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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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.
On the difficulties of correctly fine-tuning your signaling:
... (read more)Perhaps he's ultra-high-class, and is only defending the object-level irony of his garden gnome ironically.
Oh I am so getting my own gnome, just so that I can use that phrase on people.
And on the same theme, "Why Can't Anyone Tell I'm Wearing This Business Suit Ironically?" from The Onion.
I upvoted this half because I laughed and half because I now want a gnome.
Hmm, what I had in mind when I wrote the caption was something like this:
The man's social model had three classes: lower class (owns gnomes non-ironically), middle class (would never own a gnome), upper class (can own a gnome "ironically" as a joke on low-class tastes), and he aimed for signalling upper-class status. He failed at fine-tuned signalling because he did not realize that his "upper class" behavior is actually upper-middle; true upper classes are allowed to own gnomes and genuinely like them, and don't need to defensively plead irony because they have no lingering anxiety about being confused with lower classes.
-- Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
And they'll be beaten in turn by people who were in the right place at the right time, or won the genetic lottery. A little luck can make up for a lot of laziness, and working hard and learning things can just leave you digging ditches and able to quote every Simpsons episode verbatim.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/01/geeks-lose-minds-recreate-first-level-of-super-mario-land-with/
And the worst thing is they don't use a piston array! Making a scrolling wall of blocks is fairly easy within Minecraft and would've saved them the trouble of manually shifting all their blocks every single frame. That's easily an order of magnitude less work, and can be re-used for other stop-motion movies.
Their excuse? "We dont have the smarts"(sic). Sigh.
... and I've build a working prototype. Took about 3 hours to figure it out, 2 hours to get the wiring to work (first big redstone project), another 1-2 hours for the array and timing. It's trivial to scale and can be easily extended to push in both directions. The whole mechanism is hidden. I think there is a delay of ~8 seconds per 12 blocks, so scrolling the gameboy screen should take ~1.5 minutes. I'm sure you can get this below 1 minute if you try.
Here's the video. Here's the save. Here's a bunch of screenshots instead of a blueprint or explanation.
...why we can get people to do this but not our open volunteer tasks...
Volunteer tasks? I wasn't aware you (I'm assuming that means Less Wrong or SIAI) had any; perhaps you have a visibility problem?
Or maybe they're just not as engaging as an open-ended engineering environment with no arbitrary entry requirements and no visible resource constraints. . .
Thankfully for Mr. Pratchett, you can't influence the genetic lottery or the luck fairy, so his is still valid advice. In fact, one could see "trust in yourself" et al. as invitations to "do or do not, there is no try", whereas "work hard, learn hard and don't be lazy" supports the virtue of scholarship as well as that of "know when to give up". Miss Tick is being eminently practical, and "do or do not", while also an important virtue, requires way more explanation before the student can understand it.
Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of Climate, 2005.
From "If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right" by Elizabeth W. Dunn, Daniel T. Gilbert, Timothy D. Wilson in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. (http://dunn.psych.ubc.ca/files/2011/04/Journal-of-consumer-psychology.pdf)
The title of the book is a good candidate for a December quote, in and of itself.
--The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
-- Joseph de Maistre (St. Petersburg Dialogues, No. 7)
[citation needed]
It doesn't seem at all uncommon for someone from domain A to present a problem and for someone from domain B to immediately reply "Oh, we have just the perfect tool for that in my field!".
I have on numerous occasions presented problems to others, after giving them careful thought, and had them reply instantly with the correct answer. Usually the next question is "why didn't I think of that?" which sometimes has an obvious answer and sometimes doesn't.
My favorite remains Eliezer asking me the question "why don't you just use log likelihood?" I still don't have a good answer to why I needed the question!
I don't think that de Maistre's "quick answers" category is supposed to include answers based on sound expertise.
People are often confused about questions to which an expert in the relevant area will give a quick and reliably correct answer. However, an expert capable of answering a technical question competently is not someone who has "considered [the question] only briefly or not at all": he is in fact someone who has spent a great deal of time and effort (along with possessing the necessary talent) on understanding a broad class of questions that subsumes the one being asked.
This gives, by implication, a detector for absolute folly: the condition of believing that something is a very problematic question, when in fact it has a quick, consistent, explanatory answer available to those who have considered it only briefly or not at all.
Aretae
Well, that makes sense. They've panicked earlier, when the plan was announced.
Not necessarily. The human race wasn't around when "Everyone dies" was announced, so we never had the opportunity to panic properly.
