Rationality Quotes November 2011
Here’s the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:
Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
-- Randall, XKCD #971
I noticed this too, but they’re fake homeopathic pills. They’re not really homeopathic—they have active ingredients in the same quantity as the original brand-name products they are knock-offs of, but with the word “homeopathic” added as a marketing ploy. They’re lying about lying.
John W. Gardner
I agree with the general thrust, but … even though modern western society does scorn plumbers (compared to philosophers), our pipes do hold water, and I don’t have any complaints about the overall quality of plumbing.
Our society may not have much high words of praise for excellence in plumbing (you’re more likely to talk about your hobby as a wildlife photographer than your job fixing toilets on your OK Cupid profile, even if you’re average at the first and excellent at the second), but good plumbers get more money than bad plumbers, which is enough to get quality plumbing. By contrast, good philosophers get more praise from their peers than bad philosophers do, which is both harder to evaluate and less motivating.
So I don’t think it’s a matter of humble activity / exalted activity; designing bridges and transplanting hearts are exalted activities too, and we don’t tolerate much shoddiness there.
-Persi Diaconis
By the way, Diaconis stayed at Stanford. He’s giving a public lecture on Nov. 30.
That’s a pretty cool paper; eg.
Or:
I’m glad Vaniver brought it to my attention.
Voltaire
On precision in aesthetics, metaethics:
-Rolling Stone, Interview with Beavis and Butt-Head
Gloria Steinem
This doesn’t need to be true. Accepting the truth without getting pissed off is a learnable skill.
I think, in terms of truths that “set one free,” there is a high probability of being in bondage to some delusion or malformed anxiety, and that the wrenching effect of having to overturn a lot of one’s prior beliefs is quite likely to have some anger component, even if only at whatever forces kept one in ignorance previously. In many cases it means coming to terms with the degree to which one had been used and manipulated up until the new perspective arrived. At least this mirrors my experience leaving the church, as well as in some other emotionally loaded topics.
Democritus
Certainly more convenient. I mean, you’re right there. You don’t even have to verbalize your arguments!
http://onefte.com/2011/07/17/bully-for-you/
Technically true, but that’s a horrible analogy. Bullys are still a problem if you don’t notice them. An ugly picture is completely not a problem if no one sees it, so in a way it is worse.
Isn’t this opposed to Lovecraft’s claim that nothing he could describe would be as scary as the unknown / the reader’s fears?
As well, there are a lot of shock pictures out there that were worse than what I could imagine before having seen them, and looking at them is worse than remembering them. If “worse” refers to subjective experience, then it seems obvious that closing your eyes can help.
Care to name an example? I’ve been so desensitized, I think the worst any picture could do for me is to be somewhat depressing. Lovecraft, however, is still horrifying.
You actually find Lovecraft horrifying? I read a bit (color out of space, a short about ancient lizard people being wiped out by a vengeful god, and a bunch of descriptions) and found it peculiar and sad, but not horrifying. Too much Poe as a baby, I guess.
Lovecraft directly taps into my own madness and fears. He is psychologically quite similar to me and manages to actually express how bad xenophobia and the utter indifference of the cosmos feel. Worst of all, his more madness-focused stories like The Dreams in the Witch-House directly remind me of my own periods of insanity and paranoia. So it’s really horrifying through its realism, at least for a certain kind of person.
(And he is the only one I know who does that, though I’m (intentionally) not very familiar with some related authors like Ligotti.)
Plus, violations of the natural order are much worse than anything in traditional horror. A color that doesn’t fit in the light spectrum is more terrifying and disgusting to me than serial killers, torture or 2girls1cup. Not sure I can explain that one.
Pfft. Even magenta doesn’t fit in the light spectrum. Are you terrified yet? :)
Good point. No wonder it has such a negative association.
This reminds me of an experiment I’ve wanted to do for some time, but don’t have the necessary equipment for. I’d love to see it tested by someone who do.
Take multiple light sources each shining in only one frequency, that can be dimmed, in specific triplets. Quickly eyeballing it I’d suggest [420nm, 550nm, 600nm] and [460nm, 500nm, 570nm]. using a normal white light source as a reference, first adjust the relative intensity of each triplet so the combined light appears white, then scale the combined light (probably by simply altering the distance) to the same intensity. Both lights should now appear identical. if they don’t make further minor adjustments. Look at them side by side, until you can see the colour out of space. :)
rot13 hint url: UGGC://RA.JVXVCRQVN.BET/JVXV/SVYR:PBAR-ERFCBAFR.FIT
Why do you want to do this?
Because seeing tetracromaticaly would be awesome, even if it’s only possible in contrived settings.
Do you expect that setup to feel much different than say, putting florescent and incandescent bulbs next to each other?
I think you need some special equipment to actually see tetrachromatically: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Possibility_of_human_tetrachromats
My neurology intuition has proven useful in the past, and I trust it a lot more than that wikipedia article.
Same here, though I do enjoy (some of) Lovecraft’s writing. I just don’t find it as frightening as he apparently did. When I was little, Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher and Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains literally gave me nightmares for weeks, so I must have developed some powerful mental antibodies.
Please don’t taunt the basilisk.
Or just appropriately encode the text/label the link/add appropriate warnings?
I do not have a very visual imagination, and so find it easy to forget the details of disturbing pictures, even if I saw them moments ago (forget meaning not be able to recreate in my mind, rather than not be able to recognize). Of the time when I was frequenting 4chan, I think my least favorite picture was ybghf gvg.
Search Google Images for “teratoma”.
As always when we hear the word “worse”, we need to ask ourselves, “worse on what metric?”
This reminds me of Lojban, in which the constructs meaning “good” and “bad” encourage you to specify a metric. It is still possible to say that something is “worse” without providing any detail, but I suspect most Lojban speakers would remember to provide detail if there was a chance of confusion.
Tyler Cowen, on the danger of narrative for human reasoning, TED talks (TEDxMidAtlantic) 11/5/09, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoEEDKwzNBw
One of the strengths of Apollo 13 is that it has only good guys in it, battling together against an unforeseen, mysterious and near-lethal twist of fate.
Apparently he hasn’t seen many Cohen brothers movies...
Or movies that are about relationships instead of stuff blowing up. There are plenty of good movies with plots and no bad guys.
Which isn’t to say this undermines his overall point—such movies are the exception, and interesting partly because of that—just that his language was too forceful.
There’s a mystery novel that left me incredibly angry at the author because I was expecting an interesting complex cause tying all the murders together, but there wasn’t. I’m probably a calmer person now, and for all I know, there may have been hints I was missing about what sort of story it was.
Gur Anzr bs gur Ebfr
...I think it’s a sign of the times that I can read rot13 to the extent that I know what book you said. Dammit, I was going to read that book one day.
I read Sbhpnhyg’f Craqhyhz before Gur Anzr bs gur Ebfr, so the nature of the ending was no surprise to me; but I still enjoyed the book.
Apologies. I’ve seen a post with a link to a rot13 page—I’ll see if I can make that work for future spoilers.
You still might want to read the book—it had a lot of engaging detail and characters.. That’s why I was so angry at not getting the sort of ending I wanted.
It probably isn’t a common enough affliction to have to worry about.
But yeah, I’ll pick the book up some time.
-Spock, “Court Martial”, Star Trek: The Original Series
Heh.
The universe of Star Trek could get pretty weird.
Wait...theory trumps data?
If Spock wasn’t looking then he has no data. The theory makes predictions. That’s the point of theories.
EDIT: See “Belief in the Implied Invisible”
~ Orwell
“Politics and the English Language”, 1946.
This is the exact opposite of my experience- I think wordlessly with both abstract and concrete things, and hunting for words might work for the concrete things occasionally, since they are mostly the same, but for almost all abstract things there simply does not exist any word even close to what I want to say, so surrender—the hard kind, accepting defeat and humiliation, like that class scene in MoR—and making do with unbearably clumsy, confusing and muddled metaphor is exactly what I have to learn in every case I don’t know the exact mathematical notation to formalize my thoughts.
You could try using “kind of shit” or similar as the only noun in you consciousness used to describe abstract things. E.g. “Those kinds of shit, or those kinds of shit? Hmm...the first kind of shit seems much less bad when I think about it. Pile of shit—I mean, virtue ethics—it is, then!”
Huh? How would that help me communicate wordless ideas? Just because I know what “shit” means doesn’t help the other person understand what I mean by it. If anything this’d make the problem much worse.
From the original quote I thought the problem being addressed wasn’t communication, but using a cached carving of reality despite new evidence. Something analogous to how seeing a movie sets images of a book’s characters and settings in one’s mind.
Yes, that’s the problem talking about in the OP. Then I said “I’m having exactly the opposite problem” in response to that OP.
Sorry, I misinterpreted your statement.
As for how I now think you intended it, “making do with unbearably clumsy, confusing and muddled metaphor is exactly what I have to learn in every case I don’t know the exact mathematical notation to formalize my thoughts,” I disagree to some extent, as conveying ideas has much to do with the flawed interpreters, and not just perfectly formalizing thoughts. See e.g. my misinterpretation above. ;-)
The sequence post on that is here.
That’s a different problem, and a much harder one, although the specific apple tree case I’m surprised they didn’t figure out: “I don’t know, but I have a hunch it might be between 10 and 1000. ”
If I have the notation I can explain it to other somewhat rational people who also know that notation, and might be better at explaining things than me so that others can get the idea indirectly as well. If I don’t know the notation the idea is stuck in my head forever.
I find that some of the charts used to plan software and to turn English into logical constructs match my thoughts more closely than the English itself.
Yea. Lot’s of problems thou. They tend to be domain specific, making anything in them tends to take ages due to the low brain-computer bandwidth and/or flawed interfaces, others are unlikely to understand them, etc.
-Alan Saporta
Jim Harrison
Nate Silver
From the same post:
-Avery Pennarun
[ James Gleick—Genius—The work and Life of Richard Feynman; this is a really chilling passage, which describes the moments just after Feynman’s wife has passed away, which devastated him. Somehow, this struck me.]
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, “Los Alamos from Below” (third chapter of Part 3)
Nice. This is probably where mr. Gleick got it from. The strange thing is that (I think), Feynman’s wife’s first name is Arline, not the more common Arlene. I found Gleick’s book nice in that it did attempted to look beyond some of legends/anecdotes.
I recognized it from Mr. Gleick’s remarks. As for the name, I copied the text from the free preview on Amazon.com—they spelled it Arlene in the book. Guess there was an overambitious proofreader.
If you are up to a harder read, Jagdish Mehra’s biography The Beat of a Different Drum does a better job of covering Feynman’s actual work.
Thanks—I’ll put that on my reading list. Will read some other books in between though!
Alternate explanation: The clock stopped before his wife died, but the nurse recorded 9:21 as his wife’s time of death, because she determined the time by checking the clock, not realizing it had already stopped.
Things like this always remind me to doubt clever-sounding explanations of phenomena I wouldn’t actually have predicted in advance. Obviously, “not supernatural” is a very strong bet—but the specific hypotheses? Those are less obvious.
According to this comment, he had seen the nurse pick up the clock. So there’s that.
-Terry Pratchett, Jingo
Zach Weiner, SMBC]
-John Barth, the Sot-Weed Factor
-Peter Medawar in “Does Ethology Throw Any Light on Human Behavior?”
-George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By.
I think navigators (maybe orienteers?) would be a better model than than warriors or dancers.
Would you (or anyone else) please explore this further? How would we change the way we talk about discourse?
War is something we do to win. Dance is something we do either to entertain others, or for our own enjoyment. Debate teams work like this—you’re assigned a position which you must argue, even if you don’t believe it. The performers/debaters do it some for their own pleasure, and they attract audiences who come to be entertained. My husband and I do a lot of arguing/debate for amusement, which is more like social dance in that it’s playful and designed to entertain us rather than to accomplish any other goal.
But neither of these metaphors deal with objective truth. If I win a war, a debate, or a lawsuit, it doesn’t prove my point is correct. It just means I fought or argued more skillfully or impressively. In navigation, both skill and objective truth are involved. Imagine two people who are trying to reach a destination (representing truth). They need skill to figure out how to get there, and can even compete for who gets there first (as in the sport of orienteering). Or, they can collaborate to find it together. If I confidently and stylishly navigate in the wrong direction, I won’t reach my destination. I can only get there by reading the signs correctly.
I would prefer serious argument to be more about truth-seeking and less about showing off or defeating the opponent.
I have been preferring dancers over warriors.. but navigators does ring a bell… But orienteers.. kind of too abstract for me… while we are talking of navigation how about scouts??
“Too abstract”? What exactly are you thinking of? Orienteering is one of the most concrete and immediate forms of navigation. (I did a little in high school, in the brushy woodlands common in the Mid-Atlantic region it is a real challenge.)
ADDED: How about changing the [CLOSE] button to something like DISCARD. I keep clicking on it when I want to commit an edit and losing my work.
Oops really late reply. Anyway, i meant that the similarities are not apparent at first read. In fact i was extrapolating from the Orient sense of the word.. Now i see it better, was not aware of orienteering as a sport. Thanks
-Jacques Loeb, 1906, on the discovery of the mechanism of glycolysis
I am thinking of coding up a web app for accumulating, voting, and commenting on quotes. Kind of like bash.org but much fancier.
Is that something you guys would be interested in? If so, what features would you want?
This would be free to use of course, and the site would not lock down the data (ie it would be exportable to various formats).
I am thinking there are a lot of communities that post quotes for internal use, and might be interested in a kind of unified web site for this. My initial thought is that it would be like Reddit, where each tribe/community/subculture/topic/etc gets its own subdirectory.
Are you aware of my Best of Rationality Quotes post? I’m not saying that it is directly relevant for you, but there is stuff there that might give you some inspiration, especially the weird aggregate statistics at the end.
Thanks, I was not aware of this. I would like to create something like this, but generic so every online community can use it.
.
Even if they did, would you believe them?
One of the grislier consequences of Alzheimer’s disease is that it places its victims in almost precisely this position. Yes, their minds are going. It isn’t so much that they don’t believe the diagnosis as that, by the time it can be made, they cannot understand it.
That would seem to apply only if the diagnosis is made very late. Plenty of people know about their condition and must watch as their minds steadily deteriorate. See, for example, Terry Pratchett’s “Living With Alzheimer’s” documentary.
Many Thanks! I was relying on Sherwin B. Nuland’s description of it in a chapter in his “How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter ” . That was published in 1994. I guess earlier diagnosis is feasible today.
were getting stupider. :p
There’s nothing stupid about “was” there. The subjunctive and indicative are equally grammatical in this context in modern English—informal contexts might even prefer the latter over the former.
-L’Hote on Kate Bolick’s “All the Single Ladies”
This sounds good out of context, but I think it was actually confused. The context was a complaint that ‘”marriage market” theories leave love out of the equation’. But this is a false dichotomy. It could well be that people marry out of sincerely felt love, but fall in love with “older men with resources” and “younger women with adoring gazes”, as the original article had it. The cues that cause you to fall in love are not easily accessible to introspection.
More to the point, the original article was speculating about how a demographic shift that makes women wealthier than men would affect dating culture. What does it even mean to account for human emotion here? The way the problem is set up, the abstract model is the best we can hope for. In general, when discussing big trends or large groups, we don’t have detailed information about the emotions of everyone involved. In that case, leaving those out of the model is not a failure of empiricism, it’s just doing the best with what’s available.
