Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:
- 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Hofstadter on the necessary strangeness of scientific explanations:
... (read more)Moliere, Le Malade Imaginere (1673), Act III, sc. iii.
A lesson here is that if you ask "Why X?" then any answer of the form "Because " is not actually progress toward understanding.
Synonyms are not good for explaining... because there is no explanatory power in them.
I found your post funny... because it amused me.
Ah, David Wong. A few movies in the post-9/11 era begin using terrorism and asymmetric warfare as a plot point? Proof that Hollywood no longer favors the underdog. Meanwhile he ignores... Daredevil, Elektra, V for Vendetta, X-Men, Kickass, Punisher, and Captain America, just to name the superhero movies I've seen which buck the trend he references, and within the movies he himself mentions, he intentionally glosses over 90% of the plots in order to make his point "stick." In some cases (James Bond, Sherlock Holmes) he treats the fact that the protagonists win as the proof that they weren't the underdog at all (something which would hold in reality but not in fiction, and a standard which he -doesn't- apply when it suits his purpose, a la his comments about the first three Die Hard movies being about an underdog whereas the most recent movie isn't).
Yeah. Not all that impressed with David Wong. His articles always come across as propaganda, carefully and deliberately choosing what evidence to showcase. And in this case he's deliberately treating the MST3K Mantra as some kind of propaganda-hiding tool? Really?
These movies don't get made because Hollywood billionaires... (read more)
It is worth pointing out that this page is about quotes, not people, or even articles. I thought the quote was worth upvoting for:
I think it's because enjoying fiction involves being in a trance, and analyzing the fiction breaks the trance. I suspect that analysis is also a trance, but it's a different sort of trance.
Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design are full of amazing quotes. My personal favourite:
(See also an interesting note from HN's btilly on this law)
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2013/06/04/stanislaw-burzynski-versus-the-bbc/#comment-262541
Edward Snowden, the NSA surveillance whistle-blower.
You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney p 55,56, and 58.
Interestingly enough there is some evidence--or at least assertions by people who've studied this sort of thing--that doing this sort of problem solving ahead of time tends to reduce the paralysis.
When you get on a plane, go into a restaurant, when you're wandering down the street or when you go someplace new think about a few common emergencies and just think about how you might respond to them.
"When two planes collided just above a runway in Tenerife in 1977, a man was stuck, with his wife, in a plane that was slowly being engulfed in flames. He remembered making a special note of the exits, grabbed his wife's hand, and ran towards one of them. As it happened, he didn't need to use it, since a portion of the plane had been sheared away. He jumped out, along with his wife and the few people who survived. Many more people should have made it out. Fleeing survivors ran past living, uninjured people who sat in seats literally watching for the minute it took for the flames to reach them." - http://io9.com/the-frozen-calm-of-normalcy-bias-486764924
Against a Dark Background by Iain M. Banks.
This is because a speaker's attitude towards an object is not formed by the speaker's perception of the object; it is entirely arbitrary. Wait, no, that's not right.
And anyway, the previous use of the term "gentleman" was, in some sense, worse. Because while it had a neutral denotation ("A gentleman is any person who possesses these two qualities"), it had a non-neutral connotation.
Baroque Cycle by Neal Stphenson proves to be a very good, intelligent book series.
Daniel Waterhouse and Colonel Barnes in Solomon’s Gold
Does Colonel Barnes? If not, he is just repeating a word he has learned to say. Rather like some people today who have learned to say "entanglement", or "signalling", or "evolution", or...
I will gladly post the rest of the conversation because it reminds me of question I pondered for a while.
After that they started to discuss differences between Newton's and Leibniz theories. Newton is unable to explain why gravity can go through the earth, like... (read more)
Stanislaw Lem wrote a short story about this. (I don't remember its name.)
In the story, English detectives are trying to solve a series of cases where bodies are stolen from morgues and are later discovered abandoned at some distance. There are no further useful clues.
They bring in a scientist, who determines that there is a simple mathematical relationship that relates the times and locations of these incidents. He can predict the next incident. And he says, therefore, that he has "solved" or "explained" the mystery. When asked what actually happens - how the bodies are moved, and why - he simply doesn't care: perhaps, he suggests, the dead bodies move by themselves - but the important thing, the original question, has been answered. If someone doesn't understand that a simple equation that makes predictions is a complete answer to a question, that someone simply doesn't understand science!
Lem does not, of course, intend to give this as his own opinion. The story never answers the "real" mystery of how or why the bodies move; the equation happens to predict that the sequence will soon end anyway.
Amusingly, I read this story, but completely forgot about it. The example here is perfect. Probably I should re-read it.
For those interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Investigation
The reason Newton's laws are an improvement over Aristotelian "the nature of water is etc." is that Newton lets you make predictions, while Aristotle does not. You could ask "but WHY does gravity work like so-and-so?", but that doesn't change the fact that Newton's laws let you predict orbits of celestial objects, etc., in advance of seeing them.
That's certainly the conventional wisdom, but I think the conventional wisdom sells Aristotle and his contemporaries a little short. Sure, speaking in terms of water and air and fire and dirt might look a little silly to us now, but that's rather superficial: when you get down to the experiments available at the time, Aristotelian physics ran on properties that genuinely were pretty well correlated, and you could in fact use them to make reasonably accurate predictions about behavior you hadn't seen from the known properties of an object. All kosher from a scientific perspective so far.
There are two big differences I see, though neither implies that Aristotle was telling just-so stories. The first is that Aristotelian physics was mainly a qualitative undertaking, not a quantitative one -- the Greeks knew that the properties of objects varied in a mathematically regular way (witness Erastothenes' clever method of calculating Earth's circumference), but this wasn't integrated closely into physical theory. The other has to do with generality: science since Galileo has applied as universally as possible, though some branches reduced faster than others, but the Greeks and their medieval followers were much more willing to ascribe irreducible properties to narrow categories of object. Both end up placing limits on the kinds of inferences you'll end up making.
Single bad things happen to you at random. Iterated bad things happen to you because you're a dumbass. Related: "You are the only common denominator in all of your failed relationships."
Corollaries: The more of a dumbass you are, the less well you can recognize common features in iterated bad things. So dumbasses are, subjectively speaking, just unlucky.
The corollary is more useful than the theorem:-) If I wish to be less of a dumbass, it helps to know what it looks like from the inside. It looks like bad luck, so my first job is to learn to distinguish bad luck from enemy action. In Eliezer's specific example that is going to be hard because I need to include myself in my list of potential enemies.
What we want to find is the denominator common to all of your failed relationships, but absent from the successful relationships that other people have (the presumed question being "why do all my relationships fail, but Alice, Bob, Carol, etc. have successful ones?"). Oxygen doesn't fit the bill.
Of course, "bad things", and even more so "iterated bad things", have to be viewed relative to expectations, and at the proper level of abstraction. Explanation:
Right level of abstraction
"I punched myself in the face six times in a row, and each time, it hurt. But this is not mere bad luck! I conclude that I am bad at self-face-punching! I must work on my technique, such that I may be able to punch myself in the face without ill effect." This is the wrong conclusion. The right conclusion is "abstain from self-face-punching".
Substitute any of the following for "punching self in face":
Right expectations
"I've tried five brands of water, and none of them tasted like chocolate candy! My water-brand-selection algorithm must be flawed. I will have to be even more careful about picking only the fanciest brands of water." Again this is the wrong conclusion. The right conclusion is "This water is just fine and there was nothing wrong with my choice of brand. I simply shouldn't have such ridiculous expectations."
Substitute any of the following for "brands of water&qu... (read more)
Stepan is a smart chap. He has realized (perhaps unconsciously)
and so has outsourced them to a liberal paper.
One might compare it to hiring a fashion consultant... except it's cheap to boot!
-- Terry Prachett, Going Postal
--Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
During the Cold War, the US and British governments were shot through with hundreds of double agents for the Soviets, to an almost ludicrous extent (eg. Kim Philby apparently almost became head of MI6 before being unmasked); and of course, due to the end of the Cold War & access to Russian archives, we now have a much better idea of everything that was going on and can claim a reasonable degree of certainty as to who was a double agent and what their activities were.
With those observations in mind: can you name a single one of those double-agents who went public as a leaker as Snowden has done?
If you can name only one or two such people, and if there were, say, hundreds of regular whistleblowers over the Cold War (which seems like a reasonable figure given all the crap like MKULTRA), then the extreme unlikelihood of the Fox hypothesis seems clear...
Razib Khan
Similar thought:
-- Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
"It’s actually hard to see when you’ve fucked up, because you chose all your actions in a good-faith effort and if you were to run through it again you’ll just get the same results. I mean, errors-of-fact you can see when you learn more facts, but errors-of-judgement are judged using the same brain that made the judgement in the first place." - Collin Street
--SMBC
I wouldn't call it a punchline, exactly... I mean, it's not a joke. But in the comic it's likely a parent and child talking, and the subtext I infer is that parenting is a process of giving one's children the tools with which to construct superior solutions to life problems.
Nick Bostrom
It is perhaps worth noting that a similar comment was made by Dennett:
...in 1991 or so.
Apparently it does... a few minutes of googling turned up a cite to Rodolfo Llinas (1987), who referred to it as "a process paralleled by some human academics upon obtaining university tenure."
Has the life cycle of the sea squirt ever been notably used to describe something other than the reaction of an academic to tenure?
Hah! Um... hm. A quick perusal of Google results for "sea squirt -tenure" gets me some moderately interesting stuff about their role as high-sensitivity harbingers for certain pollutants, and something about invasive sea-squirt species in harbors. But nothing about their life-cycle per se. I give a tentative "no."
That's kind of amusing, considering that Lincoln is also famous for destroying his enemies the other way.
This would seem to further weaken the quote in as much as it is evidence that the tactic doesn't work.
Not explicitly, precisely because it is the norm. But it records a great many times when minorities have been wrong.
As things one could not mind go, literally dying in a fire seems unlikely to be a good choice.
