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.
- Please post all quotes separately (so that they can be voted up/down separately) unless they are strongly related/ordered.
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB - there is a separate thread for it.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
"A witty saying proves nothing." -- Voltaire
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.
... (read more)-Helen Keller
Thomas Sowell
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
-Bertrand Russell
-- John Tukey
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
-Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness
-Benjamin Franklin
-Arab proverb
"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into." (Jonathan Swift )
-Wang Yang-Ming
-Leo Rosten
I don't believe in the supernetural. There can be knowledge for which we do not possess the Google keywords, but to speak of knowledge that cannot be Googled even in principle is nonsense.
-- Vaclav Havel
Kip Thorne
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Niels Bohr
Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai
John D. Norton
(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.)
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 un... (read more)
-- Stephen Jay Gould
— Malcolm X (By Any Means Necessary)
First the sign describes reality. Then the sign replaces reality. - Last Psychiatrist, on the role of media.
-- George Shultz.
HT: Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP.
-al-Ghazali (theologian)
Pope, Essay on Criticism
-- La Rochefoucauld
-Kakuzo Okakura
A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study.
That had better be a long conversation, a very wise person, and one damned lost field you were studying for ten years.
-H.P. Lovecraft
Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai
-Willie Mays