Rationality Quotes July 2011
Here’s the new quotes thread.
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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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.
Slavoj Zizek
This puts in a new light Bohr’s saying that “It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth.” (Source.)
“It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is not also a deep truth.”
New light? That was the same Bohr who made the famous horseshoe quip.
Unless there are two horseshoe quotes, this one seems to be disputed:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr#Disputed
I (or someone) should update that page; the earliest source of the horseshoe story that I know of is from a 1927 essay by Heisenberg:
Edit: Actually that date is almost definitely wrong, the essay refers to a conference that took place in 1927, probably wasn’t given there. The earliest Google Books result for this quote is Heisenberg’s 1969 autobiography, though, so that’s still earlier and more authoritative than any of the sources given on the Wikiquote page.
This is one of the more brilliant illustrations I’ve seen, and I suspect that what it illustrates is that the Deep Wisdom of a statement is mostly the cumulative Deep Wisdom points scored by each deep-sounding concept. Thus, reversing the meaning of a sentence has little effect on its Deep Wisdom points, so long as the same concepts are being invoked.
I think we can view Deep Wisdom as an escalating status competition. It’s about taking someone else’s Deep Wisdom and elevating your own above it. As the above quotation hints at, eventually you will escalate so far up the chain of wisdom that you’ll arrive back where you’ve started again. Like a Shepard tone.
Opposing Bohr’s interpretation.
Opposing Bohr’s interpretation here as well!
i remember i started to “reverse” things according to Lou Reed lyrics, the one of yesterday if you try to solve a problem, and fail, people will think you created it, but if you try to create a problem, and fail, they’ll think you solved it !”
C.S. Lewis, “Bulverism”
(It’s not exactly correct- evidence of bias is some evidence against a belief- but not always as strong of evidence as it’s assumed to be.)
I’ve actually always found C.S. Lewis to be one of the single most fascinating and compelling Christian writers. Obviously I think he makes some very fundamental mistakes, but his approach to Christianity is about as rationalist as you can get. He really emphasizes that if you’re going to believe in something, it better really be true not just “worth believing in” or “virtuous” or “helpful”—he himself could have written Belief in Belief. Furthermore, he seems committed to a conception of “faith” that doesn’t involve any conflict with rationality—he thinks that the logical arguments for the existence of God do a lot of work, and he’s fairly sophisticated scientifically (seems reasonably knowledgeable about evolution, quantum mechanics, etc.). I would actually highly recommend The Screwtape Letters to any rationalists who find religious arguments interesting (if not compelling).
One gets that impression if one reads Mere Christianity and the Screwtape Letters. But if one reads his works aimed at children one gets the impression that he wants children to believe despite evidence. See for example the scene in The Silver Chair where the protagonists are trapped underground and the Lady of the Green Kirtle tries to enchant them to think that Narnia, Aslan and the Sun are all things they made up as part of a game. They are almost taken in until they declare that they will believe in Aslan even if there’s is no Aslan because the world they’ve imagined if it has been imagined is a better world than the one they live in.
He’s proof that you can develop a quite rational account of human psychology, and then use it to shoot yourself in the foot.
(Thanks to ciphergoth for the pointer to this quote.)
On the contrary, in the absence of the time, resources, or inclination to completely retrace a person’s reasoning, psychological factors (such as whether the result is desirable to the person in question) are indeed relevant to the probability that the person made a mistake since in general
P(made mistake | result is appealing) != P(made mistake | result not appealing)
Why should evidence of bias be some evidence against a belief? This would be like magic: using someone’s failure of rationality to learn something about the world, which is absurd. (Example: Federer’s wife is very confident that he will win, because she is biased in his favor. Does this give me any reason to bet against Federer? Obviously not.)
If you find out that someone believes A then that’s evidence for A, so your beliefs change away from the priors. If you subsequently find that the person is likely biased then your beliefs return some way toward your priors. So finding out about the bias was in some sense evidence about A.
To be precise, knowing that someone is biased towards holding a belief decreases the amount you should update your own beliefs in response to theirs — because it decreases the likelihood ratio of the test.
(That is, having a bias towards a belief means people are more likely to believe it when it isn’t true (more false positives), so a bias-influenced belief is less likely to be true and therefore weaker evidence. In Bayesian terms, bias increases P(B) without increasing P(B|A), so it decreases P(A|B).)
So CarmendeMacedo’s right that you can’t get evidence about the world from knowledge of a person’s biases, but you should decrease your confidence if you discover a bias, because it means you had the wrong priors when you updated the first time.
Francis Bacon
I’ve been looking for this quote for years since I read it in college and lost the book. Thanks for posting it.
Quoted in The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
-Richard Feynman
John Maynard Keynes
I think of facts as historical events. They cannot change. We just get more of them, and sometimes the more recent ones are more relevant to the near future.
Keynes notion of facts changing strikes me as creepy, with a hint of Orwell’s Minitrue employing Winston Smith to change them.
Keynes seems to be peddling a vision in which intellectual progress in not cumulative. Facts are established. Theory accounts for them. Facts change. Theory must also be changed. It leaves open the possibility that facts may change again or even change back!
“When the facts change” must be read as short hand for “When new facts come along that falsify the old theory, the one that did an apparently adequate job on the old facts...”. There is an important distinction but it is not between those who change their minds and those who do not. Age and generational forgetting will take care of those who refuse to change. In the fullness of time a new generation will believe in the new facts and the new theories; change is inevitable.
The big distinction is between folk-wisdom, which is content to have the new theory explain the new facts, and science, which holds itself to a higher standard. Science expects the new theory to explain the new facts and the old facts. That tends to be socially awkward, because progress, if it is permitted at all, tends to bring out the ways in which the old facts got bent to better fit the old theories.
It is doubtful this quote is authentic. See here.
Mark Twain
Daniel Dennett
Forgive me if I’m being dense, but… witty as it is, why is this a rationality quote?
My hypothesis is that it’s saying that people are vehicles for their memes in the same way they are vehicles for their genes. Ideas “use” people to propagate themselves.
Well yes, I know that much. Is there a rationality-related moral to it? Or is it just that people here like memetics?
Your hypothesis is of course correct.
It touches on the fundamental question of rationality: Why am I doing what I’m doing? Dennet is saying: at the end of all the scholarship you have in effect just become a wandering library. So what? Is this really the most important or valuable thing you could have done with your time? It’s the danger of losing the big picture of what is your real purpose in life, what is the most important thing you should be doing? How probable is it that for so many people studying for long years it the most effective use of their time?
Very true.
-raganwald, HN, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2423236
Hmmm, maybe a bit of an overgeneralization? Or a US-thing? I’ve never seen a manager being rewarded for the amount of “process” they impose on their team. I’m sure there are many bad managers, but it’s also somewhat of a cliché for programmers to blame management for the parts of the work they don’t like.
I have, and I do not (usually) reside in the US.
It also produces comic strips. So it’s not all bad.
Like broken windows are not all bad.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
— Raymond and Aaron, Calamities of Nature
“When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.”
--Lois McMaster Bujold
-Suits (TV show)
Of course, lots of those things, including “pull out a bigger gun,” fall under the practical category of “get shot.”
Including, often, “do what they say”.
(Edit: This is particularly likely when they are telling you to go somewhere—“somewhere” is likely to be a place where they will be less inconvenienced by shooting you.)
I’m pretty sure pull out a bigger gun is being used as a euphemism for having a gun under the table, or basically just having a better weapon then they do with an inherently faster draw time.
Indeed. The gun in this case is a metaphorical gun. The real object under discussion is a piece of information that was being used as blackmail against one of the characters, and the eventual response to it was a blend of calling their bluff (the blackmailer did not have the proof he claimed to have) and pulling out the bigger gun (a piece of information that was used to blackmail the blackmailer).
I am sure that this quote indicates that categorizing options too far is detrimental. The Sequence on Reductionism’s summary states ‘complicated things are made of simpler things’ but categorizing all the simple things together despite their belonging to separate complicated things should indicate a fallacy. It also indicates that the entirety of the options available are not considered properly if they’re grouped too much.
You can go too far with that though. Separating categories is only useful insofar as we care about the differences between them. If you don’t want to get shot and don’t care why you’re being shot, then there’s not much sense in separating options that lead directly to that outcome.
Obviously there are a lot more than 149 options. You could stick the barrel into your mouth, for instance, using either your left or right hand. But if you start counting this way it’s obvious that these options are useless and a waste of brain space. A good decisionmaker needs not only to be aware of the options available to them, but to be able to dismiss the bad options with a minimum of wasted thought.
I agree with going too far, this quote seems to me to be reflecting extremities and mid-ranges categorization. Yes, there’s a lot more than 149 options, but there’s many which are functionally the same, and categorizing it all under two options ‘Get Shot’ & ‘Do what they say’ doesn’t take into consideration ‘Do what they say, then get shot to hide witnesses’ or any other option, it parses all options into mutually exclusive categories when in reality, they’re not mutually exclusive.
By enforcing the two phase blanketing mentality, there’s no consideration of changing of situation or any other variables. (Such as, ‘wait to attention elsewhere, escape.’). A good decision maker does need to be able to dismiss bad options with minimal thought, but dismissing good(Less Wrong!) options with the bad is detrimental as well. What I’m taking from the quote is not that I must consider every option (The first speaker does not, he/she merely considers three and states the existence of others.) but that I must be cognizant of the fact that there are other options available and not categorize them in such a way that they are unavailable to my self.
As I’m new to Rationality, this may be a little convoluted, if you could explain any holes in what I am trying to explain I will be grateful.
Depends on how good a shot they are.
-- Benjamin Graham The Intelligent Investor, 1949.
(I really like Graham’s rational, down-to-earth approach to investing, and this quote is a good example of the kind of thinking he wants to convey)
i don’t get it, you buy stock so that you want to seduce others right ?
or is it just sexist ? (would be funny interpetations then)
Bill James was asked about the Holmes saying “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”. He responded:
Surely that also depends on the domain you are reasoning about? For example, when debugging computer programs it seems that I am eliminating the impossible all the time. “Hm, this function is not returning the answer I expect. Am I calling it with the wrong argument? (Printf—no.) Are the calculations right up to this point? (Printf—yes). Aha, this must be the line that’s wrong!”
True! However, I know I’ve had times in program debugging (though I can’t remember a specific one) when I eliminated something “impossible” and it turned out not to be. I think there was usually a flaw in my reasoning though, rather than a flaw in my knowledge of what’s possible. (In other words, I overlooked some simple possibility.) Anyway, when I feel like I’m at the end of my debugging rope, I just start from the beginning with an eye towards stuff I could have missed the first time around, including stuff that I disregarded as “impossible”.
Related: “select” Isn’t Broken”.
I once wrote code that crashed my C++ compiler. For the life of me I Was sadly never able to reproduce it, but it’s definitely in my book as an impossible error. (this is not “the programmed crashed when run”, this was “the compiler crashed when trying to compile this program”)
When debugging, I now label things as “extremely unlikely” instead...
“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible. The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.” —Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
This reminds me of something Eliezer said.
False.
True. (So?)
True.
False (unless he meant realistic?)
I think the previous appearance of a quote about this Sherlock Holmes quote bears out its falsity, except for Laplace’s Demon-type intelligences.
The statement is a literally true statement as a matter of logical deduction. When using the words ‘true’ and ‘false’ then logic is what you are doing. Applying the word ‘false’ to ‘true’ statements is simply an error, as would be holding this particular quote to a different standard to any other logical claim. It has the same problems as logical reasoning generally does, those of assuming certainty of premises and relying on incomplete or incorrect simplified models. Focus on the dangerous not incorrect because accuracy just is not the flaw.
Instead of false consider (something like) “f@#%ing stupid”. Or you are just wrong.
It seems a bad heuristic to follow for ordinary folks, susceptible to overconfidence in their judgements of “impossibility”.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes (quoted by Venkatesh Rao; thanks to InquilineKea)
Holmes is revered as a quasi-deity among most legal academics, and while I think he’s entitled to far less respect than he generally receives, I’ve always appreciated this sentiment. Basically, “the simplicity on the other side of complexity” is the lawyer’s way of stating “it all adds up to normality.”
So, the simplicity on this side of complexity would be something like naive free will theory—basically, “it feels like I have free will, so something magic must happen that gives me true power to choose.” If you reject this simplicity, but don’t make it to the other side of complexity, you might end up saying silly things like “free will doesn’t exist, so all of our choices are meaningless—everything is determined for us.” You need to work your way through the complexity to reach the simplicity that says “yeah, the experience of making decisions is real, and that’s what matters—this is just a normal part of physics, not something magic.” Sometimes, simple truths really are correct—but you need to work through a bit of complexity to understand why that’s the case.
Another good example with regard to reductionism:
Simplicity on this side of complexity: rainbows are real and awesome!
Stuck in complexity: everything is just quarks, your model of “rainbows” is a mere product of your own mind, beauty doesn’t really exist in nature, get over yourself.
Simplicity on the other side of complexity: rainbows are explained in reductionism, but not explained away; yes, my model of a rainbow is “just” a model, but that doesn’t mean rainbows aren’t “real”; you can think a rainbow really, truly is beautiful, and still believe in reductionism.
-1 for shifgrethor contagion. Especially bad if the accusations against his character are true.
Where’s the ad hominem? He’s not using the badness of the man to attack the statement. He is noting that even though he thinks the man is bad, the statement is respectable (with his exegesis).
Humans are bad at correctly dealing with affect-laden sentiments. It’s bad practice even to mention a status-valuation of a person in a context nearby to a discussion of the merits of something that person said.
That is, it doesn’t actually matter all that much that
It’s enough that he mentioned the badness of the man before discussing the statement.
There would of course be no problem if the participants in the discussion were intelligent, rather than human.
Misleading usage of the ad hominem concept. If your objection is “the parent said something that lowers the status of another” then you may consider instead claiming ‘offensive’ or ‘rude’. (I would disagree with either of those charges too but it would be a matter of subjective preference and not one of abstract understanding.)
Yes, that’s correct. Edited.
Can you explain this quote? I don’t understand what the “simplicity on this side of complexity” and the “simplicity on the other side of complexity” are. Does he mean naive opinions and well-thought-out opinions? Or folk theories and deep elegant true theories?
I think the simplicity on this side of complexity is naive theories that “just make sense” and the simplicity on the other side of complexity is mathematical elegance.
When one of the commenters in the Amanda Knox thread said yesterday that the probability has to be either 0 or 1 because either she did it or she didn’t, that sounds simple. The mathematics of Bayesian probability are also simple, in that they can be derived from a few premises and explain a wide variety of disparate situations. But they’re not the same sort of simplicity.
Substitute understanding for complexity, maybe? I got the sense he was saying that simplifying before having a full understanding isn’t valuable; but simplifying after a full understanding, having a simple model that still accurately describes the world, is extremely valuable.
The way I first took that quote:
Simple version: “Grass is always greener on the other side”.
Complex version: Simplicity (aka Pattern, aka Information) is awesome, but becomes quickly boring and meaningless because it is KNOWN. It is the Simplicity/Pattern/Information which is currently hiding in the Chaos/Randomness which we’re so eager for. It will, for a short while, be meaningful and interesting. Until we get used to it, too. Rinse and repeat.
On This Side would be that planets orbit circularly. The Complexity would be large numbers of circles within circles. On The Other Side would be that planets orbit elliptically.
Clearly false. There are all sorts of situations in which argument winning is instrumentally useful.
Perhaps, but it seems to be more likely that a focus on winning arguments is less useful then a focus on winning in general. Winning an argument may help you win on occasion; but as many lose sight of their goals in pursuit of a victorious argument, it seems more useful to hold the argument always in an instrumental sense, and never as an end in and of itself.
Funny, reading The Black Swan, Taleb struck me as someone who was trying to win an argument.
(Though he did have a point)
I’m sorry. That was abuse.
Do you mean what Taleb did was abuse? (I’m confused)
The “abuse” quip is a Monty Python reference: The Argument Clinic.
!
That’s one of my favorite Monty Python sketches too. Drops head in shame
Isaac Asimov
“Hello!”, The Book of Mormon Musical
Buckaroo Banzai
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.
David Hume
...man, even I can write more clearly than that. Jefferson said it much better (and he was wrong):
If you want the formal general version rather than the concrete example: “To prove a miracle, finding out your proof is false must be weirder than the miracle.”—still bad writing, but better than Hume’s.
Incidentally, this is a good principle. I think. (How would you check?) There are a few things I believe because the alternative involves delusions so weird I expect human brains can’t support them and keep functioning, even given the existence of some really weird delusions.
Edit: Jefferson might not actually have said it, it’s unclear.
-Joel Greenblatt
That whole “buying” vs “selling” dichotomy does nothing but cause problems. Let’s just treat selling as buying negative stock.
Like shorting?
Rather, not like shorting. Unless we also use a word like “longing” to mean buying a stock you haven’t previously sold.
“I find it deeply unimpressive that the bible can be said to predict the big bang. There are only two possibilities: either the universe began or it’s been here forever. Just two possibilities. To get one of them is really not that impressive.”
~ Richard Dawkins, in response to John Lennox’s claim that the bible predicted that the universe had a beginning.
-- Michael Shermer (one minute into the clip)
Oliver Heaviside
No law against liking to talk about yourself, I guess.
“When you are stubbornly making an argument, there is a possibility that you are uninformed, ignorant, in denial, and/or being a jerk. Of course, you might be right.”
Dante
Not that being right means you’re necessarily not uninformed, ignorant, or in denial. And being right is probably positively correlated with being a jerk, as most people measure things.
True. I was actually considering omitting the last sentence, as it doesn’t really contribute much, but I wasn’t sure if that would have been misleading as to the original meaning.
--Julius Caesar; cf. ‘Bayesian truth serum’
Without evidence, innovation is just another word for ‘fad,’ -Bill Gates
The world is not an inherently kind nor fair place. It is up to us to make it so.
E.A. Manuel, Jr.
Um, who are you quoting? -edited to add Ah, E.A Manuel thanks for adding that bit
The Analytical Engine weaves Algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.
Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace
-Ice Cube
This quote is probably well known, but I heard it for the first time this week: “Luck is probability taken personally.” (I don’t know who to attribute this to.)
http://lesswrong.com/lw/53k/rationality_quotes_april_2011/3tue
Thanks!
It’s your mind that guides you / In the world around you / Where veracity replies / To creations in your mind
-Dignity, from “Project Destiny”
(Edit—missed seeing a rule)
What makes this a rationality quote?
Am I reading too much into this quote when I think it’s referring to not crushing people’s beliefs when they’re incapable of surviving the damage to their Self? When I look at that (out of context, as I have not read the source) I’m seeing that without breakfast (a sturdy base to build upon) the character is not ready to have their beliefs destroyed.
Please don’t hastily dismiss my quote, I haven’t had breakfast yet.
The minus one must be for not seeing two fallacies and a bias in such a pretty package. Oh well, can’t win em all.
The −1 was partly for posting a quote that appears to have nothing to do with rationality, but mostly for being a smartass.
The quoits is perfect, it illustrates how welcoming the community can be.
It was a re-illustration of how the quote pertains to rationality. But, again, I guess they can’t all be winners.
When you believe in things that you don’t understand
Then you suffer
Superstition ain’t the way
-Stevie Wonder, Superstition
I realize that LW participants are having fun with this, but I’m a songwriter and I feel motivated to comment.
Writing lyrics is an extreme exercise in lossy data compression. If the lyrics are going to be interesting, you must have a tremendous story or concept in mind. Then you start throwing out 95% of your precious ideas because each gestalt has to fit into 4 lines and hit the listener in the gut or the heart. The best that you can hope for is to make people feel a few emotions and ponder a few ideas.
Stevie Wonder is among the best at the craft. He had to balance precision against brevity, word flow, and many other pressures including boring his audience. So even though a line like “All you need is love” or “my humps, my humps, my lovely lady lumps” hit the mark for their particular topics, I have to adjust Stevie Wonder’s score way up for pulling off a number 1 Bilboard hit with a subject carrying a large difficulty factor.
Ricky Gervais’ Talk Funny brought up a similar point about Chris Rock. Louis C.K. pointed out that Rock makes jokes about complex ideas, and has evolved a style of delivery that allows him to do this without losing his audience.
Did he believe in quantum mechanics?
He is still alive.
But is he suffering?
Perhaps he both believes it and understands it. The subject is not, after all, so complex as is usually thought. Or, conversely, perhaps he believes it in the sense of professing “Yes, QM is true”, but does not have any strong beliefs in the sense of anticipation-constrainers.
Dr. Ian Malcolm, “Jurassic Park”
Yes there are.
(proxy)
Please Explain Downvotes, So That I Can Do Better By Your Standards. (you sure are being helpful)
“He was going to suck my blood!” -Richard
“Which is what we do to anyone when we tell them we’ll be hurt if they don’t live our way.” -Don
-from Illusions, Richard Bach
My point of this as a rationality quote: it is a reminder that we have to stay our course regardless of how much others may not agree with the logic with which we rule our lives.
-- Yeshua ben-Yosef (attributed), on the importance of seeing the winds of evidence instead of waiting for absolute proof.
That doesn’t sound to me like a very honest way of interpreting the quote. It’s one thing to laud an appropriate degree of deference to evidence, and another to praise acceptance of a belief on little or no strong evidence.
Upvoted the quote. It can be a fun exercise to find rationality lessons in unlikely sources. (Last thread someone posted a Baron Harkonnen quote and it got many upvotes. Of course, it wasn’t explicitely marked as Baron Harkonnen quote, just as a Dune quote, so I wonder how many people realized.)
After all, within the fictional narrative in which the Jesus thing is true, those other people were better at changing their minds than the apostles he was addressing.
As a Dune fan, I feel compelled to point out that this shouldn’t surprise one. Both from an in-universe and out-of-universe perspective, the Harkonnens are written as characters which have a grip on a lot of truth. The Atreides were little morally better than the Harkonnens, Herbert tells us (he describes the former as descended from the Soviets!), and the latter are quite effective, both practically and genetically. As one should expect, given that the bloodlines mixed very early on in the plot, and given that the Harkonnens resoundingly defeated the Atreides—even if we ignore their conquest of Dune and award the Atreides victory because Muad’dib eventually managed to become Emperor, the Atreides ideals have still been utterly compromised (as remarked many times) and Muad’dib forced into scenarios he wanted desperately to avoid. Some victory. The Bene Gesserit weren’t wrong in thinking that a Harkonnen-Atreides cross would be superhuman, they were wrong about the other things.
I wasn’t precise. What I wasn’t sure that people realized was that the Baron was using the quoted reasoning to justify his wasteful cruelty. I am not even sure i’d argue that it was wrong as a piece of reasoning, but I suspect some people, if aware of the context, would have at least flinched before upvoting, like I suspect there’s flinching going on when a Jesus quote appears.
I certainly agree with you that the Baron had a good grip on reality (not equally good in all places, but still a very effective leader). Still, I wouldn’t make too much of the Harkonnen victory… are you trying to say it indicated an advantage over the Atreides way of thinking? I’d argue against that.
