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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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.
"You know what they say the modern version of Pascal's Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God." - Julie from Crystal Nights by Greg Egan
-- Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals
-Isaac Asimov, The Relativity of Wrong
—The r-selectors, Trunclade, quoted in Blindsight by Peter Watts
You're thinking of Mohs Scale of Mineral Hardness. AngryParsley was referring to Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness, neither of which should be confused with Mohs Scale of Rock and Metal Hardness.
"He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense."
-John McCarthy, on mainstream environmentalism.
As someone who regularly gets into arguments about this, I can say that he's definitely right; you wouldn't believe the amount of nonsense that can be disposed of simply by looking up the relevant numbers and doing a minute's worth of easy arithmetic.
For example, I've heard some people recently claiming that a combination of solar photovoltaics, electrolysis to produce hydrogen, and these new Bloom box fuel cells are cheaper than nuclear fission. Look up the costs of solar farms; about $3 per peak watt. Their average power output is less; we can very optimistically assume that they run at 20% of capacity on average. Efficiency losses from electrolysis and fuel cells are about 50%. Putting it all together, this would cost about $30 per watt of average power delivered. Not including the cost of the fuel cells.
A little googling will show that the total cost of building two new AP1000 reactors in Georgia is about $14 billion, and they average at least 93% of their peak power, and transmission line losses bring their average power delivered to about 1000 MW each. So thei... (read more)
Solar power requires heavy industry to build, and that has loads of externalities. It takes up a lot of space and affects local climate and ecology. And then there's the unreliability of the sun, which can have economic consequences.
As for the nuclear externalities you mentioned, the evacuation planning and government safety things are paid for by power plant fees, and budgeted into the cost of building and operating the plants. Defending the plants is something you have to do with all forms of power generation, and I actually think you're miscalculating the risks by looking at the power plants themselves, which (in the case of nuclear) tend to be pretty beefy and well-guarded. Attacking the transmission lines would be much easier, and much harder to defend against. This goes double for wind and solar farms that are located far away from everything and have to use longer power lines.
(And really, what are the odds you'll ever have to use those evacuation plans? I'd worry more about crossing the street. No water-moderated reactor has ever had an accident that made evacuating people nearby a good idea, even after all these decades of operating them, and there are good theoretical and ... (read more)
Do you consider the law regarding car liability insurance to be a subsidy? It requires you to carry liability insurance up to a finite amount, despite the fact that you can do much more damage than that with your car, and then bankruptcy law will shield you from paying the full amount.
This is the same kind of insurance nuclear plants have: they're require to have an insurance on up to $X of damages, and then "someone else" bears any cost beyond this.
Nuclear plants can't be insured for the damages in a meltdown. Not because the risk is so huge that it should never be done, but because any jury award would be effectively infinite, irrespective of the actual damage. There's no point to buying insurance when the uncovered liability increases in lockstep with your insurance coverage. However, the actual meltdown risk is extremely small and even the required insurance is effectively overinsuring the plants.
This nuclear plant "insurance" can't be compared to what FM/FM had because they are able to continue operation and making profits after a "meltdown", while a nuclear plant would be over and done with.
If you don't like the kind of uncovered liability nu... (read more)
-- spire3661, in a Slashdot post
-- Isaac Asimov
--Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline (2009), p 216
"As one shocked 42-year-old manager exclaimed in the middle of a self-reflective career planning exercise, 'Oh, no! I just realized I let a 20-year-old choose my wife and my career!'"
-- Douglas T. Hall, Protean Careers of the 21st Century
-- Herbert Simon 1971
-- John Maynard Smith (The Causes of Extinction, 1989)
"Death is the most terrible of all things; for it is the end, and nothing is thought to be any longer either good or bad for the dead."
-- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
The halt can manage a horse,
the handless a flock,
The deaf be a doughty fighter,
To be blind is better than to burn on a pyre:
There is nothing the dead can do.
-- Havamal
(posted in the right thread this time)
--- Steven Landsburg (original link by dclayh)
"It is said that those who appreciate legislation and sausages should not see them being made. The same is true for human emotions." -- Steven Pinker
old Arab proverb, according to this page, which is itself interesting
-- Daniel Shenton, President of the Flat Earth Society as of 2010
And the Earth is slowly curving in its orbit, generating an apparent centrifugal force that decreases your weight at midnight, and increases your weight at noon. Except for a very tiny tidal correction, these two forces exactly cancel which is why the Earth stays in orbit in the first place. This argument would only be valid if the Earth were suspended motionless on two giant poles running through the axis or something.
"There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you."
-- J.K. Rowling, Harvard commencement address.
She was talking to students at Harvard.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Successful zealots don't argue to win. They argue to move the goalposts and to make it appear sane to do so."
-- Seth Godin
"One thousand five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was flat... and fifteen minutes ago, you knew people were alone on this planet. Think about what you'll know tomorrow." -- Agent K, "Men in Black"
Not true! The ancient Greeks measured the circumference of the Earth to within 1%.
They (Italians and other Europeans) still knew the Earth was round. Indeed, if you live near a sea port this is a very easy thing to figure out. The resistance Columbus faced was that everyone thought the world was much too big to get to the Indies in a reasonable period of time by sailing west. And of course everyone was right and Columbus had no idea what he was talking about.
Edit: And actually I'm pretty sure the authorities cerca 1492 were basing their beliefs about the size of the Earth on work done by the ancient Greeks.
-- Quee Nelson, The Slightest Philosophy
--Admiral Hyman G. Rickover
A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual" — find out how he feels about astrology. —Robert Heinlein
By the way: Welcome to LessWrong! Feel free to post an introduction of yourself! If you want to get a good head-start on the kind of thing we do here, "What Do We Mean By Rationality?" is a good start, and if you're ever looking for other material, you can browse the sequences and the top-rated posts to find a lot of good essays.
On this specific issue, ata has the most relevant link, but I would add a couple other points:
Just because you could, in theory, be convinced of astrology at some point doesn't mean you have to be agnostic now - you can be quite strongly convinced of its incorrectness and still accept correction should some ever come to your attention.
If you are actually quite skeptical of astrology - if you believe it to be strongly contradicted by the evidence - this is one of the places where we would hope you would say so. Humility is a virtue when it makes you careful, not when it is attire you wear to affirm your open-mindedness.
Please keep posting, by the way - your remark on the externalities of nuclear power was a good one, and I would like to hear your thoughts on other occasions.
Being that there is a total absence of evidence that astrology can consistently predict anything better than chance, why is it even worth talking about possible mechanisms? Until there's any positive evidence for it, the right answer to "How does astrology work?" is "It doesn't."
"I doubt it, but who am I to say?" is still being too generous to it. It is an arbitrarily privileged hypothesis.
Edit: Be careful with those "intellectual exercises", by the way. You're not going to become a stronger rationalist by practicing rationalization: "Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge."
"The formal study of complex systems is really, really hard." -David Colander
A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions — as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. —Nietzsche
From memory of recently seeing excerpts from The Polymath: The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman:
—Charles Darwin
-- William Ernest Henley (1875)
-- Isaac Asimov
-- Seth Godin
What brazil84 said. Godin sounds like he's overextrapolating from personal experience. For his claim about "it's because you've been brainwashed" to work, he would need to show that people are taking circuitous routes to standard employment in preference to viable alternate means of making a living.
Yes, there are ways to make the same money with less time or "taking orders" ... but they're hard and risky to work out. If people are wrong in these assessments, it takes a heck of a lot more than just realizing, "hey, there are other ways!" You have to know one of those other ways well enough to get it to work! To borrow from Eliezer Yudkowsky, "non-wage-slave is not an income plan".
