If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair.
Saul Alinsky, in his Rules for Radicals.
This one hit home for me. Got a haircut yesterday. :P
If I could convince Aubrey de Grey to cut off his beard it would increase everyones expected longevity more than any other accomplishment I'm capable of.
If I could convince Aubrey de Grey to cut off his beard it would increase everyones expected longevity more than any other accomplishment I'm capable of.
This I'm not actually sure about. I think the guru look might be a net positive in his particular situation.
Agreed. His fundraising might be benefiting from a strategy that increases the variance of peoples' opinions of him even if it also lowers this mean.
There no such thing as evidence-based decision on strategies for research funding. Nobody really knows good criteria for deciding which research should get grants to be carried out.
Aubrey de Grey among other things makes the argument that it's good to put out prices for research groups that get mices to a certain increased lifespan. That's the Methuselah Foundation’s Mprize.
Now the Methuselah Foundation worked to set up the new organ liver price that gives 1 million to the first team that creates a regenerative or bioengineered solution that keeps a large animal alive for 90 days without native liver function.
Funding that kind of research is useful whether or not certain arguments Aubrey de Grey made about “Whole Body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres” are correct. In science there's room for people proposing ideas that turn out to be wrong.
I agree giving prizes for increasing the lifespan of mice is a good idea, but that's not a very strong reason to support him.
Why exactly?
Do you have examples of novel scientific ideas he's had that have turned out to be useful?
The SENS website lists 42 published papers that were funded with SENS grant money. The foundation has a yearly budget of 4 million that it uses to award grants to science that's publishable. A lot of that money comes out of Grey's own pocket and Peter Thiel's pocket. Other money comes from private donations. It's mainly additional money for the subject that wouldn't be there without Aubrey de Grey activism.
Aubrey de Grey may very well represent a picture of aging that underestiamtes the difficulties. However the resulting effect is that now a company like Google did start a project with Calico that's speficially targeted on curing aging.
If you want to convince Silicon Valley's billionaires to pay for more anti-aging research Aubrey de Grey might simply be making the right moves when scientists who are more conservative about possible success can't convince donars to put up money.
The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.
-Damon Runyon
If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.
This is what survivorship bias looks like from the inside.
That hypothetical action doesn't "work" in the sense of helping you accomplish all relevant goals, among which, I assume, is the desire to not be incarcerated. (It is also obviously highly immoral.) Put another way, if you define "work" to include something very bad happening to you, that's just "stupid."
When you hear an economist on TV "explain" the decline in stock prices by citing a slump in the market (and I have heard this pseudo-explanation more than once) it is time to turn off the television.
Thomas J. McKay, Reasons, Explanations and Decisions
All the logical work (if not all the rhetorical work) in “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” is being done by the decision about what aspects of liberty are essential, and how much safety is at stake. The slogan might work as a reminder not to make foolish tradeoffs, but the real difficulty is in deciding which tradeoffs are wise and which are foolish. Once we figure that out, we don’t need the slogan to remind us; before we figure it out, the slogan doesn’t really help us.
--Eugene Volokh, "Liberty, safety, and Benjamin Franklin"
A good example of the risk of reading too much into slogans that are basically just applause lights. Also reminds me of "The Choice between Good and Bad is not a matter of saying 'Good!' It is about deciding which is which."
I mostly agree, but I think the slogan (like, I think, many others about which similar things could be said) has some value none the less.
A logically correct but uninspiring version would go like this:
It is a common human failing to pay too much attention to safety and not enough to liberty. As a result, we (individually and corporately) will often be tempted to give up liberty in the name of safety, and in many such cases this will be a really bad tradeoff. So don't do that.
-- Not Benjamin Franklin
Franklin's slogan serves as a sort of reminder that (1) there is a frequent temptation to "give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety" and (2) this is likely a bad idea. Indeed, the actual work of figuring out when the slogan is appropriate still needs to be done, but the reminder can still be useful. And (3) because it's a Famous Saying of a Famous Historical Figure, one can fairly safely draw attention to it and maybe even be taken seriously, even in times when the powers that be are trying to portray any refusal to be terrorized as unpatriotic.
Of course Volokh is aware of the "reminder" function (as he says: "The slogan might work as a reminder") but I think he undervalues it. (He says the "real difficulty" is deciding which tradeoffs to make, but actually just noticing that there's an important tradeoff being proposed is often a real difficulty.) And, alas, its Famous Saying nature is pretty important too.
Problem is, "Fucking up when presented with surprising new situations" is actually a chronic human behavior. It's why purse snatchers are so effective -- by the time someone registers Wait, did somebody just yank my purse off my shoulder?, the snatcher is long gone.
Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste... years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just... take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that and walk away. But that's hard.
I think it means something more like, "don't expect the behaviors that pleased adults when you were a child, to get you anywhere as an adult. Children are considered pleasing when they're submissive and dependent, but adults are respected for pleasing themselves first."
The rationality connection is, well, winning.
Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why.
"It’s much better to live in a place like Switzerland where the problems are complex and the solutions are unclear, rather than North Korea where the problems are simple and the solutions are straightforward."
Scott Sumner, A time for nuance
The problems in North Korea are not so simple with straightforward solutions, when we look at them from the perspective of the actors involved.
For the average citizen in North Korea, there are no clear avenues to political influence that don't increase rather than decrease personal risk. For the people in North Korea who do have significant political influence, from a self-serving perspective, there are no "problems" with how North Korea is run.
North Korea's problems might be simple to solve from the perspective of an altruistic Supreme Leader, but they're hard as coordination problems. Some of our societal problems in the developed world are also simple from the perspective of an altruistic Supreme Leader, but hard as coordination problems. Some of the more salient differences are that those problems didn't occur due to the actions of non altruistic or incompetent Supreme Leaders in the first place, and aren't causing mass subsistence level poverty.
there is a familiar phenomenon here, in which a certain kind of would-be economic expert loves to cite the supposed lessons of economic experiences that are in the distant past, and where we actually have only a faint grasp of what really happened. Harding 1921 “works” only because people don’t know much about it; you have to navigate through some fairly obscure sources to figure out [what actually happened]. And the same goes even more strongly — let’s say, XII times as strongly — when, say, [Name] starts telling us about the Emperor Diocletian. The point is that the vagueness of the information, and even more so what most people [think they] know about it, lets such people project their prejudices onto the past and then claim that they’re discussing the lessons of experience.
Paul Krugman on the use of examples to obscure rather than clarify
Yes. Because both of those have actual data, and are thus useful - your reasoning can be tested against reality.
We just really don't know very much about the roman economy, and are unlikely to find out much more than we currently do. Generalizing from one example isn't good .. science, logic or argument. But it's better than generalizing from the fog of history. Not a lot better - Economics only very barely qualifies as a science on a good day, but Krugman is completely correct to call people out for going in this direction because doing so just outright reduces it to storytelling.
We just really don't know very much about the roman economy, and are unlikely to find out much more than we currently do.
On the other hand we do know a lot about what happened in 1921, Krugman just wishes we didn't because it appears to contradict his theories.
Generalizing from one example isn't good .. science, logic or argument. But it's better than generalizing from the fog of history.
Um, no. History contains evidence, it's not particularly clean evidence, but evidence nonetheless and we shouldn't be throwing it away.
I know that all revolutions must have ideologies to spur them on. That in the heat of conflict these ideologies tend to be smelted into rigid dogmas claiming exclusive possession of the truth, and the keys to paradise, is tragic. Dogma is the enemy of human freedom. Dogma must be watched for and apprehended at every turn and twist of the revolutionary movement. The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice.
Saul Alinsky, in his Rules for Radicals.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation, For fear they should succumb and go astray; So when you are requested to pay up or be molested, You will find it better policy to say: --
"We never pay any-one Dane-geld, No matter how trifling the cost; For the end of that game is oppression and shame, And the nation that pays it is lost!"
--Rudyard Kipling, "Dane-Geld"
A nice reminder about the value of one-boxing, especially in light of current events.
Rationalizations are more important than sex... Have you ever gone a week without a rationalization?
But frequency can be strong evidence of importance.
I suspect many people would experience significant psychological trauma if they were unable to rationalize for a week.
Where you are going to spend your time and your energy is one of the most important decisions you get to make in life.
“They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it’s because I’m a genius. If something bad happens, it’s because someone’s an idiot or I didn’t get the resources or the market moved. … What we’ve seen is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They’ll argue like hell. They’ll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, ‘here’s a new fact,’ and they’ll go, ‘Oh, well, that changes things; you’re right.’”
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
--Marcel Proust
I think the intended meaning (phrased in LessWrong terminology) is something more along the lines of the following:
Humans are not perfect Bayesians, and even if they were, they don't start from the same priors and encounter the same evidence. Therefore, Aumann's Agreement Theorem does not hold for human beings; thus, if a large number of human beings is observed to agree on the truth of a proposition, you should be suspicious. It's far more likely that they are signalling tribal agreement or, worse yet, accepting the proposition without thinking it through for themselves, than that they have each individually thought it through and independently reached identical conclusions. In general, then, civilized disagreement is a strong indicator of a healthy rationalist community; look at how often people disagree with each other on LW, for example. If everyone on LW was chanting, "Yes, Many Worlds is true, you should prefer torture to dust specks, mainstream philosophy is worthless," then that would be worrying, even if it is true. (I am not claiming that it is, nor am I claiming that it is not; such topics are, I feel, beyond the scope of this discussion and were brought up purely as examples.)
deally, everyone should be thinking alike.
Why? Thinking is not limited to answering well-defined questions about empirical reality.
As a practical matter, I think lack of diversity in thinking is a bigger problem than too much diversity.
Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense.
Cf. Tolstoy: all happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
What happens twice probably happens more than twice: are there other notable expressions of this idea?
(There's a well-known principle in software development that's pretty close, though I can't find a Famous Quotation of it right now: when you're choosing a name for a variable or function or whatever, avoid abbreviations: there's only one way to spell a word right, and lots of ways to spell it wrong. Though this is not always good advice.)
"Hah! Please. Find me a more universally rewarded quality than hubris. Go on, I'll wait. The word is just ancient Greek for 'uppity,' as far as I'm concerned. Hubris isn't something that destroys you, it's something you are punished for. By the gods! Well, I've never met a god, just powerful human beings with a lot to gain by keeping people scared."
-- Lisa Bradley, a character in Brennan Lee Mulligan & Molly Ostertag's Strong Female Protagonist
"You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10^12 to 1 against."
Our human tendency is to disguise all evidence of the reality that most frustrates us: death. We need only look at the cemeteries, the gravestones. the monuments to understand the ways in which we seek to embellish our mortality and banish from our minds this ultimate failure of our humanity. Sometimes we even resort to “canonizing” our dead. After Saint Peter’s Square, the place where most people are canonized is at wakes: usually the dead person is described as a “saint.” Of course, he was a saint because now he can’t bother us! These are just ways of camouflaging the failure that is death.
-- Pope Francis, Open Mind, Faithful Heart: Reflections on Following Jesus
It seems to me it's anti-death rather than pro-cryonics; the two aren't quite the same, and in particular being anti-death no more implies being pro-cryonics than it implies being pro-Jesus. And while no doubt Bergoglio's (= Pope Francis's) anti-death-ism is tightly tied up with his pro-Jesus-ism, what he's written here can stand on its own as an expression of an anti-death attitude.
(I'm not sure being strongly opposed to death should really qualify something as a Rationality Quote either, but that's a different complaint from "it's really all about Jesus".)
...human brains do many absurd things while failing to do many sensible things. Our purpose in developing a formal theory of inference is not to imitate them, but to correct them.
E. T. Jaynes, Probability: The Logic of Science
But, as compiler optimizations exploit increasingly recondite properties of the programming language definition, we find ourselves having to program as if the compiler were our ex-wife’s or ex-husband’s divorce lawyer, lest it introduce security bugs into our kernels, as happened with FreeBSD a couple of years back with a function erroneously annotated as noreturn, and as is happening now with bounds checks depending on signed overflow behavior.
We're similarly shocked whenever authority figures who are supposed to know what they're doing make it plain that they don't, President Obama's healthcare launch being probably the most serious recent example. We shouldn't really be shocked, though. Because all these stories illustrate one of the most fundamental yet still under-appreciated truths of human existence, which is this: everyone is totally just winging it, all the time.
Institutions – from national newspapers to governments and politicial parties – invest an enormous amount of money and effort in denying this truth. The facades they maintain are crucial to their authority, and thus to their legitimacy and continued survival. We need them to appear ultra-competent, too, because we derive much psychological security from the belief that somewhere, in the highest echelons of society, there are some near-infallible adults in charge.
In fact, though, everyone is totally just winging it.
-- Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, May 21, 2014
It is, of course, worrying in itself that there's an open question about whether an extortionist attack via malicious software on a huge company has been conducted by a nation-state, an organised crime group, or a bored teenager.
Which [sports] teams win is largely a function of which teams have the best players, and each league has its own way of determining which players end up on which teams. So, in a sense, Team 1 vs. Team 2 is no more a contest of athletic prowess than chess is a test of whether queens are more powerful than bishops. The real battle is between groups of executives, and the sport is player acquisition.
-- Adam Cadre
We so often confuse “what can be translated into print well” with “what is important and interesting.”
Even though you read much Zen literature, you must read each sentence with a fresh mind. You should not say, "I know what Zen is," or "I have attained enlightenment." This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner.
--Shunryu Suzuki
"As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown."
Ayn Rand
...We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow better. But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do n
I am reminded of:
"Arf arf arf! Not because arf arf! But exactly because arf NOT arf!" GK Chesterton's dog
In trying to find the above quote by wildcard searching on Google, I stumbled upon another quote of this nature by the dog's owner himself: "I want to love my neighbour not because he is I, but precisely because he is not I." There appears to be another one about science being bad not because it encourages doubt, but because it encourages credulity, but I'm unable to find the exact quote.
I am an intransigent atheist, but not a militant one. This means that I am an uncompromising advocate of reason and that I am fighting for reason, not against religion. I must also mention that I do respect religion in its philosophical aspects, in the sense that it represents an early form of philosophy.
Ayn Rand, to a Catholic Priest.
I've been killing characters my entire career, maybe I'm just a bloody minded bastard, I don't know, [but] when my characters are in danger, I want you to be afraid to turn the page (and to do that) you need to show right from the beginning that you're playing for keeps.
— George R. R. Martin, Wikiquote, audio interview source
(Changed from an earlier quote I decided I'd keep for later.)
Nope, just saving my first choice of quote for the beginning of the next thread. I figure if I post a good quote now, people will mostly only see it from the recent comment and recent quote feeds, and after a few others get posted, people will mostly forget about it and not, if they were to like it, upvote it. Whereas if it were one of the first posts in a thread, and people liked it and started upvoting it, it would stay high on the page and gather even more attention and upvotes, creating a positive feedback loop which would give me karma.
Machiavellian, isn't it? I doubt it'll work out that well, but I figure it's worth a shot.
"There is no such thing as uncharted waters. You may not have the chart on hand to show you how to navigate these waters, but the charts exist. Google them."
Joe Queenan, WSJ 11/30/14
Too strong to be literally true but still
Carthage must be saved.
Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Corculum
Since you're probably aware that one Roman senator (Cato) ended his speeches with "Carthage must be destroyed," you should also know that another responded with the opposite.
What does it say about us that (I would guess) most well educated westerners know about the "Carthage must be destroyed" quote but not the "Carthage must be saved" one?
It says that we care about the real as opposed to the imaginary. That is entirely to our credit.
Regardless of what may be considered moral, Carthage was destroyed. Educated people who wish to understand ancient history therefore naturally wish to learn of Cato's anti-Carthaginian campaign, precisely because it was successful. In addition, Cato the Elder was considered a model of behaviour by subsequent generations of Romans, in a way that Corculum was not, therefore to understand ancient Rome we have to understand the behaviour they valourised.
Similarly, Fumimaro Konoe is not nearly as famous as Hideki Tojo. This is not because educated Westerners favour Tojo's foreign policy, but because Tojo won the debate and Japan went to war.
While I agree with the overall sentiment, I think it's important not to overdo this approach. Let me explain.
Consider the situation where you have a stochastic process which generates values -- for example, you're drawing random values from a certain distribution. So you draw a number and let's say it is 17.
On the one hand you did draw 17 -- that number is "real" and the rest of the distribution which didn't get realized is only "imaginary". You should care about that 17 and not about what did not happen.
On the other hand, if we're interested not just in a single sample, but in the whole process and the distribution underlying it, that number 17 is almost irrelevant. We want to understand the entire distribution and that involves parts which did not get realized but had potential to be realized. We care about them because they inform our understanding of what might happen if the process runs again and generates another value.
Similarly, if you treat history as a sequence of one-off events, you should pay attention only to what actually happened and ignore what did not. But if you want to see history as a set of long-term processes which generate many events, you'...
Why is Publius Scipio Nasica a "good guy"? His opposition to Carthage's destruction was based on his idea that without a strong external enemy Rome will descend into decadence.
Well, it did.
...Recently I was with a group of mathematicians and philosophers. One philosopher asked me whether I believed man was a machine. I replied, “Do you really think it makes any difference?” He most earnestly replied, “Of course! To me it is the most important question in philosophy.”
...I imagine that if my friend finally came to the conclusion that he were a machine, he would be infinitely crestfallen. I think he would think: “My God! How horrible! I am only a machine!” But if I should find out I were a machine, my attitude would be totally different. I would
After reading Contrafactus, a friend said to me: "My uncle was almost President of the U.S.!"
"Really?" I said.
"Sure," he replied, "he was skipper of the PT 108." (John F. Kennedy was skipper of the PT 109).
-- Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach
...At this point it should become apparent that I do not think that theorems are really proved. As G. H. Hardy said long ago, we emit some symbols, another person reads them, and they are either convinced or not by them. To simple people who believe whatever they read and do not question things for themselves, a proof is a proof is a proof, but to others a proof merely supplies a way of thinking about the theorem, and it is up to the individual to form an opinion. Formal proofs, where there is deliberately no meaning, can convince only formalists, and of the
“The birthrate in the United States is at an all-time low. Whereas our death rate is still holding strong at 100 percent.”
You got it in one, and non-Martians don't get it. I tell them, you're just used to it here on Earth, and out there it's simple. Out there, no scissors come between word and deed. Out there, word and deed is one, like time and space. You said you'd do - you do...
After that incident, my doctor and I had a long, spirited conversation about statistics and Bayesian analysis. And one reason he is no longer my doctor is that he displayed very poor judgment in handling the trade-off between false positives and false negatives. That test should never have been run, because it was vastly more likely to produce unnecessary emotional anguish (and health-care spending!) than useful information.
If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair.
Saul Alinsky, in his Rules for Radicals.
(This one hit home. :p)
If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair.
Saul Alinsky, in his Rules for Radicals.
A quote from my son (just turned eleven years):
Me: "What is the meaning of life?"
He: "To live it."
This sounds trite but I think it is actually the correct (or most sensible) answer. I was kind of impressed. Maybe we should ask children more of these grande questions and gain factual answers instead of taking them as deeper as they are.
"Don’t let anybody discourage you or tell you that intelligence doesn’t pay or that success in life has to be achieved through dishonesty or through sheer blind luck. That is not true. Real success is never accidental and real happiness cannot be found except by the honest use of your intelligence."
Ayn Rand
Too strong.
Nobody EVER got successful from luck? Not even people born billionaires or royalty?
Nobody can EVER be happy without using intelligence? Only if you're using some definition of happiness that includes a term like "Philosophical fulfillment" or some such, which makes the issue tautological.
If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair.
Saul Alinsky, in his Rules for Radicals.
This one hit home for me. Got a haircut yesterday. :P
And a thousand female metalheads shall weep.
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are: