Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.
-- Paul Dirac
--Paul Romer, NYU, "My Paper “Mathiness in the Theory of Economic Growth”
What if everyone knows that all the models are flawed, but the geocentric model makes the best predictions in one sub-domain, and the heliocentric model in another?
Then the most important question for any model would be what domains it's good at.
For example: one model approximates the population as infinite, so it gets decent predictions when the number of agents in each category exceeds five (this is rare).
These requirements to apply the model should be the first thing taught about the model.
Max Shron, Thinking with Data, O'Reily 2014
Ben Franklin
Andrew Gelman, The aching desire for regular scientific breakthroughs
That sounds clever, but is it actually anywhere near true?
I went to the Wikipedia "timeline of science" page and sampled a bunch of 20th-century advances. Maybe about 10. Not one of them had anything to do with anyone being forced to change fields.
I have no idea who Peter Borden is (nor for that matter any idea whether he actually said it: "Most quotations on the internet are made up" -- Abraham Lincoln) but I would at this point suspect him of being too ready to believe things merely because they sound good.
The barriers are not erected which can say to aspiring talents and industry, 'Thus far and no farther.'
Ludwig van Beethoven
Literature and Music in the Atlantic World, 1767-1867
Keith E. Stanovich in How to Think Straight About Psychology
Keith E. Stanovich in How to Think Straight About Psychology
"The Brothers Karamazov", Dostoyevsky
"Fortune favors the prepared mind." -Louis Pasteur
Stuart Ritchie
spanish proverb.
Originally read in the rescuetime website inside my account.
Nassim Taleb
Daniel Dennett in TAM 2014 - Panel: Can Rationality Be Taught?
-- Karl Marx, in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
Before seeing this I thought you rejected all priors based on Kolmogorov complexity, as that seemed like the only way to save your position. (From what you said before you've read at least some of what Eliezer wrote on the difficulty of writing an AGI program. Hopefully you've read about the way that an incautious designer could create levers which do nothing, since the human brain is inclined to underestimate its own complexity.)
While guessing is clearly risky, it seems like you're relying on the idea that a program to simulate the right kind of "omnipotent, omniscient being" would necessarily show it creating our laws of physics. Otherwise it would appear absurd to compare the complexity of the omni-being to that of physics alone. (It also sounds like you're talking about a fundamentally mental entity, not a kind of local tyrant existing within physics.) But you haven't derived any of our physics from even a more specific theistic hypothesis, nor did the many intelligent people who thought about the logical implications of God in the Middle Ages! Do you actually think they just failed to come up with QM or thermodynamics because they didn't think about God enough?
Earlie... (read more)
Edit: Gah, missed that this was a dupe of 2013. Felt so original too...