...At home there was a game that all the parents played with their children. It was called, What Did You See? Mara was about Dann’s age when she was first called into her father’s room one evening, where he sat in his big carved and coloured chair. He said to her, ‘And now we are going to play a game. What was the thing you liked best today?’
At first she chattered: ‘I played with my cousin . . . I was out with Shera in the garden . . . I made a stone house.’ And then he had said, ‘Tell me about the house.’ And she said, ‘I made a house of the stones that come from the river bed.’ And he said, ‘Now tell me about the stones.’ And she said, ‘They were mostly smooth stones, but some were sharp and had different shapes.’ ‘Tell me what the stones looked like, what colour they were, what did they feel like.’
And by the time the game ended she knew why some stones were smooth and some sharp and why they were different colours, some cracked, some so small they were almost sand. She knew how rivers rolled stones along and how some of them came from far away. She knew that the river had once been twice as wide as it was now. There seemed no end to what she knew, and yet her father had not told h
A long one:
.... . . once upon a time men lived among the giants, who were like themselves but far more powerful, and these giants always had a supply of bread, fruit, milk, and all that was necessary to sustain life, which they must have acquired in ways that cost them little, for they would always give away their goods to whoever knew how to please them. And the giants would also carry them wherever they wanted to go, provided they asked in the proper way. So it came about that men never thought of working, nor of walking, nor of building wagons or ships; instead they became natural orators, and spent all of their time watching the giants, figuring out what would please or displease them, smiling at them or imploring them with tears in their eyes; or else simply pronouncing the necessary words, which had to be memorized exactly, though they had no understanding of the changes of humor that would come over the giants, their brusque refusals, or their sudden willingness. Now, if some man, in those days, had tried to get something for himself by his own industry, they would have laughed him to scorn; for the results of his labor would have been puny beside the immense provisions th
I guess I'm far too literal-minded. The whole time I simply assumed the giants were a normal God parable. I was rather non-plussed about the whole quote until I saw "A meditation on childhood" and then my head exploded. I don't even remember being a kid anymore.
This was wasted as a point about 'gods'. The commentary on human social instincts irrespective of belief in literal gods was far more insightful.
Ok, so it seems almost everyone got a different idea of who the giants and the men were. Children and adults, pets and humans, humans and gods, governments and populations (in both directions!), humans and computers...
My first impulse upon seeing this, is that this must be a very general phenomena that occurs in a great spectrum of situations. That all these different situations are isomorpic towards one another. The next is that we should come up with a generalized theory for the concept and maybe make up a word to access the concept quicker.
I will not procrastinate regarding any ritual granting immortality.
--Evil Overlord List #230
Day ends, market closes up or down, reporter looks for good or bad news respectively, and writes that the market was up on news of Intel's earnings, or down on fears of instability in the Middle East. Suppose we could somehow feed these reporters false information about market closes, but give them all the other news intact. Does anyone believe they would notice the anomaly, and not simply write that stocks were up (or down) on whatever good (or bad) news there was that day? That they would say, hey, wait a minute, how can stocks be up with all this unrest in the Middle East?
--Paul Graham
Well now I want to test this. Do we have anyone here who thinks they know a thing or two about the stock market? If so would they be amenable to an experiment?
I'm thinking that they would agree not to look at any stock price information for a day (viewing all the other news they want). At the end of the day they are presented with some possible sets of market closes, all but one of which of which are fake, and we see if they can reliably find the right one.
In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality.
(...)
In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.
-- George Orwell, 1984
..."Great is Bankruptcy: the great bottomless gulf into which all Falsehoods, public and private, do sink, disappearing; whither, from the first origin of them, they were all doomed. For Nature is true and not a lie. No lie you can speak or act but it will come, after longer or shorter circulation, like a Bill drawn on Nature's Reality, and be presented there for payment, - with the answer, No effects.
Pity only that it often had so long a circulation: that the original forger were so seldom he who bore the final smart of it! Lies, and the burden of evil they bring, are passed on; shifted from back to back, and from rank to rank; and so land ultimately on the dumb lowest rank, who with spade and mattock, with sore heart and empty wallet, daily come in contact with reality, and can pass the cheat no further.
