Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:
- 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
-- Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto
I concur in the general case. But I would suggest the people complaining work in computers. I'm a Unix sysadmin; my job description is to automate myself out of existence. Checklist=shell script=JOB DONE, NEXT TASK TO ELIMINATE.
It turns out, thankfully, that work expands to fill the sysadmins available. Because even in the future, nothing works. I fully expect to be able to work to 100 if I want to.
Procrastination and The Extended Will 2009
Facts which seem obvious in retrospect are often less salient than they appear, outside of their native contexts. If I'd been asked to describe humans as computational systems before reading the ancestor, pen and paper probably wouldn't be one of the things I'd have taken into account.
Calvin
This phrase was explicitly in my mind back when I was generalizing the "notice confusion" skill.
Rationality 101 ;^)
The chance of averaging exactly 3.5 would be a hell of a lot smaller. The chance of averaging between 3.45 and 3.55 would be larger, though.
Turkish proverb
http://pbfcomics.com/72/
-- Norwegian folktale.
It's a cautionary tale about Norwegian food.
It explains lutefisk.
... (read more)Betcha it'd work. I'm going to set a piece of candy in front of me, work for half an hour, and then put it back, at least once a day for a week.
I sometimes find that telling my Inner Lazy that it can decide—after I've done the first one—between whether to continue a series of tasks or to stop and be Lazy gets me to do the whole series of tasks. Despite having noticed explicitly that in practice this 'decision delay strategy' leads to the whole series getting done, it still works, and rather seems like tricking my Inner Lazy to transition into/hand the reins over to into my Inner Agent.
Accountability check!
Did you do it? How'd it go?
Did it once, binge-ate the candy a few hours later, bought more candy, binge-ate it again. Trying again in two weeks (or going to the doctor if still prone to binging).
In the context of LW, I took it as an amusing critique of the whole idea of rewarding yourself for behaviours you want to do more .
It's either a cautionary tale about the dangers of deceiving yourself, or a humorous look at the impossibility of actually doing so.
Also, don't forget his pleasure at successfully tricking himself. ;-)
--Professor Farnsworth, Futurama.
The threat of massive perfectly symmetrical violence, on the other hand...
Such a threat can also be effective for asymmetrical violence -- no matter which way the asymmetry goes.
-- Graduate student of our group, recognising a level above his own in a weekly progress report
Now I'm curious about the context...
-- Dennis Monokroussos
It's probably a much more accurate feeling than the opposite one, though...
I think it may depend a lot on how well the action fits into your schema for reasonable behavior.
I have mild OCD. Its manifestations are usually unnoticeable to other people, and generally don't interfere with the ordinary function of my life, but occasionally lead to my engaging in behaviors that no ordinary person would consider worthwhile. The single most extreme manifestation, which still stands out in my memory, was a time when I was playing a video game, and saved my game file, then, doubting my own memory that I had saved it, did it again... and again... and again... until I had saved at least seven times, each time convinced that I couldn't yet be sure I had saved it "enough."
Afterwards, I was horrified at my own actions, because what I had just done was too obviously crazy to just handwave away.
I experience horrible feelings when I humiliate myself or put myself at risk. This phenomenon seems to occur independently of whether I have a good causal model for why I did those things.
Harry Potter and the Confirmed Critical, Chapter 6
Ariel Castro (according to The Onion)
Ah. I read that one as a reference to the tendency to let tribal affiliation trump realistic evaluation of outcomes.
-Gloria Steinem
I read that as "looking for the right person to fall in love with". Then the sense is "be the right person for someone else". But that achieves a different goal entirely, since it doesn't make the other person right for you.
There are many cases where you want a different person right for the task.
Romantic partners (inherently), trading and working partners (allowing you to specialize in your comparative advantage), deputies and office-holders (allowing you to deputize), soldiers (allowing you to send someone else to their death to win the war).
Unknown
This could be studied empirically.
-Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
On the other hand, the book doesn't give a citation, and searching for the exact text of the question turns up only that passage. Not sure what to make of that.
Ross & Sicoly (1979). Egocentric Biases in Availability and Attribution.
In the study, the spouses actually estimated their contributions by making a slash mark on a line segment which had endpoints labelled "primarily wife" and "primarily husband". The experimenters set it up this way, rather than asking for numerical percentages, for ethical reasons. In pilot testing using percentages, they "found that subjects were able to remember the percentages they recorded and that postquestionnaire comparisons of percentages provided a strong source of conflict between the spouses." (p. 325)
Reynolds' law
Eugine_Nier's comment has the suppressed premise that status usually results from character traits (alone, or primarily). NancyLebovitz's response contradicts this suppressed premise.
If you get rich by being exceptionally virtuous, then redistributing the wealth will make it less obvious who is virtuous.
But if you get rich by having a rich dad, then redistributing the wealth will merely make it less obvious who had a rich dad.
At least in the US, saving money can disqualify you from welfare.
Fate/stay night
'Then he posed a question that, obvious as it seems, had not really occurred to me: “What makes you think that UFOs are a scientific problem?”
I replied with something to the effect that a problem was only scientific in the way it was approached, but he would have none of that, and he began lecturing me. First, he said, science had certain rules. For example, it has to assume that the phenomena it is observing is natural in origin rather than artificial and possibly biased. Now the UFO phenomenon could be controlled by alien beings. “If it is,” added the Major, “then the study of it doesn’t belong to science. It belongs to Intelligence.” Meaning counterespionage. And that, he pointed out, was his domain. *
“Now, in the field of counterespionage, the rules are completely different.” He drew a simple diagram in my notebook. “You are a scientist. In science there is no concept of the ‘price’ of information. Suppose I gave you 95 per cent of the data concerning a phenomenon. You’re happy because you know 95 per cent of the phenomenon. Not so in intelligence. If I get 95 per cent of the data, I know that this is the ‘cheap’ part of the inf... (read more)
Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”
-Unknown
-- Paraphrase of joke by Marcus Brigstocke
That's the joke.
It's funny, but you really shouldn't be learning life lessons from Tetris.
If Tetris has taught me anything, it's the history of the Soviet Union.
So Tetris is really an anti-procrastination learning tool? Hmmm, wonder why that doesn't sound right….
Scott Adams
Aka http://demotivators.despair.com/demotivational/stupiditydemotivator.jpg
"Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never win AND never quit are idiots"
David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
And, while you were writing, someone would provide the wanted answer ;)
Bakemonogatari
David Chapman
The opposite intellectual sin to wanting to derive everything from fundamental physics is holism which makes too much of the fact that everything is ultimately connected to everything else. Sure, but scientific progress is made by finding where the connections are weak enough to allow separate theories.
-- John McCarthy
Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book
Peter Greer
George Bernard Shaw
I agree with the thought, but I find the attribution implausible. "Finding yourself" sounds like modern pop-psych, not a phrase that GBS would ever have written. Google doesn't turn up a source.
-- GLaDOS from Portal 2
If you cast out all the easy strategies that don't actually work as non-'solutions', then sure, in what remains among the set of solutions, the best is often the easiest, though not easy. I can think of much harder ways to save the world and I'm not trying any of them.
Stephen Jay Gould
A proactive interest in the latter would seem to lead to extensive instrumental interest in the former. Finding things (such as convolutions in brains or genes) that are indicative of potentially valuable talent is the kind of thing that helps make efficient use of it.
There are surprisingly few MRI machines or DNA sequencers in cotton fields and sweatshops. Paraphrasing the original quote from Stephen Jay Gould: The problem is not how good we are at detecting talent; it's where we even bother to look for it.
You need neither MRI machines nor DNA sequencers to detect intelligence. IQ test perform much better at detecting intelligence.
Yes; at this point with only 3 SNPs linked to intelligence, it's a joke to say that 'poor people aren't being sequenced and this is why we aren't detecting hidden gems'.
I suspect, actually, that Gould would not view "find the geniuses and get them out of the fields" as a reasonable solution to the problem he poses. What he wants is for there to be no stoop labour in the first place, whether for geniuses or the terminally mediocre. The geniuses are just a way to illustrate the problem.
they are not well known to me
I chose Ramanujan as my example because mathematics is extremely meritocratic, as proven by how he went from poor/middle-class Indian on the verge of starving to England on the strength of his correspondence & papers. If there really were countless such people, we would see many many examples of starving farmers banging out some impressive proofs and achieving levels of fame somewhat comparable to Einstein; hence the reference class of peasant-Einsteins must be very small since we see so few people using sheer brainpower to become famous like Ramanujan.
(Or we could simply point out that with average IQs in the 70s and 80s, average mathematician IQs closer to 140s - or 4 standard deviations away, even in a population of billions we still would only expect a small handful of Ramanujans - consistent with the evidence. Gould, of course, being a Marxist who denies any intelligence, would not agree.)
It is worth pointing out that Ramanujan, while poor, was still a Brahmin.
And not just that, but he had more education than the poorest Indians, and probably more than the second poorest. And got his hands on a math textbook, which was probably pretty low probability.
My bet is that there aren't a lot of geniuses doing stoop labor, especially in traditional peasant situations, but there are some who would have been geniuses if they'd had enough food when young and some education.
I think it can be illustrative, as a counter to the spotlight effect, to look at the personalities of math/science outliers who come from privileged backgrounds, and imagine them being born into poverty. Oppenheimer's conjugate was jailed or executed for attempted murder, instead of being threatened with academic probation. Gödel's conjugate added a postscript to his proof warning that the British Royal Family were possible Nazi collaborators, which got it binned, which convinced him that all British mathematicians were in on the conspiracy. Newton and Turing's conjugates were murdered as teenagers on suspicion of homosexuality. I have to make these stories up because if you're poor and at all weird, flawed, or unlucky your story is rarely recorded.
A gross exaggeration; execution was never in the cards for a poisoned apple which was never eaten.
Likewise. Goedel didn't go crazy until long after he was famous, and so your conjugate is in no way showing 'privilege'.
Likewise. You have some strange Whiggish conception of history where all periods were ones where gays would be lynched; Turing would not have been lynched anymore than President Buchanan would have, because so many upper-class Englishmen were notorious practicing gays and their boarding schools Sodoms and Gomorrahs. To remember the context of Turing's homosexuality conviction, this was in the same period where highly-placed gay Englishman after gay Englishman was turning out to be Soviet moles (see the Cambridge Five and how the bisex... (read more)
From his letter to G.H. Hardy:
Googling the text finds it quoted a bunch of places.
Besides his letter to Hardy, Wikipedia cites The Man Who Knew Infinity (on Libgen; it also quotes the 'half starving' passage), where the cited section reads:
... (read more)"The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Productivity of American Mathematicians" comes to mind as an interesting recent natural experiment where the floodgate of Russian mathematical talent was unleashed after the collapse of the USSR and many of them successfully rose in America despite academic math being a zero-sum game; consistent with meritocracy.
Peter Greer
-- Tillaume, The Alloy of Law
Yes, it's wrong. In the QM formalism position is a fundamental property. However, the way physical properties work is very different from classical mechanics (CM). In CM, a property is basically a function that maps physical states to real numbers. So the x-component of momentum, for instance, is a function that takes a state as input and spits out a number as output, and that number is the value of the property for that state. Same state, same number, always. This is what it means for a property to have a well-defined value for every state.
In QM, physical properties are more complicated -- they're linear operators, if you want a mathematically exact treatment. But here's an attempt at an intuitive explanation: There are some special quantum states (called eigenstates) for which physical properties behave pretty much like they do in CM. If the particle is in one of those states, then the property takes the state as input and basically just spits out a number. Whenever the particle is in that state, you get the same number. For those states, the property does have a well-defined value.
But the problem in QM is that those are not the only states there are. There are other states as w... (read more)
-Steven Spielberg
Dollars are floppy. It's nice to have a relatively rigid bookmark. I've used tissues and such as bookmarks in the past but they're unsatisfactory. Of course, that was back when I still read books in dead tree format.
I'm reminded of a picture I saw on Facebook of a doorstop still in its original packaging used as a doorstop.
My bookmark is prettier than the dollar.
My bookmark is made of two prices of fridge-magnet material. It can be closed around a few pages and the magnetism holds it in place, preventing it from falling out.
Plus dollars in my country are exclusively coins, the smallest note is $5.
-Abstract, Material priming: The influence of mundane physical objects on situational construal and competitive behavioral choice (via Yvain)
While I respect your right to do so, I find such a concept aesthetically horrifying.
You're suffering from the typical ear fallacy. Some people have much stiffer cartilage, or something; I don't find it uncomfortable, but I've met people who're caused actual pain by it.
A decision with an aesthetic benefit is not irrational. You are misusing "irrational".
(Or was this sarcasm?)
-Robert Downey Jr.
I think it's good to be well-calibrated.
It is usually best to be socially confident while making well-calibrated predictions of success. The two are only slightly related and Downey is definitely talking about the social kind of confidence.
Well, I think the thrust of the quote had more to do with being confident in your own projects. But I'll try to do an answer to your point because I think it's important to recognise the limitations of domain specialists - some of whom just aren't very good at their jobs.
If you're not on your team of expert surgeons, you're gonna be screwed if they're not actually as expert as you might think they were. There's a bit in What Do You Care What Other People Think? Where Feynman is talking about his first wife's hospitalisation - and how he had done some reading around the area and come up with the idea that it might be TB - and didn't push for the idea because he thought that the doctors knew what they were doing.
... (read more)-Thomas Jefferson
One who possesses a maximum-entropy prior is further from the truth than one who possesses an inductive prior riddled with many specific falsehoods and errors. Or more to the point, someone who endorses knowing nothing as a desirable state for fear of accepting falsehoods is further from the truth than somebody who believes many things, some of them false, but tries to pay attention and go on learning.
misattributed often to Plato
Jack Handey
So good even dead people want to drink it.
John C Wright
St. Francis of Assisi (allegedly)
A luxury, once sampled, becomes a necessity. Pace yourself.
Andrew Tobias, My Vast Fortune
--Delmore Schwartz, "Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day"; quoted by Mike Darwin on the GRG ML
I like it when I hear philosophy in rap songs (or any kind of music, really) that I can actually fully agree with:
... (read more)Anton Lavey, The Satanic Bible, The Book of Satan II
Then, to continue the metaphor, we should study it by telescope from afar, not as a present and influential entity in our own sphere of existence, but rather a distant body, informative but impotent, the object of curiosity rather than devotion.
James Wilson
Eric Raymond
Empirically, heaping scorn on everyone and seeing who sticks around leads to lots of time wasted on flame wars.
Straw man. The grandparent explicitly made the scorn conditional, not 'on everyone'.
Eric Raymond isn't suggesting that. Why are you?
I don't follow kernel development much. Recently, a colleague pointed me to the rdrand instruction. I was curious about Linux kernel support for it, and I found this thread: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1173350
Notice that Linus spends a bunch of time (a) flaming people and (b) being wrong about how crypto works (even though the issue was not relevant to the patch).
Is this typical of the linux-kernel mailing list? I decided to look at the latest hundred messages. I saw some minor rudeness, but nothing at that level. Of course, none of these messages were from Linus. But I didn't have to go back more than a few days to find Linus saying things like, "some ass-wipe inside the android team." Imagine if you were that Android developer, and you were reading that email? Would that make you want to work on Linux? Or would that make you want to go find a project where the leader doesn't shit on people?
Here's a revealing quote from one recent message from Linus: "Otherwise I'll have to start shouting at people again." ... (read more)
Here's my thought process upon reading this. (Initially, I assumed “git 'er done” meant something like ‘women are unimportant except as sex objects, and I misread “unwilling” as “willing”.)
(A... (read more)
-- Will Wildman, analysis of Ender's Game
It is not July. It is August.
Saw this under "latest rationality quotes" and was like "man, I'm really missing the context as to how this is a rationality quote."
"If it July, I desire to believe it is July. If it is August, I desire to believe it is August..."
If the Romans had been more willing to rename months they were unwilling to keep in their original places, we might have a much saner calendar.
If people in the 1500 years since the Romans had been more willing to rename months...
There are no happy endings. Endings are the saddest part, So just give me a happy middle And a very happy start.
-Shel Silverstein
But but peak/end rule!
When a concept is inherently approximate, it is a waste of time to try to give it a precise definition.
-- John McCarthy
Sharp membership boundaries, however, often result in people forgetting the fuzziness of the concept - there are some people who vote without being responsible adults, because they can; an essay can be boring and rambling at 450 words or impressive and concise at 600; and food can be good a bit past its expiration date (it doesn't usually go in the other direction in my experience, presumably because the risk of eating spoiled food vastly outweighs the risk of mistakenly tossing out good food, so expiration dates are the very early estimates).
Huh? No it doesn't. It says an entirely different thing.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses
The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence.
Fred P. Brooks, No Silver Bullet
I've always had misgivings about this quote. In my experience about 90% of the code on a large project is an artifact of a poor requirement analysis/architecture/design/implementation. (Sendmail comes to mind.) I have seen 10,000-line packages melting away when a feature is redesigned with more functionality and improved reliability and maintainability.
Le Bovier de Fontenelle
This explains all those urges I get to burn witches, my talent at farming, all my knowledge at hunting and tracking and my outstanding knack for feudal political intrigue.
(Composition is not the relationship to previous minds that education entails. Can someone think of a better one?)
Derivation.
Sarah Hoyt
I see small examples everywhere I look; they're just too specific to point the way to a general solution.
James Portnow/Daniel Floyd
Josh Billings
(h/t Robin Hanson)
More of an anti-death quote, but:
"“Must I accept the barren Gift?
-learn death, and lose my Mastery?
Then let them know whose blood and breath
will take the Gift and set them free:
whose is the voice and whose the mind
to set at naught the well-sung Game-
when finned Finality arrives
and calls me by my secret Name.
Not old enough to love as yet,
but old enough to die, indeed-
-the death-fear bites my throat and heart,
fanged cousin to the Pale One's breed.
But past the fear lies life for all-
perhaps for me: and, past my dread,
past loss of Mastery and life,
the S... (read more)
-Ledaal Kes (Exalted Aspect Book: Air)
Robert Wright, The Moral Animal