This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.
- 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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.
"I accidentally changed my mind."
my four-year-old
-- Gregory Bateson, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind"
When you interact with someone, you may think, I will do this, so that they will do that, or think such-and-such, or feel thus-and-so; but what is actually going on for them may bear no resemblance to the model of them that you have in your head. If your model is wrong at the meta-level -- you are wrong about how people work -- then you will either notice that you have difficulty dealing with people at all, or not notice that the problem is with you and get resentful at everyone else for not behaving as you expect them to.
Here, Mrs. B.F. Skinner imagines that she is reinforcing the behaviour that she desires, of eating spinach, by providing the reinforcer, ice-cream. Or is she really punishing the consumption of ice-cream by associating it with spinach? Or associating herself with an unpleasant situation? Or any number of other possibilities.
Sure thing. For me, it was the sudden realization that I had made assumptions from the very start of reading it, and that I had ranked certain outcomes far lower than the problem -- taken in isolation -- would justify.
When I read it, I immediately thought, "Okay, rewarding a kid for eating spinach, same ol' same ol' ..."; then when I got to the end, I -- very quickly -- absorbed the insight that, in order for the process not to result in the child hating the mother, certain conditions have to hold, which are probably worthy of probing in depth.
I know all of this may sound obvious, but I really had an aha!/gotcha! moment on that one.
— Leo Tolstoy, 1896 (excerpt from "What Is Art?")
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
He seems to have understood that 0 and 1 are not probabilities.
"It's wonderful how much we suck compared to us ten years from now!"
-- Michael Blume
(Raymond Smullyan)
I have found it in an OB comment by Zubon, but it was never posted as a rationality quote.
Another Twain quote.
On a similar theme:
TV Tropes
I've asked this question before, but where the hell does the high-quality rationality on TV Tropes come from?
-- W. C. Fields
-- jman3030
-Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
"Sanity is conforming your thoughts to reality. Conforming reality to your thoughts is creativity."
-- Unknown
clippy.paperclips: how many humans, as a fraction of total humans, have a belief about whether or not they are a human, and believe they are not a human?
me: this is a subculture of humans that believes they are really animals: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_fandom
clippy.paperclips: so those are the normal ones? and it's like a war against the irrational majority?
me: bad example.
-- Dylan Thomas
THE SCANSION IS QUITE PLEASING.
Not strictly a rationality quote, but screw it, it's beautiful anyway:
... (read more)"You rationalize, Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can't reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of Holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can't be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt—species die—and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even knowing what it is."
--Jukka Sarasti, rationalist vampire in Peter Watts's Blindsight. Great book on neuroscience and map != territory.
-- Stephen Jay Gould
-- Democritus
That's not true. He had perfectly good reasons for atomism in his context.
The ontological arguments of Parmenides (and as exposited by Melissus) lead to extremely unpalatable, if not outright contradictory, conclusions, such as there being no time or change or different entities. The arguments seem valid, and most of their premises are reasonable, but one of his most important and questionable premises is that void cannot exist.
Reject that premise and you are left with matter and void. How are matter and void distributed? Well, either matter can be indefinitely chopped up (continuous) or it must halt and be discrete at some point. The Pluralists like Anaxagoras take the former approach, but continuousness leads to its own issues with regard to change.* So to avoid issues with infinity, you must have discrete matter with size/divison limits - _atom_s.
So, Democritus and Leucippus are led to Atomism as the one safe path through a thicket of paradoxes and problems. Describing it as wild conjecture is deeply unfair, and, I hope, ignorant.
* One argument, if I remember it from Sextus Empiricus's Against the Physicists correctly, is that if matter really is infinitely divisible, then you ... (read more)
You make a good case. I repudiate my previous statement.
From The Dharma Talks of Zen Master Bankei, translated by Norman Waddell. Quoted by Torkel Franzén as a perfect description of Usenet flamewars.
What I cannot build, I do not understand.
— Errett Bishop
-- Thomas Cathcart & Daniel Klein, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... : Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes
-- Publius Syrus
-- old Chinese saying
-- Eric Pepke
"He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth." -- Goethe
"We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance" - John Archibald Wheeler
Montesquieu, "The Spirit of the Laws", book XXV, chapter XIII. (Link to the book, Original French)
-- Queen Juliana
-- Clark Glymour, What Went Wrong: Reflections on Science by Observation
Longer version:
... (read more)Gawande on information overload in medicine
--James P. Carse, _Finite and Infinite Games_
"Every conviction is a prison" ---- Nietzsche
"All generalizations are false, including this one."
-Mark Twain
"The Master said, Yu, shall I tell you what knowledge is? When you know a thing, to know that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to recognize that you do not know it. That is knowledge."
Analects of Confucius (Wayley's translation.)
(This quotation is an epigram to chapter 1 of Harold Jeffreys' Scientific Inference, 1957, Cambridge University Press.)
Found here
- Beta Ray Bill
-- Alonzo Fyfe
-Nietzche
-KPAX
(I do not present this as an endorsement of the Big Bounce hypothesis.)
-- Piet Hein
-Jonathan Frakes, as William T Riker
Arthur Conan Doyle
I'm embarassed to bring this up again, because I seem to quote steven0461 too often--but, in something close to his words; "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains is likely more improbable than an error in one of your impossibility proofs."
...Or you've just missed something. If all you're left with is improbable you notice that you are confused. I've always thought that quote was off.
Then again, Sherlock never did miss anything.
Douglas Adams
"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us." -- Gandalf, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
(This is not necessarily a rationalist quote, but yet, it kinda is :))
-- Joseph Chilton Pearce
-- JoshuaZ