Rationality Quotes—Fall 2024
Once upon a time, there were posts where people would comment with quotes. The last one was a while ago, and they’d been getting less and less traffic.
I have a theory that there’s a quote overhang. Firstly, I think LessWrong has recovered a lot since the 2015~2017 decline, and so there might just be more users around. Second, it’s been half a decade and so many new quotable lines may have been written. I have a another theory that the way LessWrong 2.0 splits Frontpage and Personal is rougher on a quotes thread than 1.0′s Main and Discussion. The best thing to do with a theory is to test it.
The rules are as follows:
Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted 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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from LessWrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you’d like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here. I’m going to declare an exception: Planecrash quotes are fine to post this round. Planecrash was half written by Eliezer, but wasn’t written on LessWrong and was written entirely since the last quotes post, so there’s close to no chance someone already put it in a quotes thread.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
“Abundance is the only cure for scarcity, ever. Everything else merely allocates scarcity.”
-Patrick McKenzie, The Story of VaccinateCA
The laws of physics bound us to what we can do; so I counter that there is no such thing as extra abundance; and there is no ‘cure’ for scarcity, unless we figure out how to generate energy + entropy from nothing.
Instead I propose:
Better utilization is the only remedy for scarcity, ever; everything else merely allocates scarcity.
—Ambrose Bierce
“‘This must be X, because Y would have been a really dumb strategy’ is an argument that often presupposes too much about people’s ability to avoid really dumb strategies.”
-Nate Silver, Twitter
“So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.” ―Benjamin Franklin (Autobiography Ⅳ, 1791)
-- BoneyM, Divided Loyalties
Is the quote here: “we’re here to devour each other alive”?
Something like that!
—Bruce MacLennan
-- John Harrington
“[T]he majority of men do not think in order to know the truth, but in order to assure themselves that the life which they lead, and which is agreeable and habitual to them, is the one which coincides with the truth.” ―Tolstoy (The Kingdom of God Is Within You, 1894)
“He who knows the truth is not equal to him who loves it, and he who loves it is not equal to him who delights in it.” ―Confucius (Analects Ⅵ.18)
-- George Bernard Shaw, epigram
(Inspired by part of Superintelligences will not spare Earth sunlight)
This is apparently from a play, Man and Superman, which I have never previously heard of, let alone read or seen. I suspect that, much like Oscar Wilde’s plays, it is at least as much a vehicle for witty epigrams as it is an actual performance or plot.
The quote is from an appendix that consists entirely of epigrams that are attributed to one of the characters in the play—it’s not actually part of the play as performed. (Shaw was tired of “smart” characters in plays that don’t actually do anything to show that they’re smart so he wrote it to justify the character’s asserted intelligence.)
That’s a fascinating approach to characterization. What do you do, have the actors all read the appendix before they start rehearsals?
I have no idea!
“Failure is always for sale, even if you can’t afford the price.”
-Eliezer Yudkowsky, Planecrash, What The Truth Can Destroy
-- Arthur C. Clarke
“The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.” —Thomas Macaulay (“Lord Bacon” 1837)
- Eliezer Yudkowsky, lintamande, Planecrash, the woman of irori
“[A]n aim of philosophy is patiently and unremittingly to sustain the vigilance of reason in the presence of failure and in the presence of that which seems alien to it.” ―Karl Jaspers (Way to Wisdom, 1950)
A man who is always asking ‘Is what I do worth while?’ and ‘Am I the right person to do it?’ will always be ineffective himself and a discouragement to others.
-- G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology
-- Thomas Paine, Common Sense, demonstrating the Virtue of The Void
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum Scientarum, Section II, Aphorism V