Rationality Quotes January 2015
It is the beginning of a new year, and time for the beginning of a new rationality quotes thread.
The rules are:
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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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.
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 Do not quote with only a name.
— George R. R. Martin, Rolling Stone interview (emphasis mine)
Although the main point of this quote is valid (that sound policies rather than great men are the cause of good government), criticizing Lord of the Rings for having a “medieval philosophy” is a bit silly – it is like criticizing Johnny Cash for sounding “kind of country”. More so than an author of fiction, Tolkien was a scholar who focused much of his effort on studying medieval literature and translating that literature into modern English. Medieval literature was an inspiration and a major influence on his fiction. Of course the Lord of the Rings has a medieval philosophy; it was intended to have a medieval philosophy.
Does the intent matter? Intended or not, Lord of the Rings has come to occupy a certain cultural position; surely it’s right to ask whether it’s fit for it, even if that position is not the one the original author intended?
I think that our culture is big enough to accommodate the literature of J. R. R. Tolkien and George R. R. Martin and Michael Moorcock; we as a society don’t really need to choose among them (although some individuals will obviously prefer one over another). Aumann’s theorem does not apply to literature; not all rational authors have to write identical styles of fiction.
True as far as it goes, but is really likely that men, elves, and orcs (really all but hobbits) could have that many thousands of years of civilization at a stable or declining level of technology and magic, with so many wars and disruptions of bloodlines, without trying out any form of government other than a kingdom? I know elves are stubborn, but that seems a bit much, even if there is a literal Divine Right of Kings passed down from Numenor.
Yes, actually. Look at the history of say China before major Western contact, or Japan, or India, or Mesopotamia, or Ancient Egypt, or really anywhere outside Europe or extremely heavy European influence.
More importantly they’re immortal.
Maybe. However many scholars and other authors (Isaac Asimov comes to mind) have criticized this tendency in Tolkien. There’s an extent to which Middle Earth post-War and the Shire in particular are wish fulfillment. This is what Tolkien wants the world to be. For one recent take see The Anti Tolkien in the latest issue of the New Yorker which gives Michael Moorcock his say:
Or rather a middle class with values that Moorcock doesn’t like. (Probably because they don’t let him get high on claimed moral superiority.)
Although I have read and enjoyed several Moorcock novels in years past, I did not see much of substance in Moorcock’s views as described by the New Yorker blog post (FWIW, The Anti-Tolkien is a blog post; it is not in the latest print issue). In particular, the passage you quoted sounds like empty rhetoric from an aging pseudo-intellectual Marxist. Specifically, it raises several questions:
What makes Moorcock think that members of the middle class are apt to be morally bankrupt?
Are members of the middle class more apt than members of the upper and lower class to be morally bankrupt? If so, what evidence is there for this? If not, wouldn’t it be more descriptive to refer to “morally bankrupt society”?
Even if you accept that the middle class is morally bankrupt (which I do not), how is Tolkien’s “vast catalogue of names, places, magic rings, and dwarven kings” a “pernicious confirmation of the values” of that middle class? I don’t see any connection between a vast catalog of names, places, etc., and middle-class values (whatever those might be).
Not to endorse the view, but criticism of specifically the middle class is not novel: (from a comment on Paul Fussell’s Class):
This is true. In fact, reflexive bourgeoisie-bashing is so ubiquitous in some circles that it has become a cliché. This is what led me to liken Moorcock’s comment to empty pseudo-intellectual Marxist rhetoric.
In fairness, real life kings were essentially indifferent to commoners a lot of the time. Having good intentions is a good start to being a better ruler than them.
Being good isn’t enough, but being wise and good is. Tolkien may not be able to answer all those questions, because he’s probably not wise enough to make those hard decisions well, but Aragorn was.
It’s emphatically not enough. Jonathan Swift may have been wise enough to figure out certain evolutionary principles; he may have been good; he was also wrong on the facts, because science is fscking hard.
I’m not saying it wouldn’t be hard. I’m saying that being able to make the hard decisions is part of being a “wise ruler”. I admit I never finished the Lord of the Rings, so I don’t know what Tolkien actually said, but from what Martin quoted, Tolkien never said it would be easy. If anything, specifying that Aragorn was wise was suggesting that it was hard.
Yes, these are interesting questions. They’re beyond the scope of what he wanted to write, and I don’t think it’s wrong for him to ignore them. It is also right for Mr. Martin to write about them, because they are within the scope of what he wants to write.
Mitch Hedberg, on designing systems to fail gracefully
I have seen escalators sufficiently out-of-order that they were completely non-traversable.
My regular commute has been impeded by such a set of escalators (currently dismantled for repairs from fire damage) for weeks.
How?
One or more steps completely missing. Or, more commonly, the escalator blocked off because some repairmen are working on it.
‘I got an idea for sweatshops—air conditioning’ Mitch Hedberg
Development Economists are say we shouldn’t close sweatshops as they are the workers best options. I don’t see why altruists can’t pay for air conditioners to be installed in sweat shops.
Air conditioning has some cost associated with it; would the workers rather have the cost, or the cool air? It might be better to just give them the money, in which case it now competes with all other cash transfers for effectiveness.
