Rationality Quotes February 2014

"The story of Japanese railways during the earthquake and tsunami is the story of an unceasing drumbeat of everything going right [...] The overwhelming response of Japanese engineering to the challenge posed by an earthquake larger than any in the last century was to function exactly as designed. Millions of people are alive right now because the system worked and the system worked and the system worked.

That this happened was, I say with no hint of exaggeration, one of the triumphs of human civilization. Every engineer in this country should be walking a little taller this week. We can’t say that too loudly, because it would be inappropriate with folks still missing and many families in mourning, but it doesn’t make it any less true."

--Patrick McKenzie, "Some Perspective on the Japan Earthquake"

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/03/13/some-perspective-on-the-japan-earthquake

(Disaster is not inevitable.)

"To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth." Wittgenstein. "Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough," p. 119

Shit, if I took time out to have an opinion about everything, I wouldn't get any work done...

-- L. Bob Rife, Snow Crash

"Nothing exists in contradiction to nature, only in contradiction to what we know of it." - Dana Scully, The X-Files

A serious prophet upon predicting a flood should be the first man to climb a tree.

--Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage.

Madolyn: "Why is the last patient of the day always the hardest?"

Costigan: "Because you're tired and you don't give a shit. It's not supernatural."

The Departed

I’m better at tests than reality. Reality doesn’t tell you which of a million bits of information to look at.

A comment on slatestarcodex.

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

--Mike Tyson

Heaven and Earth are heartless
treating creatures like straw dogs.

- Tao Te Ching

Su Ch'e commentary on this verse explains: "Heaven and Earth are not partial. They do not kill living things out of cruelty or give them birth out of kindness. We do the same when we make straw dogs to use in sacrifices. We dress them up and put them on the altar, but not because we love them. And when the ceremony is over, we throw them into the street, but not because we hate them."

- Straw dog in Wikipedia

For Popper (if not for some of his later admirers), falsifiability was not a crude bludgeon. Rather, it was the centerpiece of a richly-articulated worldview holding that millennia of human philosophical reflection had gotten it backwards: the question isn’t how to arrive at the Truth, but rather how to eliminate error. Which sounds kind of obvious, until I meet yet another person who rails to me about how empirical positivism can’t provide its own ultimate justification, and should therefore be replaced by the person’s favorite brand of cringe-inducing ugh.

--Scott Aaaronson, Retiring falsifiability? A storm in Russell’s teacup

Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.

-- José Ortega y Gasset

You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.

• Napoleon Bonaparte

But, while nothing can be done about the past, much can be done in the present to prepare for the future.

--Thomas Sowell

Now life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for the training of a mere beginner. In life, we must begin to give a public performance before we have acquired even a novice's skill; and often our moments of seeming mastery are upset by new demands, for which we have acquired no preparatory facility. Life is a score that we play at sight, not merely before we have divined the intentions of the composer, but even before we have mastered our instruments; even worse, a large part of the score has been only roughly indicated, and we must improvise the music for our particular instrument, over long passages. On these terms, the whole operation seems one of endless difficulty and frustration; and indeed, were it not for the fact that some of the passages have been played so often by our predecessors that, when we come to them, we seem to recall some of the score and can anticipate the natural sequence of the notes, we might often give up in sheer despair. The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression.

-- Lewis Mumford, The Conduct of Life

I'm a big fan of the cognitive utility of the old phrase: "The exception that proves the rule." But then I'm kind of an exception in that regard, since anytime I mention I like that, I get deluged with logical and etymological objections.

I merely mean that an exception that is famous for being exceptional suggests a general tendency in the opposite direction. The canonical example is that Beethoven's titanic fame as a deaf composer suggests that most composers aren't deaf, while, say, the lack of obsessive publicity about painter David Hockney's late onset deafness suggests that deafness isn't all that big of a deal, one way or another, to painters. Judging from the immortal fame of Beethoven's battle with deafness, we can assume that there aren't many deaf composers, while the ho-hum response to Hockney's deafness suggests that we can't make strong quantitative assumptions about painters and deafness.

Steve Sailor

I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

Richard Feynman in Cargo Cult Science

The most important thing in life is to be free to do things. There are only two ways to insure that freedom - you can be rich or you can you reduce your needs to zero.

Colonel John Boyd

What a stupid fucking question. I could have answered it in a second, if Sarasti hadn't forced me to understand it first.

Peter Watts, Blindsight

學而不思則罔，思而不學則殆。 To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.

-- Confucius

"Washington had always taught himself from experience. He learned the lessons of the American war all the more readily because he had no conventional lessons to unlearn. … Long before the end of the war, Washington had become much more effective than any of his military opponents. But this did not mean that what he had taught himself would have made him a great general on the battlefields of Europe. Evolved not from theory but from dealing with specific problems, his preeminence was achieved through a Darwinian adaptation to environment. It was the triumph of a man who knows how to learn, not in the narrow sense of studying other people's conceptions, but in the transcendent sense of making a synthesis from the totality of experience." -- James Thomas Flexner in Washington : The Indispensable Man (1984), Chapter 23 : Goodbye to War, p. 183

I once talked to a theorist (not RBC, micro) who said that his criterion for serious economics was stuff that you can’t explain to your mother. I would say that if you can’t explain it to your mother, or at least to your non-economist friends, there’s a good chance that you yourself don’t really know what you’re doing.

--Paul Krugman, "The Trouble With Being Abstruse"

Science offers the boldest metaphysics of the age. It is a thoroughly human construct, driven by the faith that if we dream, press to discover, explain, and dream again, thereby plunging repeatedly into new terrain, the world will somehow come clearer and we will grasp the true strangeness of the universe. And the strangeness will all probe to be connected, and make sense.

E.O. Wilson

...it just goes to show you that if you write convoluted, dense academic prose nobody will understand it and your ideas will be misinterpreted and then the misinterpreted ideas will be ridiculed even when they weren't your ideas.

Joel Spolsky

http://xkcd.com/1330

Better read than excerpted in full.

What I'm saying is that to argue that our ancestors were sexual omnivores is no more a criticism of monogamy than to argue that our ancestors were dietary omnivores is a criticism of vegetarianism.

-- Christopher Ryan

Failure: when your best just isn't enough.

Original source unknown (at least to me).

ETA: Now that I think about it, I should explain this a little. It's funny and all, but it's a rationality quote because it conveys to me the idea that Eliezer calls nihil supernum. If your best isn't enough then God won't save you, your parents won't save you, Superman won't save you. You just...don't get whatever it is you wanted.

Submitted for a fun discussion:

Think about the strangeness of today's situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.

-- Slavoj Zizek

(Several versions of this quote exist, with this seeming to be the oldest, dating to 2005, but he also articulated the same sentiment at the Occupy Wall Street protests, which is notable because they took place during a period when the established system of capitalism was in a self-acknowledged crisis.)

Rationality principle being invoked? What looks like impossibility or inevitability is often just a failure to generate alternative hypotheses.

There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down--or hardly going up--in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress--lots of theory, but no progress--in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.

Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way--or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do "the right thing," according to the experts.

So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science.

Richard Feynman in Cargo Cult Science

'East of the Sun, West of the Moon,' rather than being an unreachable fairy tale place, actually refers to where I am like 25% of the time.

-- @superlativeish

Your legs are too short, so use your head!

Samwise Gamgee, The Lord of the Rings

Something poorly understood about skeptical philosophers (Hume, Sextus Empiricus, Huet, Montaigne, Pyrrho & the Pyrrhonian skeptics) is that their skepticism tends to be directed at contemporary experts, rather than traditions, which they tend to follow as a default strategy. And the crowds against which they stand up are the crowds of "experts", or the masses infatuated with "expert" driven ideas.

---

[ Note 1- This is in response to a question by Adam Gurri who was wondering whether there was an inconsistency between being independent and skeptical, yet respecting the "inner" information in the time-tested thanks to the Lindy Effect.]
[Note 2- The "skeptics" of today do the exact opposite: an agglomeration of "light" intellectuals going against traditions but not against experts.]

Nassim Taleb

He who has begun has half done.

Dare to be wise; begin!

-- Horace

From McKee's textbook of psychoanalysis:

"Story begins when an event, either by human decision or accident in the universe, radically upsets the balance of forces in the protagonist's life, arousing in that character the need to restore the balance of life. To do so, that character will conceive of an "Object of Desire," that which they [believe] they need to put life back into balance. They will then go off into their world, into themselves, in the various dimensions of their existence, seeking that Object of Desire, trying to restore the balance of life, and they will struggle against forces of antagonism that will come from their own inner natures as human beings, their relationships with other human beings, their personal and/or social life, and the physical environment itself. They may or may not achieve that Object of Desire; they may or may not finally be able to restore their life to a satisfying balance. That, in the simplest possible way, defines the elements of story."

Everything that happens in your life is digested by you through this process, so it would be worth your time to memorize it.

-The Last Psychiatrist

The problem isn't just that there are so many things we do for reasons too deep for us to understand; it is that our attempts to explain them spoil the party and cause us to stop doing them.

Nassim Taleb

The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it.

Nassim Taleb

In our days of unlimited science and technology, people's unfulfilled aspirations have become so important to them that a special word, popular in the press, has been coined to denote such dreams. That word is breakthrough. More rarely, it may also be used to describe something, usually trivial, which has actually been accomplished.

