It is the beginning of a new year, and time for the beginning of a new 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.
— George R. R. Martin, Rolling Stone interview (emphasis mine)
Although the main point of this quote is valid (that sound policies rather than great men are the cause of good government), criticizing Lord of the Rings for having a “medieval philosophy” is a bit silly – it is like criticizing Johnny Cash for sounding “kind of country”. More so than an author of fiction, Tolkien was a scholar who focused much of his effort on studying medieval literature and translating that literature into modern English. Medieval literature was an inspiration and a major influence on his fiction. Of course the Lord of the Rings has a medieval philosophy; it was intended to have a medieval philosophy.
Does the intent matter? Intended or not, Lord of the Rings has come to occupy a certain cultural position; surely it's right to ask whether it's fit for it, even if that position is not the one the original author intended?
I have seen escalators sufficiently out-of-order that they were completely non-traversable.
One or more steps completely missing. Or, more commonly, the escalator blocked off because some repairmen are working on it.
Nassim Taleb, Twitter
It's not just information age, but also freedom of speech. Many people in regimes without free speech sincerely believe that there is no crime (except by people corrupted by other countries), no drug abuse, etc., simply because they can never read about it in the newspapers. So when the regime later changes, they will believe that things got worse, because now they can read about all the bad stuff (and of course some politicians will use this bias to say "this wasn't happening before when we had the power, so... vote for us again").
-Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary
"Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect." -- Salman Rushdie
-- Elon Musk
Ozymandias
That's not literally true. It's just booing irrational people. Which is appropriate for Ozy on zher own blog, but not for this thread of useful quotes.
-Henri Poincare, Science and Hypothesis
Ralph Waldo Emerson on If You Demand Magic, Magic Won't Help
And yet, I also have packed my backpack, embarked in the air, and woken up in Rome, and unlike Emerson have indeed been intoxicated in contemplation of the things that were. And as in Rome, so also in Florence, and Prague, and London, and the cave monasteries of Turkey, and the Alhambra, and the temples of Japan, and other places also.
In other words, YMMV.
Nicholas Francis
Le Corbusier, Campden Technical Manual 17[3].
-- Edgar Dijkstra, The Fruits of Misunderstanding
I know who Dijkstra was, respect him greatly, and agree with most of that article, and indeed, most of everything he wrote. But this is something I disagree about. He would (here) have us speak of a computer's "store" instead of its "memory", and there were various other substitutions that he would have us do. All that that would achieve would be to develop a parallel vocabulary, one for computing machines and one for thinking beings, and an injunction to always use the right vocabulary for the right context.
What it is for a human being to try things, want things, believe things, know things, etc. is different from what it is for a program to do these things. But they also have an amount of commonality that makes insisting on separate vocabulary an unproductive ritual.
So when, for example, a compiler complains to me (must I say "issues an error message"?) that it couldn't find a file, I want it to give me the answers to questions such as "why did you look for that file?" (i.e. show me the place where you were instructed to access it), "what were you looking for?" (i.e. show me the file name exactly as you received it), "where d... (read more)
A computer is a mathematical machine, mathematics made physical. It is built of logic gates, devices which compute certain outputs as mathematical functions of their inputs. This is what they are designed to be, and in comparison with all the other physical devices mankind has contrived, they operate with phenomenal reliability.
Mathematics operates with absolute certainty. (Anyone quoting Eliezer's password is invited to go away and not come back until they've devised a new foundation for probability theory in which P(A|A) < 1.) Physical realisations can fall short. But an ordinary desktop computer can operate for weeks at a time without any hardware glitches. If you multiply the number of gates by the clock speed by the duration, that comes to somewhere in the region of 10 to the 24th operations -- approximately Avogadro's number -- every one of which worked as designed. When your program goes wrong, hardware error isn't the way to bet.
If the basic semiconductor gate were not so reliable, if each gate failed "only" one in a million times, you would be having millions of errors every second and computing on the scale of today would hardly be possible. This is one reas... (read more)
Gary Brecher, The War Nerd
Greg Cochran
Not for the first time, someone on LW links a West Hunter page that isn't content to make a reasonable point, but has to exaggerate that point and present it with sneering.
Cochran's post is short, but to make it even shorter:
It's true that Marshall's claim about WWII soldiers isn't trustworthy. (I haven't spent enough time with the literature to go further and confirm the claim's made-up bullshit vapour. But it wouldn't surprise me.) Unfortunately Cochran has to have his cherry on top; he writes off not only Marshall but t... (read more)
If you read through the comments in the linked article (which of course you were under no obligation to do before commenting here) you see that Cochran's main point was that it's silly to think that soldiers avoid killing because they have some basic aversion to doing so, although Cochran agrees that fear might cause them to not put themselves in a position where they can shoot.
You find this claim all over the place; the problem with it is that comrade "S.L.A.M" is not "one of the originals", he is the sole and only source for the claim - and he made it up. A cursory Wiki search shows:
My emphasis.
Ok. So on the one hand we've got a single book, later shown to have been an invention, but taken up by a huge number of people so it looks like a consensus, in the best Dark-Arts, "you have to be smart to know this", counterintuitive-Deep-Wisdom style. And on the other hand we have a huge amount of dead people, mysteriously killed by bullets that, somehow, got fired in spite of the noted reluctance of men to do so. I propose that your accola... (read more)
Let's not overstate your case, shall we? No 'somehow' about it, even if 90% of soldiers didn't want to shoot, the remaining 10% could kill a hell of a lot of people; that is the point of guns and explosives, after all - they make killing people quick and easy compared to nagging them to death.
(Where is the precise model relating known mortality rates to number of soldiers shooting, such that Marshall's claims could have been rejected on their face solely because they conflicted with mortality rates? There is none. The majority of soldiers survive wars, after all.)
-- Denys L. Page (1908-1978), History and the Homeric Iliad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 57
"Rationality isn't on anyone's side, but it's not neutral either." - Kevin Graham
Homer Simpson, on relativity of happiness: "When something great happens to one person, everyone else's life gets a little worse."
Source: http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=the-simpsons&episode=s26e08
Peter Watts, Echopraxia, on altruism. Well ok, I admit, not on altruism per se.
I don't try to intimidate anybody before a fight. That's nonsense. I intimidate people by hitting them.
-Mike Tyson
Alternatively, he says that he doesn't need to signal his confidence... and thereby signals confidence.
.
I always liked Fitzgerald's portrayal of what Something to Protect feels like.
Happy New Year's resolutions, all.
From the finale of Cosi Fan Tutte, by W. A. Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte
I guess that's partly what we're here for, right?
Emerson
Cameron Diaz and Javier Bardem in The Counselor