The Patrician took a sip of his beer. "I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to its day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior."
-- Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals
"You know what they say the modern version of Pascal's Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God." - Julie from Crystal Nights by Greg Egan
John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
-Isaac Asimov, The Relativity of Wrong
My genes done gone and tricked my brain
By making fucking feel so great
That's how the little creeps attain
Their plan to fuckin' replicate
But brain's got tricks itself, you see
To get the bang but not the bite
I got this here vasectomy
My genes can fuck themselves tonight.
—The r-selectors, Trunclade, quoted in Blindsight by Peter Watts
You're thinking of Mohs Scale of Mineral Hardness. AngryParsley was referring to Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness, neither of which should be confused with Mohs Scale of Rock and Metal Hardness.
"He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense."
-John McCarthy, on mainstream environmentalism.
As someone who regularly gets into arguments about this, I can say that he's definitely right; you wouldn't believe the amount of nonsense that can be disposed of simply by looking up the relevant numbers and doing a minute's worth of easy arithmetic.
For example, I've heard some people recently claiming that a combination of solar photovoltaics, electrolysis to produce hydrogen, and these new Bloom box fuel cells are cheaper than nuclear fission. Look up the costs of solar farms; about $3 per peak watt. Their average power output is less; we can very optimistically assume that they run at 20% of capacity on average. Efficiency losses from electrolysis and fuel cells are about 50%. Putting it all together, this would cost about $30 per watt of average power delivered. Not including the cost of the fuel cells.
A little googling will show that the total cost of building two new AP1000 reactors in Georgia is about $14 billion, and they average at least 93% of their peak power, and transmission line losses bring their average power delivered to about 1000 MW each. So thei...
Solar power requires heavy industry to build, and that has loads of externalities. It takes up a lot of space and affects local climate and ecology. And then there's the unreliability of the sun, which can have economic consequences.
As for the nuclear externalities you mentioned, the evacuation planning and government safety things are paid for by power plant fees, and budgeted into the cost of building and operating the plants. Defending the plants is something you have to do with all forms of power generation, and I actually think you're miscalculating the risks by looking at the power plants themselves, which (in the case of nuclear) tend to be pretty beefy and well-guarded. Attacking the transmission lines would be much easier, and much harder to defend against. This goes double for wind and solar farms that are located far away from everything and have to use longer power lines.
(And really, what are the odds you'll ever have to use those evacuation plans? I'd worry more about crossing the street. No water-moderated reactor has ever had an accident that made evacuating people nearby a good idea, even after all these decades of operating them, and there are good theoretical and ...
Do you consider the law regarding car liability insurance to be a subsidy? It requires you to carry liability insurance up to a finite amount, despite the fact that you can do much more damage than that with your car, and then bankruptcy law will shield you from paying the full amount.
This is the same kind of insurance nuclear plants have: they're require to have an insurance on up to $X of damages, and then "someone else" bears any cost beyond this.
Nuclear plants can't be insured for the damages in a meltdown. Not because the risk is so huge that it should never be done, but because any jury award would be effectively infinite, irrespective of the actual damage. There's no point to buying insurance when the uncovered liability increases in lockstep with your insurance coverage. However, the actual meltdown risk is extremely small and even the required insurance is effectively overinsuring the plants.
This nuclear plant "insurance" can't be compared to what FM/FM had because they are able to continue operation and making profits after a "meltdown", while a nuclear plant would be over and done with.
If you don't like the kind of uncovered liability nu...
In an universe full of inanimate material, sentient beings are gods.
-- spire3661, in a Slashdot post
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
-- Isaac Asimov
Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.
--Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline (2009), p 216
"As one shocked 42-year-old manager exclaimed in the middle of a self-reflective career planning exercise, 'Oh, no! I just realized I let a 20-year-old choose my wife and my career!'"
-- Douglas T. Hall, Protean Careers of the 21st Century
...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
-- Herbert Simon 1971
…it is fatally easy to read a pattern into stochastically generated data.
-- John Maynard Smith (The Causes of Extinction, 1989)
"Death is the most terrible of all things; for it is the end, and nothing is thought to be any longer either good or bad for the dead."
-- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
The halt can manage a horse,
the handless a flock,
The deaf be a doughty fighter,
To be blind is better than to burn on a pyre:
There is nothing the dead can do.
-- Havamal
(posted in the right thread this time)
People constantly ignore my good advice by contributing to the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, CARE, and public radio all in the same year--as if they were thinking, "OK, I think I've pretty much wrapped up the problem of heart disease; now let's see what I can do about cancer."
"It is said that those who appreciate legislation and sausages should not see them being made. The same is true for human emotions." -- Steven Pinker
I haven't taken this position just to be difficult. To look around, the world does appear to be flat, so I think it is incumbent on others to prove decisively that it isn't. And I don't think that burden of proof has been met yet.
-- Daniel Shenton, President of the Flat Earth Society as of 2010
And the Earth is slowly curving in its orbit, generating an apparent centrifugal force that decreases your weight at midnight, and increases your weight at noon. Except for a very tiny tidal correction, these two forces exactly cancel which is why the Earth stays in orbit in the first place. This argument would only be valid if the Earth were suspended motionless on two giant poles running through the axis or something.
"There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you."
-- J.K. Rowling, Harvard commencement address.
"Successful zealots don't argue to win. They argue to move the goalposts and to make it appear sane to do so."
-- Seth Godin
"One thousand five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was flat... and fifteen minutes ago, you knew people were alone on this planet. Think about what you'll know tomorrow." -- Agent K, "Men in Black"
Five hundred years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was flat...
Not true! The ancient Greeks measured the circumference of the Earth to within 1%.
They (Italians and other Europeans) still knew the Earth was round. Indeed, if you live near a sea port this is a very easy thing to figure out. The resistance Columbus faced was that everyone thought the world was much too big to get to the Indies in a reasonable period of time by sailing west. And of course everyone was right and Columbus had no idea what he was talking about.
Edit: And actually I'm pretty sure the authorities cerca 1492 were basing their beliefs about the size of the Earth on work done by the ancient Greeks.
The terrible truth is that postmodernism is what happens when somebody who believes what he reads, reads the Philosophy canon.
-- Quee Nelson, The Slightest Philosophy
Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.
--Admiral Hyman G. Rickover
A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual" — find out how he feels about astrology. —Robert Heinlein
By the way: Welcome to LessWrong! Feel free to post an introduction of yourself! If you want to get a good head-start on the kind of thing we do here, "What Do We Mean By Rationality?" is a good start, and if you're ever looking for other material, you can browse the sequences and the top-rated posts to find a lot of good essays.
On this specific issue, ata has the most relevant link, but I would add a couple other points:
Just because you could, in theory, be convinced of astrology at some point doesn't mean you have to be agnostic now - you can be quite strongly convinced of its incorrectness and still accept correction should some ever come to your attention.
If you are actually quite skeptical of astrology - if you believe it to be strongly contradicted by the evidence - this is one of the places where we would hope you would say so. Humility is a virtue when it makes you careful, not when it is attire you wear to affirm your open-mindedness.
Please keep posting, by the way - your remark on the externalities of nuclear power was a good one, and I would like to hear your thoughts on other occasions.
Being that there is a total absence of evidence that astrology can consistently predict anything better than chance, why is it even worth talking about possible mechanisms? Until there's any positive evidence for it, the right answer to "How does astrology work?" is "It doesn't."
"I doubt it, but who am I to say?" is still being too generous to it. It is an arbitrarily privileged hypothesis.
Edit: Be careful with those "intellectual exercises", by the way. You're not going to become a stronger rationalist by practicing rationalization: "Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge."
A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions — as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. —Nietzsche
From memory of recently seeing excerpts from The Polymath: The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman:
Delany spent a while living in a hotel which mostly catered to transsexuals, and he found it unnerving to not know what gender the person he was taking to was. He speculated that wanting to be sure about gender was hard-wired.
After about five weeks, he realized he'd taken elevator rides with people of non-obvious gender, and it didn't bother him at all.
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science
—Charles Darwin
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
-- William Ernest Henley (1875)
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today -- but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.
-- Isaac Asimov
The reason you feel most comfortable with a job (unless, like me, you're in the minority - a job would destroy my psyche) is that you've been brainwashed by many years of school, socialization and practice. I pick the word brainwashed carefully, because it's more than training or acclimation. It's something that's been taught to you by people who needed you to believe it was the way things are supposed to be.
-- Seth Godin
What brazil84 said. Godin sounds like he's overextrapolating from personal experience. For his claim about "it's because you've been brainwashed" to work, he would need to show that people are taking circuitous routes to standard employment in preference to viable alternate means of making a living.
Yes, there are ways to make the same money with less time or "taking orders" ... but they're hard and risky to work out. If people are wrong in these assessments, it takes a heck of a lot more than just realizing, "hey, there are other ways!" You have to know one of those other ways well enough to get it to work! To borrow from Eliezer Yudkowsky, "non-wage-slave is not an income plan".
Furthermore, his claim is heavily penalized by it's assertion of conspiracy: he's saying all your teachers "needed" you to beleive this is the natural order of things, that every professor you had believed that, that all employers (not just the businesses but the hiring managers) believed that, etc. Yes, I'm aware of the history of public education (incl. Gatto's claims about it), but Godin is going further, and saying that these people need you to bel...
Develop the habit of asking yourself, "Will I definitely use this information for something immediate and important?"
-- Timothy Ferriss - The 4 Hour Workweek
“Still seems it strange, that thou shouldst live forever? Is it less strange, that thou shouldst live at all? This is a miracle; and that no more.” Edward Young
...it would be a mistake to suppose that the difficulty of the case [for gender equality] must lie in the insufficiency or obscurity of the grounds of reason on which my convictions rests. The difficulty is that which exists in all cases in which there is a mass of feeling to be contended against. So long as opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of th...
Learn to criticize ideas, especially your own. Most new ideas are wrong or inadequate. If you don't reject most of your ideas promptly, then you're almost surely fooling yourself, and if you also spread them, you're almost surely polluting the intellectual world. But if an idea really seems to stand up under testing, try filling in more details, and criticizing it again.
— K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation 2.0: Advice To Aspiring Nanotechnologists
You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand. Leonardo da Vinci
"There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere." -- Isaac Asimov
Devotees of grammatical studies have not been distinguished for any very remarkable felicities of expression.
-- Amos Bronson Alcott
Reasoning is generally seen as a mean to improve knowledge and make better decisions. Much evidence, however, shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests rethinking the function of reasoning. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade.
-- Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber, Why do humans reason? (PDF)
(Further comment on the paper turned into a full post)
Three ways to increase your intelligence
Continually expand the scope, source, intensity of the information you receive. Constantly revise your reality maps, and seek new metaphors about the future to understand what's happening now. Develop external networks for increasing intelligence. In particular, spend all your time with people as smart or smarter than you.
I'll give an upvote to whoever knows the source of that.
Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.
--Hunter S. Thompson
If you get it, it will be in spite of any method you use.
You must have a method.
-- K. Bradford Brown
Can we have a norm of using the Custom Search bar to check if a quote has already been posted?
Poll: vote this up if you are in favor of the proposed norm. (And vote down the Karma Balance comment.)
Rational thought is an interpretation according to a scheme we cannot escape. -Frederich Nietzsche
This painting — which we call human life and experience — evolved gradually, and is indeed still in process of evolving — and should not therefore be regarded as a fixed quantity…. We have, through millennia, gazed into the world with blind inclinations, passions, and fears; with moral, religious, or aesthetic demands; and have so wallowed in the bad manners of illogical thought that the world has become amazingly variegated, fearsome, rich in spirit and meaning. It has acquired color, but we were the colorists. The human intellect has allowed the world of appearance to appear, and exported its erroneous presuppositions into reality.
— Nietzsche
...One of the points Lesley makes is that the idea of ‘nature’ is actually a cultural construct. What do we mean when we say something is ‘natural’? I think that, in general, we mean that it hasn’t been altered or intervened with in anyway. Which is completely impossible. Everything we do changes our body in some way. Not doing something changes our body in some other way. Everything you eat becomes a part of you. And if you don’t eat, well, that has other implications. Breathing air, drinking water, wearing clothes, walking, driving, sitting,
"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." ~HD Thoreau
Scrapheap Transhumanism:
"I’m sort of inured to pain by this point. Anesthetic is illegal for people like me, so we learn to live without it; I’ve made scalpel incisions in my hands, pushed five-millimeter diameter needles through my skin, and once used a vegetable knife to carve a cavity into the tip of my index finger. I’m an idiot, but I’m an idiot working in the name of progress: I’m Lepht Anonym, scrapheap transhumanist. I work with what I can get."
Here is more: http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/enhanced/scrapheap-transhumanism
HT:Tyler Cowen
While discussing the reliability of pundits:
Pundits are more like cheerleaders. Ugly ones.
scientia potentia est
Knowledge is power.
--This quote is attributed to Sir Francis Bacon, but we don't really know.
"Study strategy over the years and achieve the spirit of the warrior. Today is your victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men."
--Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
"The probability of bumping into Thomas Bayes is rather low. " - Koert Debyser, "What is Bayesian Average", Board Game Geek Forums
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science
Charles Darwin
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science
—Charles Darwin
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science
—Charles Darwin
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science
—Charles Darwin
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science
—Charles Darwin
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
-- William Ernest Henley (1875)
Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.
-- William Ernest Henley (1875)
I enjoyed this proposal for a 24-issue Superman run: http://andrewhickey.info/2010/02/09/pop-drama-superman/
There are several Less Wrongish themes in this arc: Many Worlds, ending suffering via technology, rationality:
"...a highlight of the first half of this first year will be the redemption of Lex Luthor – in a forty-page story, set in one room, with just the two of them talking, and Superman using logic to convince Luthor to turn his talents towards good..."
The effect Andrew's text had on me reminded me of how excited I was when I first had r...
Batmanuel: In my experience, there's only one guaranteed way to ever really know the truth - you must create it yourself.
Captain Liberty: And how do you do that?
Batmanuel: Lie.
-- The Tick, live-action series
The three laws of sanity:
The world is mad.
Your own theories and grand ideas about the world are also mad, except where this contradicts the first law. (In which case you are merely slightly more sane than average).
The world is sufficiently mad that your being sane is actually a disadvantage, except where this contradicts the first two laws.
This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.