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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.
Well, I don't want to argue about this too much, so just to clarify:
Birkenbihl quoted Bernie Siegel with "If you want to change somebody's beliefs, he acts like an addict.", in the context of the famous Max Planck quote that new scientific ideas prevail not because they are accepted, but because those who oppose them die out. In this context, I found the idea interesting, therefore I placed the quote here.
She did not mention that esoteric book. But I searched for the quote in order to provide a source, found it in that book, was mildly amused by it, but thought too little about it.
As it reads in the book, Bernie Siegel sounds somewhat sulky, too, that people do not accept his ideas about medicine. Me, I have no idea what they are. But in this context, the quote is indeed rather unhelpful (to put it politely).
The talk about quantum physics was OK, although nothing to write home about. She happily declares that she knows next to nothing about it, then claims that nobody understands it, which is of course wrong. She did not mention some very important concepts (decoherence, Feynman paths). At least, there was "many worlds" and no "wave function collapse", which is not so bad for a talk from the 1990s.
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are: