A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).
- 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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.
--Aubrey de Grey
It's not really surprising, though, is it? Brilliant people want to have other brilliant people as their colleagues.
(In fact, one mathematician of my acquaintance said that he once dabbled in circuit design, but when his first paper in the field was received as a major achievement, he left it immediately, concluding that if he could make such a large contribution so easily, the field must be unworthy of him.)
How utterly selfish of him.
If making a major contribution seemed so easy, and would be harder in some other field, it sure would suggest that his comparative advantage in the easy field is much greater; would not that suggest that he ought to devote his efforts there, since other people have proven relatively capable in the harder fields?
"And what is it about selfishness exactly that is so bad?"
It's fine and dandy in me, but I tend to discourage it in other people. I find that I get what I want faster that way.
Now give me some cash.
No, just appalling.
--George Bernard Shaw, A Treatise on Parents and Children (1910)
-- Gary Drescher "Good and Real"
(I really like this quote as a counterweight to the ubiquitous cliche-advise to follow you intuition. Often, your intuition may be fooled. And, it cannot be repeated often enough, Good and Real is a must-read for LW-minded folks)
--George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra (1898)
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying." --Woody Allen
Judson Jerome, The Poet's Handbook, Chap. 1 ("From Sighs and Groans to Art")
-- Tom Peters, HT Ben Casnocha
-- Luke Muehlhauser
I don't buy a lot of that, at least if we're referring to the 18th century.
The founders of America knew damn well that there were no such things as gods, at least not ones that actively intervened in any way we could detect.
They were wrong about some details of astronomy, but they had most of the basic outlines right (Lagrange's works describe the celestial mechanics of the solar system in quite some detail).
The theories of classical mechanics were known and well understood. Quantum mechanics and relativity weren't, of course, but I am hesitant to refer to this as people being wrong, as there were very few observations available to them which required these to be explained (the perihelion advance of Mercury, for instance, wasn't discovered until 1859).
The 18th century view of cosmology was essentially ours, except that it lacked knowledge about how it was organized on a larger scale (galaxies within clusters within superclusters and all that) due to the lack of sufficiently powerful telescopes, and many supposed the universe to be infinite instead of beginning with the Big Bang.
The structure of democratic government invented during this period works pretty darn well, by c
We have no evidence and reasoning about morality that doesn't depend on morality in the first place, is-ought problem which I won't repeat here.
Empirically, everyone derives their morality from society's norm developed in messy historical processes. Why one messy historical process is better than other by any objective standard is not clear.
By some standards we have less suffering than past times, but we're also vastly wealthier. It's not clear at all to me that wealth-adjusted suffering now is lower than historically - modern moral standards say it's fine to let 1.5 million children a year die of diarrhea because they happen to be born in a wrong country. I can imagine some of the past moral systems would be less happy about it than we are.
— Marvin Minsky
-- Scott Bakker, Neuropath
--Adapted from something in The Economist (sorry, they don't have bylines)
-H. L. Mencken
I will repeat this point again until I get hoarse: a mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point. —Nicholas Nassim Taleb
Egypt "peganthyrus" Urnash, comment thread, "a quick drawing lesson", July 17, 2008
— Henri Poincaré
-- Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
--Andrew S. Grove
– Michael Vassar
— Brendan O’Regan
"But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil." - Robert Heinlein (SISL)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, Oct.-Nov. 1867
"I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this." - Emo Phillips
"Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms." - Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair
There are two different types of people in the world,those who want to know,and those who want to believe.--Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche
"You can tell the truth but you better have a fast horse." - Rita Mae Brown
-- Dorothy L. Sayers
— Leonardo da Vinci
— Alain Robbe-Grillet
A cynic is what an idealist calls a realist.
From the Yes, Minister TV show.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
-- G. K. Chesterton
No man knows the state of another; it is always to some more or less imaginary man that the wisest and most honest adviser is speaking.
-- Thomas Carlyle, Advice to Young Men
-- Alan Kay
"We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones." - Francois de La Rochefoucauld
A pair of the same species:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. —Yeats
The trouble with this world is that the ignorant are certain, and the intelligent are full of doubt. —George Bernard Shaw
-- Homer Simpson
--Yvon Chouinard
Winston Churchill, 29 October 1941
-- Ernest Hemingway, The Sun also Rises
-- The Wizard's Oath (from So You Want To Be A Wizard by Diane Duane)
Sounds like I'd better change that.
-- John Cavil (Battlestar Galactica character)
Objectivity must be operationally defined as fair treatment of data, not absence of preference. —Stephen Jay Gould
Our actions generally satisfy us: we recognize that they are in the main coherent, and that they make appropriate, well-timed contributions to our projects as we understand them. So we safely assume them to be the product of processes that are reliably sensitive to ends and means. That is, they are rational, in one sense of that word. But that does not mean they are rational in a narrower sense: the product of serial reasoning.
-- Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained
The history of the world is the history of the triumph of the heartless over the mindless.
From the Yes, Minister TV show.
"The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments." - Friedrich Nietzsche
"Construing a rock as conscious via a joke interpretation is paradoxical only insofar as it seems to suggest that we should therefore respect and care about rocks. Resolving the paradox requires a theory of what we are obligated to respect or care about, and why." - Gary Drescher
Love consists of overestimating the differences between one woman and another. —George Bernard Shaw
(OK, it's sexist. I admit it.)
-- Aubrey de Grey
-- Galileo Galilei, The Assayer
--Harold Bloom
"Admiration is the state furthest from understanding." - Sosuke Aizen, Bleach
-- Kozma Prutkov
"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence." - Robert Frost
-- Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
– Robin Hanson
-- Jean-Yves Girard
Science involves confronting our ‘absolute stupidity’. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown.
Martin A. Schwartz
“I was forced into a measure that no one ever adopts voluntarily: I was impelled to think. God, was it difficult! The moving about of great secret trunks. In the first exhausted halt, I wondered whether I had ever thought.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, found here.
Star Trek, Richard Manning & Hans Beimler, Who Watches the Watchers? (reworded)
– Rudi Hoffman
-- George Vincent
-- A. R. Ammons
This is my last one for the month, it seems.
"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things." - Rene Descartes
"It is one thing to show a man that he is in error,| and another to put him in possession of the truth." (John Locke)
http://www.dorktower.com/2009/12/04/dork-tower-friday-december-4-2009-mayadamus/
Never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity.
-- unknown
-- Phillip E. Johnson
-- Marcus Hutter
The absence of alternatives clarifies your mind marvelously. —Kissinger
-- Albert Einstein
E.K. Hornbeck in Inherit the wind
... If the machine seemed a functional object to the artist, an instrument whose significance was that it was there to be used - as a typewriter was used for typing a manuscript - so to the engineer it was the communication that was functional. The machine was the art.
The Cat Empire - Protons, Neutrons, Electrons