Rationality Quotes August 2011
Here’s the new quotes thread, for all those quotes you were going to post.
Rules:
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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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.
-- Richard P. Feynman, Simulating Physics with Computers, International Journal of Theoretical Physics, Vol 21, Nos. 6⁄7, 1982
“A Thinking Machine! Yes, we can now have our thinking done for us by machinery! The Editor of the Common School Advocate says—” On our way to Cincinnati, a few days since, we stopped over night where a gentleman from the city was introducing a machine which he said was designed to supercede the necessity and labor of thinking. It was highly and respectably recommended, by men too in high places, and is designed for a calculator, to save the trouble of all mathematical labor. By turning the machinery it produces correct results in addition, substraction, multiplication, and division, and the operator assured us that it was equally useful in fractions and the higher mathematics.” The Editor thinks that such machines, by which the scholar may, by turning a crank, grind out the solution of a problem without the fatigue of mental application, would by its introduction into schools, do incalculable injury, But who knows that such machines when brought to greater perfection, may not think of a plan to remedy all their own defects and then grind out ideas beyond the ken of mortal mind!” --- The Primitive Expounder in 1847
That’s a bit freaky. If someone predicted the Singularity 150 years ago, it suggests current “Singularity imminent!” predictions are far off. We snicker at “thinking machine” applied to a simple calculator, because we understand that even though arithmetic operations are sufficient to build thought, there’s a long way to go from these base components to the genuine article. The analogy with current talk of intelligence is clear.
Could be. Just because it turned out not to be a ten year idea doesn’t mean it will also turn out not to be a 170 year idea. People who thought their heavier-than-air flight ideas would bear fruit 400 years ago were wrong, but when the Wright brothers believed it, they were right.
Peter Medawar
Daniel Oppenheimer’s Ig Nobel Prize acceptance speech:
-- Charles Darwin
Stan Young, 28-Jul-07 www.NISS.org; quoted in “Everything is Dangerous: A Controversy”, a paper discussing epidemiology’s failure to use things like the Bonferroni correction which has led to things like 80% of observed correlations failing to replicate (or only 1 out of 20 NIH randomized-trials replicating the original claim).
-- Wikipedia, on the reproducibility of scientific results
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
-Czeslaw Milosz, “The Captive Mind” (first sentence)
I cannot like this enough. Thank you for showing me this book. This is a big piece of western philosophy and history that I did not know I was missing.
could someone please explain this one?
Milosz is obviously talking about Communism and the philosophy it was based on. (If you haven’t read The Captive Mind, it’s pretty good albeit obviously dated).
The lesson is that philosophy can be Serious Business and you ignore bad philosophy at your own peril. To paraphrase the famous Trotsky paraphrase: You may not be interested in diseased Philosophy, but diseased Philosophy is interested in you.
Money is the unit of caring; there’s a similar quote about “some dead economist” or the like I can’t quite recall.
In Soviet Russia...
-- Robert Heinlein, on selection bias. From this big list of quotes.
-- John D. Cook, in a tweet.
From Wintersmith, on the ability to notice confusion rather than rationalizing:
About the intersection of math and politics through the mind of a child, Bob Murphy relates this story about his six-year-old son Clark:
And I know we’re not supposed to quote ourselves, but you rarely get an opportunity to use a line like this:
-Bruce Sterling, cyberpunk author
Cut off three legs.
Just sew an extra one on first.
Fully general version: just sew a rat onto the human first
The first three times I read this I thought you said “just sew a rat onto the human fist”.
And I thought: that would be a pretty terrible superpower. But, because of that, it could make for a really interesting superhero. What use is a rat sewn to your fist? At first, it seems like the answer is “none, if not negative”, but that’s just what they want the criminal underworld to think...
Possible on a man, if we perturb slightly the definition of leg.
How many legs does a man have if you call a penis a leg? ;)
^Wrong. Actually what we can do to rats is very limited compared to what we can do to humans. As for what we can do with humans… Together, even the sky is not the limit anymore: we pierce through it with our XXX. Also, wrong: in an absolute sense, we “can” do to humans the stuff we do on rats, but there are reasons, beyond ethics, why we don’t. It’s just. Not. Convenient.
My reading was “neurological manipulations that reveal the frailty of the rat mind would work on humans, thus our minds are also frail”.
My first thought was of the robot controlled by rat neurons, though I know the quote predates this technology.
It seems like your read is close to what he had in mind. Here’s the preceeding paragraph, it’s from an essay on what makes cyberpunk:
“Human thought itself, in its unprecedented guise as computer software, is becoming something to be crystallized, replicated, made a commodity. Even the insides of our brains aren’t sacred; on the contrary, the human brain is a primary target of increasingly successful research, ontological and spiritual questions be damned. The idea that, under these circumstances, Human Nature is somehow destined to prevail against the Great Machine, is simply silly; it seems weirdly beside the point. It’s as if a rodent philosopher in a lab-cage, about to have his brain bored and wired for the edification of Big Science, were to piously declare that in the end Rodent Nature must triumph.”
I would have phrased this comment differently, perhaps by saying “This quote is unimpressive because it glosses over the fact that we can do numerous bad things to humans that we can’t do to rats.”
C. HUMANdomostanything
As the statement is correct according to a common and natural (the most common and natural?) way of corresponding language with logic, I don’t approve of beginning a comment on it with “^Wrong”.
I don’t think the original statement at all strongly implies that what we can do to humans is limited to things we can do to rats. If I did, I’d feel some obligation to interpret it charitably.
Your phrasing is much better. But I still think the comparison is very weak, it’s like saying “natural numbers are infinite, real numbers contain natural numbers, therefore they are infinite”: it fails to convey the sheer MAGNITUDE of the situation.
--Hunted Down: the detective stories of Charles Dickens (Charles Dickens)
David Friedman, Price Theory, An Intermediate Text
This sounds wrong. Biases have predictable direction, that’s why they’re called biases and not variance (ahem).
Particularly, what we know about cognitive biases precisely is “theory of irrational behavior” — we just don’t have a, complete, theory of irrational behavior.
Friedman continues, but I shortened the quote to make it punchier. Essentially he says that, (1) given a large number of individuals irrationality will average out in the aggregate, (2) In most cases that an economist would be interested in (eg. investors, CEOs) the individuals have been selected to be good at the task they are performing, i.e. not irrational in that domain.
In some contexts it makes sense to talk about errors in opposite directions canceling out but in others it does not as errors only accumulate. Suppose one person overestimates how much they’ll enjoy having an iPad and buys one when they’d be better off without one, and another person underestimates how much they’ll enjoy having an iPad and doesn’t buy one when they’d be better off with one. Looking at the total number of iPads sold, these errors cancel out. But looking at total human welfare, the errors just add up—two people are each less happy than they could be, which is doubly bad. Similarly, if one person gets too much medical care and another gets too little, then they both lose, one from being overtreated and the other from being undertreated.
If you look at the market as a means of aggregating information (as in prediction markets) then errors can cancel out, but when you evaluate the market as a means of distributing products to people then errors just accumulate.
This is the part that sounds (and is) wrong. It would perhaps be correct if it was “given a large number of individuals selected from mind space via a carefully crafted distribution of deviations about some mind the irrationality will average out in the aggregate”. The irrationality of a large number of human individuals will not average out.
This seems to be an argument about definitions. To me, Friedman’s “average out” means a measurable change in a consistent direction, e.g. significant numbers of random individuals investing in gold. So, given some agents acting in random directions mixed with other agents acting in the same (rational) direction, you can safely ignore the random ones. (He argued.) I don’t think he meant to imply that in the aggregate people are rational. But even in the simplified problem-space in which it appears to make sense, Friedman’s basic conclusion, that markets are rational (or ‘efficient’), has been largely abandoned since the mid 1980s. Reality is more complex.
Both claims are implausible. Is there some kind of substantiation?
Upvoted because it provoked interesting thoughts, even though I disagree with it.
I can actually say in advance which irrational things I am likely to do on a given day. (For example, be up at 1 AM posting on Less Wrong instead of sleeping). If I know enough about a person to know their goals and approximate level of education as relates to those goals, I usually also know enough to have a sense of what types of irrational things they tend to do.
Even when errors are only random noise, modeling people as rational is different from modeling people as rational on average with random errors. If people are rational, that implies that someone with a dangerous job has properly taken the risks into account when choosing the job. But if people are rational on average with random errors, then the person who ends up with a dangerous job is probably someone who underestimated/underweighted the risks (which is a case of the winner’s curse).
It’s standard econometric practice to assume (at the very least) an error term independent of the predictor variables. That error term can be a function of any number of unobserved factors. If unbiased human error were a major component in the variance of our actions, it would be picked up in this error term.
Are you thinking of something more specific?
My sample is biased (geeks), but it seems to be mising “What makes them go ‘Ooh, shiny!’”
Is that not “What has value that is easy to appreciate”?
Not really. I have a reaction like that to non-Euclidean geometry, but I don’t know many things it can be used for.
Despite the fact that “non-Euclidean geometry” may sound like something that only concerns people in ivory towers, we all know of lots of things that aren’t straight and flat, but instead are curved, bent, or distorted.
Non-Euclidean geometry is essential to the theory of general relativity, which is of immense use in astronomy and also allows the GPS system to function accurately.
What is astronomy used for?
General relativity does. Non-Euclidean geometry does not. I’m pretty certain you can approximate it well enough with Euclidean geometry. Gravitational time dilation is just a function of hight.
Also, GPSs already work. There’s no need for me to use non-Euclidean geometry.
Finally, that was just an example. If someone is interested in pure mathematics, and there’s an application for it, it’s just a coincidence. I’ve heard some mathematicians actually go as far as disliking it when people find applications for there work.
Studying the territory improves the map.
No, that is not the case. The spacetime geometry near the Earth is non-Euclidean, and using a Euclidean approximation does not produce the required accuracy.
You are conflating “value” with “applications.” Different people see value in different things for different reasons.
I meant to say, is that feeling of “ooh, shiny!” not easily appreciable value in itself?
Polar coordinates
Admittedly this comes up in my life about as often as Euclidean geometry does, which is to say basically never.
I think another category would be “What few other people can or do learn” (rare foreign languages, chess, obscure trivia about a favorite subject). Knowing something that others don’t is good for getting status, at least in the subcultures with which I have experience.
-- R.A. Heinlein, The Star Beast
Related to this previous discussion, in anticipation of when it is revived later.
...wow. I want to read that book.
--Garrett Hardin’s ‘First Law of Ecology’
(Apropos of Darwin’s latest article on the difficulty of reaching useful medical results, with Vitamin E as a case-study into this maxim.)
-- The Phoenix Exultant by John C. Wright
I’d very much like to be more patient, humble, energetic, experienced, diversely skilled, productive, motivated, dedicated, disciplined, courageous, self reliant, systematic, efficient, cautious, pragmatic, sociable, polite, forgiving, courteous, cooperative, uninhibited, consistent, generous, expressive, coherent, observant, imaginative, adaptable, witty, inquisitive, gracious, tranquil, impartial, and sincere. Am I missing the intent of the quote?
In the Golden Oecumene, modifying minds is commonplace, so people are usually as patient, humble, energetic, etc as they can be. The quote is about changing more basic values. Ironjoy was a sociopath until the Curia punished him.
The HamletHenna(now) wants to be more patient, humble, energetic, experienced, diversely skilled, productive, motivated, dedicated, disciplined, courageous, self reliant, systematic, efficient, cautious, pragmatic, sociable, polite, forgiving, courteous, cooperative, uninhibited, consistent, generous, expressive, coherent, observant, imaginative, adaptable, witty, inquisitive, gracious, tranquil, impartial, and sincere.
If there were a HamletHenna(past) that did not want to be more patient, humble, energetic, …, would HamletHenna(now) want to edit themselves into HamletHenna(past) to save the trouble of becoming more patient, humble, energetic, …?
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What’s that bias called again ?
Are you implying those are not beautiful?
That was the intention, yes, and I expect that significantly less than 0.1% of humans would classify all of those examples as neutral or better in appearance if asked in a context with no significant priming on the matter.
It seems surprising that this is true. Why are functional things beautiful, even when they serve only their own purposes?
Because beauty in design isn’t some arbitrary metric different than the good design metric. It’s what it feels like when you pattern match to ‘good design’.
You might notice your aesthetic tastes in something change once you understand more about their design (I certainly have), and I doubt you’d see so much interest in ‘carbon fiber’ stickers if carbon fiber weren’t associated with strong light high tech stuff.
This ‘Art’ thing seems to be an obvious counterpoint, but I suspect its just beauty wireheading as a result of goodhearts law.
My theory is that art is what happens when the design is to be artistic. For example, there might be books made to entertain people. You can find beauty in how well a book is written to be entertaining. Then you can start writing books specifically for that beauty. Then you find beauty in how well a book is written to be beautiful. Pretty soon, you end up with didactic books that are useless for entertainment, unless you’re specifically into the beauty of didactic literature.
Perhaps a better word would have been ‘elegant’.
At this point the spirit of Kant compels me to say purposiveness (Deut. Zweckmässigkeit). Sorry, this isn’t a real answer to your question.
Because we’re preprogrammed to find functionality aesthetically pleasing? Why are mathematical proofs beautiful?
I once asked a similar question (here). jimrandomh’s reply was that having to satisfy constraints simply forces you to think harder about the problem, which increases the beauty of your solution. The analogy to wild animals doesn’t hold up, which is lucky.
Brother Ty’s seventh law
H. L. Mencken, Homo Neanderthalensis
Alternate hypothesis: the inferior man hates knowledge because “Yay knowledge!” is associated with people like Mencken, who go around calling people things like “inferior man” because they’re poor and uneducated.
I understood the quote as speaking of those that are incapable of understanding rather than those who could be educated or walked through to understanding so I’m not sure why this would apply. He is definitely elitist but I’ve never heard of him scoff at the idea of talent coming from poverty. Also overall even people who are capable of such tought often carry culture and values that inhibit it and don’t wish to change them no more than you want to change yours. When he speaks of the peasants or the city proletariat, he is speaking of a great mass of people many of which are on the left of the bell curve, not about individuals.
You do have a point that overall upper class and even upper middle class people underestimate how many poor smart people there are. Mencken overall was very critical of the upper class as well, he was basically pessimistic about the potential of everyone, except the rare individual exception.
“He is definitely elitist but I’ve never heard of him scoff at the idea of talent coming from poverty. ”
Elitists often make a point of not scoffing at the idea of talent coming from poverty. When poor people attain great success, it helps to justify the elitist’s belief that their own success had nothing to do with the privileges they had access to (i.e. comfortable living, proper nutrition, and good educational material).
Do you mean “hand”?
I think Mencken was using it in the sense of, “A peasant; a rustic; a farm servant.”, (see also). It’s an unusual usage.
There is nothing rationally desirable that cannot be achieved sooner if rationality itself increases. . . corollary: work to achieve Intelligence Intensification is work to achieve all our other sane and worthwhile goals.
--Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising
--”Paul Meier, Statistician Who Revolutionized Medical Trials, Dies at 87″, NYT
Not sure if this excerpt has been posted here before, th guy’s blog is a treasure trove.
-- Scott Adams Brain-Hat
He goes on to say:
Hope he does not read this site, then, to avoid disappointment.
One of the really nice things about studying human rationality is that, with practice, you can learn to recognize when you’re being irrational a lot more often than you otherwise would. Irrationality isn’t something that just happens to us, and we’re not powerless.
“A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it.” Jacques Monod, in On the Molecular Theory of Evolution (1974) Repost, but i just found it :)
The same can be said of most biology, particularly stark when contrasted with attitudes to ‘hard’ sciences.
This may be fatally sophomoric, but I really don’t understand what is so particularly hard to understand about the theory of evolution. Differentiation, Inheritance, Mutation, and Fitness produce a feedback loop of increasing Fitness. The particulars of it’s implementation on Earth are far more complicated, but the underlying theory is beautiful in it’s elegance and simplicity.
See, there you’re just confirming the original quote.
^Which, BTW, also applies to Rational!Harry. How is your book going? Because we over at ff.net are kinda starving. Your work is dearly missed. People are speculating on you pulling a Wheel Of Time on us :P
As for the quote, ever since I read “A Blind God”, I’ve really noticed how inhuman evolution is. Not intuitive, at all.
^^I suspect you might want to “Taboo Your Words” a little. What does “fitness” mean exactly?
(Recommend not asking Eliezer that question if your intent is to maximize output. It seems to provoke an aversive reaction even if encouragement is intended.)
Upvoted, but you accidentally duplicated a block of text there.
Ick. Hadn’t noticed.
I understand that I am incorrect, my own self-doubt was not made sufficiently clear. I do not however agree with the fatalism that I perceive in the initial quote. To me it seems to suggest that understanding evolution is impossible. I guess this is not necessarily the appropriate place to look for information on evolutionary theory, but nonetheless I do not agree with the suggestion of unassailability of understanding, if that is what’s going on.
I think that often people believe other things that crowd out the true explanation, so in practice it isn’t applied correctly to real-world phenomena. Then, perhaps they try to reintegrate everything under a unifying theory of “evolution”.
Anthropomorphism, promiscuous teleology, not understanding the level of selection, absolutist ideas about fitness, belief in a certain philosophical type of progress, etc. are culprits.
After all the misconceptions are added, the only work left for evolution is to provide a label for the jumble!
If i asked the question “why did humans form a hibernative monophasic sleep cycle? most people would say because at night we slept in caves and shelter to escape the dark and we evolved to sleep that way” even though that’s not the case with out genes at all. People often attribute things that are entirely behavioral to evolutionary reasons and that’s what i think the quotes trying to illustrate.
Baby’s start out sleeping Polyphasically but soon adapt a natural night/day cycle due to the humans around them (mirror neurons, reinforcement, lighting). Now i dont know if this proposed experiment would-be very feasible or ethical but most people discount it because they “understand” evolution.
I would discount polyphasic sleep as being natural on grounds of my current knowledge of anthropology. As far as I know there are no known human cultures that engage in polyphasic sleep (not counting biphasic sleep). That seems like pretty strong evidence that it isn’t behavioral, it’s physiological, which in turn suggests (but doesn’t guarantee) an evolutionary basis for human sleep patterns. Of course, some amount of human sleep patterns is behavioral, e.g. the siesta.
Look, our sun forces us into a monophasic pattern because of the day/night cycle that occurs everywhere around the earth but our body’s don’t naturally fall into it. We sleep at night because our brain is wired to sleep when its dark and that’s an evolved mechanism but the behavioral pattern that polyphasic sleep requires isn’t evolved into our system its just a natural response to the natural light patterns of our world . In parts of the world where light comes less often sleeping patterns are different than near the equator as evidenced by biphasic sleepers around the world who follow the Siesta pattern naturally.
All i’m saying is that people attribute evolutionary reasons to things that have many separate causes and are unproven because they think they understand it. That’s what both these quotes illustrate as far as i know :)
I agree, however, reverse stupidity is not intelligence. You say
but this seems like an unsubstantiated claim, just as much as people claiming sleep must be an evolved behavior. I agree that sleep is at least partially behavioral, but it’s unclear to me that there isn’t an evolved component. See this blurb from Wikipedia, which suggests that human sleep patterns are not completely dependent on external stimuli.
Your right, I was being too rhetorical when i said that. The final point of my piece was simply a way of explaining the quote, i can agree that
Fully agree, especially because I suffer from chronic insomnia =D
Have you tried vaporizing medical sleepy weed? That helped a lot with my insomnia :)
Definitely works better than any supplement or herbal remedy I’ve tried, but I usually don’t feel rested the next day.
Can anyone confirm that chimps and bonobos are diurnal as well?
