...A newspaper is better than a magazine. A seashore is a better place than the street. At first it is better to run than to walk. You may have to try several times. It takes some skill, but it is easy to learn. Even young children can enjoy it. Once successful, complications are minimal. Birds seldom get too close. Rain, however, soaks in very fast. Too many people doing the same thing can also cause problems. One needs lots of room. If there are no complications, it can be very peaceful. A rock will serve as an anchor. If things break loose from it, however, you will not get a second chance.
Is this paragraph comprehensible or meaningless? Feel your mind sort through potential explanations. Now watch what happens with the presentation of a single word: kite. As you reread the paragraph, feel the prior discomfort of something amiss shifting to a pleasing sense of rightness. Everything fits; every sentence works and has meaning. Reread the paragraph again; it is impossible to regain the sense of not understanding. In an instant, without due conscious deliberation, the paragraph has been irreversibly infuesed with a feeling of knowing.
Try to imagine other interpretations for the paragr
It looked like nonsense to me. I stopped reading after a few sentences.
I thought it was a puzzle or riddle, so I went back and looked at it again. My first guess was that it was something to do with running, then paper airplanes (which can be made from newspaper, but not a magazine). The rock as anchor made me realize there needed to be something attached, which made me realize it was a kite.
On the other hand, I don't have any trouble seeing alternative interpretations; perhaps it's because I already tried several and came to the conclusion myself. (Or maybe it's just that I'm more used to looking at things with multiple interpretations; it's a pretty core skill to changing one's self.)
Then again, I also don't see the paragraph as infused with irreversible knowing. I read the words literally every time, and have to add words like, "for flying a kite" to the sentences in order to make the link. I could just as easily add "in bed", though, at which point the paragraph actually becomes pretty hilarious -- much like a strung-together collage of fortune cookie quotes... in bed. ;-)
The reason I posted the link to epiphany addiction was that this quote is an example of how confusion doesn't feel good (it prompted you to stop reading...), and that "sense of knowing" feels pleasant. The danger being that we have very little control over when we feel either, so the feeling of knowing is no substitute for rationality.
But there’s a big difference between “impossible” and “hard to imagine.” The first is about it; the second is about you!
"For my own part,” Ms. Yellen said, “I did not see and did not appreciate what the risks were with securitization, the credit ratings agencies, the shadow banking system, the S.I.V.’s — I didn’t see any of that coming until it happened.” Her startled interviewers noted that almost none of the officials who testified had offered a similar acknowledgment of an almost universal failure.
Economist and likely future chairperson of the Federal Reserve Board Janet Yellen shows the key rationality trait of being able to admit you were wrong.
A good stack of examples, as large as possible, is indispensable for a thorough understanding of any concept, and when I want to learn something new, I make it my first job to build one.
-Paul Halmos
Is time real? …In one sense, it’s a silly question. The “reality” of something is only an interesting issue if its a well-defined concept whose actual existence is in question, like Bigfoot or supersymmetry. For concepts like “time,” which are unambiguously part of a useful vocabulary we have for describing the world, talking about “reality” is just a bit of harmless gassing. They may be emergent or fundamental, but they’re definitely there.
Sometimes it's disturbing how good Sean Carrol is at articulating my thoughts. Especially when it pertains to, as above, the philosophy of science. Here's another:
We should not think of the big bang as the beginning of the universe. We should think of it as the end [of] our [current] understanding of what is happening.
“What else [have you learned]?”
“Never make a decision blindfolded.”
The teacher laughed. “An impossible wish. We’re all wearing blindfolds, every moment of our lives, and they come off far less easily than this cheap piece of cloth.”
“Then what should we do, when we can’t take the blindfold off?”
“Do the best you can,” the teacher said, “and never forget that you’re wearing it.”
Realistically, most people have poor filters for sorting truth from fiction, and there’s no objective way to know if you’re particularly good at it or not. Consider the people who routinely disagree with you. See how confident they look while being dead wrong? That’s exactly how you look to them.
Scott Adams, in How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big
God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot predict, the courage to predict the things I can, and the wisdom to buy index funds.
