Rationality Quotes—Fall 2024

[Screwtape]

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• Do not quote yourself.

• Do not quote from LessWrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.

[Screwtape]

“Abundance is the only cure for scarcity, ever. Everything else merely allocates scarcity.”

-Patrick McKenzie, The Story of VaccinateCA

[Zack_M_Davis]

‘You acted unwisely,’ I cried, ‘as you see
By the outcome.’ He calmly eyed me:
‘When choosing the course of my action,’ said he,
‘I had not the outcome to guide me.’

—Ambrose Bierce

[Screwtape]

“‘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

[CronoDAS]

[David Gross]

“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)

[Czynski]

The most potent way to sacrifice your life has always been to do so one day at a time.

-- BoneyM, Divided Loyalties

[Dalcy]

“I always remember, [Hamming] would come into my office and try to solve a problem [...] I had a very big blackboard, and he’d start on one side, write down some integral, say, ‘I ain’t afraid of nothin’, and start working on it. So, now, when I start a big problem, I say, ‘I ain’t afraid of nothin’, and dive into it.”

—Bruce MacLennan

[Screwtape]

“Failure is always for sale, even if you can’t afford the price.”

-Eliezer Yudkowsky, Planecrash, What The Truth Can Destroy

[David Gross]

“[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)

[David Gross]

“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)

[CronoDAS]

Treason doth never prosper; what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.

-- John Harrington

[Czynski]

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

-- George Bernard Shaw, epigram

(Inspired by part of Superintelligences will not spare Earth sunlight)

[Czynski]

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.

[CronoDAS]

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.)

[Czynski]

That’s a fascinating approach to characterization. What do you do, have the actors all read the appendix before they start rehearsals?

[CronoDAS]

I have no idea!

[quetzal_rainbow]

The nice thing about being a coward is that once you notice you can just stop.

- Eliezer Yudkowsky, lintamande, Planecrash, the woman of irori

[CronoDAS]

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

-- Arthur C. Clarke

[David Gross]

“The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.” —Thomas Macaulay (“Lord Bacon” 1837)

[David Gross]

“[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)

[Nate Showell]

The ideas of the Cavern are the Ideas of every Man in particular; we every one of us have our own particular Den, which refracts and corrupts the Light of Nature, because of the differences of Impressions as they happen in a Mind prejudiced or prepossessed.

Francis Bacon, Novum Organum Scientarum, Section II, Aphorism V

[Czynski]

For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other. But lest any ill use should afterwards arise, let the crown at the conclusion of the ceremony be demolished, and scattered among the people whose right it is.

-- Thomas Paine, Common Sense, demonstrating the Virtue of The Void