[...]
But with a Fortunatus' Purse in his pocket, through what length of time might not almost any Falsehood last! Your Society, your Household, practical or spiritual Arrangement, is untrue, unjust, offensive to the eye of God and man. Nevertheless its hearth is warm, its larder well replenished: the innumerable Swiss of Heaven, with a kind of Natural loyalty, gather round it;
"Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered.
We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time; premature optimization is the root of all evil."
--Donald Knuth (see also Amdahl's law)
Just saw on reddit a perfect accidental metaphor: jakeredfield posted this in r/gaming:
...For the people that have no played Portal yet, be warned, there may be spoilers up ahead for you.
So anyway, I am a huge fan of Portal, I love everything about the game. I bought it upon release and have played through it multiple times. My friends aren't as big of gamers as me so it took them some time to get their hands on Portal. My one friend didn't have a computer capable of running Portal so I let him play on mine.
I pulled up a chair besides him and eagerly watched him play then entire time. He loved the game. I expected him to. It's an awesome game. But here comes the WTF part...(SPOILERS AHEAD)
He go to the part at the last puzzle, right before GlaDOS tries to kill you in the fire. So then, my friend is like, "Oh, so it's one of those games where you die at the end. Haha, it was a good game." And then he immediately shuts it down. I just sat there. Shocked. In awe. I couldn't believe what I just saw. He turns to me and goes, "Good game, I'd play that again."
This is the part where I just hit him and yell, "IT WASN'T OVER YET!" He was so confused. He loaded it
Kräht der Hahn am Mist, ändert sich's Wetter oder es bleibt wie's ist.
-- Common German folk saying
Translates as "If the rooster crows on the manure pile, the weather will change or stay as it is." In other words, P(W|R) = P(W) when W is uncorrelated with R.
Another good one:
Ist's zu Sylvester hell und klar, ist am nächsten Tag Neujahr.
"If it's bright and clear on New Year's Eve, the next day will be New Year's."
Speed is not attained by hurrying; it is an unsought by-product of intelligent and continuous work.
-- Frederick Giesecke, et al, Technical Drawing, 8th ed
You know in those stories where there's this immortal guy and they talk about how bored they are and how boring life is after 5000 years or whatever? I am going to call something.
I am going to call SHENANIGANS.
You know who writes those stories? MORTALS. Folks using some of their PRECIOUS, FINITE LIFE to write a made-up story in which an imaginary person keeps going on about how being immortal is actually sucky and how they're totes jealous that others get to die someday!
Ridiculous!
And kinda sad!
"After solving a problem, humanity imagines that it finds in analogous solutions the key to all problems.
Every authentic solution brings in its wake a train of grotesque solutions."
--Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 430
As they say in Discworld, we are trying to unravel the Mighty Infinite using a language which was designed to tell one another where the fresh fruit was.
-- Terry Pratchett
Some in their discourse desire rather commendation of wit, in being able to hold all arguments, than of judgment, in discerning what is true; as if it were a praise to know what might be said, and not what should be thought.
Francis Bacon
The following reminded me of Arguments as Soldiers:
Statistics for the enemy. Anecdotes for the friend. -- Zach Weiner
I'm sorry to have not found his blog sooner.
"I submit that claims about God are of this latter sort. There’s simply no reason to take them more seriously than one does claims about witches or ghosts. The idea that one needs powerful philosophical theories to settle such issues I like to call the “philosophy fallacy.”
We will see that people are particularly prey to it in religious discussions, both theist and atheist alike; indeed, atheists often get trapped into doing far more, far riskier philosophy than they need."
--Georges Rey, "Meta-atheism: Religious Avowal as Self-deception" (2009)
(First version seen on http://www.strangedoctrines.com/2008/09/risky-philosophy.html but quote from an expanded paper.)
It's true that the question of God's existence is epistemologically fairly trivial and doesn't require its own category of justifications, and it's also true that even many atheists don't seem to notice this. But even with that in mind, it almost never actually helps in convincing people to become atheists (most theists won't respond to a crash course in Bayesian epistemology and algorithmic information theory, but they sometimes respond to careful refutation of the real reasons they believe in God), which is probably why this point is often forgotten by people who spend a lot of time arguing for atheism.
