dan Barker
Natan Slifkin, The Seven Principles of Bias. (All seven are actually pretty short and make good points, although I’d be inclined to disagree with point 2.)
I’d be inclined to disagree with part 3 as well. If you are biased, your probability estimates are off. The fact that everyone’s probability estimates are off to at least some extent does not change the fact that yours are off.
I don’t think Slifkin is talking there about wrong or right in the Bayesian sense. To translate that into a more Bayesian form it might be something like “Just because one is biased doesn’t mean that one’s probability estimate is drastically off” or something like that.
Where does a ball alight,
Falling through the bright midair?
Hit it with your snout!
-- unnamed neo-dolphin poet, Uplift War by David Brin
What the?
I’ll take the upvotes here as a request for explanation.
I see two things in the poem. The first that occurred to me was the best way to predict the future is to create it. The second is related: Observe the situation and put yourself in the best position to affect or determine the outcome.
That is something to quote. :)
From the context in the book, I always thought it was a sort of gentle Zen-esque admonishment. “Why are you worrying over hypotheticals and subjunctives? Get busy doing or get busy dying.”
Is this supposed to be a haiku? It almost is one, but it’s off by one syllable.
In the book, it’s presented as a translation from the neo-dolphin language Trinary. I expect the resemblence to haiku is intentional.
From my fortune cookie yesterday:
A brief search said it is attributed to Sudie Back .
Like many deep sayings, the really interesting thing is the extent to which it is not true. There’s a reason we send kids to school, and then older kids to college, even if they are only interested in kite-flying and binge-drinking respectively. If you stop for a moment of honest reflection, it is amazing what you pick up without even trying.
I bet if you took a sample of random kids and sent some to college and prevented the others from going, the college group would spend more time thinking about certain specific socially-valued college-related topics than the control group.
If you want a horse to drink, it often helps to lead him to water.
Or it could go horribly wrong… ;)
pfft college is just about liberal indoctrination anyway.....
For your own edification, I have up-voted your comment so that it is now visible to others who might have a similar urge to post this sort of thing, and will issue this piece of advice: it is not wise to talk about politics on this site. We generally all agree with the sentiment that politics is a mind killer, and even though you likely made that comment in jest and you peer group would likely think that it is amusing, you are likely being voted down because of the inflammatory and political nature of your post. It is not a matter of political affiliation, only of objection to certain types of content by the community.
-- Moshe Feldenkreis, “Awareness Through Movement” p.172.
Patri Friedman, source
It’s true that both prices and policies are unlikely to be changed by individual efforts if everyone has perfect information and is perfectly rational. We don’t live in that world, though. Both prices and policies are often far out of equilibrium. This quote is witty, but at the cost of being entirely wrong.
The quote—as in the context of the source—hasn’t much to do with perfect rationality or perfect market considerations. Supply and demand of policies undeniably influence policymaking regardless of the actors’ rationality, in a political environment like the US. Patri Friedman’s point was that if you support a policy that cuts against the grain of mainstream (libertarianism in his case) it is ineffective to engage in the usual lobbying behavior.
In a nutshell, it’s not that policies are already perfect, but that policies are already set by people other than you.
Oh, yeah, reading the context, that makes a bit more sense. Although people trying to get specific policies implemented is a very important part of our political ecosystem, he’s not satisfied with “incremental increases in freedom” and recognizes that agitation (and, more importantly, the U.S. democracy) is not going to give him radical changes. The impression that agitation flat out doesn’t work is just an emotional argument for the real ideas.
-Michael Pemulis, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
This scene is hilarious.
In case you haven’t read the book,
The kids at a tennis academy are playing a nuclear war simulation by having countries, silos, cities, armies and whatnot represented by particular articles of clothing on specific places on a tennis court. You attack a target with a thermonuclear missile by lobbing a tennis ball at it, and then intense calculations are done in order to determine damage caused and scoring.
The particular game in the book goes horribly horribly wrong when one player lobs a tennis ball at another player, and then tries to argue that that player is vaporized, and that that entire country can no longer use nukes. It also starts snowing.
Actually, I believe that the snowing on the map, which is claimed to affect the blast radius of a nuclear strike on the territory, occurs before the Global Crisis as the beginning a sort of slippery slope into the complete confusion of map and territory and the resultant chaos.
Vauvenargues, Reflections and Maxims, 1746
--Mark Oshiro
“The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.”
-- Carl Sagan
We have always had a great deal of difficulty
understanding the world view
that quantum mechanics represents.
At least I do,
because I’m an old enough man
that I haven’t got to the point
that this stuff is obvious to me.
Okay, I still get nervous with it…
You know how it always is,
every new idea,
it takes a generation or two
until it becomes obvious
that there’s no real problem.
I cannot define the real problem,
therefore I suspect there’s no real problem,
but I’m not sure
there’s no real problem.
-Richard Feynman, set in verse by David Mermin
“No pupil should be an exact copy of his master, otherwise the art would make little progress.”
Frederick Grinke, quoted by Donald Brook in “Violinists of Today” (1948).
Unless, of course, ‘progress’ is not the goal. Sometimes simple productive output is important, in which case exact copies may be just what you need!
John Von Neumann, written in his article The Mathematician
I’m inclined to disagree. Deep abstraction gives us powerful tools for solving less abstract problems, including those that come out of the empirical sciences. Even fields developed with a deliberate eye to avoiding practical applications have sometimes turned out to make significant contributions to the sciences (I understand knot theory, for example, began this way, but has since turned out to have important applications in biochemistry).
You make a strong point, however; the question as to whether we can or cannot improve the efficiency of mathematical research appears to be an open one. I think that perhaps the real issue is that we don’t have a correct reductionist account of mathematics, and thus are not able to see clearly what we are doing when we build our theories. If we had a better road-map, I think that at the very least we could tie mathematics down to level 1/level 2 space so that we could have a better idea as to how we can measure the profitability of various possible lines of inquiry.
What do you mean, we don’t have a correct reductionist account of mathematics?
I could define mathematics as the study of systems with a complete reductionist account.
Well, my idea would be along the lines of thinking of mathematics as a combination of certain types of cognition combined with some sort of social feedback loop. We are phenomena and so are our actions. We do mathematics, therefore we should be able to make an empirical study of it.
I suppose that I would like an empirical dissection of mathematics as it is practiced by humans, something that would allow us to measure the statistical usefulness of various areas of mathematical thought. Do you think that this can’t be done? Do you think that it has already been done? If so I would be interested to hear your views, but I was under the impression that numerical cognition was still an open field. Or do you not think that this is related to numerical cognition?
I’m really not sure what to make of your reply. Even if you do
shouldn’t we be able to give a reductionist account of the methods we use to give a reductionist account? This is one of those things that I do not feel I have a clear method for thinking around, yet it still seems like a problem, and a not-quite-mysterious one to boot. Intuitively it seems that we should be able to give a neurological account of mathematical thought and gain an empirical understanding of why some mathematics appears/is more applicable than others and what sorts of applications we might expect out of certain types of mathematical thought.′
Any insight you feel like sharing on this topic would be greatly appreciated. Am I just confused by some embedded mysterious question?
“If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me,
Why, what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be!”
--W.S.Gilbert, from the opera “Patience”
Goblins Comic
Not quite sure whether this is a rationality quote—I do not completely understand it, but Charlie Munger said this (in a Bloomberg interview), so at the very least it’s food for thought.
A good rule of thumb is that if you aren’t sure whether or not a quote is valuable… discard it. Quotes are the sort of thing that can be constructed to sound deep and be persuasive even when they are bullshit. So only accept them if you already understand in detail exactly what the reasoning is and find the quote just serves as a concise reminder of the theory.
I agree in general, but having read quite a bit of Munger I have a low prior on him saying something that’s deep BS. I prefer to keep things like this filed until a possible moment when the blanks fill themselves.
I agree with wedrifid in principle, but there’s an opposing rule of thumb that if Charlie Munger said it, it’s probably rational.
This may be related to flaw balancing.
I don’t think you need a separate rule, having a prior covers it.
What Mungers statement makes me think of is an alternative approach to weakness; I think the default approach for many people is to “improve themselves”. In many cases this might just not be worth the time; looking for an imperfect “opposite virtue” might be workable. E.g. if life demands you to rise early instead of trying to become an “early riser” get an alarm that works and move on.
Malvino, April 4th 2011 blog post (original)
FWIW, that strikes me as a bit long for a quote. I’ve upvoted longer quotes in the past, but only when they had a really good payoff.
-- The Darkness That Comes Before by R. Scott Bakker
A. and B. Strugatsky, from Escape Attempt, translated by me from Hungarian translation.
It’s a mangled quote from Marx: “Freedom is the consciousness of necessity”. In the Soviet Union this phrase was a staple of state ideology, and a popular folk mockery of it went like “freedom of speech is the conscious necessity to stay silent”.
Interesting, I wasn’t aware of that. Nevertheless I didn’t detect any purpose of social commentary in the way the Strugatskys used it. Instead, I posted this as a comment because it gels well with Eliezer’s take on free will.
The alternate future Earth of “Escape Attempt” is a communist utopia. Many (most?) of their other works are set in the same world. Some of them describe it in more detail, like “Midday, XXII”.
I haven’t read Noon: 22nd century, but the other works I did read either steered clear of discussion of communism (like Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel or Definitely Maybe) or more or less subtly criticized it (Inhabited Island, Roadside Picnic, Beetle in the Anthill).
Dave Barry
Source unknown. I’m sure I read this in some ancient military writing, but I’ve never been able to find it again.
Sounds suspiciously like something a general would say even if it was untrue
And if I saw a general make that claim I would start looking into the options I had for defecting.
Generals who see the path that clearly lose in the face of underwhelming odds.
One could make a similar remark about most of the quotes.
I don’t think that is the case.
Aaron Diaz
Source: http://www.formspring.me/dresdencodak/q/198161294036078826
I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I’m rooting for the machines. Claude E. Shannon
Information is the resolution of uncertainty. Claude Shannon
Information: the negative reciprocal value of probability. Claude Shannon
JUGGLING THEOREM proposed by Claude E. Shannon
(F+D)H=(V+D)N
where F is the time a ball spends in the air, D is the time a ball spends in a hand, V is the time a hand is vacant, N is the number of balls juggled, and H is the number of hands.
Also, none of those strike me as interesting. The first is pretty much contentless sans any justification for preferring the machines; the second and third are just definitions which LWers or anyone who knows the rudiments of information theory will understand; and I have no idea what interest a ‘juggling theorem’ has.
We don’t like it when people post a lot of quotes in one post, because it’s nice to be able to up/down vote them separately. For more info see the rules at the top of the thread.
-- Jim Henley, via Alas A Blog
Politics is the Mind-Killer.
Cached Thoughts
So what?
So there wasn’t anything especially related to explicit rationality in the quote. Or rather, it wasn’t extraordinarily rational enough to make up for its extraordinary politicalness.
So, there are people who disagree with what you posted, and may be inclined to argue about it. That, combined with the idea shared in the Paul Graham quote in this very thread (about politics frequently being used as a form of identity) leads to defensiveness, leads to rationalization, and leads to stupidity.
So, in order to avoid stupid arguments, people would prefer fewer posts like your quote on LW.
FWIW I am very sympathetic to the sentiment expressed here, but I still downvoted it, for being more about politics than rationality.
I’ll defend this. I think it is closely related to rationality, and I find it ironic that the “Politics is the mind-killer” is such a popular response to an unpopular quote—it makes that point.
A rather basic fallacy is: A, B, and C lead to D. We must stop D. Therefore, we must stop A. The error, of course, is that without further premises, you could equally well get stop or C. Stopping A is merely sufficient, not necessary.
Libertarianism is usually more of an ideology than a politics (just as liberal and conservative are ideologies, to Democratic and Republican politics). This quote shows how it tends to be shaped into a politics. When there are clearly many things to be done, it is in fact bizarre that people focus heavily on one of them, particularly given the above structure.
People are very willing to believe that the market is unfree in ways that unfairly benefit others. People are not nearly as willing or interested when the market is unfree in ways that harms others or benefits themselves. I can see why people are concerned with this being excessively political, but it does seem accurate. Of course, there may be additional factors or explanations that the speaker was not crediting, but I’m not really aware of any.
Inconsistently applying an ideology is kind of the essence of politics being the mind killer, and this seems to be a good point about that.
The question is, who exactly is being targeted in this statement:
Looking at the article from which the quote comes, the target of the discussion is apparently this quote, to which he claims to have a “sequencing objection”:
The problem here is that I see nothing in that quote that says “first thing we gotta do is get rid of that welfare”.
What is possibly going through Jim Henley’s head? The quote that he’s attacking does nothing except oppose increasing government and support reducing government, period. Nothing there about what sequence to do it in. The sequencing stuff seems to be something that Jim Henley just made up, so that he would have something to attack.
As things stand, the quote looks like a straw man and a smear. A smear is guaranteed to make the blood boil. Hence: politics is the mind killer.
Unfortunately, my impression here is based on general experience and observation; there isn’t a specific document that contains the libertarian view.
But in general, a lot of people who describe themselves either as libertarian, conservative, or pro-small government are opposed to welfare with near-religious fervor, but are likely unaware of the issue of occupational licensing and (in some cases) basically indifferent to charter schools or education related issues. It’s just the interesting observation that even though there are numerous types of bad government interference, it’s one specific one that generates ire. This suggests more of a political objection (I don’t like those people!) than an ideological one (this action is inconsistent with a belief system I hold).
Ideologically, libertarians should oppose all of these things, probably in proportion to the inefficiencies they represent. As that’s often not the case, it indicates irrationality.
First, you’re no longer talking about libertarians but about a much, much larger group of people, the vast majority of whom neither are, nor consider themselves to be, libertarian. So, already, you’ve essentially changed the subject.
Second, lack of awareness is not irrational. On the contrary, ignorance is rational, for reasons explained by James Buchanan.
As a blanket statement this is simply false. The standard libertarian publications are Reason Magazine and Liberty Magazine. Both magazines are very wide-ranging in their critique of the government from a standpoint of liberty. Your statement is only “true” if you qualify it—but once you qualify it, the statement becomes meaningless. Qualified, it’s something like, “if you consider only people who are single-issue, those people are single-issue”. It’s an empty tautology.
I would like to point out, by the way, that your “evidence” for your claims amounts to your own unverifiable eyewitness accounts. In contrast, in my previous comment I offered evidence pulled from the linked article, and here in this comment I offer evidence in the form of the two major libertarian publications. If you want I can add blogs. Check out Econlog. Also check out Cafe Hayek.
First of all, I would like to point out that the word “often” is a weasel word, because it is virtually unfalsifiable. It gives us no quantity, nothing even approximating a quantity. It’s virtually meaningless.
Second, I would like to point out that earlier in your comment you already massively increased the population you’re talking about from just libertarians to libertarians and conservatives and anybody who wants to shrink government. You can’t draw conclusions about libertarians based on your earlier assertions about a very different population.
Third, your argument is based on the claim that it is irrational for a person to have beliefs which are inconsistent with his own ideology. But in order to establish that anybody has beliefs inconsistent with their ideology, you need to establish what their ideology is. You have done the opposite—you have drawn in such a diverse group of people into your generalization that there is no common ideology to establish.
Fourth, I seriously doubt the truth of your claims. I’m not saying you’re lying. I’m saying that I think you’ve probably misunderstood. For starters, if somebody tells me that they’re a libertarian, I will infer that they might be what I consider a libertarian but are probably something quite different—what I would call somebody with vaguely libertarian-ish views on some but not all topics. In contrast, what I see you’ve done here is to jump from the fact that some people call themselves libertarian all the way to the conclusion that they must subscribe to the hard core libertarian belief system. Only once you’ve done this can you then accuse them of being inconsistent. I personally think that that jump is unwarranted.
Also, didn’t Hayek support some amount of government provided welfare? My understanding is that he basically said, “Hey, in the right doses, it probably makes some peoples’ lives better who would otherwise be miserable, and our society is rich enough to afford the harm that it causes at the social level (e.g., economic inefficiencies), so why not?”
I heard this second- or third-hand, though, so I may be mischaracterizing his views.
I find it very interesting that this quote, which is also political, does not appear to have been heavily downvoted. It’s doubtlessly much less contentious among the particular demographics of this site, but it’s probably more politically antagonistic among the population in general—I don’t know, but I suspect pacifists are at least as common as libertarians, and this is far more antagonistic towards them.
So why upvote that quote but downvote this one?
Because it has Nobby at his best.
It is about cutting through bullshit. Ruthlessly. It takes a slogan “War. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.” and utterly tears it to shreds. Because it is obviously and overwhelmingly wrong for the kind of reasons we have all sorts of posts about here.
It’s exactly the response I would make if someone tried the “What is it good for?” rhetorical question on me. Come to think of it I have used the same response.
If something is transparently and obviously contradicted without even having to make two inferential leaps then politics hasn’t even had a chance to kill your mind.
Naive pacifists are annoying. (And dangerous.)
It is a necessary counter to that obnoxious ‘never ever never nerr nerr bullet’ quote that somehow became popular here.
I upvoted (or rather countered one downvote) on this one.
Upvotes and downvotes probably weight various factors. Hypothetically, two equally political statements might not be equally false, equally obnoxious, equally brilliant, equally hilarious, and so on.
True. My entire point is that I’m curious as to which is going on here. I suspect that people down-voting this one are explaining their actions by saying it’s too “political,” whereas they are not applying the exact same formula to the other one. This indicates that, “It’s too political” actually just means, “It’s politics I disagree with.”
Of course, I admit it’s possible that everyone who downvoted for political reasons downvoted both, and the other was just more popular. I don’t think that’s likely, which I why I asked what people are doing. Could admittedly have phrased it better.