Another monthly installment of the rationality quotes thread. The usual rules apply:
- 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments or posts from Less Wrong itself or from Overcoming Bias.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Randall Munroe, on updating on other people's beliefs.
Dilbert dunnit first!
(Seeing that strip again reminds me of an explanation for why teenagers in the US tend to take more risks than adults. It's not because the teenagers irrationally underestimate risks but because they see bigger benefits to taking risks.)
Let me just put the text string ‘xkcd’ in here, because I was going to add this if nobody else had, and it's lucky that I found it first.
Oh, and there's more text in the comic than what's quoted, and it's good too, so read the comic everybody!
-- Milton Friedman
-- Bertold Brecht
(I'm always amused when people of opposite political views express similar thoughts on society.)
Also:
Devine and Cohen, Absolute Zero Gravity, p. 96.
The story appears to be apocryphal. I've heard many versions of it associated with various famous scientists. The source quoted is a collection of jokes, with very low veracity. Additionally, there are no independent versions of the story anywhere on Google. By the way, the quoted date of Sommerfeld's death is also incorrect. I wonder if there even were (unpowered) ceiling fans in Munich's trolleys during that time.
Men in Black on guessing the teacher's password:
Zed: You're all here because you are the best of the best. Marines, air force, navy SEALs, army rangers, NYPD. And we're looking for one of you. Just one.
[...]
Edwards: Maybe you already answered this, but, why exactly are we here?
Zed: [noticing a recruit raising his hand] Son?
Jenson: Second Lieutenant, Jake Jenson. West Point. Graduate with honors. We're here because you are looking for the best of the best of the best, sir! [throws Edwards a contemptible glance]
[Edwards laughs]
Zed: What's so funny, Edwards?
Edwards: Boy, Captain America over here! "The best of the best of the best, sir!" "With honors." Yeah, he's just really excited and he has no clue why we're here. That's just, that's very funny to me.
—Yagyū Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword
-Joel Spolsky
-- Steve Jobs
(The Organization Formerly Known as SIAI had this problem until relatively recently. Eliezer worked, but he never published anything.)
Most people, when giving advice, don't optimize for maximal usefulness. They optimize for something like maximal apparent-insight or maximal signaling-wisdom or maximal mind-blowing, which are a priori all very different goals. So you shouldn't expect that incredibly useful advice sounds like incredibly insightful, wise, or mind-blowing advice in general. There's probably a lot of incredibly useful advice that no one gives because it sounds too obvious and you don't get to look cool by giving it. One such piece of advice I received recently was "plan things."
Faramir, from Lord of the Rings on lost purposes and the thing that he protects
From a participant at the January CFAR workshop. I don't remember who. This struck me as an excellent description of what rationalists seek.
People often seem to get these mixed up, resulting in "You want useful beliefs and accurate emotions."
Not sure what an "accurate emotion" would mean, feel like some sort of domain error. (e.g. a blue sound.)
An accurate emotion = "I'm angry because I should be angry because she is being really, really mean to me."
A useful emotion = "Showing empathy towards someone being mean to me will minimize the cost to me of others' hostility."
Why not both useful beliefs and useful emotions?
Why privilege beliefs?
This is addressed by several Sequence posts, e.g. Why truth? And..., Dark Side Epistemology, and Focus Your Uncertainty.
Beliefs shoulder the burden of having to reflect the territory, while emotions don't. (Although many people seem to have beliefs that could be secretly encoding heuristics that, if they thought about it, they could just be executing anyway, e.g. believing that people are nice could be secretly encoding a heuristic to be nice to people, which you could just do anyway. This is one kind of not-really-anticipation-controlling belief that doesn't seem to be addressed by the Sequences.)
-- Geoff Anders (paraphrased)
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—Mike Sinnett, Boeing's 787 chief project engineer
-- Noah Brand
I'd prefer if this quote ended with " ... and then I got done weeping and started working on my shoe budget," but oh wells.
"...And then I remembered status is positional, felt superior to the footless man, and stopped weeping."
Shoes aren't just about positional social status, are they? (I mean, the difference between a $20 pair of shoes and a $300 pair of shoes mostly is, but the difference between a $20 pair of shoes and no shoes at all isn't, is it?)
