Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:
- 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- Do not quote yourself
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB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.
--Teller (source)
--Michael Lewis' profile of Barack Obama
Possibly also explaining this trend in the world of academia.
Hastie & Dawes, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World, pp. 67-8.
Jem and Tessa, Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare
--Bertrand Russell (Google Books attributes this to In praise of idleness and other essays, pg 133)
-Seth Godin
Spoken like a true cat.
I'm going to adopt at different social strategy and not be the obnoxiously nosy guy with no boundaries. Some things I'm curious about really aren't my business and actively seeking to uncover information that people try to keep secret is usually a personal (and often legal) violation. The terms 'industrial espionage' and 'stalking' both spring to mind.
Curiosity didn't kill the cat. The redneck with the gun killed it for tresspassing.
-- Paul Graham
--Eminem, "The Real Slim Shady"
Eminem seeks his comparative advantage and avoids self-handicapping.
Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies
Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith
Greg Egan, Diaspora
.
--Eric Hoffer, on Near/Far
Invertible fact alert!
It's a lot easier to hate Creationists than to hate my landlady.
Mad libs:
It is a lot easier to than to .
Depends. A klansman may find it easy to hate "niggers" but much harder to hate his black neighbour. A literary critic who values her tolerance may it find difficult to hate an abstract group but can passionately hate her mother-in-law. I am not sure whether the difference stems from there being two different types of hate, or only from different causes of the same sort of hate.
It is easier to than to .
It is harder to than to .
It is easier to control how you relate to a theoretical group than a concrete individual. If you believe it is proper to hate Creationists, you can do so with little difficulty. If you change your mind and think it is better to pity them, you can do that.
But if you landlady has actually helped or hurt you, and you know a strong emotional response isn't actually called for, you're going to have a very hard time not liking or hating her.
Linus van Pelt
Noah Smith
-Dana Scully, The X-Files, Season 1, Episode 17
--Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
Other people's maps are part of my territory.
Under the assumption that a lesser power is unable to punish injustice done by a greater power, the three possible alternatives at any level of power are "Injustice is dealt with by a greater power", "Injustice is dealt with by peers", and "Injustice is dealt with by nobody". The first system sounds nice, except that infinite regression is impossible, and so eventually you end up at the greatest level of power, choosing between systems two and three. In that case, system two seems preferable, "vigilante" connotations notwithstanding.
--Will Wilkinson
That comment did move Intrade shares by around 10 percentage points, I think, though I'm only going on personal before-and-after comparisons. The good Will may have picked the wrong time to criticize his instincts.
-- Mark Schone
--Randal Munroe, A Mole of Moles
--Kruschke 2010, Doing Bayesian Data Analysis, pg56-57
-Steven Kaas (via)
-- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (extended edition)
What Faramir says contains wisdom but so do Frodo's words. The enemy is trying to destroy the world with some kind of epic high fantasy apocalypse. Frodo does not terminally value the death (heh) of specific foot soldiers. They may be noble and virtuous and their deaths a tragic waste. But Frodo has something to protect and also has baddass allies who return from the (mostly) dead with a wardrobe change. But he doesn't have enough power to give himself a batman-like self-handicap of using non-lethal force. Killing those who get in his way (but lamenting the necessity) is the right thing for him to do and so yes, people would do well not to hinder him.
--Ta-Nehisi Coates, "A Muscular Empathy"
Nate Silver
From the stories I expected the world to be sad
And it was.
And I expected it to be wonderful.
It was.
I just didn't expect it to be so big.
-- xkcd: Click and Drag
Richard Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response
Well they're maybe a little more admirable than some other types of worker. Let's not go overboard here.
Eric Schwitzgebel
Jeff Bezos
-Franz Kafka (quoted in Joy of Clojure)
-Antonio Machado
Translation:
...
--Richard Dawkins on the ontological argument for theism, from The God Delusion, pages 81-82.
Yagyu Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword (translated by William Scott Wilson).
--Frank Herbert, The Tactful Saboteur
A good heuristic. Barack Obama limits his wardrobe choices, Feynman decides to just always order chocolate ice cream for dessert. Leaves more time and energy for important stuff.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Atheist or Agnostic?”
-- Harry Potter and the Natural 20
This is a clever little exchange, and I'm generally all about munchkinry as a rationalist's tool. But as a lawyer, this specific example bothers me because it relies on and reinforces a common misunderstanding about law -- the idea that courts interpret legal documents by giving words a strict or literal meaning, rather than their ordinary meaning. The maxim that "all text must be interpreted in context" is so widespread in the law as to be a cliche, but law in fiction rarely acknowledges this concept.
So in the example above, courts would never say "well, you did 'attend' this school on one occasion, and the law doesn't say you have to 'attend' more than once, so yeah, you're off the hook." They would say "sorry, but the clear meaning of 'attend school' in this context is 'regular attendance,' because everyone who isn't specifically trying to munchkin the system understands that these words refer to that concept." Lawyers and judges actually understand the notion of words not having fixed meanings better than is generally understood.
-- mme_n_b
Émile Zola
A good article on Slate.com by Daniel Engber
This thread needs a mention of this saying: "Correlation correlates with causation because causation causes correlation." (I don't know if anyone knows who came up with this.)
xkcd said it better:
Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace, "A Philosophical Essay On Probabilities", quoted here. (Hat tip.)
James Stephens
Richard Feynman
(Partially quoted here, but never given in a Rationality Quotes thread before.)
Scott Adams
While I don't ever feel that way, I understand that many people have such internal verbal or non-verbal conversations with one or more other "selves". These are also common in fiction, probably in part as a literary device, but also probably as a reflection of the author's mind. Hmm, maybe it is worth a poll.
Lucky him - his internal persons are friends.
Frankenweenie
Milan Cirkovic
-- Robert H. Thouless, Straight and Crooked Thinking
Experience trumps brilliance.
— Thomas Sowell
This belief seems to me very convenient for the brilliant, implying that they got where they are by hard work and properly deserve everything they have. Of course brilliant people also have to put in hard work, but their return on investment is much higher than many other contenders who may have put in even more work for lower total returns. Just-world hypothesis; life is not this fair. And while I do go about preaching the virtue of Hufflepuff, I also go about saying that people should try to Huffle where they have comparative advantage.
My reading of the quote is that empiricism is superior to rationalism (the old philosophical schools, not the sort we discuss here). If I have a proof that my bridge will hold a thousand pounds, and it breaks under a hundred, then the experiment trumps the proof.
Lacking sufficient inspiration, I shall reduce my perspiration until recommended ratio is met.
A true genius would do nothing and then steal the results of other people's inspiration and perspiration.
OWAIT
Fred de Martines, a pork farmer who does direct marketing
"Anything that real people do in the world is by definition interesting. By 'interesting', I mean worthy of the kind of investigation that puts curiosity and honesty well before judgment. Judgment may come, but only after you’ve done some work." - Timothy Burke
People, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain. Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions, and then again within those twenty-four hours. It's a daily pantomime, one man yielding control to the next: a backstage crowded with old hacks clamoring for their turn in the spotlight. Every week, every day. The angry man hands the baton over to the sulking man, and in turn to the sex addict, the intro... (read more)
—George Polya, How to Solve It
Arthur Schopenhauer
The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. Because, if you can do that, you can do anything. -Waking life (2001)
It's always "you can do anything" and never "you can do more than you currently believe you're capable of" with these motivational quotes.
Terry Pratchett, The Last Hero
Found here.
It seems to be a misquotation of this.
-- Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies
"A car with a broken engine cannot drive backward at 200 mph, even if the engine is really really broken."
--Eliezer
Frédéric Bastiat.
I happen to agree with the quote; I just don't think it's particularly a quote about rationality. Just because a quote is correct doesn't mean that it's a quote about how to go about acquiring correct beliefs, or (in general) accomplish your goals. The fact that HIV is a retrovirus that employs an enzyme called reverse transcriptase to copy its genetic code into the host cell is useful information for a biologist or a biochemist, because it helps them to accomplish their goals. But it is rather unhelpful for someone looking for a way to accomplish goals in general.
-- Princess Bubblegum
Attributed to Charles De Gaulle.
Trinity: "You always told me to stay off the freeway." Morpheus: "Yes, that's true." Trinity: "You said it was suicide." Morpheus: "Then let us hope that I was wrong."
— The Matrix Reloaded
I disagree. We're obligated to do things to the best of our ability based on the knowledge we have. If those decisions have bad outcomes, that doesn't mean our actions weren't justified. Otherwise, you displace moral judgement from the here and now into inaccessible ideas about what will have turned out to be the case.
Somebody should start a sister site, Less Culpable. It might be More Useful.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_evolution/2012/10/evolution_of_anxiety_humans_were_prey_for_predators_such_as_hyenas_snakes.2.html
-Mägo de Oz
Not only is this false, I would make the counter claim "There can be causes that have been abandoned that are less 'lost' than other causes that have not been abandoned."
Let's contrive an example: If everyone abandoned the cause 'prevent global warming over the time scale of 30 years' it would still be less of a lost cause than the cause "raise this child with faith in God such that she is accepted into eternal life in heaven" even though there may be several people diligently and actively working toward said cause.
As a rule of thumb, the word "Truly" in a claim constitutes the announcement "This claim probably relies on No True Scottsman".