Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
I thought it was a puzzle or riddle, so I went back and looked at it again. My first guess was that it was something to do with running, then paper airplanes (which can be made from newspaper, but not a magazine). The rock as anchor made me realize there needed to be something attached, which made me realize it was a kite.
On the other hand, I don't have any trouble seeing alternative interpretations; perhaps it's because I already tried several and came to the conclusion myself. (Or maybe it's just that I'm more used to looking at things with multiple interpretations; it's a pretty core skill to changing one's self.)
Then again, I also don't see the paragraph as infused with irreversible knowing. I read the words literally every time, and have to add words like, "for flying a kite" to the sentences in order to make the link. I could just as easily add "in bed", though, at which point the paragraph actually becomes pretty hilarious -- much like a strung-together collage of fortune cookie quotes... in bed. ;-)
The reason I posted the link to epiphany addiction was that this quote is an example of how confusion doesn't feel good (it prompted you to stop reading...), and that "sense of knowing" feels pleasant. The danger being that we have very little control over when we feel either, so the feeling of knowing is no substitute for rationality.
-- Marvin Minsky
Economist and likely future chairperson of the Federal Reserve Board Janet Yellen shows the key rationality trait of being able to admit you were wrong.
-Paul Halmos
Sean Carroll
Sometimes it's disturbing how good Sean Carrol is at articulating my thoughts. Especially when it pertains to, as above, the philosophy of science. Here's another:
Math with Bad Drawings
Scott Adams, in How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big
Nate Silver
(h/t Rob Wiblin)
From an article about Obamacare.
James Franklin, The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal
Julien Smith
Corollary 1: Always try to be that person.
Disputed. Some people are naturally on the defensive even when debating true propositions. Defensiveness though is more often a bad sign, since somebody defending a false proposition that they know on some level to be false, is more likely to try to hold territory and block opponent progress. Many advocating true propositions very commonly go on the offensive, nor is it clear to me that this is always wrong in human practice.
Nitpicking, but the quote stated that people who are on neither offensive nor defensive are people you can learn from - it didn't say that people who are on the offensive or defensive are necessarily wrong to do so.
-- Peter Drucker
"It is far better to improve the [quality] of testing first than to improve the efficiency of poor testing. Automating chaos just gives faster chaos." -- Mark Fewster & Dorothy Graham, Software Test Automation
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (emphasis mine)
--John Ciardi
That behaviourally people treat free very differently from even $1, and that effective policymaking requires removing even trivial-seeming barriers to desired actions.
Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.
We laughed, -knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.
-Wilfred Owen
--Richard Feynman
West Hunter
How meaningful are figures on brain size without figures on overall body size?
That's close enough to not effect his point, or even the order. I think you're engaging in motivated continuing to avoid having to acknowledge conclusions you find uncomfortable.
Do you also apply the same criticism to the (much larger number of) people how make (much larger errors) in the direction of no difference? Also, could you taboo what you mean by "descrimited". Steelmanning suggests you mean "judged according to inaccurate priors", yet you also seem be implying that inaccurately equaliterian priors aren't a problem.
By that reasoning, refusing to hire someone who doesn't have good recommendations, is discrimination, because you're giving him distinguishing treatment (refusing to hire him) based on membership in a category (people who lack good recommendations).
I think you have some assumptions that you need to make explicit, after thinking them through first. (For instance, one obvious change is to replace "category" with "irrelevant category", but that won't work.)
Emphasis mine. I don't think this is the question at all, because you also have the grade information; the only question is if grades screen off evidence from names, which is your second option. It seems to me that the odds that the name provides no additional information are very low.
To the best of my knowledge, no studies have been done which submit applications where the obviously black names have higher qualifications in an attempt to determine how many GPA points an obviously black name costs an applicant. (Such an experiment seems much more difficult to carry out, and doesn't have the same media appeal.)
Agreed that if you have P(A|B) and P(A|C), then you don't have enough to get P(A|BC).
But if you have the right objects and they're well-calibrated, then adding in a new measurement always improves your estimate. (You might not be sure that they're well-calibrated, in which case it might make sense to not include them, and that can obviously include trying to estimate P(A|BC) from P(A|C) and P(A|B).)
Not quite. Regression to the mean implies that you should apply shrinkage which is as specific as possible, but this shrinkage should obviously be applied to all applicants. (Regressing black scores to the mean, and not regressing white scores, for example, is obviously epistemic malfeasance, but regressing black scores to the black mean and white scores to the white mean makes sense, even if the IQ-grade... (read more)
His stated point is about telling things that everybody is supposed to know.
If you have an SD of 35 for an average of 1362 you have no idea about whether the last digit should be a 2. That means either you do state an error interval or you round to 1360.
Human height changed quite a bit over the last century. http://www.voxeu.org/article/reaching-new-heights-how-have-europeans-grown-so-tall . Taking data about human brainsize with 4 digit accuracy and assuming that it hasn't changed over the last 30 years is wrong.
European gained a lot of bodymass over the last 100 years due to better nutrition. The claim that it's static at 4 digit in a way where you could use 30 year old data to describes todays situation, gives the impression that human brainsize is something with is relatively fixed.
The difference in brain size between Africans and European in brainsize in that study is roughly the difference in height between todays Europeans and Europeans 100 years ago.
Given that background taking a three decades old average from one sample population and claiming that it's with 4 digits accuracy the average that exist today is wrong.
No, that was absolutely not his point. I don't understand how you could have come away thinking that- literally the entire next paragraph directly stated the exact opposite:
More generally, that was not a tightly reasoned book/paper about brainsize. That line was a throwaway point in support of a minor example ("For example, average brain size is not the same in all human populations") on a short blog post. Arguments about the number of significant figures presented, when you don't even disagree about the overall example or the conclusion, are about as good an example of bad disagreement as I can imagine.
His claim was:
(a) Everybody knew that different ethnicities had different brain sizes (b) It was an uncomfortable fact, so nobody talked about it (c) Now nobody knows that different ethnicities have different brain sizes
--Stuart Diamond, Getting More, 2010, pp. 51-52
I was once at a meetup, and there were some people there new to LessWrong. After listening to a philosophical argument between two long-time meetup group members, where they agreed on a conclusion that was somewhere between their original positions, a newcomer said "sounds like a good compromise," to which one of the old-comers (?) said "but that has nothing to do with whether it's true... in fact now that you point that out I'm suspicious of it."
Later in the meetup, an argument ended with another conclusion that sounded like a compromise. I pointed it out. One of the arguers was horrified to agree with me that compromising was exactly what he was doing.
Is this actually a failure mode though, if you only "compromise" with people you respect intellectually? In retrospect, this sounds kind of like an approximation to Aumann agreement.
On not doing the impossible:
-Article at The Atlantic
-- Peter Drucker
-- Ian Hacking, Images of Science: Essays on Realism and Empiricism
-- Reid Hastie & Robyn Dawes (Rational Choice in an Uncertain World)
The "Ulysses" reference is to the famous Ulysses pact in the Odyssey.
--Benjamin Franklin
SMBC comics on the relative proximity of excretory and reproductive outlets in humans.
Evo-devo (that is to say, actual real science) gives an even better account of that accident of evolutionary history. For simple sessile animals, reproduction often involves dumping quantities of spores or gametes into the environment. And what other system already dumps quantities of stuff into the environment...?
Okay, but why should the reproductive outlets be there too?
I agree connotationally, but the comic only answers half of the question.
I am a fan of SMBC, but the entire explanation is wrong. The events that led to the integration of reproductive and digestive systems happened long before a terrestrial existence of vertebrates, and certainly long before hands. To get a start on a real explanation you have to go back to early bilaterals:
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/chb/lectures/anatomy9.html
As near as I can tell it was about pipe reuse. But you can't make a funny comic about that (or maybe you can?). Zach is a "bard", not a "wizard." He entertains.
-Goro Shimura on Yutaka Taniyama
-- Peter Drucker The Effective Executive
-- Sam Starfall, FreeFall #1516
-- David Chapman
Saying that something is ineffable and saying that nothing we can say is meaningful without the exact same shared experience are rather different things. To use your own example, comparision is possible - so we can imperfectly describe chocolate in terms of sugar and (depending on the type) bitterness, even if our audience has never heard of chocolate.
Conveniently, this allows us to roughly fathom experiences that nobody has ever had. Playwrights, for example, set out to create an experience that does not yet exist and prompt actors to react to situations they have never lived through, and through their capability to generalize they can imperfectly communicate their ideas.
Skitter the bug girl on morality, consequentialism and metaethics in Worm, the online serial recommended by Eliezer for HPMoR withdrawal ... (read more)
snip
--Paul Graham
Dupe.
-- Mother Goose
Presumably, a wise implementation of this quote would consider a continuum of remedies, ranging from mild treatment of symptoms to vaccination against the possibility of ever contracting the ailment. Even if there is no cure for an ailment, there is still value in mitigating its negative effects.
James A. Donald
Exact same argument. Does it sound equally persuasive to you?
I'd extend Eugene's reply and point out that both the original and modified version of the sentence are observations. As such, it doesn't matter that the two sentences are grammatically similar; it's entirely possible that one is observed and the other is not. History has plenty of examples of people who are willing to do harm for a good cause and end up just doing harm; history does not have plenty of examples of people who are willing to cut people open to remove cancer and end up just cutting people open.
Also, the phrasing "to end malaria" isn't analogous to "to remove cancer" because while the surgery only has a certain probability of working, the uncertainty in that probability is limited. We know the risks of surgery, we know how well surgery works to treat cancer, and so we can weigh those probabilities. When ending malaria (in this example), the claim that the experiment has so-and-so chance of ending malaria involves a lot more human judgment than the claim that surgery has so-and-so chance of removing cancer.
Utilitarianism isn't a description of human moral processing, it's a proposal for how to improve it.
One problem is that if we, say, start admiring people for acting in "more utilitarian" ways, what we may actually be selecting for is psychopathy.
Agreed. Squicky dilemmas designed to showcase utilitarianism are not generally found in real life (as far as I know). And a human probably couldn't be trusted to make a sound judgement call even if one were found. Running on untrusted hardware and such.
Ah- and this is the point of the quote. Oh, I like that.
We us::should try to be as utilitarian as we can because our intuitive morality is kind of consequentialist, so we care about how the world actually ends up, and utilitarianism helps us win.
If we ever pass up a chance to literally hold one child's face to a fire and end malaria, we have screwed up. We are not getting what we care about most.
It's not the "tidiness" in any aesthetic sense of VNM axioms that are important, it's the not-getting-money-pumped. Not being able to be money pumped is important not because getting money pumped is stupid and we can't be stupid, but because we need to use our money on useful stuff.
If I'm not fighting the hypothetical, yes I would.
If I encountered someone claiming that in the messy real world, then I run the numbers VERY careful and most likely conclude the probability is infinitesimal of him actually telling the truth and being sane. Specifically, of those claims the one that it'd be easier to kidnap someone than to find volunteer (say, adult willing to do it in exchange for giving their families large sums of money) sounds highly implausible.
Here's one with actual information gained: Imperial Japanese experimentation about frostbite
The cost of this scientific breakthrough was borne by those seized for medical experiments. They were taken outside and left with exposed arms, periodically drenched with water, until a guard decided that frostbite had set in. Testimony From a Japanese officer said this was determined after the "frozen arms, when struck with a short stick, emitted a sound resembling that which a board gives when it is struck."
I don't get the impression that those experiments destroyed a lot of trust-- nothing compared to the rape of Nanking or Japanese treatment of American prisoners of war.
However, it might be worth noting that that sort of experimentation doesn't seem to happen to people who are affiliated with the scientists or the government.
Logically, people could volunteer for such experiments and get the same respect that soldiers do, but I don't know of any real-world examples.
...
So your answer is that in fact it would not work. That is a reasonable response to an outrageous hypothetical. Yet James A. Donald suggested a realistic scenario, and beside it, the arguments you come up with look rather weak.
Given the millions killed by malaria and at most thousands of experimental subjects, it takes a heavy thumb on the scales of this argument to make the utilitarian calculation come out against.
This is a get-out-of-utilitarianism-free card. A real utilitarian simply chooses the action of maximum utility. He would only pay a psychological cost for not doing that. When all are utilitarians the laws will also be utilitarian, and an evaluation of utility will be the sole criterion applied by the courts.
You are not a utilitarian. Ne... (read more)
I upvoted this comment, but I want to add an important caveat. Whether, and how much, you trust your own judgment over that of an expert should depend at least in part on the degree to which you think your situation is unusual.
The IT guy wants you to shut up and go away, but (if in fact he is an expert and not a trained monkey reading a script) he's not going to spout random nonsense at you just to get you to leave. He's going to tell you things relevant to what is, in his experience, the usual situation.
Consider well whether you're sure your problem is some special snowflake. The IT guy has seen a lot of issues. Sometimes he can, before you finish your first sentence, know exactly what your problem is and how to fix it, and if he sounds bored when he tells you "just reboot it", that doesn't mean that he's wrong. If it costs you little, try his advice first.
GK Chesterton
I don't really like quotes like this. It's not that it's not true and it's not that it's not that no one commits the error it warns against.
It's that no one who is blind to fallacies due to popularity is going to notice their mistake and change - it's too easy to agree with the quote without firing up the process that would lead you to making the mistake.
Good quotes will make it easy to put yourself in either position so that you can mentally bridge the two. If you're thinking "I can't imagine how they might make that mistake!", then you won't recognize that thought process when you go through it yourself.
Harrap's First Law
"The enemy of my enemy has their own relationship with me."
--Paul
Found here.
Publilius Syrus
Trivial statements are often useful as reminders of facts, particularly when those facts are tradeoffs we would rather not have to face.
James Argo
puts "quantum" + " consciousness"
=> quantum consciousness
Here ignorance is acting as the "+" operator, binding the two strings into one. On reflection, it's not as clever as I thought it was when I read it on Hacker News. Rationality quotes should be scrutable. I'll retract.
Eric Raymond
Eric Raymond
Google Is My Friend.
What's the difference between "based on computation of the odds" and "based on some model"?
-William Deresiewicz
-- Bas van Fraassen, Laws and Symmetry
Guilded Age
Edit: mispelling of "write" corrected.
In fact, the more you ponder it, the more inevitable it seems. Evolution gave us the cognition we needed, nothing more. To the degree we relied on metacognition and casual observation to inform our self-conception, the opportunistic nature of our cognitive capacities remained all but invisible, and we could think ourselves the very rule, stamped not just the physical image of God, but in His cognitive image as well. Like God, we had no back side, nothing to render us naturally contingent. We were the motionless centre of the universe: the earth, in a very ... (read more)
-- Stefan Kendall
I bet he believes you can't walk on the moon either.
That is true. There are some things that we cannot do. There are some things that we cannot do yet. There are some things that we can do, but have not.
The objection to the quote is that it seems to place "moving Mt. Fuji", as an example of some larger class, in the first class not arbitrarily, but in spite of the evidence (the fact that the audience has come up with an answer, if indeed they have). While the surrounding article makes a good point, the quote in isolation smacks of irrational defeatism.
As an alternative to the quote, I propose the following:
-Tyrion Lannister, Game of Thrones
Tyrion is frequently put into situations where he relies on his family's reputation for paying debts.
It's a real-life Newcomb-like problem - specifically a case of Parfit's Hitchhiker - illustrating the practical benefits of being seen as the sort of agent who keeps promises. It's not an ordinary quid-pro-quo because there is, in fact, no incentive for Tyrion to keep his end of the bargain once he gets what he wants other than to be seen as the sort of person who keeps his bargain.
Think it's a stretch?
Ahem.