And each individual panics! Witness the common existential crisis: execute a head-first dive into mild depression and loudly proclaim your conversion to pure hedonism. But since nobody else is currently panicking, the individual comes to mimic the standard mental state. Which may not be the correct mental state...
-- Road sign in Griffin, Georgia, showing that sometimes it's good to have some distance between map and area.
-Tooby and Cosmides, emphasis theirs. It occurred to someone on the Less Wrong IRC channel how good this is an isomorphism of, "You have asked a wrong question."
That sounds like less of a wrong question and more of a "right question with surprising (low prior) answer". As far as the asker knew, the answer could have turned out to be, "Genes produce the same organism phenotype across virtually all environments, so genes are more important because changing them is much more likely to change the expressed phenotype than changing the environment." (and indeed, life would not be life if genes could not force some level of environment-invariance, thereby acting as a control system for a low-entropy island)
I don't see what's wrong with answering this question with "neither [i.e., they're equal], because they jointly determine phenotype, as independent changes in either have the same chance of affecting phenotype".
An example of a wrong question, by contrast, would be something like, "Which path did the electron really take?" because it posits an invalid ontology of the world as a pre-requisite. The question about phenotypes doesn't do that.
The conversation in question.
The width. Changing the width makes a bigger change in the area than changing the length does. (By convention, the width is defined as the smaller of the two dimensions of the rectangle.)
You have resolved the question to the nearest available sane question but that isn't the answer to the question itself and does not make the question valid.
Come to think of it I am somewhat dubious with answering "is the area of this 1km by 1m rectangle more the 1km or the 1m?" with "the 1m". That just doesn't seem right.
Of course.
But imagine a world in which environment truly was more determining than genes. Every animal born in a swamp would be a frog (no matter what its parents were) and every animal born in a tree would be a bird. Perhaps coloration or some other trait might be heritable — blue birds who move to swamps give rise to little blue tadpoles — but the majority of phenotypic features would be governed by the environment in which the organism is born and develops.
In our world, all we know about X is that it is a phenotypic feature, then we should expect it is more likely to be stable under different environments than to be stable under different genotypes. Features must owe more (on the aggregate) to genes than to environment. If it were otherwise, then we would not talk about species! We know we are not in the swamp-birds-have-tadpoles world.
When people talk about genes vs. environment, they usually aren't really talking about all features. They're usually talking about some particular, politically interesting set of features of humans ...
---"Culture in Economics and the Culture of Economics: Raquel Fernández in Conversation with The Straddler"
There are also countless examples of "top-down social planning" that leaded to huge success - from sending men to the moon to eradicating smallpox to building the TGV (French high-speed train) network to eradicating illiteracy in some countries. We can argue for long if those results could have been achieved otherwise, or if they had more drawbacks than they are worth, ... that would mean entering in a full-scale political discussion, which is not the purpose of Less Wrong. But calling it a "delusion" with a sleight of the hand like you do really looks like you're victim of mind-killing on that issue. Rational political debate shouldn't appear so blatantly one-sided.
--Hokusai and Hiroshige
It took me a long time to figure out this poem isn't about a recovering alcoholic.
-- Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning
Malcolm was one of Wittgenstein's most promising students; yet even he fell - unquestioningly - into the vapid jingoistic idea that there are intrinsic 'national characters' (aggregates over millions of people of multiple regions!) which carry moral qualities despite the obvious conflict of interest (who is telling him the English are too noble to assassinate), that they exist and carry enough information to overrule public claims like that, and all his philosophical training which ought to have given him some modicum of critical thought, some immunity against nationalism, did nothing. And in point of fact, he was blatantly wrong, which is why I linked the British-connected plots and assassins.
Uh huh. And if a Tea P... (read more)
With all due respect, you are getting seriously mind-killed here.
Do you agree that the probability of a person accepting and following certain norms (and more generally, acting and thinking in certain ways) can be higher or lower conditional on them belonging to a specific nationality? Similarly, would you agree that the probability of a government acting in a certain way may strongly depend on the government in question? Or are these "vapid jingoistic idea[s]"?
For example, suppose I'm an American and someone warns me that the U.S. government would have me tortured to death in the public square if I called the U.S. president a rascal. I reply that while such fears would be justified in many other places and times, they are unfounded in this case, since Americans are too civilized and decent to tolerate such things, and it is in their national character to consider criticizing (and even insulting) the president as a fundamental right. What exactly would be fallacious about this reply?
Note that I accept it as perfectly reasonable if one argues that Malcolm was factually mistaken about the character of the British government. What I object to is grandstanding rhetoric and moral posturing that tries to justify what is in fact nothing more than a display of the usual human frailty in a petty politicking quarrel.
This makes me think of one of those intellectual hipster Hegelian dialectic thingies.
Idiot: My monkeys are better than your monkeys. (Blood for the blood god, etc; Malcolm.)
Contrarian: My monkeys are better than your monkeys, because they don't say things like "My monkeys are better than your monkeys." (Secular Western cosmopolitanism, faith in progress, etc; Wittgenstein.)
Hipster: My monkeys are better than your monkeys, because they don't say things like "My monkeys are better than your monkeys, because they don't say things like 'My monkeys are better than your monkeys.'" (Postmodernism, cultural relativism, etc; Vladimir.)
It amuses me that I can think of a few trendy Continentals right now who base their appeal on working at level four.
Primarily the latter. Consider this:
North Korea abducts women for the president's harem.
South Korea does not (neither openly nor secretly, with p~0).
And yet it's people of the same nationality on both sides of the border. Therefore such things don't seem to me to be primarily dependent on "national character". They seem to be primarily about what each leader can get away with doing. South Korea and America are semi-democratic capitalist states. North Korea is a totalitarian regime.
To get back to my comment where I explained what I consider to be a reasonable interpretation of "national character," I defined it thus:
In this discussion, I am not at all interested in the exact connection that these norms have with ethnicity or any other factors. I merely claim that for whatever reason, there is variation in such norms across governments, which sometimes gives very strong information on what they may be capable of doing.
(And anyway, several decades of life under radically different regimes imposed by foreign conquerors, one of which practices extreme isolation, will cause cultural divergences that run deeper than the immediate structure of clear incentives. Moreover, this one example is not conclusive proof that all such differences in governments' behaviors in all places and times are caused by the same factor.)
Every time I hear such discussion a dialogue runs in my head
USA: If it wasn't for us that nail would have never been hammered.
WORLD: It was a bolt.
USA: Doesn't count. Still Hammered It.
-Probably not Henry Ford
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/08/henry_ford_never_said_the_fast.html
-- Bryan Caplan
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
"I did not think; I investigated."
Wilhelm Roentgen, when asked by an interviewer what he thought on noticing some kind of light (X-ray-induced fluorescence) apparently passing through a solid opaque object. Quoted in de Solla Price, Science Since Babylon, expanded edition, p. 146.
-- Dutch proverb
Possibly it's making a subtle equivocation between "earth" and "land", that is, the Dutch obtained a lot of what is now the Netherlands by extracting underwater land from the sea (or used to, something like that). It's not just saying that the Dutch "created their nation" in the sense of laws and whatnot, but actually "made" the land for it.
My guess, anyway.
That's also how this Dutchwoman interprets it. But of course, while it literally refers to the creation of polders, the figurative meaning is 'faith might have its place, but science and hard work are what solve problems', like PhilosophyTutor said. (With a little bit of 'Gee, aren't we Dutch GREAT?' thrown in. ;p)
~ Randall Munroe, xkcd #240: Dream Girl
Except that in this case it did.
What made it real was (among other things) Randall posting that comic. He wanted the meetup, and chose that method to publicise it.
Wanting something isn't sufficient: desire is a force that acts upon you, not on the universe.
Thomas Carew
-- Alan J. Perlis, in the foreword to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
-- Questionable Content #2072
--I.J. Good (as quoted in "The Problem of Thinking Too Much" by Persi Diaconis)
-John Nash, A Beautiful Mind
In other words, recognizing that politics is the mind-killer helped Nash manage his paranoid-scizophrenia.
Or, at least, he believes it did.
The latter. I don't think Nash is a reliable narrator.
EDIT: And not merely because of his schizophrenia. Without hard data, I'd be hard-pressed to evaluate whether or not learning a mental habit increased or decreased my sanity, and that's assuming I'm sane to begin with.
Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions - Daniel Kahneman
-Randall Munroe, xkcd
Thomas Jefferson, to John Adams, August 15, 1820.
"If a theory has a lot of parameters, you adjust their values to fit a lot of data, and your theory is not really predicting those things, just accommodating them. Scientists use words like “curve fitting” and “fudge factors” to describe that sort of activity. On the other hand, if a theory has just a few parameters but applies to a lot of data, it has real power. You can use a small subset of the measurements to fix the parameters; then all other measurements are uniquely predicted. " Frank Wilczek
"With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."
John von Neumann
-Pierre de Beaumarchais (and usually incorrectly attributed to Voltaire)
I would take it to be about art in general rather than music specifically. It's socially acceptable for works of art to support a particular viewpoint - and try to convert their consumers to it - without supplying much evidence to show that it's actually true.
One example that will probably ring true with LWers is the strong lesson in lots of fiction that following one's "heart" is a better (more moral, or more likely to lead to success) course of action than following one's "head".
“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.” ― Paul Valéry
Anatole France, Le livre de mon ami (1885)
Anatole France is probably better known for saying, "La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain" - or, in English, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
I actually have a mild distrust of cognates - I don't think the connotations are necessarily preserved.
--Arthur Schopenhauer
There's not point being annoyed at nature, but a precommitment to revenge is useful.
Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2008). The sting of intentional pain. Psychological Science, 19(12), 1260-1262. pdf
More like a causation, I'd say: causation causes correlation.
The way I like to put it is this: "correlation correlates with causation because causation causes correlation." :)
Tom Lehrer, "That's Mathematics"
(If one were so inclined, one could give a quasi-rationalist commentary on practically every lyric in that song.)
(McKay & Dennett 2009)
~ Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book
~ Mencius Moldbug
-- Paul Graham, "The Age of the Essay" (http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html)
-Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation
This is just reinforcing what people (on LessWrong) already think about non-narrow AI; you could just as easily have someone say that:
I remember reading on LessWrong (though I can't find the link now) about how if folk wisdom/sayings can be reversed and applied to the situation, it means that neither is capable of giving real insight to the problem.
-Voltaire, Cato
I think this quote unfairly trivializes the subjectively (and often objectively) harsh lives suicidal people go through.
As a 911 Operator, I have spoken to hundreds of suicidal people at their very lowest moment (often with a weapon in hand). In my professional judgment, the quote is accurate for a large number of cases (obviously, there are exceptions).
I think this quote is objectively accurate:
In other words, if you ever think you want to kill yourself, there's a 90% chance you're wrong. Behave accordingly.
Quoting a forum post from a couple years ago...
"The problem with trying to extrapolate what a person would want with perfect information is, perfect information is a lot of fucking information. The human brain can't handle that much information, so if you want your extrapolatory homunculus to do anything but scream and die like someone put into the Total Perspective Vortex, you need to enhance its information processing capabilities. And once you've reached that point, why not improve its general intelligence too, so it can make better decisions? Maybe teach it a little bit about heuristics and biases, to help it make more rational choices. And you know it wouldn't really hate blacks except for those pesky emotions that get in the way, so lets throw those out the window. You know what, let's just replace it with a copy of me, I want all the cool things anyway.
Truly, the path of a utilitarian is a thorny one. That's why I prefer a whimsicalist moral philosophy. Whimsicalism is a humanism!"
The sophisticated reader presented with a slippery slope argument like that one first checks whether there really is a force driving us in a particular direction, that makes the metaphorical terrain a slippery slope rather than just a slippery field, and secondly they check whether there are any defensible points of cleavage in the metaphorical terrain that could be used to build a fence and stop the slide at some point.
The slippery slope argument you are quoting, when uprooted and placed in this context, seems to me to fail both tests. There's no reason at all to descend progressively into the problems described, and even if there was you could draw a line and say "we're just going to inform our mental model of any relevant facts we know that it doesn't, and fix any mental processes our construct has that are clearly highly irrational".
You haven't given us a link but going by the principle of charity I imagine that what you've done here is take a genuine problem with building a weakly God-like friendly AI and tried to transplant the argument into the context of intervening in a suicide attempt, where it doesn't belong.
~Epictetus
This is rather self-serving: the Stoics in general were renowned (and well-paid) teachers. (More practically, I've seen some articles suggesting that, in the US, the cost of some majors now outweighs the monetary benefits. The cost of education should at least be considered.)
--Max Tegmark, asking for some quantitative information in a vague lecture.
--Gregory Cochran
-- Steven Kaas
“If you follow the ways in which you were trained, which you may have inherited, for no other reason than this, you are illogical.”
--Jalaluddin Rumi
Louis C.K., Live at the Beacon Theater
"'...You are now nearly at childhood's end; you are ready for the truth's weight, to bear it. The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theater. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcomes resolve all-- all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify an audience. An audience.' He made a gesture I can't describe: 'Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality-- there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth-- actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.'"
"'Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsquence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui-- these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.'"
David Foster Wallace, The Pale King, p. 232
--Heinrich Heine; an early, little-known German contribution to the Evil Overlord List.
Of course. What he's describing isn't rationality, it's dysrationalia - and especially the ability to compartmentalize. The rational ones in this passage are the young, who are "intimately and passionately concerned" with the existence of God, Free Love versus Catholic Morality, and so on. More than anything I see this quote as a caution against losing the fire in your belly.
Gerry Spence (emphasis his)
-Doctor Who, Season 5, Episode 5
So long as it is kept in mind that "How impossible?" is merely a more polite and less coherent way of replying "Bullshit. How difficult is it really?".
(I can't give the exact quote, as it's hearsay, and I'm translating it back into English from Russian)
During WW2, British aircraft engineers had to reach a compromise between an airplane's structural durability and other uses of weight such as armor, defensive armament, etc. The odds of losing a bomber due to its structure falling apart were much less than those of it simply being shot down; 1:10000 and 1:20 respectively. Yet when the designers proposed sacrificing some structural integrity to improve the bomber's armor plating or machineguns, the pilots w... (read more)
Fritz Zwicky, Morphological Astronomy
“Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.” - Zen saying
A warning that not all hyperrationality is beneficial.
Or a warning that the Zen notion of enlightenment won't let you automate menial tasks you dislike.
...or another way of saying "it all adds up to normal."
Euripides, Helen
-- Guy Steele, Growing a Language (pdf)
“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.” - Sir Francis Bacon
"The Latest Toughs" by Okkervil River http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tziQcj4XIYw
--PZ Myers
-- Daniel Shelton, re-founder of the Flat Earth Society
(We're looking for good illustrations of motivated uncertainty, insistence that no conclusion can be drawn from overwhelming data. Shelton may not be a good example because he is probably a deliberate troll who does not really believe the Earth is flat. Also, religious examples are excluded, bu... (read more)
-- Wendell Johnson, as quoted in Language Thought and Action
--Christopher Hitchens (Dec. 15 December 2011) The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-believer
Let's go for two-in-one this time:
-- Finn's Note, from "The Real You"
An example of working precommitment (to a plan that may involve forgetting the plan).
"Clear language engenders clear thought, and clear thought is the most important benefit of education." - Richard Mitchell, The Graves of Academe
After describing an odd subjective experience:
... (read more)--Asher Peres
Seeing how individual decisions are rational within the bounds of the information available does not provide an excuse for narrow-minded behavior. It provides an understanding of why that behavior arises. Within the bounds of what a person in that part of the system can see and know, the behavior is reasonable. Taking out one individual from a position of bounded rationality and putting in another person is not likely to make much difference. Blaming the individual rarely helps create a more desirable outcome. – Donella H Meadows
-John Lennon on leaving a line of retreat
-- Kiwi Dave
-- Salman Khan
(Edit: Pretty sure he means "sci-fi book".)
African proverb
Whoops, didn't mean to retract that. The quote is "The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now." - African proverb
Richard Scholz
Is there some research corroborating this quote? I have a lot of useless knowledge but it doesn't seem to stop me from accumulating useful knowledge. It does make sense to avoid spending time and energy on acquiring useless knowledge, though.
-- Scott Adams
-- Warhammer 40,000
I have a policy of down-voting quotes that are simply anti-religious cheering.
-- Terence McKenna, Culture and Ideology are Not Your Friends
We should implement a filter that changes the above phrase to "The USA in the 1950s". Because then the statements that include the phrase would generally become true.
I don't really disagree with the point he's trying to make there, and if we restrict ourselves to talking about post-Enlightenment Western cultures the argument might be largely accurate; but over all cultures in all times and places he's simply wrong.
It's actually fairly unusual for a culture to be consistently forward-looking at all, let alone to assume that the solutions to all its problems and the answers to all its open questions will arrive in a few years or decades. Most seem to have assumed that the present world's unusually debased and that things will only get worse, usually culminating in some sort of cataclysm; compare Hesiod's Ages of Man, the Kali Yuga, et cetera. This sort of thing might seem like a reactionary fantasy to us here and now, but that or a cyclical viewpoint or some combination are part of the bedrock of myth in essentially all the traditional cultures I know anything about.
-Homer Simpson