Discounting other theories unjustifiably, or overusing a particular theory past it’s explanation is one sin. Not understanding a theory is another however. I think that many people who draw such false conclusions still base them on a pretty clear understanding of the core of evolutionary theory, i.e. mutation, gene exchange, selection, reproduction.
I agree with your sentiment, but I find myself constantly reminded by this site that the majority of the world is stupider than we give them credit for.
--Napoleon Bonaparte; Napoleon: In His Own Words (1916); edited by Jules Bertaut, as translated by Herbert Edward Law and Charles Lincoln Rhodes
-H.L. Mencken
Counterexamples: Exhibit A: The battle of Marathon. Exhibit B: Teachers.
Mencken probably meant “inconvenient” truths. If you insert this qualifier, the rest of the phrase becomes trivial.
I question this example. Teachers are subject to the same restrictions regarding truthtelling.
Uncomfortable-truth telling yes, but they still impart massive amounts of truth, as in truth-as-empirically-valid-information.
Teachers are often unpopular with their students in my experience.
Yeah, but that has much more to do with their social and communication skills than with the fact that they are imparting knowledge. And, regardless of popularity as in likeableness, any teacher who demonstrates mastery of their chosen field, that is, the reliability of their word as rational evidence, will get respect from their students, whether willingly or grudgingly. I think that also counts as a form of “popularity”: your company is not sought after, but your judgement and knowledge are, and isn’t that more importaant and valuable in the end?
This would be nice, but in my experience is not always true. Maybe your school experience was different to mine, but I found that within a certain age range the teacher is often most disliked person in student’s whole world.
Such a life might not be very pleasant, if people only ever spend time with you when they need you for something, rather than because they like you. I would also imagine it is quite stressful, respect is very easy to lose with a single mistake.
Maybe it’s because I come from an Islamic culture where Teachers and Scholars are respected and esteemed as a matter of principle, and where children have been taught to be thankful for the teachers to be harsh and authoritarian, instead of allowing you to do whatever the hell you wanted at an age at which such freedom is utterly wasted due to stupidity, ignorance, AND temerity (well, actually there isn’t that much emphasis on that last part, but I can’t possily imagine why you’d hate a teacher except for the same reason you’d hate your parents: getting in the way of your fun and not leaving you the option of laziness). Anyway, in my school teachers were loved or at least respected. The people students hated the most were their classmates, but they were also those whose acceptance they craved the most, so it was more like a permanent, relatively friendly, multipolar Cold War.
Well, for example, the teacher might not understand logarithms .
That’s no reason to bite them, Harry, my dear. Or to strongly react in any way. You may look down on them, especially if they are a math teacher, but then again, if they aren’t supposed to teach logarythms at the level they work in, that is entirely forgivable. A much more legitimate reason for hatred would be deliberate abusive behavior. If they are abusive AND incompetent… then, at that point, desprate times require desperate measures. It seldom happens: incompetent teachers are usually the most lenient, and they deliberately are as lenient and low-profile as possible.
In my high school, teachers who understood their material and were good at explaining it and willing to help if you didn’t understand the first time got respect, and were well liked at the same time. Teachers the students deemed incompetent got respect to their faces only.
~ Cal Newport
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Somerset Maugham
“The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.”
-- Alan Kay, Programming and Scaling
-- Little Wars (H. G. Wells)
That’s a little opaque… I think he means: ‘These war games seem like very easy problems but are actually very hard; so legislation or proposals which tackle hard problems are probably tackling really hard problems, and failure is to be expected.’
Richard Feynman
Strunk & White, The Elements of Style
Obligatory.
I thought you were going to link to something completely different.
And I thought at least one of you had linked to something completely different again and equally obligatory (pdf).
Your completely different obligatory link has its own obligatory link.
Much more obligatory.
via Bob Somerby (The Daily Howler) who adds, among other comments:
--Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Joe Centofanti, master tailor. From the trailer for Men of the Cloth.
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Practical answer: when my daughter does this, “Why do you think?” is proving a useful reply that gets thoughtful answers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u2ZsoYWwJA#t=7m36s
Jacques Bertin
I can’t make head or tail of this quote.
