A monthly thread for posting any interesting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently on the Internet, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages.
During the discussion of Pranknet on Slashdot about a month ago, I saw this comment. It reminded me of our discussions about Newcomb's problem and superrationality.
I also disagree that our society is based on mutual trust. Volumes and volumes of laws backed up by lawyers, police, and jails show otherwise.
That's called selection/observation bias. You're looking at only one side of the coin.
I've lived in countries where there's a lot less trust than here. The notion of returning an opened product to a store and getting a full refund is based on trust (yes, there's a profit incentive, and some people do screw the retailers [and the retailers their customers -- SB], but the system works overall). In some countries I've been to, this would be unfeasible: Almost everyone will try to exploit such a retailer.
When a storm knocks out the electricity and the traffic lights stop working, I've always seen everyone obeying the rules. I doubt it's because they're worried about cops. It's about trust that the other drivers will do likewise. Simply unworkable in other places I've lived in.
I've had neighbors whom I don't know receive UPS/FedEx packages for me. Again, trust. I don't think they're afraid of me beating them up.
There are loads of examples. Society, at least in the US, is fairly nice and a lot of that has to do with a common trust.
Which is why someone exploiting that trust is a despised person.
Perpetually angry dude makes the opposite case. Never get an argument with that guy, by the way.
US is higher than most of non-Northern Europe when it comes to trust.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/lif_tru_peo-lifestyle-trust-people
The first theory is diversity, but trust here doesn't seem to correspond to diversity at all - Norway and Austria are homogenous and on opposite ends. Canada and Belgium are diverse and on opposite ends.
As for other theories, socialist countries are also on both top (Scandinavia) and bottom (Austria, France). Catholic countries seem to be lower than Protestant countries, but Ireland is pretty high, and it might just be Scandinavia making this impression.
So I'm not really sure what trust correlates much with.
socialist countries...Scandinavia...Austria, France
Which countries on that list do you call not socialist? English-speaking ones? Switzerland?
Where can we get objective information about whether people are trusting or trust-worthy, rather than what they say? The Japanese claim to be less trusting than Americans, but they are trustworthy with wallets, if not with umbrellas and bicycles.
and the angry dude argues that Americans should not trust institutions which is completely different from whether they do trust people, which is the topic of the survey and the slashdot entry.
US, Japan, and Switzerland seem less socialist than Scandinavia, Austria, and France by standard measures, right?
Questionnaire is a proxy measure, but it's better proxy than some random blog rant.
Here are some obvious things that might reasonably correlate with trust, but don't seem to:
FWIW, the exact quote (from pp.13-14 of this article) is:
Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than the exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise. [Emphasis in original]
Your paraphrase is snappier though (as well as being less ambiguous; it's hard to tell in the original whether Tukey intends the adjectives "vague" and "precise" to apply to the questions or the answers).
Maybe it needs further explanation? Ink being the object with which books are created, and knowledge put down for others to use, you must be careful to avoid using that object directly and believing you have gained knowledge from it.
The blog post itself isn't the great insight, nor is the Reddit software it's running on, or the comment system, or the upvoting and downvoting. Insight can only come from the mind, and understanding the words and how they all link together into the idea being presented. The idea isn't in the text; it's an abstraction of the human mind.
Perhaps better summarized as, "Don't just read: think."
Puts me in mind of this passage
...philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow—it is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst of an age of “work,” that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to “get everything done” at once, including every old or new book:—this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn
"What's that saying?" he said, smiling crookedly. "When you've eliminated the impossible, whatever it is that remains--- "
"--- however improbable, must be the truth. Yes, the problem is, the man who wrote that believed in faeries, and that he could photograph them."
The real confusion begins when you make lighthouse-churches, and people start defending the religious doctrines by saying that faith-based buildings are the only possible source of warning-lights to sailors, and hey, just look at all that beautifully cylindrical architecture, so it must be a great and necessary thing to believe in [insert wacky stuff here]. Rationalizations for silly things one came to believe as a child are always ugly, because everything gets all jumbled up in people's heads, and they don't want to straighten it out, because that would be a thought crime.
[Sorry, was that venting a little? I get so sick of this argument, but I can't bring myself to humor people who say it.]
That may not be the right attribution; I see in Google Books attributions to Immanuel Kant, the Talmud, Adias Ninn, Halsey P. Taylor, and Preston James. I suspect one of the non-Rosten attributions is correct - the earliest Rosten hit from 1978 has the first use of the sentence in quotes.
We at the Church of Google believe the search engine Google is the closest humankind has ever come to directly experiencing an actual God (as typically defined). We believe there is much more evidence in favour of Google's divinity than there is for the divinity of other more traditional gods.
We reject supernatural gods on the notion they are not scientifically provable. Thus, Googlists believe Google should rightfully be given the title of "God", as She exhibits a great many of the characteristics traditionally associated with such Deities in a scientifically provable manner.
