Rationality Quotes January 2010
A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you’ve seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).
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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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.
-- The Onion, Millions and Millions Dead
Related: World Death Rate Holding Steady At 100 Percent
“Most haystacks do not even have a needle.”
-- Lorenzo
- Alan Sokal (hat tip)
“You cannot understand what a person is saying unless you understand who they are arguing with.”
-- Don Symons, quoted by Tooby and Cosmides.
-- Miss HT Psych
Believe me, breaking the bed is a bit more worrying when you’re tied to it.
-- Alexander Pope
-- Voltaire
“If I were wrong, then one would have been enough.”
Einstein’s reported response to the pamphlet “One Hundred Authors Against Einstein.”
-- Mark Jason Dominus
This sounds like a funny “blooper” story, but could just as well be an entirely normal history of the solution to an important problem. Many important theorems are proved by contradiction, and for all we know, the question of the existence of partially uniform k-quandles could have been a difficult unsolved problem.
There is a similar story—whether true or not I don’t know—told at Oxford about Cambridge and at Cambridge about Oxford. Someone wrote a thesis on anti-metric spaces, which are like metric spaces, except that the triangle inequality is the other way round. He proved all sorts of interesting facts about them, but at the viva, the external examiner pointed out that there are only two anti-metric spaces: the empty set and the one-point set.
It is recounted that the student passed, but his supervisor was criticised for not having picked up on this earlier.
Likewise there’s the story about the Princeton student defending his thesis on the set of real functions that satisfy the Lipschitz condition for every positive constant C, and being asked by an examiner to compute the derivative of such a function...
My point having been, of course, that the k-quandle story is not (necessarily) of this type.
I don’t think you need to do anything as sophisticated as computing the derivative to prove that the only such functions are constant functions. Consider any distinct x_1, x_2. d(x_1, x_2) is nonzero by the definition of metric spaces. If d(f(x_1), f(x_2)) were nonzero, there would be a K small enough for the condition to be violated; therefore it must be zero for all x_1, x_2.
The humor of asking the student to compute the derivative is that one imagines the student confidently starting to answer the question, until a dawning horror rises on the student’s face as the implications of the answer become evident.
I… don’t mathematicians usually have more than one interesting example of a mathematical object before they decide to study it?
Not when the question is whether any examples exist!
OK, but it takes two minutes to prove that an anti-metric space with more than one point can’t exist. If x != y, then d(x, y) + d(y, x) > d(x, x).
Unless you allow negative distances, in which case an anti-metric space is just a mirror image of a metric space.
Generally yes. But not always. Sometimes there’s only a single such object. For example, there’s a largest sporadic simple group. It is a very interesting object. But there’s only one of it.
To use a slightly less silly example, up to isomorphism there’s only one ordered complete archimedean field. We call it R and we care a lot about it.
Also, sometimes you lack enough data to know if there are other examples of what you care about. But yes, you should generally try to figure out if a non-trivial example exists before you start studying it.
Non-Euclidean geometries? IIRC the questions of “what can you still/now prove with this one postulate removed” were studied for centuries before hyperbolic or elliptic geometries were really understood.
Or maybe I’m misremembering. That always did seem odd to me. I guess hyperbolic geometries can’t be isometrically embedded in R^3, which makes them hard to intuitively comprehend. But the educated classes have known the Earth was a sphere for millennia; surely somebody noticed that this was an example of an otherwise well-behaved geometry where straight lines always intersect.
The fact that they didn’t notice that Earth is an example of a non-Euclidean geometry is especially ironic when you consider the etymology of “geometry”.
“It is therefore highly illogical to speak of ‘verifying’ (3.8 [the Bernoulli urn equation]) by performing experiments with the urn; that would be like trying to verify a boy’s love for his dog by performing experiments on the dog.”—E.T. Jaynes, Probability Theory
“Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?”
-- attributed to George Carlin
Sam Harris’s reply to Karen Armstrong
Armstrong’s reply is nothing but chiding Harris for being rude, and waffle. Returning to the “niceness” discussion, it strikes me that if Harris had made the same points with a straight face and without sarcasm, Armstrong would have been left with nothing but waffle.
He absolutely gave her something to use against him by being sarcastic in a public forum, but I think he made a rational decision that an interesting dialogue in which he could be called snide would catch much more attention than the dull one in which he makes a polite, logically airtight case and receives a shorter reply full of nothing much.
Edit: Oh, I was going to add: and I now know a lot more about Armstrong than I would otherwise, namely, that her argumentative approach is deceitful and based on manipulating her audience’s moral feelings.
I’m not sure Armstrong’s reply is so bad as all that—it’s legitimate to point out that there’s a difference between doing science and using the reputation of science as an excuse to commit atrocities, as in Communism and Nazism.
Armstrong’s reply was not up when I first read the article. I am glad you brought that to my attention.
I am stunned at her reply. She completely missed the point that Harris was making (not surprising, I have known some pretty smart people who were caught flat-footed by the philosophical tool of object replacement). That she did not catch the comparison of witchcraft in Africa as a form of religious practice is… well, stunning.
Yes, Karen, what we need to do with Theologists such as William Lane Craig, who whole-heartedly defends the genocidal acts of his God in the old testament, is to have their theology enriched by rationalizing of those atrocities rather than have them understand why they do not stand up to a rational criticism.
Can you elaborate? What is the tool of “object replacement”?
It is essentially what Harris did in the article. He replaced the noun objects of Armstrong’s point with other, analogous/isomorphic objects to illustrate that the point being made did not have the merit that Armstrong thought it did.
I’ll see about looking up the term as it applies to Propositional Logic. It’s a more widely recognized term (at least here).
Yeah, but waffle is all Armstrong ever writes when she puts her theologian hat on, and it doesn’t seem to bother her fans in the slightest. Using sarcasm allowed Harris to point out the ridiculousness in her article without giving the impression that it was sane enough to deserve a respectful reply.
To “point out” means to induce others to see what you see. Do you think that Harris’s approach reliably induces people who don’t already agree with him to see the ridiculousness that he sees? I suspect that he accomplishes little more than signaling his tribal loyalties, while exacerbating antipathy towards his tribe by non-tribe-members.
Since the people he has to convince are religious believers, I think his approach is about as reliable as the ‘nice’ approach, which is to say it’s almost completely worthless. However, it has other benefits that the nice approach doesn’t have.
Unless I’m reading you wrong, those “other benefits” amount to no more than signaling tribal loyalties, at least in practical terms.
ETA: . . . and if that kind of behavior helps a tribe to grow, it does so for non-truth-tracking reasons, producing a tribe full of people who are there just because they like the company.
The benefit is to help other non-believers (and perhaps a few believers) realize that Armstrong’s article (and defense of religion in general) doesn’t fit into the category of “Respectable beliefs I disagree with”, it fits into the category of “Intellectually dishonest nonsense that should be scorned and ridiculed”.
It’s a benefit closely related to breaking the taboo that protects religious beliefs and raising the sanity waterline.
If the benefit of scorn and ridicule is just to inform others about what to scorn and ridicule, then I don’t see the point. Scorn and ridicule aren’t terminal values.
That would be true if the ability to deride were a reliable signal of sanity. But derision is cheap; it’s a tool that is equally available to the insane.
One of the things that keep religion alive in western society in the 21st century is the dogma, widespread even among atheists, that even if religious beliefs are false they’re sane enough to deserve respect. In other words, most non-believers treat mainstream religious beliefs as if they were like the belief that the Washington Redskins are going to win the 2010 Superbowl rather than like the belief that Tom Cruise is the son of Xenu, Lord of the Galactic Confederacy.
The first step towards a society in which ridiculous beliefs are acknowledged to be ridiculous, is to stop acting as if these beliefs aren’t ridiculous. The point of ridicule is first to make those who hold ridiculous beliefs feel ashamed or at least uncomfortable, and second to help make rationalists feel the appropriate emotion when dealing with such extremes of irrationality. The end goal is a society in which people have the same attitude towards religious beliefs than they do towards belief in alien abductions.
Humans are social animals. Inducing shame and discomfort might be useful if the believer is isolated away from other believers and cannot rely on them for emotional support. If not, he or she will likely relieve their shame by seeking the company of fellow believers, reinforcing the affiliation with the believing group.
Or they’ll give up their belief to avoid looking like a nut. I know several Christian fundamentalists who’ve done just that. Unfortunately, since ‘moderate’ or ‘liberal’ religion is still respected, they just became Christians of a different type instead of atheists.
How exactly do you expect to make humanity acknowledge the ridiculousness of religion if you yourself continue to act as if it was a respectable position?
Does your experience accord with my (implied) retrodiction that the fundamentalists who gave up their extreme beliefs could not easily retreat to a more comfortable social milieu?
Well, I was thinking of some of my fellow students, back in college. IIRC their families were mostly fundies (and lived in the same city) so, not really.
Anyway, could you answer my question? It wasn’t rhetorical.
Families are a special case—one doesn’t get to choose them, and one might not particularly like them.
I neither act as if religious belief were a respectable position nor expect to make humanity acknowledge the ridiculousness of religion.
I’m dubious of militant atheism, as it seems counter-productive. Promoting atheism is closely related to promoting science. Aggressively promoting science and proclaiming it to be in direct conflict with religion will polarize society as religious groups will in turn attack science. On the other hand, if you just quietly taught science to everyone and not mention anything about a conflict, religious people would just compartmentalize their beliefs so that they didn’t interfere with the things science teaches. You’d basically get people who were technically religious, but close to none of the negative sides.
This has pretty much already happened in my country (Finland). The majority still belongs to a religious domination, but religion is considered a private thing and actually arguing in favor of something “because of the Bible” will get you strange looks and likely branded as a fanatic. Yes, there is still a Christian political party in parliament, but they’re a minor player, fielding 7 representatives out of 200. There has traditionally been practically no public debate about any sort of conflict between science and religion, though that’s possibly changing as parts of the populace have began to express a fear of Islam. Judging from past evidence, that is probably just going to make any clash of cultures worse. That article is also a good example of the results you’ll get when the debate gets polarized, as it shows people who might otherwise have been moderates become extremists.
And yes, we should regardless still continue to provide some critique of religion and the fallacies involved, to shift the social consensus even further into the “religion is just a private way you look at the world, not something you can base real-world decisions on” camp. But one can do that without being overly aggressive.
Pardon my drooling—I live in the United States. The inmates run much of the asylum here.
Do you know the history of how Finland acheived this compartmentalization of religion? Are there lessons in the path you followed that we can learn from? We can’t directly follow your current-day practices because our would-be theocrats are still quite rabid, and hold significant power. I agree that head-on confrontation doesn’t work. What did work?
Sociology isn’t my strongest field (though not my weakest either) and I haven’t studied this issue in detail, so I can’t provide any very conclusive answers. Still, there’s one thing that many people suspect to be at least partially responsible. Curiously enough, this is the existence of a state church. Two to be exact, one Lutheran and one Orthodox.
Most people are members of the Lutheran one (79,7% of the population in 2009, down from 85% in 2000 and from 90% in about 1980). They’ll attend a week-long Confirmation camp around age 14, get a church marriage and have their children baptized, have a church funeral when they die. But the church is a very mild, non-radical one. Most of the kids I knew had their Confirmation because tradition says you get gifts afterwards and hey, a week spent camping! The lessons on theology you have to endure are an acceptable price to pay for that.
A prevailing theory is that this acts as a sort of an inoculation against more radical strands of religion. Religion is that traditional thing you grew up with, with neat rituals that bring some comfort and you’ll likely believe in at least some of what they say, but that’s about it. It’s been mostly relegated to the position of “those nice people who provide nice traditional rituals for a few special occasions in everyone’s life”. And once you’re used to the thought of that being the church’s function, any church or religion that gets more involved in the daily lives of its followers will seem radical and fanatic in comparison.
ETA: The fact that the church is funded by taxes probably also helps, as it makes the church more independent from the common populace. They don’t need to actively collect money from people. If they needed to, the fundraising events would probably reach out to more people and make them feel more committed to the church.
ETA2: Of course, this doesn’t explain how the Lutheran church became so secularized. I don’t know the answer to that myself either. A plausible hypothesis might be that as a state church, it’s had a need to do what the rulers told it to, which has forced it to be more secular than churches that don’t need to answer to anyone. That doesn’t help much for the situation in the United States, of course.
Many thanks!
Yes, I’ve read analysis along those lines before as well.
Good point. And they don’t need to carefully tune themselves to actually attract the population either. They are insulated from “market discipline”.
Agnostics and atheists united to weaken church/state separation by funding lukewarm, preferably bureacratic state religion(s). Hmm, do I have the energy to set up a web site...
One comment and one odd suggestion:
But, but...aren’t they also supposed to maintain special cuisines for religious festival days too? Once the fangs are gone, I thought that that was one of the central purposes of a nominal religion… :-)
Perhaps the best solution to Islam is to add a third...