This subsidizes the owners of sweatshops, which may have undesirable downstream effects, or set odd expectations.
Nassim Taleb, Twitter
It’s not just information age, but also freedom of speech. Many people in regimes without free speech sincerely believe that there is no crime (except by people corrupted by other countries), no drug abuse, etc., simply because they can never read about it in the newspapers. So when the regime later changes, they will believe that things got worse, because now they can read about all the bad stuff (and of course some politicians will use this bias to say “this wasn’t happening before when we had the power, so… vote for us again”).
This is something, I find a lot of people don’t realize(by virtue of never testing their boundaries). It’s not that the universe* has become suddenly maleficient, it was indifferent / mildly maleficient(think increasing entropy rule, if you prefer), we just didn’t realize it and it’s getting harder to ignore.
*-- Edit Clarification: Universe—Humans. (- being set difference here.)
The increasing entropy rule seems irrelevant, as planet Earth is not a closed system.
You are right. I was guilty of repeating from memory an oversimplified quote. The wikipedia page points out that it was misworded quote by Rudolf Clausius. Thanks for pointing out.
-Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary
“Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.”—Salman Rushdie
Wikipedia article on Alec Guinness, who played Obi-Wan Kenobi
--Hideaki Anno, “Skill Up”; (“From Newtype, April 4, p. 4, article entitled ‘Skill Up’.” Interview ~April 1995)
I imagine it would be quite hard to be happy. In a society that demands that only a certain portion of your life can contain imagination and impossibilities and robots and dinosaurs and make-believe in general, the most make-believe-y stuff has real social costs.
As a small child I remember imagining dramatic stories all around me. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that if my mind wandered quite so much today, had such a focus on the unreal and imaginative, there would be almost no place in the world at all for me. Sadness would follow in the wake of all vivid diversions.
Thank goodness television is socially acceptable! While most of it is hardly fictional at all, at least that element of life hasn’t been completely subtracted from adult society.
Susan, El Goonish Shive
-- Elon Musk
I disagree. Perhaps this is true in already well understood fields of study, but in others we do not have any trunks or branches. Trying to understand general guidelines and principles in such situation necessitates first manufacturing them without much empirical evidence, which seems like a large mistake. In my opinion, the best thinkers are those who try to use general principles and specific details simultaneously, and in turn the best of those ones tend to look at details slightly more often.
What fields do you have in mind?
I disagree. Perhaps this is true in already well understood fields of study, but in others we do not have any trunks or branches. Trying to understand general guidelines and principles in such situation necessitates first manufacturing them without much empirical evidence, which seems like a large mistake. In my opinion, the best thinkers are those who try to use general principles and specifc details simultaneously, and in turn the best of those ones tend to look at details slightly more often.
I disagree. Perhaps this is true in already well understood fields of study, but in others we do not have any trunks or branches. Trying to understand general guidelines and principles in such situation necessitates first manufacturing them without much empirical evidence, which seems like a large mistake. In my opinion, the best thinkers are those who try to use general principles and relevant details in conjunction with each other, and in turn the best of those ones are people who look at details slightly more than the guidelines.
I disagree. Perhaps this is true in already well understood fields of study, but in others we do not have any trunks or branches. Trying to understand general guidelines and principles in such situation necessitates first manufacturing them without much empirical evidence, which seems like a large mistake. In my opinion, the best thinkers are those who try to use general principles and relevant details in conjunction with each other, and the best of those thinkers tend to look at details slightly more.
Ozymandias
That’s not literally true. It’s just booing irrational people. Which is appropriate for Ozy on zher own blog, but not for this thread of useful quotes.
-Henri Poincare, Science and Hypothesis
Ralph Waldo Emerson on If You Demand Magic, Magic Won’t Help
And yet, I also have packed my backpack, embarked in the air, and woken up in Rome, and unlike Emerson have indeed been intoxicated in contemplation of the things that were. And as in Rome, so also in Florence, and Prague, and London, and the cave monasteries of Turkey, and the Alhambra, and the temples of Japan, and other places also.
In other words, YMMV.
I hope the quote didn’t come across as “travel sucks, period”. Admittedly, with the opening “Travelling is a fool’s paradise”, it’s hard for the quote to come across any other way. But my interpretation is not so much that Emerson is against travel; it’s that Emerson is against yearning for travel as the magic solution to all of your problems. No matter where you go, you bring yourself—so if the problems lie within yourself, no amount of travelling will let you escape them.
You sound like an awesome person who would love life even if you didn’t get to travel (perhaps less, but still). When you chose to set out on your adventures, what was your motivation (I would be pretty surprised if it was to “lose your sadness”)?
I wanted to see these places. There’s nothing quite like being there.
This reminds me of Socrates’ quip:
It’s a common enough classical remonstration; eg Horace’s “Skies change, not cares, for those who cross the seas.”
Nicholas Francis
This is a great quote that draws attention to a very common human mental failing—intellectual dishonesty.
