Rationality Quotes Thread March 2016
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
Post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you’d like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
-- Proverbs 18:2
Damn, I think I could learn a lot from this one.
Nassim Taleb
It seems to me that there’s a useful distinction between what government does and what politicians and bureaucrats do; likewise for science (and, e.g., between what the private sector does and what CEOs do; between what religion does and what clergy do; etc.).
CEOs play (at least according to caricature) a lot of golf, but the business world does not play golf. Politicians kiss babies; the government does not kiss babies. Science advances (among other ways) by the death of scientists whose ideas fail to match more recent evidence; individual scientists don’t.
Keith E. Stanovich (member of CFAR’s board of advisors) in How to Think Straight About Psychology
Tycho of Penny Arcade, on the importance of systems thinking.
Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
A high school student would say no, because by definition a molecule has more than one atom.
That depends entirely on your definition (which is the point of the quote I guess), I’ve heard people use it both ways.
The failures to grasp the meaning which are the impressive feature of our third set of protocols are, therefore, not easy to range in order. Inability to construe may have countless causes. Distractions, preconceptions, inhibitions of all kinds have their part, and putting our finger on the obstructing item is always largely guesswork. The assumption, however, that stupidity is not a simple quality, such as weight or impenetrability were once thought to be, but an effect of complex inhibitions is a long stride in a hopeful direction. The most leaden-witted blockhead thereby becomes an object of interest.
― I. A Richard, Practical Criticism- A study of literature
I feel like general stupidity does exist, in the same way that general intelligence does? Not sure what you like about this quote. The idea that biases are diverse, maybe?
General stupidity exists, but effective stupidity occurs regularly in very intelligent people. It’s easy and feels good to dismiss people who disagree with you, and are wrong, as stupid. This is sometimes true, but it closes off the possibility of uncovering biases and other problems and correcting them.
Intelligence and stupidity are both complex things with multiple causes. A “general factor” of intelligence or stupidity doesn’t take away the fact that some people are particularly good or bad at particular things for particular reasons.
Incidentally, it may be worth mentioning that the people whose work I A Richards is referring to here, who exhibited such “failure to grasp the meaning” of (in this case) some not especially obscure poetry, were undergraduate students of English at the University of Cambridge. So we’re talking about relative stupidity here; these are people selected for intelligence and with at least some interest in (and apparent aptitude for) the material. Some of their errors really are pretty stupid, though.
[EDITED to fix an inconsequential typo.]
Nick Szabo
Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Nick Szabo
Keith E. Stanovich (member of CFAR’s board of advisors) in How to Think Straight About Psychology
It seems to me it’s even worse: that when once in a while some theories say something falsifiable in principle, most psychologists don’t care, because they are more interested in learning “what X said” than whether ‘what X said’ corresponds to the territory. (Or maybe I just had shitty education.)
For example, Freud predicts that people who don’t have enough sex will instead find some other activity, such as art. On the other hand, Maslow predicts that people will first attempt to get sex, and only after they get it they will care about things like art.
So this is a rare situation where two famous psychologists were talking about the same topic, made predictions, and those predictions clearly opposed each other. And it’s like no one cares enough to make an experiment, which is guaranteed to falsify at least one of those predictions (possibly both if there is no relation between the quantity of sex and the art produced). Whichever of these two theories is right (at least in this specific aspect), its proponents should be doing the experiment, making the result popular, and rubbing it in the faces of their opponents all the time. But no one cares. And that leaves me with an impression that neither side actually cares about whether their favorite theories are true.
But the two theories predict the same observations, because art is a good strategy to get sex.
Why do you think so?
Assume we run the experiment and 60% go Maslow way, 40% go Freud way. We try to replicate and 55% go Freud way, 45% go Maslow way. The results from running the test on undergrads at Somecollege show this and the results from running the test on middle-aged adults living in Boonieville show that.
So what got falsified?
Both did. At least, each of them should make their prediction more specific, to explain why it doesn’t apply to large groups of people.
David D. Burns (on of the people who popularized CBT) in “When Panic Attacks: The New, Drug-Free Anxiety Therapy That Can Change Your Life-Broadway”
...
-http://effective-altruism.com/ea/tk/expertise_assessment/
― Pendleton Ward, Adventure Time Vol. 1
adventure time...the candy people have taught me it’s okay just to enjoy my life, I don’t have to be force for good or evil. If I’m happy, that’s good enough. I’m not a bad thing then. I’m kinda good too by default
-- Charles Kenney, “For Fighting Poverty, Cash Is Surprisingly Effective”, Bloomberg News, June 3, 2013
Once I was talking with a beggar on the street. While talking, I was also noticing how much money people were throwing him. I concluded that he makes approximately as much money as is the average salary in my country. When I asked him how he spends the money, he said he buys alcohol, and donates the rest to the church.
A girl I know has an insane aunt. The aunt spends all her disability income on buying figurines of angels. Then she has no money left for food, so her relatives bring her lunch.
Yes, if we twist the meaning of the words sufficiently, these people are poor because they don’t have enough money. By that I mean, if we would give them unlimited money, the beggar wouldn’t have to beg anymore, and the crazy aunt would always have enough money to pay for food delivery. But it is also true that other people with comparable incomes live very different lives.
Giving each of these two some kind of food-vouchers could improve their lives. Well, at least as long as they would find someone willing to trade the food-vouchers for money; which would happen quite soon.
I am not saying that these two are representative for poor people on average. Just showing how “poor people are poor because they don’t have enough money” can be kinda technically true and still hugely misleading.
For a counter-example, see the story of almost every lottery winner ever, who was poor before winning the lottery, and ended up poor again soon enough.
I know there are many cases of this, but is it as universally true as you say?
And apart from lottery winners, is there evidence that smaller windfalls are squandered in a high percentage of cases?
In the short term, giving people money makes them less poor, but in the long term, it may not be so effective.
The long term discussed in that article is multiple generations, and there’s still evidence there that wealth does transfer to children and further (e.g. the Swedish doctors). It has little to say about the relative efficacy of social programs vs. direct cash grants in alleviating poverty today.
The evidence with the Swedish doctors versus the lottery winners though, is that it’s something other than just the amount of money they have that leaves their descendants better off.
If the reason that the poor are poor is only that they don’t have enough money, then it shouldn’t be necessary to keep funneling in more money to keep them from being poor. That is, if a person has a low-paying job, but has income supplementation which gives them the same level of money as someone with a better job, then their children should be as likely to be well off as the children of the person with the better job, because both have the same access to money. But in practice this appears not to be the case.
There’s a lot of middle ground between “the poor have less money because they’re morally lacking and deserve to have as little as they do” and “the poor have less money only because they started out with less money, and the key to being able to make money is already having money.
Having worked as an educator for some persistently poverty-stricken school districts, I have to say that there being a “human capital” element is definitely attested to in my experience, and I don’t mean this simply as a euphemism for “genes.” I’ve seen plenty of intelligent, conscientious young people who are going to be seriously disadvantaged in achieving future financial success, because they
Haven’t been exposed to standards and expectations that prepare them for how hard they’ll have to work to compete with similarly intelligent people from more functional environments.
Have absorbed disadvantageous social norms about how to manage money (flaunting it via conspicuous consumption, living ahead of paychecks, not investing for future needs or building up a buffer for unforeseen situations, etc.) because these were the examples that everyone they knew who had any money set with it.
Engage in a lot of avoidable conflict, because high conflict interpersonal styles are the norm in the social circles they grew up with (but are not the norm in the social circles they’re going to have to move in in more lucrative careers.)
Have had their learning opportunities sabotaged, because even when they were capable and willing to engage in a high level of learning, they were surrounded by peers who disrupt their teachers’ attempts to create an educational environment.
...And so on.
Not just on a personal level, but on a community level, there are different reasons for being poor, and some poor communities may have very different social norms and values (see Kiryas Joel for instance,) but the norms still tend to perpetuate poverty.
I can’t claim it constitutes a large data set, but I’ve watched a couple of people in these communities regress from being financially well off (due to payouts from having won lawsuits) to being poor again in just a couple of years. And I tried to talk them out of the money management habits that were inevitably leading to that. But while they recognized my cause for concern, they made it clear that they wanted to use the money to gain a few short years living in a way that would make them pinnacles of admiration in their community. Neither of them were dumb, but they were reasoning according to the social norms they’d grown up with.
I don’t think program paternalism is necessarily a good solution, since being forced to use resources pragmatically doesn’t mean that people will learn to use their resources effectively when they have autonomy over them. But I think it’s incorrect to suppose that poor people and more affluent people in general are separated only by the amount of money they have access to, and not by any sort of cultural gaps that act to perpetuate their differences in wealth.
As far as simple wealth transfers having a lasting impact, I think it’s likely that the impact will tend to be different in different places. With the cash transfers to poverty-stricken Ugandan women, for instance, as the article says, most of them used the money to set some kind of retail operation in motion. They had the motivation to use the money entrepreneurially, but also, crucially, they had access to markets with relatively low competition and barriers to entry. Give a couple hundred thousand dollars to a poor person in an American city, and they might want to use it to start a business, but not many would be able to start a business with those resources which would turn a profit given the level of existing competition they’d have to face.
-Hal Norby, as quoted in The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? (1998), by David Brin, p. 3.
Oh no, I can’t unretract!
After attending this panel talk it hits me that lay people are way off on which experts to consult regarding AI safety and regulation.
...
-http://effective-altruism.com/ea/tk/expertise_assessment/
-P. L. Travers, author of the Mary Poppins stories, in The Paris Review No. 86 (Winter 1982).
That’s the medieval theory of art in a nutshell. CS Lewis was, of course, a medievalist. Creativity was not discovered until the 18th century. Before that, it was a word only ever applied to God.
Adventure Time
Vox Day
The closest thing to rationality content I can pull from this is “just because a thing looks good, doesn’t mean it is good”. However, the source page lists a grand total of one corrupt non-profit. You can find one bad version of anything, no matter how good or bad the whole group is. You could probably even find a hundred such examples, just from population size and base rate alone. Vox doesn’t attempt to check if he is right, he doesn’t even list a few examples. He just lists a single instance of a probably corrupt non-profit and, pleased with his own cynicism and insight, declares he they has found a pattern. This is a good example of what not to do, and an important failure mode to watch out for, but you are presenting it as though it were rational rather than a cautionary tale.
Think of it as an exercise in looking at the incentives people in various situations have. You may want to start by examening the sentence:
Look closer. It’s a comment about organizations which exist mostly for the benefits of their employees. One might call them parasites.
He lists a single “parasitic” non-profit, and then declares the entire field of non-profits to be corrupt thieves on the scale of the financial sector. This post is explicitly about his disgust with the “non-profit world”, and he pretty clearly believes that this sort of this is common despite providing no strong evidence in support of that belief. That is his mistake, generalizing from a single example with no additional evidence provided or even discussed.
It’s a quote. Most quotes generalize and don’t provide or discuss evidence.
By he I meant Vox. I read the linked post, and it makes all these mistakes. I wouldn’t expect a quote to include a full argument or evidence base, but the source ideally should.
Most quotes have a justification lurking about somewhere, either within the quote itself, or in shared experience. A quote that’s just an unsubstantiated claim shouldn’t be quoted.
“Shared experience” is the most common, I think, and is conveniently unfalsifiable.