This time he covered a lot more ground and was willing to talk about the mundane details of presidential existence. “You have to exercise,” he said, for instance. “Or at some point you’ll just break down.” You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”
A lot of outcomes about which we care deeply are not very predictable. For example, it is not comforting to members of a graduate school admissions committee to know that only 23% of the variance in later faculty ratings of a student can be predicted by a unit weighting of the student's undergraduate GPA, his or her GRE score, and a measure of the student's undergraduate institution selectivity -- but that is opposed to 4% based on those committee members' global ratings of the applicant. We want to predict outcomes important to us. It is only rational to conclude that if one method (a linear model) does not predict well, something else may do better. What is not rational -- in fact, it's irrational -- is to conclude that this "something else" necessarily exists and, in the absence of any positive supporting evidence, is intuitive global judgment.
Hastie & Dawes, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World, pp. 67-8.
The late F.W.H. Myers used to tell how he asked a man at a dinner table what he thought would happen to him when he died. The man tried to ignore the question, but on being pressed, replied: "Oh well, I suppose I shall inherit eternal bliss, but I wish you wouldn't talk about such unpleasant subjects."
--Bertrand Russell (Google Books attributes this to In praise of idleness and other essays, pg 133)
Curiosity was framed. Avoid it at your peril. The cat's not even sick. If you don't know how it works, find out. If you're not sure if it will work, try it. If it doesn't make sense, play with it until it does. If it's not broken, break it. If it might not be true, find out. And most of all, if someone says it is none of your business, prove them wrong.
-Seth Godin
And most of all, if someone says it is none of your business, prove them wrong.
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.
To succeed in a domain that violates your intuitions, you need to be able to turn them off the way a pilot does when flying through clouds. You need to do what you know intellectually to be right, even though it feels wrong.
-- Paul Graham
Will Smith don't gotta cuss in his raps to sell his records;
well I do, so fuck him and fuck you too!
--Eminem, "The Real Slim Shady"
Eminem seeks his comparative advantage and avoids self-handicapping.
And who shows greater reverence for mystery, the scientist who devotes himself to discovering it step by step, always ready to submit to facts, and always aware that even his boldest achievement will never be more than a stepping-stone for those who come after him, or the mystic who is free to maintain anything because he need not fear any test?
Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies
“But can’t you just wave your hand and make all the dirt fly away, then?”
“The trouble is getting the magic to understand what dirt is,” said Tiffany, scrubbing hard at a stain. “I heard of a witch over in Escrow who got it wrong and ended up losing the entire floor and her sandals and nearly a toe.”
Mrs. Aching backed away. “I thought you just had to wave your hands about,” she mumbled nervously.
“That works,” said Tiffany, “but only if you wave them about on the floor with a scrubbing brush.”
Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith
Hate is easier with a diffuse target.
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 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.
I love uncertainty. In many situations I'd rather try something just to see what happens. I'm the character that gets killed first in every horror movie, but that's fine with me, since life is not generally like a horror movie.
...Lastly, there is an attitude not unknown in the crisis against which I should particularly like to protest. I should address my protest especially to those lovers and pursuers of Peace who, very short-sightedly, have occasionally adopted it. I mean the attitude which is impatient of these preliminary details about who did this or that, and whether it was right or wrong. They are satisfied with saying that an enormous calamity, called War, has been begun by some or all of us; and should be ended by some or all of us. To these people this preliminary chapter about the precise happenings must appear not only dry (and it must of necessity be the driest part of the task) but essentially needless and barren. I wish to tell these people that they are wrong; that they are wrong upon all principles of human justice and historic continuity: but that they are specially and supremely wrong upon their own principles of arbitration and international peace.
These sincere and high-minded peace-lovers are always telling us that citizens no longer settle their quarrels by private violence; and that nations should no longer settle theirs by public violence. They are always telling us that we no longe
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.
I prefer this sort of distant, reductionist, structural approach to analysing the race because there's little reason to believe in the validity of the implicit theories or "models" lurking behind pundits' gut judgments. When I heard Mr Romney's 47% comments, I thought "Oooh, he's toast!" and then I stopped myself and acknowledged that I actually have no rational basis for believing that his remarks would in the final analysis hurt Mr Romney at all. What percentage of undecided or weakly-decided swing-state voters ever caught wind of Mr Romney's embarrassing chat? I didn't know! Of those who became aware of it, how many cared? I didn't know! So why did I think "Oooh, he's toast!" Because I am human, and I make most judgments and decisions on the basis of crackpot hunches, the underlying logic of which is almost completely inscrutable to me.
My wife and I, since we'd been in lock-down with each other, oh, these past nine years, have developed a bit of shorthand. If one of us says something the other has heard so many times before that tears of boredom flow, the victim has a right to protest. The victim says, "That's on the tape." As in, that's on your tape -- the list of stories and obsessions you've rewound so often I could sing along with them in my sleep.
-- Mark Schone
I can pick up a mole (animal) and throw it. Anything I can throw weighs one pound. One pound is one kilogram.
--Randal Munroe, A Mole of Moles
Despite the difficulty of exact Bayesian inference in complex mathematical models, the essence of Bayesian reasoning is frequently used in everyday life. One example has been immortalized in the words of Sherlock Holmes to his friend Dr. Watson: “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” (Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four, 1890, Ch. 6). This reasoning is actually a consequence of Bayesian belief updating, as expressed in Equation 4.4. Let me re-state it this way: “How often have I said to you that when p(D|θ_i ) = 0 for all i!=j, then, no matter how small the prior p(θ_j ) > 0 is, the posterior p(θ_j |D) must equal one.” Somehow it sounds better the way Holmes said it.
--Kruschke 2010, Doing Bayesian Data Analysis, pg56-57
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains is often more improbable than your having made a mistake in one of your impossibility proofs.
-Steven Kaas (via)
Frodo: Those that claim to oppose the Enemy would do well not to hinder us.
Faramir: The Enemy? (turns over body of an enemy soldier) His sense of duty was no less than yours, I deem. You wonder what his name is, where he came from, and if he was really evil at heart. What lies or threats led him on this long march from home, and if he'd not rather have stayed there... in peace. War will make corpses of us all.
-- 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.
It's all fine and good to declare that you would have freed your slaves. But it's much more interesting to assume that you wouldn't have and then ask, "Why?"
--Ta-Nehisi Coates, "A Muscular Empathy"
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
A common mistake is to suppose that scientists are such admirable people that they can be safely entrusted with the ultimate responsibility for guiding scientific research. In fact they are no more admirable than any other type of worker. Neither selection nor self-selection tor a scientific career is based on admirableness. Though the conventions and protocols of science enforce on scientists, in comparison to astrologers and English professors—and lawyers—a high degree of objectivity when they are doing science, it does not follow that such individuals can be depended on to be objective policy analysts. That is a role for which they are not trained (but is anyone?) and that does not impose the constraints that science imposes.
Richard Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response
From the leavings of memory and forgetfulness we could create a nearly complete map, I think, of a person's values. What you don't even see -- the subtle sadness in a colleague's face? -- and what you might briefly see but don't react to or retain, is in some sense not part of the world shaped for you by your interests and values. Others with different values will remember a very different series of events.
Michelangelo is widely quoted as having said that to make David he simply removed from the stone everything that was not David. Remove from your life everything you forget; what is left is you.
Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino, y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino,
sino estelas en la mar.
-Antonio Machado
Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road,
and upon glancing back
one sees the path
that must never be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road—
Only wakes upon the sea.
Why, I wonder, didn't he say something like: 'Great Scott, the ontological argument seems to be plausible. But isn't it too good to be true that a grand truth about the cosmos should follow from a mere word game?
...
My own feeling, to the contrary, would have been an automatic, deep suspicion of any line of reasoning that reached such a significant conclusion without feeding in a single piece of data from the real world.
--Richard Dawkins on the ontological argument for theism, from The God Delusion, pages 81-82.
To think only of winning is sickness. To think only of using the martial arts is sickness. To think only of demonstrating the results of one's training is sickness, as is thinking only of making an attack or waiting for one. To think in a fixated way only of expelling such sickness is also sickness. Whatever remains absolutely in the mind should be considered sickness. As these various sicknesses are all present in the mind, you must put your mind in order and expel them.
Yagyu Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword (translated by William Scott Wilson).
We keep the wheel turning slowly and smoothly. Some anonymous Corpsman put it into words a long time ago: "When in doubt, delay the big ones and speed the little ones.''
--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.
The moment when someone attaches to a philosophy or a movement, then they assign all the baggage and all the rest of the philosophy that goes with it to you, and when you want to have a conversation they will assert that they already know everything important there is to know about you because of that association.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Atheist or Agnostic?”
"...city law states that 'children under the age of twelve must attend school,' but it never said they had to 'attend school' more than once."
Hermione's mouth moved, but no words came out.
"It's funny, I got an A in my Munchkinry course without ever showing up past the first lesson. All the other students failed."
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.
No, correlation does not imply causation, but it sure as hell provides a hint.
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.
The mind has its illusions as the sense of sight; and in the same manner as feeling corrects the latter, reflection and calculation correct the former.
Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace, "A Philosophical Essay On Probabilities", quoted here. (Hat tip.)
For purely practical reasons we count one human body as one "person." That makes sense for all sorts of legal and economic purposes. But it sure doesn't feel as if I have only one person in my head. It feels like a conversation between two friends.
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.
The formalization of knowledge — which includes giving precise definitions — usually comes at the end of the original research in a given field, not at the very beginning. A particularly illuminating example is the concept of number, which was properly defined in the modern sense only after the development of axiomatic set theory in the… twentieth century.
Milan Cirkovic
The belief that one can find out something about real things by speculation alone is one of the most long-lived delusions in human thought. It is the spirit of antiscience which is always trying to lead men away from the study of reality to the spinning of fanciful theories out of their own minds. It is the spirit which every one of us (whether he is engaged in scientific investigation or in deciding how to use his vote in an election) must cast out of his own mind. Mastery of the art of thought is only the beginning of the task of understanding reality. Without the correct facts it can only lead us into error.
-- Robert H. Thouless, Straight and Crooked Thinking
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.
...The best description of the scientific method I have ever seen is from a conceptual physics textbook by Hobson. Paraphrasing:
The scientific method involves the dynamic interplay between theory and experiment.
That’s it. Perfect. As a scientist, I don’t come to work on Monday and make an observation, then form a hypothesis on Tuesday, devise an experiment to test some prediction on Wednesday, perform the experiment Thursday, and interpret the result on Friday. On any given day I would be hard pressed to tell you where I am in the process. All of the abo
Talking is easy, listening is hard.
Fred de Martines, a pork farmer who does direct marketing
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...
But mostly there was the knowledge that one day, quite soon, it would be all over. ‘Ah, well, life goes on,’ people say when someone dies. But from the point of view of the person who has just died, it doesn't. It's the universe that goes on. Just as the deceased was getting the hang of everything it's all whisked away, by illness or accident or, in one case, a cucumber. Why this has to be is one of the imponderables of life, in the face of which people either start to pray… or become really, really angry.
Terry Pratchett, The Last Hero
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.
[The people of my kingdom] rely on me. I can't imagine what might happen to them if I was gone. But after my brush with death at the hands of the Lich, I realized something: I'm not going to live forever, Finn. I would if I could. But modern science just isn't there yet. So I engineered a replacement who can live forever.
Suppose you were misguidedly to give your own child poison. The fact that you might think the poison you were administering was good for your child, the fact that you might have gone to a lot of trouble to obtain this poison, and that if it were not for all your efforts your child would not even been there to be offered it, none of this would give you a right to administer the poison—at most, it would only make you less culpable when the child died.
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.
We could bemoan these legacies, but it makes more sense to confront them head on, to consider just how we should live not in light of the bodies we wish we had but instead with the ones we are born with, bodies that evolved in the wild, thanks to ancestors who only just barely got away.
...Something now appears to you as an error which you used to love as a truth, or as a probability. You cast this opinion aside and imagine that your reason has thereby gained a victory. But perhaps that error was as necessary for you then - for the old "you" (you are always another person) - as all your current "truths" : that "error" being a skin as it were which concealed and veiled from you much that you were not yet permitted to see. Your new life and not your reason has killed that opinion for you: you do not need it any
The only truly lost cause is that which has been abandoned
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".
Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules: