Rationality Quotes Thread April 2015

No, Mr. Shepard, with respect, (that) is not the moral of the story. The moral of the story is that, if you have grounds to believe there is a ferocious predator at large, don't appoint as your sole watchman a twelve-year-old child whom you have resolved to ignore.

• Mitchell and Webb prosecuting attorney, from the sketch, "The boy who cried wolf"

When I was in law school, I devised my own idiosyncratic solution to the problem of studying a topic I knew nothing about. I'd wander into the library stacks, head to the relevant section, and pluck a book at random. I'd flip to the footnotes, and write down the books that seemed to occur most often. Then I'd pull them off the shelves, read their footnotes, and look at those books. It usually took only 2 or 3 rounds of this exercise before I had a pretty fair idea of who were the leading authorities in the field. After reading 3 or 4 of those books, I usually had at least enough orientation in the subject to understand what the main questions at issue were - and to seek my own answers, always provisional, always subject to new understanding, always requiring new reading and new thinking.

--David Frum

The oldest (non-dead) source I could find was this 2008 post by someone else quoting Frum.

Related to: Update Yourself Incrementally and For progress to be by accumulaton and not by random walk, read great books

In Silicon Valley, [...] many of the more successful entrepreneurs seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger’s where it’s like you’re missing the imitation, socialization gene... It happens to be a plus for innovation, and creating great companies, but I think we always should turn this around as an incredible critique of our society. We need to ask, what is it about our society where those of us who do not suffer from Asperger’s are at some massive disadvantage because we will be talked out of our interesting, original, creative ideas before they are even fully formed?

Peter Thiel on the Future of Innovation, in conversation with Tyler Cowen.

To teach students any psychology they did not know before, you must surprise them. But which surprise will do? Nisbett and Borgida found that when they presented their students with a surprising statistical fact, the students managed to learn nothing at all. But when the students were surprised by individual cases—two nice people who had not helped—they immediately made the generalization and inferred that helping is more difficult than they had thought. Nisbett and Borgida summarize the results in a memorable sentence:

Subjects’unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular.

This is a profoundly important conclusion. People who are taught surprising statistical facts about human behavior may be impressed to the point of telling their friends about what they have heard, but this does not mean that their understanding of the world has really changed. The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact. There is a deep gap between our thinking about statistics and our thinking about individual cases. Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than noncausal information. But even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience. On the other hand, surprising individual cases have a powerful impact and are a more effective tool for teaching psychology because the incongruity must be resolved and embedded in a causal story. That is why this book contains questions that are addressed personally to the reader. You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.

--Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

Science has this in common with art, that the most ordinary, everyday thing appears to it as something entirely new and attractive, as if metamorphosed by witchcraft and now seen for the first time. Life is worth living, says art, the beautiful temptress; life is worth knowing, says science.

Nietzsche, Homer and Classical Philology, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Homer_and_Classical_Philology

There may be room for a few pure theorists... In my life I’ve met a few brilliant geniuses, very few, who could sit in an office and think great thoughts and contribute to the world. It’s a very small number, by the way. Then I’ve met lots of people who generalize, which doesn’t move me because I don’t find it helpful. I find it distracting, confusing, misguided, or misplaced.

For most of us mortals, I think the deep engagement in real problems is crucial. I wouldn’t want to train doctors without the medical students walking the wards with their mentors. I don’t like training economists without them grappling with real problems in real places and learning the complexity of the interacting physical, technological, political, economic, natural systems.

Jeffrey D. Sachs on the Future of Innovation, in conversation with Tyler Cowen.

“What's up, Sarge? Do you want to live for ever?”

“Dunno. Ask me again in five hundred years.”

• "Guards! Guards!", Terry Pratchett

What is the difference between describing 'how' and explaining 'why'? To describe 'how' means to reconstruct the series of specific events that led from one point to another. To explain 'why' means to find causal connections that account for the occurrence of this particular series of events to the exclusion of all others.

--Yuval Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Now on what condition is the use of hypothesis without danger?

The firm determination to submit to experiment is not enough; there are still dangerous hypotheses; first, and above all, those which are tacit and unconscious. Since we make them without knowing it, we are powerless to abandon them. Here again, then, is a service that mathematical physics can render us. By the precision that is characteristic of it, it compels us to formulate all the hypotheses that we should make without it, but unconsciously.

Henri Poincaré, "The Foundations of Science".

What great causes are deeply unpopular?

Peter Thiel 50m into the interview. He only wants to fund unpopular causes because he assumes popular causes are relatively well funded.

Desirability is not a requisite of the truth darkmatter2525 source

"Make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged." -- ''Grice, Paul (1975). "Logic and conversation". pp. 41–58.''

Conversation is an art. The above is the 'well-known' Cooperative Principle.

If you can't feed your baby, then don't have a baby.

-Michael Jackson (Wanna be starting something)

Magnificent phrases like 'inductive reactance' flow effortlessly from the lips of guys who can't cook hotdogs or find the flashing blue light in a K-mart store. That's important to keep in mind. It doesn't take a lot of brains to learn a few words. Parakeets and my a birds do it all the time. You can, too. It's not work, it's a game.

• Kenn Amdahl "There are no Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings"

Yet another variant on the difference between words and understanding.

Science has this in common with art, that the most ordinary, everyday thing appears to it as something entirely new and attractive, as if metamorphosed by witchcraft and now seen for the first time. Life is worth living, says art, the beautiful temptress; life is worth knowing, says science.

Nietzsche, in Homer and Classical Philology

It would have been wiser for the English governing class to have called upon some other god. All other gods, however weak and warring, at least boast of being constant. But science boasts of being in a flux for ever; boasts of being unstable as water.

GK Chesterton, Heretics

(for "god" read "moral principles")

So raise your glass if you are wrong in all the right ways!

• Pink, virtually alone among the pop-singer community in her early endorsement of the post-rationality movement.

(Epistemic status: frivolous wordplay on the different meanings of "wrong.")

Compassion and denial, mixed together, can be a lethal cocktail.

Daniel Falush

Jim Raynor: You think he's right? That I'm just gonna run out on you all?

Ajendarro Ybarra: You got us working for the Dominion now, Commander. Taking us back to Char. It's like you're gone already.

Jim Raynor: This ain't about the Dominion. Our war has always been about saving lives. If the Zerg wipe everyone out, it's all been for nothing. So I'm going back to Char. If you're with me, it's your choice. Just like it's always been.

--Jim Raynor, Starcraft

Truth only looks like trolling when it is sufficiently uncomfortable.

Vox Day