“It is braver to be intellectually honest than it is to be ready to do physical battle. In the latter case, the most you risk is torture and death, in the former, you risk being held accountable for the flaws in your character, ideas, and choices. A great many men are physically brave, but intellectually cowardly, dishonest, and unfaithful to exploring the reality they secretly suspect exists. Most men shun knowledge from a fear of it.”
Le Corbusier, Campden Technical Manual 17[3].
Mitch Hedberg on fun theory and the complexity of human values.
Everest is probably an atypical example (though maybe not in the context of a joke), but Into Thin Air made it sound like base camp is a pretty unpleasant place to spend any time, because no-one really cares much about making it a nice place (and thus there is e.g. terrible hygiene, litter everywhere)
-- Edgar Dijkstra, The Fruits of Misunderstanding
I know who Dijkstra was, respect him greatly, and agree with most of that article, and indeed, most of everything he wrote. But this is something I disagree about. He would (here) have us speak of a computer’s “store” instead of its “memory”, and there were various other substitutions that he would have us do. All that that would achieve would be to develop a parallel vocabulary, one for computing machines and one for thinking beings, and an injunction to always use the right vocabulary for the right context.
What it is for a human being to try things, want things, believe things, know things, etc. is different from what it is for a program to do these things. But they also have an amount of commonality that makes insisting on separate vocabulary an unproductive ritual.
So when, for example, a compiler complains to me (must I say “issues an error message”?) that it couldn’t find a file, I want it to give me the answers to questions such as “why did you look for that file?” (i.e. show me the place where you were instructed to access it), “what were you looking for?” (i.e. show me the file name exactly as you received it), “where did you look for it?” (i.e. show me the directory search path in force at the point where you looked for it), and “why did you look there?” (i.e. show me where you got that search path from). This seems to me an entirely natural and unproblematic way of speaking, and not at all in conflict with his larger message, which is of fundamental importance for programming, that programming is a mathematical activity which, when done right, carries mathematical guarantees of correctness.
That message is especially important to the task of designing superintelligent machines.
BTW, It’s “Edsger”.
I thought the most interesting part of the quote was the proposed link between “empathizing” reasoning and operational semantics.
I don’t know if this was your intent when you chose the username, but I subconsciously prepend “Pfft.” to the beginning of all your comments and read them in a dismissive tone.
Ha, yeah that’s an unintended effect.
How so?
A computer is a mathematical machine, mathematics made physical. It is built of logic gates, devices which compute certain outputs as mathematical functions of their inputs. This is what they are designed to be, and in comparison with all the other physical devices mankind has contrived, they operate with phenomenal reliability.
Mathematics operates with absolute certainty. (Anyone quoting Eliezer’s password is invited to go away and not come back until they’ve devised a new foundation for probability theory in which P(A|A) < 1.) Physical realisations can fall short. But an ordinary desktop computer can operate for weeks at a time without any hardware glitches. If you multiply the number of gates by the clock speed by the duration, that comes to somewhere in the region of 10 to the 24th operations—approximately Avogadro’s number—every one of which worked as designed. When your program goes wrong, hardware error isn’t the way to bet.
If the basic semiconductor gate were not so reliable, if each gate failed “only” one in a million times, you would be having millions of errors every second and computing on the scale of today would hardly be possible. This is one reason we don’t use valves any more. (Another is that they’re too big.) Above a certain size, the proportion of operating time taken up by replacing burnt-out valves approaches 100%.
Programs constructed on top of that hardware are themselves mathematical objects, physically realised. When you write a program to accomplish a precisely defined task, if you get the program right, it will do the right thing every single time. It will not be “stressed” by hard inputs, as a bridge is stressed by a heavy load. It will not need to be “maintained”, as a car must be maintained. These physical metaphors do not apply to mathematical objects. A correctly written program “just works”, a hacker expression of high praise.
This is not an easy thing to accomplish. It can be accomplished, but a prerequisite is to realise that you are engaged in a mathematical activity, and to know how to approach the task as such.
The mathematical nature of the discipline was recognised from the very start by the founders of computing. Turing and von Neumann were mathematicians, and von Neumann explicitly referred back to Leibniz’s idea of a calculus ratiocinator, in the sense of both a mechanical method of reasoning and a machine for performing it. That reached its mathematical fulfilment in the late 19th and early 20th century with the development of mathematical logic, and its physical fulfilment with the development of the general purpose computer.
I also don’t think this is a concern. It’s just analogy, metaphor, figurative language, which is more or less what the human mind runs on. I also don’t think it leads to real anthropomorphization in the minds of those using it; it’s more just a useful shorthand. Compare something I overheard once about atoms of a certain reactive element “wanting” to bond with other atoms. I don’t think either party was ascribing agency to those atoms in this case; rather, “it wants X” is commonly understood as a useful shorthand for “it behaves as if it wanted X”.
Edit: see also: http://catb.org/jargon/html/anthropomorphization.html
--”Fabulous Prizes”, Dresden Codak
And, while we’re on the subject, here’s a classic:
-- Sidney Morgenbesser to B. F. Skinner
(via Eliezer, natch.)
Gary Brecher, The War Nerd
Greg Cochran
Not for the first time, someone on LW links a West Hunter page that isn’t content to make a reasonable point, but has to exaggerate that point and present it with sneering.
Cochran’s post is short, but to make it even shorter:
It’s true that Marshall’s claim about WWII soldiers isn’t trustworthy. (I haven’t spent enough time with the literature to go further and confirm the claim’s made-up bullshit vapour. But it wouldn’t surprise me.) Unfortunately Cochran has to have his cherry on top; he writes off not only Marshall but the general idea of soldiers, and people in general, finding it hard to kill other people.
Now, I first read about that idea, and about Marshall’s dodgy WWII work, in (I’m fairly sure) Randall Collins’s Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory, which quotes Marshall at length and cites him for various (alleged) results, among them the WWII statistic. According to Collins, the famous statistic “has been controversial”, though he also writes “Marshall is not presenting a statistical argument, but was summarizing his judgment”.
That’s not really good enough. But Collins doesn’t rely exclusively on Marshall — the chapter where Collins goes on & on about Marshall cites many other sources which contradict Cochran’s sarcasm & scepticism. They include five citations to affirm that a nontrivial number of soldiers soil themselves in battle, with one of those five mentioning soldiers trying to hide on the ground or under “blankets or sleeping bags”; Marshall’s predecessor Colonel Charles Ardant du Picq, who gave “questionnaires to French army officers in the 1860s, who reported a tendency for soldiers to fire wildly in the air”; John Keegan’s Face of Battle, which reveals that “eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century massed firing formations” often included NCOs pressing their swords against soldiers’ backs “to force them to hold their position”; Paddy Griffith on a “pervasiveness of fear and firing incompetence” in the US Civil War; Richard Holmes and Dave Grossman on the same “pervasiveness” “for twentieth-century wars”; a conclusion “that the level of non-firing was similar [in WWII] in all armies” from Dyer’s 1985 edition of War; Ulysses S. Grant’s description of newly equipped troops fleeing in panic on the first day of the Battle of Shiloh; and Martin Gilbert’s First World War to show that “[m]utinies in World War I occurred among all the armies that had been long in action, or had taken accumulated casualties [on the order of 100%]”.
Collins also tabulates observations from a collection of combat photographs and from Russell W. Glenn’s Reading Athena’s Dance Card, finding that more US infantry in Vietnam reported firing “Rarely” or “Sometimes” (54% in total) than “Virtually always” (46%) in “life-threatening enemy confrontations”, and that most of his photos show no troops firing at all.
I could go on. This is just the first half of chapter 2. Some of the evidence is anecdotal and could be cherry-picked, but the broad drift seems really very clear, and the rest of the book compiles further evidence that people tend to experience “confrontational tension and fear” in the face of potential violence, which leads them to back down or fumble — though competent violence can still occur when people overcome that tension & fear.
Cochran is probably right about Marshall, but probably wrong about the ease with which people kill each other. Perhaps Cochran should be less keen to call others idiots in the future.
Um, most of these examples appear to be examples of soldiers fearing for their own lives as opposed to concern about the lives of the enemy.
Failing to shoot someone out of fear is just as much a failure to shoot someone as failing to shoot someone out of concern for their life. And most of those examples are evidence of soldiers failing/refusing to fire competently at the enemy, or needing to be coerced to try to attack the enemy.
Edit: surprised that within 30 minutes the parent’s at +3 and this is at −1, especially at this time of day. How is the parent comment responsive to the claim that consistently shooting at people is hard for soldiers to do? All alienist is doing is disputing why soldiers don’t manage it, not that they don’t.
If you read through the comments in the linked article (which of course you were under no obligation to do before commenting here) you see that Cochran’s main point was that it’s silly to think that soldiers avoid killing because they have some basic aversion to doing so, although Cochran agrees that fear might cause them to not put themselves in a position where they can shoot.
Would that Cochran’s original post had focused on that specific point and on Marshall’s unreliability.
In any case, thanks for making the downvotes intelligible. Upvoted.
I see Cochran as also making the meta-point that we should be sneering at things that are obviously wrong when you look at them from an evolutionary or realist perspective, or that map blue tribe ‘what-we-want-to-be’ back to the historical past. Take this comparable aside (that I expect is more agreeable) from The Germ of Laziness:
Sounds plausible, and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with such sneering. I do ask, though, that the sneering be reserved for obviously wrong claims, and that the sneerer not simultaneously make a sneer-worthy claim of their own.
Yeah, screw those fools who think homosexuality exists.
Science is hard.
In case you aren’t aware, Cochran is one of the names behind the ‘gay germ’ hypothesis, which is basically the claim that homosexuality’s most likely cause is a pathogen of some sort, given how common it is and the negative impact it has on fertility. (An index of his posts on the subject.)
So in practice, this means you will sneer at anyone disagreeing with an idea you consider “obvious”, ie clever. The point of the Jonathan Swift link was that your prior is bad and you should feel bad:
Consider this quote:
--Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)
That there is some idea that you think is fundamental, and as a result it is overwhelmingly likely that anyone who goes up against will end in defeat, does not mean you extend that privilege to all ideas or that you lock in your current sense of obviousness.
I wouldn’t put evolution at second law status, but it seems like it should be more shameful to propose ideas that fail on basic evolutionary principles.
And if you can prove mathematically that some idea goes against evolutionary principles—rather than making an informal argument of exactly the type that Swift seems to believe rules out homosexual behavior in other animals—this would be relevant.
Sounds dubious, but I really don’t care—you’re talking about possible causes of homosexual orientation, while I linked someone denying it exists.
How is “someone denying it exists” relevant to this debate? Is that “someone” Cochran? I haven’t seen his name in the debate you linked. I don’t understand what exactly are you trying to say by posting that link.
That is a really clever mixup of different argumentation modes. That being said, Mr. Cochran strangling one of his opponents would still be only weak evidence that it is not so difficult for humans to psych themselves up to kill another human.
First of all, he hasn’t actually done it (I presume).
Secondly, we know it’s difficult, not impossible.
Thirdly, we know there are sociopaths and psychopaths who can do this without much thought, as well as perhaps normal people who have become desensitized to killing. Fortunately these are a small percentage of the populace.
There is, in fact, a large amount of research that has gone into studying the minds of people who kill: in wartime, in criminal activity, in law enforcement, and so forth; and there is a strong consensus that for most people intentional killing is hard. For example,
-- William S. Frisbee, The Psychology of Killing
If you want a more detailed look at this, including lots of references to the original Defense Department research, there are a number of good books by army officers including On Killing by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman. One of the originals is Men Against Fire by World War I Officer S. L. A Marshall. Bruce Siddle’s work, more focused on law enforcement, is also worth a look. E.g. Sharpening the Warrior’s Edge.
None of these are perfect or irrefutable evidence. For instance, the research I’m aware focuses primarily on U.S. and British troops and police officers. It’s certainly possible that this is culturally conditioned and the results might be different elsewhere. However, I’ve yet to see any strong critiques of the general consensus about the difficulty of killing in war. The best evidence we have is that killing is in fact difficult for most people, most of the time, even in war.
You find this claim all over the place; the problem with it is that comrade “S.L.A.M” is not “one of the originals”, he is the sole and only source for the claim—and he made it up. A cursory Wiki search shows:
My emphasis.
Ok. So on the one hand we’ve got a single book, later shown to have been an invention, but taken up by a huge number of people so it looks like a consensus, in the best Dark-Arts, “you have to be smart to know this”, counterintuitive-Deep-Wisdom style. And on the other hand we have a huge amount of dead people, mysteriously killed by bullets that, somehow, got fired in spite of the noted reluctance of men to do so. I propose that your accolade of “best evidence” is a bit misplaced.
This is an excellent example of the need to apply some skepticism to a counter-intuitive but neat-seeming claim, whose possession will put you inside the tribe of people who Know Neat And Counterintuitive Stuff. Sometimes the simple answer really is the right one; this is one of those times.
Let’s not overstate your case, shall we? No ‘somehow’ about it, even if 90% of soldiers didn’t want to shoot, the remaining 10% could kill a hell of a lot of people; that is the point of guns and explosives, after all—they make killing people quick and easy compared to nagging them to death.
(Where is the precise model relating known mortality rates to number of soldiers shooting, such that Marshall’s claims could have been rejected on their face solely because they conflicted with mortality rates? There is none. The majority of soldiers survive wars, after all.)
With modern automatic weapons, if their targets obligingly massed in a single spot, sure. Bolt-action rifles, less so; Civil-War-era muzzle loaders, still less.
Now, there’s a more subtle version of the argument that could be made: Maybe a lot of people were shooting to miss. That would account for the 10000-to-1 bullets-to-hits ratio, also known as “fire your weight in lead to kill a man”. But again, if people weren’t actually shooting, you’d think their officers would notice that they never needed ammunition refills.
Observe: The more people refuse to fire their rifles, the higher should be the proportion of casualties from artillery. Yet from WWII to Vietnam, we see that reports claim an increasing percentage of soldiers firing rifles, but a decreasing proportion of casualties from small arms. I propose that, instead, the proportion of rifle-firers was constant and the lethality and ubiquity of artillery was growing. Note that, to make up for an increase from 25% to 55% of rifle-firers, as is claimed from WWII to Vietnam, artillery would have to become twice as deadly just to remain on an even footing; this seems to me unlikely, even though there certainly were technical advances.
So, do you know offhand exactly how many soldiers were killed by other soldiers in all those conflicts? Do you know how fast and effective those weapons were? Do you know what the distribution and skew of killings per soldier are and how that changes from conflict to conflict? You do not know any of those factors, all of which together determine whether the Marshall estimate is plausible.
‘Marshall made everything up’ is a good argument. ‘Look, there’s lots of dead soldiers!’ is a terrible argument which is pure rhetoric.
Ceteris is never paribus. You’re just digging yourself in deeper. Those conflicts were completely different—WWII and Vietnam, seriously? You can’t think of any reasons artillery might have different results in them?
Ok, I sit corrected.
You’re vastly overstating the criticisms of S. L. A Marshall. He did not just make up his figures. His research was not an invention. He conducted hundreds of interviews with soldiers who had recently been in combat. The U.S. Army found this research quite valuable and uses it to this day. Some people don’t like his conclusions, and attempt to dispute them, but usually without attempting to collect actual data that would weigh against Marshall’s.
The Wikipedia article’s claim that “Professor Roger J. Spiller (Deputy Director of the Combat Studies Institute, US Army Command and General Staff College) demonstrated in his 1988 article, “S.L.A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire” (RUSI Journal, Winter 1988, pages 63–71), that Marshall had not actually conducted the research upon which he based his ratio-of-fire theory” appears to be false. Spiller’s article criticizes Marshall’s methodology and points out a number of weaknesses in his later accounts. However it does not claim that the interviews Marshall described did not take place. Rather it suggests that Marshall intentionally or unintentionally sometimes inflated the number of interviews he had conducted, though it still allows for hundreds to have taken place. The RUSI article doesn’t seem to be online, (I’ll try and see if JSTOR has a copy) but some relevant portions are quoted here.
I agree that Marshall’s evidence is not perfect. I’d be interested to see better evidence, and if it came to different conclusions than he did, using better research techniques, then I would update my beliefs accordingly. Until I am see such research, though I am very wary of poorly sourced ad hominem attacks.
Libgen is your friend: https://pdf.yt/d/zueukhIJDa6woF9R / https://www.dropbox.com/s/dwjrpviga6e137z/1988-spiller.pdf / http://sci-hub.org/downloads/d5cf/spiller1988.pdf
Hum! That first article is very interesting; it quotes Marshall as saying the percentage of men who fired their weapons was 15% in an average day’s action. This is very different from 15% firing their rifles at all, which is the claim usually made. So quite apart from being a fabrication, Marshall’s imaginary number is apparently even being misquoted!
Some interesting quotes:
(Emphasis in original).
Update: JSTOR does not appear to include RUSI Journal. If anyone has access to a library that does have it, please do us a favor and look it up.
Can you please link what you’re quoting from.
Here.
Thanks. -ETA I followed both the link and the links to several of Wikipedia’s sources, but no further. The stuff I saw all seems to support Rolf’s claims about S. L. A Marshall being unreliable and the primary source for most of the claims of the killing is hard side.
Isegoria claims Grossman’s claims, if not Marshall’s, is better supported by things like fighter pilot studies: http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/12/28/shoot-to-kill/#comment-64665
Fighter pilot victories in clear-air combat are rare; it follows that they are Poisson-distributed, and that you would expect to have a few extreme outliers and a great mass of apparent “non-killers” even if every pilot was doing his genuine best to kill. That is even before taking into account pilot skill, which for all we know has a very wide range.
I don’t see how that follows at all. You don’t know it was a Poisson distribution (there are lots of distributions natural phenomena follow; the negative binomial and lognormal also pop up a lot in human contexts), and even if you did, you don’t know the the relevant rate parameter lambda to know how many pilots should be expected to have 1 success, and since you’re making purely a priori arguments here rather than observing that the studies have specific flaws (eg perhaps they included pilots who never saw combat), it’s clear you’re trying to make a fully general counterargument to explain away any result those studies could have reached without knowing anything about them. (‘Oh, only .001% of pilots killed anyone? That darn Poisson!’)
The Poisson distribution is the distribution that models rare independent events. Given how involved you are with prediction and statistics, I’d expect you to know that.
Are number of fighter pilot victories, clearly, a priori, going to be independent events? That a pilot shooting down one plane is entirely independent of whether they go on to shoot down another plane? (Think about the other two distributions I mentioned and why they might be better matches...)
Distributions are model assumptions, to be checked like any other. In fact, often they are the most important and questionable assumption made in a model, which determines the conclusion; a LW example of this is Karnofsky’s statistical argument against funding existential risk, which driven entirely by the chosen distribution. As the quote goes: ‘they strain at the gnat of the prior who swallow the camel of the likelihood function’.
I personally find choice of distribution to be dangerous, which is why (when not too much more work) in my own analyses I try to use nonparametric methods: Mann-Whitney u-tests rather than t-tests, bootstraps, and at least look at graphs of histograms or residuals while I’m doing my main analysis. Distributions are not always as one expects. To give an example involving the Poisson: I was doing a little Hacker News voting experiment. One might think that a Poisson would be a perfect fit for distribution of scores—lots of voters, each one only votes on a few links out of the thousands submitted each day, they’re different voters, and votes are positive count data. One would be wrong, since while a Poisson fits better than, say, a normal, it’s grossly wrong about outliers; what actually fits much better is a mixture distribution of at least 3 sub-distributions of Poissons and possibly normals or others. (My best guess is that this mixture distribution is caused by HN’s segmented site design leading to odd dynamics in voting: the first distribution corresponds to low-scoring submissions which spend all their time on /newest, and the rest to various subpopulations of submissions which make it to the main page—although I’m not sure why there are more than 1 of those).
So no, I hope it is because of, rather than despite, my involvement with stats that I object to Rolf’s casual assumption of a particular distribution to create a fully general counterargument to explain away data he has not seen but dislikes.
Rolf addressed that point:
In particular notice that any deviations from Poisson are going to be in the direction that makes Rolf’s argument even stronger.
No, they’re not, not without even more baseless assumptions. The Poisson is not well-justified, and it’s not even conservative for Rolf’s argument. If there was a selection process in which the best pilots get to combat the most (a shocking proposition, I realize); then many more would cross the threshold of at least 1 kill than would be predicted if one incorrectly modeled kill rates as Poissons with averages. This is the sort of thing (multiple consecutive factors) which would generate other possible distributions like the lognormal, which appear all the time in human performance data like scientific publications. (‘...who swallow the camel of the likelihood function’.)
And this still doesn’t address my point that you cannot write off data you have not seen with a fully general counterargument—without very good reasons which Rolf has not done anything remotely like showing. You do not know whether that extremely low quoted rate is exactly what one would expect from pilots doing their level best to kill others without doing a lot more work to verify that a Poisson fits, what the rate parameter is, and what the distribution of pilot differences looks like; the final kill rate of pilots, just like soldiers, is the joint result of many things.
Killing them would be introducing valid evidence. Talking about it is just fictional evidence.
-- Denys L. Page (1908-1978), History and the Homeric Iliad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 57
Any context? (e.g. what the suggestion is)
A Google Books search for “positively refuted” yields the following:
“Rationality isn’t on anyone’s side, but it’s not neutral either.”—Kevin Graham
Homer Simpson, on relativity of happiness: “When something great happens to one person, everyone else’s life gets a little worse.”
Source: http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=the-simpsons&episode=s26e08
This is an anti-rationality quote, right?
I’d call it an a-rationality quote, in the sense that it’s just an observation; one backed up by evidence but with no immediate relevancy to the topic of rationality.
On second thought, it does show a kind of bias, namely the “compete-for-limited-resources” evolutionary imperative which introduced the “bias” of treating most social phenomena as zero-sum games. Bias in quotes because there is no correct baseline to compare against, tendency would probably be a better term.
But it is descriptive of how we are actually wired; perhaps it would be better if happiness were not relative, but it is.
Partially. It’s related to how most of us are in fact biased, and taken to the extreme, the consequence of our implicit thought pattern.
I think the only answer to that is, speak for yourself.
--Anita Wooley, Thomas W. Malone. and Christopher Chabris, Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others, New York Times, January 16. 2015
Possible interpretation:
If a team wants to do something smart together, the team members have to (a) communicate, or at least (b) be really good at guessing what the other team members are thinking.
communication
mind reading
I’m open to the idea that the factors informing group performance might not be identical to those informing individual performance, and it seems plausible that intra-group communication could play a strong role in that, but this is a result suspiciously amenable to the NYT’s politics. Probably deserves a grain or two of salt.
You have probably actually heard of this study already—it was in the news briefly when the Science article got published in 2010, this is just a rehash.
Anyhow, to some extent this is factor analysis smoke and mirrors—just because there’s this nice factor that correlates well with performance on group tasks doesn’t mean that the causal mechanism doesn’t go through cognitive skills. This is especially obvious in the case of gender, where it seems implausible that women improve average performance just by exuding some sort of aura. They probably do it by using skills that are distributed differently among genders and weren’t captured by the study’s emotional-perceptiveness test. So as soon as they include number of women in their c-factor, you know it’s correlational and not necessarily telling you useful actions to take (e.g. the intervention “get people to talk more equally” has no guarantee of helping, even though equal time spent talking correlates with success).
But, that said, there is this nice factor that correlates well with performance on group tasks, and if one wants a diagnostic test, and your tasks look like those in the study (e.g. brainstorming, within-group bargaining, playing checkers, designing a building), and your participants are drawn from a population similar to college students, it’s more valuable to measure social skills than it is IQ.
EDIT: Nor are they discounting intelligence. From the paper:
The correlation coefficients for intelligence are about half to 2⁄3 those for the social perceptiveness and turn-taking—and also about half to 2⁄3 what the correlation with IQ is when doing these tasks alone. this is consistent with the hypothesis that when working in groups, less of the variation depends on IQ and more of the variation between groups is due to different levels of social skills.
That’s pretty much exactly what the article, and the quoted selection, said. The improved performance of teams with more women is attributed to from gender disparity on the test for “Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible.”
Peter Watts, Echopraxia, on altruism. Well ok, I admit, not on altruism per se.
I don’t try to intimidate anybody before a fight. That’s nonsense. I intimidate people by hitting them.
-Mike Tyson
While a cute quote, I’m not sure it involves much (or any) rationality.
An expert declares one of his profession’s social rituals to be nonsense, and explains how to get the same effect the ritual is intended to evoke through a simple physical procedure. Elegant rationalism.
Alternatively, the quote says that signaling is worthless and only the application of brute force matters. Not quite as elegant.
Alternatively, he says that he doesn’t need to signal his confidence… and thereby signals confidence.
Of course, him having to actually say that signals less confidence… Say, how many turtles do you think there are on the way down? :-)
42? 3^^^3? Somewhere in there.