I think there are different contexts where this same quote makes more sense: for example you probably won’t get a very good understanding of eBay auctions by assuming that everyone involved follows a simple economic model.
--Thomas Sowell
Is idealism a different state of mind? Surely brain circuitry doesn’t change when considering true ideas.
John Adams, Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials
Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire
Bertrand Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy 1919 ( http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-construction/#Hon )
Austin Bradford Hill, “The Environment and Disease: Association or Causation?”
-- Odysseus in Odyssey
I’m confused about why it was valuable for him to be able to hear, if he wasn’t allowed to act upon information.
The point of the story is that it illustrates the power of precommitment; Odysseus made a choice in advance not to steer towards the rocks even though he knew that when the opportunity would arise he would want to steer towards them.
Why he wanted to be lashed to the mast instead of stooping his ears with wax I guess was because he desired to hear the “sweet singing”.
It was implied in myths that if you listened to the Sirens (and survived), you would learn more about yourself. Curiosity about your own true nature, fighting self-deception, etc. Very much a rationalist motivation.
Huh. Never got that. Cool.
Getting hit by basilisks can be very fun.
Pure curiosity, probably. It’s the same reason that (some) people climb mountains or poke around with rare and special rocks that glow in the dark.
For the same reason a kleptomanic may enjoy visiting a museum even where all the beautiful works of art are securely displayed. Because he could appreciate the aesthetic without knowing that his decisions at the time would destroy him.
This makes sense, but I never felt it was really implied by the story. It always sounded like there was supposed to be a practical reason for sailing the ship.
To get to the other side?
:P
Practical reason (with respect to sailing the ship) for lashing yourself to the mast.
I don’t think so—I mean, he was lashed to the mast so he couldn’t influence the sailing of the ship. And it’s not like he could shout orders, what with everyone else’s ears plugged.
When he stopped thrashing about trying to free himself so that he could go to the Sirens, the crew could know the danger had passed.
Ooo, nice!
Although potentially vulnerable, if the song left him with sufficient reason to pretend.
-Peter Denning
Jorge Luis Borges, “Another poem of gifts” (opening lines).
--Rhonda Byrne (Author of The Secret) (p. 156)
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ip/fake_explanations/
http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical
That’s a good irrationality quote—but that’s a different thing.
It was too epic not to post. I wonder what people’s emotional reactions to it are.
My rational reaction is to be sceptical of whether Rhonda Byrne’s claimed understanding of quantum physics extends to passing a finals exam.
Presumably her passing a finals exam in quantum mechanics would depend on her wanting to pass rather than her understanding. ;-)
Does “Bingo!” count as an emotional reaction? (I mean, energetic?)
That’s beautiful. Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias.
(^_^)
Rule three of Quote Thread: You don’t quote yourself on Quote Thread.
“GLaDOS can do whatever she wants, just don’t eat me.”
-- Baughn
Technically, that does count as a rationality quote. Or at least a very rational one.
-- Mark Twain
A specific instance of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, which in turn is a type of selection bias.
John Kenneth Galbraith
John M. Ford, How Much for Just the Planet?
--Thomas Sowell
American proverb
A propos:
Thales of Miletus was a philosopher—so committed was he to thinking carefully that once he was walking along contemplating deeply and thus fell into a well. The locals made fun of him, commenting that philosophers were so busy attending to the stars that they could not see what is in front of them.
Since coins were recently invented (or recently brought to Asia Minor), Thales was involved in a discussion over the power of money. His interlocutors didn’t believe that a philosopher could become rich, but he insisted that the power of the mind was paramount. To prove the power of having a reasoning mind, he devised a way of predicting weather patterns. He used this knowledge to buy up everyone’s olive presses when the weather was bad and managed to corner the market, becoming quite wealthy when a very good season followed soon after.
In “Self-poisoning of the mind” Jon Elster uses the Thales olive incident as an example of a perverse cognitive bias:
What Elster is pushing is that, since we are aware we edit reality to suit our self-images, we constantly suspect ourselves of doing so, and perversely believe the worst of ourselves on very flimsy evidence.
Also, Welcome to Less Wrong, apparently. Your handle looks familiar for some reason, so I didn’t notice you were new.
Isn’t that SisterY of The View from Hell?
Right, that SisterY. You’re probably right.
Not a fan of rhetorical questions? How about meta-jokes?
-Chuang-tzu
That’s witholding potentially important information. Also, you still have to address other people’s erroneous beliefs about their points.
No and yes.
I recall a user by that name on Overcoming Bias.
This being markdown, begin the first line of that blockquote paragraph with a greater-than sign and replace the italics tags with asterisks.
I don’t buy that Thales indeed predicted any weather patterns so well, that he became rich be cause of those pattern predictions of him. Just an urban legend from those times.
While I agree that this is the more probable explanation, I’m not sure one needs to predict the weather particularly well to know “it’ll likely be different at some point soonish”, which seems to be all he needed for the above story.
I agree. With the strong incentives for people involved in the olive trade to be as good as possible at predicting the weather, it’s hard to believe a philosopher could become better than the subject matter experts of his time; especially with the armchair methods popular at the time, and especially^2 since we still can’t predict the weather very well. Also, the story switches from “the power of money” to “the power of thought” abruptly.
Thales was arguably the first Western philosopher, and despite the ‘well’ story, he was noted for being particularly observant and empirical. The primary distinction between Thales and earlier philosophers was that where other philosophers made explanations based on supernatural forces and agents, Thales preferred explanations referring to the natural properties of objects. Notably, he was the first recorded person to study electricity.
Indeed a likely explanation—Aesop in particular was fond of writing about the exploits of Thales, and we know how often he drifted from fact for his subjects.
If you’re so rich, why aren’t you smart? -- Traditional reply. (I’m not sure it makes much sense, but then neither does the original question.)
To which, of course, the reply is that they don’t need to be, and so why waste the effort? That is, they are smart, on the level that’s important.
Oddly, this reply works equally well for the original quote.
Exactly.… to me this is always a sign of a strawman argument..
Or rather, a fully general counterargument.
Or maybe both statements are equally ridiculous.
If the only thing that’s important is money, yes.
Or if money were fungible.
“It takes money to make money.”
- Titus Maccius Plautus.
Because my utility function includes moral constraints.
is that your true reason or is it a reason that allows you to assert status over those wealthier than you?
If so, then my utility function places status/morality above wealth. Which also answers the question.;
all of the economic analysis I’ve seen indicates it is more efficient to maximize wealth and then buy what you value directly. Forgoing money because it would harm someone is probably less efficient than making money and donating to givewell.
A better phrasing might be: “If you’re so smart why aren’t you fulfilling your Goals/Utility Function”
Effort.
The Occupy Wall Street movement would like to have a word with you (or rather, with your proverb).
Have you read many of the “99%” bio-snippets? Having gone through about a hundred of them now, I am struck by nothing else save how exquisitely bad those people are at the skill of making sound economic decisions. Honestly; if the 99% is comprised of people who after two years of schooling have 60,000 in student debt knowing they have no career opportunities ahead of them … why are they doing it?
The college wage premium is large and growing.
The unemployment rate is much worse among those who do not have a college degree.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, basically.
The problem is that “college” is not an atomic thing. If you break it down by major, some are very much not worth the money and time, while others are very much worth the money and time. I mean, check out Table 7: computer software engineers with a bachelor’s degree have twice the lifetime earnings of teachers with a bachelor’s degree, who themselves barely earn more than the average person with “some college.”
And so when you hear that the number of people seeking journalism degrees is growing, you start to wonder if those people don’t know that journalism is a collapsing field, or if they don’t care.
A person enrolling in an architecture degree program in 2004 probably estimated that their employment prospects were quite good. Too bad said person graduated in 2008. Predicting job prospects at the moment of matriculation is a ticklish thing.
I have long been of the opinion that much of that is a result of privilege more than actual benefit of college education. I myself was able to find my way to an income above the national average per individual (and at that on the lower end of average for my industry) without even an Associate’s degree. (I’ve actually done this twice, in two different industries. After the housing market crashed I had to essentially start over from scratch. I made some economic strategy re-assessments after that external wrecking-ball destroyed the path I was then on, and am now once again on a track to an early retirement; it is my long-term goal to have sufficient capital reserves to be able to live comfortably off of 3% APY returns by the time I’m 55. The economic downturn delayed me from 50 to 55. And I will note that I’m doing this without engaging in entrepeneurship of any kind; my sole foray into that field demonstrated I do not have the necessary social skillset to succeed in that venue.)
And I have no student debt to pay off, at that.
My parenthetical is actually demonstrative of my point here: I have achieved all of these things not because I am especially gifted, or especially insightful, or especially privileged. I have started with little to no social safety net and have built/rebuilt myself a total of three times, once from personal failure which I assessed and acted upon to adjust as necessary, once from external failure.
The only thing I can claim to have is what Eliezer would call, I suspect, a “winning attitude”. One of my primary supergoals is, simply: “do what works.”
Whether the wage premium is a signalling issue or a skill issue, it’s still a fact.
And while I congratulate you on your own good fortune, you are generalizing from one example.
Yes but correlation isn’t causation.
(EDIT: I want to point out that the statement “going to college gets you good wages” is just as magical thinking, when expressed solely in that manner, as “It rains sometimes when I dance.” Demonstrate a causal link between the two if you want the fact of their being correlated to be treated as meaningful.)
I am expressing a general principle through a single example, yes.
You’re staring in the face of a giant availability bias.
“We are the 99%” is filled with people who can afford a webcam/camera, a computer, and internet access. Some even have gone to college. That’s vastly richer than the average human being.
But still representative of somewhere between two-thirds and four-fifths of Americans. (The computer / webcam part anyhow). Especially with the advent of camera smartphones.
We have, I suspect, a definition problem. When I state “99%” I am referring to those who describe themselves by that title.
Yet still a far cry from actually representing the 99%.
No, you’re not. You’re generalizing from the hundred or so pictures you saw on a single website that’s only tangentially related to the movement. Hence, availability bias.
99% of what, exactly? Furthermore, if 80% of a population has characteristic X, then interviewing those with characteristic X will yield patterns that would hold, all other things being equal, for 99% of said population as well—to within specific limits. (That’s what the whole notion of “statistically relevant sampling sizes” are about.)
Who said anything about it being from a single website? Who said the submitters were the ones with the computers?
Furthermore: As I just explicitly stated, by “99%” I refer *solely to those who self-apellate in this manner.
Even, thusly, if we somehow allow for an “availability bias”, the simple fact of the matter is that said bias simply isn’t sufficient to the task of overcoming the fact that I have taken a statistically relevant sampling size of the protestors who self-apellate as “99%”, and found that the overwhelming majority of them exhibit seriously poor economic planning abilities in various ways. (Not a single description on a single sign showed good planning done in by external forces. Not one. Out of one hundred. Of a movement numbered less than one hundred thousand individuals.)
I’m sorry, but you’ll just have to provide better, sounder, reasoning if you expect my beliefs on this matter to be revised in the direction you appear to insist.
Can I see your data ? I was thinking of collecting some myself, but if I can just piggy-back on your effort, then I don’t have to :-)
Well, there’s this one, but it’s just a single random sign off of a front page of one website, so it’s probably not statistically significant all by itself.
Only archived in wetware, I’m afraid. Watched enough videos (many I’m sure on youtube) where the signs were legible, and seen enough of the signs via reddit to accumulate to over 100.
… dude works for 20 years at minimum wage, and then when he gets sick with a non-acute ailment expects everyone to drop their shit and make his life better as a free ride—and that’s an example of “good planning done in by external forces”?
I think not, sir.
That summary is incorrect. He worked for 20 years at his chosen profession, lost his job, then found work at minimum wage instead of no work at all, then got sick.
Could he have saved more during those 20 years, and therefore done better? Undoubtedly. What size should an emergency fund be? Let’s ask Google:
says GetRichSlowly
says LifeHacker
says About.com Financial Planning
says Investopedia
says… um… nowhere, as far as I can tell.
This seems to leave you more vulnerable to many biases.
I don’t disagree.
He worked in some ambiguous field for 20 years until he lost his job in the economic collapse, then he started working minimum wage, and with the insurance available to him on that job he was unable to afford treatment for cancer. Cancer is among the more acute ailments one might reasonably expect ever to face; if a tumor is malignant, that is, cancerous, then if untreated, it is unusual for it to be nonfatal.
If you start completely mischaracterizing data that is held up as a counterexample to your position, it’s a good sign that you’re being controlled by your preconceptions.
This doesn’t really touch your broader point, but my understanding is that “acute)” refers to the progression of the disease—how quickly it comes on and runs its course—not its severity. Most cancers are highly lethal if untreated, but also long-lasting, making them chronic diseases.
And then found it surprising that private institutions weren’t paying his way for it, as per his own words.
In medicine, an acute disease is a disease with either or both of: # a rapid onset, as in acute infection # a short course (as opposed to a chronic course).
Common wisdom is that nobody in this country is supposed to get turned away from necessary life saving treatment due to personal inability to pay. I have been told this by EMTs myself. He is testifying that this is, in fact, incorrect.
For acute conditions.
Yup. It’s the law. No emergency medical establishment can refuse care for someone currently suffering an acute, life-threatening condition regardless of ability to pay.
See, that’s what they mean when they say “necessary life-saving treatment”.
Where people get this notion it applies to cancer therapies, I don’t know—but nobody in the medical industry has ever actually said that. They wouldn’t; it’s not true. It’s also not what the law says.
So do you think that because he was dying of something that was not rapid-onset, and couldn’t pay for treatment because he had lost his job in the economic crash and the job he was able to find in the meantime didn’t give him enough to cover it, he had only himself to blame?
Edit: I also don’t think it makes much sense to blame people for assuming that when they’re told that they won’t be turned away from treatment for necessary life saving procedures due to inability to pay, that it means what it sounds like it means.
As Desrtopa and dlthomas pointed out below, your summary of this guy’s situation is incorrect; I think that your wetware-based data collection policy may have something to do with this.
Speaking more generally, I am not sure I understand your “big picture” view. You say:
Does this mean that you’re against the very idea of having a social safety net ? Or are you merely saying that, while a safety net is a good idea, this particular person’s expectations are unreasonable ?
In that I misread where he stated he was earning minimum wage, yes. I acknowledge this.
It’s not exactly as though I planned to publish research papers on this topic. I expect that my own personal observations are replicable but they are not directly share-able.
This is no more unusual a “policy” than for anyone else who uses his or her own direct observations of a class of event to make judgments of said event. Please try not to use such loaded language.
Fair enough, you’re right, I shouldn’t have used such a loaded word.
I make no statements whatsoever about a social safety net. Which, by the way, according to that same posting has now “caught” him, although it has done so only once he was “officially” disabled. We can talk about the moral justice or expected social utility of that history some other time—because right now, in this world, it is a matter of truth that it is irrational to expect private institutions to pay for your ailments without a vested interest in doing so.
So where, precisely, is his justification for the claim “despite what you were told”? Nobody was saying that.
I believe that the OWS crowd explicitly wants to change this situation; this is one of their long-term goals. Of course, they would probably prefer it if public institutions achieved this task, not private ones. We could argue whether this is a worthy goal or not, but hopefully we can both agree that it’s an achievable one, at least in principle.