Nate Silver
(h/t Rob Wiblin)
When the tech geeks raised concerns about their ability to deliver the website on time, they are reported to have been told “Failure is not an option.” Unfortunately, this is what happens when you say “failure is not an option”: You don’t develop backup plans, which means that your failure may turn into a disaster.
From an article about Obamacare.
The theme of this book, then, must be the coming to consciousness of uncertain inference. The topic may be compared to, say, the history of visual perspective. Everyone can see in perspective, but it has been a difficult and long-drawn-out effort of humankind to become aware of the principles of perspective in order to take advantage of them and imitate nature. So it is with probability. Everyone can act so as to take a rough account of risk, but understanding the principles of probability and using them to improve performance is an immense task.
James Franklin, The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal
"Next time you’re in a debate, ask yourself if someone is on offense or defense. If they’re neither, then you know you have someone you can learn from"
Disputed. Some people are naturally on the defensive even when debating true propositions. Defensiveness though is more often a bad sign, since somebody defending a false proposition that they know on some level to be false, is more likely to try to hold territory and block opponent progress. Many advocating true propositions very commonly go on the offensive, nor is it clear to me that this is always wrong in human practice.
Nitpicking, but the quote stated that people who are on neither offensive nor defensive are people you can learn from - it didn't say that people who are on the offensive or defensive are necessarily wrong to do so.
"It is far better to improve the [quality] of testing first than to improve the efficiency of poor testing. Automating chaos just gives faster chaos." -- Mark Fewster & Dorothy Graham, Software Test Automation
"I spread the map out on the dining room table, and I held down the corners with cans of V8. The dots from where I'd found things looked like the stars in the universe. I connected them, like an astrologer, and if you squinted your eyes like a Chinese person, it kind of looked like the word 'fragile'. [...] I erased and connected the dots to make 'porte'. I had the revelation that I could connect the dots to make 'cyborg', and 'platypus', and 'boobs', and even 'Oskar', if you were extremely Chinese. I could connect them to make almost anything I wanted, which meant I wasn't getting closer to anything. And now I'll never know what I was supposed to find. And that's another reason I can't sleep."
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (emphasis mine)
Any man can learn to learn from the wise once he can find them: but learn to learn from a fool and all the world’s your faculty.
That's why it's so important to understand how unworried I was. I wasn't $400 worth of worried, or $100 worth of worried, or even $20 worth. I wouldn't have gone to the dermatologist if I didn't have health insurance. I probably wouldn't have gone if I had insurance but it had a big deductible, or even any real co-pay. The only reason I went to have my life saved is because it cost me zero dollars.
That behaviourally people treat free very differently from even $1, and that effective policymaking requires removing even trivial-seeming barriers to desired actions.
Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.
We laughed, -knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.
"One of the miseries of life is that everybody names things a little bit wrong, and so it makes everything a little harder to understand in the world than it would be if it were named differently."
Someone I know at TAC opined that everyone knows this stuff, and talking about it is just mean. I think he is mistaken: you have to state important facts every so often, or nobody knows them anymore.
Quick Googling shows that there's a paper published that states that European's average cranial capacities is 1347.
That's close enough to not effect his point, or even the order. I think you're engaging in motivated continuing to avoid having to acknowledge conclusions you find uncomfortable.
Rather then describing the facts as they are he paints things as more certain than they are. I think that people who do that in an area, where false beliefs lead to people being descrimited, are in no position to complain when they some social scorn.
Do you also apply the same criticism to the (much larger number of) people how make (much larger errors) in the direction of no difference? Also, could you taboo what you mean by "descrimited". Steelmanning suggests you mean "judged according to inaccurate priors", yet you also seem be implying that inaccurately equaliterian priors aren't a problem.
By that reasoning, refusing to hire someone who doesn't have good recommendations, is discrimination, because you're giving him distinguishing treatment (refusing to hire him) based on membership in a category (people who lack good recommendations).
I think you have some assumptions that you need to make explicit, after thinking them through first. (For instance, one obvious change is to replace "category" with "irrelevant category", but that won't work.)
The question would be whether the name is a better predictor of job performance than grades to distinguish people in the population of people who apply or whether the information that comes from the names adds additional predictive value.
Emphasis mine. I don't think this is the question at all, because you also have the grade information; the only question is if grades screen off evidence from names, which is your second option. It seems to me that the odds that the name provides no additional information are very low.
To the best of my knowledge, no studies have been done which submit applications where the obviously black names have higher qualifications in an attempt to determine how many GPA points an obviously black name costs an applicant. (Such an experiment seems much more difficult to carry out, and doesn't have the same media appeal.)
If you combine a low noise signal with a high noise signal the combined signal can be of medium noise. Combining information isn't always useful if you want to use both signal as proxy for the same thing.
Agreed that if you have P(A|B) and P(A|C), then you don't have enough to get P(A|BC).
But if you have the right objects and they're well-calibrated, then adding in a new measurement always improves your estimate. (You might not be sure that they're well-calibrated, in which case it might make sense to not include them, and that can obviously include trying to estimate P(A|BC) from P(A|C) and P(A|B).)
For combining information in such a way you would have to believe that the average black with a IQ of 120 will get a higher GPA score than the average white person of the same IQ.
Not quite. Regression to the mean implies that you should apply shrinkage which is as specific as possible, but this shrinkage should obviously be applied to all applicants. (Regressing black scores to the mean, and not regressing white scores, for example, is obviously epistemic malfeasance, but regressing black scores to the black mean and white scores to the white mean makes sense, even if the IQ-grade...
His stated point is about telling things that everybody is supposed to know.
If you have an SD of 35 for an average of 1362 you have no idea about whether the last digit should be a 2. That means either you do state an error interval or you round to 1360.
Human height changed quite a bit over the last century. http://www.voxeu.org/article/reaching-new-heights-how-have-europeans-grown-so-tall . Taking data about human brainsize with 4 digit accuracy and assuming that it hasn't changed over the last 30 years is wrong.
European gained a lot of bodymass over the last 100 years due to better nutrition. The claim that it's static at 4 digit in a way where you could use 30 year old data to describes todays situation, gives the impression that human brainsize is something with is relatively fixed.
The difference in brain size between Africans and European in brainsize in that study is roughly the difference in height between todays Europeans and Europeans 100 years ago.
Given that background taking a three decades old average from one sample population and claiming that it's with 4 digits accuracy the average that exist today is wrong.
His stated point is about telling things that everybody is supposed to know.
No, that was absolutely not his point. I don't understand how you could have come away thinking that- literally the entire next paragraph directly stated the exact opposite:
Graduate students in anthropology generally don’t know those facts about average brain volume in different populations. Some of those students stumbled onto claims about such differences and emailed a physical anthropologist I know, asking if those differences really exist. He tells them ‘yep’ – I’m not sure what happens next. Most likely they keep their mouths shut. Ain’t it great, living in a free country?
More generally, that was not a tightly reasoned book/paper about brainsize. That line was a throwaway point in support of a minor example ("For example, average brain size is not the same in all human populations") on a short blog post. Arguments about the number of significant figures presented, when you don't even disagree about the overall example or the conclusion, are about as good an example of bad disagreement as I can imagine.
His claim was:
(a) Everybody knew that different ethnicities had different brain sizes (b) It was an uncomfortable fact, so nobody talked about it (c) Now nobody knows that different ethnicities have different brain sizes
Most people think that the negotiation is about substance: I’m a financial expert, I’m a medical doctor, I’m an environmental lawyer, I’m an energy expert, I’m a mechanic. But studies show that less than 10 percent of the reason why people reach agreement has anything to do with the substance. More than 50 percent has to do with the people—do they like each other, do they trust each other, will they hear what each other has to say? Just over a third has to do with the process they use. That is, do they decide to explore each other’s needs (rational and emotional)? Do they agree on an agenda? Do they make genuine commitments to each other?
If you believe that negotiations are about the substantive issues, sadly, you will be right more than you are persuasive. That means that the truth, the facts, are only one argument in a negotiation. The people and the process are much more important. This is particularly hard for people who are focused on the substance—doctors, engineers, financial experts—to accept. But, based on research, it is true. You can’t even use substantive issues to persuade effectively unless and until the other party is ready to hear about them.
--Stuart Diamond, Getting More, 2010, pp. 51-52
I was once at a meetup, and there were some people there new to LessWrong. After listening to a philosophical argument between two long-time meetup group members, where they agreed on a conclusion that was somewhere between their original positions, a newcomer said "sounds like a good compromise," to which one of the old-comers (?) said "but that has nothing to do with whether it's true... in fact now that you point that out I'm suspicious of it."
Later in the meetup, an argument ended with another conclusion that sounded like a compromise. I pointed it out. One of the arguers was horrified to agree with me that compromising was exactly what he was doing.
Is this actually a failure mode though, if you only "compromise" with people you respect intellectually? In retrospect, this sounds kind of like an approximation to Aumann agreement.
On not doing the impossible:
Ferrucci says. “We constantly underestimate—we did in the ’50s about AI, and we’re still doing it—what is really going on in the human brain.”
The question that [Douglas] Hofstadter wants to ask Ferrucci, and everybody else in mainstream AI, is this: Then why don’t you come study it?
...
Peter Norvig, one of Google’s directors of research, echoes Ferrucci almost exactly. “I thought he was tackling a really hard problem,” he told me about Hofstadter’s work. “And I guess I wanted to do an easier problem.”
I know that what I see through the microscope is veridical because we made the grid to be just that way. I know that the process of manufacture is reliable, because we can check the results with the microscope. Moreover we can check the results with any kind of microscope, using any of a dozen unrelated physical processes to produce an image. Can we entertain the possibility that, all the same, this is some gigantic coincidence?
-- Ian Hacking, Images of Science: Essays on Realism and Empiricism
The idea that a self-imposed external constraint on action can actually enhance our freedom by releasing us from predictable and undesirable internal constraints is not an obvious one. It is hard to be Ulysses.
-- Reid Hastie & Robyn Dawes (Rational Choice in an Uncertain World)
The "Ulysses" reference is to the famous Ulysses pact in the Odyssey.
I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them: For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others. Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that whereever others differ from them it is so far error. Steele, a Protestant in a Dedication tells the Pope, that the only difference between our Churches in their opinions of the certainty of their doctrines is, the Church of Rome is infallible and the Church of England is never in the wrong. But though many private persons think almost as highly of their own infallibility as of that of their sect, few express it so naturally as a certain french lady, who in a dispute with her sister, said "I don't know how it happens, Sister but I meet with no body but myself, that's always in the right"--"Il n'y a que moi qui a toujours raison."
Natural selection is a tinkerer, not an idiot!
SMBC comics on the relative proximity of excretory and reproductive outlets in humans.
Evo-devo (that is to say, actual real science) gives an even better account of that accident of evolutionary history. For simple sessile animals, reproduction often involves dumping quantities of spores or gametes into the environment. And what other system already dumps quantities of stuff into the environment...?
Who puts sanitation next to recreation? Well here's why your excretory organs should be separate from your other limbs and near the bottom of your body.
Okay, but why should the reproductive outlets be there too?
I agree connotationally, but the comic only answers half of the question.
I am a fan of SMBC, but the entire explanation is wrong. The events that led to the integration of reproductive and digestive systems happened long before a terrestrial existence of vertebrates, and certainly long before hands. To get a start on a real explanation you have to go back to early bilaterals:
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/chb/lectures/anatomy9.html
As near as I can tell it was about pipe reuse. But you can't make a funny comic about that (or maybe you can?). Zach is a "bard", not a "wizard." He entertains.
He was not a very careful person as a mathematician. He made a lot of mistakes. But he made mistakes in a good direction. I tried to emulate him. But I've realized that it's very difficult to make good mistakes.
The only rigorous method, the only one that enables us to test an opinion against reality, is based on the clear recognition that opinions come first[as opposed to facts]—and that this is the way it should be. Then no one can fail to see that we start out with untested hypotheses—in decision-making as in science the only starting point. We know what to do with hypotheses—one does not argue them; one tests them. One finds out which hypotheses are tenable, and therefore worthy of serious consideration, and which are eliminated by the first test against observable experience.
-- Peter Drucker The Effective Executive
The next best thing to have after a reliable ally is a predictable enemy.
-- Sam Starfall, FreeFall #1516
What is the experience of eating a chocolate brownie like? Can you describe it?
I believe it is ineffable. There is nothing you can say about chocolate that would mean anything to someone who has not tasted it.
Chocolate brownies are one of my favorite things -- but I don't think their ineffability is a big deal.
All experiences are ineffable. The best we can ever do is say "it's like this other thing."
Saying that something is ineffable and saying that nothing we can say is meaningful without the exact same shared experience are rather different things. To use your own example, comparision is possible - so we can imperfectly describe chocolate in terms of sugar and (depending on the type) bitterness, even if our audience has never heard of chocolate.
Conveniently, this allows us to roughly fathom experiences that nobody has ever had. Playwrights, for example, set out to create an experience that does not yet exist and prompt actors to react to situations they have never lived through, and through their capability to generalize they can imperfectly communicate their ideas.
”I don’t believe in shouldn’t, like there’s some universal rules about the way things should be, the way people should act.”
“So there’s no right or wrong? People and animals should do whatever?”
“No, there’s always going to be consequences. Believe me when I say I know about that. But I do think there’s always going to be extenuating circumstances, where a lot of things we normally assume are wrong become excusable.”
Skitter the bug girl on morality, consequentialism and metaethics in Worm, the online serial recommended by Eliezer for HPMoR withdrawal ...
Robert Morris has a very unusual quality: he's never wrong. It might seem this would require you to be omniscient, but actually it's surprisingly easy. Don't say anything unless you're fairly sure of it. If you're not omniscient, you just don't end up saying much. More precisely, the trick is to pay careful attention to how you qualify what you say. ... He has an almost superhuman integrity. He's not just generally correct, but also correct about how correct he is.
--Paul Graham
For every ailment under the sun;
There is a remedy, or there is none;
If there be one, try to find it;
If there be none, never mind it.
-- Mother Goose
Presumably, a wise implementation of this quote would consider a continuum of remedies, ranging from mild treatment of symptoms to vaccination against the possibility of ever contracting the ailment. Even if there is no cure for an ailment, there is still value in mitigating its negative effects.
...It's one thing to feel your own problems more acutely than those of other people, even millions of other people, even many whose problems make yours look trivial by comparison. We all do that, and we could barely function if we didn't. It's quite another thing to expect that other people will see your problems as more important than those of millions. I sprained my ankle a few weeks ago, and I'll admit that in the time since I've given more thought to my ankle's recovery than I have to the 660,000 people who die every year from malaria. But if I asked you
Utilitarianism is not in our nature. Show me a man who would hold a child’s face in the fire to end malaria, and I will show you man who would hold a child’s face in the fire and entirely forget he was originally planning to end malaria.
Medicine is not in our nature. Show me a man who would cut someone open to remove cancer, and I will show you man who would cut someone open and entirely forget he was originally planning to remove a tumour
Exact same argument. Does it sound equally persuasive to you?
I'd extend Eugene's reply and point out that both the original and modified version of the sentence are observations. As such, it doesn't matter that the two sentences are grammatically similar; it's entirely possible that one is observed and the other is not. History has plenty of examples of people who are willing to do harm for a good cause and end up just doing harm; history does not have plenty of examples of people who are willing to cut people open to remove cancer and end up just cutting people open.
Also, the phrasing "to end malaria" isn't analogous to "to remove cancer" because while the surgery only has a certain probability of working, the uncertainty in that probability is limited. We know the risks of surgery, we know how well surgery works to treat cancer, and so we can weigh those probabilities. When ending malaria (in this example), the claim that the experiment has so-and-so chance of ending malaria involves a lot more human judgment than the claim that surgery has so-and-so chance of removing cancer.
Utilitarianism isn't a description of human moral processing, it's a proposal for how to improve it.
One problem is that if we, say, start admiring people for acting in "more utilitarian" ways, what we may actually be selecting for is psychopathy.
Agreed. Squicky dilemmas designed to showcase utilitarianism are not generally found in real life (as far as I know). And a human probably couldn't be trusted to make a sound judgement call even if one were found. Running on untrusted hardware and such.
Ah- and this is the point of the quote. Oh, I like that.
We us::should try to be as utilitarian as we can because our intuitive morality is kind of consequentialist, so we care about how the world actually ends up, and utilitarianism helps us win.
If we ever pass up a chance to literally hold one child's face to a fire and end malaria, we have screwed up. We are not getting what we care about most.
It's not the "tidiness" in any aesthetic sense of VNM axioms that are important, it's the not-getting-money-pumped. Not being able to be money pumped is important not because getting money pumped is stupid and we can't be stupid, but because we need to use our money on useful stuff.
If I'm not fighting the hypothetical, yes I would.
If I encountered someone claiming that in the messy real world, then I run the numbers VERY careful and most likely conclude the probability is infinitesimal of him actually telling the truth and being sane. Specifically, of those claims the one that it'd be easier to kidnap someone than to find volunteer (say, adult willing to do it in exchange for giving their families large sums of money) sounds highly implausible.
Here's one with actual information gained: Imperial Japanese experimentation about frostbite
For example, Unit 731 proved that the best treatment for frostbite was not rubbing the Limb, which had been the traditional method but immersion in water a bit warmer than 100 degrees, but never mom than 122 degrees.
The cost of this scientific breakthrough was borne by those seized for medical experiments. They were taken outside and left with exposed arms, periodically drenched with water, until a guard decided that frostbite had set in. Testimony From a Japanese officer said this was determined after the "frozen arms, when struck with a short stick, emitted a sound resembling that which a board gives when it is struck."
I don't get the impression that those experiments destroyed a lot of trust-- nothing compared to the rape of Nanking or Japanese treatment of American prisoners of war.
However, it might be worth noting that that sort of experimentation doesn't seem to happen to people who are affiliated with the scientists or the government.
Logically, people could volunteer for such experiments and get the same respect that soldiers do, but I don't know of any real-world examples.
Would experimenting on little girls actually help that much?
...
The answer is not obviously biased towards "experiment on little girls.". In fact, I'd say it's still biased towards "experiment on mice."
So your answer is that in fact it would not work. That is a reasonable response to an outrageous hypothetical. Yet James A. Donald suggested a realistic scenario, and beside it, the arguments you come up with look rather weak.
Would experimenting on little girls actually help that much? Also consider that many people consider a child's life more valuable than an adult one
Given the millions killed by malaria and at most thousands of experimental subjects, it takes a heavy thumb on the scales of this argument to make the utilitarian calculation come out against.
...evade legal problems and deal with psychological costs...
This is a get-out-of-utilitarianism-free card. A real utilitarian simply chooses the action of maximum utility. He would only pay a psychological cost for not doing that. When all are utilitarians the laws will also be utilitarian, and an evaluation of utility will be the sole criterion applied by the courts.
You are not a utilitarian. Ne...
...Experts are simply people with more information and experience. But they are not necessarily as intelligent as you are, they often lack some of the most relevant information, and they usually have no skin in the game so they often don't even bother paying serious attention to the matter at hand.
Some of my biggest mistakes have been because, against my better judgment, I trusted the expert to know what he was doing. The main problem, I think, is that the expert is usually making a probabilistic decision based on the averages without bothering to apply the
I upvoted this comment, but I want to add an important caveat. Whether, and how much, you trust your own judgment over that of an expert should depend at least in part on the degree to which you think your situation is unusual.
The IT guy wants you to shut up and go away, but (if in fact he is an expert and not a trained monkey reading a script) he's not going to spout random nonsense at you just to get you to leave. He's going to tell you things relevant to what is, in his experience, the usual situation.
Consider well whether you're sure your problem is some special snowflake. The IT guy has seen a lot of issues. Sometimes he can, before you finish your first sentence, know exactly what your problem is and how to fix it, and if he sounds bored when he tells you "just reboot it", that doesn't mean that he's wrong. If it costs you little, try his advice first.
I don't really like quotes like this. It's not that it's not true and it's not that it's not that no one commits the error it warns against.
It's that no one who is blind to fallacies due to popularity is going to notice their mistake and change - it's too easy to agree with the quote without firing up the process that would lead you to making the mistake.
Good quotes will make it easy to put yourself in either position so that you can mentally bridge the two. If you're thinking "I can't imagine how they might make that mistake!", then you won't recognize that thought process when you go through it yourself.
It turns out that when you are really really sleepy your favorite pieces of code are always the most 'obvious' ones. Thinking is not fun in the middle of the night, and it shouldn't be necessary all of the time.
--Paul
if I understand "hastily" to mean, roughly, "more rapidly/sloppily than prudence dictates", then this statement is trivially true.
Trivial statements are often useful as reminders of facts, particularly when those facts are tradeoffs we would rather not have to face.
Ignorance isn't a concatenation operator.
James Argo
puts "quantum" + " consciousness"
=> quantum consciousness
Here ignorance is acting as the "+" operator, binding the two strings into one. On reflection, it's not as clever as I thought it was when I read it on Hacker News. Rationality quotes should be scrutable. I'll retract.
It’s something I learned from animal ethology. An “overdetermined” behavior is one for which there are multiple sufficient explanations. To unpack: “For every interesting behavior of animals and humans there is more than one valid and sufficient causal theory.” Evolution likes overdetermined behaviors; they serve multiple functions at once.
Eric Raymond
Google Is My Friend.
...You often see in the papers things saying events we just saw should happen every ten thousand years, hundred thousand years, ten billion years. Some faculty here in this university had an event and said that a 10-sigma event should happen every, I don't know how many billion years. Do you ever regard how worrisome it is, when someone makes a statement like that, "it should happen every ten thousand years," particularly when the person is not even two thousand years old?
So the fundamental problem of small probabilities is that rare events don't
they are not making a statement based on empirical evidence, or computation of the odds, but based on what? On some model, some theory.
What's the difference between "based on computation of the odds" and "based on some model"?
I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea.
Rachel: I'll have to write that into the new gospel.
E-Merl: New gospel?
Rachel: Gospels should be updated regularly.
Edit: mispelling of "write" corrected.
In fact, the more you ponder it, the more inevitable it seems. Evolution gave us the cognition we needed, nothing more. To the degree we relied on metacognition and casual observation to inform our self-conception, the opportunistic nature of our cognitive capacities remained all but invisible, and we could think ourselves the very rule, stamped not just the physical image of God, but in His cognitive image as well. Like God, we had no back side, nothing to render us naturally contingent. We were the motionless centre of the universe: the earth, in a very ...
How would you move Mount Fuji?
Take some time. Think about it.
Got an answer?
Good.
Throw it away.
You can't move Mount Fuji.
That is true. There are some things that we cannot do. There are some things that we cannot do yet. There are some things that we can do, but have not.
The objection to the quote is that it seems to place "moving Mt. Fuji", as an example of some larger class, in the first class not arbitrarily, but in spite of the evidence (the fact that the audience has come up with an answer, if indeed they have). While the surrounding article makes a good point, the quote in isolation smacks of irrational defeatism.
As an alternative to the quote, I propose the following:
How would you move Mount Fuji?
Take some time. Think about it.
Got an answer?
I'll bet it's tremendously expensive, potentially devastating to the surrounding landscape, and requires the improbable cooperation of a lot of other entities.
Wouldn't it be so much easier to go around it instead?
Have you ever heard the phrase "rich as a Lannister"? ...Of course you have! You're a smart man. You know who the Lannisters are. I am a Lannister. Tyrion, son of Tywin. Of course, you have also heard the phrase "a Lannister always pays his debts". If you deliver a message from me to Lady Arryn, I will be in your debt. I will owe you gold... if you deliver the message, and I live, which I very much intend to do.
-Tyrion Lannister, Game of Thrones
Tyrion is frequently put into situations where he relies on his family's reputation for paying debts.
It's a real-life Newcomb-like problem - specifically a case of Parfit's Hitchhiker - illustrating the practical benefits of being seen as the sort of agent who keeps promises. It's not an ordinary quid-pro-quo because there is, in fact, no incentive for Tyrion to keep his end of the bargain once he gets what he wants other than to be seen as the sort of person who keeps his bargain.
Think it's a stretch?
I don't see any a priori reason why those intuitions should apply to the case of religion but not homosexuality.
How a priori reason do you want it to be? There's at this point a general consensus that sexual orientation, while culturally mediated, has a large genetic component. I don't think that anyone thinks there's say a gene for Christianity or the like. And while self-identified sexual orientation can change, that's substantially less common an occurrence as changes in one's religious self-identification. For example, in the US about half of all adults have changed their religion at least once in their lives. See here. Some of those people are people changing f...
Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are: