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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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.
- Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
When another asserted something that I thought an error, I deny'd myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appear'd or seem'd to me some difference, etc.
I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engag'd in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I propos'd my opinions procur'd them a readier reception and less contradiction; I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevail'd with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right.
Benjamin Franklin
Unfortunately this self-debasing style of contradiction has become the norm, and the people I talk to can instantly notice when I am pouring sugar on top of a serving of their own ass. Perhaps they are simply noticing changes in my tone of voice or body language, but in sufficiently intellectual partners I've noticed that abruptly contradicting them startles them into thinking more often, though I avoid this in everyday conversation with non-intellectuals for fear of increasing resentment.
Dawkins, in arguments with theists, homeopaths, etc., is not trying to convince his interlocutors; nor are most of the other well-known atheist public figures. The aim to convince bystanders — the private atheist who is unsure whether to "come out", the theist who's all but lost his faith but isn't sure whether atheism is a position one may take publicly, the person who's lukewarm on religious arguments but has always had a rather benign and respectful view of religion, etc.
In private conversations with someone whose opinions are of concern to you, Franklin's advice make sense. The public arguments of Dawkins & Co. are more akin to performances than conversations. I think he achieves his aim admirably. I, for one, have little interest in watching people get on a public stage and have exchanges laden with "in certain cases or circumstances..." and other such mealy-mouthed nonsense.
There is such a thing as a less mediated experience of the world.
Or maybe they and satt mean different things by “unmediated”.
I believe them. I don't believe in God, but I do believe that it's possible to have the subjective experience of a divine presence -- there's too much agreement on the broad strokes of how one feels, across cultures and religions, for it to be otherwise. Though on the other hand, some of the more specific takes on it might be bullshit, and basic cynicism suggests that some of the people talking about feeling God's presence are lying.
Seems reasonable to extend the same level of credulity to claims about enlightenment experiences. That's not to say that Buddhism is necessarily right about how they hash out in terms of mental/spiritual benefits, or in terms of what they actually mean cognitively, of course.
You could. And the way to resolve a dispute over the existence of, say, unicorns, would be to determine what is being meant by the word, in terms of what observations their existence implies that you will be more likely to see. Then you can go and make those observations.
The problem with talk of mental phenomena like "unmediated perception" is that it is difficult to do this, because the words are pointing into the mind of the person using them, which no-one else can see. Or worse, the person isn't pointing anywhere, but repeating something someone else has said, without having had personal experience. How can you tell whether a disagreement is due to the words being used differently, the minds being actually different, or the words and the minds being much the same but the people having differing awareness of their respective minds?
This is a problem I have with pretty much everything I have read about meditation. I can follow the external instructions about sitting, but if I cannot match up the description of the results to be supposedly obtained with my experience, there isn't anywhere to go with that.
- Herman Chernoff (pg 34 of Past, Present, and Future of Statistical Science, available here)
Actually, if you do this with something besides a test, this sounds like a really good way to teach a third-grader probabilities.
Experiments can fail if they are executed or planned improperly. If both the control and the experimental group are given sugar pills, for example, or the equipment fails in a shower of sparks, the experiment has provided no evidence by which one can update. It is a small quibble, and probably not what the quote meant to illustrate (I'm guessing that the experiment provided evidence which downgraded the probability of the hypothesis), but something to note nonetheless: experiments are not magic knowledge-providers.
— Robert Morris, quoted in Brian Snow's "We Need Assurance!"
I tend to disagree.. I have done some things which I thought was experimenting with but did not come up with any clear conclusion after the experiment and analysis. On rewriting the thesis it turned out there were a lot more implicit assumptions inside the hypothesis that I was not aware of. I think it was a badly designed experiment and it was rather unproductive in retrospective analysis. I suppose one could argue that it brought to light the implicit assumptions and that was a useful result. Somehow(not sure how or why) I find that a low standard to consider something an experiment.
"Man is not going to wait passively for millions of years before evolution offers him a better brain."
--Corneliu E. Giurgea, the chemist who synthesized Piracetam and coined the term 'Nootropic'
-- Scott Aaronson
The same is true for a lot of intellectual concepts outside of math.
The joke was that this is precisely what a liberal arts degree was meant to be; the main problem is that liberal arts degrees haven't kept up with the times.
For my part, I've found the economic notions of opportunity cost and marginal utility to be like this.
"Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die."
-Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
-- Joseph P. Simmons, The Reformation: Can Social Scientists Save Themselves
Captain James Tiberius Kirk dodging an appeal to nature and the "what the hell" effect, to optimize for consequences instead of virtue.
-- Carlos Bueno, Mature Optimization, pg. 14. Emphasis mine.
“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer.”
― Douglas Adams
— Errol Morris
-- Alan Lightman
Every 100 million years or so, an asteroid or comet the size of a mountain smashes into the earth, killing nearly everything that lives. If ever we needed proof of Nature’s indifference to the welfare of complex organisms such as ourselves, there it is. The history of life on this planet has been one of merciless destruction and blind, lurching renewal.
Sam Harris, Mother Nature is Not Our Friend, in response to the Edge Annual Question 2008
http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/the-edge-annual-question-20081#sthash.IBMyMOQN.dpuf
Accident, n. An inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws.
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." -George Bernard Shaw
Real probabilities about the structure and properties of the cosmos, and its relation to living organisms on this planet, can be reach’d only by correlating the findings of all who have competently investigated both the subject itself, and our mental equipment for approaching and interpreting it — astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and so on. The only sensible method is that of assembling all the objective scientifick data of 1931, and forming a fresh chain of partial indications bas’d exclusively on that data and on no conceptions derived from earlier and less ample arrays of data; meanwhile testing, by the psychological knowledge of 1931, the workings and inclinations of our minds in accepting, connecting, and making deductions from data, and most particularly weeding out all tendencies to give more than equal consideration to conceptions which would never have occurred to us had we not formerly harboured provisional and capricious ideas of the universe now conclusively known to be false. It goes without saying that this realistic principle fully allows for the examination of those irrational feelings and wishes about the universe, upon which idealists so amusingly base their various dogmatick speculations.
-- H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 1932-1934.
This is from Greg Egan's 1999 novel Teranesia; since there are no hits for ‘Teranesia’ in the Google custom search, I'm inferring that it hasn't been posted before.
Here's a little background. This is a spoiler for some events early in the novel, but it is early; it's not a spoiler for the really big stuff (not even in this chapter). So Prabir lives alone with his father (‘Baba’) and mother (and baby sister Madhusree who is not in this scene), and their garden has been sown with mines for some very interesting reasons that needn't concern us, and Baba has discovered this by being blown up by one. But he's still alive, so mother and Prabir have laid a ladder atop some boxes across the garden, and she's crawled along the ladder to rescue Baba without setting off more mines. But this is harder than anticipated.
... (read more)Wikipedia:Don't stuff beans up your nose
Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Steven Pinker
This lacks a ring of truth for me.
A lot of folks seem to expect the science of human beings to reinforce their bitterness and condemnation of human nature (roughly, "people are mostly crap"). I kinda suspect that if you asked "sophisticated people" (whoever those are) to name some important psychology experiments, those who named any would come up with Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment and Milgram's obedience experiments pretty early on. Not a lot of emotional uplift there.
As for the arts — horror films where everyone dies screaming seem to be regarded as every bit as lowbrow as feel-good comedies.
― Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men (Discworld, #30)
Scott Aaronson in reply to the statements like "A stone is conscious to the “inputs” of gravity and electrostatic repulsion"
Nassim Taleb
--Kevan Lee
Patrick McKenzie on why having a publication date on your blog entry devalues it.
-- Max H. Bazerman
-- Lucien Zell (can't find an authoritative attribution)
I'm sure this has been discussed before, but my attempts at searches for those discussions failed, so...
Why is this thread in Main and not Discussion?
Well, discussion didn't exist back than.
-- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, pg. 76
-- Scott Adams
Context: In a short video, a woman throws out an old desk lamp. The music and cinematography are contrived such that the viewer feels tempted to feel sorrow on behalf on the lamp. Then a man walks up and addresses the camera with:
A good example of the difference between fuzzies and utilons.
In an opinion piece in the Boston Globe called "At MIT, the h... (read more)
Some of these things are not like the others...
How did he know that his judgment of what actually had gone on was correct? How did he verify his conclusion?
Statistics is precisely that, but with numbers.
Not necessarily.
Relevant Slate Star Codex post: “If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing With Made-Up Statistics”
--- The Black Opera by Mary Gentle
"The best way to sort out confusion is to expose it" - Richard Dawkins. (In the greatest show on earth, p.157. )
.There is no such thing as absolute truth.... People are less deceived by failing to see the truth than by failing to see its limits.
Nick Szabo
The quote doesn't give that impression in context, including the comments - it's actually a statement about the importance of the rule of law. From the comments, Nick notes: