Rationality Quotes July 2012

Person: "It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you."
Robot: " ... Paranoia is such a childish emotion. You're an adult. Why aren't all your enemies dead by now?"

-- RStevens

The words "I am..." are potent words; be careful what you hitch them to. The thing you're claiming has a way of reaching back and claiming you.

--A.L. Kitselman

Just explained the Higgs Boson to my friend even though I don't understand it myself. He was very convinced. I bet this is how religions get started.

-Rob DenBleyker

I often tried plays that looked recklessly daring, maybe even silly. But I never tried anything foolish when a game was at stake, only when we were far ahead or far behind. I did it to study how the other team reacted, filing away in my mind any observations for future use.

— Ty Cobb

We find it difficult and disturbing to hold in our minds arguments of the form ‘On the one hand, on the other.’ If we are for capital punishment we want it to be good in all respects, with no serious drawbacks; if we are against it, we want it to be bad in all respects, with no serious advantages. We want the world of facts to dictate to us, virtually, how to act; but this it will never do. We always have to make a choice.

-- Theodore Dalrymple, article in "Library of Law and Liberty".

Here is a hand. How do I know? Look closely, asshole, it's clearly a hand.

Look, if you really insist on doubting that here is a hand, or anything else, there's nothing really I can say to convince you otherwise. What the tits would the world even look like if this weren't a hand? What sort of system is your doubt endorsing? After all, you can't just say "It's not true that here is a hand." You have to be endorsing some other picture of the world. [...]

So it turns out when I say things like "Here is a hand" I'm not really making a claim about the world, I'm laying down some rules for discussion. If you doubt there's a hand here, then fuck you and that's all there is to it. We can't really talk about anything now, because we can't even agree on something as simple as a goddamn hand. When we all agree here is a hand, then we can go about discussing our world in meaningful ways. Skepticism just undermines a foundation and replaces it with nothing; it[']s paralyzing. The grounds for such radical skepticism don't exist; it presupposes and relies on the very certainty it tries to undermine.

This is more practical than you realize. There are people who actually believe that the world is only 6,000 years old. What the fuck, right? But if you've ever talked with one of them, you know that they're fucking impossible to have what you consider a 'reasonable' discussion with. It's not like they don't have answers for everything, it[']s just that those answers don't make any fucking sense to you. It[']s the sort of gibberish that makes you want to scream. The problem is that you don't even play the game by the same goddamn rules. You're both certain of your positions, because those positions are logically derived from the worldview each of you endorses as your starting point, and you both look at each other's foundations and say, "Seriously, what the fuck are you talking about?" You don't even know how you would go about convincing them that you're right and they're wrong; you don't even agree on a method by which to do that.

If you flew to some part of the world where they'd never heard of an airplane or even a bird, how the fuck could you convince them you flew? They don't even know what that means. They would have all sorts of questions, and would consider your answers nonsensical or magical. When a non-believer is told that God exists, he reacts in the same way; also, a believer when he is told there is no God.

So everything we believe about the world is built on some sort of foundation. Sure, that foundation can change, but there is always something there at the base, and it is that base that enables us to talk about the world. Not everyone has the same base you do, and that has to be okay. Just know that some of your beliefs are just as unsupported as everyone else's. It's just the way it is, bro.

— Philosophy Bro summarizing Wittgenstein's "On Certainty". (I'm not sure the summary is very true to the original but it's interesting nonetheless.)

If the "assumption" is so obvious and near-universal, why does Singer go on pompously to announce it.

Possibly for the same sorts of reasons that Eliezer wrote this big long thing to "restore a naïve view of truth", or that Nick Bostrom wrote this big long thing to explain why death is bad ... namely, that people have come up with all kinds of non-obvious, idiosyncratic rationalizations to justify the status-quo of starvation, ignorance, and death; that these rationalizations have, over the centuries, become cached thoughts; and that therefore getting back to "obvious and near-universal" basics is both desirable and nontrivial.

Suppose we find a society which lacks our understanding of human physiology, and that speaks a language just like English, except for one curious family of idioms. When they are tired they talk of being beset by fatigues, of having mental fatigues, muscular fatigues, fatigues in the eyes and fatigues of the the spirit. Their sports lore contains such maxims as 'too many fatigues spoils your aim' and 'five fatigues in the legs are worth ten in the arms'. When we encounter them and tell them of our science, they want to know what fatigues are. They have been puzzling over such questions as whether numerically the same fatigue can come and go and return, whether fatigues have a definite location in matter and space and time, whether fatigues are identical with some physical states or processes or events in their bodies, or are made of some sort of stuff. We can see that they are off to a bad start with these questions, but what should we tell them? One thing we can tell them is that there simply are no such things as fatigues - they have a confused ontology. We can expect them to retort: 'You don't think there are fatigues? Run around the block a few times and you'll know better! There are many things your science might teach us, but the non-existence of fatigues isn't one of them!

--Dan Dennett, Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology

We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled. But how can we be sure our senses are not being deceived at any particular time, or even all the time? Might I just be a brain in a tank somewhere, tricked all my life into believing in the events of this world by some insane computer? And does my life gain or lose meaning based on my reaction to such solipsism?

--- Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7. Activity recorded M.Y. 2302.22467. (TERMINATION OF SPECIMEN ADVISED)

From Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

"Buddhism IS different. It's the followers who aren’t."

-- A Dust Over India.

Commentary: Reading this made me realize that many religions genuinely are different from each other. Christianity is genuinely different from Judaism, Islam is genuinely different from Christianity, Hinduism is genuinely different from all three. It's religious people who are the same everywhere; not the same as each other, obviously, but drawn from the same distribution. Is this true of atheistic humanists? Of transhumanists? Could you devise an experiment to test whether it was so, would you bet on the results of that experiment? Will they say the same of LessWrongers, someday? And if so, what's the point?

Now that I think on it, though, there might be a case for scientists being drawn from a different distribution, or computer programmers, or for that matter science fiction fans (are those all the same distributions as each other, I wonder?). It's not really hopeless.

Human behavior is economic behavior. The particulars may vary, but competition for limited resources remains a constant.

– CEO Nwabudike Morgan in Alpha Centauri

I never felt I was studying the stupidity of mankind in the third person. I always felt I was studying my own mistakes.

-Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics

"New rule: If you handle snakes to prove they won't bite you because God is real, and then they bite you -- do the math."

– Bill Maher, Real Time with Bill Maher, 6/8/2012

video article

A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren't flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.

-Marvin Minsky

Thinking of your brain (and yourself) like an instrument to played might be useful for instrumental rationality.

All mushrooms are edible. But some of them you can eat only once.

From Paleohacks.

> 11\. Everything is air-droppable at least once.

Religion begins by being taken for granted; after a time, it is elaborately proved; at last comes a time (the present) when the whole effort is to induce people to let it alone.

--John Stuart Mill (1854).

However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

-- Clay Shirky

I begin with the assumption that suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad. I think most people will agree about this, although one may reach the same view by different routes. I shall not argue for this view. People can hold all sorts of eccentric positions, and perhaps from some of them it would not follow that death by starvation is in itself bad. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to refute such positions, and so for brevity I will henceforth take this assumption as accepted. Those who disagree need read no further.

Peter Singer

"A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week."

General Patton

Obviously not true in all cases, but good advice for folks that have trouble getting things done despite being extremely intelligent (which this community has more than its fair share of).

Why do you insist that the human genetic code is "sacred" or "taboo"? It is a chemical process and nothing more. For that matter—we—are chemical processes and nothing more. If you deny yourself a useful tool simply because it reminds you uncomfortably of your mortality, you have uselessly and pointlessly crippled yourself.

– Chairman Sheng-ji Yang in Alpha Centauri

Many difficulties which nature throws our way, may be smoothed away by the exercise of intelligence.

--Titus Livius

Reality is the ultimate arbiter of truth. If your thoughts, beliefs, and actions aren't aligned with truth, your results will suffer.

--Steve Pavlina

I'd like to propose a new guideline for rationality quotes:

• Please don't post multiple quotes from the same source.

I enjoy the Alpha Centauri quotes, but I think posting 5 of them at once is going a bit overboard. It dominates the conversation. I'm fine with them all getting posted eventually. If they're good quotes, they can wait a couple months.

And here we tinker with metal, to try to give it a kind of life, and suffer those who would scoff at our efforts. But who's to say that, if intelligence had evolved in some other form in past millennia, the ancestors of these beings would not now scoff at the idea of intelligence residing within meat?

--Prime Function Aki Zeta-5, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

Rational politician:

It certainly isn't the government's job to educate voters. Our system is designed to make candidates compete for votes, and the most effective way to compete is by appealing to emotion and ignorance. The last thing a politician wants is to be labeled professorial. That's the same as boring.

Dilbert blog

It's better to light a candle than curse the darkness.

-Chinese proverb

Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.

John Ioannidis Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

Likewise people have their rituals in argument evaluation. Philosophers like to set out the premises in an orderly numbered fashion, and tend to regard this as making an argument clear. Whether or not it actually does so depends; unless the argument is being made from scratch, this procedure involves rearrangement and interpretation, so whether it actually does make things more clear, in terms of increasing understanding, seems to vary considerably. But it still feels like you are bringing order and clarity to a disordered muddle, so you find people who will swear by it, even though it's not difficult to find cases where it clearly introduced a distortion. There's an argument to be made -- it would, of course, be controversial among those who engage in this kind of practice -- that such people are taking the ritual itself to be a kind of clarity, by sympathetic magic, and are taking arguments in this form to be better arguments simply because they conform to ritual expectation. It may even have good practical results, if so; a ritual might well put one in the right state of mind for a certain kind of work, and there's no reason to think that philosophical thinking doesn't sometimes need 'being in the right state of mind' as much as any difficult endeavor. And, of course, you find people who try to refute arguments by naming them -- a practice difficult to avoid, but not really all that different from shamans casting out illness by naming it.

-- Brandon Watson

In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause -- it is seen. The others unfold in succession -- they are not seen: it is well for us, if they are foreseen. Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference -- the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen, and also of those which it is necessary to foresee. Now this difference is enormous, for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favourable, the ultimate consequences are fatal, and the converse. Hence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good, which will be followed by a great evil to come, while the true economist pursues a great good to come, -- at the risk of a small present evil.

In fact, it is the same in the science of health, arts, and in that of morals. It often happens, that the sweeter the first fruit of a habit is, the more bitter are the consequences. Take, for example, debauchery, idleness, prodigality. When, therefore, a man absorbed in the effect which is seen has not yet learned to discern those which are not seen, he gives way to fatal habits, not only by inclination, but by calculation.

--From the introduction of Frederic Bastiat's "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen".

...there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from ... the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Intellectuals may like to think of themselves as people who "speak truth to power" but too often they are people who speak lies to gain power.

-- Thomas Sowell

"Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist." Academician Prokhor Zakharov, Alpha Centauri

Scientific theories are judged by the coherence they lend to our natural experience and the simplicity with which they do so.”

– Commissioner Pravin Lal in Alpha Centauri

Never do anything on principle alone. If the principle of the thing is the only reason to do it, don't.

-- Bill Bryson

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area - crime, education, housing, race relations - the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.

-- Thomas Sowell

...’Twas a nest full of young birds on the ground
The cutter-bar had just gone champing over
(Miraculously without tasting flesh)
And left defenseless to the heat and light.
...The way the nest-full every time we stirred
Stood up to us as to a mother-bird
Whose coming home has been too long deferred,
Made me ask would the mother-bird return
And care for them in such a change of scene
And might our meddling make her more afraid?
That was a thing we could not wait to learn.
We saw the risk we took in doing good,
But dared not spare to do the best we could
Though harm should come of it; so built the screen
You had begun, and gave them back their shade.
All this to prove we cared. Why is there then
No more to tell? We turned to other things.
I haven’t any memory—have you?—
Of ever coming to the place again
To see if the birds lived the first night through,
And so at last to learn to use their wings.

--"The Exposed Nest", Robert Frost; I googled some interpretation & discussions of it after reading, and was surprised to see I seem to be the only person to take it as a discussion of ethics.

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

Susan B. Anthony

Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.

Arthur Schopenhauer

[H]ow you get to Carnegie Hall is you sell out Town Hall twice in a year, and now you sell enough tickets to do a show at Carnegie Hall.

-- Louis C.K.

Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy.

Stephen Jay Gould

In the case of any person whose judgement is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself...the fallacy of what was fallacious.

–John Stuart Mill

Every argument must start from some unargued (because commonly accepted) assumptions. This is both logically necessary (as with axioms) and crucial for brevity of the argument. Since many truths are entangled, explaining all assumptions would eventually lead to listing a lot of our knowledge from many domains, and including many other arguments.

Anything can be an instrument, Chigurh said. Small things. Things you wouldnt even notice. They pass from hand to hand. People dont pay attention. And then one day there's an accounting. And after that nothing is the same. Well, you say. It's just a coin. For instance. Nothing special there. What could that be an instrument of? You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? Well, it's just a coin. Yes. That's true. Is it?

— Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

It's worth remembering, especially for people who are interested in meta-ethics, that often you can skip the confusion and jump ahead to Rough Consensus and Running Code. On rare occasions this will come back to bite you, but usually not (and if it does, you can jump back to the beginning).

We are accustomed to thinking of evolution in a biological context, but modern evolutionary theory views evolution as something much more general. Evolution is an algorithm; it is an all-purpose formula for innovation, a formula that, through its special brand of trial and error, creates new designs and solves difficult problems. Evolution can perform its tricks not just in the "substrate" of DNA, but in any system that has the right information processing and information-storage characteristics. In short, evolution s simple recipe of "differentiate, select, and amplify" is a type of computer program—a program for creating novelty, knowledge, and growth. Because evolution is a form of information processing, it can do its order-creating work in realms ranging from computer software to the mind, to human culture, and to the economy.

Eric Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth

A perennial favourite: "If you torture the data enough, they will confess."

Often attributed to Ronald Coase, however this version was likely: "If you torture the data long enough, nature will confess" - perhaps implying a confession of truth. Another version, attributed to Paolo Magrassi: "If you torture the data enough, it will confess anything" - perhaps implying a confession of falsehood.

Personally, I find the ambiguous version of greater interest.

After a while, Kit noticed that a large part of the pattern that made a bridge or a tower was built entirely out of people.

Kij Johnson, "The Man Who Bridged the Mist"

nominated for this year's Hugo

It may be expecting too much to expect most intellectuals to have common sense, when their whole life is based on their being uncommon -- that is, saying things that are different from what everyone else is saying. There is only so much genuine originality in anyone. After that, being uncommon means indulging in pointless eccentricities or clever attempts to mock or shock.

-- Thomas Sowell

Retracted, because it's a duplicate.

Men show their characters in nothing more clearly than in what they think laughable.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

(re-posted on request.)

Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.

--Seneca

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

– James Baldwin

The obscure language was likely due to the political context of the original; try substituting 'identified' for 'faced'.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

Albert Einstein

(Quoted here but not in any LW quotes thread.)

Posted to wrong month, moved.

An excerpt from Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss. Boxing is not safe.

The innkeeper looked up. "I have to admit I don't see the trouble," he said apologetically. "I've seen monsters, Bast. The Cthaeh falls short of that."

"That was the wrong word for me to use, Reshi," Bast admitted. "But I can't think of a better one. If there was a word that meant poisonous and hateful and contagious, I'd use that."

Bast drew a deep breath and leaned forward in his chair. "Reshi, the Cthaeh can see the future. Not in some vague, oracular way. It sees all the future. Clearly. Perfectly. Everything that can possibly come to pass, branching out endlessly from the current moment."

Kvothe raised an eyebrow. "It can, can it?"

"It can," Bast said gravely. "And it is purely, perfectly malicious. This isn't a problem for the most part, as it can't leave the tree. But when someone comes to visit..."

Kvothe's eyes went distant as he nodded to himself. "If it knows the future perfectly," he said slowly, "then it must know exactly how a person will react to anything it says."

Bast nodded. "And it is vicious, Reshi."

Kvothe continued in a musing tone. "That means anyone influenced by the Cthaeh would be like an arrow shot into the future."

"An arrow only hits on person, Reshi." Bast's dark eyes were hollow and hopeless. "Anyone influenced by the Cthaeh is like a plague ship sailing for a harbor." Bast pointed at the half-filled sheet Chronicler held in his lap. "If the Sithe knew that existed, they would spare no effort to destroy it. They would kill us for having heard what the Cthaeh said."

"Because anything carrying the Cthaeh's influence away from the tree..." Kvothe said, looking down at his hands. He sat silently for a long moment, nodding thoughtfully. "So a young man seeking his fortune goes to the Cthaeh and takes away a flower. The daughter of the king is deathly ill, and he takes the flower to heal her. They fall in love despite the fact that she's betrothed to the neighboring prince..."

Bast stared at Kvothe, watching blankly as he spoke.

"They attempt a daring moonlight escape," Kvothe continued. "But he falls from the rooftops and they're caught. The princess is married against her will and stabs the neighboring prince on their wedding night. The prince dies. Civil war. Fields burned and salted. Famine. Plague..."

"That's the story of the Fastingsway War," Bast said faintly.

Another Goethe quote, whilst on that tack; seems appropriate for disciples of GS.

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Wise men store up knowledge, but the mouth of a fool invites ruin.

-Proverbs 10:14

If you want to learn why you think whatever it is you think, strip away existing context and force it into a new one and see what happens.

The Last Psychiatrist, at http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/11/judge_beats_his_daughter_for_b.html

"'Whereof one cannot speak thereof be silent,' the seventh and final proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, is to me the most beautiful but also the most errant. 'Whereof one cannot speak thereof write books, and music, and invent new and better terminology through mathematics and science,' something like that, is how I would put it. Or, if one is not predisposed to some such productivity, '. . . thereof look steadfastly and directly into it forever.'"

-- Daniel Kolak, comment on a post by Gordon Cornwall.

I predict that if we were to poll professional economists a century from now about who is the intellectual founder of the discipline [economics], I say we'd get a majority responding by naming Charles Darwin, not Adam Smith.

Robert H. Frank, 2011 September 12, speaking on Russ Roberts' EconTalk podcast. The rest of the quote can be found near 14:11 in the transcript. Robert H Frank was talking a lot about his book The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good.

Duplicate.

If you wish to advance into the infinite, explore the finite in all directions.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Bad luck isn't brought by broken mirrors, but by broken minds.

Dr Frank Mandel from Suspiria by Dario Argento

Minor spoiler alert. (I think you know the drill.)

Nsgre Oebaa jvaf n qhry:

Ynql Neela: "Lbh qba'g svtug jvgu ubabe!"

Oebaa: "Ab."

Oebaa fzvyrf naq cbvagf gb gur zna ur whfg qrsrngrq.

"Ur qvq."

Game of Thrones (TV series), episode S01E06

(Rational agents should WIN.)

[like this](http://notareal.url/ "See? See how much better this is?")

[like this](http://notareal.url/ See? See how much better this is?)

There is no mutually exclusive 'is – ought' distinction. The only mutually exclusive alternative to 'is' is 'is not'. This means that 'ought' either needs to find a comfortable home in the realm of 'is', or needs to be tossed into the realm of 'is not'.

A person comes to me and says, "Alonzo, you ought to do X."

I answer, "Prove it."

That person then says, "Well, as you know, an 'ought' statement cannot be derived from any set of 'is' statements . . . .”

"You can stop right there," I say. "We're done. You have just told me that your 'ought' statement is a work of fiction – an artifact of the realm of make-believe. If your claim that I ought to do X is false, then why are you telling me I ought to do X?"

-- Alonzo Fyfe

If our society seems more nihilistic than that of previous eras, perhaps this is simply a sign of our maturity as a sentient species. As our collective consciousness expands beyond a crucial point, we are at last ready to accept life's fundamental truth: that life's only purpose is life itself.

– Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang in Alpha Centauri

will you ever forgive yourself after this realization?

Cognitron2

Yeah, okay, I get it; I give up. No more trying to post quotes that make people think.

"Arguing over the meaning of a word nearly always means that you've lost track of the original question."

• Eliezer Yudkowsky

Everything is true, nothing is permitted.

Jerod Poore