A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).
- 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 fine, post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
-- Winston Churchill
You want to learn from experience, but you want to learn from other people’s experience when you can.
Warren Buffett
I have met people who exaggerate the differences [between the morality of different cultures], because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of belief about facts. For example, one man said to me, "Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?" But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did-if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did. There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.
-C.S. Lewis
The kind of epistemology that allows you to be that certain about something so false is immoral.
To wit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5cFKpjRnXE&feature=player_embedded
Well, bad enough weather in an agricultural society is murder.
Bad weather, as in 'rain that rots your crops and causes famine', 'wind that takes the roof off your house', 'blizzards that kill your livestock', etc...
I suspect that 300 days of sleet might have an effect, even now.
-- George Bernard Shaw, writer, Nobel laureate (1856-1950)
Edit: The full citation is to his 1903 play Man and superman: a comedy and a philosophy, where the character John Tanner ("M.I.R.C., Member of the Idle Rich Class") says:
-- Sagredo, "Two New Sciences" (1914 translation), Galileo Galilei
Okay, I'm over my quota, but I really have to reproduce this from an ensuing discussion between myself and Michael Vassar, in which Michael Vassar commented that Galileo seemed to have accomplished his feats through character traits other than ultra-high-g:
-- seen on Livejournal
-- Paul Graham
"There is a superstition in avoiding superstition, when men think to do best if they go furthest from the superstition formerly received."
-- Francis Bacon
-- Michael Bishop, Epistemology and the psychology of human judgement
-- Joshua Greene, The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality And What To Do About It
"Thus Aristotle laid it down that a heavy object falls faster than a light one does. The important thing about this idea is not that he was wrong, but that it never occurred to Aristotle to check it." Albert Szent-Györgyi de Nagyrápolt, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
A good point - but also note that, when Galileo argued against Artistotelian physics in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, he set forth instead the idea of the inertial reference frame - but Galileo also never felt the need to perform an experiment to verify that his shipboard "experiments" would work as he predicted. Both the wrong conclusion, and the right conclusion, were arrived at via thought-experiment. And when Einstein took the next step by proposing the special theory of relativity, that too was a thought-experiment with no validation.
"Everything is open to questioning. That does not mean all answers are equally valid."
-- Kelvin Throop
-- Edsger Dijkstra
It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear. —Nicholas Nassim Taleb
(i.e.: don't forget to put, in your utility functions, the damn appropriate weight of those highly-improbable-but-high-negative-impact tragedies!)
Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned. —Avicenna (980–1037 AD)
-- Roger Parloff, senior editor, "More brazen than Madoff?", Fortune, 2009-03-31
—Edsger Dijkstra
Since all things related to akrasia and self motivation are relevant here:
"As a final incentive before giving up a difficult task, try to imagine it successfully accomplished by someone you violently dislike." -K. Zenios
The master mathematician sat in his private room and pushed the papers from him. His calculations were already finished. In a small white phial there still remained a little of the drug that had kept him awake and active for four long nights. Each day, serene, explicit, patient as ever, he had given his lecture to his students, and then had come back at once to this momentous calculation. His face was grave, a little drawn and hectic from his drugged activity. For some time he seemed lost in thought. Then he went to the window, and the blind went up with a click. Half way up the sky, over the clustering roofs, chimneys and steeples of the city, hung the star.
He looked at it as one might look into the eyes of a brave enemy. "You may kill me," he said after a silence. "But I can hold you--and all the universe for that matter--in the grip of this little brain. I would not change. Even now."
-- H.G. Wells, "The Star", 1897
"Experience does not ever err, it is only your judgement that errs in promising itself results which are not caused by your experiments."
Leonardo Da Vinci
--Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf
(M. Aug. Gottlieb Spangenbergs Apologetische Schluß-Schrift (Leipzig and Görlitz, 1752; http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/quotations/quotations_by_ib.html )
Never underestimate the difficulty of changing false beliefs by facts. —Harvard economist Henry Rosovsky
-- Michael Bishop, 50 Years of Successful Predictive Modeling Should Be Enough: Lessons for Philosophy of Science
-- Kyon, The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi
"A theory which cannot be mortally endangered cannot be alive."
W. A. H. Rushton, quoted in J.R. Platt, "Strong Inference", Science vol.146, n.3642, 1964.
Ph.D. comics no.1173
The script:
A grad student in humanities has been called before a hearing to justify his existence.
Student: "It's hard to explain monetarily, but how can you put a price tag on the human soul?"
Student: "The humanities help us appreciate beauty and grow as individuals."
Student: "What good are science and technology if we don't ask ourselves the question, what does it mean to be a human being?"
Chair: "So how's the answer coming along?"
Student: "Oh no, we just ask the question, not actually answer it."
Robert Hamburger, REAL Ultimate Power, The Official Ninja Book
Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you're wrong.
-- Unknown
That's a terrible quote. Being wrong is the best possible outcome of an argument, as it's the one with the highest expected knowledge gain (unless you're a hardcore altruist who doesn't value their own knowledge differently from anyone else's).
You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts. —Daniel Moyniham
Confucius
-- Nassim Taleb
Ian Stewart, Letters to a Young Mathematician
The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. -Oscar Wilde
What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so. —Mark Twain
-Theodore Cheney, Getting the Words Right
There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth…not going all the way, and not starting.
Buddha
"Now I'll never know if I was right."
-- final words of Adric, in Dr. Who, "Earthshock", on realizing that he's about to crash into the Earth
Mathematics is rational, not reasonable.
-- Terry Padden, in "Ultimately, in Physics the Rational shall become Reasonable!"
"I can't see it, so you must be wrong."
my four-year-old
"My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there."
Charles F. Kettering
Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 239–251
-- Aretae
[This is not a quote, but a meta discussion.]
I find it curious that the quotes posted here have higher votes on average than the usual discussion comments, and it makes me think that I have a below-average appreciation for quotations. Why do people value them, I wonder?
-- Hybrid Theory
"Do you really mean to tell me that back in Berlin you've got a plan for war against France and one for war against France and England and one for war against France and England and Russia and one for-"
"Aber naturlich," [But naturally] Schlieffen broke in. "And we think of also Austria-Hungary and Italy, though they are now our friend. And we remember Holland and Belgium and Denmark and Sweden and Turkey and-"
The general-in-chief of the United States stared at him. "Jesus Christ, you do mean it," Rosecrans said slowl... (read more)
"People are not base animals, but people, about 90% animal and 10% something new and different. Religion can be looked on as an act of rebellion by the 90% animal against the 10% new and different (most often within the same person)."
That way of looking at it is attractive but I don't think it is accurate. Most of religion is the outcome of that extra 10% and definitely part of what we identify as 'person'. Rejecting religion, and other equivalent institutions is an act of rebellion of 2% against the other 8%.
-- Matt Arnold
Nullius in verba ~The Royal Society
(approximate, my translation)
-- Esa Lappi, my high school math teacher when showing us the proof of some theorem.
Lies!
Blessed just gives you a +1 to attack while sight gives you 2 AC, half speed, -4 search, automatically failed spot checks and the 50% miss chance on every attack from total concealment!
In fewer words: we can imagine things that cannot exist.
— Peter Medawar
— Edward Teller
And when one goeth through fire for his teaching--what doth that prove? Verily, it is more when one's teaching cometh out of one's own burning!
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist
-Carl von Clausewitz
All that glitters is not gold
Unknown Origin
William Lawrence Bragg
--William James, "The Consciousness of Self", The Principles of Psychology
"Although blinding with science can be used in any argument, many will recognize the special domain of this fallacy as the subjects which like to consider themselves as sciences, but are not.
Science deals with things from atoms to stars at a level where individual differences do not matter. The scientist talks of 'all' rolling bodies or whatever, and formulates general laws to test by experiment.
The trouble with human beings is that, unlike rolling bodies, the individual differences do matter. Often, again unlike rolling bodies, they want to do differ... (read more)