In fiction, villains start with some great scheme to do something awesome, and that immediately makes them fascinating to the reader. The hero - if you're doing this poorly - sits at home and just waits for the villain to do something awesome so they can respond. This is a problem. The solution is for your heroes to have a great and awesome scheme also, that just isn't evil.
That's often true, but there are counter-examples, like my all time favorite : the Foundation cycle. In it, especially the beginning of it (the Foundation novel and the prequels), it's truly the heroes who are doing something awesome - the Foundation and all what's associated to it - and the villains who try to prevent them (and even that is more complicated/interesting as simple "vilain").
It's also often the case in Jules Verne fiction, or in the rest of "hard scifi", be it about trans-humanism (permutation city for example) or about planetary exploration.
It does in various points of the saga, some examples I can give easily, other are spoilers so I'll ROT13 them.
In the first tome and the prequels, it's Harry Seldon who tries to develop pyschohistory and setup the Foundation, and different "villains" react to that. It's true that afterwards the Foundation is mostly reacting to Seldon Crisis, but those crisis are part of Seldon's Plan (so, of the hero planning ahead awesome things).
In the last tome, Foundation and Earth, it's clearly the heroes who start their own quest of finding back the Earth.
Now the spoiling parts (rot13) :
Va gur cerdhryf vg'f pyrneyl Qnarry jub gevrf gb chfu Fryqba gb qrirybc cflpubuvfgbel, naq Qnarry vf gur erny "ureb" bs gur rkgraqrq Sbhaqngvba-Ebobg plpyr.
Va Sbhaqngvba'f Rqtr, juvyr gur znva ureb vf vaqrrq ernpgvba gb orvat chfurq ol inevbhf punenpgre, vg'f abg ivyynvaf jub ner cynaavat gur jubyr riragf, ohg Tnvn, jub vf n cebqhpg bs Qnarry, fb ntnva, bs gur erny "nepu ureb" bs gur fntn.
There are other similar examples in other parts of the cycle, but less obvious ones.
It might be more accurate to say that Ayn Rand's heroes start with grand and awesome schemes. There's a lot of speechifying in between, but in terms of action they always seem to degenerate into some form of "screw you guys, I'm going home" by the end.
I haven't read it for a long time, but I remember thinking that the first third of Atlas Shrugged is a much better book than the whole thing -- because up to that point, it's a novel about building something great in the face of adversity, and after that the adversity wins and it becomes a novel about spite and destruction on all sides. Also because it's way too long for its plot, but never mind that.
It’s easier to bear in mind that the map is not the territory when you have two different maps.
--Eric Raymond on the value of bilinguilism
My native language is Russian (and was also the only language I could speak before my teens). I can also speak English, and it is my primary language for thinking now (it is MUCH easier to think in English, than in Russian - Russian is horrible). The two languages do not feel like different maps. I do have some problems in conversing with Russian-speaking individuals, mostly with expressing myself (English offers so many useful features not present in Russian that I feel like an amputee when I can't use them), but I do not think that knowing the distinction helped me with rationality much. They are not different ways of seeing the world, but different ways of describing what you see. Not different maps, different map colorings, maybe.
Hmmm. I have a slightly different experience to you. I am bilingual - English/Afrikaans - though my Afrikaans was never a language I used a lot and I have a very poor grasp of it in comparison.
This has led to something interesting - if I try to think in Afrikaans, I notice a distinct difference in my thoughts. Normally, my thoughts take the form of an internal monologue (almost, but not quite, exclusively). If I try to think in Afrikaans, which has a different grammar (and importantly, a different word order) to English, then I get the distinct impression of parts of my thoughts queued up and waiting for their part of the sentence to happen. This tells me that there are more complicated things going on inside my head than I had previously thought.
...though interesting, I have not as yet found any practical use for this knowledge.
I don't know Afrikaans, but Russian is very much unlike English in a lot of things - most notably, the order of words in a sentence usually plays next to no role whatsoever in terms of actual meaning (you may sound somewhat posh or dramatic if you randomize it too much, but Yoda still sounds pretty normal in all Star Wars Rusian translations I know). Given all that, I don't feel anything like you describe when I think in Russian.
Are there no instances in Russian which reveal a poorly categorized concept in English, or vice-versa?
I'm surprised ESR didn't bring up the difficulty of talking about "free software" in a language that doesn't distinguish "libre" from "gratuit", for example.
My own favorite example is how stunningly ambiguous the word "why" seems after learning about finer distinctions like the "por que" vs "para que" distinction in Spanish. How many creationists are subconsciously confused by the fact that "from what cause?" and "for what purpose?" are treated in English as identical questions?
You can always translate the ambiguity logically (into any sufficiently "complete" language?), but the increased awkwardness of the translation may have an effect. For an example from today's news commentary: even some ardent feminists are surprised to learn that "Banksy" might be a woman, possibly because even if you know intellectually that English uses "he" as a neutral pronoun for a person of unknown gender, that's not always enough to prevent prose references to an unknown person as "he" from affecting you subliminally.
For an example from today's news commentary: even some ardent feminists are surprised to learn that "Banksy" might be a woman, possibly because even if you know intellectually that English uses "he" as a neutral pronoun for a person of unknown gender, that's not always enough to prevent prose references to an unknown person as "he" from affecting you subliminally.
Or possibly because the prior for the gender of the kind of person who'd the kind of things Banksy does is heavily in favor of him being male.
Are there no instances in Russian which reveal a poorly categorized concept in English, or vice-versa?
Oh yes, there are. My personal pet peeve, there is no way to distinguish "difficulty" and "complexity" in Russian. There is even no simple way (or, at least, I don't know one) like "difficult as in how hard it is to do, not as in how hard it is to describe"). However, hard way (spending a minute explaining the difference and then using some shorthand) works perfectly with Russian-only speakers, even not very intelligent ones. They do seem to have that distinction in their maps, and sometimes even comment on how weird it is that it is impossible to spell it properly. I never saw anyone being confused by it.
My own favorite example is how stunningly ambiguous the word "why" seems after learning about finer distinctions like the "por que" vs "para que" distinction in Spanish.
BTW, Russian does have that distinction. Question words is one area in which Russian is superior, in my opinion.
...For an example from today's news commentary: even some ardent feminists are surprised to learn that "Banksy" might be a woman
I, too, sometimes find that it is easier for me to express certain ideas in English than in my native language. However, I guess, in my case the reason seems to be analogous to the reasons mentioned in Steven Pinker's article "Why Academics Stink at Writing". Although it mainly talks about why academics find it difficult to express their ideas in simple words, it seems to me that if one uses predominantly English in certain settings or talking about certain subjects, then the reasons (chunking and functional fixedness) why ideas about these subjects are difficult to express in one's native language are probably similar.
...Scholars lose their moorings in the land of the concrete because of two effects of expertise that have been documented by cognitive psychology. One is called chunking. To work around the limitations of short-term memory, the mind can package ideas into bigger and bigger units, which the psychologist George Miller dubbed "chunks." As we read and learn, we master a vast number of abstractions, and each becomes a mental unit that we can bring to mind in an instant and share with others by uttering its name. An adult mind that is brimming with chun
I want to get the most amount of candy with the least amount of walking.
My 9-year-old son on Halloween.
I want to get the most amount of candy with the least amount of walking.
My 9-year-old son on Halloween.
The Valley of Bad Rationality at work again. Improved optimisation skills and strategic awareness applied to increase the amount of candy consumed while reducing physical exercise!
“There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened.”
-- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams
[Vizzini has just cut the rope The Dread Pirate Roberts is climbing up]
Vizzini: HE DIDN'T FALL? INCONCEIVABLE.
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I always feel a bit bad for Vizzini. His plan is very well thought-out and sensible; he's just in the entirely wrong genre for those qualities to be remotely relevant to its success.
It doesn't help that up to that point, the genre looks like one where it should work. Obviously the character's timeline could make it more obvious, but from ours it isn't.
The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.
Mark Twain
Actually I found this in The topology of Seemingly impossible functional programs which is using topological methods to 'check' infinitely many cases in finite time. Which might even be applicable to FAI research.
... wait, what? You can equate predicates of predicates but not predicates?!
(Two hours later)
Well, I'll be damned...
"I remember reading of a competition for a paper on resolution of singularities of surface; Castelnuovo and Enriques were in the committee. Beppo Levi presented his famous paper on the resolution of singularities for surfaces.
Enriques asked him for a couple of examples and was convinced; Castelnuovo was not. The discussion got heated. Enriques exclaimed 'I am ready to cut off my head if this does not work', and Castelnuovo replied 'I don't think that would prove it either.'"
Personality problems and pattern ordered by difficulty to change according to Seligman:
Panic - Curable
Specific Phobias - Almost Curable
Sexual Dysfunctions - Marked Relief
Social Phobia - Moderate Relief
Agoraphobia - Moderate Relief
Depression - Moderate Relief
Sex Role - Moderate Change
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder - Moderate/Mild Relief
Sexual Preferences - Moderate/Mild Cange [*]
Anger - Mild/Moderate Relief
Everyday Anxiety - Mild/Moderate Relief
Alcohol Dependency - Mild Relief
Overweight - Temporary Change
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) - Marginal Relief [except for rape which shows Moderate Relief]
Sexual Orientation - Probably Unchangeable [*]
Sexual Identity - Unchangeable [*]
From 'What You Can Change and What You Can't*' by Seligman pg. 244 of the reviewed ('vintage') edition of 2006, explicitly confirmed to be still state of the art.
Just read the book and thought this table to be quite quote-worthy even though it isn't prosaic.
* These terms have specific and possibly somewhat non-standard definitions in the book. Seligman gives a convincing theory for formation of aspects of sexuality of different 'depth' (a core concept of Seligman) based on biological facts around expression of genes and hormones. See chapter 11.
Alas, no. I just saw the bottom half of that list and my physicist instincts said "ah, some nice person has provided a list of interesting and difficult unsolved problems".
The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
...It is a sound maxim, and one which all close thinkers have felt, but which no one before Bentham ever so consistently applied, that error lurks in generalities: that the human mind is not capable of embracing a complex whole, until it has surveyed and catalogued the parts of which that whole is made up; that abstractions are not realities per se, but an abridged mode of expressing facts, and that the only practical mode of dealing with them is to trace them back to the facts (whether of experience or of consciousness) of which they are the expression.
Proceeding on this principle, Bentham makes short work with the ordinary modes of moral and political reasoning. These, it appeared to him, when hunted to their source, for the most part terminated in phrases. In politics, liberty, social order, constitution, law of nature, social compact, &c., were the catch-words: ethics had its analogous ones. Such were the arguments on which the gravest questions of morality and policy were made to turn; not reasons, but allusions to reasons; sacramental expressions, by which a summary appeal was made to some general sentiment of mankind, or to some maxim in familiar use, which might be true
Lampshading mysterious answers:
The door was the way to... to... The Door was The Way. Good. Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to.
-- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams
The moment I realized that if I fall, that would probably be my end, I became really, really calm and detached. I picked up a good spot in the parking, with the back to the wall,, between 2 cars, and I moved there to meet them, all the time I was very focused to not get taken down and to take as many of them with me as possible. That was all I was thinking. In retrospect, I still think there were a decent amount of adrenalin circulating through my body, but in the moment I really felt zen and in complete control of myself.
Now, I don't think that's the average reaction you can expect in a combat situation, nor do I think that so much control is needed. But I've been in other critical and stressful situations (like in the middle of a forest fire, or going up the ring to fight other guys in front of a few hundred people), and I think that it's not the prospect of death or getting hurt that are most stressing, is not knowing what to do
--Bogdan M (emphasis mine)
With the truth, all given facts harmonize; but with what is false, the truth soon hits a wrong note.
-- Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics, pointing out entangled truths and contagious lies
Teacher: So if you could live to be any age you like, what would it be?
Boy 2: Infinity.
Teacher: Infinity, you would live for ever? Why would you like to live for ever?
Boy 2: Because you just know a lot of people and make lots of new friends because you could travel to lots of countries and everything and meet loads of new animals and everything.
--Until (documentary)
Colin Howson, talking about how Cox's theorem bears the mark of Cox's training as a physicist (source):
...An alternative approach is to start immediately with a quantitative notion and think of general principles that any acceptable numerical measure of uncertainty should obey. R.T. Cox and I.J. Good, working independently in the mid nineteen-forties, showed how strikingly little in the way of constraints on a numerical measure yield the finitely additive probability functions as canonical representations. It is not just the generality of the assumptions that makes the Cox–Good result so significant: unlike some of those which have to be imposed on a qualitative probability ordering, the assumptions used by Cox and to a somewhat lesser extent Good seem to have the property of being uniformly self-evidently analytic principles of numerical epistemic probability whatever particular scale it might be measured in. Cox was a working physicist and his point of departure was a typical one: to look for invariant principles:
To consider first ... what principles of probable inference will hold however probability is measured. Such principles, if there are any, will play in the theory of pro
I was at this entrepreneur dinner and I met Melissa, and she’s this brilliant, amazing entrepreneur. She was like, “Everyone I know wants me to write a book but I don’t have time and I’m not a good writer and publishing is this awful process … can you help me?” So, of course — I’d like to think that I’m not an elitist snob but of course I am — and I start lecturing her about hard work and writing and the writer’s life and all this shit and she rolls her fuckin’ eyes. And I’m like, “what?” and she’s like, “Are you an entrepreneur? I’m an entrepreneur, too, and in my job I have to solve problems. Can you solve my problem or are you just going to lecture me about hard work?”
This conclusory invocation to "science" w/o reference to any study is an IQ test for the American intelligentsia.
Joel S. Gehrke, Sr. on Twitter referencing American Ebola policy and fears.
More US citizens have married Kim Kardashian than have died of Ebola.
-- a member of the scientific collaboration I'm in.
Marriage to Kim Kardashian is not contagious. The danger of Ebola is not to be measured by how many it has killed, but how many it may kill.
Marriage to Kim Kardashian is not contagious.
As far as we know! Perhaps it simply has a long incubation period, and transitive polyamory will be legally recognized some time in the 2020s.
Drone strikes aren't contagious
They kinda are :-D First by physical proximity at the moment of the strike (you get to be called "collateral damage"), and second, via the "association with suspicious persons" method.
The only way for people in the U.S. (whether they are citizens or not) to be safe from Ebola is for people with Ebola to be prevented from entering
Are you, by any chance, looking for absolute safety? It tends to be very expensive to achieve and even then fails often enough.
If we are talking about "driving the risks from Ebola to the general background risk level", well, at the moment it's well below that level.
Also more than have died from UFAI. Clearly that's not worth worrying over either.
I'm not terrified of Ebola because it's been demonstrated to be controllable in fairly developed counties, but as a general rule this quote seems incredibly out of place on less wrong. People here discuss the dangers of things which have literally never happened before almost every day.
On almost any given policy question, even if all the relevant facts were beyond dispute, choices would still involve complex value judgments.
We should be wary of political vapourware. If somebody’s alternative to the status quo is nothing, or at least nothing very specific, then what are they even talking about? They are hawking political vapourware, giving a “sales pitch” for something that doesn’t even exist.
Everything Is Problematic, an account of getting out of radical left wing politics.
If you kick a ball, about the most interesting way you can analyze the result is in terms of the mechanical laws of force and motion. The coefficients of inertia, gravity, and friction are sufficient to determine its reaction to your kick and the ball's final resting place, even if you can 'bend it like Beckham'. But if you kick a large dog, such a mechanical analysis of vectors and resultant forces may not prove as salient as the reaction of the dog as a whole. Analyzing individual muscles biomechanically likewise yields an incomplete picture of human movement experience.
Thomas W. Myers in Anatomy Trains - Page 3
[in the context of creatively solving a programming problem]
"You will be wrong. You're going to think of better ideas. ... The facts change. ... When the facts change, do not dig in. Do it over again. See if your answer is still valid in light of the new requirements, the new facts. And if it isn't, change your mind, and don't apologize."
-- Rich Hickey
(note that, in context, he tries to differentiate between reasoning with incomplete information, which you don't need to apologize for - just change your mind and move on - and genuine mistakes or errors)
In general, the limits imposed by working memory can be overcome by the use of more time-consuming strategies. Therefore, although performance might improve if working memory were larger, it might also improve if subjects simply thought more.
Baron, Thinking and Deciding
One of the major symptoms of my stroke was seriously truncated working memory, and I spent months both training it back and learning to work around the limitations of it.
So i agree that there are strategies that can overcome the limits of working memory,though I wouldn't describe them as "thinking more"... it was more like saving state externally on a regular basis, and developing useful habits of interacting with that saved state. More generally, it's not a question of doing the same thing for longer, it's a question of doing different things that end up taking longer. It's "thinking differently, for longer."
That being said, though, I cannot begin to describe how much smarter I felt (and seemed) when the damage began to heal and I could start doing stuff in my head again.
I sing the praises of common sense. Like Quine, I see science as continuous with common sense. It goes beyond common sense, but does not discard it. Rather than overthrow common sense, science explains it. Common sense provides us with a grounding in the world. It is the foundation upon which scientific realism rests. As we will see, it even provides protection against the anti-realist scepticism...
-- Science, Common Sense and Reality by Howard Sankey
For those curious the paper uses Arthur Eddington's two tables metapher which is also nice to illustrate...
[S]kepticism should be directed at things that are actually untrue rather than things that are difficult to measure.
Scepticism is directed not at things, but at claims. And claims about things difficult to measure should face increased scepticism.
People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.
--Stephen Covey (in response to, paraphrased, 'how do I get other people to use these self-help techniques?')
This is from a novel (Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone). The situation is a man and a woman who have to work together but have trouble trusting each other because of propaganda from an old war:
[Abelard] hesitated, suddenly aware that he was alone with a woman he barely trusted, a woman who, had they met only a few decades before, would have tried to kill him and destroy the gods he served. Tara hated propaganda for this reason. Stories always outlasted their usefulness.
My little brother who's 7 was saying girls can’t be scientists, and my little sister who's 5 looked at him offended and said, “Princess Bubblegum is a girl and she's a scientist, Jonny!” and he said, “oh yeah…ok nvm,” and they continued eating breakfast like nothing.
Cleffairie on Tumblr (punctuation cleaned up)
The latest in a continuing series on immediate Bayesian updating in response to information. (Also viable as an example of an "unknown known," since he knew the counter-example but had not thought to apply it.)
It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles' Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable inquiry even though he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry with us the Jocasta in our hearts, who begs Oedipus, for God's sake, not to inquire further.
Arthur Schopenhauer, letter to Johann Goethe, 1819.
But the surprising thing, even to Hamilton, was that network availability went up, not down. And that is because AWS switches and routers only had features that AWS needed in its network. Commercial network operating systems have to cover all of the possible usage scenarios and protocols with tens of millions of lines of code that is difficult to maintain. “The reason our gear is more reliable is that we didn’t take on this harder problem. Any way that wins is a good way to win.”
James Hamilton on how Amazon speeds up AWS networking by only implementing ...
The wise man looks to the purpose of all actions, not their consequences; beginnings are in our power, but Fortune judges the outcome, and I do not grant her a verdict upon me.
--Seneca, on judging actions by expected value.
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Richard Feynman on the Challenger incident
Ambition means tying your well being to what other people say or do.
Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you.
Sanity means tying it to your own actions.
--Marcus Aurelius
...When confronting something which may be either a windmill or an evil giant, what question should you be asking? There are some who ask, "If we do nothing, and that is an evil giant, can we afford to be wrong?" These people consider themselves to be brave and vigilant. Some ask, "If we attack it wrongly, can we afford to pay to replace a windmill?" These people consider themselves cautious and pragmatic. Still others ask, "With the cost of being wrong so high in either case, shouldn't we always definitively answer the 'windmill vs.
There is no such thing as an absolute despotism; it is only relative. A man cannot wholly free himself from obligation to his fellows. A sultan who cut off heads from caprice, would quickly lose his own in the same way. Excesses tend to check themselves by reason of their own violence. What the ocean gains in one place it loses in another.
A person can never be broken. Our built environment, our technologies, are broken and disabled. We the people need not accept our limitations, but can transcend disability through technological innovation.
Presenter: [Snipping 75 minutes of reading without eye contact.] "...so as you can see, I have reconceptualized and reconsidered and -icized and -atized until this problem I talk about is clearly both like and unlike what Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Plato, and Arendt implied by choosing one word instead of a universe of other words in these few sentences no one else has really talked much about."
Theory Search Committee Member: "Well, certainly, but since we have clear answers about this philosophical problem deriving from Augustine's flirtation...
Personality problems and pattern ordered by difficulty to change according to Seligman:
Panic - Curable
Specific Phobias - Almost Curable
Sexual Dysfunctions - Marked Relief
Social Phobia - Moderate Relief
Agoraphobia - Moderate Relief
Depression - Moderate Relief
Sex Role - Moderate Change
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder - Moderate/Mild Relief
Sexual Preferences - Moderate/Mild Cange [*]
Anger - Mild/Moderate Relief
Everyday Anxiety - Mild/Moderate Relief
Alcohol Dependency - Mild Relief
Overweight - Temporary Change
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) - Marginal Relief [except for rape which shows Moderate Relief]
Sexual Orientation - Probably Unchangeable [*]
Sexual Identity - Unchangeable [*]
From 'What You Can Change and What You Can't*' by Seligman pg. 244 of the reviewed ('vintage') edition of 2006, explicitly confirmed to be still state of the art.
Just read the book and thought this table to be quite quote-worthy even though it isn't prosaic.
* These terms have specific and possibly somewhat non-standard definitions in the book. Seligman gives a convincing theory for formation of aspects of sexuality of different 'depth' (a core concept of Seligman) based on biological facts around expression of genes and hormones. See chapter 11.
This is an excellent concept and I am interested in reviewing the evidence further but Seligman's conclusions in positive psychology are notoriously...ah....unfounded by evidence so I am skeptical of this scale.
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are: