Rationality Quotes October 2014

A novice asked master Banzen: “What separates the monk from the master?”

Banzen replied: “Ten thousand mistakes!”

The novice, not understanding, sought to avoid all error. An abbot observed and brought the novice to Banzen for correction.

Banzen explained: “I have made ten thousand mistakes; Suku has made ten thousand mistakes; the patriarchs of Open Source have each made ten thousand mistakes.”

Asked the novice: “What of the old monk who labors in the cubicle next to mine? Surely he has made ten thousand mistakes.”

Banzen shook his head sadly. “Ten mistakes, a thousand times each.”

The Codeless Code

Prominent altruists aren't the people who have a larger care-o-meter, they're the people who have learned not to trust their care-o-meters... Nobody has [a care-o-meter] capable of faithfully representing the scope of the world's problems. But the fact that you can't feel the caring doesn't mean that you can't do the caring.

Nate Soares

The Courage Wolf looked long and slow at the Weasley twins. At length he spoke, "I see that you possess half of courage. That is good. Few achieve that."

"Half?" Fred asked, too awed to be truly offended.

"Yes," said the Wolf, "You know how to heroically defy, but you do not know how to heroically submit. How to say to another, 'You are wiser than I; tell me what to do and I will do it. I do not need to understand; I will not cost you the time to explain.' And there are those in your lives wiser than you, to whom you could say that."

"But what if they're wrong?" George said.

"If they are wrong, you die," the Wolf said plainly, "Horribly. And for nothing. That is why it is an act of courage."

• HPMOR omake by Daniel Speyer.

When I was 16, I wanted to follow in my grandfathers footsteps. I wanted to be a tradesman. I wanted to build things, and fix things, and make things with my own two hands. This was my passion, and I followed it for years. I took all the shop classes at school, and did all I could to absorb the knowledge and skill that came so easily to my granddad. Unfortunately, the handy gene skipped over me, and I became frustrated. But I remained determined to do whatever it took to become a tradesman.

One day, I brought home a sconce from woodshop that looked like a paramecium, and after a heavy sigh, my grandfather told me the truth. He explained that my life would be a lot more satisfying and productive if I got myself a different kind of toolbox. This was almost certainly the best advice I’ve ever received, but at the time, it was crushing. It felt contradictory to everything I knew about persistence, and the importance of “staying the course.” It felt like quitting. But here’s the “dirty truth,” Stephen. “Staying the course” only makes sense if you’re headed in a sensible direction. Because passion and persistence – while most often associated with success – are also essential ingredients of futility.

That’s why I would never advise anyone to “follow their passion” until I understand who they are, what they want, and why they want it. Even then, I’d be cautious. Passion is too important to be without, but too fickle to be guided by. Which is why I’m more inclined to say, “Don’t Follow Your Passion, But Always Bring it With You.”

• Mike Rowe

"While there are problems with what I have proposed, they should be compared to the existing alternatives, not to abstract utopias."

Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future (page number not provided by e-reader)

The version of Windows following 8.1 will be Windows 10, not Windows 9. Apparently this is because Microsoft knows that a lot of software naively looks at the first digit of the version number, concluding that it must be Windows 95 or Windows 98 if it starts with 9.

Many think this is stupid. They say that Microsoft should call the next version Windows 9, and if somebody’s dumb code breaks, it’s their own fault.

People who think that way aren’t billionaires. Microsoft got where it is, in part, because they have enough business savvy to take responsibility for problems that are not their fault but that would be perceived as being their fault.

-John D. Cook

Lord Vetinari, as supreme ruler of Ankh-Morpork, could in theory summon the Archchancellor of Unseen University to his presence and, indeed, have him executed if he failed to obey.

On the other hand Mustrum Ridcully, as head of the college of wizards, had made it clear in polite but firm ways that he could turn him into a small amphibian and, indeed, start jumping around the room on a pogo stick.

Alcohol bridged the diplomatic gap nicely. Sometimes Lord Vetinari invited the Archchancellor to the palace for a convivial drink. And of course the Archchancellor went, because it would be bad manners not to. And everyone understood the position, and everyone was on their best behaviour, and thus civil unrest and slime on the carpet were averted.

-- Interesting Times, Terry Pratchett

I want to say "live and let live" about non-scientific views. But, then I read about measles outbreaks in countries where vaccines are free.

Zach Weinersmith (Twitter)

Related:

Rather than panicking about the single patient known to have Ebola in the US, protect yourself against a virus that kills up to 50,000 Americans every year. It's the flu, and simply getting the shot dramatically reduces your chances of becoming ill.

Erin Brodwin Business Insider

"You know, esoteric, non-intuitive truths have a certain appeal – once initiated, you’re no longer one of the rubes. Of course, the simplest and most common way of producing an esoteric truth is to just make it up."

West Hunter

To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods

-- Robert Heinlein (http://tmaas.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/robert-heinlein-quotes.html)

"Put simply, the truth about all those good decisions you plan to make sometime in the future, when things are easier, is that you probably won't make them once that future rolls around and things are tough again."

Sendhil Mullaainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity, p. 215

“Nobody supposes that the knowledge that belongs to a good cook is confined to what is or may be written down in a cookery book.” - Michael Oakeshott, "Rationalism in Politics"

"What we assume to be 'normal consciousness' is comparatively rare, it's like the light in the refrigerator: when you look in, there you are ON but what's happening when you don't look in?"

Keith Johnstone, Impro - Improvisation and the Theatre

To summarize Twitter and my Facebook feed this morning: “The Ebola virus proves everything I already believed about politics.” You might find this surprising. The Ebola virus is not running for office. It does not have a policy platform, or any campaign white papers on burning issues. It doesn’t even vote. So how could it neatly validate all our preconceived positions on government spending, immigration policy, and the proper role of the state in our health care system? Stranger still: How could it validate them so beautifully on both left and right?

Megan McArdle

The words out of your mouth will literally be ignored, misheard, or even contorted to the opposite of what they mean, if that’s what it takes to preserve the listener’s misconception

Scott Aaronson on why quantum computers don't speed up computations by parallelism, a popular misconception.

Still, it was possible that he could close in and thus block the Frenchman's blade.

No. Would he consider such a move if he did not have three ounces of fifteen-percent-alcohol purple passion in his bloodstream? No. Forget it.

Philip Jose Farmer's character, "Richard Francis Burton," The magic labyrinth

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not hide them -- especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of art, which in a way they are. The fundamental reaction to any mistake ought to be this: "Well, I won't do that again!" Natural selection doesn't actually think this thought; it just wipes out the goofers before they can reproduce; natural selection won't do that again, at least not as often. Animals that can learn -- learn not to make that noise, touch that wire, eat that food -- have something with a similar selective force in their brains. We human beings carry matters to a much more swift and efficient level. We can actually think that thought, reflecting on what we have just done: "Well, I won't do that again!" And when we reflect, we confront directly the problem that must be solved by any mistake-maker: what, exactly, is that? What was it about what I just did that got me into all this trouble? The trick is to take advantage of the particular details of the mess you've made, so that your next attempt will be informed by it and not just another blind stab in the dark.... The natural human reaction to making a mistake is embarrassment and anger (we are never angrier than when are angry at ourselves), and you to work hard to overcome these emotional reactions. Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then once you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully set them behind you, and go on to the next big opportunity. But that this not enough; you should actively seek out opportunities to make grand mistakes; just so you can recover from them.

-Daniel Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking

The winner worldview is that you have responsibility for your own life and it is irrelevant who is at fault if the people at fault can't or won't fix the problem. I've noticed over the course of my life that winners ignore questions of blame and fault and look for solutions they can personally influence. Losers blame others for their problems and expect that to produce results.

Scott Adams musing on what that woman in the Manhattan harassment video could do.

This actually clashes with the idea of heroic responsibility, a popular local notion. I guess it depends on what your values are.

if people use data and inferences they can make with the data without any concern about error bars, about heterogeneity, about noisy data, about the sampling pattern, about all the kinds of things that you have to be serious about if you’re an engineer and a statistician—then you will make lots of predictions, and there’s a good chance that you will occasionally solve some real interesting problems. But you will occasionally have some disastrously bad decisions. And you won’t know the difference a priori. You will just produce these outputs and hope for the best.

--Michael I. Jordan, Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Machine-Learning Maestro Michael Jordan on the Delusions of Big Data and Other Huge Engineering Efforts

My greatest inspiration is a low bank balance.

Ludwig Bemelmens

The humans aren't doing what the math says. The humans must be broken.

SMBC on the Ultimatum Game

“And therein lies the problem,” scowled the master. “Yesterday I was a fool, the week before an idiot, and last month an imbecile. Don’t show me code I might have written yesterday. Show me code as I will write it tomorrow.”

Qi at The Codeless Code

When you get to a fork in the road, take it.

• Yogi Berra, on Harder choices matter less

(I will keep doing this. I have no shame.)

"... beware of false dichotomies. Though it's fun to reduce a complex issue to a war between two slogans, two camps, or two schools of thought, it is rarely a path to understanding. Few good ideas can be insightfully captured in a single word ending with -ism, and most of our ideas are so crude that we can make more progress by analyzing and refining them than by pitting them against each other in a winner-take-all contest."

• Steven Pinker, on page 345 of The Sense of Style.

To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge.

Benjamin Disraeli.

But philosophers share the general human weakness for explanations of what is incomprehensible in terms suited for what is familiar and well understood, though entirely different.

Originally said by Thomas Nagel (I got it from Hofstadter and Dennett here )

This is a quote from memory from one of my professors in grad school:

Last quarble, the shanklefaxes ulugled the flurxurs. The flurxurs needed ulugled because they were mofoxiliating, which caused amaliaxas in the hurble-flurble. The shakletfaxes domonoxed a wokuflok who ulugles flurxurs, because wokuflok nuxioses less than iliox nuxioses.

1. When did the shaklefaxes ulugle the flurxurs?
2. Why did the shaklefaxes ulugle the flurxurs?
3. Who did they get to ulugle the flurxurs?
4. If you were the shaklefaxes, would you have your ulugled flurxurs? Why or why not?
5. Would you domonox a wokuflok who ulugles flurxurs instead of an iliox? Why or why not?

Notice how if you only memorize things, you can reasonably answer the first three questions but not the last two. But if you actually understand things, you can answer all five. Instead of memorizing things, you will get a lot further in life if you actually understand the reasoning behind them.

Physicists, in contrast with philosophers, are interested in determining observable consequences of the hypothesis that we are a simulation.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1847 , Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation

"Information always underrepresents reality."

Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (page number not provided by e-reader)

Holmes: "What's the matter? You're not looking quite yourself. This Brixton Road affair has upset you."

Watson: "To tell the truth, it has," I said. "I ought to be more case-hardened after my Afghan experiences. I saw my own comrades hacked to pieces in Maiwand without losing my nerve."

Holmes: "I can understand. There is a mystery about this which stimulates the imagination; where there is no imagination there is no horror ."

• From Conan Doyle's "a study in scarlet" (bold added by me for emphasis)

Chesterton's fence is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. The quotation is from Chesterton’s 1929 book The Thing, in the chapter entitled "The Drift from Domesticity":

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. 1)

1) "Taking a Fence Down". American Chesterton Society. Retrieved 21 June 2014.

Wikipedia: Chesterton's Fence

Prompted by this comment; curiously this appears to be lacking from rationality quotes threads despite some references to the fence around here.

Germany’s plans in the event of a two front war [WW I] were the results of years of study on the part of great soldiers, the German General Staff. That those plans failed was not due to any unsoundness on the part of the plans, but rather due to the fact that the plans could not be carried out by the field armies.

An official Army War College publication, 1923

While reverse stupidity isn't intelligence, learning how others rationalize failure can help us recognize our own mistakes.

Edited to reflect hydkyll's comment.

The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, Part I (trans. by Bernard Frechtman).

Cf. Rationality is Systematized Winning and Rationality and Winning.

What if the polls prove to have no bias? Our model shows Republicans as about 75 percent likely to win a Senate majority. This may seem confusing: Doesn’t the official version of FiveThirtyEight’s model have Republicans as about 60 percent favorites instead? Yes, but some of the 40 percent chance it gives Democrats reflects the possibility that the polls will have a Republican bias. If the polls were guaranteed to be unbiased, that would would make Republicans more certain of winning.

Nate Silver

"If we take everything into account — not only what the ancients knew, but all of what we know today that they didn't know — then I think that we must frankly admit that we do not know. But, in admitting this, we have probably found the open channel."

Richard Feynman, "The Value of Science," public address at the National Academy of Sciences (Autumn 1955); published in What Do You Care What Other People Think (1988); republished in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman (1999) edited by Jeffrey Robbins.

Thankfully, they have ways of verifying historical facts so this [getting facts wrong] doesn't happen too much. One of them is Bayes' Theorem, which uses mathematical formulas to determine the probability that an event actually occurred. Ironically, the method is even useful in the case of Bayes' Theorem itself. While most people attribute it to Thomas Bayes (1701 - 1761), there are a significant number who claim it was discovered independently of Bayes - and some time before him - by a Nicholas Saunderson. This gives researchers the unique opportunity to use Bayes' Theorem to determine who came up with Bayes' Theorem. I love science.

John Cadley, Funny You Should Say That - Toastmaster magazine

Slytherin, the hat had almost put him in, and his similarity to Slytherin's heir Riddle himself had commented on. But he was beginning to think this wasn't because he had "un-Gryffindor" qualities that fit only in Slytherin, but because the two houses - normally pictured as opposites - were in some fundamental ways quite similar.

Ravenclaws in battle, he had no doubt, would cooly plan the sacrifice of distant strangers to achieve an important objective, though that cold logic could collapse in the face of sacrificing family instead. Hufflepuffs would sacrifice no one, though it means they sacrifice an objective in its place.

Only Gryffindors and Slytherins were good at sacrificing those they loved.

But with one friend who had lost weeks to the hospital wing and who could so easily have lost her life instead, with another mourning..., with himself going into battles he barely survived, and making decisions he should not have to make, he dreaded what they might be called upon to sacrifice next.

And he decided: he would do much, to see that it did not happen.

From Myst Shadow's excellent fanfiction, Forging the Sword.

Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all "part of the plan". But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!

-- Joker, The Dark Knight

[T]here are several references to previous flights; the acceptance and success of these flights are taken as evidence of safety. But erosion and blowby are not what the design expected. They are warnings that something is wrong. The equipment is not operating as expected, and therefore there is a danger that it can operate with even wider deviations in the unexpected and not thoroughly understood way. The fact that this danger did not lead to catastrophe before is no guarantee that it will not the next time, unless it is completely understood. (..) The origin and consequences of the erosion and blowby were not understood. Erosion and blowby did not occur equally on all flights or in all joints: sometimes there was more, sometimes less. Why not sometime, when whatever conditions determined it were right, wouldn't there be still more, leading to catastrophe?

Richard Feynman, Appendix F: Personal Observations on the Reliability of the Shuttle

One of the things about the online debate over e-piracy that particularly galled me was the blithe assumption by some of my opponents that the human race is a pack of slavering would-be thieves held (barely) in check by the fear of prison sentences.

Oh, hogwash.

Sure, sure - if presented with a real "Devil's bargain," most people will at least be tempted. Eternal life. . . a million dollars found lying in the woods. . .

Heh. Many fine stories have been written on the subject! But how many people, in the real world, are going to be tempted to steal a few bucks?

-- Introducing the Baen Free Library, Eric Flint

(Which I can no longer find at Baen, but copies are scattered across the internet, including here)

If you kick a ball, about the most interesting way you can analyze the result is in terms of the mechanical laws of force and motion. The coefficients of inertia, gravity, and friction are sufficient to determine its reaction to your kick and the ball's final resting place, even if you can 'bend it like Beckham'. But if you kick a large dog, such a mechanical analysis of vectors and resultant forces may not prove as salient as the reaction of the dog as a whole. Analyzing individual muscles biomechanically likewise yields an incomplete picture of human movement experience.

Thomas W. Myers in Anatomy Trains - Page 3

"What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it! / Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."

-- John Anster in a "very free translation" of Faust from 1835. (http://www.goethesociety.org/pages/quotescom.html)

Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time.

Benjamin Disraeli.

The fact that censorship is progressivism’s default position regarding so many things is evidence of progressives’ pessimism about the ability of their agenda to advance under a regime of robust discussion.

George Will, writing in the Washington Post.

The quote illustrates rationality with a particular example from a political subject, which we all know can be mind-killing. For the avoidance of doubt, I would therefore note that the lesson in rationality from the quote applies equally to anyone, regardless of their politics, who is keen to censor discussions.

"Dammit, Roselyn, you've done enough. If you keep putting it off, you could end up in a desperate place one day!" Caprice nuzzled Roselyn's leg. "You always act as if you are trying to make up for something. If you'd just take the serum, you'd find that Celestia forgives humans. She knows humans can't help what they are." Caprice looked deeply into Roselyn's eyes, and Roselyn felt that somehow Caprice was speaking from personal experience. "Just do it, Ros. Run and grab a cup and then get on the boat. It's alright. You have my permission."

-Jennifer Reitz, 27 Ounces, Final Chapter.

Context: Taking ponification serum increases the expected value of one's lifespan by 300 years, though Roselyn is averse to taking the serum, because she feels that existing in human form serves as penitence for wrongs she has committed in the past. There is a tenuous connection between Roselyn's act of procrastinating on taking the ponification serum, and the practice of cryocrastinating in real life.

Edit: I'm sorry that nopony liked the above quote; my intent in posting it was to cheer for the sentiment that living for a long time is a good thing. I, um, guess that I did a bad job, sorry. I will leave the test of my original post unedited, so that everypony can see what I originally wrote.

Truth is the invention of a liar

Heinz von Foerster (he founded the Biological Computer Lab in 1958)