No. Please, just no. This is the worst possible form of fighting the hypothetical. If you're going to just say "it's all hypothetical, who cares!" then please do everyone a favor and just don't even bother to respond. It's a waste of everyone's time, and incredibly rude to everyone else who was trying to have a serious discussion with you. If you make a claim, an your reasoning is shown to be inconsistent, the correct response is never to pretend it was all just a big joke the whole time. Either own up to having made a mistake (note: having made a mistake in the past is way higher status than making a mistake now. Saying "I was wrong" is just another way to say "but now I'm right". You will gain extra respect on this site from noticing your own mistakes as well.) or refute the arguments against your claim (or ask for clarification or things along those lines). If you can't handle doing either of those then tap out of the conversation. But seriously, taking up everyone's time with a counter-intuitive claim and then laughing it off when people try to engage you seriously is extremely rude and a waste of everyone's time, including yours.
You're completely right. I retract my remark.
From the remarkable opening chapter of Consciousness Explained:
--Daniel Dennett
I've had that conversation with a few people over the years, and I conclude that it does for some people and not others. The ones for whom it doesn't generally seem to think of it as a piece of misdirection, in which Dennett answers in great detail a different question than the one that was being asked. (It's not entirely clear to me what question they think he answers instead.)
That said, it's a pretty fun read. If the subject interests you, I'd recommend sitting down and writing out as clearly as you can what it is you find mysterious about subjective experience, and then reading the book and seeing if it answers, or at least addresses, that question.
Consider the following dialog:
A: "Why do containers contain their contents?"
B: "Well, because they are made out of impermeable materials arranged in such a fashion that there is no path between their contents and the rest of the universe."
A: "Yes, of course, I know that, but why does that lead to containment?"
B: "I don't quite understand. Are you asking what properties of materials make them impermeable, or what properties of shapes preclude paths between inside and outside? That can get a little technical, but basically it works like this --"
A: "No, no, I understand that stuff. I've been studying containment for years; I understand the simple problem of containment quite well. I'm asking about the hard problem of containment: how does containment arise from those merely mechanical things?"
B: "Huh? Those 'merely mechanical things' are just what containment is. If there's no path X can take from inside Y to outside Y, X is contained by Y. What is left to explain?"
A: "That's an admirable formulation of the hard problem of containment, but it doesn't solve it."
How would you reply to A?
— W. V. Quine, An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary (a whimsical and fun read)
If America needs a double agent from a hostile foreign power to merely point out to the media that their government may be doing something that some might find questionable, then America's got far bigger problems than a few spies.
And if hostile government cares more about the democratic civil liberties of Americans than Americans do then there is an even bigger problem. (The actual benefit to China of the particular activity chosen for the 'double agent' is negligible.)
T.K.V. Desikachar
-Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
I'm sure I could interpret a rationalist message from that quote, in the same way that I could derive a reasonable moral system based solely on the Book of Revelations. But that doesn't imply that my reading is intended by the author, or a plausible reading of the text.
Graffiti on the wall of an Austrian public housing block:
(German original: "Weiße Wände — hohe Mieten". I'm not actually sure it's true, but my understanding is that rent in public housing does vary somewhat with quality and it seems plausible that graffiti could enter into it. And to make the implicit explicit, the reason it seems worth posting here is how it challenges the tenants' — and my — preconceptions: You may think that from a purely selfish POV you should not want graffiti on your house, but it's quite possible that the benefits to you are higher than the costs.)
Yes.
-- Shamus Young
Thanks for the link.
Here's another good quote:
nod unfortunately, I am terrible at these sorts of plays. Thank you for your criticism, and I'll attempt to behave more gracefully in the future.
EDIT: I'm going to go ahead and trigger your downvotes, now, because reviewing the situation, I feel like I need to speak in my own defense.
I consistently lose fourty to fifty karma over the course of a few minutes, once every few days. Posts which have no possible reason why someone would downvote them get downvoted. And I do not, as you put it, "shame people who chose to downvote me". I mostly ask for an explanation why I got downvoted, so that I can improve. The ONLY time I have explicitly tried to shame someone who downvoted me was Eugine, and only after spending a very long time examining the situation and coming to the conclusion (p > 0.95) that Eugine was downvoting EVERYTHING I say, just because.
If you feel that that deserves further retributive downvoting, you are free to perform it to your heart's content; I am powerless to stop you.
John W. Holt (previously quoted here, but not in a Rationality Quotes thread)
-- Paul Rosenberg
I don't know if there are short words for this, but seems to me that some people generally assume that "things, left alone, naturally improve" and some people assume that "things, left alone, naturally deteriorate".
The first option seems like optimism, and the second option seems like pesimism. But there is a catch! In real life, many things have good aspects and bad aspects. Now the person who is "optimistic about the future of things left alone" must find a reason why things are worse than expected. (And vice versa, the person who is "pessimistic about the future of things left alone" must find a reason why things are better.) In both cases, a typical explanation is human intervention. Which means that this kind of optimism is prone to conspiracy theories. (And this kind of pessimism is prone to overestimate the benefits of human actions.)
For example, in education: For a "pessimist about spontaneous future" things are easy -- people are born stupid, and schools do a decent job at making them smarter; of course, the process is not perfect. For an "optimist about spontaneous future", children should be left alone to become... (read more)
Matt Taibbi opening paragraph in [Everything Is Rigged The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever] (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425#ixzz2W8WJ4Vix)
Your what?
No, I'm not letting it go this time. I've heard people talking about internal monologues before, but I've never been quite sure what those are - I'm pretty sure I don't have one. Could you try to define the term?
Gosh. New item added to my list of "Not everyone does that."
...I have difficulty imagining what it would be to be like someone who isn't the little voice in their own head, though. Seriously, who's posting that comment?
I may be in a somewhat unique position to address this question, as one of the many many many weird transient neurological things that happened to me after my stroke was a period I can best describe as my internal monologue going away.
So I know what it's like to be the voice in my head, and what it's like not to be.
And it's still godawful difficult to describe the difference in words.
One way I can try is this: have you ever experienced the difference between "I know what I'm going to say, and here I am saying it" and "words are coming out of my mouth, and I'm kind of surprised by what I'm hearing myself say"?
If so, I think I can say that losing my "little voice" is similar to that difference.
If not, I suspect the explanation will be just as inaccessible as the phenomenon it purported to explain, but I can try again.
...what? Wow!
I'm dying to know whether we're stumbling on a difference in the way we think or the way we describe what we think, here. To me, the first state sounds like rehearsing what I'm going to say in my head before I say it, which I only do when I'm racking my brains on eg how to put something tactfully, where the latter sounds like what I do in conversation all the time, which is simply to let the words fall out of my mouth and find out what I've said.
No! The parts of my brain that handle text generation are the only parts that... *slap*... Ow. Nevermind. It seems we have reached an 'understanding'.
Right!
I mean, I do realize you're being funny, but pretty much exactly this.
I don't recommend aphasia as a way of shock-treating this presumption, but I will admit it's effective. At some point I had the epiphany that my language-generating systems were offline but I was still there; I was still thinking the way I always did, I just wasn't using language to do it.
Which sounds almost reasonable expressed that way, but it was just about as creepy as the experience of moving my arm around normally while the flesh and bone of my arm lay immobile on the bed.
When you're playing a sport... wait, maybe you don't... okay, when you're playing an instrum—hm. Surely there is a kinesthetic skill you occasionally perform, during which your locus of identity is not in your articulatory loop? (If not, fixing that might be high value?) And you can imagine being in states similar to that much of the time? I would imagine intense computer programming sessions would be more kinesthetic than verbal. Comment linked to hints at what my default thinking process is like.
Didn't think this was going to be my first contribution to LessWrong, but here goes (hi, everybody, I'm Phil!)
I came to what I like to think was a realisation useful to my psychological health a few months ago when I was invited to realise that there is more to me than my inner monologue. That is, I came to understand that identifying myself as only the little voice in my head was not good for me in any sense. For one thing, my body is not part of my inner monologue, ergo I was a fat guy, because I didn't identify with it and therefore didn't care what I fed it on. For another, one of the things I explicitly excluded from my identity was the subprocess that talks to people. I had (and still have) an internal monologue, but it was at best only advisory to the talking process, so you can count me as one of the people for whom conversation is not something I'm consciously acting on. Result: I didn't consider the person people meet and talk to to be "me", but (as I came to understand), nevertheless I am held responsible for everything he says and does.
My approach to this was somewhat luminous avant (ma lecture de) la lettre: I now construe my identity as consisting of at... (read more)
From the comments on the article on the jobs for good-looking.
This is a nice calculation with a fairly simple causal diagram. The basic point is that if you think people are repeatedly hired either for their looks or for being a good worker, then among the pool of people who are repeatedly hired, looks and good work are negatively correlated.
That's called Berkson's paradox.
“Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.” --Lord Byron.
All too often those who are least rational in their best moments are the greatest supporters of using one's head, if only to avoid too early a demise. I wonder how many years Lord Byron gained from rational thought, and which of the risks he took did he take because he was good at betting...
--Nick Szabo, Falsifiable design: A methodology for evaluting theoretical technologies
-- R. Hanson
I'm under the impression that all EY / RH quotes are discouraged, as described in this comment tree, which suggests the following rule should be explicitly amended to be broader:
Sounds like Takamachi Nanoha to me.
Substitute "friends" with "trading partners" and the outlook improves though.
--Joshua Lang, New York Times, June 12, 2013, What Happens to Women Who Are Denied Abortions?
“Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.” --Jules Verne.
The fellow had a brilliant grasp of how to make scientific discovery interesting, and I think people could learn a thing or two from reading his stuff, still.
-Stabby the Raccoon
--W. Timothy Gallwey, Inner Tennis: Playing the Game
The Buddha
I've heard this quoted a lot, but I can't find the original source.
Richard Feynman tells the story of how he learned that thinking isn't only internal monologue.
A spherically symmetric shell has no effect on the gravitational field inside. It will not pull the surface of a hollow Earth outwards.
Tuco, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
I just watched Oz the Great and Powerful, the big-budget fanfic prequel film to The Wizard of Oz. Hardly a rationalist movie, but there was some nice boosting of science and technology where I didn't expect it. So here's the quotation:
(There's more, but this is all that I could get out of the Internet and my memory.)
Rosenberg writes:
Plenty of big banks did make money by betting on the crisis. There were a lot of cases where banks sold their clients products the banks knew that the products would go south.
Realising that there are important political things that don't happen in the open is a meaningful conclusion. Matt isn't in a position where he can make claims for which he doesn't have to provide evidence.
In 2011 Julian Assange told the press that the US government has an API with the can use to query the data that they like from facebook. On the skeptics stackexchange website there a question whether their's evidence for Assange claim or whether he makes it up. It doesn't mention the possibility that Assange just refers to nonpublic information. The orthodox skeptic just rejects claims without public proof.
Two years later we know have decent evidence that the US has that capability via PRISM. In 2011 Julian had the knowledge that it happ... (read more)
On this site, it's probably worth clarifying that "evidence" here refers to legally admissible evidence, lest we go down an unnecessary rabbit hole.
-- Doug McDuff, M.D., and John Little, Body by Science, pp. x-xi
Yup.
— Mark Salter & Trevor H. Turner, Community Mental Health Care: A practical guide to outdoor psychiatry
Though you can still find subjects who don't know the outcome, ask them for their predictions, and compare those predictions with subjects who are told the outcome to find the size of the hindsight bias.
I believe the implication is "I am doing you a favor by spraying graffiti on your apartment building, because that will cause your rent to decrease."
I don't know if this is actually true, but that's what I take to be the intent.
--Thomas M Georges, Digital Soul, 2004, p. 14
From your link: Sense of "gracious, kind" (now obsolete) first recorded late 13c.; that of "mild, tender" is 1550s.
This is, of course, exactly what the halo effect would predict; a word that means "good" in some context should come to mean "good" in other contexts. The same effect explains the euphemism treadmill, as a word that refers to a disfavored group is treated as an insult.
Jim Holt
Would the static look any different if it was 0% though?
Yes, it wouldn't be peaked at about 3 GHz. Since television only goes up to about 1 GHz, this means more noise at higher channels after accounting for other sources.
Elvis Presley
-- Albert Einstein
I think your tulpa is playing tricks on you. A shell around the Earth will have no effect on the interactions of bodies within it, or their interactions with everything outside the shell.
From David Shields' Reality Hunger:
--Oscar Wilde on signalling.
(Architect Melandri to Noemi, the girl he is in love with, who thinks the flood of 1966 was sent as an answer to her prayers)
All my Friend, Act II [roughly translated by me]
This is yet another reason why a God that answers prayers is far, far crueler than an indifferent Azathoth. Imagine the weight of guilt that must settle on a person if they prayed for the wrong thing and God answered!
On another note, that girl must not be very picky, if God has to destroy a whole city to keep her a virgin...(please don't blast me for this!)
Jon Elster
Even if altruism turns out to be a really subtle form of self-interest, what does it matter? An unwoven rainbow still has all its colors.
Rational distress-minimizers would behave differently from rational atruists. (Real people are somewhere in the middle and seem to tend toward greater altruism and less distress-minimization when taught 'rationality' by altruists.)
Part 1:
The idea of having a "true probability" can be extremely misleading. If I flip a coin but don't look at it, I may call it a 50% probability of tails, but reality is sitting right there in my hand with probability 100%. The probability is not in the external world - the coin is already heads or tails. The probability is just 50% because I haven't looked at the coin yet.
What sometimes confuses people is that there can be things in the world that we often think of as probabilities, and those can have a true value. For example, if I have a... (read more)
If you find the truth, continue the search for it regardless.
Forget about arriving at the truth, rather practice the methods that brings you closer to truths.
The intended meaning has something to do with the Buddhist concept that the practice of Buddhism (basically meditation) is the realization of Buddhahood, and instead of accepting any Buddha you meet, you must simply continue your practice.
Today we kneel only to hypocrisy.
Unfortunately, even if the effect is real, hanging a lantern on it probably neutralizes it.
It may be useful to recognize that this is a choice, rather than an innate principle of identity. The parts that speak are just modules, just like the parts that handle motor control. They can (and often do) run autonomously, and then the module that handles generating a coherent narrative stitches together an explanation of why you "decided" to cause whatever they happened to generate.
That depends on the parents. Yes, many parents (including mine and, presumably, yours) have the best interests of the child at heart, and have the knowledge and ability to be able to serve those interests quite well.
This is not, however, true of all parents. There's no entrance exam for parenthood. Thus:
- Some parents are directly abusive to their children (including: many parents who abuse alcohol and/or drugs)
- Some parents are total idiots; even if they have the best interests of the child at heart, they have no idea what to do about it
- Some parents are
... (read more)Yeah, something clicked while I was reading an old encyclopedia sometime around age 7; I remember it quite vividly. My brain started being able to process chunks of text at a time instead of single words, so I could sort of focus on the middle of a short sentence or phrase and read the whole thing at once. I went from reading at about one-quarter conversation speed, to about ten times conversation speed, over the course of a few minutes. I still don't quite understand what the process was that enabled the change; I just sort of experienced it happening.
One... (read more)
Downvoted, unread. This is the place for quotes, not essays. (And if you object that there's no rule about the size of the quotes, I'll downvote you again)
In my example, my husband and I are two people, anticipating the experience of two people. In your example, I am one person, anticipating the experience of two people. It seems to me that what my husband and I anticipate in my example is analogous to what I anticipate in your example.
But, regardless, I agree that we're just disagreeing about names, and if you prefer the approach of not talking about "I expect" in such cases, that's OK with me.
The theory that there is nothing but zombies runs into the much bigger difficulty of explaining to myself why I'm a zombie. When I poke myself with a needle, I sure as hell have the qualia of pain.
