Once again, here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:
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- Do not quote yourself
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB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.
Reminds me of http://xkcd.com/125/
chairman of the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation
The quote was brought to my attention by a student in my Economics of Future Technology course who is writing on sanitation in the developing world.
Vespasian
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-- Screwtape, from "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" by C. S. Lewis.
Hayek was right. Capitalists in a mixed-economy seem to be in something analogous to a prisoner's dilemma. It would benefit any individual capitalist to seek monopoly privileges for their own firm, but it hurts all of them if any significant number of them do so.
-Stanley Kubrick
the past is a third-world country
The past is in some respects worse than a third world country. In the United States around 1900, the life expectancy ranged from around 50 climbing steadily to reach around 60 around 1930 (curiously the Great Depression didn't cause a slump in life expectancy, although the rate of growth did slow). Source with related data(pdf). But, if one looks at current life expectancy in many countries in the developing world, most countries exceed the US-1900 numbers. Similar comparisons can be made for literacy and many other metrics of success. The middling developing countries today are better in many ways than most of the US was in 1900.
Also, third world countries can buy the used stuff we don't want anymore. The past can't do that.
NYT article titled "Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?"
The next line of the article after the above quote is "But none of this happened."
Ariex
I thought that "agree to disagree" had become a fixed expression meaning something like "stop discussing this for now even though we don't agree, because we have more productive things to do/talk about".
Yes, but understanding that makes it harder to get annoyed at people.
--Nate Silver Parody Twitter Account @fivethirtynate, on the night of the presidential election
--Steve Sailer, here
"It's frightening to think that you might not know something, but more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what is going on." - Amos Tversky
Devil's advocate time:
They don't know nothing about it. They know two things.
Here are some reasons to oppose the plan, based on the above knowledge:
We don't need a debt reduction plan, just keep doing what we're doing and it will sort itself out.
I like another existing plan, and this is not that one, so I oppose it.
I've heard of Panetta and (s)he's a complete douchebag. Anything they've come up with is clearly junk.
I haven't even heard of either of them, so what the heck would they know about debt reduction?
They're from different parties, there's no way they could have come up with something sensible.
I've heard 10 different plans described, and surely this is one of them. I can't remember which one this is, but I hated all of them so I must oppose this too.
And of course you can make a very similar set of reasons to support it. Not trying to rationalise people's stupidity or make excuses for them as such, just present the opposing argument in all its glory. Ok maybe making excuses for them is exactly what I'm doing. But honestly, how many of your political opinions, as a percentage, including all those that you don't know you have until asked, are really much better than the reasons above?
This might be a distinction without a difference. The trick was to get people to think they knew about some topic X well enough to profess an opinion on it, even though in fact they didn't know the first thing about X. Making sure that X doesn't exist is just a cheap way to implement this trick.
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Long quote to make a simple point, but relevant. (Context: this is from a Star Wars novel, so it's fiction.)
... (read more)Well,
it is exactly what the quote said:
In the case of LW, voting irrationally has almost zero costs. You don't get penalized for voting wrongly(Incidentally I suggested trying to implement some measure of this kind and guess what... I was downvoted). The penalties are more indirect, like diminishing the amount of epistemically correct contributions.
So why would you assume that LW would be less prone to have this sort of problem?
The evidence suggests that the problem should actually be worse on LW, see1, 2.
— Yagyū Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword
--Dr. House
-Francis Bacon
— Confucius, allegedly (quoted in The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed)
Edit: The rationality relevance might need some explanation. The way I've seen this aphorism used is this: it's sometimes hard to distinguish between a task that's achievable but very difficult (and that it therefore might make sense to spend time/effort on), and a task that is impossible (and thus is a complete waste of time/effort).
If you spend some time searching for the cat in the dark room, you might not find it. Is that because finding it is difficult (after all, this is what you might quite plausibly expect, if you assume that the cat is there), or because the cat is not there and you're wasting your time?
John Cleese
transcript
— Yagyū Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword
— Yagyū Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword
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-- Eden Phillpotts
Yes, the universe is full of things waiting for our wits to grow sharp enough that we stop anthropomorphizing them...
TELL ME ABOUT IT.
The universe is full of sharp things, waiting to skewer us.
No idea what I got the sudden urge to respond with that.
Roadside Picnic, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky
Derek Lowe, In the Pipeline
Catharine G. Evans
Johanna Schroeder
"Speed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to 'discover' that - where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed." - Marvin Minsky
-- Ozy Frantz
-- Sherlock (BBC series), season 1, episode 3 "The Great Game"
Yes, I know that if you correct for differences in caring due to distance/scope insensitivity/etc. it does help save them, and that caring doesn't preclude skepticism about which actions are helpful, and that in this particular case Sherlock should have refused to respond to blackmail and there'd have been fewer deaths. But it works as a retort to "can't say no" spending. Don't give to some counterproductive charity because you care about starving kids in Africa, give to the Against Malaria Foundation because it makes fewer kids dead.
--John Maynard Keynes on Bertrand Russell
--Charles Munger http://ycombinator.com/munger.html
selenite on Yvain's blog
Reading the context (it's said in response to an evangelical trying to use Lewis' Trilemma) just makes it plain badass.
Edit: Yup, apparently that's a famous quote by Bradley which I read for the first time in that book. Good catch.
A Google search attributes this to Gen. Omar Bradley.
-- Algernon Blackwood, The Damned
If you are hiding in a basement from the Nazis, this isn't true. If you are going to be tortured for the whereabouts of people hiding from the Nazis, you should also avert your eyes and avoid finding out where they are hiding. The fact that instrumental and epistemic rationality are sometimes at odds is another tragic truth.
Just remember, most people most of the time are not about to learn the location of a refugee just before being tortured by Nazis.
Which we should not avert our eyes from.
"Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition."
Alan Turing, Alan Turing: the Enigma (Vintage edition 1992), p. 513
Myiamoto Musashi, Book of the Five Rings.
-John Hunter
John Preskill
--Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers
I'm not talking about the mindkilling politics of Starship Troopers today. The quote's about doing the impossible. A while back Kyre posted a link to Minus #37, and without context, it hit me like a knife in the guts. I didn't know that she was a godlike reality-bender. To me she was just a kid who stepped up to take a swing, she was Tiffany Aching.
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... (read more)
That's been posted before, and appears to have made it far enough into the LW vernacular to be used without explanation although not without scare quotes. You do give more context for it, though.
"They're running on the same neural architecture that I am and I'm a person."
Florence Ambrose (Fictional Biological AI, referring to machine AIs)
-- Richard Wilbur, At Moorditch
-- Imre Lakatos, ‘‘Criticism and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,’’
--Seth Roberts, Online Teaching vs. What?, which also makes the point that the best books on a subject are rarely if ever textbooks
-John Hunter
Confucius, Analects V.14
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 8
-Buttercup Dew (@NationalistPony)
"Proof is for mathematics and alcohol."
-- Common response to requests for proof of scientific results
-- Emily Dickinson
@zizek_ebooks, a Twitter account remixing quotes from Slavoj Zizek's texts.
Ernesto Che Guevara (ironically enough)
I think we've got too much focus here on criticizing bad stuff, deconstructing lies, weighing and doubting between options, and dreaming of uncertain futures. As opposed to working hard, building stuff, making decisions, and starting on it right now..
@Akrasia, @WhyOurKindCan'tCooperate, @HalfARationalist @ApologistVSRevolutionary @SelfImprovementVSShinyDistr... (read more)
-Today's A Softer World. Not the first time that it's had transhumanist sentiments.
--Hark! The Herald Angels Sing (traditionally, the third verse -- starts at 2:52 in the linked video)
An unusual choice, to be sure. But notwithstanding the obvious religious content, I actually find this piece of the hymn to be a beautiful expression of genuine transhumanist sentiment. We've previousl... (read more)