That may be, but the actual context of the quote it's arguing with is quite different, on a couple of fronts.
Harold Abbott, the author of the original 1934 couplet ("I had the blues because I had no shoes / Until upon the street, I met a man who had no feet"), wrote it to memorialize an encounter with a happy legless man, at a time when Abbott was dead broke and depressed. (Abbott was not actually lacking in shoes, nor the man only lacking in feet, but apparently in those days people took their couplet-writing seriously. ;-) )
Thing is, at the time he encountered the legless man (who smiled and said good morning), Abbott was actually walking to the bank in order to borrow money to go to Kansas City to look for a job. And not only did he not stop walking to the bank after the encounter, he decided to ask for twice as much money as he had originally intended to borrow. He had in fact raised his sights, rather than lowering them.
That is, the full story is not anything like, "other people ... (read more)
On scientists trying to photograph an atom's shadow:
Luke McKinney - 6 Microscopic Images That Will Blow Your Mind
Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics' review of The Core
The remark included the following as a footnote:
... I had not known about red buttons on SMBC.
roll d20... success on 'resist re-binge' check.
--Tom Chivers
I agree subject to the specification that each such observation must look substantially more like the absence of a duck then a duck. There are many things we see which are not ducks in particular locations. My shoe doesn't look like a duck in my closet, but it also doesn't look like the absence of a duck in my closet. Or to put it another way, my sock looks exactly like it should look if there's no duck in my closet, but it also looks exactly like it should look if there is a duck in my closet.
This is completely wrong, though not many people seem to understand that yet.
For example, the voltage across a capacitor is uncorrelated with the current through it; and another poster has pointed out the example of the thermostat, a topic I've also written about on occasion.
It's a fundamental principle of causal inference that you cannot get causal conclusions from wholly acausal premises and data. (See Judea Pearl, passim.) This applies just as much to negative conclusions as positive. Absence of correlation cannot on its own be taken as evidence of absence of causation.
Yes, this is completely wrong. There is frequently no correlation but strong causation due to effect cancellation (homeostasis, etc.)
Here's a recent paper making this point in the context of mediation analysis in social science (I could post many more):
http://www.quantpsy.org/pubs/rucker_preacher_tormala_petty_2011.pdf
Nancy, I don't mean to jump on you specifically here, but this does seem to me to be a special instance of a general online forum disease, where people {prefer to use | view as authoritative} online sources of information (blogs, wikipedia, even tvtropes, etc.) vs mainstream sources (books, academic papers, professionals). Vinge calls it "the net of a million lies" for a reason!
I've just come across a fascinatingly compact observation by I. J. Good:
This is a beautifully simple recipe for a conflict of interest:
Considering absolute losses assuming failure and absolute gains ... (read more)
Which is not nearly as common as the reverse, the Reckless Adviser Formula, when the personal loss to the adviser is so low and the potential personal gain is so high, they recommend adoption even when the expected gain for the company is negative.
-- John C Wright
That reminds me of http://xkcd.com/690/.
Also:
-- Raymond Arritt
(Quoting this before dinner is making me hungry.)
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Nah, this doesn't require any magic; just code reuse or the equivalent. If the cognitive mechanisms that we use to simulate other people are similar enough to those we use to run our own minds, it seems logical that those simulations, once rich and coherent enough, could acquire some characteristics of our minds that we normally think of as privileged. It follows that they could then diverge from their prototypes if there's not some fairly sophisticated error correction built in.
This seems plausible to me because evolution's usually a pretty parsimonious process; I wouldn't expect it to develop an independent mechanism for representing other minds when it's got a perfectly good mechanism for representing the self. Or vice versa; with the mirror test in mind it's plausible that self-image is a consequence of sufficiently good other-modeling, not the other way around.
Of course, I don't have anything I'd consider strong evidence for this -- hence the lowish p-value.
--Sam Harris
You put them into a social enviroment where the high status people value logic and evidence. You give them the plausible promise that they can increase their status in that enviroment by increasing the amount that they value logic and evidence.
This reminds me of
which I believe is a paraphrasing of something Jonathan Swift said, but I'm not sure. Anyone have the original?
I don't think this is empirically true, though. Suppose I believe strongly that violent crime rates are soaring in my country (Canada), largely because I hear people talking about "crime being on the rise" all the time, and because I hear about murders on the news. I did not reason myself into this position, in other words.
Then you show me some statistics, and I change my mind.
In general, I think a supermajority of our starting opinions (priors, essentially) are held for reasons that would not pass muster as 'rational,' even if we were being generous with that word. This is partly because we have to internalize a lot of things in our youth and we can't afford to vet everything our parents/friends/culture say to us. But the epistemic justification for the starting opinions may be terrible, and yet that doesn't mean we're incapable of having our minds changed.
If you can't appeal to reason to make reason appealing, you appeal to emotion and authority to make reason appealing.
I have some friends who do... At least insofar as things like "I don't have to worry about finances because God is watching over me, so I won't bother trying to keep a balanced budget." Then again, being financially irresponsible (a behaviour I find extremely hard to understand and sympathize with) seems to be common-ish, and not just among people who think God will take care of their problems.
They beat you up. People who haven't specialized in logic and evidence have not therefore been idle.
I think you just independently invented the holy war.
I think the spirit of the quote is that instead of counting on anyone to be a both benevolent and effective ruler, or counting on voters to recognize such things, design the political environment so that that will happen naturally, even when an office is occupied by a corrupt or ineffective person.
From this recent talk
I cannot express how true this is, at least not without a lot of swear words.
Aubrey de Grey being an immortalist himself, I'm assuming the irony to be unintentional?
The only one I've heard of is "fiction." Did you have an example in mind?
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The first response that comes to my mind is "because if the butterfly were trying that hard to escape the kid, it would fly above the kid's reach, and the kid would give up." When I look at the scene, I see a kid chasing a butterfly, and a butterfly too stupid to realize it should flee instead of simply dodging.
Animals on the intelligence levels of butterflies (which, keep in mind, have specific mating flight patterns they use to tell other members of their species apart from things like ribbons and stray flower petals,) don't seem to even have retreat instincts, just avoidance instincts. They can't recognize persistent pursuit. A fly won't hesitate to land on a person who has been trying to swat it for minutes on end.
Three things, in no particular order:
I seem to recall that, in some obscure language, each noun has an agency level and in a sentence the most agenty noun is the subject by default, unless the verb is specially inflected to show otherwise: for example, “[dog] [bite] [man]” would mean ‘a man bit a dog’, regardless of word order, because the noun “[man]” has higher agency than “[dog]”.
Would you sooner see a tiger chasing a man, or a man running away from a tiger? If the former, it's not just the fact that butterflies are not human, it's the fact that the butterflies are small.
I think that, at least in the case of the lion, it would also depend on whether the two of them are moving towards the left side or the right side of my visual field. I heard that in _The Great Wave off Kanagawa_ the boats are intended to look more agenty than the wave, but for Western people it will typically look like the other way round (due to Western languages being written from left to right), and for a Westerner to get the right effect they'd have to look at the picture in a mirror. (It works for me, at least.)
Is this visual field orientation issue really Western vs Eastern? If so, has it evaporated lately?
One of the media that most lends itself to testing this notion is video games, since there is almost always an agent, and often a preferred direction to gameplay. In some cases, there is a lot of free movement but when you enter a new zone/approach a boss, it generally goes one way rather than the other.
Eastern games favoring left-to-right over right-to-left: Super Mario Brothers, Ninja Gaiden, Megaman, Ghosts and Goblins, Double Dragon, TMNT, River City Ransom, Sonic the Hedgehog, Gradius/Lifeforce, UN Squadron, Rygar, Contra, Codename: Viper, Faxanadu (at least, the beginning, which is all I saw), Excitebike, Zelda 2, Act Raiser, Wizards and Warriors, and Cave Story.
On the other side, Final Fantasy combat generally puts the party on to right side, facing left. That's pretty leftward-oriented for sure. And very slightly - more slightly than any of the above - Metroid. Whenever you find a major powerup, you approach it from the right. You enter Tourian (the last area) from the right, and approach all 3 full bosses from the right. Those two are all I can think of with any sort of leftwa... (read more)
Ozy Frantz - Brain Chemicals are not Fucking Magic
Klingon proverb.
--Gabe Newell during a talk. The whole talk is worthwhile if you're interested in institutional design or Valve.
What's the percent chance that I'm doing it wrong?
The whole quote:
The problems you face might not require a serious approach; without more information, I can't say.
-Alex Tabarrok
So it's true what they say! The opposite of a Klingon proverb is also a Klingon proverb...
-- Magnificent Sasquatch
An example is in Federalist No. 10. Madison is trying to design a political environment resilient to the corrupt effects of factions:
... (read more)-- Screwtape, The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
Been making a game of looking for rationality quotes in the super bowl
"It's only weird if it doesn't work" --Bud Light Commercial
Only a rationality quote out of context, though, since the ad is about superstitious rituals among sports fans. My automatic mental reply is "well that doesn't work"
W. H. Auden, "The More Loving One"
You're not the only one. We should be doing more firewalling the optimal from the rational in general.
William Deseriewicz
The whole speech is worth reading as one giant rationality quote
I think it just promotes grasping at straws.
FTL being impossible is undesirable if you want to go to the stars.
The conclusion that "FTL is impossible" is undesirable if and only iff FTL is possible.
The two conditions are very different.
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(Joseph Heath, The Efficient Society)
Heath is an excellent writer on economics/philosophy.
Introduction to Learn Python The Hard Way, by Zed A. Shaw
If anyone feels even remotely inspired to click through and actually learn python, do it. Its been the most productive thing I've done on the internet.
This makes me wonder how much my writing skills would improve if I retyped excellently written essays for a while.
Benjamin Franklin's method of learning to write well is summarized here. His version:
... (read more)I would expect the answer to be "not much, compared to writing and publishing horrible, horrible fanfiction".
-- Randall Munroe
Earlier posting
I'd say that setting up incentives so that people within a system do culturally useful things out of their own self-interest is about as close to an opposite of corrupting people as we're likely to find.
The subject's capacity for deception is finite, and will be needed elsewhere. Sooner or later it becomes more cost-effective for the sincere belief to change.
You seem to be confusing support for a free market with rent seeking. Milton Friedman supported free markets, in this and your follow up comment you seem to equate this with rent seeking.
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The publisher selected that design. The author's involvement almost always ends with the manuscript.
You don't "judge" a book by its cover; you use the cover as additional evidence to more accurately predict what's in the book. Knowing what the publisher wants you to assume about the book is preferable to not knowing.
According to a single counter-intuitive (and therefore more likely to make headlines), unreplicated study.
Gah! Spoiler!
No, they selected them to sell more copies by highjacking the easier-to-press buttons of your nervous system.
On the other hand, the method of judging a book's contents by its cover clearly has holes in it considering Spice and Wolf 1 has the cover of Spice and Wolf 1.
It doesn't matter that much, but I'm pretty sure that line is original to the HBO series, not to the books.
(Not my downvotes, incidentally, but I'd speculate they come from a desire to separate rationality from anti-deathism.)
(Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell)
The Last Psychiatrist (http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/06/delaying_gratification.html)
@slicknet
-- Time Braid
-- Scott Sumner (talking about Italian politicians when the EU controls their monetary policy, but it generalizes)
Linus Pauling
The example in the comic is not a good one. Of the choices on the board, E being proportional to mc^2 is the only option where the units match. You only need to have that one idea to save yourself the trouble of having lots of other ideas.
We demand complete rigour from all forms of levity! The unexamined joke is not worth joking!
-Luc de Clapiers
The nice thing about working with incentives is that they're pretty stable relative to political leanings. I'd expect a given person's perceptions of politicians' level of corruption or incompetence or any other negative adjective you can think of to depend almost entirely on party affiliation, but you can actually leverage that to get changes in incentive structures passed: just frame it as necessary to curb the excesses of those guys over there, you know, the ones you hate.
And in any case the quote works just as well for the governed. As anyone who's e... (read more)
Simplest positive example I can think of offhand: if there's lots of content-free posting going on and you want it to go away, changing the board parameters so that user titles are no longer based on postcount goes a surprisingly long way.
Simplest negative example I can think of: if you think there's too much complaining going on (I didn't, but the board owner at the time did), allocating a subforum for complaints will only make things worse. Even if you call it something like "Constructive Criticism".
"We're even wrong about which mistakes we're making."
-Carl Winfeld
I'm not certain what lesson on rationality I'm expected to glean from this, unless it's "model your opponents as agents, not as executors of cached scripts" -- and that seems both strongly dependent on the opponents you're facing and a little on the trivial side.
In iterated games, defection has its price.
What happens if you apply the same epistomological standards to claims that someone is racist that you apply to claims from science?
Huh, what definition of "racist" are you using here? Would you describe von Neumann's proposal for a pre-emtive nuclear strike on the USSR as "racist"?
I'm not sure what you mean by "racist", ho... (read more)
Satoshi Kanazawa
This seems to imply that science is somehow free from motivated cognition — people looking for evidence to support their biases. Since other fields of human reason are not, it would be astonishing if science were.
(Bear in mind, I use "science" mostly as the name of a social institution — the scientific community, replete with journals, grants and funding sources, tenure, and all — and not as a name for an idealized form of pure knowledge-seeking.)
While I pretty much agree with the quote, it doesn't provide anyone that isn't already convinced with many good reasons to believe it. Less of an unusually rational statement and more of an empiricist applause light, in other words.
In any case, a scientific conclusion needn't be inherently offensive for closer examination to be recommended: if most researchers' backgrounds are likely to introduce implicit biases toward certain conclusions on certain topics, then taking a close look at the experimental structure to rule out such bias isn't merely a good political sop but is actually good science in its own right. Of course, dealing with this properly would involve hard work and numbers and wouldn't involve decrying all but the worst studies as bad science when you've read no more than the abstract.
I'd take an issue with "undesirable", the way I understand it. For example, the conclusion that traveling FTL is impossible without major scientific breakthroughs was quite undesirable to those who want to reach for the stars. Similarly with "dangerous": the discovery of nuclear energy was quite dangerous.
Not at all. It means you don't know about the real mistakes you make (so you can't fix them), and you spend resources trying to fix something that's not really broken.
--Jovah's Angel by Sharon Shinn
Yep.
— Gaston Leroux
People tend to conform to it's peers values.
And for that matter, to start believing what they behave as if they believe.
Joke: a tourist was driving around lost in the countryside in Ireland among the 1 lane roads and hill farms divided by ancient stone fences, and he asks a sheep farmer how to get to Dublin, to which he replies:
"Well ... if I was going to Dublin, I wouldn't start from here."
Moral, as I see it anyway: While the heuristic "to get to Y, start from X instead of where you are" has some value (often cutting a hard problem into two simpler ones), ultimately we all must start from where we are.
That's a... remarkably loose definition of corruption you've got going on there.
I'm not sure it's practical to make a political system completely free of incentives, as long as you're working with humans governing humans: the closest approximations I can think of would have to involve a leadership caste socially and economically isolated from the people they govern and without any means of improving their own welfare, and that's so far removed from anything historical I know about that I don't even want to try working out all its long-term implications. I... (read more)
A large part of the Federalist Papers is about designing structures and incentives to make government robust against overwhelming ambition and corruption - to make ambition in one branch check ambition in another branch, similarly between state and federal and between state and state.
That said, I think Friedman (I was never on a first name basis with him) is overly dismissive of electing the right people. But again we need to set up structures and incentives differently, so elections are less of an entertaining spectacle and more like a hiring search or j... (read more)
I don't get it.
Francis Spufford, Red Plenty
(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
Studies show that people who try to run behind a car frequently fail to keep up, while nobody who runs in front of a car fails more than once.
-- C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
Karl Popper
There's a failure mode associated to this attitude worth watching out for, which is assuming that people who disagree with you are being irrational and so not bothering to check if you have arguments against what they say.
-- Martin Fowler
[Footnote to: "This was a most disturbing result. Niels Bohr (not for the first time) was ready to abandon the law o... (read more)
It's not a question of encouragement. Humans tends to want to be like the high status folk that they look up to.
Concretely, Milton Friedman probably didn't have a workable plan for bringing about such an environment, though he may have thought he did; I'm not familiar enough with his thinking. One next-best option would be to try to convince other people that that's what part of a solution to bad government would look like, which under a charitable interpretation of his motives, is what he was doing with that statement he made.
If you have corrupt politicians, blame the voters. The politicians did not vote themselves into the office. (Unless they own the vote-counting machines factory.) I guess the quote suggests that "making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things", whatever precisely that means, could still be easier than replacing the whole population of voters; or at least the majority of them.
You usually can't get someone with a spider phobia to drop his phobia by trying to convince them with logic or evidence. On the other hand there are psychological strategies to help them to get rid of the phobia.
Okay, but P(doesn't want you to change | loves you just the way you are) is higher than P(doesn't want you to change | doesn't love you just the way you are), and in addition P(you won't change | you surround yourself with people who love you just the way you are) is higher than P(you won't change | you don't surround yourself with people who love you just the way you are).
To prevent lines from being merged together, add two spaces at the end of each one.
-- From the final screen of Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land
Does this mean something different than "Truth doesn't have a moral valence"?
Cause it seems like it is trying harder to sound deep than to sound insightful. Sigh - maybe I'm just jaded by various other trying-to-sound-deep-for-its-own-sake sayings. Aka seem deep vs. is deep issues.
I don't see how to extract that meaning from the words I see. In particular, I don't understand what the last sentence is trying to say. The dash is also confusing. I thought initially that this was a dialogue but now I'm less sure.
Doc Scratch isn't exactly the best source for rationality quotes- a guy who already knows the truth has little need to overcome flawed cognitive processes for arriving at it. Which isn't to say the guy doesn't say some relevant stuff:
... (read more)I suppose I should distinguish between two kinds of emotion-hacking: hacking your emotional responses to thoughts, and hacking your emotional responses to behaviors. The former is an epistemic technique and the latter is an instrumental technique. Both are quite useful.
Still sounds extremely unlikely. If a model of car has a particular design flaw, you'll expect to hear a lot of reports of that model suffering the same malfunction, but you wouldn't expect to hear that dozens of units within a certain radius suffered the same malfunction simultaneously. You'd need to subject them all to some sort of outside interference at the same time for that sort of occurrence to be plausible, and an event of that scale ought to leave evidence beyond its effect on all the pacemakers in the vicinity.
Or do they want to be like those folks appear to be like?
I didn't downvote you, but I'm not continuing the argument because it seems really political in a partisan way. I suspect that's what's motivating the downvotes.
In The Tamuli, by David Eddings, one country's political system is described as an attempt to limit corruption. (The usual caveats regarding fictional evidence apply here, of course). In short, when a person is elected onto the ruling council of the Isle of Tega, all that he owns is sold, and the money is deposited into the country's treasury. He is then simply not permitted to own anything until his term is up, some four years later (presumably food and housing is provided at the expense of the state); when that time comes, the money in the treasury is di... (read more)
Wouldn't they still have incentives to aid parties who promise to repay them once their term is up? Similar to how some legislators conveniently acquire lucrative positions requiring little-to-no effort on their part from companies who they have helped out through the years once they've retired from politics?
There hasn't been a lot of money spent researching it, but meta-analysis of the studies that have been conducted show that on average there is no placebo effect.
Be sure to let us know when you find such people. One of the main conceits of this site is that rationalists should win. If it's possible to get ahead by not being a rationalist (even temporarily), people are going to do that. Ultimately, I think what the original quote from Friedman boils down to is the old adage that you should try to fix the system rather than blame the people in it.
Bryan Caplan
I think the most common human tactic for appearing to care is to lie to themselves about caring until they actually believe they care; once this is in place they keep up appearances by actually caring if anyone is looking, and if people look often enough this just becomes actually caring.
Born and raised in the US, so English is my primary language. I had some long-term exposure to Chinese growing up as a kid (generally written up-to-down then right-to-left in our workbooks). Speaking and understanding (rudimentary) Chinese has stuck with me; the writing and reading of, has not.
Sorry, confused. A function is not always uncorrelated with its derivative. Correlation is a measure of co-linearity, not co-dependence. Do you have any examples where statistical dependence does not imply causality without a faithfulness violation? Would you mind maybe sending me a preprint?
edit to express what I meant better: "Do you have any examples where lack of statistical dependence coexists with causality, and this happens without path cancellations?"
I think that also works with acyclic graphs: suppose you have an arrow from “eXercising” to “Eating a lot”, one from “Eating a lot” to “gaining Weight”, and one from “eXercising” to “gaining Weight”, and P(X) = 0.5, P(E|X) = 0.99, P(E|~X) = 0.01, P(W|X E) = 0.5, P(W|X ~E) = 0.01, P(W|~X E) = 0.99, P(W|~X ~E) = 0.5. Then W would be nearly uncorrelated with X (P(W|X) = 0.4996, P(W|~X) = 0.5004) and nearly uncorrelated with E (P(W|E) = 0.5004, P(W|~E) = 0.4996, if I did the maths right), but it doesn't mean it isn't caused by either.
Ignoring the error bars does throw away potentially useful information, and this does break the rules of Bayes Club. But this makes the test a conservative one (Wikipedia: "it has very general applicability but may lack the statistical power of other tests"), which just makes the rejection of the nil hypothesis all the more convincing.
... (read more)which sounds to me like the state we are in w.r.t. election to political offices.
My point is nobody hires people for ordinary jobs the way we collectively hire a president. We are extremely passive, and don't manage the process. There is a field I am very interested in called Social Epistemology (it's a divided field with one part being ex... (read more)
Maybe the idea could gain popularity from a survival-island type reality program in which contestants have to measure the height of trees without climbing them, calculate the diameter of the earth, or demonstrate the existence of electrons (in order of increasing difficulty).
This seems like possibly quite a useful bit of abstraction and offer the potential of arguing the merits of a single principle that appears in man... (read more)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_dysfunction
In most cases 'executive dysfunction' covers the same territory as 'adult ADHD', but it can also be the outcome of some kinds of brain damage.
Eckhart Tolle, as quoted by Owen Cook in The Blueprint Decoded
I think you have the lesson entirely backward.
Sun Tzu on establishing a causal chain from reality to your beliefs.
I agree that this is a hard question.
General complaint: sometimes when I say that people should be doing a certain thing, someone responds that doing that thing requires answering hard questions. I don't know what bringing this point up is supposed to accomplish. Yes, many things worth doing require answering hard questions. That is not a compelling reason not to do them.
Exponential decay is a very very ordinary process to find a capacitor in. Most capacitors are not in feedback control systems.
Actually, it should be "FTL is impossible" is undesirable if and only if FTL is possible."
False. Here (second graph) is an example of a real-life thermostat. The correlation between inside and outside temperatures is evident when the outside temperature varies.
I don't understand what point you're trying to make.
Coincidences … are the worst enemies of the truth. (Les coïncidences … sont les pires ennemies de la vérité. —Gaston Leroux, Le mystère de la chambre jaune
"For belief did not end with a public renunciation, a moment when one's brethren called one a heretic, and damned. Belief ended in solitude, and silence, the same way it began." -Robert V. S. Redick, The Night Of The Swarm
(I'm mid-way through the book, but perhaps I should instead say that I am mid-way through gur sryybjfuvc bs gur evat, juvpu unf sbe fbzr ernfba orra vafregrq vagb gur zvqqyr bs vg, pbzcyrgr jvgu eviraqryy, zvfgl zbhagnvaf, naq gur jvmneq qvfnccrnevat gb svtug n zbafgre).
Where is this from? I looked it up to see if the weird grammar was intended and couldn't find anything.
Agreed. It's too easy to pander to a base that doesn't expect you to be good, just deliver a few things... things that matter a great deal less than the cumulative effect of having the right people in charge.
Can you clarify what you mean by this?