Following the link might help, but I believe the general idea is that if you’re trying to present information in a graphic, to sort out what is important about it and what presentation will make it clear.
If you’re trying to present any kind of information at all, you should figure out what is important about it and what presentation will make it clear.
Unfortunately, the quote above isn’t at all clear, even in context. I suspect this is because Jacques Bertin isn’t as good at expressing himself in English as in French, but even so I’m unable to understand the sample data he presents or how it relates to the point he was trying to make.
It’s Continental Philosophy at its worst. I can assure you it’s exactly as messy in French.
Unfortunately, I posted because it looked reasonable more than because I had a solid understanding.
Here’s where I picked it up (page down to del_c)-- the chart is definitely clearer when the person influenced by Bertin has re-arranged it.
“What is man? A miserable little pile of secrets^W heuristics.”—Apologies to Andre Malraux
But enough talk, have at you!
You mean ^ as “group intersection”, but what about the W?
^W means Control-W, which is the ASCII code for “delete previous word”.
Oh, “heuristics”, otherwise known as “prejudice”! The main difference in connotation being that heuristics are changed in the face of enough contrary evidence, while prejudices… aren’t.
Of course prejudices can be changed, at which point they become postjudices.
No, they become “judgements”. I too wish the lnguage obeyed the rules of etymology, but life is not so easy.
-- Billy Preston (Made famous in the song by Stephen Stills)
Woot, Stockholm syndrome.
I think anyone in the position of Robert Baratheon would have had trouble following this advice...
-- The Axis of Awesome, in this song.
Bishop Joseph Butler
Because the mechanisms for encoding goals, planning, and updating on new information are completely different. They may malfuction in both cases, but you’ll be better off looking at how it’s supposed to work and how it fails than making a surface anaology with humans. Otherwise either you’ve just said “Both of these things break sometimes” or you’re going to run off and predict economic fluctuations by analogy to mood swings or something.
Summers, Lawrence H, “Comments on ‘The Contradiction in China’s Gradualist Banking Reforms’”, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2006, 2, 149-162
an excerpt From Neal Asher’s “The Gabble: And Other Stories”:
“‘Same arguments apply,’ he replies, and of course they do. ‘God?’ I ask. He laughs in my face then says, ‘I try to understand it. I don’t try to cram it in to fit my understanding.’ He definitely has the essence of it there.”
-- Frank Stockton, The Lady or The Tiger
Not sure if this counts as a quote...
I am fairly sure it does not.
Can you say anything more substantive than that? It’s plausible given the studies mentioned in Cialdini, an example of which follows:
-- Robert Caildini, Influence: Science and Practice
I wasn’t agreeing or disagreeing with the substance of the linked abstract—I only meant to say that it probably didn’t belong in this thread because it looked more like a link to research than what usually goes in the ‘Rationality Quotes’ thread.
I am fairly sure that’s a terrible counter-argument.
We have ‘open threads’ in the discussion section from time to time. This would fit there. (Start a new one according to the template if there isn’t a recent one open.)
“[Y]ou should be able to kick your own ass in ten minutes or less.”—Diana Hsieh, “Modern Paleo Principles”
In addition to the general interest around here in Paleo-style diets, compare to my similar August 2010 quote.
