Rationality Quotes—September 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/down separately) unless they are strongly related/ordered.
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB—there is a separate thread for it.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
“A witty saying proves nothing.”—Voltaire
During the discussion of Pranknet on Slashdot about a month ago, I saw this comment. It reminded me of our discussions about Newcomb’s problem and superrationality.
Perpetually angry dude makes the opposite case. Never get an argument with that guy, by the way.
Yeah, looking over his blog, he never has arguments, only shouting matches. Considering his rampaging contempt for everyone who is not himself, I wonder why he even bothers to publish anything at all.
US is higher than most of non-Northern Europe when it comes to trust.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/lif_tru_peo-lifestyle-trust-people
The first theory is diversity, but trust here doesn’t seem to correspond to diversity at all—Norway and Austria are homogenous and on opposite ends. Canada and Belgium are diverse and on opposite ends.
As for other theories, socialist countries are also on both top (Scandinavia) and bottom (Austria, France). Catholic countries seem to be lower than Protestant countries, but Ireland is pretty high, and it might just be Scandinavia making this impression.
So I’m not really sure what trust correlates much with.
Which countries on that list do you call not socialist? English-speaking ones? Switzerland?
Where can we get objective information about whether people are trusting or trust-worthy, rather than what they say? The Japanese claim to be less trusting than Americans, but they are trustworthy with wallets, if not with umbrellas and bicycles.
and the angry dude argues that Americans should not trust institutions which is completely different from whether they do trust people, which is the topic of the survey and the slashdot entry.
US, Japan, and Switzerland seem less socialist than Scandinavia, Austria, and France by standard measures, right?
Questionnaire is a proxy measure, but it’s better proxy than some random blog rant.
Here are some obvious things that might reasonably correlate with trust, but don’t seem to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality
-Helen Keller
Thomas Sowell
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Anne Lamott
-Bertrand Russell
A cursory Google search doesn’t reveal the date of this quote. Do you know if it was before or after Yeats’s version of 1919? (Wikipedia claims that Yeats was inspired by Shelley...)
1933
Ah, thank you. So it is quite likely that he had read the Yeats, then.
For all I know, it could be misattributed. From a random quotable file.
According to Wikiquote, the original (from the essay collection Mortals and Others) is:
-- John Tukey
FWIW, the exact quote (from pp.13-14 of this article) is:
Your paraphrase is snappier though (as well as being less ambiguous; it’s hard to tell in the original whether Tukey intends the adjectives “vague” and “precise” to apply to the questions or the answers).
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
-Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Raymond M. Smullyan, The Tao Is Silent
S. M. Stirling, The Peshawar Lancers
Better than fairies he couldn’t photograph.
Sadly, there are other ways to make the fairies unfalsifiable. (“They must be hiding today! Maybe tomorrow!”)
-Benjamin Franklin
The real confusion begins when you make lighthouse-churches, and people start defending the religious doctrines by saying that faith-based buildings are the only possible source of warning-lights to sailors, and hey, just look at all that beautifully cylindrical architecture, so it must be a great and necessary thing to believe in [insert wacky stuff here]. Rationalizations for silly things one came to believe as a child are always ugly, because everything gets all jumbled up in people’s heads, and they don’t want to straighten it out, because that would be a thought crime.
[Sorry, was that venting a little? I get so sick of this argument, but I can’t bring myself to humor people who say it.]
-Arab proverb
Maybe it needs further explanation? Ink being the object with which books are created, and knowledge put down for others to use, you must be careful to avoid using that object directly and believing you have gained knowledge from it.
The blog post itself isn’t the great insight, nor is the Reddit software it’s running on, or the comment system, or the upvoting and downvoting. Insight can only come from the mind, and understanding the words and how they all link together into the idea being presented. The idea isn’t in the text; it’s an abstraction of the human mind.
Perhaps better summarized as, “Don’t just read: think.”
Alternatively, “Put down the RSS feed and go learn something.”
I don’t see the connection. The point of the original quote is that the medium is independent of the info it carries. You’re quote says the opposite: one particular medium (RSS) is incapable of carrying info.
Puts me in mind of this passage
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn
Better still when this kind of deep reflection doesn’t turn out to be mindless trance or faithful chanting.
“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.” (Jonathan Swift )
-Wang Yang-Ming
-Leo Rosten
That may not be the right attribution; I see in Google Books attributions to Immanuel Kant, the Talmud, Adias Ninn, Halsey P. Taylor, and Preston James. I suspect one of the non-Rosten attributions is correct—the earliest Rosten hit from 1978 has the first use of the sentence in quotes.
-- The Church of Google
(Moved from the LW/OB Rationality Quotes thread, where is was previously posted by accident)
Heh, it’s funny that you first put it in the LW/OB quotes section, because that’s actually kind of similar to an out-of-context quote I excerpted from Eliezer Yudkowsky here.
I don’t believe in the supernetural. There can be knowledge for which we do not possess the Google keywords, but to speak of knowledge that cannot be Googled even in principle is nonsense.
What of Göögle’s theorem?
And here I was trying to fit in a joke about the Fitch-Church knowability paradox.
Not familiar with that. *Goes to look that up, worshiping at the Fitch Church of Google*
And there you have your joke. :)
...said Achilles to his friend Mr Tortoise.
Roger Federer knows a hell of a lot about how to play tennis; I can’t imagine any meaningful way of indexing and searching that knowledge.
And as long as you acknowledge that this is a limitation of your own imagination (and abilities) and not that of the universe it is not nonsensical.
-- Vaclav Havel
Kip Thorne
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
If I only had a dollar for every time somebody misquoted that wonderful quote to me as “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”...
Not a misquote, just slightly out of context. And I’m fairly sure Emerson would apply ‘foolish’ to most sorts of consistency.
It omits a crucial part of the quote that results in a completely different meaning. Leaving out an adjective that it is integral to the meaning is different than omitting some minor context.
That’s why I pointed out that leaving out ‘foolish’ probably doesn’t change Emerson’s intent at all. Worrying about consistency at all is what he found troublesome—he counseled against trying to be consistent in general, and I take ‘foolish’ to be more superlative than anything.
You may be right that it doesn’t change the meaning much, in which case it’s still a misquote, but a minor one (such as using a synonym of a word instead of the actual word: correct sense, wrong words). What it definitely is not is “just slightly out of context”, since that means the utterance is missing context and as a result appears to mean something other than what was intended, which is precisely what you’re arguing has not happened.
I disagree on both points. It is not a misquote since it is entirely the words Emerson actually wrote, as he wrote them. It is out of context since there are words nearby (“context”) that were not included.
I guess we understand the phrase “out of context” differently then and have to disagree. I would never use it for leaving out a single adjective, and haven’t heard it used that way. I have only heard it used when entire clauses or sentences are omitted.
I note that wikipedia seems to agree with my interpretation. From Fallacy of Quoting Out of Context (emphasis mine):
...
Niels Bohr
Albert Einstein
Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai
John D. Norton
(I know this quote is very much a cliche—but, as a realized a long time after seeing it, it is not only a nice heuristic, but it also emphasizes the bayesian, probabilistic view of knowledge over the popperian one.)
Economic growth occurs whenever people take resources and rearrange them in ways that are more valuable. A useful metaphor for production in an economy comes from the kitchen. To create valuable final products, we mix inexpensive ingredients together according to a recipe. The cooking one can do is limited by the supply of ingredients, and most cooking in the economy produces undesirable side effects. If economic growth could be achieved only by doing more and more of the same kind of cooking, we would eventually run out of raw materials and suffer from unacceptable levels of pollution and nuisance. Human history teaches us, however, that economic growth springs from better recipes, not just from more cooking. New recipes generally produce fewer unpleasant side effects and generate more economic value per unit of raw material.
. . .
Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. The difficulty is the same one we have with compounding: possibilities do not merely add up; they multiply.
- Paul M. Romer, “Economic Growth”, The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, 2007
(Related to a theme in We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think, which is about failure to grasp the other arguments one could have considered, and to a theme in arguments about the consequences of intelligence (Expected Creative Surprises, Belief in Intelligence, Efficient Cross-Domain Optimization, Recursive Self-Improvement, Dreams of Friendliness, That Alien Message, or The AI-Box Experiment), which are about failure to grasp the strategies that something more intelligent than oneself could find.
People usually can’t feel loss of opportunities unless they are already able to imagine the details of the opportunity. To be rational, one should have a habit of making well-calibrated estimates of how much opportunity would be felt by the sort of person who would have investigated the details.)
-- Stephen Jay Gould
Do you have the context for that one? My immediate reaction is to suspect that Gould wants to rehabilitate some discarded old idea, and talks about consistency, beauty and coherence as a way of not talking about evidence and truth. But perhaps I am too suspicious.
I don’t have the context for that particular wording, but it’s a recurring theme of his essays. He felt that wrong ideas could still be instructive, and he would often write essays explaining ideas that he clearly referred to as incorrect.
His point here seems to be that the theory is already wrong, so don’t destroy the remaining value by cutting it up to extract the bits you could get from current theory. I don’t think you need to worry that he’s calling for a return to something you dislike.
— Malcolm X (By Any Means Necessary)
First the sign describes reality. Then the sign replaces reality. - Last Psychiatrist, on the role of media.
-- George Shultz.
HT: Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP.
-al-Ghazali (theologian)
Pope, Essay on Criticism
-- La Rochefoucauld
-Kakuzo Okakura
A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study.
That had better be a long conversation, a very wise person, and one damned lost field you were studying for ten years.
This is a lesswrong quote, but I think it belongs in this discussion because it’s remarkably apropos:
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Wise in comparison. The other quantifiers are hyperbole.
The quote applies insofar as the field being studied is already somewhat mapped and investigated. Programming forums are ultimately more useful than tutorials and textbooks, talking to an author more insightful than reading the 200 page thesis, and having access to a community of intelligent synthetics is much more valuable than having access to a library.
Find the right books, and it’ll probably be far more rewarding than talking to an author, simply because of the information density and better organization that you can get in written form.
An hour of reading Hennessy and Patterson’s excellent book on CPU design will teach you a hell of a lot more than six hours of classes. I speak from recent quantitative experience here, which is where I got those specific numbers. The exceptions to this rule are local: particularly hard-to-understand concepts like the Tomasulo algorithm are a lot easier to wrap your head around if you have someone to walk you through them. But for the most part, a well-written textbook can teach you better than a person talking with you.
One problem is that most textbooks just aren’t written that well. Often they’re too concerned with signaling academic status, and they forget to make the book something that people will want to read. Just because an author can go off on a tangent about graph isomorphisms doesn’t mean they should. Other times they get bogged down in obscure details up front, killing off people’s interest. There are other failure modes, too depressing to list here.
By the way, I think that one reason why wikis are so easy to learn from is because you can skip past the boring stuff until you need it. This makes reading a wiki more fun, and also leads to tab explosions, keeping you hooked. I figure that this could significantly improve on the traditional textbook model, despite all those nice things I said about it earlier in the post.
(In honor of the tab explosion, I’ve stuck in a bunch of links to pages that might be interesting.)
Only if he were an exceptionally bad writer. 200 pages contains a lot more information than you can fit into most conversations. Not to mention being more logically structured.
Of course, a conversation is more interactive and lets you ask about the things that were left unclear, as well as clear up misunderstandings… but I don’t think that anywhere near compensates.
What you could argue is that talking to the author is time more efficiently spent, as it gives you a better idea of whether her thesis is worth reading.
most people are exceptionally bad writers
How can that be the case? You apparently have ‘exceptions’ forming most of the population!
More generally, being able to talk to the author after reading the thesis is hugely valuable, because whatever was unclear in the thesis can be cleared up. But talking to the author without reading his work is fairly worthless; you won’t know what questions to ask, unless of course you’re already knowledgeable in the field.
But actually it also applies only insofar as you have already studied the field. Programming forums are great, but we’ve all seen the guy who shows up to post a tutorial question verbatim and appends “send me the code plz”, and we all understand he’s just wasting everybody’s time. You have to read the textbooks and at least seriously attempt the tutorials yourself before you can ask the right questions on the forum.
You could see that as anthropomorphizing the power of interaction.
Meh. Maybe if that wise man is Eliezer Yudkowsky. But then, calling Eliezer Yudkowsky a “wise man” is like calling the Sahara Desert a “litterbox”.
Or Chuck Norris a “tough guy”.
ETA: Grr! I can’t put underscores in people’s names anymore without adding italics!
Is it perhaps time for another round of Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts?
“Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts—September 2009”.
Just backslash escape them—type it like this: Eliezer\_Yudkowsky
ETA: this is an amusing example of “do as I say, not as I do”. What I actually typed looked like this: Eliezer\\\_Yudkowsky
I think you misunderstand the problem. I know I can override the formatting. It’s just that if I did so, it would invalidate my claim that I have software that lets me call up forum screen names with hotkeys, and replaces the spaces with underscores in forums that allow spaces in names.
In other words, people would know I was needlessly typing out their whole screen name and adding underscores, and it wasn’t just some glitchy software.
Of who is this a quote?
I believe it’s actually a Chinese proverb.
You need to be careful of supposed Chinese proverbs; I recently found that the Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times” was actually created in the fifties by Eric Frank Russell.
It has to be “may your grandchildren live in interesting times”, or the caster of the curse is as cursed as the recipient. sheesh!
Maybe the problem is that you’re focusing too much on whether the proverb is authentic Chinese rather than on whether it accurately captures reality?
-H.P. Lovecraft
It could be true, but how would anyone know?
Well it may be technically false that the human mind has this inability, but on the other hand the human mind has a remarkable ability to avoid correlating many of its contents. “Belief is not closed under implication!”
Consistency checking is NP-complete… “Compartmentalization” may be a rationalist sin, but you can’t learn anything efficiently if you have to keep checking every fact against every other fact.
That’s a pretty strong claim. Is there a proof? Or did you just mean that consistency checking is in NP?
It’s worse than that, consistency checking is undecidable. This is implied by Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem.
Well, 3-SAT is NP-complete, anyway. If consistency checking in mere propositional logic is already NP-complete, then it can’t be any easier to do consistency checking to real-world arguments that require predicate logic or other, even more complicated systems to express.
Godel Escher Bach has a section that talks about this.
One of my favorite quotes but it is definitely anti-rationalist in its orientation.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai
-Willie Mays