I found an interesting article which contains a summary of what people in the Nordic countries think are the most important functions of the church:
Interestingly, the article also concludes that simply having a state church isn’t enough, if the population is too heterogeneous:
Many thanks!
Sounds like the state churches should look for a way to inject themselves into graduation ceremonies… Tricky balancing act, keeping them banal and toothless, but not fading into oblivion...
Ouch! So innoculation via state religion has the same heterogeneity problem that personalized medicine has...
Perhaps it seems tautologous that ridicule is the best way to deal with the ridiculous. So I’m tabooing the word “ridiculous”. What do you mean by it?
Does it just mean “crazy” in the sense in which Eliezer uses it? Then, for what reason do you believe that ridicule (e.g., sarcasm and contemptuous scorn) is the best way to achieve your end goal?
If I read “crazy” where you wrote “ridiculous”, then your claim is that the first step towards a society in which crazy beliefs are acknowledged to be crazy is to heap scorn and contempt on them. But this is far from obvious. How do you make this argument without relying on the verbal similarity between the words “ridiculous” and “ridicule”?
Pretty much.
Well, not in all situations, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be scorn and contempt, it could also be incredulity (“You believe WHAT?!”), for example. The point is to shock people out of their usual way of thinking, and that sometimes requires a bit of finesse. But a lot of the time scorn and contempt is necessary, yes.
The idea is that faith and self-deception are bad, while truth and rationality are good. So we reward good behavior and punish bad behavior.
How did the gay movement make so much progress in so little time? Was it by engaging in gentle, respectful debate with their opponents? Of course not. They just pointed out the obvious repeatedly: Those people are intolerant bigots. It was obvious, and yet somehow it hadn’t really entered public consciousness, even among those who had the kind of morality that should have lead them to support gay rights. Now that it has, most of those whom we now call homophobes haven’t suddenly become enlightened, but they’ve been forced to dilute their language if not their beliefs if they want to be part of the public sphere.
There’s more than that to the gay movement’s accomplishments, but heaping scorn and contempt on their opponents is definitely a big part of it. If it worked that movement, why not for this one?
There’s an implicit premise here that the punishment works to discourage the bad behavior. Your argument for this premise is to make an analogy with the gay-rights movement:
That is not my sense of how the gay-rights movement succeeded at all. As I see it, they did it by gaining the sympathy of enough of the right people. This, in turn, they did by making their humanity evident. And this they did by having high-status, sympathetic representatives.
Now, once your group is already high-status, you can use scorn to squelch opposition. If you’re high-status, people will want to affiliate with you, and they’ll read your scorn as a signal that they can affiliate with you by helping to squelch your opposition.
Personally, I’d say that that trick is a dishonest manipulation, because it’s not truth-tracking. It depends only on having high status, not on being right. But, more pragmatically, it only works if you already have the high status. Otherwise, it backfires. People read your scorn as a signal to affiliate with your opponents.
Before homosexuals had sufficiently high status, any scorn they showed hampered their progress. But I grant that they eventually gained enough status so that the scorn trick could work. Sam Harris does not appear to me to have reached that level.
This may be true, but I don’t think the gay movement waited to start expressing their scorn for homophobia until after they were high status. Are you saying that before the gay movement was high status, most of its representatives acted like homophobia was simply an opinion with which they disagreed, but which they respected nonetheless?
My impression is that portraying homophobia as something contemptible played an important part in obtaining this high status. Hell, just coming up with the word ‘homophobia’ (which was brilliant) helped a lot, and that was done a few decades ago.
Anyway, there’s another reason why treating religious beliefs like they’re crazy is a good thing: Religious beliefs are, indeed, crazy. I don’t see how this fact can ever be acknowledged by the rest of humanity if no one actually acts like it’s true, even those who accept it!
No, I am saying that whatever displays of scorn they made didn’t help them gain the sympathy of non-homosexuals, and probably hurt them.
I agree that we should act as though religious beliefs are crazy (in Eliezer’s sense of the word). The question is, what does it mean to act that way? That is, what is the most productive response to crazy beliefs? I expect that it’s not generally contempt.
It may not have gotten them sympathy, but I think labeling the opposing view as bigotry and a phobia could easily have gotten them a higher status, even in the early days of the movement.
Honestly though, I have no idea where to find the information we need to settle this disagreement.
What I mean is that our reaction to someone who says, “I believe that Jesus is the son of God” should be similar to our reaction to someone who says, “I believe aliens are trying to kidnap me”.