“The virtue of Rationality means the recognition and acceptance of reason as one’s only source of knowledge, one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide to action. It means one’s total commitment to a state of full, conscious awareness, to the maintenance of a full mental focus in all issues, in all choices, in all of one’s waking hours. It means a commitment to the fullest perception of reality within one’s power and to the constant, active expansion of one’s perception, i.e., of one’s knowledge. It means a commitment to the reality of one’s own existence, i.e., to the principle that all of one’s goals, values and actions take place in reality and, therefore, that one must never place any value or consideration whatsoever above one’s perception of reality. It means a commitment to the principle that all of one’s convictions, values, goals, desires and actions must be based on, derived from, chosen and validated by a process of thought—as precise and scrupulous a process of thought, directed by as ruthlessly strict an application of logic, as one’s fullest capacity permits. It means one’s acceptance of the responsibility of forming one’s own judgments and of living by the work of one’s own mind (which is the virtue of Independence). It means that one must never sacrifice one’s convictions to the opinions or wishes of others (which is the virtue of Integrity)—that one must never attempt to fake reality in any manner (which is the virtue of Honesty)—that one must never seek or grant the unearned and undeserved, neither in matter nor in spirit (which is the virtue of Justice). It means that one must never desire effects without causes, and that one must never enact a cause without assuming full responsibility for its effects—that one must never act like a zombie, i.e., without knowing one’s own purposes and motives—that one must never make any decisions, form any convictions or seek any values out of context, i.e., apart from or against the total, integrated sum of one’s knowledge—and, above all, that one must never seek to get away with contradictions. It means the rejection of any form of mysticism, i.e., any claim to some nonsensory, nonrational, nondefinable, supernatural source of knowledge. It means a commitment to reason, not in sporadic fits or on selected issues or in special emergencies, but as a permanent way of life.” “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness, 440. Ayn Rand
That is a fine-sounding set of applause lights, but Rand’s own record does not bear measurement by the standard she so vigorously preached.
How so?
On Rand’s record, short version here, referencing this, and the canonical demolition job is this. Rand has been mentioned a few other times on LessWrong, generally as an example of a cult figure.
On the applause-light nature of the passage, the more I look at it, setting aside my urge to applaud and asking “what does this mean? is it true?”, the more the substance dissolves. “Reason as one’s only source of knowledge”—what about observation? She goes on to talk about observation (perception, evidence), but how well was she observing her own words when she wrote “reason as one’s only source of knowledge”?
“One must never place any value or consideration whatsoever above one’s perception of reality”—even when the perception is mistaken? Our senses are fallible, an issue which I think Rand never grappled with, or if she did, only to come to the opposite conclusion. (I say “I think”, only because I have not actually read Rand, only read about her, but what I’ve read about her sufficiently persuades me that reading the source would be about as useful as reading the Book of Mormon, i.e. low enough on my list of priorities that it is unlikely ever to rise higher.) She fell into the rational anti-pattern that goes “A is A, therefore B”.
“One must never seek or grant the unearned and undeserved”—doing good to others as a sin, deduced from doing good to oneself as the sole good action, deduced from reason as one’s only source of knowledge.
Objectivism is a classic example of C.S. Lewis’ observation that every purportedly new moral system consists of nothing but the puffing up of one part of what he called the universal moral law at the expense of the rest.
-- The Notorious BIG, Juicy
While the racially charged term was likely appropriate in the source material, it severely restricts the domain of application of the quote, especially but not exclusively when removed from context.
Yeah, I’d rather have a few more lines of context to get why that’s a rationality quote. I can take or leave the n-word; I’m assuming that particular spelling has the connotation that it is spoken between people with similar skin-melanin levels.
Obviously I went out on a limb here, but I stand by the lyric as a good rationality quote.
It succinctly and elegantly echoes one of Eliezer’s 12 virtues: relinquishment. Biggy is basically telling his audience to update their beliefs based on new evidence which he reveals throughout the song. He is systematically destroying untruth.
Also, the word “nigga” is mostly devoid of racial connotations, especially in this context. It’s much more akin to “brother”, “comrade”, “man,” “friend”, etc. -- it’s emphasizing the communal nature between the artist and his audience. He’s inviting them into his private world of truth.
I would roughly interpret it like this: “You may not have known before, but now you do know, my friend [and that is a good thing].”
Should it be “if you didn’t know, now you know” and aesthetic concerns (ie lyrics flow better with don’t) changed it? Because I’m not sure I agree with deducing knowledge from ignorance in the general case.
Maybe, but there’s a possible further interpretation: “If you do not understand the mechanisms of what happened, you can deduce from it that you are ignorant about this area, which you would to well to keep in mind”.
Mashup aesthetics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et2MpcJ5LpA&feature=player_embedded#!
[Apparently not as amusing as I thought]