Every month on the month, Less Wrong has a thread where we post Deep Wisdom from the Masters. I saw that nobody did this yet for December for some reason, so I figured I could do it myself.
* Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down 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* "Do not quote yourself." --Tiiba
* Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB. That's like shooting fish in a barrel. :)
* No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
G.K. Chesterton
Dr. E. E. Peacock, Jr., quoted in Medical World News (September 1, 1972), p. 45, as quoted in Tufte's 1974 book Data Analysis for Politics and Policy; http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/12/the-ethics-of-random-clinical-trials.html
-Warren E. Buffett
kevinpet at Hacker News
Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.
— John Von Neumann
A little learning is not a dangerous thing to one who does not mistake it for a great deal.
-- William A White
A young boy walks into a barber shop and the barber whispers to his customer, “This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove it to you.” The barber puts a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other, then calls the boy over and asks, “Which do you want, son?” The boy takes the quarters and leaves. “What did I tell you?” said the barber. “That kid never learns!” Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream store. “Hey, son! May I ask you a question? Why did you take the quarters instead of the dollar bill?” The boy licked his cone and replied, “Because the day I take the dollar, the game is over!”
Found on /r/funny
-Confucius
Mitch Hedberg on the distinction between labels and the things to which they are applied:
And more Mitch Hedburg, illustrating how redrawing the map won't alter the territory.
--Manuel Blum, "Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student"
Mark Zuckerberg
And the answer is, "Yes! I run the world's biggest honeypot for teenage idiots who want to post pics of themselves racing on a freeway with a suspended license and a beer in the cupholder."
I suspect the answer is "making as much money as I possibly can", and he's doing much better than all of us. He can convert that to other forms of value later.
-- Ted Kaczynski
In the Information Age, the first step to sanity is FILTERING. Filter the information; extract the knowledge.
Filter first for substance. Filter second for significance. These filters protect against advertising.
Filter third for reliability. This filter protects against politicians.
Filter fourth for completeness. This filter protects from the media.
-- Marc Stielger, David's Sling
“On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.”
--Nietzsche
Isn't this true for any sort of mountains that are difficult to climb, not just the mountains of truth? For example, training makes you better at lying too!
With this in mind, I suppose the difficult part would be correctly identifying the range you're climbing.
— Lazarus Long (in Time Enough For Love by Robert Heinlein)
"Imagine being told you were made for a purpose, and that longevity and happiness are not in the list of design objectives." -David Eubanks, Life Artificial
Witching was turning out to be mostly hard work and really short on magic of the zap!-glingle-glingle-glingle variety. There was no school and nothing that was exactly like a lesson. But it wasn’t wise to try to learn witching all by yourself, especially if you had a natural talent. If you got it wrong, you could go from ignorant to cackling in a week ...
When you got right down to it, it was all about cackling. No one ever talked about this, though. Witches said things like “You can never be too old, too skinny, or too warty,” but they never mentioned the cackling. Not properly. They watched out for it, though, all the time.
It was all too easy to become a cackler. Most witches lived by themselves (cat optional) and might go for weeks without ever seeing another witch. In those times when people hated witches, they were often accused of talking to their cats. Of course they talked to their cats. After three weeks without an intelligent conversation that wasn’t about cows, you’d talk to the wall. And that was an early sign of cackling.
“Cackling,” to a witch, didn’t just mean nasty laughter. It meant your mind drifting away from its anchor. It meant you losing your grip. It meant lone... (read more)
"When I start to wonder if black swans exist, I put down my copy of Mind and pick up my copy of Nature."
-- Ariadne (former columnist in New Scientist).
I pick up my spraypaint and find a swan. Soon I don't have to wonder anymore.
"When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my yogurt"
"Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."
-- Charles Darwin
-George Bernard Shaw
-- Albert Einstein
"Empty arguments with words cannot (in any way) compare with a test which will show practical results."
Ma Jun, inventor or reinventor of the South Pointing Chariot and the differential gear.
The word empty spoils the quotation. The point is that
or
"When in total ignorance, try anything and you will be less ignorant."
-- G.Harry Stine, A Matter of Metalaw
Yes, but you can at least knowingly commit to following the advice. Build a robot that detects whether you are in total ignorance, and takes a random action if so. Then forget about the robot.
(emphasis added)
"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you." -Oscar Wilde
-- Laurens Van der Post
--John Holt
"Any fool can have an opinion; to know what one needs to know to have an opinion is wisdom; which is another way of saying that wisdom means knowing what questions to ask about knowledge."
--Neil Postman, "Building a Bridge to the 18th Century"
— Carl E. Linderholm, "Mathematics Made Difficult"
(There are many more good quotes to be found in this book.)
God is nowhere treated worse than by the natural scientists who believe in him. Materialists simply explain the facts, without making use of such phrases, they do this first when importunate pious believers try to force God upon them, and then they answer curtly, either like Laplace: Sire, je n’avais pas, etc., or more rudely in the manner of the Dutch merchants who, when German commercial travellers press their shoddy goods on them, are accustomed to turn them away with the words: Ik kan die zaken niet gebruiken [I have no use for the things] and that is the end of the matter: But what God has had to suffer at the hands of his defenders! In the history of modern natural science, God is treated by his defenders as Frederick William III was treated by his generals and officials in the Jena campaign. One division of the army after another lays down its arms, one fortress after another capitulates before the march of science, until at last the whole infinite realm of nature is conquered by science, and there is no place left in it for the Creator. Newton still allowed Him the “first impulse” but forbade Him any further interference ‘in his solar system. Father Secchi bows Him out of t... (read more)
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Winston Churchhill
"To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune... to lose both seems like carelessness." - Oscar Wilde (though he didn't mean it to refer to cryonics).
[Edit: correction, thanks ciphergoth]
-- Kafka, The Trial
I don't know if this quote has already shown up, but it's one of my favorites.
"Consider this: You are the architect of your own imprisonment."
-- Macros the Black (from Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar Saga)
Robert Anton Wilson, The Trick Top Hat
Coping with radical novelty requires an orthogonal method. One must consider one's own past, the experiences collected, and the habits formed in it as an unfortunate accident of history, and one has to approach the radical novelty with a blank mind, consciously refusing to try to link it with what is already familiar, because the familiar is hopelessly inadequate. One has, with initially a kind of split personality, to come to grips with a radical novelty as a dissociated topic in its own right. Coming to grips with a radical novelty amounts to creating an... (read more)
Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.
--J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
I can't help but ask whether you've ever found this advice personally useful, and if so, how.
Actually my first thought upon reading that was "follow the improbability" -- be suspicious of elements of your world-model that seem particularly well optimized in some direction if you can't see the source of the optimization pressure.
Yes, but it says "never trust", not "don't trust by default". It should be possible for non-brain-based beings to demonstrate their trustworthiness.
Edit: Also, you can't spell "REALISTIC" without "RACIST LIE". Proof by anagram. So there.
Theories have four stages of acceptance. i) this is worthless nonsense; ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view, iii) this is true, but quite unimportant; iv) I always said so.
-- J.B.S. Haldane
"The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year.
Unless you give at least forty-five minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your ninety minutes of a night are chiefly wasted. This means that your pace will be slow.
Never mind. " - Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 hours per day.
[EDIT: Found to be erroneous! Sorry!]
I don't feel frightened, not knowing things; I think it's much more interesting.
-Richard P. Feynman
| "Why did I do that?" I asked.
-- The Poet Who Is Odd, Knapsack Poems by Elanor Arnason
| Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.
-- Linus Torvalds
The brighter you are, the more you have to learn. -- Don Herold
I don't know the context of this, I came across it as a quote, but I can see two totally different interpretations, both true.
ADDED: Make that five interpretations.
The two I had in mind were:
Epistemic responsibility - you have an ethical obligation to learn because you can.
The more you have to learn - I don't know about you, but I am about as likely to stop learning as to stop breathing - I'm not likely to do either voluntarily.
"Even though it is a path of 1,000 miles, you walk one step at a time. Consider this well." - Miyamoto Musashi
-Benjamin Franklin
That reminds me: when I was little, there was a puzzle in a happy meal that said, "Rearrange these letters to spell something that can make a canoe sink: ELAK." The correct answer, of course, was "leak". I was upset, because my answer was "a elk". (And now that I think about it, if you draw this as a causal diagram, "lake" should be a valid answer too.)
Well, strictly speaking, if you pile KALE high enough on your canoe, it will also cause it to sink due to excess weight. But that doesn't make KALE the best or most likely answer.
I do like your answer, though.
"Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs safe from ordinary standards of evaluation, can only corrupt this fabric, just as a contradiction can corrupt a system of logic, allowing falsehoods to proliferate through it." -- Steven Pinker
“Complexity is a symptom of confusion, not a cause.” - Jeff Hawkins
Montaigne
"The proper, wise balancing of one's whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour."
--Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours Per Day
"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." Henry David Thoreau
Max Planck
Nice way to put it! To phrase it another way:
To argue in favor of mortality because of fears of entrenched conservatives is to demand capital punishment where term limits would suffice.
— Yitz Herstein
— Peter Medawar
Up voted, although I think 'wasted' is a bit harsh. I would call lost time to unsuccessful research a necessary cost. If we all knew exactly which problems to study and which approaches to use it wouldn't be research, it would be divination.
"Today I will question my own confusion."
From Today I Will Nourish My Inner Martyr - Affirmations for Cynics by Ann Thornhill & Sarah Wells
"A man has free choice to the extent that he is rational." -- St. Thomas Aquinas
"Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear." -- Bertrand Russell
"Reality contains not only evidence, but also the means (such as our minds, and our artefacts) of understanding it. There are mathematical symbols in physical reality. The fact that it is we who put them there does not make them any less physical." -- David Deutsch
"If one devalues rationality, the world tends to fall apart" -- Lars von Trier
Montaigne
"they have attained [happiness] by realising that happiness does not spring from the procuring of physical or mental pleasure, but from the development of reason and the adjustment of conduct to principles.
Now, shall I blush, or will you?
Do not fear that I mean to thrust certain principles upon your attention. I care not (in this place) what your principles are. Your principles may induce you to believe in the righteousness of burglary. I don't mind. All I urge is that a life in which conduct does not fairly well accord with principles is a silly life... (read more)
"I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." -- Groucho Marx
History of science is good stuff -- economists should try it some time. Once you start looking it's usually pretty easy to appreciate the wry maxim that scientific advances are usually named for the last person to "discover" them, not the first.
figleaf
I apologize if this is a duplicate, for I cannot find it with the search bar:
Time Enough for Love (1973) or The Notebooks of Lazarus Long (1978), Robert... (read more)
-- Ravel Puzzlewell in Planescape: Torment
Dueling Cryonics Relevant Quotes:
Tecumseh
... (read more)"Fine phrases are the last resource of those who have run out of arguments." -- Peter Singer
Tim Ferriss | The 4 hour body
Tim Ferriss | The 4 hour body
-Nestor
Oriana Fallaci as quoted in Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon, by Craig Nelson, which cites 'Fallici, Oriana If the Sun Dies. New York. Atheneum, 1967', seen on http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/12/11/after-two-days-id-turned-into-an-idiot/
Arthur Schopenhauer
I hate that quote; it's completely backwards and depends entirely on selection effect.
Many ideas accepted as self-evident, both true and false, are first violently opposed. Many ideas violently opposed are first ridiculed. However, most ridiculed ideas stay ridiculed, and most violently opposed ideas stay violently opposed.
Similarly: If you win, before that they probably fought you. If they fight you, before that they probably laughed at you. And if they laugh at you, before that they probably ignored you.
Seth Godin
HPMOR demonstrates:
1) People usually don't recognize faked genius as faked when they see it; they don't realize what's missing from "genius" characters in their fiction.
2) However, if you then show them real genius, they can recognize it as new, different, better, and important (though they may not realize what the added ingredient was).
Surprisingly enough it doesn't.
"I don't think anyone should have to do anything educational in school if they don't want to." -- Cordelia's character, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
"When a man finds a conclusion agreeable, he accepts it without argument, but when he finds it disagreeable, he will bring against it all the forces of logic and reason."
Thucydides
Thank you for a wonderful and rich forum of ideas. Looking fwd. to offering something soon.
"It's not having what you want, it's wanting what you've got" -- Sheryl Crow
George W. Bush (source)
And if you're one of those types of people that are always trying to figure out what region of the multiverse they're in, or how many identical copies of them have been created by an intergalactic superintelligent trickster, or what anthropic reference class they're in, or whether they're living in a computer simulation, or how their choices will impact maybe-logically-impossible counterfactual worlds — you know, one of those people — decision making can be really difficult. ;)
"Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act according with the dictates of reason." - Oscar Wilde
del
"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. " - Oscar Wilde.
Asked by Galileo to look through his telescope at the newly discovered four moons of Jupiter, a representative of the pope answered: "I refuse to look at something which my religion tells me cannot exist." -- newscientist
I think this quotation actually comes not from a real papal representative but from Brecht's play "Galileo".
(Isn't it obvious that this isn't the sort of thing a real person would be likely to say? Especially not the sort of person who would be sent to Galileo by the Pope.)
Shhh! That quote is a soldier for Our Side, don't break it! ;)
The smiley is there as the equivalent of Braille for the joke-blind.
The quote isn't accurate. There was argument over what was being seen through the telescope, not about whether to look through it. Details from a guy who wrote a book on Galileo here.