A newspaper is better than a magazine. A seashore is a better place than the street. At first it is better to run than to walk. You may have to try several times. It takes some skill, but it is easy to learn. Even young children can enjoy it. Once successful, complications are minimal. Birds seldom get too close. Rain, however, soaks in very fast. Too many people doing the same thing can also cause problems. One needs lots of room. If there are no complications, it can be very peaceful. A rock will serve as an anchor. If things break loose from it, however, you will not get a second chance.

Is this paragraph comprehensible or meaningless? Feel your mind sort through potential explanations. Now watch what happens with the presentation of a single word: kite. As you reread the paragraph, feel the prior discomfort of something amiss shifting to a pleasing sense of rightness. Everything fits; every sentence works and has meaning. Reread the paragraph again; it is impossible to regain the sense of not understanding. In an instant, without due conscious deliberation, the paragraph has been irreversibly infuesed with a feeling of knowing.

Try to imagine other interpretations for the paragr

But there’s a big difference between “impossible” and “hard to imagine.” The first is about it; the second is about you!

-- Marvin Minsky

"For my own part,” Ms. Yellen said, “I did not see and did not appreciate what the risks were with securitization, the credit ratings agencies, the shadow banking system, the S.I.V.’s — I didn’t see any of that coming until it happened.” Her startled interviewers noted that almost none of the officials who testified had offered a similar acknowledgment of an almost universal failure.

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.

Is time real? …In one sense, it’s a silly question. The “reality” of something is only an interesting issue if its a well-defined concept whose actual existence is in question, like Bigfoot or supersymmetry. For concepts like “time,” which are unambiguously part of a useful vocabulary we have for describing the world, talking about “reality” is just a bit of harmless gassing. They may be emergent or fundamental, but they’re definitely there.

Sean Carroll

"Next time you’re in a debate, ask yourself if someone is on offense or defense. If they’re neither, then you know you have someone you can learn from"

Julien Smith

Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.

-- Peter Drucker

"I spread the map out on the dining room table, and I held down the corners with cans of V8. The dots from where I'd found things looked like the stars in the universe. I connected them, like an astrologer, and if you squinted your eyes like a Chinese person, it kind of looked like the word 'fragile'. [...] I erased and connected the dots to make 'porte'. I had the revelation that I could connect the dots to make 'cyborg', and 'platypus', and 'boobs', and even 'Oskar', if you were extremely Chinese. I could connect them to make almost anything I wanted, which meant I wasn't getting closer to anything. And now I'll never know what I was supposed to find. And that's another reason I can't sleep."

Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (emphasis mine)

Any man can learn to learn from the wise once he can find them: but learn to learn from a fool and all the world’s your faculty.

--John Ciardi

That's why it's so important to understand how unworried I was. I wasn't $400 worth of worried, or $100 worth of worried, or even $20 worth. I wouldn't have gone to the dermatologist if I didn't have health insurance. I probably wouldn't have gone if I had insurance but it had a big deductible, or even any real co-pay. The only reason I went to have my life saved is because it cost me zero dollars.

• Jon Schwarz, A Tiny Revolution

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

"One of the miseries of life is that everybody names things a little bit wrong, and so it makes everything a little harder to understand in the world than it would be if it were named differently."

--Richard Feynman

Someone I know at TAC opined that everyone knows this stuff, and talking about it is just mean. I think he is mistaken: you have to state important facts every so often, or nobody knows them anymore.

West Hunter

Most people think that the negotiation is about substance: I’m a financial expert, I’m a medical doctor, I’m an environmental lawyer, I’m an energy expert, I’m a mechanic. But studies show that less than 10 percent of the reason why people reach agreement has anything to do with the substance. More than 50 percent has to do with the people—do they like each other, do they trust each other, will they hear what each other has to say? Just over a third has to do with the process they use. That is, do they decide to explore each other’s needs (rational and emotional)? Do they agree on an agenda? Do they make genuine commitments to each other?

If you believe that negotiations are about the substantive issues, sadly, you will be right more than you are persuasive. That means that the truth, the facts, are only one argument in a negotiation. The people and the process are much more important. This is particularly hard for people who are focused on the substance—doctors, engineers, financial experts—to accept. But, based on research, it is true. You can’t even use substantive issues to persuade effectively unless and until the other party is ready to hear about them.

--Stuart Diamond, Getting More, 2010, pp. 51-52

On not doing the impossible:

Ferrucci says. “We constantly underestimate—we did in the ’50s about AI, and we’re still doing it—what is really going on in the human brain.”

The question that [Douglas] Hofstadter wants to ask Ferrucci, and everybody else in mainstream AI, is this: Then why don’t you come study it?

...

Peter Norvig, one of Google’s directors of research, echoes Ferrucci almost exactly. “I thought he was tackling a really hard problem,” he told me about Hofstadter’s work. “And I guess I wanted to do an easier problem.”

-Article at The Atlantic

I know that what I see through the microscope is veridical because we made the grid to be just that way. I know that the process of manufacture is reliable, because we can check the results with the microscope. Moreover we can check the results with any kind of microscope, using any of a dozen unrelated physical processes to produce an image. Can we entertain the possibility that, all the same, this is some gigantic coincidence?

-- Ian Hacking, Images of Science: Essays on Realism and Empiricism

Natural selection is a tinkerer, not an idiot!

SMBC comics on the relative proximity of excretory and reproductive outlets in humans.

The only rigorous method, the only one that enables us to test an opinion against reality, is based on the clear recognition that opinions come first[as opposed to facts]—and that this is the way it should be. Then no one can fail to see that we start out with untested hypotheses—in decision-making as in science the only starting point. We know what to do with hypotheses—one does not argue them; one tests them. One finds out which hypotheses are tenable, and therefore worthy of serious consideration, and which are eliminated by the first test against observable experience.

-- Peter Drucker The Effective Executive

What is the experience of eating a chocolate brownie like? Can you describe it?

I believe it is ineffable. There is nothing you can say about chocolate that would mean anything to someone who has not tasted it.

Chocolate brownies are one of my favorite things -- but I don't think their ineffability is a big deal.

All experiences are ineffable. The best we can ever do is say "it's like this other thing."

-- David Chapman

”I don’t believe in shouldn’t, like there’s some universal rules about the way things should be, the way people should act.”

“So there’s no right or wrong? People and animals should do whatever?”

“No, there’s always going to be consequences. Believe me when I say I know about that. But I do think there’s always going to be extenuating circumstances, where a lot of things we normally assume are wrong become excusable.”

Skitter the bug girl on morality, consequentialism and metaethics in Worm, the online serial recommended by Eliezer for HPMoR withdrawal ... (read more)

Robert Morris has a very unusual quality: he's never wrong. It might seem this would require you to be omniscient, but actually it's surprisingly easy. Don't say anything unless you're fairly sure of it. If you're not omniscient, you just don't end up saying much. More precisely, the trick is to pay careful attention to how you qualify what you say. ... He has an almost superhuman integrity. He's not just generally correct, but also correct about how correct he is.

--Paul Graham

For every ailment under the sun;
There is a remedy, or there is none;
If there be one, try to find it;
If there be none, never mind it.

-- Mother Goose

Utilitarianism is not in our nature. Show me a man who would hold a child’s face in the fire to end malaria, and I will show you man who would hold a child’s face in the fire and entirely forget he was originally planning to end malaria.

James A. Donald

Experts are simply people with more information and experience. But they are not necessarily as intelligent as you are, they often lack some of the most relevant information, and they usually have no skin in the game so they often don't even bother paying serious attention to the matter at hand.

Some of my biggest mistakes have been because, against my better judgment, I trusted the expert to know what he was doing. The main problem, I think, is that the expert is usually making a probabilistic decision based on the averages without bothering to apply the

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

GK Chesterton

The enemy of the enemy of my enemy is my enemy.

Harrap's First Law

Nothing can be done [both] hastily and prudently.

Publilius Syrus

all interesting behavior is overdetermined

Eric Raymond

You often see in the papers things saying events we just saw should happen every ten thousand years, hundred thousand years, ten billion years. Some faculty here in this university had an event and said that a 10-sigma event should happen every, I don't know how many billion years. Do you ever regard how worrisome it is, when someone makes a statement like that, "it should happen every ten thousand years," particularly when the person is not even two thousand years old?

So the fundamental problem of small probabilities is that rare events don't

Rationality is only bridled irrationality.

-- Bas van Fraassen, Laws and Symmetry

Rachel: I'll have to write that into the new gospel.

E-Merl: New gospel?

Rachel: Gospels should be updated regularly.

Guilded Age

Edit: mispelling of "write" corrected.