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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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.
Faced with the task of extracting useful future out of our personal pasts, we organisms try to get something for free (or at least at bargain price): to find the laws of the world -- and if there aren't any, to find approximate laws of the world -- anything at all that will give us an edge. From some perspectives it appears utterly remarkable that we organisms get any purchase on nature at all. Is there any deep reason why nature should tip its hand, or reveal its regularities to casual inspection? Any useful future-producer is apt to be something of a trick -- a makeshift system that happens to work, more often than not, a lucky hit on a regularity in the world that can be tracked. Any such lucky anticipators Mother Nature stumbles over are bound to be prized, of course, if they improve an organism's edge.
Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are: