(Last month's started a little late, I thought I'd bring it back to its original schedule.)
A monthly thread for posting any interesting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently on the Internet, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages.
- Please post all quotes separately (so that they can be voted up (or down) separately) unless they are strongly related/ordered.
- Do not quote yourself (or your sockpuppets).
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB - if we do this, there should be a separate thread for it.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
John Holt, Freedom and Beyond, p. 119
See also this comment by Z_M_Davis.
-- John C. Wright, Fugitives of Chaos
-- Princess Waltz
Commentary: What's odd is not how many people think they contain other people. What's odd is how many of those people think the other person is the real one.
John Holt, How Children Fail, p. 101
See also Paul Lockhart.
-- Mark Thompson
-- Voltaire
"Experiment and theory often show remarkable agreement when performed in the same laboratory."
-- Daniel Bershader
-from Net of Magic, by Lee Siegel
The Mathemagician nodded knowingly and stroked his chin several times. "You'll find," he remarked gently, "that the only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that's hardly worth the effort."
-- Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
-- Alphadominance
It's pretty depressing. Not too long ago, someone I know expressed the belief that red is more likely to come up on a roulette table if the last five spins landed on black. He holds a graduate degree in computer science.
-- Edsger Dijkstra
Edit: Added context to "rabbits" in brackets.
"Philosophy triumphs easily over past and future evils; but present evils triumph over it."
-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
-- Terry Pratchett, 'Hogfather'
-- pg
-- Edward de Bono
-- David Stove, What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts
--Abba Lerner
"I am about to discuss the disease called 'sacred'. It is not, in my opinion, any more divine or more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause, and its supposed divine orgin is due to men's inexperience, and to their wonder at its peculiar character"
--Hippocractic treatise on epilepsy
---John Holt, What Do I Do Monday?
-- Samuel Johnson
-- Albert Einstein
If they are false they are small violations of truth and thus inconsequential.
By Ta Nehisi Coates
---John Holt, What Do I Do Monday?
Compare "Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom"
When I first saw this, I had a negative gut reaction. The second sentence especially bothered me. Over time, I've come to like it more. I'm now at the point of wanting to follow it but usually failing to do so.
Discussions here on akrasia seem to focus on procrastination, but this is my own very close number two.
"On the contrary, it's because someone knows something about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance... so it's the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about! "
-- Richard Feynman
"I’m moved to laughter at the thought of how presumptuous it would be to reject mathematics for philosophical reasons. How would you like the job of telling the mathematicians that they must change their ways…now that philosophy has discovered that there are no classes? Can you tell them, with a straight face, to follow philosophical argument wherever it leads? If they challenge your credentials, will you boast of philosophy’s other great discoveries: that motion is impossible, that a Being than which no greater can be conceived cannot be conceived no... (read more)
John Von Neumann
"To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods."
-- Robert A. Heinlein (to be precise, his character Lazarus Long, but I don't think there's much difference)
-- E.T. Jaynes, summarizing all of Eliezer's posts
-- Homer Simpson
"The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice that failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds."
-- R.D. Laing, Knots
-- Edward de Bono
-- Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, 'Good Omens'
I view it as the opposite. It seems to suggest figuring out what people are rather than throwing up our hands and calling them good/evil/crazy/etc. Kind of like this. YMMV.
-Fry of the show Futurama perceives the future well
At the other end of the spectrum are the opponents of reductionism who are appalled by what they feel to be the bleakness of modern science. To whatever extent they and their world can be reduced to a matter of particles or fields and their interactions, they feel diminished by that knowledge....I would not try to answer these critics with a pep talk about the beauties of modern science. The reductionist worldview is chilling and impersonal. It has to be accepted as it is, not because we like it, but because that is the way the world works.
--Steven Weinberg
I thought about med school again, the anatomy class I had told Jason about. Candice Boone, my one-time almost-fiancée, had shared that class with me. She had been stoic during the dissection but not afterward. A human body, she said, ought to contain love, hate, courage, cowardice, soul, spirit ... not this slimy assortment of blue and red imponderables. Yes. And we ought not to be dragged unwilling into a harsh and deadly future.
But the world is what it is and won't be bargained with. I said as much to Candice.
She told me I was "cold". But it was still the closest thing to wisdom I had ever been able to muster.
William James
Sagredo: [I]n my opinion nothing occurs contrary to nature except the impossible, and that never occurs. - "Two New Sciences" (1914 translation), Galileo Galilei
"The reader in search of knock-down arguments in favor of my theories will go away disappointed. Whether or not it would be nice to knock disagreeing philosophers down by sheer force of argument, it cannot be done. Philosophical theories are never refuted conclusively. (or hardly ever. Gödel and Gettier may have done it.) The theory survives its refutation - at a price. Perhaps that is something we can settle more or less conclusively. But when all is said and done, and all the tricky arguments and distinctions and counterexamples have been discovered... (read more)
Tamnor Sommers — Distributed Cognition and the Will: Individual Volition and Social Context, “The Illusion of Freedom Evolves”, p. 62, MIT Press, 2007
– Peter Shotwell, Go: More than a game
-- Raymond Smullyan
Surely, to label a statement "vague" is a higher order of insult than to call it "wrong". Newton was wrong but at least he was not vague.
--Aristotle
Many of the arguments on LW remind me of this quote:
"for the obscurity of the distinctions and of the principles that they use is the reason why they talk about everything as confidently as if they knew about it, and defend everything they say about it against the most subtle and knowledgeable, without leaving any room to convince them of their mistake. In doing this they seem to me to resemble a blind person who, in order to fight without any disadvantage against a sighted person, would bring them into the depths of a very dark celar."
-Rene Descartes from the Discourse on Method
-- Amy Hempel, 'Tumble Home'
-- yosefk
Abraham Maslow
For many years I had a slight variant of this in my sig: "When the only tool you have is a hammer, all your problems start to look like nails"
One request I must make of my reader, which is, that in judging these poems he would decide by his own feelings genuinely, and not by reflection upon what will probably be the judgment of others. How common is it to hear a person say, I myself do not object to this style of composition, or this or that expression, but to such and such classes of people it will appear mean or ludicrous! This mode of criticism, so destructive of all sound unadulterated judgment, is almost universal: let the reader then abide, independently, by his own feelings, and, if he ... (read more)
Seems apropos to recent posts on honesty, as well.
--Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.
-- Samuel Johnson
-- Edsger Dijkstra
Brian Clevinger, 8-Bit Theater
-- Scott Adams, Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook
James Lee Stanley
(My interpretation: remember that our various seemingly nonsensical personality tics can mask other, more addressable concerns.)
-- Peter Watts, 'Ambassador'
~ Bertrand Ruessell
-- A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge
“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it” --I tried to find where I read it, but unsucessfully
EDIT: Googled, it's by Kurt Vonnegut
Chapterhouse Dune, Frank Herbert
-- Charles Eames
Peter Medawar — Pluto’s Republic, “Hypothesis and Imagination”, p. 117
WikiHow, "How to Avoid Cults That May Try to Convert You"
"Of Truth in Things False", Proverbial Philosophy, Martin Farquhar Tupper
-- Jonathan Schaffer, 'Is There a Fundamental Level?'
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house."
-- Robert Heinlein (as Lazarus Long)
ETA: If I could downvote my own postings, I'd downvote this one. I won't delete it, to leave the context for loqi's response.
Dammit, I've read Distress and I know without looking exactly the context of the Egan quote. I was practically cheering for Rourke in that chapter. But there's a big gap between encountering an idea and finding it good, and actually applying it after closing the book.
— Greg Egan (as James Rourke), Distress
John Holt, Never Too Late
-- Cervantes