There’s a general perception in our culture that hospitals are obligated to heal the sick (I used to believe it myself until relatively recently), and that the churches provide charity and support for the same purpose. In fact, churches actively market themselves based on this latter notion.
Presumably these people started out as speaking for 99% of Americans, but now that the movement has gone international, that no longer makes sense. It’s the nature of this beast to be slightly incoherent.
You originally linked to a website called “We are the 99%”, which I had alluded to earlier. You didn’t say anything about looking at other websites, so what else was I supposed to assume?
While it’s true that they themselves may not directly own the computer, merely having access to the Internet is something that many poor people in the United States simply don’t have. That “those who describe themselves as the 99%” do not actually represent “99% of Americans” or “99% of people” is orthogonal to my point about availability bias.
To estimate any scalar quantity from a population size of even 50,000, at 95% confidence, with a 5% margin of error, one would have to sample around 380 people. You’re not even doing anything as rigorous as statistics. Nevermind that your criteria for judging “seriously poor economic planning abilities” is likely ad-hoc.
Conversely, if you want to convince anyone else about your beliefs regarding the protest movement, you’ll just have to provide actual evidence.
Uh, no that’s not what it’s saying. It’s railing against the top 1% of people that have huge capital. People who have webcams/cameras etc. are contained in the 99% of Americans. They aren’t the “average” of the 99%. Each is one of the 99% who do not have huge capital and together they make up the 99%. In other words, in order for you to have a problem with their claims, you need to show that someone who says “We are the 99%” is actually part of the top 1%.
If you prefer, they could say “I am one of the 99%,” but that’s not as catchy.
I have no idea what you’re responding to here.
paper-machine was pointing out that those who post on that blog come from a particular subset of the “99% movement”, and so only looking at people from that blog will skew your judgement of the entire mass of people.
Were you disagreeing that making inferences about a movement based on one blog constitutes availability bias?
Oh, reading through it again, I just seemed to misunderstand both people.
I haven’t read that many bio-snippets, so you may be right. My gut feeling is that the OWS protesters are mainly complaining about our lack of a social safety net and a broken political system, but I have no hard data to verify this.
That said, I think your next sentence rests on some incorrect assumptions. You say:
You are implicitly assuming that a). the primary purpose of college is to prepare you for a specific career; and that b). it is relatively easy to pick a career, put yourself through training for that career, and then reap the financial rewards. IMO both of these assumptions are wrong. I’m prepared to defend my views, if you’re interested (assuming I interpreted your comment correctly, that is).
I think the quibble is more to do with why anyone would accrue $60,000 of debt knowing they’d have limited means of repaying it.
I think that’s a fair point, but I also think that it should be possible to acquire an education without going into massive, unrepayable debt. Society as a whole would benefit if that were the case.
It is possible to get an education without going into massive unrepayable debt. The rate of $60,000 over two years (italicised in the original comment) seems to also be part of the quibble.
I think this depends on your field of study. My own education cost less than that, but by no means an order of magnitude less; and I was able to get a few scholarships to supplement the loans. This was a long time ago, however; and AFAIK the scholarships today are harder to get, and the costs are higher.
In most parts of California, the education you get at a community college is comparable to that in your first two years at a four-year institution (better in some ways, worse in others, and depends a little on your focus, of course). That cuts the cost nearly in half.
I think this depends quite strongly on the institution, as well as your area of study (as you said). FWIW, I went to a community college for two years in order to save money, just as you said. I then ended up having to to re-take several classes at the university anyway, and thus lost a lot of valuable time (and money). I could be an outlier, though.
Gotcha. It’s something you need to be careful with, but not (I think) much more so than at a university.
Your education is important. Tens of thousands of dollars? Also important. Be aware of what your goals are, how you’re meeting them, and at what cost.
Community college worked out very well for me, but I did have the advantage of living near one of the better ones.
To put it in a somewhat less glib way:
The answer to the question (“if you’re so smart then why aren’t you rich ?”) is often, “because there are many factors beyound my control that determine to my net worth, and these factors weigh a great deal more than my intelligence or work ethic”.
Sharon Fenick
Bertrand Russell
A common sentiment among the thoughtful, it seems.
I would never die for my beliefs because… screw that I would rather lie.
Is Bertrand Russell willing to die if he encounters someone with a gun who demands he agree that 2 + 2 = 5?
I am willing to lie if I encounter someone with a gun who demands I agree that 2 + 2 = 5.
Profess the belief or adopt the belief?
Deceptively clever.
Russell would have liked that one, I think.
Why? (Can you explain?)
At first glance, it looks like a misunderstanding. “I would never die for my beliefs” is unambiguous, and the “because I might be wrong” is merely a bit of explanation in case you’re wondering why he’d take that stance. So obviously, Russell would not be willing to die for “2+2=4”.
Russell, while a Philosopher of any sort, is perhaps best known for his contributions to math and logic. He is the sort of person who would have insisted that he can’t be wrong that 2+2=4.
In the case that “X because Y”, it is generally assumed that ~Y would have counterfactually resulted in ~X. It was a popular-enough way to approach the problem in the early 20th century, anyway. Thus the statement seems to imply that for any beliefs Russell can’t be wrong about, he is willing to die for them. And thus he seems to be saying that he would die for “2+2=4″, and we’re left to ponder what that would mean.
In what way is it “dying for one’s beliefs” to refuse to capitulate to a gunman about a trivial matter? I’d guess that in that situation, Russell would have perfectly good reasons left to not die for “2+2=4″.
So we might conclude that there are a lot of reasons not to die for a lot of beliefs, other than that we might be wrong about them. So that’s not Russell’s true rejection of dying for one’s beliefs.
Ah, got it. Thanks for the explanation.
Since Russell said he wouldn’t be willing to die for his beliefs because of X, it seems logical to conclude he would be willing to die if not-X. But that is absurd (as highlighted by Eliezer’s question) so Russell hadn’t given his true rejection.
… I’ll add that Russell didn’t give his true rejection but a clever one, so he does prefer cleverness over truthiness, so he would appreciate Eliezer’s rhetorical question, which was more clever than accurate (because 2+2=4 is something Russell could still possibly be wrong about.)
Did you mean that, or did you mean die for not “2+2=5”?
Seems ambiguous. I’m not sure which I meant to write. I’ll fix it to be consistent.
He’s probably talking about “ought” beliefs, not “is” beliefs. Even so...
It’s a bit late to threaten Bertrand Russell with anything, particularly a gun, considering that he died decades ago.
Barbarians shouldn’t win. At the very least, we shouldn’t surrender ahead of time.
(Brackets, then parentheses.)
I would die if I believed that would save the world, does that count?
Repeat.
Aye, sorry. It’s a good quote.
~Commissioner Pravin Lal, fictional character from Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
a comercial slogan of Pirelli Tyre Company
--Howard Marks, The Most Important Thing p.136 (about investing, but applies to other things)
Theodore Dreiser
Very much like Alexander Pope’s:
Or Terry Pratchett:
It seems like Terry Pratchett is explicitly contradicting Theodore Dreiser (IN ALL CAPS, no less).
Pratchett: “Humans need fantasy to be fully human.”
Dreiser: “Fantasy is an atavism, humans need reason to be fully human.”
Though it’s possible that Dreiser was reflecting on cognitive bias, not on fantasy.
The ALL CAPS are because it’s the character Death who is speaking here, in a voice like two concrete blocks being rubbed together, or the slamming of coffin lids.
That’s what I figured, but it still looks weird without context.
--Daniel Kahneman
From the new book, I take it, based on http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-24/bias-blindness-and-how-we-truly-think-part-1-daniel-kahneman The full quote offers an interesting debiasing strategy:
Kahneman gave a talk at Google about how and why intuition works well for us on 10 November. I am about halfway through it and so far it is marvelous.
Link.
edit The same talk (very close) at Edge transcribed plus discussion after with Cosmides and Tooby and Pinker. Link to transcript.
Klein’s proposal can also be used on arguments: suppose your argument will be found unconvincing (alternatively, suppose it’s actually wrong). What were its weak points? Unfortunately my weak point forecasting is … weak, so when back-and-forth is an option I much prefer that.
Yes, it is from the book “Thinking, fast and slow”.
Alexander Pope
— Albert Einstein, obituary for Ernst Mach (1916)
David Frum
Yeah, right.
Keyword: “conscious cynicism”.
Markus’s cynicism trumps your conscious!
/bows
His kung fu is best.
Ekman’s studies on lying nurses found about half of them leaked nothing when lying about the emotional content of films they were watching. (“Oh, these are pretty flowers, not a gruesome surgery on a burn victim.”) I don’t think ‘few’ is the way I’d put it.
I hadn’t known someone had decided to study that specifically...
Based on my experience of nursing school, I would say this ability not to leak emotional reactions is true of nurses in particular, because you do get used to seeing a lot of really gross or upsetting stuff and reacting matter-of-factly. I basically don’t experience disgust anymore. (Specification: in certain situations where most people would be disgusted, I experience pretty much no emotions, i.e. cleaning up diarrhea or changing bandages on infected wounds. There are some situations where I wouldn’t previously have been grossed out and I am now, i.e. by the idea of doing CPR without a pocket mask.) Even in the case of empathy in others’ pain, I’ve had to learn to control my emotional reactions so that I can, you know, get my work done and not be totally useless.
This is the study. A few more details (I don’t have access to the full study):
One of the reasons they decided to study it was because it was a case where they were fairly confident that the liars actually wanted to lie well and be believed. The subjects were nursing students, and were all told that their ability to keep their calm and not present disgust is necessary for nurses. They watched a pleasant film about flowers, and narrated their reaction to it while being videotaped, and then watched an unpleasant film about surgery on a burn victim, attempting to react the same way as they did to the flower film.
The thing you’re describing sounds different, though- whereas Ekman thought he had found people who hid their disgust well, perhaps he found people that didn’t actually feel disgust in the disgusting situation. The full study may have more details.
That is a belief that I recommend people consciously choose to endorse in most social contexts. I wouldn’t say it is true though, unless spoken by a three year old with respect to his peers.
An example for your side:
The link has some added snark in square brackets, but I’m not up for figuring out how to defeat markdown to include it, and anyway the snark isn’t part of the original quote.
I have no idea how you’d evaluate the average level of self-delusion.
Love it.
(And for reference, if something seems to be getting confused with markdown you can almost always fix it by throwing a “\” before the offensive character.
~CEO Nwabudike Morgan, fictional character from Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri...or is he?
Damn you beat me to that one! I loved that quote as a kid.
My favorite quotes were always the Deirdre ones.
-- Sir Humphrey Appleby
Henry St. John
Jerry Coyne
Cute, but false. Scientists have been positing “things” for centuries that a consensus of modern scientists no longer believe exist. Also, most of the controversial parts of science don’t have anything to do with what can been “seen”, but things that are only observable using specialized equipment (which would seem equivocal to the non-scientist) or when interpreted from inside an elaborate theoretical framework (which the non-scientist would likely not even understand).
I’m having trouble parsing this sentence.
It’s a sort of rebuttal to the Bible, Hebrews 11:1:
This passage is often cited as one of the key passages in the Christian religion; Christians often use it when they debate atheists.
Oh, I see. Thanks.
-- The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas.
Hmm, not sure I agree. The living now can cause great harm for the people in the future. In that regard at any given time the dead are creating harm in some sense. But the basic point seems valid. The dead at least can’t alter their activity to help more or reduce harm, the living can.
It’s the other way around: in timeless view, nether living not dead can “alter” anything, the relevant fact is that you can influence activity of the living, but not of the dead (not as you said whether the dead themselves can alter things vs. the living can alter things).
-Nick Szabo
Downvoted. Exchange does not require a common estimate of “value”, although reciprocal altruism probably does. Rational agents will undertake all exchanges which make both of them better off according to each agent’s utility function. Assuming TDT, agents which are similar to each other will also reach a Pareto optimum in a bilateral monopoly game.
Humans might sometimes be unable to agree to an exchange in a bilateral monopoly, but that need not imply any disagreement about “value”: for instance, they might disagree about bargaining positions, or using brinkmanship to extract concessions from other parties.
This seems like anthropomorphic pessimism.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stotting#Purpose, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory, http://www.cracked.com/article_19456_8-things-you-wont-believe-plants-do-when-no-ones-looking_p2.html (especially #1) and http://lesswrong.com/lw/st/anthropomorphic_optimism/.
“If you think a weakness can be turned into a strength, I hate to tell you this, but that’s another weakness.”
-- Jack Handey
“I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.”
-- Jack Handey
~CEO Nwabudike Morgan, fictional character from Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri...or is he?
Relevant video.
--Daniel Kahneman
Jacob Bronowski
-Hans Georg Fritzsche
--Abraham Lincoln
--James L. Kugel, In the Valley of the Shadow pg 156-157 (doesn’t provide any further reference)
The conclusion happens to be correct but the argument looks invalid to me. A man can smash a clock or a compass just as easily, but that doesn’t prove that these defenseless devices cannot provide useful information.
The real argument may have went something like this: “I am a very busy and violent man, who, as I have just demonstrated, is quite accurate with a deadly projectile weapon. In light of this, would you perhaps prefer to rethink your policy of holding up my entire army ?”
Similar to Solomon’s classic legal argument: “Don’t bother me with petty crap like this or I will slice your baby in half!”
I don’t think the implicit argument is anywhere near as simple as ‘anything which provides information cannot be destroyed; this bird was destroyed; QED, this bird does not provide information.’
What is it, then? A more complicated implicit argument can still fail. (I can easily imagine a situation where the behavior of birds does provide information about the enemy army over the next hill, or something.) To rule out divination you really need to bring out the big guns and rule out all mysticism. I’m not sure any participants in the story could do that.
I imagine the argument would go something like ‘Creatures usually act to preserve themselves; if the bird knew the future actions of the army, it would know about being shot by that Jew; if it knew about being shot, it would not be there (since it wants to preserve itself); the augur’s interpretation is true only if the bird knows; it was shot, so it did not know; it did not know, so the augur’s interpretation is false.’
There are ways we can rescue this if we want to make excuses for augury and I’m sure you can think of 3 or 4 counter-arguments, but why bother? It’s a good story - ‘physician, heal thyself!’
The argument was wrong even by the standards of the time. You just misunderstand the concept of divination :-) It doesn’t rely on the bird consciously knowing anything. In fact, instead of watching the bird, you can kill it and inspect its entrails. Divination works (or doesn’t) because the will of the gods leaks into the pattern of visible things (or doesn’t).
You can patch the argument easily; either the gods want their will known or not. If they don’t, then the augur is screwed; if they do, then they want the bird to survive (to the point where the augur can figure out what was meant); and so on.
The gods are not required to be helpful, especially to the sacrilegious.
No, but the people who believed in the Greek deities also typically believed those deities were heavily invested in immediate mortal conflicts and highly sensitive to slights. Those Greeks would have expected some protection for the bird or retaliation against Meshullam. Seeing none would provide evidence that the bird was not a favorite of any of their deities.
Deorum iniuriae Diis curae. This was not sarcastic or mocking in the slightest bit, as Marius points out and a reading of Herodotus will remind one.
It seems that any wrong argument for a correct conclusion has a decent chance of being patchable into a correct argument by a sufficiently smart patcher, so arguing about patchability of such arguments doesn’t make much sense.
Such runs an argument against the principle of charity, indeed, that it licenses special pleading or endless special-casing.
Nice connection! I see we had a post about that recently.
I’d just shoot the bird and carry it with me. Then whichever way I went was the right one!
-- John Carmack
~Academician Prokhor Zakharov, fictional character from Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. God I wish Zakharov was real.
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, p. 98
-Amos Tversky
David Brin
I’m all for appropriating religious language for fun, but the kind of argument David Brin makes strikes me as unhygienic. Inventing a strained interpretation of the Bible in order to support a conclusion you’ve decided on ahead of time is sinful, and I feel would actually be seen as disrespectful by most Christians. Jews like Brin do it all the time, but they’re a minority.
Compare the Creationist who writes that the theory of evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. She literally doesn’t care whether she’s right, since it’s not her true rejection, and that makes her paper more annoying to scientists than if she’d just quoted her own sacred text.
I don’t think it makes much sense to get too sensitive about Bible quotes; the context seems more like quoting poetry to me, along the lines of trawling Shakespeare for phrases to use as a title or chapter heading. There’s plenty of precedent for doing so, both theistic and nontheistic: so much so, actually, that I think the text of the Bible might be more important as a work of literature than it is as religious doctrine. After all, most of the points of any particular Christian denomination (even nominally fundamentalist ones) are derived not from a clear “thou shalt” but from one or two lines of the text filtered through a rather tortured process of interpretation, and there’s way more text than there is active doctrine.
This all goes double for the Old Testament, and triple for anything like Revelation that’s usually understood in allegorical terms.
Inventing a strained interpretation of the Bible in order to support a conclusion you’ve decided on ahead of time is sinful, as it is written: “And in the eleventh year, in the month Bul, which is the eighth month, was the house finished throughout all the parts thereof, and according to all the fashion of it. So was he seven years in building it.”
http://www.randombiblequotes.com/
That’s sloppy, even for a random quote. The immediately preceding verse is “The foundation of the temple of the LORD was laid in the fourth year, in the month of Ziv.”
11 − 7 = 4.
Whatever the flaws of the book of First Kings, failures of basic arithmetic in the literal text isn’t one of them.
I feel like this would be a bad thing if there was some truth or reality that was being distorted. But simply retelling a story in a new light to make a new point is not new, nor do I see a problem with it. For example, “Wicked” is a great retelling of “The Wizard of Oz” from the Wicked Witch of the West’s point of view. It takes the opportunity to make commentary on society, as well as the nature of story-telling.
For that matter, Methods of Rationality is a retelling of the Harry Potter cannon to tell a story that supports a particular conclusion drawn ahead of time. That’s the nature of stories. As long as one doesn’t confuse “story” with “reality”, the “telling” with the “drawing the conclusion”, then there shouldn’t be a problem.
I think this could only be called unhygienic if people took the story to be literal truth. I don’t think anyone here is in danger of that, and I suspect anyone who does think that way is unlikely to be swayed very far with Brin’s clever turn of phrase.
I thought that was the point of his talk! Wasn’t he saying, in short, “Singularitarians, even if they’re atheists, should quote the Bible when reaching out to Bible-believers?”
Yeah, but I think he was talking more of the “much of this is metaphor and can be interpreted in many ways” crowd. People who are already halfway to thinking life extension might be ok and not an unholy usurping of god’s will.
Isn’t that the job description of an apologist? I don’t think most apologists are viewed as sinful or disrespectful by others of their faith.
It always bother me when atheists argue about the right way to argue with believers. This presupposes that there is a single Right Way. Personally, I’m happy that I live in a world where there are blunt and uncompromising people like Richard Dawkins, and people who take a gentler approach. And I’m happy that there are people using David Brin’s clever Bible-quoting tricks. The combination of multiple approaches is more effective than picking one and using it consistently.
You’re just arguing that a “mixed strategy” (rather than a “pure strategy”) is better, which might well be true, in which case we should figure out which mixed strategy is the Right Way...
(I’m not sure how your comment was relevant.)
Different atheists also perform differently with different strategies. Thus, taking into account comparative advantage, unless there is a severe shortage or excess of practitioners of a strategy, or a strategy’s usefulness has been severely misjudged, the Right Way is simply for everyone to keep doing whatever they’re best at. Hence “don’t criticize each others’ strategies” rather than “75% of incendiaries should switch to being diplomats”.
On re-reading, I agree with you. I’m pretty sure that a reasonable argument can be made that closely resembles what I said, so I’m just going to post this instead of strikethrough-ifying that comment.
--John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester
~Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, “Looking God in the Eye”, fictional character from Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero
-Carl Rogers
Less redundantly,
I tried to devise a similar maxim recently: “To the honest inquirer, all surprises are pleasant ones.”
Jerry Fodor
François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes 38
~Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
~CEO Nwabudike Morgan, fictional character from Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri...or is he?
Face your fears or they will climb over your back—Odrade in Frank Herbert’s Chapterhouse: Dune
“It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy, it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either.”
-Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light
Dupe
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Which is why “X Rays” still don’t have an actual name, just a letter.
What? I thought they were Xtreeeeme Rays!
“We’ve taken too much for granted And all the time it had grown From the techno seeds we first planted Evolved a mind of its’ own”
-Judas Priest ‘Metal Gods’
Richard Feynman, “Cargo Cult Science”
Progress in reducing recidivism rates.
Teacher tests clever idea, fails.
Sometimes authorities are right.
I am thinking of coding up a web app for accumulating, voting, and commenting on quotes. Kind of like bash.org but much fancier.
Is that something you guys would be interested in? If so, what features would you want?
This would be free to use of course, and the site would not lock down the data (ie it would be exportable to various formats).
I am thinking there are a lot of communities that post quotes for internal use, and might be interested in a kind of unified web site for this. My initial thought is that it would be like Reddit, where each tribe/community/subculture/topic/etc gets its own subdirectory.
But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
> Our civilization is still in a middle stage: scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly ruled by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly ruled by reason.
Theodore Dreiser
Feynman
This is a duplicate: http://lesswrong.com/lw/7e1/rationality_quotes_september_2011/4rj0
Fine.
And? Isn’t this just the standard definition of realism?
-John Cage
Retracted: More I think about it, the less this quote makes sense.
It makes quite a bit of sense.
I know, but aren’t there valid rational reasons to be frightened of new ideas as well? It’s like neophilia.
Maybe, but it isn’t valid to be frightened of an idea purely because it is new.
Isn’t it valid to be somewhat frightened of a new medicine purely because it’s yet untested on humans?
You have additional information about the idea; you are frightened of it because it is new and it is a medicine.
Can you explain your reasoning in more detail as to why it’s “valid” to be wary of a new medicine, but it’s not “valid” to be wary of a new idea?
Keep in mind that reversed stupidity is not intelligence. That some people are stupidly afraid of new ideas doesn’t automatically make it intelligence not to be afraid of them.
There’s two components to it, really:
People perceive exposure to a bad medicine as being much harder to correct than exposure to a bad idea. It feels like you can always “just stop beleiving” if you decided something was false, even though this has been empericially been demonstrated to be much more difficult than it feels like it should be.
Further, there’s an unspoken assumption (at least for ideas-in-general) that other people will automatically ignore the 99% of the ideaspace that contains uniformly awful or irrelevant suggestions, like recomending that you increase tire pressure in your car to make it more likely to rain and other obviously wrong ideas like that. Medicine doesn’t get this benefit of the doubt, as humans don’t naturally prune their search space when it comes to complex and technical fields like medicine. It’s outside our ancestoral environment, so we’re not equiped to be able to automatically discard “obviously” bad drug ideas just from reading the chemical makeup of the medicine in question. Only with extensive evidence will a laymen even begin to entertain the idea that ingesting an unfamiliar drug would be benefical to them.
The vast majority of untested chemicals-that-would-be-medicine are harmful or at least discomfiting. The vast majority of untested words-that-would-be-ideas are nonsense or at best banal.
(That is, part of knowing it’s medicine vs knowing it’s an idea is our prior for “this is harmful”, and the relevant properties of ideas, medicine, human bodies, and human minds play a part here.)
I didn’t say that being wary (i.e. being careful of it) wasn’t valid (and of course it is perfectly valid). I said that being frightened (i.e. not going near it) wasn’t valid.
So I think we were just using those words slightly differently.
Should you be frightened of an idea purely because it is old?
No.
--Gregory Cochran
Which I would modify to:
Which based on feedback I would modify to:
Just don’t believe it. It’s a convenient thing to say when the reaction to your accusation happens to be anger. If they don’t get angry it must be true also because, um, they knew already and it isn’t surprising, etc. Also, if they run away that means they are a witch and if they stay they are a witch.
That is certainly true. Taking such a saying to heart can basically make you just another crank ranting about how this is just like what happened to Galileo.
But it is often useful to remember that making a more moderate statement can actually get you in more trouble, precisely because it seems more believable to someone who’s far away from you on the inferential chain. Thinking about it again, I see that the original quote will be more often employed in the first meaning than in this one.
Does anyone have a good quote that captures the spirit I wanted to convey?
Check the rules: “No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.”
I think you’re over 10 quotes already. Better exclude yourself from next month’s quotes as well.
Ah thank you I had forgotten about that rule. Up voted.
I know which jobs my mother worked, but that didn’t stop bullies using this line.
I would not agree even with the second statement. Do Holocaust survivors fear Holocaust deniers are telling the truth? (or insert some even more offensive and unpopular belief)
Good point.
Better?
No; when reading this I had no idea that you had (apparently) added the modified quote specifically in response to the grandparent, and thus I read the grandparent as an objection to the second version. And the objection stands.
(In fact, the grandparent actually says “I would not agree even with the second statement”, so now I’m confused: what did you change?)
Better?
For anyone having trouble following, it is a question as to whether this edit makes things clearer.
To which I would answer (having seen an earlier version): yes, better.
Overall I now, after feedback and doing some thinking, I feel it was ill thought out of me to post this quote here.
Truthfully, I’ve thought that of a lot of your recent video game quotes.
Hey I didn’t start the Sid Meier’s Alpha Centuari quote fad!
Just kidding, updating on your feedback, please don’t ever hesitate to give it since I value your opinion a bit above the average rationalist.
What about my other posts and quote posts?
None of them have been bad enough to form a cluster in my thoughts like ‘those video game quotes are getting annoying’; was there any one in particular?
Note to self: start a Warhammer 40K fad on the next month’s thread.
“Success is commemorated, failure merely remembered.”
Sadly, my copy of Rogue Trader is back at my mother’s house, but “Pain is an illusion of the body, despair an illusion of the mind” springs to mind, even though I haven’t looked at the rulebook in years.
“A small mind is easily filled with faith”, maybe?
~Commissioner Pravin Lal, “Man and Machine”, “We must Dissent”, fictional character from Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
Einstein
--Thomas Sowell
Bob Dylan (Love minus Zero / No limit)
~Caretaker Lular H’minee, “Sacrifice : Life”, fictional character from Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
vs.
~Usurper Judaa Marr, “Courage : To Question”, fictional character from Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
Where do you stand?
From personal experience, I can say that I hate both those guys, and their bullshit first-turn Ogres as well. Bah ! Bah I say !
~Academician Prokhor Zakharov, “Planet Speaks”, fictional character from Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri.
Seems like a bad strategy of trying to make the planetmind not wipe out humans. It might however preserve some human value in future universe states in those particular circumstances (where the planet mind was awakening and it was going to grow to goodhood and wipe out humans no matter what), since planet mind will probably be infected by some human memes.
I thought you were going somewhere else with that.
I thought any argument or transmittable piece of information that could convince someone to change their values was a meme.
“Don’t sell yourself to your enemy in advance, in your mind. You can only be defeated here.” He touched his hands to his temples.
Admiral Aral Vorkosigan, Mirror Dance
“Do you know that a man has only one eye which sees and registers everything; this eye, like a superb camera which takes minute pictures, very sharp, tiny—and with that picture man tells himself: ‘This time I know the reality of things,’ and he is calm for a moment. Then, slowly superimposing itself on the picture, another eye makes its appearance, invisibly, which makes an entirely different picture for him. Then our man no longer sees clearly, a struggle begins between the first and second eye, the fight is fierce, finally the second eye has the upper hand, takes over and that’s the end of it. Now it has command of the situation, the second eye can then continue its work alone and elaborate its own picture according to the laws of interior vision. This very special eye is found here,” says Matisse, pointing to his brain.
Check out “The Ecological Theory of Visual Perception” by James Gibson. The fact that it deals with visual sensory perception is merely coincidental with your quote. The real issue is that homunculus theories of perception just don’t cut the mustard. Everything about you is part of your sensory perception. I highly recommend that book; as a grad student in machine perception myself, it helped me really realize that there’s no special, sequestered perceiver inside of an entity. It’s just data mashing up against matter that filters data.
Let any one examine the wonderful self-regulating and self-adjusting contrivances which are now incorporated with the vapour-engine, let him watch the way in which it supplies itself with oil; in which it indicates its wants to those who tend it; in which, by the governor, it regulates its application of its own strength; let him look at that store-house of inertia and momentum the fly-wheel, or at the buffers on a railway carriage; let him see how those improvements are being selected for perpetuity which contain provision against the emergencies that may arise to harass the machines, and then let him think of a hundred thousand years, and the accumulated progress which they will bring unless man can be awakened to a sense of his situation, and of the doom which he is preparing for himself… we must choose between the alternative of undergoing much present suffering, or seeing ourselves gradually superseded by our own creatures, till we rank no higher in comparison with them, than the beasts of the field with ourselves...
There is reason to hope that the machines will use us kindly, for their existence will be in a great measure dependent upon ours; they will rule us with a rod of iron, but they will not eat us; they will not only require our services in the reproduction and education of their young, but also in waiting upon them as servants; in gathering food for them, and feeding them; in restoring them to health when they are sick; and in either burying their dead or working up their deceased members into new forms of mechanical existence.
-- Samuel Butler, Darwin Among the Machines 1863
Voltaire
duplicate
Huh. Weird that my Google site search didn’t turn it up, then.
Probably the different translations for “saying”/”quote”.
What, if anything, does that mean? And who is it quoted from?
Ad meme-inem means ‘against the meme’, and I made up the quote.
There is so much wrong with that sentence.
?
-1 for being non-specific. E.g., bad neology, quoting myself...?
I didn’t downvote that particular comment, but it’s a horrible neologism that doesn’t need to exist, quoting yourself is explicitly prohibited in the rules on the main post (second on the list), and just saying something doesn’t make it a quotation.
‘Ad meme-inem’ does not mean ‘against the meme’ any more than ‘ad sandwich-inem’ means ‘against the sandwich’.
‘Ad hominem’ literally means ‘to the man’ in Latin. ‘Ad’ means ‘to the’, and ‘hominem’ means ‘the man (who is the object of this sentence)’.
‘Meme’ is a word of Greek origin, so it doesn’t really belong in a Latin expression. I would guess a suitable Latin substitute would be ‘ratio’, meaning reasoning or idea, which would decline to ‘rationem’ in this context. A more suitable Latin version of your sentiment would therefore be ‘ad rationem’; you are taking the argument to the idea.
You wouldn’t see this on a list of logical fallacies, though, because it isn’t one.
Guilty on all counts.
When you’re in a hole, rule #1 - stop digging.
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