Rationality Quotes—April 2009
A monthly thread for posting any interesting rationality-related quotes you’ve seen recently on the Internet, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages.
Please post all quotes separately (so that they can be voted up (or down) separately) unless they are strongly related/ordered.
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB—if we do this, there should be a separate thread for it.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
-- The Big Bang Theory
-- Randall Munroe
s/Monroe/Munroe/
(Tried valiantly but unsuccessfully to make that link to http://xkcd.com/about/.)
Done.
-- E. B. White
Ah, the investment-or-consumption conundrum.
Aristotle
That is an interesting contrast with Spinoza’s view that all ideas enter the mind as beliefs, and that mere apprehension is achieved by diminishing something about the idea believed.
I don’t think it’s a contrast. The point is that it takes practice to do the necessary diminishing.
Spinoza was ahead of his time: there’s more recent psychological research confirming that when you hear a statement—even if the context makes it clear that no one is seriously telling you it’s true—the effect is to make you believe it more; and that this effect is stronger if you’re having to use more of your brain for some other task at the same time. I forget all the details, but I think there was some discussion of this on Overcoming Bias 6-18 months ago (90% confidence interval).
Oh, that’s a good point. I was assuming Aristotle was commending people who could hear it without coming to believe it, but it could easily be that he is commending people who diminish their belief rapidly, and acquire a state of mere apprehension.
-- Confusion, Why functional programming doesn’t catch on
Bertrand Russell, ‘Introduction’, in Sceptical Essays, London, 1928
Sean M Burke
-- Richard Dawkins
-- E.T. Jaynes, Probability Theory as Logic [pdf].
-- Ian McEwan, Enduring Love (1998, p. 181)
--Daniel Dennett
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr
Alas, even those who are governed by reason take the chance that someday a sunken fact will rip the bottom out of their boat.
The odds are only somewhat less for this happening to those governed by reason.
-- John F. Kennedy
(For those interested, I’m pulling most of these quotes from Rational Choice in an Uncertain World by Robyn Dawes, which I just began)
If you don’t know about relative motion and inertia, then it does seem like the sun moves around the earth (even when you know, it still looks that way). Prior to the “Copernican” revolution, it was generally thought that our sense experience of everyday life was sufficient to expose the truth to us. Those two things combined make a major roadblock in establishing that the earth rotates.
Now we can fully appreciate that it doesn’t even make sense to make an absolute statement either way. If earth is taken to be stationary, then the sun does move around it (interestingly, this was Tycho Brahe’s solution to the problem of shifting to a helio-centric view.)
There’s a better version of this discussion—Anscombe’s reply, for example, is worth quoting: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2p1/a_failure_to_evaluate_returnontime_fallacy/2l29?c=1
Francis Bacon
John McCarthy
“Faced with the choice of changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” -- John Kenneth Galbraith
Repeat.
--Aldous Huxley
Philip K. Dick
“Trying to be happy is like trying to build a machine for which the only specification is that it should run noiselessly.” -- (unknown)
“Fifth Law of Decision Making: Decisions are justified by benefits to the organization; they are made by considering benefits to the decision makers.”—Archibald Putt
-- Bertrand Russell in Faith and Mountains
-- Ben Casnocha
When the spiritual teacher and his disciples began their evening meditation, the cat who lived in the monastery made such noise that it distracted them. So the teacher ordered that the cat be tied up during the evening practice. Years later, when the teacher died, the cat continued to be tied up during the meditation session. And when the cat eventually died, another cat was brought to the monastery and tied up. Centuries later, learned descendants of the spiritual teacher wrote scholarly treatises about the religious significance of tying up a cat for meditation practice.
-- Zen Stories to Tell Your Neighbors http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/zenstory/ritualcat.html
Welcome! Don’t forget to post on the welcome thread
-- William T. Powers
“They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” -- Carl Sagan
You’re posting more than five items here.
(But it also looks to me like someone is creating multiple accounts, coming through, and downvoting all recent comments. Other users, please look over recent comments and repair if this is the case.)
Mea culpa! Apparently I’m blind. I deleted all but the 5 highest voted quotes I had added.
I get the same sense.
“Science is interesting and if you don’t agree, you can fuck off.”
-- Richard Dawkins quoting a former editor of New Scientist magazine.