Furthermore, his claim is heavily penalized by it's assertion of conspiracy: he's saying all your teachers "needed" you to beleive this is the natural order of things, that every professor you had believed that, that all employers (not just the businesses but the hiring managers) believed that, etc. Yes, I'm aware of the history of public education (incl. Gatto's claims about it), but Godin is going further, and saying that these people need you to bel... (read more)
"If it works for you, it works because of you." -- Mark Greenway on marriage
-- Timothy Ferriss - The 4 Hour Workweek
“Still seems it strange, that thou shouldst live forever? Is it less strange, that thou shouldst live at all? This is a miracle; and that no more.” Edward Young
...it would be a mistake to suppose that the difficulty of the case [for gender equality] must lie in the insufficiency or obscurity of the grounds of reason on which my convictions rests. The difficulty is that which exists in all cases in which there is a mass of feeling to be contended against. So long as opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of th... (read more)
— K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation 2.0: Advice To Aspiring Nanotechnologists
You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand. Leonardo da Vinci
"There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere." -- Isaac Asimov
-- Amos Bronson Alcott
-- Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber, Why do humans reason? (PDF)
(Further comment on the paper turned into a full post)
Three ways to increase your intelligence
Continually expand the scope, source, intensity of the information you receive. Constantly revise your reality maps, and seek new metaphors about the future to understand what's happening now. Develop external networks for increasing intelligence. In particular, spend all your time with people as smart or smarter than you.
I'll give an upvote to whoever knows the source of that.
•The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants – Albert Camus
--Hunter S. Thompson
-- Henry David Thoreau
If you get it, it will be in spite of any method you use.
You must have a method.
-- K. Bradford Brown
–xkcd
Can we have a norm of using the Custom Search bar to check if a quote has already been posted?
Poll: vote this up if you are in favor of the proposed norm. (And vote down the Karma Balance comment.)
Rational thought is an interpretation according to a scheme we cannot escape. -Frederich Nietzsche
"There's only so many ways to be smart, but idiocy is Legion." - The TV Tropes Wiki
— Nietzsche
Emotions are the lubricants of reason. —Nicholas Nassim Taleb
When the means are autonomous, they are deadly
--Charles Williams
Link
... (read more)"You don't need to be an ichthyologist to know when a fish stinks." (Unattributed)
"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." ~HD Thoreau
Scrapheap Transhumanism:
"I’m sort of inured to pain by this point. Anesthetic is illegal for people like me, so we learn to live without it; I’ve made scalpel incisions in my hands, pushed five-millimeter diameter needles through my skin, and once used a vegetable knife to carve a cavity into the tip of my index finger. I’m an idiot, but I’m an idiot working in the name of progress: I’m Lepht Anonym, scrapheap transhumanist. I work with what I can get."
Here is more: http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/enhanced/scrapheap-transhumanism
HT:Tyler Cowen
While discussing the reliability of pundits:
--Gregory Cochran
scientia potentia est
Knowledge is power.
--This quote is attributed to Sir Francis Bacon, but we don't really know.
And I still can't see how [Matthew 21:18-21] is metaphorical unless you just take it that way. But I may as well open a history book and read "Napoleon crossed the Alps" and read that as a metaphor that even the best of us have to travel. --Hariant
"Study strategy over the years and achieve the spirit of the warrior. Today is your victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men."
--Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
-Nangaku
"The probability of bumping into Thomas Bayes is rather low. " - Koert Debyser, "What is Bayesian Average", Board Game Geek Forums
Charles Darwin
—Charles Darwin
—Charles Darwin
—Charles Darwin
—Charles Darwin
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
-- William Ernest Henley (1875)
Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.
-- William Ernest Henley (1875)
Alan Kay
I enjoyed this proposal for a 24-issue Superman run: http://andrewhickey.info/2010/02/09/pop-drama-superman/
There are several Less Wrongish themes in this arc: Many Worlds, ending suffering via technology, rationality:
"...a highlight of the first half of this first year will be the redemption of Lex Luthor – in a forty-page story, set in one room, with just the two of them talking, and Superman using logic to convince Luthor to turn his talents towards good..."
The effect Andrew's text had on me reminded me of how excited I was when I first had r... (read more)
-- The Tick, live-action series
The three laws of sanity:
The world is mad.
Your own theories and grand ideas about the world are also mad, except where this contradicts the first law. (In which case you are merely slightly more sane than average).
The world is sufficiently mad that your being sane is actually a disadvantage, except where this contradicts the first two laws.
The limits of my language are the limits of my world. —Ludwig Wittgenstein