A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).
- 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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.
Buckminster Fuller
Kołakowski's Law, or The Law of the Infinite Cornucopia:
Leszek Kołakowski
-Pantene Pro-V hair care bottle
Dean Schlicter
Rule I
Rule II
Rule III
... (read more)-- T-Rex, Dinosaur Comics #539
I know this is well known, but to supplement the T-Rex:
-Alfréd Rényi/Paul Erdős
Yes, and don't forget the dual result that a comathematician is a device for turning cotheorems into ffee.
H.L. Mencken, Minority Report.
A more direct paraphrasing would be, Just because I don't have all the answers doesn't mean that your answers are correct.
A concrete example: just because scientists don't currently know everything about how evolution happened, that doesn't mean that Young Earth Creationists are right. Typical YEC debating strategy is to look for gaps (real or imagined) in our current theories, and act as if that proves that God created the world in six days, and from the dust created every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, etc.
"We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this." is a fallacy. (The Politician's Syllogism.) Mencken's statement pretty clearly includes the course of action of not taking action; he's stating that any action is not necessarily better than no action, and that taking on any belief is not necessarily better than holding no belief.
I don't think either of you are getting it right. I'm not familiar with the context of this particular quote, but knowing it's from Mencken, he's clearly referring to various idealistic busybodies and their grand (and typically disastrously unsound) plans to solve the world's problems. The quote is directed against idealists who assume moral high ground and scoff at those who question their designs.
From desert cliff and mountaintop we trace the wide design,
Strike-slip fault and overthrust and syn and anticline...
We gaze upon creation where erosion makes it known,
And count the countless aeons in the banding of the stone.
Odd, long-vanished creatures and their tracks & shells are found;
Where truth has left its sketches on the slate below the ground.
The patient stone can speak, if we but listen when it talks.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the rocks.
There are those who name the stars, who watch the sky by night,
Seeking out the darkest place, to better see the light.
Long ago, when torture broke the remnant of his will,
Galileo recanted, but the Earth is moving still.
High above the mountaintops, where only distance bars,
The truth has left its footprints in the dust between the stars.
We may watch and study or may shudder and deny,
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the sky.
By stem and root and branch we trace, by feather, fang and fur,
How the living things that are descend from things that were.
The moss, the kelp, the zebrafish, the very mice and flies,
These tiny, humble, wordless things--how shall they tell us lies?
We are kin to beasts; no other answer can we bring.
The truth... (read more)
What evidence is there that Galileo was tortured?
So far as I know, he wasn't, just placed under house arrest. It jumped out at me too; you really have to get these poems exactly right on a factual level or it takes a lot away.
The modern conception of Galileo as someone harshly prosecuted for his beliefs seems rather exaggarated: in reality, he was even explicitly encouraged to write a book on the subject by the church. It was only when he offended the Pope in his book that he got sent to house arrest.
... (read more)According to Owen Gingerich's The Great Copernicus Chase, the 1633 decree calling Galileo to be interrogated* read, in part, as follows:
(Emphasis added.) Gingerich goes on to say:
(Emphasis adde... (read more)
I would still say that torture was used to break his will. To say this would be accurate, if not precise (because I'm not specifying whether I mean a particular act or an institutionalized practice). Whether his will proved too easy to break to satisfy the electorate is another matter.
John Archibald Wheeler
Related to: Politics, Protection
A horse that can count to ten is a remarkable horse, not a remarkable mathematician.
--Samuel Johnson
— T.H. White (The Once and Future King)
For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it. The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellences, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations; and those who travel very slowly may yet make far greater progress, provided they keep always to the straight road, than those who, while they run, forsake it.
~René Descartes, Discourse on the Method
It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful, they are found because it was possible to find them. -J. Robert Oppenheimer.
-- Ken Binmore, in Natural Justice, p56
This is a bit long for a rationality quote and isn't really a quote but short enough and worth the read: The most poetic and convincing argument for striving for posthumanity (via aleph.se).
Dr. Manhattan (Watchmen)
It is still an unending source of surprise for me how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a piece of paper can change the course of human affairs. -Stanislaw Ulam
In 1923, England and France divided between them the previously Turkish territories of what are modern Syria, Lebanon and Israel/Palestine. They drew a pencil line on a map to mark the treaty border.
It turned out that the thickness of the pencil line itself was several hundred meters on the ground. In 1964, Israel fought a battle with Syria over that land.
People were killed because someone neglected to sharpen their pencil. That's "scribbles on a piece of paper" for you.
Ref: a book found by Google. I originally learned about this from an Israeli plaque at the Dan River preserve near the border.
William Stanley Jevons, Theory of Political Economy, 1871: p.275-6
Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
Charles Sanders Peirce
I. A. Richards, "Principles of Literary Criticism"
-- French Ninja, Freefall
Puts me in mind of "Rationalists should win".
If you can't tell whose side someone is on, they are not on yours. -Warren E. Buffett
Richard Feynman
--Futurama
[I have had cause to apply this one recently. It particularly resonated to see it in the book just now.]
There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.
-Samuel Butler
Charles H. Spurgeon
Not always. I know someone who narrowly avoided Auschwitz who would beg to differ; her worst enemies were definitely external.
Your comment raises a very delicate point and I'm not sure that I am tactful enough to make it clearly.
Zooming out to get a broader view so that we can notice what usually happens, rather than the memorable special case, we notice that most Germans were enthusiastic about Hitler, all the way from 1933 to 1941. It is hard to reconstruct the reasons why. Looking at the broad picture we get a clear sense of people being their own worst enemies, enthusiastically embracing a mad leader who will lead them to destruction.
The message that history is sending to Alan is: if you had been a young man in Germany in 1933 you would have idolized Hitler. There are two ways to respond to this sobering message. One is to picture myself as an innocent victim. There were plenty of innocent victims, so this is easily done, but it dodges the hard question. The other response is to embrace the LessWrong vision and to search for ways to avoid the disasters to which self-deception sentences Man.
You're right, and I think that the reason it's so hard to make that point tactfully is because of how scary it is. If we go down that line of thought honestly, we can imagine ourselves firing up the ovens, or dragging manacled people into the belly of a slave ship, and feeling good about it. This is not a comfortable idea.
But there's another, more hopeful side to this. As MartinB points out, it's possible to understand how such monstrous acts feel to the people committing them, and train yourself to avoid making the same mistakes. This is a problem we can actually attack, as long as we can accept that our own thoughts are fallible.
(On a lighter note: how many people here regularly catch themselves using fallacious logic, and quickly correct their own thoughts? I would hope that the answer is "everyone", or at least "almost everyone". If you do this, then it shows that you're already being significantly less wrong, and it should give a fair amount of protection against crazy murderous ideologies.)
Can't you say "not always" about pretty much any quote? They aren't meant to be taken as universal truths that apply to all people and all circumstances across all of time ;-).
Rationality quotes: very many from @BadDalaiLama on Twitter.
(Edit: there's also this handy archive.)
Isaac Newton's argument for intelligent design:
... (read more)Xenophanes
-- Michaelangelo's motto
From Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series:
"Certainly, my situation is unique," Sazed said. "I would say that I arrived at it because of belief."
"Belief?" Vin asked.
"Yes," Sazed said. "Tell me, Mistress, what is it that you believe?"
Vin frowned. "What kind of question is that?"
"The most important kind, I think."
Vin thought, then shrugged. "I don't know what I believe."
"People often say that, but I find it is rarely true."
Overall, however, we've done better by avoiding dragons than by slaying them. -Warren E. Buffett
The course of human progress staggers like a drunk; its steps are quick and heavy but its mind is slow and blunt
-Jesse Michaels of Operation Ivy
Posted because it's a useful and evocative metaphor: the drunk feels himself leaning or falling in one direction, and puts his foot down in that direction to steady himself. If he doesn't step far enough, he is still leaning in the same direction, and he steps again. In this way we can make fantastic progress in directions we don't like while getting further away from the ways we did want to go.
I just came across this and thought it was a pretty funny dialogue: "Reality is that which does not go away upon reprogramming." (Check the first 4 comments here: Chatbot Debates Climate Change Deniers on Twitter so You Don’t Have to)
This is of course a paraphrase borrowed from Philip K. Dick's famous statement:
I shared this on another website and got this comment:
Pope, Essay on Criticism
Deuteronomy 18:20-22
half of being smart is knowing what you're dumb at
solomon short (david gerrold's fictional character)
Y.S. Abu-Mostafa, in explaining the VC inequality of PAC learning.
There are times I almost think
Nobody sure of what he absolutely know
Everybody find confusion
In conclusion he concluded long ago
And it puzzle me to learn
That tho' a man may be in doubt of what he know,
Very quickly he will fight...
He'll fight to prove that what he does not know is so!
~ A Puzzlement, The King and I
Scooping the Loop Snooper
an elementary proof of the undecidability of the halting problem
by Geoffrey Pullum
... (read more)Talmud, Avoda Zara 54b
The Mexican Drug War in One Lesson: Know Your Zetas!
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kavanagh ch. 1
Sunday in the Park with George, by Stephen Sondheim
-- Gordon Freeman, kind of
— Randall Munroe, xkcd – Mutual
del
Don't feed the trolls, people, this is not reddit.
-- The Jesus Seminar
(Developed in the context of biblical interpretation, of course. But despite my nontheism, I've found the principle behind it to be widely applicable.)
For the young who want to by Marge Piercy
The poem is mostly about not being recognized as having a magical ability to do things until after you've succeeded. I'm just posting the link because it's more trouble than it's worth to make the line breaks show up properly.
Erwin Rommel, The Rommel Papers (1982) edited by Basil Henry Liddell Hart http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Erwin_Rommel#Sourced
"But building your life's explanations around science isn't a profession. It is, at its core, an emotional contract, an agreement to only derive comfort from rationality."
-Robert Sapolsky, in a essay reply to "Does science make belief in God obsolete?"
That is a no-no
"All of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them."
---George Eliot, "Middlemarch"
~ Robert M. Pirsig
Now the actual quote's out of the way, here's my version: when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity; when many people suffer from a delusion it is called society.
Francis Bacon
Awkward.
Not a quote about rationalism, but probably relevant to Less Wrong:
... (read more)-- Talib Kweli (substitute "nature" for "God")
David Fasold
-John Gray, Straw Dogs
-Theodore Dreiser, The Titan
There are times I almost think, Nobody sure of what he absolutely know. Everybody find confusion, In conclusion he concluded long ago. And it puzzle me to learn , That tho' a man may be in doubt of what he know, Very quickly he will fight... He'll fight to prove that what he does not know is so!
There are times I almost think Nobody sure of what he absolutely know Everybody find confusion In conclusion he concluded long ago And it puzzle me to learn That tho' a man may be in doubt of what he know, Very quickly he will fight... He'll fight to prove that what he does not know is so!
~ A Puzzlement, The King and I
"However insistently the blind may deny the existence of the sun, they cannot annihilate it. " - D. T. Suzuki
--The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, vol 1