If a given hypothesis is incoherent even to its strongest proponents, then it's not very meritorious. It's in "not even wrong" territory.
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Give a man a fishing rod and he'll sell it for a fish.
Make a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
(Terry Pratchett, I think.)
I saw a creepy hospice volunteer search ad on the street a few days ago. It said something along the lines of "They will be grateful to you for the rest of their lives." Like an inappropriate joke.
I think it's more elegant to say it like this: "Light a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man afire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.
Paul Graham
Apathy on the individual level translates into insanity at the mass level.
-- Douglas Hofstadter
People who have been living with serious problems for a long time find it hard to imagine that there's been a solution within their reach all along. For the short term, it's easier to go on putting up with the problem than it is to change one's expectations.
paulwl (quoted here)
ETA: I thought this had the smell of Usenet about it, and on Google Groups I found the original, written by one Alex Clark here. paulwl is actually the person he was replying to.
BTW, there's quite a bit of rationality (and irrationality) on that newsgroup on the subject of people looking for relationships (mostly men looking for women), from way back when. I don't know if 1996 predates the sort of PUA that has been talked about on LW.
"But can people in desperate poverty be considered to be making free choices? Many say no. So, is the choice between starving and selling one’s kidney really a choice? Yes; an easy one. One of the options is awful. To forbid organ selling is to take away the better choice. If we choose to provide an even better option to the person that would be great – but it is no solution to the problem of poverty to take away what choices the poor do have absent outside help."
Katja Grace, on Metaeuphoric, Dying for a Donation
I appeal to the philosophers of all countries to unite and never again mention Heidegger or talk to another philosopher who defends Heidegger.
It is not rational to ignore arguments because they were made by an awful person.
In academic philosophy there is a tendency to refer to "Heidegger's arguments and positions" as simply "Heidegger". (This is true of all philosophers, not just Heidegger). Popper, of course, would have been familiar with this; when I read that quote I got the distinct impression of "Heidegger's arguments are hollow and his positions are indefensible; please can we agree on this and stop discussing them?"
I once told a university friend of mine, who was majoring in modern philosophy, that Heidegger was the most empty and nonsensical philosopher I had encountered in high school. He blamed this on translation difficulties and my Marxist teacher, and offered to guide me through a selected reading of Sein und Zeit; an offer on which I took him up.
We called it quits (in a friendly manner) after five evenings of heated arguing over whether it was even intellectually permissible to use half of the words Heidegger was using, and I left with the judgment that Heidegger was raping the German language.
Will_Newsome pointed out the caveat that it's only good to admit errors when actually in error. I'd add a second caveat, which is that most of the benefit from admitting an error is in the lessons learnt by retracing steps and finding where they went wrong. Each error has a specific cause - a doubt not investigated, a piece of evidence given too much or too little weight, or a bias triggered. I try to make myself stronger by identifying those causes, concretely envisioning what I should have done differently, and thinking of the reference classes where the same mistake might happen in the future.
After finishing dinner, Sidney Morgenbesser decides to order dessert. The waitress tells him he has two choices: apple pie and blueberry pie. Sidney orders the apple pie. After a few minutes the waitress returns and says that they also have cherry pie at which point Morgenbesser says "In that case I'll have the blueberry pie."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_of_irrelevant_alternatives
To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.
-Confucius
Sometimes they only unlock the deadbolt, and you need a friend to help push open the door. Sometimes the door is on the top of a cliff, and you need to climb up the rope of Wikipedia to get there. And so on. A lot of people who are having trouble learning something are having trouble realizing what resources they have available.
Its a bizarre feature of university life that it is very difficult to get students to take opportunities for help, even when they are obviously and explicitly provided.
And the reasons those students don't take opportunities for help tend to be embarrassingly pathetic. Like, so embarrassing that they avoid even thinking about it, because if they made their real reason explicit, they would be pained at how dumb it is. (I've done this sot of thing myself, more times than I'm comfortable with.)
For example, I discovered that a significant fraction of the students in a certain class were afraid to ask questions of the professor because they found him scary. Now, I know the professor in question, and he's a friendly person who wishes that his students would talk to him more -- but he has an abrupt, somewhat awkward way of speaking, and an eastern European accent. Such superficial details are apparently what leaves the biggest impression on most people.
Or there are the guys who get depressed and stop coming to class for a week or two, and then keep on not coming to class because they haven't been to class for a while, and it would be hard trying to get back up to speed. I really sympathize with these guys, but that doesn't make their reasoning any saner. (A fair number of them come in at the end of a semester to flunk their final exams. Damn it all, this...
On two occasions I have been asked, – "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
-Charles Babbage
How emotionally entangled are you with your point of view? Test yourself - defend an opposing view, believing your life depends upon it.
-- Marc Stiegler, David's Sling
"Nor let him [the ruler] ever believe that a state can always make safe choices; on the contrary, let him think that he must make only doubtful ones; because this is in the order of things, that one never tries to avoid one inconvenience without incurring another; but prudence consists of knowing how to recognize the kinds of inconveniences, and to take the least sad for good."
--Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality by not dying
-- The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
I haven't been able to find the original source of the Woody Allen quote, but it seems "The Colour of Magic" was published in 1983, and Google Books finds some copies of the Woody Allen quote predating that.
Too broad a viewpoint, too philosophical an outlook paralyzes the will.
-- Robert A Heinlein, Lost Legacy
Go not to the elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.
-- Frodo Baggins, conveying one of the many wise sayings that Hobbits chuck around daily. The elf he was talking with thought it was hilarious, but refused to simply agree or disagree with it.
Heed a lesson from a successful practical propagandist. If you want to persuade people that a premise they unconsciously hold is wrong, do not give it a label they will perceive as insulting! If you do this, you make them reluctant to consciously accept that they hold the premise, which will make it more difficult to argue them out of it!
This rule does not hold for conscious premises. It can be effective to make insulting labels for those.
(This applies no less strongly to one's own brain.)
We've all bought and enjoyed books called 'Optical Illusions'. We all love optical illusions. But that's not what they should call the book. They should call them 'Brain Failures'. Because that what it is: a complete failure of human perception. All it takes is a few clever sketches and our brains can't figure it out.
Transcribed from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAD25s53wmE
At my mother's knee I learned to view religious worship as a practice which lures people away from their duties and pleasures on earth, and breeds in them a thirst for impossible things, the chasing of which can bring no honour or delight but only bewilderment, disappointment, and insanity.
(a sentiment I think applies to all super-stimuli)
Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.
-- Seth Lloyd
I would like to get rid of one or two of them. Its painfull to see how often really inevitable things get confused with those that could at least in theory be dealt with.
"Paper clips are gregarious by nature, and solitary ones tend to look very, very depressed." - dwardu
The world around us redounds with opportunities, explodes with opportunities, which nearly all folk ignore because it would require them to violate a habit of thought ... I cannot quite comprehend what goes through people's minds when they repeat the same failed strategy over and over, but apparently it is an astonishingly rare realization that you can try something else.
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky, putting words in my other copy's mouth
surely quotes from his fiction are kosher.
I'm happy to see gems from HPMOR done up in needlepoint and hung on the metaphorical wall of the parlor. But it still smells like trayf! Consider:
Quirrell avoids the ban on quoting himself by attributing the quotation to Eliezer. And he then avoids the ban on quoting Eliezer by pointing out that Eliezer was quoting Quirrell. This is clever and slippery and rabbinical and all that, but it jumps the shark when you realize that Quirrell is not just Eliezer's HPMOR character, he is also probably his LW sock-puppet!
Quirrell is not just Eliezer's HPMOR character, he is also probably his LW sock-puppet!
Oh, come on. It's obviously been the other way around all along.
"Alas, how terrible is wisdom
when it brings no profit to the man that's wise!
This I knew well, but had forgotten it,
else I would not have come here."
--Teiresias to the unrelenting Oedipus, Oedipus the King 316-9, Sophocles
(Assigning a specific location to 'here' left as an exercise for the reader...)
The astro-philosophers of Krull once succeeded in proving conclusively that all places are one place and that the distance between them is an illusion, and this news was an embarrassment to all thinking philosophers because it did not explain, among other things, signposts.
-- Terry Pratchett, "Sourcery"
It has never mattered to me that thirty million people might think I'm wrong. The number of people who thought Hitler was right did not make him right... Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?
-- Frank Zappa, quoted from The Real Frank Zappa Book
On simpler solutions:
"But still you did not know the algorithm."
"Yes, but I had some idea that it was related to the Azure/Pufferfish algorithm, which in turn is related to the zeta functions that we studied at Princeton. So I just sat down and said to myself if Rudy were going to build the ultimate cryptosystem on this basis, and if Azure/Pufferfish is a simplified version of that system, then what is Arethusa? That gave me a handful of possibilities."
"And out of that handful you were able to pick the right one."
"No," Waterhouse says, "it was too hard. So I went to the church where Enoch was working, and looked through his wastebasket. "
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
The same reign of terror that occurred under Robespierre and Hitler occurred back then in the fifties, as it occurs now. You must realize that there is very little actual courage in this world. It's pretty easy to bend people around. It doesn't take much to shut people up, it really doesn't. In the fifties all I had to do was call a guy up on the telephone and say, "Well, I think your wife would like to know about your mistress."
An upvote to the first person to identify the author of that quote.
I think some time we should have an irrationality quotes thread, kind of in the "how not to" spirit.
I think such a thread should include an expectation of deconstruction - "this is wrong and this is why".
Since so many poker opponents often decide at whim, we need to do more than just strategically analyze their actions relative to what they should be doing. We need to watch and listen and determine what they are doing.
--Mike Caro, Caro's Book of Tells
"What happens when you combine organized religion and organized sports? I don’t know, but I suspect not much would change for either institution."
Opinions are like sex, you should change your positions if it feels wrong
~ garcia1000, Witchhunt game
[Humanity] had been the mere plaything of nature, when first it crept out of uncreative void into light; but thought brought forth power and knowledge; and, clad with these, the race of man assumed dignity and authority.
-- Mary Shelley, The Last Man
People think of the future as something other people do, But there's something weirder about a society where people don't think about the future. -- Peter Thiel
"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
In Dirk Gently's universe, a number of everyday events involve hypnotism, time travel, aliens, or some combination thereof. Dirk gets to the right answer by considering those possibilities, but we probably won't.
I think we could modify our sense of it to mean that if you are down to having to accept a 0.01% probability, because you've excluded everything else, then it's probably better to go back over your logic and see if there's any place you've improperly limited your hypothesis space.
Several paradigm-changing theories introduced concepts that would have previously been thought impossible (like special relativity, or many-worlds interpretation)
Seibel: The way you contributed technically to the PTRAN project, it sounds like you had the big architectural picture of how the whole thing was going to work and could point out the bits that it wasn’t clear how they were going to work.
Allen: Right.
Seibel: Do you think that ability was something that you had early on, or did that develop over time?
Allen: I think it came partially out of growing up on a farm. If one looks at a lot of the interesting engineering things that happened in our field—in this era or a little earlier—an awful lot of them come fro...
Increasingly each year the wild predictions of science-fiction writers are made tame by the daily papers.
Robert Heinlein
"Please don't hold anything back, and give me the facts" – Wen Jiabao, Chinese Premier (when meeting disgruntled people at the central complaints offices).
Pendarvis Theory of Technology: "..., it is my theory that everything wrong with everything is the fault of language teachers.
"If a child is taught that it is all right if you mis-spell a word occasionally, or don't always punctuate exactly correctly, then you are teaching that child that small mistakes are okay, as long as people know pretty well what is meant. I feel this is a dangerous attitude to foster in a highly technological society."
-- William Tuning, Fuzzy Bones
Better to teach the child the difference between programming a computer, proving a theorem, and writing an essay.
That's true if the only benefit of proofreading is finding misspellings. But you should be proofreading to find errors of expression in general, and the optimal amount of proofreading for that may imply that you find and fix all misspellings.
...To be sure, science is also mistrusted by those who don't like its discoveries for religious, political, ethical, or even esthetic reasons. Some thoughtful people complain that science has erased enchantment from the world. They have a point. Miracles, magic, and other fascinating impossibilities are no long much encountered except in movies. But in the light shed by the best science and scientists, everything is fascinating, and the more so the more that is known of its reality. To science, not even the bark of a tree or a drop of pond water is dull or h
...One might expect self-improving systems to be highly unpredictable because the properties of the current version might change in the next version. Our analysis will instead show that self-improvement acts to create predictable regularities. It builds on the intellectual foundations of microeconomics, the science of preference and choice in the face of uncertainty. The basic theory was created by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in 1944 for situations with objective uncertainty and was later extended by Savage and Anscombe and Aumann to situations wi
...Happily our civilization possesses two great advantages over past times : scientific knowledge and the scientific spirit. To us have been revealed secrets of life our forebears never knew. And to us has been vouchsafed a passion for truth such as the world has never seen. Other ages have sought truth from the lips of seers and prophets; our age seeks it from scientific proof. Other ages have had their saints and martyrs dauntless souls who clung to their faith with unshakable constancy. Yet our age has also its saints and martyrs heroes who can not only f
Approximate quote: [You should] go in with a thesis, not a conclusion.
From a BBC program about the media and crime in Detroit. The context was the extent to which Detroit is over-reported as a high-crime city, and someone commented that the BBC had sent someone over for a reason, but they were actually looking at the situation instead of assuming they knew what they were going to see.
Whenever I’m about to do something, I think "would an idiot do that?" and if they would, I do not do that thing.
— Dwight Schrute ("The Office" Season 3, Episode 17 "Business School," written by Brent Forrester)
...Disputes with men, pertinaciously obstinate in their principles, are, of all others, the most irksome; except, perhaps, those with persons entirely disingenuous, who really do not believe the opinions they defend, but engage in the controversy from affectation, from a spirit of opposition, or from a desire of showing wit and ingenuity superior to the rest of mankind. The same blind adherence to their own arguments is to be expected in both; the same contempt of their antagonists; and the same passionate vehemence, in inforcing sophistry and falsehood. And
"Traditional Renaissance perspective conforms most closely to the way people in our Western culture perceive objects in space. In our perceptions, parallel lines appear to converge at vanishing points on a horizon line (the viewer's eye level) and forms appear to become smaller as distance from the viewer increases."
-- Betty Edwards, "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" (actually an awesome book, this quote isn't very representative)
[E]conomic statistics are a peculiarly boring sub-genre of science fiction; extremely useful, but not to be treated as absolute truth.
-- Paul Krugman
The best of all things is to learn. Money can be lost or stolen, health and strength may fail, but what you have committed to your mind is yours forever.
-- Louis L'Amour, The Walking Drum
If you don't like to read, you'll have to [go to] college. A college's faculty presumes that students don't read without threats of failure [or] expulsion. But, if you like to read, your education will take place, despite everything.
-- John Coyne & Tom Hebert, This Way Out
Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but yourself can free your mind.
An upvote to the first person to correctly identify the first person to say that (the quote is often misattributed, you'll get a downvote if you identify the wrong author).
When we exhort people to Faith as a virtue, to the settled intention of continuing to believe certain things, we are not exhorting them to fight against reason. The intention of continuing to believe is required because, though Reason is divine, human reasoners are not. When once passion takes part in the game, the human reason, unassisted by Grace, has about as much chance of retaining its hold on truths already gained as a snowflake has of retaining its consistency in the mouth of a blast furnace.
C.S. Lewis, "Religion: Reality or Substitute?", in "Christian Reflections".
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
After finishing dinner, Sidney Morgenbesser decides to order dessert. The waitress tells him he has two choices: apple pie and blueberry pie. Sidney orders the apple pie. After a few minutes the waitress returns and says that they also have cherry pie at which point Morgenbesser says "In that case I'll have the blueberry pie."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_of_irrelevant_alternatives
Sidney chooses pies on the basis of popularity. Apple pie is more popular than blueberry pie. Apple pie is so popular that pie eaters have grown sick of it. They quickly gorge on the new cherry pie. When the fad dies down, they are still sick of apple pie and begin a blueberry revival. Sidney correctly predicts that blueberry will be more popular.
Take off every 'quote'! You know what you doing. For great insight. Move 'quote'.
And if you don't: