Rationality Quotes March 2013

This one is excellent! Thankyou satt! (Almost disappointing that it was 'wasted' as a mere reply.)

It seems to me that The Last Psychiatrist makes up theories about what people really mean according to his mental habits. Is there any way of checking his claims?

Cute. :) And someone on Wikiquotes traces it back to

"The way to get things done is not to mind who gets the credit." --Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893)

Seems difficult. The people sending this signal are necessarily sending it really quietly. I guess it could be a good way to evaluate someone you know well. It wouldn't work to pick an altruist out of a crowd if you're, say, looking at job applicants.

I think looking at politicians as insane is entirely the wrong approach. Most of them are sane enough, they just operate under some perverse incentives (and I wouldn't bet on China's being too reasonable either). That said, allegedly China does have plans for thorium, although I'm not too familiar with the details. (Also, recent article suggesting plans are still going.)

Well, that very same Cracked article has this to say:

So if you actually Google the subject of the clean energy link above (in this case, thorium nuclear reactors) instead of, say, instantly forwarding it to all of your friends, you will be immediately kicked in the balls by Wikipedia's giant wall of text describing the many problems with the technology.

"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LFTR#Disadvantages" Interestingly, that same wiki page possible solutions to most of the disadvantages Personally, I think the biggest reason is that Carter stopped the research decades ago, so there are no actual examples of the technology to evaluate. People thereby assume that because no-one is doing it, it must not be worthwhile.

According to Wikipedia, there are at least 4 groups currently working on LFTRs, one of which is China: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LFTR#Recent_developments

I think the "pay no price for being wrong" formulation is stronger than the "gain nothing from being right" one because of loss aversion (which makes penalties a stronger incentive), and either is stronger than your second suggestion because of pithiness.

Really, anything that can fit in a twitter is unlikely to be useful.

I'm afraid this isn't the thread for you!

Really, anything that can fit in a twitter is unlikely to be useful.

72 characters.

patio11 is something of a "marketing engineer", and his target audience is young software enthusiasts (Hacker News). What makes you think that this isn't pretty specific advice for a fairly narrow audience?

And http://lesswrong.com/lw/ki/double_illusion_of_transparency/

Works for a class size of 1, in a way.

Well, Larry Ellison is also pretty rich.

Yes, but only literally.

I find this to be like saying to someone with cancer "Don't bother with treatment, you aren't dead yet". A bucket list is for plans and actions, not attributes inherent to existing in the first place.

Other commenters have said that it is more about things you may not have done without having it on the bucket list for a reminder or incentive. In this case, we can reasonably expect Gates meant putting effort into avoiding death, not "I was immortal, but now feel like trying to win the Hardcore Mode Bucket List challenge.

Right.

Socially a higher threshold should play a role than the above epsilon. There are things that are so low in probability (though much higher than epsilon) that establishing a contract/agreement on what should both of you do if they happen is deleterious for the relationship. Such as when a couple who thinks they disagree about abortion asks: What should we do if the condom and pill don't work?

The probability is not so low. But the fight is too costly.

Not necessarily. Cosmic rays are just electromagnetic energy on particular (high) frequencies. So if it interprets everything along those lines, it's just seeing everything purely in terms of the EM spectrum... in other words 'normal, uninteresting background case, free of cosmic rays'. So things that don't trigger high enough to be cosmic rays, like itself, parse as meaningless random fluctuations... presumably, if it was 'intelligent', it would think that it existed for no reason, as a matter of random chance, like any other case of background radiation below the threshold of cosmic rays, without losing any ability to perceive or understand cosmic rays.

Here's how I parsed it:

"You can better extrapolate from a chimp to a human, of the same gender, than from a human to another human of a different gender."

To be fair, most pop evopsych is extrapolating from imaginary details of caveman behavior rather than actual chimp behavior.

It's worth noting that LWers may have more exposure to real evopsych relative to popular evopsych. I for one had despared of ever finding rational evopsych before discovering this site. Pop evopsych is incredibly bad.

