“A well-laid plan is always to my mind most profitable; even if it is thwarted later, the plan was no less good, and it is only chance that has baffled the design; but if fortune favors one who has planned poorly, then he has gotten only a prize of chance, and his plan was no less bad.”
--Artabanus, uncle of Xerxes; book 7 of Herodotus’s Histories (I could swear I’d seen this on a LW quote thread before, but searching turns up nothing.)
(To make it clear: I have never seen the movie in question, so this is not a comment on the specifics of what happened)
Just because it turned out poorly doesn’t make it a bad rule. It could have had a 99% chance to work out great, but the killer is only seeing the 1% where it didn’t. If you’re killing people, then you can’t really judge their rules, since it’s basically a given that you’re only going to talk to them when the rules fail. Everything is going to look like a bad rule if you only count the instances where it didn’t work.
Without knowing how many similar encounters the victim avoided with their rule, I don’t see how you can make a strong case that it’s a bad (or good) rule.
Just because it turned out poorly doesn’t make it a bad rule.
That kinda depends on the point of view.
If you take the frequentist approach and think about limits as n goes to infinity, sure, a single data point will tell you very little about the goodness of the rule.
But if it’s you, personally you, who is looking at the business end of a gun, the rule indeed turned out to be very very bad. I think the quote resonates quite well with this.
Besides, consider this. Let’s imagine a rule which works fine 99% of the time, but in 1% of the cases it leaves you dead. And let’s say you get to apply this rule once a week. Is it a good rule? Nope, it’s a very bad rule. Specifically, your chances of being alive at the end of the year are only 0.99^52 = about 60%, not great. Being alive after ten years? About half a percent.
Shorn of context, it could be. But what is the context? I gather from the Wikipedia plot summary that Chigurh (the killer) is a hit-man hired by drug dealers to recover some stolen drug money, but instead kills his employers and everyone else that stands in the way of getting the money himself. To judge by the other quotes in IMDB, when he’s about to kill someone he engages them in word-play that should not take in anyone in possession of their rational faculties for a second, in order to frame what he is about to do as the fault of his victims.
Imagine someone with a gun going out onto the street and shooting at everyone, while screaming, “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” Is it still a rationality quote?
I saw the movie and the context of the quote was that the killer was about to kill a guy that was chasing him. So we could say that the victim underestimated the killer. He was not randomly selected.
-- The killer shortly before killing his victim in No Country for Old Men
--Artabanus, uncle of Xerxes; book 7 of Herodotus’s Histories (I could swear I’d seen this on a LW quote thread before, but searching turns up nothing.)
(To make it clear: I have never seen the movie in question, so this is not a comment on the specifics of what happened) Just because it turned out poorly doesn’t make it a bad rule. It could have had a 99% chance to work out great, but the killer is only seeing the 1% where it didn’t. If you’re killing people, then you can’t really judge their rules, since it’s basically a given that you’re only going to talk to them when the rules fail. Everything is going to look like a bad rule if you only count the instances where it didn’t work. Without knowing how many similar encounters the victim avoided with their rule, I don’t see how you can make a strong case that it’s a bad (or good) rule.
That kinda depends on the point of view.
If you take the frequentist approach and think about limits as n goes to infinity, sure, a single data point will tell you very little about the goodness of the rule.
But if it’s you, personally you, who is looking at the business end of a gun, the rule indeed turned out to be very very bad. I think the quote resonates quite well with this.
Besides, consider this. Let’s imagine a rule which works fine 99% of the time, but in 1% of the cases it leaves you dead. And let’s say you get to apply this rule once a week. Is it a good rule? Nope, it’s a very bad rule. Specifically, your chances of being alive at the end of the year are only 0.99^52 = about 60%, not great. Being alive after ten years? About half a percent.
I agree. But this is not how I saw the quote. For me it is just a cogent way of asking “is your application of rationality leading to success”?
Shorn of context, it could be. But what is the context? I gather from the Wikipedia plot summary that Chigurh (the killer) is a hit-man hired by drug dealers to recover some stolen drug money, but instead kills his employers and everyone else that stands in the way of getting the money himself. To judge by the other quotes in IMDB, when he’s about to kill someone he engages them in word-play that should not take in anyone in possession of their rational faculties for a second, in order to frame what he is about to do as the fault of his victims.
Imagine someone with a gun going out onto the street and shooting at everyone, while screaming, “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” Is it still a rationality quote?
I saw the movie and the context of the quote was that the killer was about to kill a guy that was chasing him. So we could say that the victim underestimated the killer. He was not randomly selected.