Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where you had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whether the author was telling the whole truth? If you really want to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he's writing about this subject at all.
-- Paul Graham
There’s an old saying in the public opinion business: we can’t tell people what to think, but we can tell them what to think about.
— Doug Henwood
It seems to me that The Last Psychiatrist makes up theories about what people really mean according to his mental habits. Is there any way of checking his claims?
You know something is important when you're willing to let someone else take the credit if that's what it takes to get it done.
-Seth Godin
A leader is best when people barely know that he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him. Fail to honor people, They fail to honor you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say, "We did this ourselves."
Cute. :) And someone on Wikiquotes traces it back to
"The way to get things done is not to mind who gets the credit." --Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893)
On the presentation of science in the news:
It's not that clean energy will never happen -- it totally will. It's just that it won't come from a wild-haired scientist running out of his basement screaming, "Eureka! I've discovered how to get limitless clean energy from common seawater!" Instead, it will come from thousands of scientists publishing unreadable studies with titles like "Assessing Effectiveness and Costs of Asymmetrical Methods of Beryllium Containment in Gen 4 Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors When Factoring for Cromulence Decay." The world will be saved by a series of boring, incremental advances that chip away at those technical challenges one tedious step at a time.
But nobody wants to read about that in their morning Web browsing. We want to read that while we were sleeping, some unlikely hero saved the world. Or at least cured cancer.
David Wong — 5 Easy Ways to Spot a BS News Story on the Internet
I don't understand why we can't simply build an LFTR. I can't find anything online about why we can't just build an LFTR. I get the serious impression that what we need here is like 0.1 wild-haired scientists, 3 wild-haired nuclear engineers, 40 normal nuclear engineers, and sane politicians. And that China has sane politicians but for some reason can't produce, find, or hire the sort of wild-haired engineers who just went ahead and built a molten-salt thorium reactor at Oak Ridge in the 1960s.
Considering that politicians get ahead by gaining the approval of their constituents, I'd think that now that America is no longer in an arms race, a politician could probably get ahead by proclaiming support for sustainable nuclear energy which does not have a chance of producing weapons.
Except for where that would mean announcing support for nuclear energy.
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
Interesting to contrast the connotation with:
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who gain nothing from being right.
Or:
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who have no strong reason to prefer the world in which their decisions are right, over the world in which they are wrong.
Good points.
My take on it: I'd noticed that "people who pay no price for being wrong" primed ideas of punishment in my mind, not just loss. "People who gain nothing from being right" primed ideas of commerce or professionalism — an engineer gains by being right, as does a military commander, a bettor, a venture capitalist, or the better sort of journalist.
And the third formulation doesn't prime anything but "this sounds like Less Wrong".
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way...
I can imagine one easily. Where they have an active incentive to be wrong.
Really, anything that can fit in a twitter is unlikely to be useful.
I'm afraid this isn't the thread for you!
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
-- George Bernard Shaw
I wrote an email to Bill Gates after reading his answer. I suggested that he should invest in anti-ageing research and/or cryonics. Ageing is a disease that afflicts everybody, and I think it would be a far better use of his money if he pledges financial support for anti-ageing research than if he continues pouring funding into curing malaria.
In addition, he has enough clout to motivate more people to take anti-ageing seriously instead of dismissing it as wishful thinking.
The world of the manager is one of problems and opportunities. Problems are to be managed; one must understand the nature of the problem, amass resources adequate to deal with it, and "work the problem" on an ongoing basis.[...] But what if the problem can be fixed? This is not the domain of the manager.
An engineer believes most problems have solutions. The engineer isn't interested in building an organisation to cope with the problem. [...] And yet the engineer's faith in fixes often blinds him to the fact that many problems, especially those involving people, don't have the kind of complete permanent solutions he seeks.
-- John Walker, The Hacker's Diet (~loc 250 on an e-reader)
I remember asking a wise man, once,
'Why do men fear the dark?'
'Because darkness' he told me, 'is ignorance made visible.'
'And do men despise ignorance?', I asked.
'No!', he said, 'they prize it above all things - all things! - but only so long as it remains invisible.'
– R. Scott Bakker: The Judging Eye
...these things are possible. And because they're possible we have to think of them so they don't surprise us later. We have to think of them so that if the worst does come, we'll already know how to live in that universe.
-- Miro, in Xenocide by Orson Scott Card
"If you don't know what you want," the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don't."
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Any positive social quality -- looks, smarts, cash, power, whatever -- makes people want to compete for your attention. Some of these people are going to be assholes operating under the mistaken impression that you are a vending machine, and that if they feed you enough suck-up coins, you will dispense whatever it is they want. If you have no idea that you have Quality X that they want from you, then you have no chance of figuring out that the reason they're getting so overbearing is that you're not giving them all the X they think they deserve. People can get remarkably angry when you don't give them the thing you have no idea they're asking for. And then they get angrier if you try to tell them you're confused.
On consciousness:
"Forget about minds," he told her. "Say you've got a device designed to monitor—oh, cosmic rays, say. What happens when you turn its sensor around so it's not pointing at the sky anymore, but at its own guts?"
He answered himself before she could: "It does what it's built to. It measures cosmic rays, even though it's not looking at them any more. It parses its own circuitry in terms of cosmic-ray metaphors, because those feel right, because they feel natural, because it can't look at things any other way. But it's the wrong metaphor. So the system misunderstands everything about itself. Maybe that's not a grand and glorious evolutionary leap after all. Maybe it's just a design flaw."
-- Blindsight, by Peter Watts
Popular evopsych, summed up: "Men and women are different. Humans and chimps are the same."
This seems to me a form of equivocation: "different" as used in the first sentence and "the same" as used in the second sentence are not opposites. The context is different; the intended meaning (insofar as any evo-psychologists actually make such claims) is something like this:
"Men and women are more different, on average, than men and other men, and certainly more different than (some? most?) people think. The difference is sufficiently large that we cannot indiscriminately apply psychological principles and results across genders."
"Humans and chimps are closer than (some? most?) people think; in fact, sufficiently close that we can apply unexpectedly many psychological principles and results across these two species."
I don't know of anyone (even in "popular" evo-psych) who endorses the view implied in the quote, which I suppose would be something like:
"Humans are chimps are less different from each other than men and women."
In short, I think the quote mocks a strawman.
Wenn der Hahn kräht auf dem Mist, dann ändert sich das Wetter, oder es bleibt wie es ist.
(When the rooster crows on the dungheap, then the weather will change, or stay as it is)
-- German weather lore / farmers' rule
I... believe the experimentalists when they say the world works in a completely different way than I thought it did... All I want to know is: What went wrong with my intuition? How should I fix it, to put it more in line with what the experiments found? How could I have reasoned, such that the actual behavior of the world wouldn't have surprised me so much?
The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown.
--George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
--Ursula K. Le Guin {Lord Estraven}, The Left Hand of Darkness
If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children 'There are no fairies'; he can omit to teach them the word 'fairy'.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel § 413; via "Fable of The Born-Blind-People"
(Gb rkcerff guvf va zber YJl wnetba: vs lbh qvq abg nyernql xabj gur jbeq be pbaprcg snvel, jung bofreingvbaf jbhyq cevivyrtr gur fcrpvsvp ulcbgurfvf bs 'snvevrf' gb gur cbvag jurer vg jbhyq orpbzr n frevbhf cbffvovyvgl? Ubj znal ovgf jbhyq gung gnxr naq jurer jbhyq lbh trg gurz, nfvqr sebz gur zrqvn naq bgure crbcyr'f cebqhpgf?)
As long as others know and believe in such concepts, it is important that your child learns about them from a trustworthy source, before being introduced to such concepts by fairy-believers.
As long as others know and believe in such concepts, it is important that your child learns about them from a trustworthy source, before being introduced to such concepts by fairy-believers.
This is especially the case if the message is generalized. That is, if the well meaning but naive parent tries to keep their children ignorant of all things bullshit. They are deprived key critical thinking skills and the ability to comfortably interact (and reject) nonsense beliefs that will be thrust on them.
I don't see how you're disagreeing with Eliezer about anything. As far as I can tell, you both think it's a good idea to teach children about nonsense as an exercise in critical thinking. Eliezer thinks Santa Claus is a good example of this. Have I misrepresented your position or your interpretation of Eliezer's position here?
Humans tend to anthropomorphize, but this is filtered through cultural beliefs and forms - you do not get a highly specific concept like 'fairies' out of a general anthropomorphization, any more than people got Dracula out of their fear of the dark pre-Bram Stoker. I've linked studies here on what children believe and anthropomorphize by default, and it tends to look like 'other people and animals continue to exist even after dying'; not 'the Unseelie and Seelie folk live in hills and if you visit them, be sure to not eat any of their food or you will be their prisoner for a century'.
Luck, when it's regular, it's called skill. (Il culo, quando è sistematico, si chiama classe)
(I tried a rough tranlsation, but it sounds way better in Italian)
You can't possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It's a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we've been building them for 100 years, it's very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works – it's even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential.
-- Freeman Dyson
But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential.
No, the trial was.
There’s a funny irony in “tell your story” and “speak your truth”, in that those two things are fundamentally at odds with each other. Stories and narratives aren’t, and can’t be, the truth of our actual lived experiences. Real lives don’t follow the structures of narrative, they don’t move in linear tidy sequences of causes and actions and effects and consequences. Real lives are big jumbled messes that are almost impossible to make real sense of, and the act of imposing a narrative on them, sorting out our “life story”, is always an act of editing.
If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking can undo it.
-Dawkins Into to the 30th anniversary edition of the Selfish Gene.
Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
W. H. Auden
Hasn't common sense been wrong before? Of course. But how do people show that a common sense view is wrong? By demonstrating a conflict with other views even more firmly grounded in common sense. The strongest scientific evidence can always be rejected if you're willing to say, "Our senses deceive us" or "Memory is never reliable" or "All the scientists have conspired to trick us." The only problem with these foolproof intellectual defenses is... that... they're... absurd.
I once had a civil argument with [someone], in which I laid out my position in the usual way: “Premiss + premiss + premiss = conclusion.” She responded: “Well, that’s your opinion; you have yours, and I have mine.” I pointed out that no, I wasn’t asserting an opinion, I was making an argument based on facts and logic. Either my facts are wrong, or my logic is. She looked at me like I had lost my mind.
(Post slightly edited in response to comments below)
This sort of argument was surprisingly common in the 18th and 19th century compared to today. The Federalist Papers, for example, lay out the problem as a set of premises leading inexorably to a conclusion. I find it hard to imagine a politician successfully using such a form of argument today.
At least that's my impression; perhaps appeals to authority and emotion were just as common in the past as today but selection effects prevent me from seeing them.
This is not a good way to argue about anything except mathematics. It takes the wrong attitude towards how words work and in practice doesn't even make arguments easier to debug because there are usually implicit premises that are not easy to tease out.
For example, suppose I say "A (a thing that affects X) hasn't changed. B (a thing that affects X) hasn't changed. C (a thing that affects X) hasn't changed. Therefore, X hasn't changed." There's an implicit premise here, namely "A, B, C are the only things that affect X," which is almost certainly false. It is annoyingly easy not to explicitly write down such implicit premises, and trying to argue in this pseudo-logical style encourages that mistake among others.
(In general, I think people who have not studied mathematical logic should stop using the word "logic" entirely, but I suppose that's a pipe dream.)
I agree that the formal "premiss + premiss + premiss = conclusion" style of arguing is not good outside formal contexts. But still, the appropriate response would be "Your argument is wrong because it doesn't take into account D", not "that's your opinion and I have mine".
Well, that depends on what the premises and conclusion were. "That's your opinion" can be used as a deflecting move if someone doesn't want to have a particular debate at that particular moment (e.g. if the premises and conclusions were about something highly charged and the woman was not interested in having a highly charged debate). Ignoring a deflecting move could be considered a social blunder, and maybe that's what the woman was responding to. There are a lot of ways to read this situation, and many of them are not "haha, look at how irrational this woman was."
I saw exactly that subtext.
The quote opens "I once had a civil argument with a woman". The author spends one noun to describe this person, and spends it on gender. It could have been "with a friend" or "with a politician" or even just "I once had a civil argument" (that the author had it with somebody is implied in the nature of argument). The antiepistimologist has exactly one characteristic: gender, and that characteristic is called out as important.
It gets worse because being bad at logic is an existing negative stereotype of women.
Single data point: when I read "I once had a a civil argument with a woman", it immediately felt sexist to me. I think I half-expected something about "how men think versus how women think". The whole thing doesn't feel sexist to me, just that opening.
(I do not necessarily endorse that feeling.)
Yep. It's a matter of what features are salient to mention.
If someone said "I once had a civil argument with a German" it would sound like they were saying that it was unusual or notable for an argument with a German to be civil; or possibly that the person's Germanness was somehow relevant to the civility of the argument — maybe they cited Goethe or something?
(On the other hand, it might be that they were trying to imply that they were well-traveled or cosmopolitan; that they've talked to people of a lot of nationalities.)
If the identity mentioned is a stereotyped group, a lot of people would tend to mentally activate the stereotype.
I once had a civil argument with a German. Germans' arguments are usually uncivil, but this one time ....
I once had a civil argument with a German. Most of my arguments with Germans are flamewars and cussin'.
I once had a civil argument with a German. Germans are so civil, even their arguments are civil!
I once had a civil argument with a German. I'm so good at civil arguments (or so well-traveled) I've even had one with a German!
That's something that I think laypeople never realize about computer science - it's all really simple things, but combined together at such a scale and pace that in a few decades we've done the equivalent of building a cat from scratch out of DNA. Big complex things really can be built out of extremely simple parts, and we're doing it all the time, but for a lot of people our technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-- wtallis
"I wish to defend this world. I wish to protect this world which God has abandoned, and defend it against everything that threatens it!"
-- To the Stars (Madoka fanfiction)
Rule number one of life: Don't get mad at video games. Corollary to rule number one: Life is a video game.
-Matt Vana
Can I get mad at the programmers of video games when the game is poorly balanced or designed, or simply broken?
Can I get mad at a video game that implements an agent?
And what the hell is all this pay-to-win microtransaction crap? Life's devs should change their business model.
Yeah, but have you seen the graphics? And the NPC AI? I think the physics engine might be buggy though.
The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called "spannungsbogen"--which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.
--Frank Herbert, Dune
Something a friend said that made sense in context that really cracked me up:
"I'm decidedly aware of unknown unknowns."
..."Where'd they go?" said Wensley.
WHERE THEY BELONG, said Death, still holding Adam's gaze. WHERE THEY HAVE ALWAYS BEEN. BACK IN THE MINDS OF MAN.
He grinned at Adam.
There was a tearing sound. Death's robe split and his wings unfolded. Angel's wings. But not of feathers. They were wings of night, wings that were shapes cut through the matter of creation into the darkness underneath, in which a few distant lights glimmered, lights that may have been stars or may have been something entirely else.
BUT I, he said, AM NOT LIKE THEM. I AM AZRAEL, CREATED
Let us, then, avoid the philosophical minefields of belief and truth, and pay attention to what we really need, which is predictive ability.
I'm sorry, I want to be with someone more interesting, someone who just does something wild and lets the chips fall where they may!
I plan to never take any action toward fulfilling any of my hopes and dreams. What could possibly be riskier than that?
In every transaction with an airline there are two customers. The first is the one who buys the ticket. He wants the best deal and is willing to go to another web site to save ten bucks. The second is the customer who shows up and acts as if he bought first class.
In an article proclaiming the transcendent use of complicated, modern statistics in baseball, and in particular, one called "WAR" (wins above replacement):
...I'm not a mathematician and I'm not a scientist. I'm a guy who tries to understand baseball with common sense. In this era, that means embracing advanced metrics that I don't really understand. That should make me a little uncomfortable, and it does. WAR is a crisscrossed mess of routes leading toward something that, basically, I have to take on faith.
And faith is irrational and anti-intellec
I downvoted for equivocating between faith and probability.
A doctor walking in with a syringe full of something that he says will prevent measles I would assign a much higher probability to being true than Bob from the car mechanic walking in with a syringe full of strange liquid that Bob says will prevent measles.
Essentially this seems like the fallacy of gray.
Faith is holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.
-- C.S. Lewis
"The 'law of causality' is obsolete and misleading. The principle 'same cause, same effect' is utterly otiose. As soon as the antecedents have been given sufficiently fully to enable the consequent to be calculated with some exactitude, the antecedents have become so complicated that it is very unlikely they will ever recur." - Bertrand Russell "On the Notion of Cause", 1913
To me it sounds like a complaint about what are variably called "cargo-cult", "voodoo", or "superstitious" practices in IT: repeating curative procedures that are available to mind, without understanding why (or if) they ever worked, in situations where they may not have any application. There are a lot of procedures that users can learn by rote without having to know why they ever work, and that are cheap and safe enough that using them when they don't do any good isn't likely to do any harm either.
Not sure I see that - this is about how non-computer people think about computers, not about the real behaviour of a real singularity.
The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people.
Randy Pausch in The Last Lecture.
Many hands make light work.
Too many cooks spoil the broth.
The optimal solution seems to be one cook with many hands.
Yes, that's what I was suggesting. I presumed simplicio was pointing out that proverbs are not a good source of rationality advice because they are contradictory and I was trying to use a similar style of quote to continue making that point, but I suppose there is also a less charitable reading.
Well, Jayson's quote mostly applies to menial labor, whereas yours applies to creative work.
The trick with contradictory proverbs is knowing the domain of applicability of each.
"You can accept, reject, or examine and test any new idea that comes to you. The wise man chooses the third way." - Tom Willhite
The wise man must have an awful lot of time on his hands, or else not come across many new ideas...
So ask yourself before you get in [...] is there room in your life for one more breakdown?
-- Marilyn Manson
Surely a man who possesses even a little erectioris ingenii [of the higher way of thinking] has not become entirely a cold and clammy mollusk, and when he approaches what is great it can never escape his mind that from the creation of the world it has been customary for the result to come last, and that, if one would truly learn anything from great actions, one must pay attention precisely to the beginning. In case he who should act were to judge himself according to the result, he would never get to the point of beginning. Even though the result may give ...
"...even she can't make her own actions fit with what she thinks she is. She's confused about her own motivations."
"So? Welcome to the human fucking race."
--Richard K. Morgan, Woken Furies
If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.
-- Linji Yixuan
If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.
I suggest the alternative strategy of not killing the Buddha on the road if you meet him. Likewise I recommend ignoring the related advice to kill patriarchs, arhats, parents and kinsman. Contrary to Linji's words, Homicide is not the optimal path to emancipation, enlightenment or disentanglement. The quote in the one sentence form presented here and in its broader context is rubbish.
If there is any wisdom associated with this quote (and even that I doubt) it comes from the reader pattern matching the bullshit to the nearest available sane message that they already have cached. That kind of quote can gain popularity, in contexts where obfuscation is confused with insight. It does not belong in "Rationality Quotes".
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." -L. Wittgenstein
(Apologies if this quote has been in a previous month -- I'm a new user to LW -- but I had to include it since a) pretty brevity and b) so perfect for the Internets!)