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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.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.
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)
Richard Feynman tells the story of how he learned that thinking isn't only internal monologue.
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
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.
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
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."
From the remarkable opening chapter of Consciousness Explained:
--Daniel Dennett
A spherically symmetric shell has no effect on the gravitational field inside. It will not pull the surface of a hollow Earth outwards.
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)
T.K.V. Desikachar
-Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
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.)
-- Shamus Young
Thanks for the link.
Here's another good quote:
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)
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.
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.
An Idiot Plot is any plot that goes away if the characters stop being idiots. A Muggle Plot is any plot which dissolves in the presence of transhumanism and polyamory. That exact form is surprisingly common; e.g. from what I've heard, canon!Twilight has two major sources of conflict, Edward's belief that turning Bella into a vampire will remove her soul, and Bella waffling between Edward and Jacob. I didn't realize it until Baughn pointed it out, but S1 Nanoha - not that I've watched it, but I've read fanfictions - counts as a Muggle Plot because the entire story goes away if Precia accepts the pattern theory of identity.
I think the idea is not so much "rare preference" as "constrained preference," where that constraint is not relevant / interesting to the reader. Looking at gay fiction, there's lots of works in settings where homosexuality is forbidden, and lots of works in settings where homosexuality is accepted. A plot that disappears if you tried to move it to a setting where homosexuality is accepted seems too local; I've actually mostly grown tired of reading those because I want them to move on and get to something interesting. I imagine that's how it feels for a polyamorist to read Bella's indecision.
To use the ice cream example, imagine trying to read twenty pages on someone in an ice cream shop, agonizing over whether to get chocolate or strawberry. "Just get two scoops already!"
(shrug) My husband and I live in a largely poly-normative social environment, and are monogamous. We don't object, we simply aren't interested. It still makes "oh noes! which lover do I choose! I want them both!" plots seem stupid, though. ("if you want them both, date them both... what's the difficulty here?")
So, no, acknowledging that polyamory is something some people decide is a good idea doesn't force me to "admit" that monogamy is a bad idea.
Admittedly, I'm also not sure why it would be sad if it did.
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.
--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
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.)
-- Doug McDuff, M.D., and John Little, Body by Science, pp. x-xi
— 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.
--Thomas M Georges, Digital Soul, 2004, p. 14
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
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.)
-- 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
— Herbert Simon