Another monthly installment of the rationality quotes thread. The usual rules apply:
- 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
-- Scott Aaronson
Holy Belldandy, it sounds like someone located the player character. Everyone get your quests ready!
Woah, I'd better implement Phase One of my evil plan if it's going to be ready in time for the hero to encounter it.
Just act life-like!
My bet is that the student had many digits of pi memorised and just used their parity.
I would have easily won that game (and maybe made a quip about free will when asked how...). All you need is some memorized secret randomness. For example, a randomly generated password that you've memorized, but you'd have to figure out how to convert it to bits on the fly.
Personally I'd recommend going to random.org, generating a few hexadecimal bytes (which are pretty easy to convert to both bits and numbers in any desired range), memorizing them, and keeping them secret. Then you'll always be able to act unpredictably.
Well, unpredictably to a computer program. If you want to be able to be unpredictable to someone who's good at reading your next move from your face, you would need some way to not know your next move before making it. One way would be to run something like an algorithm that generates the binary expansion of pi in your head, and delaying calculating the next bit until the best moment. Of course, you wouldn't actually choose pi, but something less well-known and preferably easier to calculate. I don't know any such algorithms, and I guess if anyone knows a good one, they're not likely to share. But if it was something like a pseudorandom bitstream generator that takes a seed, it could be shared, as long as you didn't share your seed. If anyone's thought about this in more depth and is willing to share, I'm interested.
http://blog.yunwilliamyu.net/2011/08/14/mindhack-mental-math-pseudo-random-number-generators/
When I need this I just look at the nearest object. If the first letter is between a and m, that's a 0. If it's between n and z, that's a 1. For larger strings of random bits, take a piece of memorized text (like a song you like) and do this with the first letter of each word.
Winston Rowntree, Non-Bullshit Fables
I've always thought there should be a version where the hare gets eaten by a fox halfway through the race, while the tortoise plods along safely inside its armored mobile home.
Link.
"The peril of arguing with you is forgetting to argue with myself. Don’t make me convince you: I don’t want to believe that much."
The others are quite nice too: http://www.theliteraryreview.org/WordPress/tlr-poetry/
That link is now broken. It turns out it was a highly incomplete excerpt from "Vectors 3.0" so I've put By the Numbers on Libgen and put up a complete version taken from the book. (I like some of the aphorisms, so I've ordered the other 2 books to scan as well.)
--Pirates of the Caribbean
The pirate-specific stuff is a bit extraneous, but I've always thought this scene neatly captured the virtue of cold, calculating practicality. Not that "fairness" is never important to worry about, but when you're faced with a problem, do you care more about solving it, or arguing that your situation isn't fair? What can you do, and what can't you do? Reminds me of What do I want? What do I have? How can I best use the latter to get the former?
That said, if I recognize that I'm in a group that values "fairness" as an abstract virtue, then arguing that my situation isn't fair is often a useful way of solving my problem by recruiting alliances.
I am in many groups where, when choosing between two strategies A and B, fairness is one of the things we take into account. I'm not sure that's a problem.
Well, it certainly didn't stop Jack Sparrow from being a beloved character.
You can be ruthless and popular, if you're sufficiently charismatic about it.
It also helps to be fictional, or at least sufficiently removed from the target audience that they perceive you in far mode.
-Allen Knutson on collaborating with Terence Tao
Daniel Kahneman,Thinking, Fast and Slow
I've read your link to John Leslie with both curiosity and bafflement.
17 x 24 is not perhaps the best example of a question for which no answer comes immediately to mind. Seventeen has the curious property that 17 x 6 = 102. (The recurring decimal 1/6 = 0.166666... hints to us that 17 x 6 = 102 is just the first of a series of near misses on a round number, 167 x 6 = 1002, 1667 x 6 = 10002, etc). So multiplying 17 by any small multiple of 6 is no harder than the two times table. In particular 17 x 24 = 17 x (6 x 4) = (17 x 6) x 4 = 102 x 4 = 408.
17 x 23 might have served better, were it not for the curious symmetry around the number 20, with 17 = 20 - 3 while 23 = 20 + 3. One is reminded of the identity (x + y)(x - y) = x^2 - y^2 which is often useful in arithmetic and tells us at once that 17 x 23 = 20 x 20 - 3 x 3 = 400 - 9 = 391.
17 x 25 has a different defect as an example, because one can hardly avoid apprehending 25 as one quarter of 100, which stimulates the observation that 17 = 16 + 1 and 16 is full of yummy fourness. 17 x 25 = (16 + 1) x 25 = (4 x 4 + 1) x 25 = 4 x 4 x 25 + 1 x 25 = 4 x 100 + 25 = 425.
17 x 26 is a better example. Nature has its little jokes. 7 x 3 = 21 the... (read more)
I'm not sure exactly what he had in mind, but learning the multiplication tables using Anki isn't exactly rote.
Now, this may not be the case for others, but when I see a new problem like 17 x 24, I don't just keep reading off the answer until I remember it when the note comes back around. Instead, I try to answer it using mental arithmetic, no matter how long it takes. I do this by breaking the problem into easier problems (perhaps by multiplying 17 x 20 and then adding that to 17 x 4). Sooner or later my brain will simply present the answers to the intermediate steps for me to add together and only much later do those steps fade away completely and the final answer is immediately retrievable.
Doing things this way, simply as a matter of course, you develop somewhat of a feel for how certain numbers multiply and develop a kind of "friendship with the integers." Er, at least, that's what it feels like from the inside.
--Chris Brogan on the Sunk Cost Fallacy
-- Isaac Asimov
― David Lamb & Susan M. Easton, Multiple Discovery: The pattern of scientific progress, pp. 100-101
Columbus's "genius" was using the largest estimate for the size of Eurasia and the smallest estimate for the size of the world to make the numbers say what he wanted them to. As normally happens with that sort of thing, he was dead wrong. But he got lucky and it turned out there was another continent there.
Yes, actually. He believed the true dimensions of the Earth would conform to his interpretation of a particular Bible verse (thwo-thirds of the earth should be land, and one-third water, so the Ocean had to be smaller than believed) and fudged the numbers to fit.
Perhaps Columbus's "genius" was simply to take action. I've noticed this in executives and higher-ranking military officers I've met-- they get a quick view of the possibilities, then they make a decision and execute it. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but the success rate is a lot better than for people who never take action at all.
From Boswell's Life of Johnson. HT to a commenter on the West Hunter blog.
If each person counts as one for each time he dines, Alexander can only claim to have personally hosted the guests at his most recent meal; the others were guests of someone else.
I think the idea is that all of the people are him.
-Paul Graham
--Paul Graham, same essay
Source
-- Scott Aaronson on areas of expertise
If the atheists what to win me over, then the way for them to do so is straightforward: they should ignore me, and try instead to win over the theology community, bishops, the Pope, pastors, denominational and non-denominational bodies, etc., with superior research and arguments.
-- Scott Aaronson in the next paragraph
Not that I don't think this is a fair counterpoint to make, but in my own experience trying to find the best arguments for religion, I learned a lot more and got better reasoning talking to random laypeople than by asking priests and theologians.
Of course, the fact that I talked to a lot more laypeople than priests and theologians is most likely the determining factor here, but my experiences discussing the nature and details of climate change have not followed a similar pattern at all.
I think "etc." is a request to the reader to be a good classifier--simply truncating the list at "etc." is overfitting, and defeats the purpose of the "etc." Contrariwise, construing "etc." to mean "everything else, everywhere" is trying to make do with fewer parameters than you actually need. The proper use of "etc." is to use the training examples to construct a good classifier, and flesh out members of the category by lazy evaluation as needed.
Something a Chess Master told me as a child has stuck with me:
-- Robert Tanner
-- Jake the Dog (Adventure Time)
Will is (non-seriously) pointing out that the synchronicity between army1987's Facebook status and Qiaochu's comment is too great to be explained by coincidence alone, and is thus strong evidence for the existence of God.
Which is of course a different question to "What should I do to get good at Chess?" which is all about deliberate practice with a small proportion of time devoted to playing actual games.
- K'ung Fu-tzu
Following the chain, I came across:
Source, with the addition later of 'expect to read a lot of sentences like this in coming years.'
-- Albert Einstein
At least sometimes the formulation is far easier than the solution.
--Matt Dillahunty
-- Steve Jobs
Longer version from here
—Steve Jobs, interviewed in Fortune, March 7, 2008
One of the things that focusing is about is giving up pursuing good things.
Which means that if I want to focus, I need to decide which good things I'm going to say "no" to.
This may seem obvious, but after seeing many not-otherwise-stupid management structures create lists of "priorities" that encompass everything good (and consequently aren't priorities at all), I'm inclined to say that it isn't as obvious as it may seem.
Joe Pyne was a confrontational talk show host and amputee, which I say for reasons that will become clear. For reasons that will never become clear, he actually thought it was a good idea to get into a zing-fight with Frank Zappa, his guest of the day. As soon as Zappa had been seated, the following exchange took place:
Of course this would imply that Pyne is not a featherless biped.
Source: Robert Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
-- Thomas Szasz
.
Punster: go on a hunting trip with Mick Jagger.
─James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State
-Kafka, A Little Fable
Moral: Just because the superior agent knows what is best for you and could give you flawless advice, doesn't mean it will not prefer to consume you for your component atoms!
My problem with this is, that like a number of Kafka's parables, the more I think about it, the less I understand it.
There is a mouse, and a mouse-trap, and a cat. The mouse is running towards the trap, he says, and the cat says that to avoid it, all he must do is change his direction and eats the mouse. What? Where did this cat come from? Is this cat chasing the mouse down the hallway? Well, if he is, then that's pretty darn awful advice, because if the cat is right behind the mouse, then turning to avoid the trap just means he's eaten by the cat, so either way he is doomed.
Actually, given Kafka's novels, so often characterized by double-binds and false dilemmas, maybe that's the point: that all choices lead to one's doom, and the cat's true observation hides the more important observation that the entire system is rigged.
('"Alas", said the voter, "at first in the primaries the options seemed so wide and so much change possible that I was glad there was an establishment candidate to turn to to moderate the others, but as time passed the Overton Window closed in and now there is the final voting booth into which I must walk and vote for the lesser of two evils."... (read more)
—Richard Hamming
(I recommend the whole talk, which contains some great examples and many other excellent points.)
I think the thing that strikes me most about this talk is how different science was then versus now. For one small example he was asked to comment on the relative effectiveness of giving talks, writing papers and writing books. In today's world its not a question anyone would ask, and the answer would be "write at least a few papers a year or you won't keep your job."
Charles P Kindleberger, in Manias, Panics and Crashes; a History of Financial Crisis
-- Garret Jones
Parfit, On What Matters, Vol. 2 (pp. 616-620).
--Charlie Munger
“You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar.” “You can catch even more with manure; what's your point?”
--Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory
That's actually an insightful analogy regarding human social politics.
-- John Stuart Mill, autobiography
--Charlie Munger
But regardless of whether we believe our own positions are inviolable, it behooves us to know and understand the arguments of those who disagree. We should do this for two reasons. First, our inviolable position may be anything but. What we assume is true could be false. The only way we’ll discover this is to face up to evidence and arguments against our position. Because, as much as we may not enjoy it, discovering we’ve believed a falsehood means we’re now closer to believing the truth than we were before. And that’s something we should only ever feel gratitude for.
Aaron Ross Powell, Free Thoughts
This is why steelmanning is a really good community norm. Social incentives for understanding the other's position are usually bad, but if people give credit for steelmanning, these incentives are better.
It's difficult to steelman someone's position if I don't understand it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921
-- Warren Buffett
I have no idea whether this is true of Darwin, but it still might be good advice.
-Paul Graham
I like the sentiment, but Paul Graham seems to be claiming that information hazards don't exist, and that doesn't appear to be true.
I would say this is not ALWAYS true. But for the purpose of civilized discussion between human beings, it does seem like a very useful rule of thumb.
― Halldór Laxness, Under the Glacier.
...and then adjusted our senses of the 'incredible' accordingly, so that Special Relativity seemed less incredible, and God more so.
Before remembering the older definition of "incredible" that is presumably meant, I parsed this as "Like all great rationalists you believed in things that were twice as awesome as theology"; and thought "Only twice?".
That on probabilistic or rational reflection one can come to believe intuitively implausible things that are as or more extraordinary than their theological counterparts. Or to mutilate Hamlet, that there are more things on earth than are dreamt of in heaven.
Most of quantum physics and relativity are certainly intuitively weirder than Jesus turning water into wine, self-replicating bread or a body of water splitting itself to create a passage.
I mean, our physics say it's technically possible to make machines that do all of this. Without magic. Using energy collected in space and sent to Earth using beams of light. Although we probably wouldn't use beams of light because that's inefficient.
Scott Adams on evolution toward... what?
-To The Stars
--Francis Bacon
Boswell's Life of Johnson (quoted in "Applied Scientific Inference", Sturrock 1994)
The quote struck me as a poetic way of affirming the general importance of metacognition - a reminder that we are at the center of everything we do, and therefore investing in self improvement is an investment with a multiplier effect. I admit though this may be adding my own meaning that doesn't exist in the quote's context.
Rewatching Branagh's version recently, I keyed in on a different aspect. In his speech, Henry describes in detail all the glory and status the survivors of the battle will enjoy for the rest of their lives, while (of course) totally downplaying the fact that few of them can expect to collect on that reward. He's making a ... (read more)
Howard Taylor - Schlock Mercenary
Source: http://bladekindeyewear.tumblr.com/post/47462509182/but-where-exactally-will-this-backdoor-out-the-felt
--Daniel Kahneman on the dichotomy between the self that experiences things from moment to moment and the self that remembers and evaluates experiences as a whole. (from Thinking, Fast and Slow )
Edgar Lawrence Smith, Common Stocks as Long Term Investments
-Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward
Whoops, forgot to promote this.
Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.
"Michael Jordan"
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
-- Albert Einstein