Rationality Quotes February 2013

arundelo

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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments or posts from Less Wrong itself or from Overcoming Bias.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.

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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments or posts from Less Wrong itself or from Overcoming Bias.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.

I don't like the study setup there. One readthrough of spoiled vs one readthrough of unspoiled material lets you compare the participants' hedonic ratings of dramatic irony vs mystery, and it's quite reasonable that the former would be equally or more enjoyable... but unlike in the study, in real life unspoiled material can be read twice: the first time for the mystery, then the second time for the dramatic irony; with spoiled material you only get the latter.

5A1987dM14y

Those error bars look large enough that I could still be right about myself even without being a total freak.

28Kaj_Sotala14y

According to a single counter-intuitive (and therefore more likely to make headlines), unreplicated study.