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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB - if we do this, there should be a separate thread for it.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
"A witty saying proves nothing." -- Voltaire
I've always found that useful to keep in mind when reading threads like this.
I think this should go at the top of all monthly Rationality Quotes posts as an epigraph.
"As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls."
-- M. Cartmill
Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, qtd. in Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room
Eliezer didn't say... oh sod it.
Whitehead, Alfred North (1861 - 1947), An Introduction to Mathematics.
-- DanielLC
-- Karl Popper
Alice came to a fork in the road. "Which road do I take?" she asked. "Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat. "I don't know," Alice answered. "Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter." ~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
I forget if I've posted this before, but:
"I've noticed that the press tends to be quite accurate, except when they're writing on a subject I know something about." -- Keith F. Lynch
-- David Hill
-Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
-- Ibsen, 1881
-Terry Pratchett, Mort
-- Steven Pinker, How The Mind Works
John Von Neumann
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
[ while in general I value philosophy, there is also much nonsense and, especially, little progress ]
-- Richard Feynman The Character of Physical Law
"The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning. ... Perception is inference."[emphasis added]
- Atul Gawande
"It’s hard to argue with a counter-example."
-- Roger Brockett
-- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
In J. R. Newman (ed.), The World of Mathematics, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956.
-- Roger Zelazny, as Corwin ("Nine Princes in Amber").
Saul Perlmutter
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground
(Self-promotion: this is the epigraph to the novella I'm working on, which is not really about rationality but is about what we're pleased to call "human nature", and which you may read the beginning of here if so inclined.)
Ken Binmore
"If you’ve never missed a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports."
-- Umesh Vazirani (as quoted by Scott Aaronson)
-Mark Twain
-- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
-Buddha
Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. ~Andre Gide
"Most men are so thoroughly subjective that nothing really interests them but themselves. They always think of their own case as soon as any remark is made, and their whole attention is engrossed and absorbed by the merest chance reference to anything which affects them personally, be it never so remote: with the result that they have no power left for forming an objective view of things, should the conversation take that turn; neither can they admit any validity in arguments which tell against their interest or their vanity."
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
-- Tailsteak
“To rationalize their lies, people -- and the governments, churches, or terrorist cells they compose -- are apt to regard their private interests and desires as just.”
--Wendy Kaminer (A woman social activist)
Cletus O. Oakley
The problem with engineers is that they tend to cheat in order to get results.
The problem with mathematicians is that they tend to work on toy problems in order to get results.
The problem with program verifiers is that they tend to cheat on toy programs in order to get results.
the UNIX fortune-cookie program; original source unknown
-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
A verse from Jonathan Richman's song, "Summer Feeling," on memory.
Francis Bacon
~ Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
[ I'm actually not too fond of objectivism, but this quote is spot-on ]
"God ha' mercy! What cannot be racked from words in five centuries? One could wring, methinks, a flood from a damp clout!"
Shakespeare in the 20th century, as imagined by Isaac Asimov in "The Immortal Bard".
-- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality.
--Eliezer (http://lesswrong.com/lw/if/your_strength_as_a_rationalist/)
Whenever, then, anything in nature seems to us ridiculous, absurd or evil, it is because we have but a partial knowledge of things, and are in the main ignorant of order and coherence of nature as a whole, and because we want everything to be arranged according to dictates of our own reason; although in fact, what our reason pronounces bad is not as bad as regards the order and laws of universal nature, but only as regards the order and laws of our own nature taken separately.... As for the terms good and bad, they indicate nothing positive considered in t... (read more)
"Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something" Thoreau
-- Mencius Moldbug, teaching us how to argue any point persuasively. (In this example he's talking about the Allies vs Nazi Germany.)
Hyman G. Rickover
"You can't tell what someone is doing by watching what they're doing."
-- Richard Marken
"Action speaks nothing, without the Motive."
-- anonymous fortune cookie
Mencius said, "Whenever anyone told him that he had made a mistake, Tzu-lu was delighted. Whenever he heard a fine saying, Yü bowed low before the speaker. The Great Shun was even greater. He was ever ready to fall into line with others, giving up his own ways for theirs, and glad to take from others that by which he could do good."
"If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity."
-- Deuteronomy 25:11-12 (New International Version)