The reaction can be incredulity, or amusement, or contempt, or something else, anything that doesn’t communicate the impression that you think it’s perfectly (or mostly) OK to be deluded in such a fashion.
That’s an important question, but one for which I have no answer.
Okay, just so long as we agree that “what it means to act as though a belief is crazy” isn’t something that you ought to define however you like. (As though you were to argue “It’s ridiculous. Therefore, by definition, I should ridicule it.”) The proper way to act is not something you can determine just by analyzing what “crazy” means, or just by establishing that it’s not okay to have crazy beliefs. The proper way to act is determined by what will in fact change the world into a state more like it ought to be.
If you’re right about the history of the acceptance of homosexuality, then that is some evidence in favor of your position.
It’s not just verbal similarity—one is derived from the other. It indeed seems merely definitional that the ridiculous ought to be ridiculed, though not necessarily that it is ‘the best’ way of dealing with it.
Arguments from etymology are not normative.
There’s some equivocation here. “Ridiculous” can mean, as the etymology would suggest, “that which should be ridiculed”, or it can mean “not sensible”. In the latter case, the ridiculous should not necessarily be ridiculed.
----John Holt, Learning All the Time
-- E.T. Jaynes, Probability Theory
Do you remember where exactly in the book this quote is?
Page 136 (in Chapter 5 - “Queer Uses for Probability Theory”), in the first full paragraph.
Wow, that was fast, I can see that you definitively did your homework. :)
Google Books is your friend.
LOL. :(
“I once spent a whole day in thought, but it was not so valuable as a moment in study. I once stood on my tiptoes to look out into the distance, but it was not so effective as climbing up to a high place for a broader vista. Climbing to a height and waving your arm does not cause the arm’s length to increase, but your wave can be seen farther away. Shouting downwind does not increase the tenseness of the sound, but it is heard more distinctly. A man who borrows a horse and carriage does not improve his feet, but he can extend his travels 1,000 li [~500km] A man who borrows a boat and paddles does not gain any new ability in water, but he can cut across rivers and seas. The gentleman by birth is not different from other men; he is just good at “borrowing” the use of external things.”
-- Xunzi, An Exhortation to Learning (勸學) 4, translated by John Knoblock in “Xunzi: A Translation and study of the Complete Works”
“Do not ask permission to understand. Do not wait for the word of authority. Seize reason in your own hand. With your own teeth savor the fruit.”
-”The Way of Analysis”, Robert S. Strichartz
-- PeteWarden
-- William S Burroughs, Words of Advice for Young People
I have a brother-in-law who used to manage a Christian rock band. He told me that Christian organizations were the worst about paying for performances, because they assumed that the musicians were in it for service to God, not for the money.
But it could also be that the Christian organizations just had less money.
-- Tetragrammaton
-- Carl Sagan
What’s wrong with identifying with sports teams
A very funny video comparing identifying with a team to assuming you were there in your favorite movies.
Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing; it was here first. —Mark Twain
-- Nazgulnarsil
-- Anon
In the UK to dribble a football means to keep it close to your feet as you move along the pitch—is that the meaning you refer to here? If so I can’t make sense of the quote, because it’s perfectly possible.
Heh. Make that, “tell them to basketball-dribble an American football.”
People in the rest of the world dribble footballs all the time.
Funny, when I was a kid I sometimes used to try to basketball-dribble a US football for fun. Never got it down very well.
American football, basketball dribble.
Edit: Aww, I lose alphabetically and chronologically.
You found better references, though. :)
He almost certainly meant an American football, and dribbling as in basketball, which is done by bouncing it off the ground repeatedly.
-- Herbert Samuel
“The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.”
-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
“I’d rather do what I want to do than what would give me the most happiness, even if I knew for a fact exactly what actions would lead to the latter.”
Keith Lynch, rec.arts.sf.fandom, hhbk90$hu5$3@reader1.panix.com
“With my eyes I can see you. With your eyes I can see myself.”
K. Bradford Brown
~ Bill James
Matter flows from place to place
And momentarily comes together to be you
Some people find that thought disturbing
I find the reality thrilling
—Richard Dawkins quoted in Our Place in the Cosmos
-- John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
The absence of alternatives clarifies your mind marvelously. —Kissinger
“Psychologists tell us everyone automatically gravitates toward that which is pleasurable and pulls away from that which is painful. For many people, thinking is painful.”—Leil Lowndes, How to Talk to Anyone
(Given the context, perhaps a bit of a Dark Arts view.)
--A.E Housman, Juvenal (1905), xi
--A.E. Housman, Last Poems 10
He thought he knew that there was no point in heading any further in that direction, and, as Socrates never tired of pointing out, thinking that you know when you don’t is the main cause of philosophical paralysis.
-- Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
-- Mark Twain
Clearly Dennett has his sources all mixed up.
Just out of curiosity, who is being discussed, and what direction did he discount?
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. —Nietzsche
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes (via Pharyngula)
-- The Cure, “Where The Birds Always Sing”
--- Walt Whitman, “Song of Joys”
-The Book of Bantorra, Episode 12
-- Daniel Dennett
Interestingly, my memory of the quote was corrupted, until I retrieved it to post here; I thought he’d said “harshest efforts”; perhaps owing to contamination from the quote “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be”.
“Wars do not end when they are won, but when those who want to fight to the death find their wish has been granted.”—Spengler
-- Xunzi, An Exhortation to Learning (勸學) 1.6, translated by John Knoblock in “Xunzi: A Translation and study of the Complete Works”
*Knoblock gives “If there is no ardor and enthusiasm in purpose” as an alternative, personally I would translate it as “if there is no one who deeply wills it” and similarly the next passage as “if there is no one who singlemindedly labors for it” (Knoblock doesn’t give any alternative there).
-- Thomas Carlyle
-- Julian Barbour, The End of Time
- Joni Mitchell
Beautiful (in the song) and true, but it doesn’t sound very poetic on its own, and the following line is beautiful and false.
In the next line, only the word “back” is false.
-- G.K. Chesterton, quoted in Jonah Lehrer’s How we decide
(In the section which discusses psychopaths and notes that the “rational” part of their brains appears to be undamaged: the human brain relies on the circuitry of emotion to form moral decisions, or at any rate that’s what’s broken in psychopaths.)
Alan Sokal
--- Mike Caro
Joni Mitchell
We’re here to devour each other alive.
Do not ask permission to understand. Do not wait for the word of authority. Seize reason in your own hand. With your own teeth savor the fruit.
-”The Way of Analysis”, Robert S. Strichartz
Order of the Stick
Funny quote; what’s the connection to rationality? The character in question not being in touch with reality? The recent melatonin thread? Something else?
-- Octavio Paz, The labyrinth of Solitude
Or maybe that is just what a lonely man might think so he can feel deep. Like a high status emo.
Or maybe it’s what a genius would say after emerging from the “existential labyrinth,” the main theme of The Labyrinth of Solitude.
Here is Jostein Gaarder’s response to your response:
The condition of solitude is not imaginary; though, Octavio Paz, being a poet, sensationalizes it well. It’s a condition that has, at the very least, lightly touched every human. And it is a condition that has spun many great people into the deepest kind of angst.
Communication is a major human bottleneck, and Octavio Paz laments this. Our input/output capabilities are severely restricting, considering everything that goes on in our minds. Our methods of communication aren’t very effective.
I find Octavio Paz’s quote interesting in light of transhumanism.
“Lonely” → “senstationalise the experience so I sound deep” → “gain status as a poet and author” → “get laid”. That ranks well above “cutting” as far as plans go.
I do not respect wallowing in existential angst and definitely don’t consider it rational. More importantly I do not allow my brain to reward itself with a sense of smug superiority when it generates such trains of thought for me.
“One word, Ma’am,” he said, coming back from the fire; limping because of the pain. “One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Supose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”
Puddleglum the Marshwiggle, in C.S. Lewis “The Silver Chair”.
-- Octavio Paz, The labyrinth of Solitude
Italicized emphases mine. I really liked that phrase.
The italicized premise seems bogus to me.
I can’t give an opinion on the surrounding context of that phrase. However, I really liked the phrase because it is eloquent.
I am having a hard time seeing how the premise of that phrase is bogus; the phrase, on its own, is a description of the process of society reproducing itself through generations. The phrase, on its own, has nothing to say about the device, or “protection,” that does this.
It’s fascinating that nations can stay around with the same name and substance even though the original founders have long died. Now, isn’t “a mere protection for society with no other object but the reproducing of that same society” a good phrase for boxing up that fascination and making it wonderfully palpable?
Of course, the phrase would have to be modified to exist on its own. But for now, I am happy that I have it under my belt.
*E: Reading the phrase again, I can see that there may be cause for objection saying that the “protection” has only a single use. Is this what you find bogus?
Yes, the ‘no other object’ part I find most bogus. I would still disagree if the claim was ‘the main object’ or even ‘a significant object’ although such relative judgements require more reasoning and background to evaluate than the banal absolute.
I find it abhorrent. It has enough ‘wonderfully palpability’ that many people will hesitate to actually parse the meaning and realise that, trying to describe it without an expletive, what little content it contains lacks factual merit.
Marriage is not merely, primarily or even credibly understood to be a protection for society with the object of reproducing of that same society.
I would much prefer Octavio put his ability to turn phrase into something harmless like, say, and ‘Ode to Blue’. If he wants to keep up the airs of intellectual sophistication he can perhaps work some qualia into the mix. That would tie in nicely with the whole poignant solitude, sublime experience of the human condition vibe. Then if he wants to raise the intellectual bar another notch he can include “da ba dee dah be daa” as a refrain.
I concede that the quote was inappropriate.
This pertains to the part of the quote that I don’t care too much about and don’t have much of an opinion on.
The thing that I found most valuable in the phrase was this: “reproducing itself through generations,” in the discussion of a nation. It’s something that I’ve tried to say before, but it came out very clumsy. So, seeing something similar to what I’ve been trying to say, written, was great. I’m sure you’ve had the experience before.
Anyway, now I feel really silly putting that quote up. Please understand that I’m likely much younger than you and am just now getting my feet wet with rationality. Thank you for the discourse and I’ll see you around.
Don’t feel silly for putting the quote up. It is a quote that has the form of wisdom and brushes past potential insight. In fact, the reason I object is not because it silly to identify with these quotes from Octavio but the reverse. It is the sort of thing that appeals to our intuition and we are naturally pulled into agreeing with when we may otherwise see flaws. It’s a trap and, speaking here particularly of the poignant angsty existential quote, one that I carefully train myself to avoid.
---A Charlie Brown Christmas
(edited to include more context)
I don’t understand why this is a rationality quote. Am I missing some context? (I’ve never read any Charlie Brown books).
I thought it exemplifies a virtue which is nameless.
In what way does it exemplify that virtue?
Hmm, I still don’t get it but thanks for the explanation.
Right, so Charlie Brown is frustrated with commercialism and asks if anyone knows what Christmas is all about, and Linus replies by quoting the Bible, reminding Charlie Brown about the religious significance of the day and thereby guarding against loss of purpose. (In our state of knowledge, we don’t regard religious observance as a legitimate purpose, but conditioning on the premise that Christianity is true, it would be important to make sure your holidays remain being about Christ, rather than wandering off and becoming about gifts or something.)
I like the indirectness of Linus’s reminder (the scene would have been much less effective if Linus had just said, “Well, it’s about Jesus”), which is why I referred to the Eliezer’s “twelfth virtue” in my (apparently still too opaque) attempt at explanation above. Mere words can only be pointers; they don’t in themselves contain the complexity of a thought. The thoughts that you can only invoke indirectly are important. (“You may try to name the highest principle with names such as ‘the reason for the season,’ ‘the true spirit of Chirstmas,’ or ‘God’s word,’ but what if &c.)
I like the seeming incongruity of using a religious quote in a Rationality Quotes thread, which on a meta level illustrates that specific ideas can be accepted or rejected on their own merits. Of course Christianity is false, but if a religious quote also demonstrates something true or useful, the irrationality of the source doesn’t matter.
Maybe too subtle (judging by the downvotes), but I’m not so sure.
Loss of purpose indeed.
If you haven’t grown up in a Christian household or something, this completely fails. It doesn’t sound like a reminder of purpose. Just a fail.
It did occur to me after the first attempted explanation that perhaps my unreligious upbringing was why this quote doesn’t work for me. My immediate reaction to Linus’ quote is simply ‘no, that’s not what Christmas is about at all’ - Christmas has almost nothing to do with religion for me so the quote doesn’t work.
This context is absent in the quote, which makes it impenetrably confusing (and as such, a bad quote).
Edited to include character names and previous line of dialogue
I believe this is from a tv special; I’m having trouble determining the relevance as well.
One possibility: the extended description of the story, rather than a simple statement of fact or belief, constitutes a warning about the power of contextual imagery in activating availability heuristics.