The Harkonnens, as the Baron admitted himself, defeated the Atreides with wealth, with their immense initial advantage, including the support of the Emperor himself. The Atreides had a good grasp of reality too, they were pragmatic and looked to results (for instance: didn’t just count on their benevolence to be self-evident, but had an effective propaganda corps). And they did have a plan based on a better understanding of at least some aspects of the situation: they understood the value of the Fremen, whom the Baron refused to acknowledge as important until Hawat opened his eyes. (One wonders what Piter had been doing during the earlier Harkonnen reign). It is conceivable to me that things could have gone over differently with a bit more time and luck. /fan
I’d very much like to hear more of your thoughts.
I would want to be clear about this: the Atreides may have a net advantage over the Harkonnen, but they are not ‘strictly superior’ to the Harkonnen in every respect. As the Baron explains in the full passage, the Atreides wagered on a strategy (‘rabbits’) that failed against the enemies they knew were gunning for them (‘bees’), so at the very least, their planning was not so hot.
Aspects which didn’t matter until much later if you count Paul’s resurgence, and which resurgence involved some pretty exotic factors I can’t really blame the Harkonnens for missing.
Being trained, perhaps. Remember that the Baron’s twisted mentats were periodically killed off. The Terrible Duo aside, I don’t think we know how long Piter was at the job—it is entirely possible he had been kept completely busy calculating out the loss of Arrakis and the subsequent invasion. Certainly Hawat (Piter’s non-twisted counterpart) was kept full occupied by his counter-plotting.
There’s a passage where the Baron has pretty clearly been handed the Idiot Ball by Herbert, because he gets direct evidence that the Fremen are superior to the Sardaukar and dismisses it for specious reasons.
There’s also some question in my mind how the Baron missed the reason the Emperor was helping him (Leto had trained a fighting force getting close in strength to the Sardaukar).
Calling it an Idiot Ball is a little harsh. If his prior was that Fremen were pretty worthless, and then a unit of supposed Fremen—who conveniently have Hawat among them—defeat Sardaukar, it’s perhaps easier to explain it by supposing Atreides soldiers wearing Fremen clothes (in fact some of them were just that, since the Atreides group under Hawat did join these Fremen) than to suddenly decide the natives were equal to the Imperium’s most elite fighters. Especially since the Baron had just done something similar, letting Sardaukar fight in Harkonnen uniforms.
Rereading that passage, I was also discounting that Vladimir was getting this info from Rabban, who he doesn’t have strong reason to believe (although he did ask some penetrating questions). So it may be a little harsh.
Well, they could have mattered, if the Atreides had more time to implement their plan. I’m not sure what point you’re arguing against there—I’m not saying they had a better grasp of reality than the Harkonnens in all respects or even on average.
That is a very strange idea; where does it come from? I’d have said the moral superiority of Atreides over Harkonnens is overwhelmingly obvious, including to in-universe third party characters (e.g. Count and Lady Fenring).
Herbert, as I said. See:
http://www.jacurutu.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2692
http://www.jacurutu.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2690
http://www.jacurutu.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2691
It can be a fun exercise, but I think that sometimes creates a bias in favor of interpreting quotes too generously. Even in the context of a narrative where Jesus’s abilities are real, believing in them on the basis of hearsay would still be a poor treatment of evidence; it’s not as if there weren’t plenty of other purported oracles and prophets whose powers were fake.
Well, imagine we’re not talking about the Bible, but some fantasy novel. I assumed that within that kind of a fictional context, there would be a big difference between a real prophet and the usual religious kooks, and the recognition of that difference would be at least somewhat contagious to people who haven’t witnessed it themselves.
But I suppose you’re right, I was being at least a little too generous. Interpreting that quote in terms of rational ability to respond to evidence was an entertaining stretch, but in the end it’s still a stretch.
Personally, I always favored this one:
Of course, this one nicely cuts both ways.
That’s not a bad one.
I always liked “You will know them by their fruit”.