A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
ETA: It would seem that rationality quotes are no longer desired. After several days this thread stands voted into the negatives. Wolud whoever chose to to downvote this below 0 would care to express their disapproval of the regular quotes tradition more explicitly? Or perhaps they may like to browse around for some alternative posts that they could downvote instead of this one? Or, since we're in the business of quotation, they could "come on if they think they're hard enough!"
From a BBC interview with a retiring Oxford Don:
Don: "Up until the age of 25, I believed that 'invective' was a synonym for 'urine'."
BBC: "Why ever would you have thought that?"
Don: "During my childhood, I read many of the Edgar Rice Burroughs 'Tarzan' stories, and in those books, whenever a lion wandered into a clearing, the monkeys would leap into the trees and 'cast streams of invective upon the lion's head.'"
BBC: "But, surely sir, you now know the meaning of the word."
Don: "Yes, but I do wonder under what other misapprehensions I continue to labour."
On utility:
--bash.org
also from bash.org (made as a reply since I'm already at my 5-quote limit):
The analysis fails to take into account the cost of buying and raising of cats.
Or at least of maintaining friendships with people who have cats.
While hilarious, and I upvoted it, I doubt economists would agree with the stated cost of the catpenny game, nor with its comparability to other forms of entertainment.
ETA: and catpenny seems likely to be subject to drastically diminishing returns.
We should test this! Anyone got a cat? I've got 9 pennies I don't want.
Don't forget to consider the negative utility of an angry cat attacking the catpenny player, which will surely happen after x catpennies.
Anyone going to go looking for x? It would of course have to be statistical distribution, varying with cat age, breed, and so on.
Doesn't catpenny cost less than a penny (in terms of dollars spent)? You can recover most, if not all, of the pennies.
-- Raving Atheist, found via the Black Belt Bayesian blog (props to Steven)
"Intuition only works in situations where neurology and evolution has pre-equipped us with a good set of basic-level categories. That works for dealing with other humans, and for throwing things, and for a bunch of other things that do not, unfortunately, include constructing viable philosophies."
-- Eric S. Raymond
-- Bryan Caplan
Steven Pinker -- The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
"You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right." --Randall Munroe, in the alt-text of xkcd 701
"In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it." GK Chesterton
-- G.K. Chesterton
Your friend must be pretty hungry by now.
"Who are you?"
"Who am I? I'm not quite sure."
"I admire an open mind. My own is closed upon the conviction that I am Shardovan, the librarian of Castrovalva."
-- Doctor Who
-- Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
-- Slavoj Žižek @ Google
-- Peter's Evil Overlord List on how to be a less wrong fictional villain
Yeah, let me do it.
Alfred Mander -- Logic for the Millions
On parsimony:
--John von Neumann, at the first national meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery
—H.P. Lovecraft, clearly talking about cryonic preservation
"If the tool you have is a hammer, make the problem look like a nail."
Steven W. Smith, The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing
--Bryan Caplan
Reference: Guardians of Ayn Rand
-- The Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine
Bruce Schneier
Presumably not per unit exposure, which is the relevant measure when you're near a pig or shark. If he's talking about abstract worry, then he might have a point.
The terrifying soundtrack that accompanies them when they approach.
-- Mark Twain, excerpt from The War Prayer
Penn Jillette
Note to self: every day, eight million things happen in New York.
--- James Stephens
-- Isaac Asimov via Salvor Hardin, Foundation
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
"We can get very confused, because we think that words must have some secret meaning that we have to figure out. They don't. They are just noises or marks, and they mean whatever experience you have learned to mean by them. People tend to use similar words in similar situations, but unless you have specifically agreed on what the words will mean, in terms of underlying experiences, there's no way to know what another person understands when you use them. The experience you attach to a word when you say it isn't automatically the same as the experience another person attaches to the same word when hearing it."
William T. Powers
--Jonothan Coulton
Johannes Kepler
-- Benjamin Franklin
-- Garfield
-- Han Solo
Yet whenever I see that, I think "European Union". And when I first saw Star Wars fans talk about the OT, my first though was, "Old Testament". Actually, that's not far off, in a sense! (It's actually "Original Trilogy".)
ETA: A "Jew" of Star Wars would, I guess, be someone who accepts the OT, but rejects everything thereafter. There seem to be many...
-- PZ Myers
-- Nicolas Boileau
Rough translation: "What is well understood can be told clearly, and words to express it should come easily."
ETA: it is worth pondering the converse; just because something rolls off the tongue doesn't mean it's well understood. It could be that it's only well-rehearsed.
What the quote is aimed at is work of a supposedly high intellectual caliber, which just so happens to be couched in impenetrable jargon. Far more often, that is in fact evidence of muddled thought, not that the material is "beyond me".
-Benoit Mandelbrot
"People are not complicated. People are really very simple. What makes them appear complicated is our continual insistence on interpreting their behavior instead of discovering their goals."
-- Bruce Gregory
-- http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/
'Nash equilibrium strategy' is not necessarily synonymous to 'optimal play'. A Nash equilibrium can define an optimum, but only as a defensive strategy against stiff competition. More specifically: Nash equilibria are hardly ever maximally exploitive. A Nash equilibrium strategy guards against any possible competition including the fiercest, and thereby tends to fail taking advantage of sub-optimum strategies followed by competitors. Achieving maximally exploitive play generally requires deviating from the Nash strategy, and allowing for defensive leaks in ones own strategy. -- Johannes Koelman
"Seeing is believing, but seeing isn't knowing." -- AronRa
-- H. Ross Perot
To take advantage of professional specialization, gains from trade, capital infrastructure, comparative advantage, and economies of scale, the way grownups do it when they actually care, I'd say that the activist is the one who pays someone else to clean up the river.
If people don't realise that the river is dirty and that's causing problems, changing that is valuable work by itself.
-- Groucho Marx
Marvin Minsky -- The Society of Mind
-- Ben Shahn, "The Shape of Content"
--Erwin Schrodinger, Mind and Matter
-- News of the Weird (relevance)
During a conversation with a Christian friend, during which my apostasy was challenged sincerely and politely but with the usual arguments and style...
Christian: And the Bible tells us that if we have Faith as small as a mustard seed...
Me: Yeah, we can move mountains. Matthew 17:20. So, tell me. Could God make an argument so circular that even He couldn't believe it?
Christian: Of course! He's God, God can do anything.
'Made in His Image' seems to apply all too well.
Marquis de Condorcet, 1794
"In my experience, the most staunchly held views are based on ignorance or accepted dogma, not carefully considered accumulations of facts. The more you expose the intricacies and realities of the situation, the less clear-cut things become."
Mary Roach - from her book Spook
John Maynard Keynes
--Emanuel Derman
(quoted in Beyond AI by JoSH Hall)
"Most people are more complicated than they seem, but less complicated than they think"
-- Karp
"Love God?" you're in an abusive relationship.
DLC, commenter at Pharyngula.
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
A bit of a meta-quote:
... (read more)“He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher...or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.”
"In madness all sounds become articulate." -- "Language of the Shadows", Nile
For the record, I didn't downvote this below zero, but it did at one point downvote this back to zero (and did the same for the Open Thread). Not because I'd disagree with the tradition in any way, but because I don't think the first person to get around posting the month's thread should get tens of points of karma for simply being quick.
--Dr. Samuel Johnson
-- Mark Chu-Carroll
[Connections to rationality: Focus, taking action, and conversation style.]
---Star Trek: Voyager, "Good Shepherd"
"To know something is to make this something that I know myself; but to avail myself of it, to dominate it, it has to remain distinct from myself." -- Miguel de Unamuno
--Jean-Luc Picard
-Michael Anissimov
Don't tolerate intolerance. -bumper sticker
— Bob Dylan, "Desolation Row"
Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
A man with one watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never quite sure.
A man with one watch might have the wrong time; a man with two watches is more aware of his own ignorance.