Rationality Quotes: December 2010

He uses statistics as a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not for illumination.

G.K. Chesterton

'One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction.

At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, “Do you mean did I not operate on half the patients?” The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, “Yes, that’s what I had in mind.” Then the visitor’s fist really came down as he thundered, “Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death.”

God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, “Which half?”'

Dr. E. E. Peacock, Jr., quoted in Medical World News (September 1, 1972), p. 45, as quoted in Tufte's 1974 book Data Analysis for Politics and Policy; http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/12/the-ethics-of-random-clinical-trials.html

The Noah principle: predicting rain doesn’t count, building arks does.

-Warren E. Buffett

if you're the smartest person in the room, go look for a room with smarter people in it.

kevinpet at Hacker News

Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.

— John Von Neumann

A little learning is not a dangerous thing to one who does not mistake it for a great deal.

-- William A White

A young boy walks into a barber shop and the barber whispers to his customer, “This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove it to you.” The barber puts a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other, then calls the boy over and asks, “Which do you want, son?” The boy takes the quarters and leaves. “What did I tell you?” said the barber. “That kid never learns!” Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream store. “Hey, son! May I ask you a question? Why did you take the quarters instead of the dollar bill?” The boy licked his cone and replied, “Because the day I take the dollar, the game is over!”

Found on /r/funny

A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it, is committing another mistake.

-Confucius

Mitch Hedberg on the distinction between labels and the things to which they are applied:

I just bought a 2-bedroom house, but it's up to me, isn't it, how many bedrooms there are? Fuck you, real estate lady! This bedroom has a oven in it! This bedroom’s got a lot of people sitting around watching TV. This bedroom is A.K.A. a hallway.

"Claude Shannon once told me that as a kid, he remembered being stuck on a jigsaw puzzle. His brother, who was passing by, said to him: "You know: I could tell you something."

That's all his brother said.

Yet that was enough hint to help Claude solve the puzzle. The great thing about this hint... is that you can always give it to yourself."

--Manuel Blum, "Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student"

The question I ask myself like almost everyday is 'Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?'

Mark Zuckerberg

"Look! Can your fortunetelling explain that?!"

"Ha! Can your science explain why it rains?"

"YES! Yes, it can!"

• Avatar: the Last Airbender

The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way. [...] Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a non-moral origin.

-- Ted Kaczynski

In the Information Age, the first step to sanity is FILTERING. Filter the information; extract the knowledge.

Filter first for substance. Filter second for significance. These filters protect against advertising.

Filter third for reliability. This filter protects against politicians.

Filter fourth for completeness. This filter protects from the media.

-- Marc Stielger, David's Sling

“On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.”

--Nietzsche

It's amazing how much "mature wisdom" resembles being too tired.

— Lazarus Long (in Time Enough For Love by Robert Heinlein)

"Imagine being told you were made for a purpose, and that longevity and happiness are not in the list of design objectives." -David Eubanks, Life Artificial

Witching was turning out to be mostly hard work and really short on magic of the zap!-glingle-glingle-glingle variety. There was no school and nothing that was exactly like a lesson. But it wasn’t wise to try to learn witching all by yourself, especially if you had a natural talent. If you got it wrong, you could go from ignorant to cackling in a week ...

When you got right down to it, it was all about cackling. No one ever talked about this, though. Witches said things like “You can never be too old, too skinny, or too warty,” but they never mentioned the cackling. Not properly. They watched out for it, though, all the time.

It was all too easy to become a cackler. Most witches lived by themselves (cat optional) and might go for weeks without ever seeing another witch. In those times when people hated witches, they were often accused of talking to their cats. Of course they talked to their cats. After three weeks without an intelligent conversation that wasn’t about cows, you’d talk to the wall. And that was an early sign of cackling.

“Cackling,” to a witch, didn’t just mean nasty laughter. It meant your mind drifting away from its anchor. It meant you losing your grip. It meant loneliness and hard work and responsibility and other people’s problems driving you crazy a little bit at a time, each bit so small that you’d hardly notice it, until you thought that it was normal to stop washing and wear a kettle on your head. It meant you thinking that the fact you knew more than anyone else in your village made you better than them. It meant thinking that right and wrong were negotiable. And, in the end, it meant you “going to the dark,” as the witches said. That was a bad road. At the end of that road were poisoned spinning wheels and gingerbread cottages.

What stopped this was the habit of visiting. Witches visited other witches all the time, sometimes traveling quite a long way for a cup of tea and a bun. Partly this was for gossip, of course, because witches love gossip, especially if it’s more exciting than truthful. But mostly it was to keep an eye on one another.

Today Tiffany was visiting Granny Weatherwax, who was in the opinion of most witches (including Granny herself) the most powerful witch in the mountains. It was all very polite. No one said, “Not gone bats, then?” or “Certainly not! I’m as sharp as a spoon!” They didn’t need to. They understood what it was all about, so they talked of other things. But when she was in a mood, Granny Weatherwax could be hard work.

• Pratchett, "Wintersmith"

"When I start to wonder if black swans exist, I put down my copy of Mind and pick up my copy of Nature."

-- Ariadne (former columnist in New Scientist).

"Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."

-- Charles Darwin

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

-George Bernard Shaw

The splitting of the atom has changed everything save the way men think, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

-- Albert Einstein

"Empty arguments with words cannot (in any way) compare with a test which will show practical results."

Ma Jun, inventor or reinventor of the South Pointing Chariot and the differential gear.

"When in total ignorance, try anything and you will be less ignorant."

-- G.Harry Stine, A Matter of Metalaw

That's the thing about power, I think. To some people --those of us who have none-- anyone who has it and uses it is a villain. To those who have it, anyone who tries to stop them from using it is a villain. Because we're all the heroes of our own story, no matter what horrible things we might be doing.

Sometimes people do terrible things with the best of intentions. I don't think that makes them any less guilty. But if you understand their reasons, you might find it more difficult to condemn them out of hand. You might find it more difficult to call them villains.

On the other hand, sometimes people do terrible things with the absolute worst of intentions. But even there, I don't think they're supervillains. I think they're just people.

(emphasis added)

• David J. Schwartz, "Superpowers"

"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you." -Oscar Wilde

Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.

-- Laurens Van der Post

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.

--J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

The scared fighter may be the best fighter, but the scared learner is always a poor learner.

--John Holt

"Any fool can have an opinion; to know what one needs to know to have an opinion is wisdom; which is another way of saying that wisdom means knowing what questions to ask about knowledge."

--Neil Postman, "Building a Bridge to the 18th Century"

... unfortunately, there is a flaw in the reasoning. ... [T]o say that each of two numbers cannot be bigger than the other is to repeat the statement that is to be proved. It is not correct in logic to prove something by saying it over again; that only works in politics, and even there it is usually considered desirable to repeat the proposition hundreds of times before considering it as definitely established.

— Carl E. Linderholm, "Mathematics Made Difficult"

(There are many more good quotes to be found in this book.)

God is nowhere treated worse than by the natural scientists who believe in him. Materialists simply explain the facts, without making use of such phrases, they do this first when importunate pious believers try to force God upon them, and then they answer curtly, either like Laplace: Sire, je n’avais pas, etc., or more rudely in the manner of the Dutch merchants who, when German commercial travellers press their shoddy goods on them, are accustomed to turn them away with the words: Ik kan die zaken niet gebruiken [I have no use for the things] and that is the end of the matter: But what God has had to suffer at the hands of his defenders! In the history of modern natural science, God is treated by his defenders as Frederick William III was treated by his generals and officials in the Jena campaign. One division of the army after another lays down its arms, one fortress after another capitulates before the march of science, until at last the whole infinite realm of nature is conquered by science, and there is no place left in it for the Creator. Newton still allowed Him the “first impulse” but forbade Him any further interference ‘in his solar system. Father Secchi bows Him out of the solar system altogether, with all canonical honours it is true, but none the less categorically for all that, and he only allows Him a creative act as regards the primordial nebula. And so in all spheres. In biology, his last great Don Quixote, Agassiz, even ascribes positive nonsense to Him; He is supposed to have created not only the actual animals but also abstract animals, the fish as such! And finally Tyndall totally forbids Him any entry into nature and relegates Him to the world of emotional processes, only admitting Him because, after all, there must be somebody who knows more about all these things (nature) than John Tyndall! What a distance from the old God – the Creator of heaven and earth, the maintainer of all things – without whom not a hair can fall from the head!

~Frederick Engels, Notes and Fragments for Dialectics of Nature

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.

Winston Churchhill

"To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune... to lose both seems like carelessness." - Oscar Wilde (though he didn't mean it to refer to cryonics).

[Edit: correction, thanks ciphergoth]

You have to realize that a great number of things are discussed in these proceedings that the mind just can't deal with, people are simply too tired and distracted, and by way of compensation they resort to superstition.

-- Kafka, The Trial

I don't know if this quote has already shown up, but it's one of my favorites.

"Consider this: You are the architect of your own imprisonment."

-- Macros the Black (from Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar Saga)

Coping with radical novelty requires an orthogonal method. One must consider one's own past, the experiences collected, and the habits formed in it as an unfortunate accident of history, and one has to approach the radical novelty with a blank mind, consciously refusing to try to link it with what is already familiar, because the familiar is hopelessly inadequate. One has, with initially a kind of split personality, to come to grips with a radical novelty as a dissociated topic in its own right. Coming to grips with a radical novelty amounts to creating and learning a new foreign language that can not be translated into one's mother tongue. (Any one who has learned quantum mechanics knows what I am talking about.) Needless to say, adjusting to radical novelties is not a very popular activity, for it requires hard work. For the same reason, the radical novelties themselves are unwelcome.

• Edsger W. Dijkstra, On the cruelty of really teaching computing science

Theories have four stages of acceptance. i) this is worthless nonsense; ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view, iii) this is true, but quite unimportant; iv) I always said so.

-- J.B.S. Haldane

"The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year.

Unless you give at least forty-five minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your ninety minutes of a night are chiefly wasted. This means that your pace will be slow.

Never mind. " - Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 hours per day.

[EDIT: Found to be erroneous! Sorry!]

I don't feel frightened, not knowing things; I think it's much more interesting.

-Richard P. Feynman

| "Why did I do that?" I asked.

-- The Poet Who Is Odd, Knapsack Poems by Elanor Arnason

| Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.

-- Linus Torvalds

The brighter you are, the more you have to learn. -- Don Herold

I don't know the context of this, I came across it as a quote, but I can see two totally different interpretations, both true.

ADDED: Make that five interpretations.

The two I had in mind were:

Epistemic responsibility - you have an ethical obligation to learn because you can.

The more you have to learn - I don't know about you, but I am about as likely to stop learning as to stop breathing - I'm not likely to do either voluntarily.

I swear, if I write a column saying it was a beautiful day yesterday, I'll get at least two letters informing me that it wasn't a nice day for the people starving in Bangladesh, and if I wasn't such a heartless son of a bitch who only thinks about himself, I'd realize that and stop talking about the weather, so I should do everyone a favor and kill myself. -- Tom Naughton

"Even though it is a path of 1,000 miles, you walk one step at a time. Consider this well." - Miyamoto Musashi

A small leak can sink a great ship.

-Benjamin Franklin

"Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs safe from ordinary standards of evaluation, can only corrupt this fabric, just as a contradiction can corrupt a system of logic, allowing falsehoods to proliferate through it." -- Steven Pinker

“Complexity is a symptom of confusion, not a cause.” - Jeff Hawkins

I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.

Montaigne

"The proper, wise balancing of one's whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour."

--Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours Per Day

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." Henry David Thoreau

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Max Planck

The value of a problem is not so much coming up with the answer as in the ideas and attempted ideas it forces on the would be solver.

— Yitz Herstein

I reckon that for all the use it has been to science about four-fifths of my time has been wasted, and I believe this to be the common lot of people who are not merely playing follow-my-leader in research.

— Peter Medawar

"Today I will question my own confusion."

From Today I Will Nourish My Inner Martyr - Affirmations for Cynics by Ann Thornhill & Sarah Wells

"A man has free choice to the extent that he is rational." -- St. Thomas Aquinas

"Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear." -- Bertrand Russell

"Reality contains not only evidence, but also the means (such as our minds, and our artefacts) of understanding it. There are mathematical symbols in physical reality. The fact that it is we who put them there does not make them any less physical." -- David Deutsch

"If one devalues rationality, the world tends to fall apart" -- Lars von Trier

To learn to write well is to pursue a connection between your facility with language and the content, intellectual and otherwise, of your character. I do not mean by this that people who cannot write well have no character or that writing is the only way in which people can show their character. I mean, simply, that you cannot write well if you do not make this connection, because not to make it is to fail, as a writer, in holding yourself accountable for the quality of your own thinking. Or, to put it another way, it is to fail to take your own intellect seriously. As a teacher, primarily of writing but also of literature, I measure my success not in how many A’s or B’s I give out—since grades reflect the surface of learning, not necessarily its quality—but in whether my students have begun to take on the responsibility not simply of having ideas, but of having the audacity, because we lie to our students if we do not acknowledge that it takes courage, to attempt to communicate those ideas in words compelling enough to command a reader’s attention above and beyond the fact that they were written in response to a classroom assignment…. As writers, we exercise this responsibility—we hold ourselves accountable—most obviously through the process of revision. In order for revision to be meaningful, however, in order for revision even to be possible, a writer must have a sufficient stake in what she or he is attempting to revise that the work of seeing it anew feels both worthwhile and necessary.

---Richard Jeffrey Newman

So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination... And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do not bring forth in the agitation.

Montaigne

"they have attained [happiness] by realising that happiness does not spring from the procuring of physical or mental pleasure, but from the development of reason and the adjustment of conduct to principles.

Now, shall I blush, or will you?

Do not fear that I mean to thrust certain principles upon your attention. I care not (in this place) what your principles are. Your principles may induce you to believe in the righteousness of burglary. I don't mind. All I urge is that a life in which conduct does not fairly well accord with principles is a silly life; and that conduct can only be made to accord with principles by means of daily examination, reflection, and resolution. What leads to the permanent sorrowfulness of burglars is that their principles are contrary to burglary. If they genuinely believed in the moral excellence of burglary, penal servitude would simply mean so many happy years for them; all martyrs are happy, because their conduct and their principles agree.

As for reason (which makes conduct, and is not unconnected with the making of principles), it plays a far smaller part in our lives than we fancy. We are supposed to be reasonable but we are much more instinctive than reasonable. And the less we reflect, the less reasonable we shall be. The next time you get cross with the waiter because your steak is over-cooked, ask reason to step into the cabinet-room of your mind, and consult her. She will probably tell you that the waiter did not cook the steak, and had no control over the cooking of the steak; and that even if he alone was to blame, you accomplished nothing good by getting cross; you merely lost your dignity, looked a fool in the eyes of sensible men, and soured the waiter, while producing no effect whatever on the steak. " - Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 hours per day.

"I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." -- Groucho Marx

History of science is good stuff -- economists should try it some time. Once you start looking it's usually pretty easy to appreciate the wry maxim that scientific advances are usually named for the last person to "discover" them, not the first.

figleaf

I apologize if this is a duplicate, for I cannot find it with the search bar:

What are the facts? Again and again and again — what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history" — what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!

Time Enough for Love (1973) or The Notebooks of Lazarus Long (1978), Robert A. Heinlein

“No choice. At. All. When you feel instead of think, there is little room for choice.”

-- Ravel Puzzlewell in Planescape: Torment

Dueling Cryonics Relevant Quotes:

When it comes time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.

Tecumseh

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

‎"Fine phrases are the last resource of those who have run out of arguments." -- Peter Singer

Be proactively skeptical not defensively skeptical.

Tim Ferriss | The 4 hour body

It's important to look for hypotheses worth disproving

Tim Ferriss | The 4 hour body

the combination of compliant human + distress call is something of a universal tool, all the cat needs to do is identify there is a problem, then meow until the human makes it go away.

-Nestor

"I thought a little [while in the isolation tank], and then I stopped thinking altogether. … incredible how idleness of body leads to idleness of mind. After two days, I’d turned into an idiot. That’s the reason why, during a flight, astronauts are always kept busy."

Oriana Fallaci as quoted in Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon, by Craig Nelson, which cites 'Fallici, Oriana If the Sun Dies. New York. Atheneum, 1967', seen on http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/12/11/after-two-days-id-turned-into-an-idiot/

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Arthur Schopenhauer

The key to getting a reputation for being brilliant is actually being brilliant, not just acting like you are.

Seth Godin

"I don't think anyone should have to do anything educational in school if they don't want to." -- Cordelia's character, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

"When a man finds a conclusion agreeable, he accepts it without argument, but when he finds it disagreeable, he will bring against it all the forces of logic and reason."

Thucydides

Thank you for a wonderful and rich forum of ideas. Looking fwd. to offering something soon.

"It's not having what you want, it's wanting what you've got" -- Sheryl Crow

Is it hard to make decisions as president? Not really. If you know what you believe, decisions come pretty easy. If you’re one of these types of people that are always trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing, decision making can be difficult.

George W. Bush (source)

"Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act according with the dictates of reason." - Oscar Wilde

del

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. " - Oscar Wilde.

Asked by Galileo to look through his telescope at the newly discovered four moons of Jupiter, a representative of the pope answered: "I refuse to look at something which my religion tells me cannot exist." -- newscientist

The apprentice thought, "we are blind", and he sat down and wrote Blindness to remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures. Jose Saramago

I’d prefer to be raped rather than cuckolded; any other men have a preference?

RobinHanson

"My perceptions are worthless and misleading."

From Today I Will Nourish My Inner Martyr - Affirmations for Cynics by Ann Thornhill & Sarah Wells