Well, setting aside the hipster issue of trying too hard to show how much he didn’t care, thereby betraying how much he actually did care, I sense there may be a link between that statement and the nameless twelfth virtue (“Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement”), in that, instead of making a show for the cameras before the fight, he focused on winning the fight, which was what mattered at the end of the day.
A similar example, from a Chris Farley movie:
Tommy: Let’s think about this for a sec, Ted, why do they put a guarantee on a box? Hmm, very interesting.
Ted: I’m listening.
Tommy: Here’s how I see it. A guy puts a guarantee on the box ’cause he wants you to fell all warm and toasty inside.
Ted: Yeah, makes a man feel good.
Tommy: ’Course it does. Ya think if you leave that box under your pillow at night, the Guarantee Fairy might come by and leave a quarter.
Ted: What’s your point?
Tommy: The point is, how do you know the Guarantee Fairy isn’t a crazy glue sniffer? “Building model airplanes” says the little fairy, but we’re not buying it. Next thing you know, there’s money missing off the dresser and your daughter’s knocked up, I seen it a hundred times.
Ted: But why do they put a guarantee on the box then?
Tommy: Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of shit. That’s all it is. Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for right now, for your sake, for your daughter’s sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality item from me.
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How is this a rationality quote?
If this is a joke, I love it.
If this isn’t a joke, it’s probably just a typo.
The quote was dashed by the poster.
It looks like RPMcMurphy has replaced all of their recent comments with that character.
RPMcMurphy, if you want to delete your account, you can do so by going to preferences and clicking on DELETE in the top right. You can also retract posts to protect them from being downvoted (will also keep them from being upvoted) by clicking on the button that looks kind of like Ѳ at the bottom right of your comments.
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-- Principles by Ray Dalio http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgewater-Associates-Ray-Dalio-Principles.pdf
The Great Gatsby
I always liked Fitzgerald’s portrayal of what Something to Protect feels like.
Happy New Year’s resolutions, all.
From the finale of Cosi Fan Tutte, by W. A. Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte
Gogol Bordello, Raise the Knowledge
I guess that’s partly what we’re here for, right?
Emerson
Cameron Diaz and Javier Bardem in The Counselor
Glaucon, in Plato’s Republic
Why is this a rationality quote?
Maybe for the bit about signalling in the last paragraph...? Just guessing here; perhaps Kawoomba will fill us in.
There are analogues of the classic biases in our own utility functions, it is a blind spot to hold our preferences as we perceive them to be sacrosanct. Just as we can be mistaken about the correct solution to Monty Hall, so can we be mistaken about our own values. It’s a treasure trove for rational self-analysis.
We have an easy enough time of figuring out how a religious belief is blatantly ridiculous because we find some claim it makes that’s contrary to the evidence. But say someone takes out all such obviously false claims, or take a patriot, someone who professes to just deeply care about his country, or his bat mitzvah, or her white wedding, or what have you. Even then, there is more cognitive exploration to be had there than just shrugging and saying “can’t argue with his/her utility function”.
The quote does some work in that direction. From a certain point of view, altruism is the last, most persistent bias. Far from “there is a light in the world, and we are it”—rather the final glowing ember on the bonfire of irrationality. But that’s a long post in and of itself. Shrug, if you don’t see it as a rationality quote, just downvote it.
Whose? You seem reluctant to stand by the nihilism you are preaching.
I truly am torn on the matter. LW has caused a good amount of self-modification away from that position, not in the sense of diminishing the arguments’ credence, but in the sense of “so what, that’s not the belief I want to hold” (which, while generally quite dangerous, may be necessary with a few select “holy belief cows”)*.
That personal information notwithstanding, I don’t think we should only present arguments supporting positions we are convinced of. That—given a somewhat homogeneous group composition—would amount to an echo chamber, and in any case knock out Aumann’s agreement theorem.
* Ironic, is it not? Analogous to “shut up and do the impossible” a case of instrumental versus epistemic rationality.
“It follows, therefore, that truth manifests itself...”
Benedictus De Spinoza
Rachel Haywire, Twitter concerning shirtgate.
I honestly don’t understand whether this is criticising Matt Taylor or criticising Taylor’s critics.
Seems utterly foolish either way. Matt Taylor made a mistake, he apologized, I forgot his name and am only going by the evidence of your comment. We didn’t “lose” anyone.
I agree. I only know the name ’cause I clicked through the links. Like, okay, maybe the ESA should hire someone who will say “don’t wear that shirt over in front of the cameras to give the interview.” But it really isn’t a big deal
I would argue that was his actual mistake, i.e., apologizing when he did nothing wrong.
One of the replies there is,
Reminds me of Twain’s comparison of the two Reigns of Terror.
Edit: Not to mention that we didn’t lose Matt Taylor. He still has the same job as a scientist with the ESA.
This seems to silently assume that women are not geekshamed.
Otherwise the proper comparison would be “more women driven from phys by harassment than both men and women by geekshaming”, if we want to argue that geekshaming is not a problem. We should not automatically assume that focusing public attention on a scientist’s shirt instead of their scientific results will have zero impact on geek women.
In other words, the original quote is, simply, a lie. Perhaps the “rationality” aspect is to remind people of all affiliations how readily people will lie for politics?