(Moved from the LW/OB Rationality Quotes thread, where is was previously posted by accident)
Heh, it's funny that you first put it in the LW/OB quotes section, because that's actually kind of similar to an out-of-context quote I excerpted from Eliezer Yudkowsky here.
the dream couldn't be evidence because ... only actual sensory impressions of Google results could form the base of a legitimate chain of inferences.
Yeah, I can see why you're worried people might quote you without permission! I mean, I thought I'd seen the worst Google fanboys, but never before did I see anyone claim that Google was the genesis of all valid inferences!
I would roughly divide philosophies into two categories, "crazy" and "sensible". Of the two, I definitely prefer the former. Sensible philosophies are noted for their sobriety, propriety, rationality, analytic skill and other things. One definite advantage they have is that they are usually quite sensible. Crazy philosophies are characterized by their madness, spontaneity, sense of humor, total freedom from the most basic conventions of thought, amorality, beauty, divinity, naturalness, poesy, absolute honesty, freedom from inhibitions, contrariness, paradoxicalness, lack of discipline and general yum-yummyness. ... ... In general I would say that psychologist, psychiatrist, economists, sociologists and political scientists tend towards the "sensible", whereas artists, poets, musicians and (to my great delight!) chemists, theoretical physicists, mathematicians - especially mathematical logicians - tend towards what I call "crazy".
Raymond M. Smullyan, The Tao Is Silent
That's why I pointed out that leaving out 'foolish' probably doesn't change Emerson's intent at all. Worrying about consistency at all is what he found troublesome - he counseled against trying to be consistent in general, and I take 'foolish' to be more superlative than anything.
You may be right that it doesn't change the meaning much, in which case it's still a misquote, but a minor one (such as using a synonym of a word instead of the actual word: correct sense, wrong words). What it definitely is not is "just slightly out of context", since that means the utterance is missing context and as a result appears to mean something other than what was intended, which is precisely what you're arguing has not happened.
I guess we understand the phrase "out of context" differently then and have to disagree. I would never use it for leaving out a single adjective, and haven't heard it used that way. I have only heard it used when entire clauses or sentences are omitted.
I note that wikipedia seems to agree with my interpretation. From Fallacy of Quoting Out of Context (emphasis mine):
The practice of quoting out of context, sometimes referred to as "contextomy" or "quote mining", is a logical fallacy and type of false attribution in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning.
...
Contextomy refers to the selective excerpting of words from their original linguistic context in a way that distorts the source’s intended meaning, a practice commonly referred to as "quoting out of context". The problem here is not the removal of a quote from its original context (as all quotes are) per se, but to the quoter's decision to exclude from the excerpt certain nearby phrases or sentences (which become "context" by virtue of the exclusion) that serve to clarify the intentions behind the selected words.
The word “philosopher” has its origins in the Greek, where its root is a “lover of wisdom.” There is no assurance that a lover of wisdom has any, just as an anglophile is not assured to have an Englishman locked in the basement.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence -- Carl Sagan
(I know this quote is very much a cliche -- but, as a realized a long time after seeing it, it is not only a nice heuristic, but it also emphasizes the bayesian, probabilistic view of knowledge over the popperian one.)
Great thinkers build their edifices with subtle consistency. We do our intellectual forebears an enormous disservice when we dismember their visions and scan their systems in order to extract a few disembodied “gems”—thoughts or claims still accepted as true. These disarticulated pieces then become the entire legacy of our ancestors, and we lose the beauty and coherence of older systems that might enlighten us by their unfamiliarity—and their consequent challenge—in our fallible (and complacent) modern world.
-- Stephen Jay Gould
I don't have the context for that particular wording, but it's a recurring theme of his essays. He felt that wrong ideas could still be instructive, and he would often write essays explaining ideas that he clearly referred to as incorrect.
His point here seems to be that the theory is already wrong, so don't destroy the remaining value by cutting it up to extract the bits you could get from current theory. I don't think you need to worry that he's calling for a return to something you dislike.
When the time comes, there is no moment for reasoning. And if you have not done your inquiring beforehand, there is most often shame. Reading books and listening to people's talk are for the purpose of prior resolution.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai
Economic growth occurs whenever people take resources and rearrange them in ways that are more valuable. A useful metaphor for production in an economy comes from the kitchen. To create valuable final products, we mix inexpensive ingredients together according to a recipe. The cooking one can do is limited by the supply of ingredients, and most cooking in the economy produces undesirable side effects. If economic growth could be achieved only by doing more and more of the same kind of cooking, we would eventually run out of raw materials and suffer from unacceptable levels of pollution and nuisance. Human history teaches us, however, that economic growth springs from better recipes, not just from more cooking. New recipes generally produce fewer unpleasant side effects and generate more economic value per unit of raw material.
. . .
Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. The difficulty is the same one we have with compounding: possibilities do not merely add up; they multiply.
- Paul M. Romer, "Economic Growth", The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, 2007
(Related to a theme in We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think, which is about failure to grasp the other arguments one could have considered, and to a theme in arguments about the consequences of intelligence (Expected Creative Surprises, Belief in Intelligence, Efficient Cross-Domain Optimization, Recursive Self-Improvement, Dreams of Friendliness, That Alien Message, or The AI-Box Experiment), which are about failure to grasp the strategies that something more intelligent than oneself could find.
People usually can't feel loss of opportunities unless they are already able to imagine the details of the opportunity. To be rational, one should have a habit of making well-calibrated estimates of how much opportunity would be felt by the sort of person who would have investigated the details.)
First the sign describes reality. Then the sign replaces reality. - Last Psychiatrist, on the role of media.
This is a lesswrong quote, but I think it belongs in this discussion because it's remarkably apropos:
I remember when I finally picked up and started reading through my copy of the Feynman Lectures on Physics, even though I couldn't think of any realistic excuse for how this was going to help my AI work, because I just got fed up with not knowing physics. And - you can guess how this story ends - it gave me a new way of looking at the world, which all my earlier reading in popular physics (including Feynman's QED) hadn't done. Did that help inspire my AI research? Hell yes. (Though it's a good thing I studied neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology, Bayes, and physics in that order - physics alone would have been terrible inspiration for AI research.)
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Wise in comparison. The other quantifiers are hyperbole.
The quote applies insofar as the field being studied is already somewhat mapped and investigated. Programming forums are ultimately more useful than tutorials and textbooks, talking to an author more insightful than reading the 200 page thesis, and having access to a community of intelligent synthetics is much more valuable than having access to a library.
talking to an author more insightful than reading the 200 page thesis,
Find the right books, and it'll probably be far more rewarding than talking to an author, simply because of the information density and better organization that you can get in written form.
An hour of reading Hennessy and Patterson's excellent book on CPU design will teach you a hell of a lot more than six hours of classes. I speak from recent quantitative experience here, which is where I got those specific numbers. The exceptions to this rule are local: particularly hard-to-understand concepts like the Tomasulo algorithm are a lot easier to wrap your head around if you have someone to walk you through them. But for the most part, a well-written textbook can teach you better than a person talking with you.
One problem is that most textbooks just aren't written that well. Often they're too concerned with signaling academic status, and they forget to make the book something that people will want to read. Just because an author can go off on a tangent about graph isomorphisms doesn't mean they should. Other times they get bogged down in obscure details up front, killing off people's interest. There are other failure modes, too depressing to list here.
By the way, I think that one reason why wikis are so easy to learn from is because you can skip past the boring stuff until you need it. This makes reading a wiki more fun, and also leads to tab explosions, keeping you hooked. I figure that this could significantly improve on the traditional textbook model, despite all those nice things I said about it earlier in the post.
(In honor of the tab explosion, I've stuck in a bunch of links to pages that might be interesting.)
talking to an author more insightful than reading the 200 page thesis
Only if he were an exceptionally bad writer. 200 pages contains a lot more information than you can fit into most conversations. Not to mention being more logically structured.
Of course, a conversation is more interactive and lets you ask about the things that were left unclear, as well as clear up misunderstandings... but I don't think that anywhere near compensates.
What you could argue is that talking to the author is time more efficiently spent, as it gives you a better idea of whether her thesis is worth reading.
How can that be the case? You apparently have 'exceptions' forming most of the population!
More generally, being able to talk to the author after reading the thesis is hugely valuable, because whatever was unclear in the thesis can be cleared up. But talking to the author without reading his work is fairly worthless; you won't know what questions to ask, unless of course you're already knowledgeable in the field.
But actually it also applies only insofar as you have already studied the field. Programming forums are great, but we've all seen the guy who shows up to post a tutorial question verbatim and appends "send me the code plz", and we all understand he's just wasting everybody's time. You have to read the textbooks and at least seriously attempt the tutorials yourself before you can ask the right questions on the forum.
You could see that as anthropomorphizing the power of interaction.
Is it perhaps time for another round of Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts?
I think you misunderstand the problem. I know I can override the formatting. It's just that if I did so, it would invalidate my claim that I have software that lets me call up forum screen names with hotkeys, and replaces the spaces with underscores in forums that allow spaces in names.
In other words, people would know I was needlessly typing out their whole screen name and adding underscores, and it wasn't just some glitchy software.
[Others] note that my 'avoidance of the standard philosophical terminology for discussing such matters' often creates problems for me; philosophers have a hard time figuring out what I am saying and what I am denying. My refusal to play ball with my colleagues is deliberate, of course, since I view the standard philosophical terminology as worse than useless — a major obstacle to progress since it consists of so many errors. – Daniel Dennett, The Message is: There is no Medium
Well, 3-SAT is NP-complete, anyway. If consistency checking in mere propositional logic is already NP-complete, then it can't be any easier to do consistency checking to real-world arguments that require predicate logic or other, even more complicated systems to express.
Godel Escher Bach has a section that talks about this.
In the words of the ancients, one should make his decisions within the space of seven breaths. Lord Takanobu said, "If discrimination is long, it will spoil." Lord Naoshige said, "When matters are done leisurely, seven out of ten will turn out badly. A warrior is a person who does things quickly."
Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai