This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.
- 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
From Thomas Macaulay's 1848 History of England.
.................................
... (read more)The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.
-- Douglas Adams
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (trans. Norman Kemp Smith), p. A5/B8.
-- Bertrand Russell
I was worried by my own conclusion, so I built a mathematical model to check it*:
Suppose that there is an urn with 100 balls. You're 99% sure that there are 99 white balls and 1 black, but there's a 1% chance that there are 99 black balls and 1 white.
You're about to be scored on the probability you assign to the correct state of the urn, using a logarithmic scoring method, but before that happens your friend takes a ball from the urn, looks at it, and puts it back. Your friend then tells you what colour it was.
Your prior that your friend would lie is 10%.
Suppose you are given the chance to check the colour of the ball your friend drew. How much are you willing to pay for this knowledge? Will you pay more or less if your friend said that the ball was black?
By my calculations** the expected utility
if your friend said "white", and you don't check is -0.013581774
if your friend said "white", and you check is -0.0037359
if your friend said "black", and you don't check is -0.391529169
if your friend said "black", and you check is -0.155101993
So your you will pay 0.0098 to check if your friend said "white" but 0.2364 if they said "black... (read more)
Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.
I agree. But, as a slight tangent, I think that after we've dealt with basic problems of rationality - that cause much confusion when poetic language is mixed with science - there is still the fact that science has undeniable aesthetic and emotional effects on people familiar with it. Those things are part of the fun, apart from doing science strictly in order to win, which may have gave Eliezer the idea of weirdtopia with secretive science. Also, I think that being artistically refined and poignant about science differs greatly from plain mysticism. The latter is often a vacuous and cheap trick to invoke a warm fuzzy feeling. The real feat would be to be artistic with the purpose of making people feel emotions that fit the facts.
Are you implying that Jesus' crucifixion was an example of suicide via cop?
(In a thread where people were asked whether or not they had a religious experience of "feeling God"):
-- Axiomatic
Read the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence and the Twelve Virtues (especially that of Curiosity). We can't be "connected in that mystery" because the feeling of mysteriousness is a type of ignorance, and ignorance of some phenomenon is a fact about our minds, not about the phenomenon. When something seems mysterious to us, the proper thing to do is to think about how to solve it, not to worship our ignorance.
If God means all that, then you've just changed the definition so much that there's no point in ca... (read more)
-- Carl Sagan
--Samuel Johnson
Is Samuel Johnson's quote a valid or true statement? I understand your central thrust--the inability to do something personally (such as control one's sexual urges) and the disposition to encourage others to overcome that inability are not necessarily contradictory--indeed, they may fall together naturally.
However, in Samuel Johnson's world, and the world in which this "issue" comes up the most, politics, we might imagine that there exist two types of people: sociopathic individuals hungry for power, and individuals who are sincere.
If sociopathic individuals hungry for power are more often hypocrites, then we might, as an efficient rule of thumb (not being able to distinguish the two save through their observable actions!) condemn hypocrites because they are likely to be power-hungry individuals.
As a bayesian update, in the world of politics, we expect that hypocrites are more likely to be power hungry or sociopathic. I see Samuel Johnson's quote as potentially true, but ignoring a world of imperfect information and signaling.
-Voltaire
(The phrase was written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall as a summary of Voltaire's attitude toward free speech. Since then, people started attributing it to Voltaire himself, and the myth has spread far and wide, as nobody really checks to see if he actually said that. Hearing something somewhere is plenty of evidence for most people, most of the time, and the conviction gets more solid over time. Which brings me to my second rationality quote, from Winston Churchill: "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.")
-- John Rambo, Rambo: First Blood Part II
Discussion of how not to get lost in the woods
Only slightly less interesting in the same comment:
This matter of case studies is intensely valuable.
-- John Stuart Mill
-- Alfred North Whitehead
-Richard A. Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response, p. 13
-- Hippocrates, On the sacred disease (ca. 4th century BCE).
[ In this and other of his writings, Hippocrates shows such an incredible early sense for rationality and against superstition that was only rarely seen in the next 2000 after that -- and in addition, he was not just a armchair philosopher, he actually put these things is practice. So, hats off for Hippocrates, even when his medicine was not without faults of course...]
Edit: DUPLICATE
Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light. (h/t zhurnaly)
-Vorpal
-- Scott Atran
-- Ollie, The Mist, 2007
"History is like the weather. Themes do repeat themselves, but never in the same way. And analogies became rhetorical flourishes and sad ex post facto justifications rather than explanations. In the end, they explain nothing."
-Errol Morris
Here is what he said prior to making the statement I quoted (to give you some context):
Take historical analogies. I believe that historical analogies are always wrong. This a long discussion, but, to me, the most dangerous thing about Chamberlain’s capitulation to Hitler at Munich is not the fact that Munich happened and it led to further Nazi aggression and so on and so forth, but that the example of Munich has been used to support thousands upon thousands of bad policies and inappropriate decisions. LeMay called JFK’s recommendation for a “quarantine” (that is, a blockade) in the Cuban Missile Crisis “worse than Munich”. Would nuclear war have been a better alternative? But nuclear war was averted by Kennedy’s policies. And thirty years later the Soviet Union collapsed without the need for nuclear war. Was LeMay right? I don’t think so. But again, the example of Munich was invoked to justify the invasion of Iraq. Appeasing Saddam, appeasing Hitler. The use of the Munich analogy does not clarify, it obscures.
Aldous Huxley
"This is the first test of a gentleman: his respect for those who can be of no possible value to him."
-- William Lyon Phelps
P.D. Ouspensky, "In Search of the Miraculous", ch.17
-- Michael Bishop(50 Years of Successful Predictive Modeling Should Be Enough: Lessons for Philosophy of Science).
--Review of The Art of Choosing, by Sheena Iyengar
-- Stephen J. Gould
Q: How much does the smoke weight?
A: Subtract from the weight of the wood that was burned the weight of the ashes that remain, and you will have the weight of the smoke.
--Immanuel Kant
I recall being taught them (as in, the teacher said "these are the 4 elements: earth, fire, wind, and water" and had us each make a full page drawing to plaster on the wall; no mention that it was an antiquated Greek model or anything) in kindergarten and/or elementary school in Peru. Aether was also mentioned as the 5th element, but it was handwaved as being too advanced for us or something. Frankly, I don't think they had any idea what the hell they were talking about; somebody just told them that those were the elements and they passed it on.
Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.
-Thomas Carlyle
"71-hour Ahmed was not superstitious. He was substitious, which put him in a minority among humans. He didn’t believe in the things everyone believed in but which nevertheless weren’t true. He believed instead in the things that were true in which no one else believed. There are many such substitions, ranging from ‘It’ll get better if you don’t pick at it’ all the way up to ‘Sometimes things just happen."--Terry Pratchett, Jingo
"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Albert Einstein
This relates well to my earlier frustration about the cop-out of vaguely appealing to life experience in an argument, without actually explaining anything.
Right on. I'm thinking about writing an "explain yourself" series that shows how you can overcome the supposed barriers to explaining your position if there's actual substance to it to begin with.
ETA: 5 upvotes so far -- sounds like a vote of confidence for such an article.
ETA2: Message heard loud and clear! I'm working on an article for submission, which may expand into a series.
Does the length of his sequences imply that Eliezer doesn't understand their subject matter, or that the universe is sometimes actually complicated?
Maybe this detracts from my previous agreement with the quote, but there's a difference between explaining in person, vs. explaining in writing for a general audience. With the former, you can get immediate feedback as to which parts you're not explaining well and appropriately redirect your focus, while in the latter you have to cover all the possible confusions.
This phenomenon was revealed most starkly in one of the articles in the quantum physics sequences, when I replied to the article by saying,
And Eliezer Yudkowsky said in response:
The fact that something can be explained simply doesn't deny the problem of inferential distance, in my view; it just means that each step is simple, not that there won't be many steps depending on how much of the listener's knowledge you can build on.
-- Imre Lakatos, "What Does a Mathematical Proof Prove?"
ETA: When I first read this remark, I couldn't decide whether it was terrifying, or just a very abstract specification of a deep technical problem. I currently think it's both of those things.
--Eliot Z. Cohen, The Four Emotions of Tai Chi, The Ultimate Guide to Tai Chi.
-- Sam Harris (emphasis in original)
The first person to come to mind for me was Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege who is famous for basically inventing symbolic logic (specifically, predicate logic with quantified variables). He spent an enormous amount of time working on the thesis that the results of mathematics flow rather directly from little more than the rules of logic plus set theory. He aimed to provide a constructive proof of this thesis.
Bertrand Russell discovered a logical flaw (now called Russell's paradox) in Frege's first book containing the constructive proof when the second book in his series was already in press and communicated it to Frege. Russell wrote of Frege's reaction in a bit of text I recall reading in a textbook on symbolic logic but found duplicated in this document with more details from which I quote:
... (read more)And Rumours of War, time-travel story on the Ynglinga Saga blog.
-L. A. Rollins, Lucifer's Lexicon
We live in an age of uncertainty, complexity, and paranoia. Uncertainty because, for the past few centuries, there has simply been far too much knowledge out there for any one human being to get their brains around; we are all ignorant, if you dig far enough. Complexity multiplies because our areas of ignorance and our blind spots intersect in unpredictable ways - the most benign projects have unforseen side effects. And paranoia is the emergent spawn of those side effects; the world is not as it seems, and indeed we may never be able to comprehend the world-as-it-is, without the comforting filter lenses of our preconceptions and our mass media.
-- Charles Stross (Afterword: Inside the Fear Factory)
--Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-Of-Control (1989), Langdon Winner
Two comments:
1) Magic: the Gathering strategy was developed and refined almost entirely through the Internet. If you want to be a competitive Magic player, you need the Internet.
2) If you need narrow advice - "how to fix a broken faucet" is pretty narrow - than the Internet works pretty well. If you want to learn to be a plumber, yeah, the Internet kinda sucks, but if you have relatively limited needs, it works.
-- Bruce Lee
---Portal (emph. mine)
Relevance: rationalists should win, importance of saying "Oops"
"Jews don't read books: We study them." (Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf)
Jane Jacobs
No problem can stand the assault of sustained thinking.
--Voltaire
Alas, rigorous truth is the constant enemy of the aphorism.
This reminds me of something I read in C.S. Lewis which is quite rational: the purpose of curiosity is finding answers. It's not dithering for the sake of dithering, or debate for the sake of debate. The goal is to find out what the right answer is, as accurately as possible, not to eternally keep all the options open. That's how I understand the quote.
Of course, real curiosity can look like dithering and endless debate because people are being very careful not to get things wrong.
-- Mark Twain
I got nothing from my tracking system until I used it as a source of critical perspective, not on my performance but on my assumptions about what was important to track.
-- Gary Wolf
Stephen Jay Gould
"I don't believe important statements just because someone makes them. Even if I make them."
-- William T. Powers
"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise"
-- Michael Bishop(50 Years of Successful Predictive Modeling Should Be Enough: Lessons for Philosophy of Science).
-- Allan Cromer
Niels Henrik David Bohr (1885-1962)
"A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life."
-Baruch Spinoza
"He remembered the pride filled glow that had swamped Gyoko's face and he wondered again at the bewildering gullibility of people. How baffling it was that even the most cunning and clever people would frequently see only what they wanted to see, and would rarely look beyond the thinnest of facades. Or they would ignore reality, dismissing it as the facade. And then, when their whole world fell to pieces and they were on their knees slitting their bellies or cutting their throats, or cast out into the freezing world, they would tear their topknots or rend their clothes and bewail their karma, blaming gods or kami or luck or their lords or husbands or vassals—anything or anyone—but never themselves."
-Shogun
-- John Dewey
Ultimately, a carefully-maintained lack of self awareness is the only bulwark standing between any of us and the depths of madness.
-- Kwi Jung
"The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world. And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others."
-- William Lyon Phelps
"He who dies with the most toys is nonetheless dead." --anonymous
Unless one of the toys in question is a cryostat. Then there's still hope.
"Society begins to appear much less unreasonable when one realizes its true function. It is there to help everyone to keep their minds off reality." Celia Green, The Human Evasion.
http://deoxy.org/evasion/4.htm
-- Edsger Dijkstra
--Bertrand Russell
H.L. Mencken, Minority Report.
-- André Gide
Errol Morris
(Clearly this isn't an actual definition, but it works pretty well if you reframe it as evidence rather than as a necessary or sufficient condition.)
.
Árni Magnússon
Truth is context dependent. It happens that there are some contexts we all share.
-- Kwi Jung
--Charles Darwin, "The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals", ch.3.
--Freeman Dyson
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.
Samuel Florman