The quote is instructive to those of us trying to develop an integrated and rational view of evo psych. In my case, I DO see a lot of compelling material on how women are different from men, and I DO see a lot of compelling material on how humans are like other primates and even mammals. The quote brings me up short: do I have the sex differences within species properly "weighted" in my thinking compared to across-species similarities? Or do I switch between my microscope and my telescope paying attention only to what I am seeing, forgetting which instrument I am using to look?

Around these parts, there are a lot of arguments about the ancestral environment and its implications. Isn't the argument that we are not cavemen engaging with those types of arguments?

If so, I'm not sure flamboyant strawman is the relevant reference class. Things actually argued by proponents are not strawmen.

But if your point is that 140 character tweets are not a good source of nuanced argument, I agree.

Why on earth was this downvoted? Upvoted back to neutral. It's relevant and useful, to the extent the quote is useful.

As long as others know and believe in such concepts, it is important that your child learns about them from a trustworthy source, before being introduced to such concepts by fairy-believers.

This is especially the case if the message is generalized. That is, if the well meaning but naive parent tries to keep their children ignorant of all things bullshit. They are deprived key critical thinking skills and the ability to comfortably interact (and reject) nonsense beliefs that will be thrust on them.

More importantly IMO than it being unnecessary is that there is no indication of what is going to be behind the rot31 so I don't know whether it's safe to rot13 or not. The first sentence would be best left in plain-text.

For rationality quotes where the meaning is opaque, I like to include an exegesis; but I don't want to make the exegesis trivial to read because then people won't think about it for themselves. I'm sorry if you don't like that.

Humans tend to anthropomorphize, but this is filtered through cultural beliefs and forms - you do not get a highly specific concept like 'fairies' out of a general anthropomorphization, any more than people got Dracula out of their fear of the dark pre-Bram Stoker. I've linked studies here on what children believe and anthropomorphize by default, and it tends to look like 'other people and animals continue to exist even after dying'; not 'the Unseelie and Seelie folk live in hills and if you visit them, be sure to not eat any of their food or you will be their prisoner for a century'.

I modified the post after less than five minutes... are you spying on me? ;)
Thank you, preserving the feeling, alongside the literal meaning, while translating in a foreign language can be surprisingly difficult (for me, at least).

The error was epiphenomenal.

The error was essential in the sense that it was an inevitable outcome of an essential process. Similarly you might say, "exhaling carbon dioxide is not essential for survival; what you really need is to turn food into energy." But if I was prevented from exhaling CO2, I would quickly run into problems.

Also, in the past the people you were trying to convince were likely to be better educated.

The Federalist Papers, for example, lay out the problem as a set of premises leading inexorably to a conclusion. I find it hard to imagine a politician successfully using such a form of argument today.

Today's politicians don't use writing as their primary means of convincing other people. Airplane travel is cheap. It doesn't cost much to get a bunch of people into a room behind closed doors and talk through an issue.

I agree that the formal "premiss + premiss + premiss = conclusion" style of arguing is not good outside formal contexts. But still, the appropriate response would be "Your argument is wrong because it doesn't take into account D", not "that's your opinion and I have mine".

In general, I think people who have not studied mathematical logic should stop using the word "logic" entirely, but I suppose that's a pipe dream.

People who have not studied mathematical logic reserved the word well before those who have studied mathematical logic. If a field wants to make a word that means something different to what it used to mean or is exclusive to those in the field then it should make up a new word.

In general, I think people who have not studied mathematical logic should stop using the word "logic" entirely, but I suppose that's a pipe dream.

The word logic is much older than proper mathematical logic. There no real reason to assume that people mean mathematical logic when they say the term.

I honestly don't think so, because I don't see any implication or subtext in the quote that the attitude that this particular woman took is representative of all/most women, or more prevalent in women than in men. It is just as easy to imagine a man taking this attitude, it just happened to be a woman in this particular conversation.

Don't worry, it's not the person's wish you think it is.

Something To Protect springs to mind, as does Tsuyoku Naritai! (I Want To Become Stronger). "This world which God has abandoned" seems to imply/assume Beyond The Reach Of God although I'm not sure if that counts as "rational" in and of itself.

What's the rationality-related moral?

I asked myself the same question when my first impression was "Transhumanist/x-risk in-group applause light". The answer I gave myself was that that is is related to bullet-biting and shut-up-and-multiply.

The assumption is that the person to be inspired by this quote already has preferences for people not dying and for a positive future for the human race. But few consider those implications personally and act on them. Few consider it their responsibility or, if they do act, act to save individuals that catch their attention rather than doing something that does the greatest good (according to their own preferences).

My guess is that Ubzhen jvyy ghea bhg gb or oruvaq gur nyvra vainfvba va gur svefg cynpr. Fvapr Gb Gur Fgnef oryvrirf gung n zntvpny tvey pna'g qvr hagvy ure jvfu vf shysvyyrq, Ubzhen pna'g qvr hagvy gur jbeyq fur'f fjbea gb cebgrpg vf qrfgeblrq.

This isn't incompatible with your theory, though.

Is the idea that, because people naturally shy away from bad info, making the world better also makes it easier (on the emotions) to understand?

...Very interesting. That is a thought that's going to fester, in a good way.

Only if there were no uncertainty about what "better" meant.

.

And what the hell is all this pay-to-win microtransaction crap? Life's devs should change their business model.

What good does getting mad do? What does it accomplish?

Asks the guy who routinely gets mad at a video game that was made for WIndows 95.

Well, you can calculate expected values without asserting that the probabilities used in your calculations correspond to either subjective belief or some objective truth. You can just do the maths and note that when you do it a certain way, your predictions are more useful.

I think it's fair to say that humans doing this will form beliefs about the correspondence between their model and "real life".

Then what are you risking?

As I recall, CS Lewis once defined it as "believing something based on the evidence/logic in the face of irrational doubt" (paraphrased.) I've always preferred that meaning myself, as it retains the positive connotations. Presumably what you describe would be "blind faith".

I'm not really sure that counts as faith. Faith usually implies something like "believing something without concern for evidence". And in fact, the evidence I have fairly strongly indicates is that when I step into an airplane, I'm not going to die.

Which of the seven models of faith do you think "believing something without concern for evidence" would fall under?

"Many kinds of experiments are repeatable after all."

Only very simple ones, and even then "same" must be interpreted loosely. Pick up a ball. Drop it from a given height onto a specified surface. How high will it bounce? There is no error term in the laws of motion, but the actual result will vary considerably because of all the variables - spin axes, wind, the temperature of the ball and surface - that you aren't controlling for. Most "interesting" results scientists (from physicists to sociologists) get turn out to be unrepeatable - sometimes they are artifacts of a measuring apparatus, but sometimes they're caused by something as simple and impossible to remember o determine as "that time I stirred counterclockwise." This is especially true in biology and medicine (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/ and http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269/).

To me it sounds like a complaint about what are variably called "cargo-cult", "voodoo", or "superstitious" practices in IT: repeating curative procedures that are available to mind, without understanding why (or if) they ever worked, in situations where they may not have any application. There are a lot of procedures that users can learn by rote without having to know why they ever work, and that are cheap and safe enough that using them when they don't do any good isn't likely to do any harm either.

I think it is a comment on the tendency of human minds to model complex systems as simple ones and therefore stick strongly to a few remedies whether they are sensible or not - ancestrally "whack it with a club" but in the case of computers, "reboot it", "run the virus scanner" and "defrag it". Admittedly, for old computers that relied on vacuum tubes whose connections would sometimes work loose, "whack it with a club" did, in fact, occasionally work.

It sounds like Michael Wilson's "We must program the AI in LISP, because if we don't, LISP purists will spend the next several subjective millennia arguing that it should have been done in LISP."

EDIT: Read the XKCD. It sounds like typical Strossian cynicism about how the 'Singularity' will look like a malfunctioning computer or something. Obviously not talking about the intelligence explosion.

This seems to be a fully general argument for the virtue of anything being difficult.

That's not as bad as you seem to be implying -- see the last three paragraphs of Beware Trivial Inconveniences.

They are there to stop people who deserve to die!

Where did you get that the other people deserve to die from?

And you could make that argument while you had a magical liver producing machine as a justification for not using it.

You make a good counterargument to "make sure the brick walls stay up, because they keep out the other people," but he didn't say that.

The brick walls are any barriers that get in the way of getting what you want. He gives the example of that he was a faculty adviser for a team that won a trip on the vomit comet, and he wanted to go, but faculty advisers were not allowed to come. But the team was allowed to bring a journalist, so he resigned as faculty adviser and got a press pass.

He was saying that you should keep trying after most people would give up, not that you should expect everything to magically go your way.

This seems pretty irrational to me. Ask a lucky stock trader whether you should try to beat the market or not and he'd reply that you should, and damn the statistics, because the efficient market hypothesis applies only to other people.

The obstacle is a brick wall. Not an insurmountable barrier or the resource already having been nearly completely exploited by others (as would be analogous to the efficient market). Brick walls are comparatively simple to climb or destroy.

Overall the advice is sound.

the efficient market hypothesis applies only to other people.

The reverse Tinkerbell effect!

Many hands make light work.

Too many cooks spoil the broth.

The optimal solution seems to be one cook with many hands.

It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth.

The parallelizability of tasks depends on the task.

Well, Jayson's quote mostly applies to menial labor, whereas yours applies to creative work.

The trick with contradictory proverbs is knowing the domain of applicability of each.

These are not inconsistent. The former is about the amount of effort required per person, while the later is about the absolute quality of the final product.

How many hecatonchires does it take ...?

If you're here, you've got time.

If you knew nothing about vaccines, but you knew that homeopathy was hooey, and someone told you about vaccines, you might consider them "nearby" to homeopathy — combating a disease by administering a tiny amount of a disease-causing agent — and thus dismiss them as hooey.

(Also, just so ya know — "hooey" is Russian for "cock", pretty much.)

I don't think this is a good heuristic. I would call it a fallacy; I don't know if it has an official name, but in my head I've been calling it "syntactic similarity implies semantic similarity" (this being the fallacy). Ideas that sound similar don't necessarily map to close points in ideaspace.

There's been some LW discussion, e.g. Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale, about the specific application of this fallacy to ideas that sound similar to obviously absurd ideas.

I believe the original context is about being careful about getting involved/obsessed with dangerous people, but I really like the overall idea of taking stock of your resources before you make decisions that could result in emotional breakdowns. I think people sometimes have the idea that emotions are this unpredictable thing that you can't control or manage, so they don't really hold themselves accountable in predictable situations? Like, if you're already involved in some sort of stressful situation, then you don't have room in your life for another breakdown. Don't call your ex during finals week! Stuff like that.

I could give some kind of "level above mine" interpretation to this, but it would merely provide additional support for your claim about pattern matching. Consider me persuaded by your reasoning.

Contrary to Linji's words, Homicide is not the optimal path to emancipation, enlightenment or disentanglement.

I honestly don't know why doing something like that to words that obviously weren't meant to be taken literally strikes anyone as clever.

The quote is commonly understood to be about not getting hung up on the concept of the Buddha, or letting symbols and figures of authority get in the way of actual practice. As in, keep your eye on the ball, and don't start worshipping the Buddha instead of actually practicing buddhism. And if, when meditating, you "meet" (get some sort of a vision of) a Buddha or other amazing stuff, well, it's just images in your mind; don't attach unwarranted importance to them.

I like this quote because I find it analogous to how the point of rationality isn't one's self-image as a rational person, or some specific rituals of cognition, or listening to what an admired teacher says, but actually getting the right answers.

That said, I agree it's a risky choice for a rationality quote, but mainly because, well, it takes for granted the reader practices Buddhism. But that doesn't mean it's garbage.

I suggest the alternative strategy of not killing the Buddha on the road if you meet him.

Tozan may admit you, but you should not be admitted under Tokusan.

It does not belong in "Rationality Quotes".

Agreed.

In context, by "whereof one cannot speak" Witty means "whereof one is ignorant."