And don't tell me it's an illusion - any illusion is a qualia by itself.
This seems empirically false.
No, Dennett explicitly denies that the brain makes up information to fill the blind spot. This is central to his thesis. He creates a whole concept called 'figment' to mock this notion.
His position is that nothing within the brain's narrative generators expects, requires, or needs data from the blind spot; hence, in consciousness, the blind spot doesn't exist. No gaps need to be filled in, any more that HJPEV can be aware t... (read more)
I cashed out "unanswerable" to "should be dissolved."
The p-zombie doesn't, because the p-zombie is not a logically consistent concept. Imagine if there was a word that meant "four-sided triangle" - that's the level of absurdity that the 'p-zombie' idea represents.
On the other hand, the epiphenomenal consciousness (for which I'll accept the appelature 'homunculus' until a more consistent and accurate one occurs to me) is simply mistaken in that it is drawing too large a boundary in some respects, and too small a boundary in others. It's drawing a line around certain phenomena and ascribing a causal... (read more)
Or more precisely:
..Most actors don't think enough, and most thinkers don't act enough. cf. Dunning-Kruger effect.
Extroverts and Introverts typically line up with those two categories quite neatly, and in my observation tend to associate mainly with people of similar temperament (allowing them to avoid much of the pressure to be more balanced they'd find in a less homogenous social circle). I believe that this lack of balan... (read more)
When you're hoping the saber-tooth tiger won't notice you.
-- John Galsworthy
"Why do people worry about mad scientists? It's the mad engineers you have to watch out for." - Lochmon
Considering the "mad scientists" keep building stuff, perhaps the question is "Why do people keep calling mad engineers mad scientists?"
Comic
By the way, Sam Harris wrote an essay starting with this quote, called 'Killing the Buddha'.
http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/killing-the-buddha/
— Herbert Simon
Calling different but somewhat related things the same when they are not does not warrant "rationality quote" status.
I acknowledge & respect this criticism, but for two reasons I maintain Simon had a worthwhile insight(!) here that bears on rationality:
Insight, intuition & recognition aren't quite the same, but they overlap greatly and are closely related.
Simon's comment, although not literally true, is a fertile hypothesis that not only opens eyeholes into the black boxes of "insight" & "intuition", but produces useful predictions about how minds solve problems.
I should justify those. Chapter 4 of Simon's The Sciences of the Artificial, "Remembering and Learning: Memory as Environment for Thought", is relevant here. It uses chess as a test case:
... (read more)Evolution is satisfied if at least some of the children live to breed. There are several possible strategies that parents can follow here; having many children and encouraging promiscuity would satisfy evolutionary reasons and likely do so better than having few children and ensuring that they are properly educated. Evolutionary reasons are insufficient to ensure... (read more)
"Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right." --Isaac Asimov
All too often, an intuition creates mistakes which rationality must remedy, when one is presented with a complex problem in life. No fault of the intuition, of course--it is merely the product of nature.
Ehh.. Todays children are often subject to much more limited familial authority than were 19th century women. It is for example illegal to use physical force on them in a great many places.
Shouldn't you anticipate being either clone with 100% probability, since both clones will make that claim and neither can be considered wrong?
That could work! On the other hand, it may set up a situation where a person who is only guilty of being raised in the wrong place may never get a decent job. Wonder what can be done to prevent that as much as possible?
Scott Aaronson in The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine.
Second clarifying question, then: Can you describe what 'identifying the loop' would look like?
Quick clarifying question: How small does something need to be for you to consider it a "circuit"?
Hijacking this thread to ask if anybody else experiences this - when I watch a movie told from the perspective of a single character or with a strong narrator, my internal monologue/narrative will be in that character's/narrator's tone of voice and expression for the next hour or two. Anybody else?
You're claiming that you understand his thought better than he does. That is a severe accusation and is not epistemologically justified. Also, I can't recall off the top of my head any time somebody insulted me, I think my reaction would depend on the context, but I don't see why it will involve imagined words.
I think the quote is alluding to capital 'S' scientist rather than a particular group of humans. In theory a Scientist's cause to be correct, while human scientists want to be right.
I agree with you; the context from earlier in the strip was about reading a study with evidence pointing to T-rexes being a timid scavenger, and then getting transported back in time and seeing a T-rex acting timid.
Didn't we do this last month ?
Apparently the Buddha has reincarnated, so we need to kill him again. It's like playing the World of Warcraft.
You may be thinking your priorities are more typical than they are. A straight forward utilitarian might think its a reasonable view / goal. There are lots of people out there.
As a more general point rationality doesn't speak to end goals, it speaks to achieving those goals. See orthogonality hypothesis.
Not everyone who speaks about morality automatically sinks down into nonsense and intuition, into the depths of accusations and praise for particular persons, however strange the language they use. Sometimes, speaking about morality means speaking about rationality, surviving and thriving, etc. It may be a mistake to think that Asimov was entirely ignorant of the philosophies this website promotes, given his work in science and the quotes one finds from his interviews, letters, and stories.
How comes six people downvoted this? While I can think of a few relevant differences between women then and children today, it's not so obvious to me that they'd be so obvious to everybody as to justify unexplained downvotes.
Thanks for the cite: sadly, on clicking through, I get a menacing error message in a terrifying language, so evidently you can't share it that way? You are quite right that it's consistent. It's just that it surprised my model, which was saying "if realistic mental imagery is going to happen anywhere, surely it's going to be dreams, that seems obviously the time-of-least-contention-for-visual-workspace."
I'm beginning to wonder whether any useful phenomenology at all survives the Typical Mind Fallacy. Right now, if somebody turned up claiming that... (read more)
I was under the impression you wanted to improve things significantly. Hence why I mentioned that issue--and it IS an issue.
Matt isn't a mainstream journalist. On the other hand he writes about stuff that you can easily document instead of writing about Rothschilds, Masons and the Illuminati.
He isn't the kind of person who cares about symbolic issues such as whether the members of the Bohemian grove do mock human sacrifices.
In the post I link to he makes his case by arguing facts.
Careful, there are some tricky conceptual waters here. Strictly, anything I want to do can be ascribed to my emotional response to it, because that's how nature made us pursue goals. "They did it because of the emotional response it invoked" is roughly analogous to "They did it because their brain made them do it."
The cynical claim would be that if people could get the emotional high without the altruisti... (read more)
I wouldn't say I literally hear the voice; I can easily distinguish it from sounds I'm actually hearing. But the experience is definitely auditory, at least some of the time; I could tell you whether the voice is male or female, what accent they're speaking in (usually my own), how high or low the voice is, and so on.
I definitely also have non-auditory thoughts as well. Sometimes they're visual, sometimes they're spatial, and sometimes they don't seem to have any sensory-like component at all. (For what it's worth, visual and spatial thoughts are essential to the way I think about math.)
--... (read more)
There is already a word for "don't think about, don't care about, don't act based on, don't know how many there were". That word is "disregarding", which is used in the original quote. It then adds, a fortiori, "and in many cases outright denying the existence of victims of drone strikes". In that context, it cannot mean anything but "explicitly say that there are no victims", and in addition, that this has actually happened in "many" cases.
By "in many cases outright denying the existence of victims of drone strikes", I think that the author meant "in many cases (i.e., many strikes), outright denying that some of the victims are in fact victims."
The author is probably referring to the reported policy of considering all military-age males in a strike-zone to be militants (and hence not innocent victims). I take the author to be claiming that (1) non-militant military-age male victims of drone strikes exist in many cases, and (2) the reported policy amounts to "outright denying the existence" of those victims.
People who are depressed can quite reasonably want to raise their level of happiness-- their baseline is below what makes sense for their situation.
There's a difference between wanting to raise one's level of happiness and wanting to raise it as high as possible.
In the sense of the experience not happening if that circuit doesn't work, yes.
In the sense of being able to give a soup-to-nuts story of how events in the world result in a subjective experience that has that specific character, no.
Certainly. How far do you want to go? Maps are not territories, but some maps provide useful representations of territories for certain contexts and purposes.
The danger represented by "I" and "is" come from their tendency to blow away the map-territory relation, and convince the reader that an identity exists between a particular concept and a particular phenomenon.
I have also found that process useful (although like 'I', there are contexts where it is very cumbersome to get around using them).
This body works construction.
Jobs are a particularly egregious case where tabooing "is" seems like a good idea - do you find the idea that people "are" their jobs a particularly useful encapsulation of the human experience? Do you, personally find your self fully encapsulated by the ritualized economic actions you perform?
High, if they happen to be foundational.
Sometimes you get spandrels, and sometimes you get systems built on foundations that are no longer what we would call "adaptive", but that can't be removed without crashing systems that are adaptive.
Yes(ish), on the basis that the change between me(expr1) and me(expr2) is small enough that assigning them a single consistent identity is more convenient than acknowledging the differences.
But if I'm operating in a more rigorous context, then no; under most circumstances that appear to require epistemological rigor, it seems better to taboo concepts like "I" and "is" altogether.
Shooting the messenger! :-(
Exeunt.
(In all earnestness, it works better with comment... (read more)
I appear to be confused.
Are you implying that subjective self-image is something that we should respect rather than analyze?
Where does that intersect with "that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be"?
"I'm dying to know whether we're stumbling on a difference in the way we think or the way we describe what we think, here." wasn't asking?
-Dr. Raymond Peat
I'm not sure I agree in the general case, and I think that among LessWrongers things are certainly unbalanced in the other direction.
I didn't mean to imply that a rational person should be willing to pay any possible price to raise his happiness.
Imani Coppola
Yea I sometimes struggle with that: Taken at face value, the quote is of course trivially wrong. However, it can be steelmanned in a few interesting ways. Then again, so can a great many random quotes. If, say, EY posted that quote, people may upvote after thinking of a steelmanned version. Whereas with someone else, fewer readers will bother, and downvote since at a first approximation the statement is wrong. What do, I wonder?
(Example: "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!" - Well downvoted, because killing is wrong! Or upvoted, because e.g. even "you may hold no sacred beliefs" isn't sacred? Let's find out.)
Since as lukeprog writes one of the methods for becoming happier is to "Develop the habit of gratitude" here is a quote of stuff to be thankful for: "
... (read more)The taxes I pay because it means that I am employed
The clothes that fit a little too snug because it means I have enough to eat
My shadow who watches me work because it means I am out in the sunshine
A lawn that has to be mowed, windows that have to be washed, and gutters that need fixing because it means I have a home
The spot I find at the far end of the parking lot because it means I
I would still have enough to eat if my clothes fit, I would still have a home if my lawn were self-mowing, I would still be able to hear if she sang more tunefully, I would still be alive if I didn't set my alarm, etc. Taking advantage of these sorts of moments as opportunities to practice gratitude is a fine practice, but it's far better to practice gratitude for the thing I actually want (enough to eat, a home, hearing, life, etc.) than for the indicators of it I'd prefer to be rid of.
I'm fairly certain that's not how you're supposed to develop a habit of gratitude. It's not about doublithinking yourself into believing you like things that you dislike; it's to help you notice more things you like.
I've been doing a gratitude journal. I write three short notes from the last day where I was thankful for something a person did (eg, saving me a brownie or something). Then I take the one that makes me happiest and write a 1 paragraph description of what occurred, how I felt, and such that writing the paragraph makes me relive the moment. Then I write out a note (that is usually later transcribed) to a past person in my gratitude journal.
When I think of that person or think back to that day, I'm immediately able to recall any nice things they did that I wrote down. Also, as I go through my life, I'm constantly looking for things to be thankful for, and notice and remember them more easily.
If you do something like in the quote, it seem more likely that you'll remember negative things (that you pretend to be positive). It goes against the point of the exercise.
The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli, p. 33.
I prefer to quantify my lack of information and call it a prior. Then it's even better than wrong information!
I want to point out that in this post, you were quoting sediment quoting Hofstadter who was referencing Hanson's quoting of Heisenberg. Pretty sure even Inception didn't go that deep.
It's not just the words you're squeezing, it's the medium — the fact that the words are written in graffiti.
I agree that a nice neighborhood is the point of paying rent, and your comment about people who want to live in slums, etc. I'm not sure that graffiti by itself constitutes neighborhood-not-niceness, but of course it's correlated with lots of other things, and there's the broken windows theory, etc.
To a poor person, having walls at all is more important than having white walls.
The jargon introduction was yours, not Asimov's or mine and your interpretation of his advice to be telling to people to ignore ethical injunctions is uncharitable as a reading of his intent and mistaken as a claim about the how the LW concept applies.
Yes, really. I don't know what you are basing this 'consideration' on.
An example of following Asimov's advice would be someone with strong moral sense... (read more)
--Scott Adams, I Want My Cheese
I don't think that's the situation here though. That sounds like a description of this situation: (imagine) we have weak evidence that 1) snakes are sapient, and we grant that 2) sapience is morally significant. Therefore (perhaps) we should avoid wonton harm to snakes.
Part of why this argument might make sense is that (1) and (2) are independent. Our confidence in (2) is not contingent on the small probability that (1) ... (read more)
Reading through some AI literature, I stumbled upon a nicely concise statement of the core of decision theory, from Lindley (1985):
... (read more)Moral implications of a proposition in the absence of evidence one way or another for that proposition are insufficient to justify caring.
If I actually care about the experiences of minds capable of experiences, I do best to look for evidence for the presence or absence of such experiences.
Failing such evidence, I do best to concentrate my attention elsewhere.
For my part, my social intuitions respond differently to those cases for two major reasons, as far as I can tell. First, I seem to have a higher expectation that someone will respond to an explanation of a downvote with a legalistic objection than that they will beat their spouses, so responding to the possibility of the former seems more justified. In fact, the former seems entirely plausible, while the second seems unlikely. Second, being accused of the latter seems much more serious than being accused of the former, and require correspondingly stronger ... (read more)
This may be a situation where that's a messy question. After all, qualia are experience. I keep expecting experiences, and I keep having experiences. Do experiences have to be publicly verifiable?
Would you expect that reply to convince A?
Or would you just accept that A might go on believing that there's something important and ineffable left to explain about containment, and there's not much you can do about it?
Or something else?
I can no longer remember if there was actually an active David when I joined, or if I just picked the name on a lark. I frequently introduce myself in real life as "Dave -- no, not that Dave, the other one."
The principle here is that an attribute x of an entity A is not explained by reference to a constituent entity B that has the same property. The strength of an arch is a property of arches, for example, not of the things from which arches are constituted.
That doesn't imply that theremust be a B in the first place, merely that whether there is or not, referring to B.x in order to explain A.x leaves x unexplained. (Of course, if there is no B, referring to B.x has other problems as well.)
I suspect the "top"/"bottom"/"level" anal... (read more)
Timothy Burke
You may have missed the idea of a quote here.
I don't think a single downvote is that significant. I've seen so many inexplicable downvotes that I would suspect there's a bot that every time a new comment is posted generates a random number between 0 and 1 and downvotes the comment if the random number is less than 0.05 -- if I could see any reason why anyone would do that.
S/he is making a pun of the typo: "what grater proof..." instead of "what greater proof...". (I don't find it a very funny pun myself.)
Sorry, I don't understand your rephrasing. Must be the inference gap between a philosopher and a scientist.
The colour of the sky? What direction a rock goes if you drop it from near the ground?
No.
I'm just opinionated on the subject.