The quote appeals to me in at least three ways. It describes a stable set of affairs where investment of cognitive effort (through typical human forms like studying and debating that do not greatly compound) can make you smarter but don’t change the status quo. This is a fairly pleasant outcome as game-theoretic escalation goes and is also comforting in a compatibilist fatalist sort of way. Second, the quote is observer symmetric, and thus helps me to empathize and sympathize both with people who are much more and much less intelligent than me. Third, it brings to mind an image very like the Hubble flow, where each mind sees its neighbors falling off to irrelevance or speeding ever faster toward greater thoughts and skills and discoveries, proportional to their separation. And cosmological analogies are pretty.
So it may be not quite a rationalist quote, but it’s a pretty, comforting thought that gives an unusual and sympathetic perspective on scholarship and intelligence and other things that our subculture also finds interesting. Also it seems roughly valid for present biological minds that don’t self modify, and truth counts for something.
-- Gian-Carlo Rota
Missing context, I think.
The quote appeals to me in at least three ways. It describes a stable set of affairs where investment of cognitive effort (through typical human forms like studying and debating that do not greatly compound) can make you smarter but don’t change the status quo. This is a fairly pleasant outcome as game-theoretic escalation goes and is also comforting in a compatibilist fatalist sort of way. Second, the quote is observer symmetric, and thus helps me to empathize and sympathize both with people who are much more and much less intelligent than me. Third, it brings to mind an image very like the Hubble flow, where each mind sees its neighbors falling off to irrelevance or speeding ever faster toward greater thoughts and skills and discoveries, proportional to their separation. And cosmological analogies are pretty.
So it may be not quite a rationalist quote, but it’s a pretty, comforting thought that gives an unusual and sympathetic perspective on scholarship and intelligence and other things that our subculture also finds interesting. Also it seems roughly valid for present biological minds that don’t self modify, and truth counts for something.