Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.
-Walter Lippmann
MichaelGR
Karma: 1,878
Take the bettors in the racetrack experiment. Thirty seconds before putting down their money, they had been tentative and uncertain; thirty seconds after the deed, they were significantly more optimistic ans self-assured. The act of making a final decision—in this case, of buying a ticket—had been the critical factor. Once a stand had been taken, the need for consistency pressured these people to bring what they felt and believed into line with what they had already done. They simply convinced themselves that they had made the right choice and, no doubt, felt better and it all.
-Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The psychology of Persuasion, p.59
The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Thank you.
Thanks for putting this together, I’m definitely saving it for later perusal!
Apparently, I contributed 27 quotes this year.
The 2002 letter can be found here:
Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
-George Bernard Shaw
A man who has committed a mistake and doesn’t correct it, is committing another mistake.
-Confucius
The Noah principle: predicting rain doesn’t count, building arks does.
-Warren E. Buffett
A small leak can sink a great ship.
-Benjamin Franklin
Overall, however, we’ve done better by avoiding dragons than by slaying them. -Warren E. Buffett
I think he had things like the development of physics in the 20th century that led to the creation of the A and H bombs. I got the quote from Richard Rhodes history of the making of the atomic bomb.
It doesn’t matter exactly which blackboard or wrote wrote what, in the end, a bunch of people making calculations and experiments changed the course of human affairs pretty significantly.
If you can’t tell whose side someone is on, they are not on yours. -Warren E. Buffett
A horse that can count to ten is a remarkable horse, not a remarkable mathematician.
--Samuel Johnson
It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful, they are found because it was possible to find them. -J. Robert Oppenheimer.
It is still an unending source of surprise for me how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a piece of paper can change the course of human affairs. -Stanislaw Ulam
Typo/missing word alert:
When an unusually fast atom escapes, it takes with an unusually large amount of kinetic energy, and the average energy decreases.
Should be: “it takes with IT an unusually...”
I don’t think you are very atypical.
I can easily imagine that some of the most “advanced” rationalists here might not be getting as much useful information out of LW, and so they might see it as a low-ROI site.
But the average LW reader probably isn’t so “advanced” (might not have been familiar with a lot of the concepts taught here before reading LW), and so the ROI can be much higher.
Update: In fact, one of the main benefits of LW might be to transfer some of that knowledge from the more advanced rationalists to the beginners.
From the Wikipedia article about perverse incentives:
In Hanoi, under French colonial rule, a program paying people a bounty for each rat pelt handed in was intended to exterminate rats. Instead, it led to the farming of rats.
and
19th century palaeontologists traveling to China used to pay peasants for each fragment of dinosaur bone (dinosaur fossils) that they produced. They later discovered that peasants dug up the bones and then smashed them into multiple pieces to maximise their payments.
-Jeremy Grantham, about the stock market/economy.