Funny, yes, but rational? Hardly.
“People will then often say, ‘But surely it’s better to remain an Agnostic just in case?’ This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I’ve been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would choose not to worship him anyway.)” —Douglas Adams
-- the Agnostic’s Prayer, by Roger Zelazny
“I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”
God (presumably), Revelation 3:16
Yes, this is a reasonable rationality quote. However, can we discuss the idea behind it because it’s not entirely clear to me.
If the person maintains that there is any possibility—as indicated by his “just in case”, then is he not, necessarily an agnostic? What is so wrong about choosing the correct word? He doesn’t believe in God but believes he could be wrong: he’s an agnostic atheist.
Q: Am I being down-voted because I’m wrong? Am I beyond help??
To say that you’re agnostic about something can mean two things: That you’re not 100% certain, or that you’re (approximately) 50% certain. If you’re using the first meaning, nothing you’ve said is wrong… but it is extremely pedantic. It’s true we can’t be 100% certain that there is no God, but it’s also true that we can’t be 100% certain about any of our beliefs except perhaps mathematical truths. Would you go around saying you’re agnostic about the possibility that Obama is Satan in disguise, or the possibility that the keyboard in front of you is actually a specimen of an as-of-yet undiscovered species of animals with keyboard-mimicry capabilities? Of course you wouldn’t. So why would you bother mentioning your agnosticism about God?
Of course, there are some people who really are agnostic about God, in the second sense of ‘agnostic’. They’re wrong, but at least they’re not being pedantic.
What annoys atheists like me is those who take advantage of the dual meaning of ‘agnostic’ to make us look like overconfident fools: They’ll say that no one can know “with absolute certainty” that God doesn’t exist and that it is therefore arrogant to believe that he doesn’t exist. To someone who hasn’t come to terms with the inherently probabilistic nature of knowledge, this can sound like a convincing argument, but to the rest of us it can be rather infuriating.
Thank you. In the future (LW will get this question again) I think a link to this comment would be most helpful.
“Agnostic,” as used here and as criticized by Adams, is most often a weasel word used by atheists who believe atheism necessarily requires a god-hating, Hitchens-esque attitude towards religion and do not identify with that, or who are afraid to admit to their atheism for social reasons, or out of fear that they are wrong and god will punish them (and that calling themselves “agnostics” instead of “atheists” will somehow prevent god from punishing them, the absurdity of which is Adam’s point, obviously.
Interestingly, this is not the original meaning of agnostic. A “gnostic” believes that the question “Is there a god?” is discoverable or knowable. An “agnostic” believes that it is unknowable or undiscoverable. Thus, an agnostic atheist is one who does not believe there is a god and believes we can never (fundamentally, not just practically) know if there is one or not. The person you would describe is just an atheist, and probably a gnostic one.
I think the vast majority of the atheists in this community believe they could be wrong, they just assign a very, very low probability to it, particularly with respect to certain specifications of god.
See “The Fallacy of Gray”.
“Agnostic,” as used here and as criticized by Adams, is most often a weasel word used by atheists who believe atheism necessarily requires a god-hating, Hitchens-esque attitude towards religion and do not identify with that, or who are afraid to admit to their atheism for social reasons, or out of fear that they are wrong and god will punish them (and that calling themselves “agnostics” instead of “atheists” will somehow prevent god from punishing them, the absurdity of which is Adam’s point, obviously.
Interestingly, this is not the original meaning of agnostic. A “gnostic” believes that the question “Is there a god?” is discoverable or knowable. An “agnostic” believes that it is unknowable or undiscoverable. Thus, an agnostic atheist is one who does not believe there is a god and believes we can never (fundamentally, not just practically) know if there is one or not. The person you would describe is just an atheist, and probably a gnostic one.
I think the vast majority of the atheists in this community believe they could be wrong, they just assign a very, very low probability to it, particularly with respect to certain specifications of god.
-- Scott Adams
Information wants to be anthropomorphized. ~ Anonymous
Don’t anthropomorphize computers. They hate that.
Over on Hacker News mechanical_fish explains science
-E. O. Wilson
“[T]he purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity.”—Calvin, Bill Watterson’s “Calvin and Hobbes”
“Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned.” —Avicenna, Medieval Philosopher
This quote is amusing, but it has always made me wonder… if this is a good translation, then did Avicenna really not understand the law of non-contradiction? Because one who denies that p^~p is a contradiction does not necessarily assert that p and ~p are the same.
What does one mean when one denies the truth of ~(p^~p)? I would guess the person means that this statement is not always true, and thus there exists a p for which this statement is false. Which would mean that there is a p for which p and ~p are simultaneously true.
Of course this doesn’t mean that the person believes that “to be beaten is the same as not to be beaten”, but it’s an amusing quote.
Alan Perlis (concerning computer programs, but I think the same is commonly true elsewhere)
-- Keith Stanovich, The Robot’s Rebellion (p. xii)
--K. Eric Drexler
Philosophy easily triumphs over past and future evils. But present ones, prevail over it.
Maxim 22 François de La Rochefoucauld
-- Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan
“Even in the games of children there are things to interest the greatest mathematician.” G.W. Leibniz
“Dear is Plato, dearer still is truth.”
-Aristotle
There will always be a large difference between those who’d ask themselves “why won’t things work as they are meant to” and those asking themselves “how could I get them to work”. For the moment being, the human world belongs to those who would ask “why”. But the future belongs, necessarily, to those who’d ask themselves “how”.
Bernard Werber
And a few interesting reversed proverbs and quotes that ring truer than the original ones there (for those who can read French).
Like :
In doubt, abstain !
In doubt, search further !
“This isn’t right. This isn’t even wrong.” -- Wolfgang Pauli, on a paper submitted by a physicist colleague
“On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”
Charles Babbage
I remember someone on slashdot replied to that quote by saying, basically, If you’re a mid-19th century member of Parliament, and you’re presented with a machine design you don’t understand (and don’t expect to), by a respectable person asking for money, but you have a basically non-mysterious view of the world, what kinds of questions can you ask to determine whether the idea is scam? The question Babbage complains about is an excellent one.
If the designer claims it can get the right answers no matter what you’ve input into the machine, thus relying on reading your mind, you can know it’s just a crude attempt at scamming you.
I suspect that’s giving mid-19th century members of Parliament way too much credit.
Reminds me of this, can’t remember where it’s from
“That’s too confused even to be wrong. Yes, every statement must evaluate to true or false, but that won’t even compile.”
No, it’s false.
Reposting from the Open Thread:
From the Profit by “Kehlog Albran”:
-- John Searle
Voted this up, but of course Searle’s dog was selected for chasing things similar enough to tennis balls.
I am not looking for intelligent disagreement any longer.… What I am looking for is intelligent agreement. ~ Ayn Rand
-- St. Paul. (Phillipians 4:8)
(Yes, yes, someone who had a major hand in creating Christianity. I know. As context, I first encountered these words in the 1999 “Doomwatch” pilot, where they are spoken at the funeral of Dr Quist, and then googled it.)
--Arthur Schopenhauer
--Goethe
Not exactly a quote, but close enough—http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1993-02-07/
Otto Neurath, ‘The Scientific Conception of the World: the Vienna Circle’, in Marie Neurath and Robert S. Cohen (eds.), Otto Neurath: Empiricism and Sociology, Dordrecht, 1973, p. 306
“I have no need of that hypothesis.”—Laplace to Napoleon
Fifth and last.
-- Anon
As this got voted down, perhaps some commentary is in order. This quote is from a juggling forum a long time ago, and is in fact about juggling. But I also read it as a parallel of the twelfth virtue of rationality.
The juggler’s task is to entertain his audience, and if he fails, it is futile for him to protest that he can do many tricks. It is not enough to master many techniques. They must be used to achieve the result that the techniques aim at.
.
Bertrand Russell, ‘Mysticism and Logic’, in John G. Slater (ed.), The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, London, 1986, vol. 8, p. 33
-- Buddhist saying
I wish I loved the Human Race; I wish I loved its silly face; I wish I liked the way it walks; I wish I liked the way it talks; And when I’m introduced to one, I wish I thought “What Jolly Fun!”
~Sir Walter A Raleigh
“The First Law of Innovation Management: Management by objectives is no better than the objectives.”—Archibald Putt
--Richard Feynman
It’s worth including the whole sentence:
--Avril Lavigne
--Anonymous
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, New York, 1945, p. 816
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, by David Hume
-- http://www.necronomi.com/projects/amor/
del
In a manner which matches the fortuity, if not the consequence, of Archimedes’ bath and Newton’s apple, the [3.6 million year old] fossil footprints were eventually noticed one evening in September 1976 by the paleontologist Andrew Hill, who fell while avoiding a ball of elephant dung hurled at him by the ecologist David Western.
~John Reader, Missing Links: The Hunt for Earliest Man
“Never believe a thing simply because you want it to be true.”—Diax
‘The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.’
Thomas Jefferson
I had recourse to use this one recently.
Quoting XKCD for cheap points Eliezer—I’ll have to pull one of those out next month!
-- Eamon Collins, terrorist-turned-informer, from his memoir Killing Rage
“Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.”—David Hume
Note about the selection of this quote: While I am not inclined towards the position that reason is (and ought to be) slave to the passions, I considered this a good quote on the topic of rationality because it concisely presents one of the most fundamental challenges for rationalism as such.
George Zebrowski
Thomas Henry Huxley
Jacob Bernoulli
-- Terence Kelly
“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.” -- Donald Knuth
“I don’t like spinach and I’m glad I don’t because if I liked it I’d eat it, and I just hate it.” -- (unknown)
“First Law of Advice: The correct advice to give is the advice that is desired.”—Archibald Putt
In context:
(The rest of the chapter is not relevant.)
Don’t . . . get any of that on me please. Ick.
Really? −4 for not liking a defense of marketing sophistry? One which literally noted “Advertise the color” as a positive virtue?
Sorry, if that’s not favoring the darkside, I’m not sure how you’re defining ‘darkside’, and karma around here is way too arbitrary - {G}. I will concede to a bias against marketing as a solution to anything—the marketing textbook I was subjected to in college was the most self-important ego-centric defense of a field I’ve ever seen - {G}.
Jonnan
The best intelligence test is what we do with our leisure.
Dr Laurence J Peter
There are other comments above that are just as bad (Goethe, Adams, Casnocha whose statements I generally like, Feynman who statements I almost always dislike) but I will pick on this one.
These quotes aren’t really about rationality and the awesome power of an effective tool. They’re about the smugness of being right. I’d say leave your superiority out of it, and prefer statements that balance the power of the tool with the humility of being human (Russell, Confusion, Munroe, Maxim 22).
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” -- Richard Feynman
-- Wittgenstein
He that uses his words loosely and unsteadily will either not be minded or not understood. - John Locke
“To understand the secret laws and relations of those high faculties of thought by which all beyond the merely perceptive knowledge of the world and of ourselves is attained or matures, is an object which does not stand in need of commendation to a rational mind.”
-George Boole
“It is curious how often you humans manage to obtain that which you do not want.”
-Spock
To conquer Chaos one must Learn, To maintain Stability one must Know, The dual struggle can be exhausting. —Donald Kingsbury
Ludwig Wittgentstein
--from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
We never desire passionately what we desire by reason alone.
La Rochefoucauld
(In Markdown, you need to use an underscore instead of an or ; see http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#em )
deleted
The citation is taken from “Brinkmanship in Business”[pdf]. The cited assertion is actually a mistake, as it presupposes that the right thing to do in the Ultimatum game is to accept any amount offered to you, and never punish the unfair dealer. The whole document is a lesson in Dark Arts.
del
I like the phrase. The document is written to profess a mistaken position about how to deceive, and as a result it becomes a deceptive lesson in deception, Dark Side Epistemology incarnate.
del
No, he might be right about how people in business react “rationally”, and I wouldn’t know anything about that.
del
You may give solid advice, accompanying it with ridiculous rationalization. The bottom line is correct, but the reasons you put above it are not. So, in this case, I assume that the practical advice he gives might be reasonable, but the description of why it works is not.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Eliezer Yudkowsky, Creating Friendly AI, 2001
“As far as I know, this computer has never had an undetected error.” -- (unknown)
-- http://www.necronomi.com/projects/amor/
“After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting.”
-Spock
“People are limited in their ability to integrate many different pieces of evidence. Computers are not.” -- Daphne Koller
“Information wants to be WRONG!”—Sam & Max: Moai Better Blues
“Eat shit. 50 million flies can’t be wrong.” -- (unknown)