John R. Pierce, An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise, during a discussion about translating the idea of a vocoder to transmit human facial movements.

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

G.K. Chesterton

Men use the past to prop up their prejudices.

A.J.P. Taylor

You don't believe in ghosts, right? Well, neither do I. But how would you like to spend a night alone in a graveyard? I am subject to night fears, and I can tell you that I shouldn't like it at all. And yet I am perfectly well aware that fear of ghosts is contrary to science, reason, and religion. If I were sentenced to spend a night alone in a graveyard, I should know beforehand that no piece of evidence was going to transpire during the night that would do anything to raise the infinitesimal prior probability of the hypothesis that there are ghosts. I should already know that twigs were going to snap and the wind moan and that there would be half-seen movements in the darkness. And I should know that the inevitable occurrences of these things would be of no evidential value whatever. And yet, after I had been frog-marched into the graveyard, I should feel a thrill of fear every time one of these things happened. I could reason with myself: "I believe that the dead are in Heaven or Hell, or else that they sleep until the General Resurrection. And if my religion is an illusion, then some form of materialism is the correct metaphysic, and materialism is incompatible with the existence of ghosts. And if the Church and the materialists are both wrong and there are ghosts, what could be the harm in a ghost? What could such a poor wispy thing do to one?" And what would the value of this very cogent piece of reasoning be? None at all, at least in respect of allaying my fear of ghosts.

-- Peter van Inwagen

You are never going to catch up, and neither is anyone else.

-- Gian-Carlo Rota

"Much of real rationality is learning how to learn from others."

—Robin Hanson

"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them." -Galileo Galilei (via BrainyQuote)

The ultimate freedom lies in not having to explain "why" you did something.

Nassim Taleb

Frederick Starr: Lost Enlightenment

Very interesting account of the rise and fall of the arab enlightenment in central asia.

First chapter here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s10064.pdf

From that chapter:

There is no more vexing question regarding the flowering of intellectual and cultural life in the era of Ibn Sina and Biruni than the date of its end. The most commonly accepted terminus point is the Mongol invasion, which Chinggis Khan launched in the spring of 1219. But this turns out to be both too early and too late. It is too early because of the several bursts of cultural brilliance that occurred thereafter; and it is too late because the cultural and religious crisis that threw the entire enterprise of rational enquiry, logic, and Muslim humanism into question occurred over a century prior to the Mongol invasion, when a Central Asian theologian named Ghazali placed strict limits on the exercise of logic and reason, demolished received assumptions about cause and effect, and ruthlessly attacked what he considered “the incoherence of the philosophers.”1 That he himself was at the same time a subtle and nuanced thinker and a genuine champion of the life of piety made his attack all the more effective.

At multiple points in its development, research in connectionism has been marked by technical breakthroughs that significantly advanced the computational and representational power of existing models. These breakthroughs led to excitement that connectionism was the best framework within which to understand the brain. However, the initial rushes of research that followed focused primarily on demonstrations of what could be accomplished within this framework, with little attention to the theoretical commitments behind the models or whether their operation captured something fundamental to human or animal cognition. Consequently, when challenges arose to connectionism’s computational power, the field suffered major setbacks, because there was insufficient theoretical or empirical grounding to fall back on. Only after researchers began to take connectionism seriously as a mechanistic model, to address what it could and could not predict, and to consider what constraints it placed on psychological theory, did the field mature to the point that it was able to make a lasting contribution. This shift in perspective also helped to clarify the models’ scope, in terms of what questions they should be expected to answer, and identified shortcomings that in turn spurred further research.

There are of course numerous perspectives on the historical and current contributions of connectionism, and it is not the purpose of the present article to debate these views. Instead, we merely summarize two points in the history of connectionism that illustrate how overemphasis on computational power at the expense of theoretical development can delay scientific progress.

Early work on artificial neurons by McCulloch and Pitts (1943) and synaptic learning rules by Hebb (1949) showed how simple, neuron-like units could automatically learn various prediction tasks. This new framework seemed very promising as a source of explanations for autonomous, intelligent behavior. A rush of research followed, culminated by Rosenblatt’s (1962) perceptron model, for which he boldly claimed, “Given an elementary a-perceptron, a stimulus world W, and any classification C(W) for which a solution exists, . . . an error correction procedure will always yield a solution to C(W) in finite time” (p. 111). However, Minsky and Papert (1969) pointed out a fatal flaw: Perceptrons are provably unable to solve problems requiring nonlinear solutions. This straightforward yet unanticipated critique devastated the connectionist movement such that there was little research under that framework for the ensuing 15 years.

Connectionism underwent a revival in themid-1980s, primarily triggered by the development of back-propagation, a learning algorithm that could be used in multilayer networks (Rumelhart et al. 1986). This advance dramatically expanded the representational capacity of connectionist models, to the point where they were capable of approximating any function to arbitrary precision, bolstering hopes that paired with powerful learning rules any task could be learnable (Hornik et al. 1989). This technical advance led to a flood of new work, as researchers sought to show that neural networks could reproduce the gamut of psychological phenomena, from perception to decision making to language processing (e.g., McClelland et al. 1986; Rumelhart et al. 1986). Unfortunately, the bubble was to burst once again, following a series of attacks on connectionism’s representational capabilities and lack of grounding. Connectionist models were criticized for being incapable of capturing the compositionality and productivity characteristic of language processing and other cognitive representations (Fodor & Pylyshyn 1988); for being too opaque (e.g., in the distribution and dynamics of their weights) to offer insight into their own operation, much less that of the brain (Smolensky 1988); and for using learning rules that are biologically implausible and amount to little more than a generalized regression (Crick 1989). The theoretical position underlying connectionism was thus reduced to the vague claim that that the brain can learn through feedback to predict its environment, without a psychological explanation being offered of how it does so. As before, once the excitement over computational power was tempered, the shortage of theoretical substance was exposed.

One reason that research in connectionism suffered such setbacks is that, although there were undeniably important theoretical contributions made during this time, overall there was insufficient critical evaluation of the nature and validity of the psychological claims underlying the approach. During the initial explosions of connectionist research, not enough effort was spent asking what it would mean for the brain to be fundamentally governed by distributed representations and tuning of association strengths, or which possible specific assumptions within this framework were most consistent with the data. Consequently, when the limitations of the metaphor were brought to light, the field was not prepared with an adequate answer. On the other hand, pointing out the shortcomings of the approach (e.g., Marcus 1998; Pinker & Prince 1988) was productive in the long run, because it focused research on the hard problems. Over the last two decades, attempts to answer these criticisms have led to numerous innovative approaches to computational problems such as object binding (Hummel & Biederman 1992), structured representation (Pollack 1990), recurrent dynamics (Elman 1990), and executive control (e.g., Miller & Cohen 2001; Rougier et al. 2005). At the same time, integration with knowledge of anatomy and physiology has led to much more biologically realistic networks capable of predicting neurological, pharmacological, and lesion data (e.g., Boucher et al. 2007; Frank et al. 2004). As a result, connectionist modeling of cognition has a much firmer grounding than before.

-- Matt Jones & Bradley C. Love, Bayesian Fundamentalism or Enlightenment? On the explanatory status and theoretical contributions of Bayesian models of cognition

It's unfortunate that when we feel a storm,
We can roll ourselves over 'cause we're uncomfortable.

-Paradise Circus, Massive Attack

Well, probably an anti-rationality quote:

At Smith, the “old boys’ network” becomes an “ageless women’s network.”

From the exclusively female Smith College, where James Miller happens to teach.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald might have said if he had been a little more sober: the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to notice that this bathtub gin bottle is both part empty and part full at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

Steve Sailer

"To learn is to stabilize preestablished synaptic combinations, and to eliminate the surplus."

--Jean-Pierre Changeux

Winston Churchill reputedly quipped that fanatics are people who cannot change their minds and will not change the subject. He got their epistemology just right in his first point. But perhaps he got them wrong in his second point. It is not so much that they will not change the subject. Rather, they cannot change it, because they have no other subject. That is the nature of their crippled epistemology, without which they would not be fanatics.

Russell Hardin, in Political Extremism and Rationality.

Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Study hard. Be evil.

--source unknown

"Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." Susan Ertz

Edit: I read this as "Hey, if I can't add days to the end I'll add them to the middle." It never occurred to me to think the author wanted everyone to die.

I don't want to sound defensive, but lest people think the same of me: I assure you, reader, whoever you are: I do not want you to die. (Never thought I'd have to make that as a contentful disclaimer)

Scott Aaronson on Max Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis:

I find Max a fascinating person, a wonderful conference organizer, someone who’s always been extremely nice to me personally, and an absolute master at finding common ground with his intellectual opponents—I’m trying to learn from him, and hope someday to become 10^-122 as good. I can also say that [...] I personally find the “Mathematical Universe Hypothesis” to be devoid of content.

(emphasis mine)

Peter Woit of Not Even Wrong agrees, unsurprisingly. More interestingly, Max Tegmark replies.

"We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves." -Galileo Galilei (via BrainyQuote)

The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.

Winston Churchill

“Don't we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it...There are some European words you can never translate properly into another language.”

― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

RAMON: Sterling, please! This is loco!
ARCHER: No, Ramon, getting my stolen money back isn't loco, it's --- Wait, what's the word for rational?
RAMON: Racional.
ARCHER: Goddammit.

-- Archer