Another monthly installment of the rationality quotes thread. The usual rules apply:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
-- Paul Graham
— 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?
-Seth Godin
Tao Te Ching
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)
Somehow it seems appropriate that it's hard to track down the originator of this idea.
On the presentation of science in the news:
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.
"Or, well..."
Was that subtle framing intentional?
-- Thomas Sowell
Interesting to contrast the connotation with:
Or:
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".
I can imagine one easily. Where they have an active incentive to be wrong.
- patio11
I'm afraid this isn't the thread for you!
-- George Bernard Shaw
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It should be said about things that appear to work because of confirmation bias.
Bertrand Russell
I was the only student in my high school graduating class that wasn't unique.
-Bill Gates in his AMA on reddit.
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.
Yes, but only literally.
-- John Walker, The Hacker's Diet (~loc 250 on an e-reader)
– R. Scott Bakker: The Judging Eye
-- Miro, in Xenocide by Orson Scott Card
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Arabella Flynn
On consciousness:
-- Blindsight, by Peter Watts
Popular evopsych, summed up: "Men and women are different. Humans and chimps are the same."
Cliff Pervocracy
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.
-- German weather lore / farmers' rule
Scott Aaronson
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
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.
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.
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'.
Nereo Rocco
(I tried a rough tranlsation, but it sounds way better in Italian)
-- Freeman Dyson
No, the trial was.
-Futurama
-Natalie Reed
-Dawkins Into to the 30th anniversary edition of the Selfish Gene.
John Adams, US President
Related
W. H. Auden
--Bryan Caplan
--Rod Dreher
(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!
-- 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)
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Arman Suleimenov
-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.
--Frank Herbert, Dune
Something a friend said that made sense in context that really cracked me up:
"I'm decidedly aware of unknown unknowns."
From a great book
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
-- David Henderson quoting a flight attendant
In an article proclaiming the transcendent use of complicated, modern statistics in baseball, and in particular, one called "WAR" (wins above replacement):
... (read more)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.
-- 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.
Randy Pausch in The Last Lecture.
-- John Heywood
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.
The parallelizability of tasks depends on the task.
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...
If you're here, you've got time.
-- Marilyn Manson
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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 ... (read more)
--Richard K. Morgan, Woken Furies
-- Linji Yixuan
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!)