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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments or posts from Less Wrong itself or from Overcoming Bias.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:
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.
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".
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
-- Geoff Anders (paraphrased)
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.)
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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.
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.
And for that matter, to start believing what they behave as if they believe.
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.
I think it just promotes grasping at straws.
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.
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?
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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
-- Magnificent Sasquatch
-- 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
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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
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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.
(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
"We're even wrong about which mistakes we're making."
-Carl Winfeld
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.
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.
--Jovah's Angel by Sharon Shinn
— Gaston Leroux
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.
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)
-- From the final screen of Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land
Bryan Caplan
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.
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).
-- Seng-Ts'an
I wouldn't be surprised if this has come up before:
... (read more)Klingon proverb.
So it's true what they say! The opposite of a Klingon proverb is also a Klingon proverb...
--Lawrence Watt-Evans, The Spriggan Mirror
Syrio Forel, Game of Thrones based on A Song of Ice and Fire by George R R Martin
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.)
-- Doc Scratch, Homestuck