Rationality Quotes October 2013

The market doesn't give a shit how hard you worked. Users just want your software to do what they need, and you get a zero otherwise. That is one of the most distinctive differences between school and the real world: there is no reward for putting in a good effort. In fact, the whole concept of a "good effort" is a fake idea adults invented to encourage kids. It is not found in nature.

--Paul Graham (When I saw this quote, I thought it had to have been posted before, but googling turned up nothing.)

We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was also one of the winners.

Paul Graham

Him: We can't go back. We don't understand everything yet.

Her: "Everything" is a little ambitious. We barely understand anything.

Him: Yeah. But that's what the first part of understanding everything looks like.

Randall Munroe - Time

A majority of life's errors are caused by forgetting what one is really trying to do.

-Charlie Munger

“Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.”

Neal Stephenson - "Quicksilver"

the mass of an object never seems to change: a spinning top has the same weight as a still one. So a “law” was invented: mass is constant, independent of speed. That “law” is now found to be incorrect. Mass is found to increase with velocity, but appreciable increases require velocities near that of light. A true law is: if an object moves with a speed of less than one hundred miles a second the mass is constant to within one part in a million. In some such approximate form this is a correct law. So in practice one might think that the new law makes no significant difference. Well, yes and no. For ordinary speeds we can certainly forget it and use the simple constant-mass law as a good approximation. But for high speeds we are wrong, and the higher the speed, the more wrong we are.

Finally, and most interesting, philosophically we are completely wrong with the approximate law. Our entire picture of the world has to be altered even though the mass changes only by a little bit. This is a very peculiar thing about the philosophy, or the ideas, behind the laws. Even a very small effect sometimes requires profound changes in our ideas.

Richard Feynman Lectures on Physics

"I didn't go spiralling down. Because there is no abyss. There is no yawning chasm waiting to swallow us up, when we learn that there is no god, that we're animals like any other animal, that the universe has no purpose, that our souls are made of the same stuff as water and sand."

I said, "There are two thousand cultists on this island who believe otherwise."

Michael shrugged. "What do you expect from moral flat-Earthers, if not fear of falling?"

-- Greg Egan, "Distress".

You can't trust your intuitions [in this domain]. I'm going to give you a set of rules here that will get you through this process if anything will. At certain moments you'll be tempted to ignore them. So rule number zero is: these rules exist for a reason. You wouldn't need a rule to keep you going in one direction if there weren't powerful forces pushing you in another.

Paul Graham

header: funtime activity: casually accusing people of machiavellianism.

man: i’m hungry. we should buy lunch.

woman: OH, so you’re saying THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS?

--Zack Weinersmith, SMBC rejected ideas

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

If--, by Rudyard Kipling

You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.

-- Henry Ford

A number of isolated facts does not produce a science any more than a heap of bricks produces a house.

Alfred Korzybski - Science and Sanity Page 55

...I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

Abraham Lincoln, Letter to Horace Greeley

The reason that testability is not enough is that prediction is not, and cannot be, the purpose of science. Consider an audience watching a conjuring trick. The problem facing them has much the same logic as a scientific problem. Although in nature there is no conjurer trying to deceive us intentionally, we can be mystified in both cases for essentially the same reason: appearances are not self-explanatory. If the explanation of a conjuring trick were evident in its appearance, there would be no trick. If the explanations of physical phenomena were evident in their appearance, empiricism would be true and there would be no need for science as we know it. The problem is not to predict the trick's appearance. I may, for instance predict that if a conjurer seems to place various balls under various cups, those cups will later appear to be empty; and I may predict that if the conjurer appears to saw someone in half, that person will later appear on stage unharmed. Those are testable predictions. I may experience many conjuring shows and see my predictions vindicated every time. But that does not even address, let alone solve, the problem of how the trick works. Solving it requires an explanation: a statement of the reality which accounts for the trick's appearance.

David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

When philosophers use a word—"knowledge", "being", "object", "I", "proposition", "name"—and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?—What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. You say to me: "You understand this expression, don't you? Well then—I am using it in the sense you are familiar with."— As if the sense were an atmosphere accompanying the word, which it carried with it into every kind of application.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 116-117

[Death] does not add up. All you can say is that: no. No, these books do not balance. Not even in Newtonian terms. The only terms in which they make sense are Darwin’s, and no one wants to go there. There are no protagonists in Darwin, and everybody wants to be a protagonist.

John Dolan, of all people.

Because of the way evolution operates, the mind consists of many, many parts, and these parts have many different functions. Because they're designed to do different things, they don't always work in perfect harmony.

Why Everyone Else Is A Hypocrite, by Robert Kurzban, p. 6.

The CS people screamed that the problem was NP-hard, computationally intractable, etc. But we didn't know what any of that meant, so we got it working.

A reply to the request in The Register for programmers to share their experiences working on computationally intractable tasks.

There is solemn satisfaction in doing the best you can for eight billion people.

-Robert Heinlein, Double Star

Human consciousness isn't optimized for anything, except maybe helping feral hominids survive in the wild.

-Charles Stross, "Rule 34"

It is entirely reasonable to believe that Obamacare is terrible policy that will hurt more people than it helps. Your inability to grasp that anyone has this belief does not mean that everyone who disagrees with you is a venal, amoral wretch; it means that you have been blinded by confirmation bias and your own lack of empathy...

Similarly, it is entirely reasonable to believe that Obamacare is good policy that will help more people than it hurts. The fact that you think otherwise does not mean that the law’s supporters are too stupid to be allowed near sharp objects. It means that they are valuing different things -- expanded coverage over innovation, for instance -- or else that their assessment of the probability that various things will go wrong is different from yours.

Megan McArdle

Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you'll realize how much harder it is to change someone else

• Anonymous quote from Facebook

Mu means "no thing." Like "quality" it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, "no class: not one, not zero, not yes, not no." It states that the context of the question is such that a yes and a no answer is in error and should not be given. "Unask the question" is what it says.

.... [Somewhere later]

That Mu exists in the natural world investigated by science is evident. […] The dualistic mind tends to think of Mu occurrences in nature as a kind of contextual cheating, or irrelevance, but Mu is found through all scientific investigation, and nature doesn't cheat, and nature's answers are never irrelevant. It's a great mistake, a kind of dishonesty to sweep nature's Mu answers under the carpet. […]

When your answer to a test is indeterminate it means one of two things: that your test procedures aren't doing what you think they are or that your understanding of the context of the question needs to be enlarged. Check your tests and restudy the question. Don't throw away those Mu answers! They're every bit as vital as the yes and no answers. They're more vital. They're the ones you grow on.

--- Robert M Pirsig (Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.

“For the sin of the idolater is not that he worships stone, but that he worships one stone over others.”

-Scott Bakker

This is actually just a chapter opener in a fantasy story, but I like it as a sort of short hand for the de-mystifying rainbows sequence. Everything is connected and that's ok.

The hedgehog and the Fox: Hedgehogs "know one big thing" and have a theory about the world; they account for particular events within a coherent framework, bristle with impatience toward those who don't see things their way, and are confident in their forecasts. They are also especially reluctant to admit error. For hedgehogs, a failed prediction is almost always "off only on timing" or "very nearly right". They are opinionated and clear, which is exactly what television producers love to see on programs. Two hedgehogs on different sides of an issue, each attacking the idiotic ideas of the adversary, make for a good show. Foxes, by contrast, are complex thinkers. They don't believe that one big thing drives the march of history (for example they are unlikely to accept the view that Ronald Reagan single-handedly ended the cold war by standing tall against the Soviet Union). Instead the foxes recognize that reality emerges from interactions of many different agents and forces, including blind luck, often producing large and unpredictable outcomes.

~ Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, fast and slow)

If you find yourself with mind control powers and tempted to do something evil, you can probably get more of what you want by working on yourself and being good.

jimmy, the resident non-evil cognitive engineer.

Nullius in verba. (On the words of no one.)

Motto of the Royal Society.

Umm…well this is going to sound silly, but I was actually not terribly well-trained as a scientist in college; I was much more of the social science type, so I actually never took any chemistry or physics in college and don't have a very good fundamental grounding. So I am easily panicked in my science and I think thus I can easily imagine more readily than most people in my position how somebody else can be. I think sort of pedagogically where that came about: during grad school I wound up in a grad school that didn’t have an undergraduate college—it was just a research institute—so we didn't have to do the TAing stuff that grad students do here, and thought that was probably a bad thing sort of professionally, so I figured out a way to sneak off and moonlight, I was in New York at a place called The New School for Social Research, where they kind of hired me to moonlight on the side, and it like totally violated my fellowship and I had to like sneak off out the back way from my university and stuff. And right around time there was this fashion institute in New York called Parsons School of Design that had just lost their academic accreditation—which it turned out to be, like, decades after that probably should have happened—and they decided, they went out and like shut out all their tenured non-design faculty and they forced their students to go over to The New School to take their courses. And there was a science requirement and I was like offered one of the two science courses at the New School, so I would get these classes full of these unbelievably hostile, phobic, teeny-bopper textile designers, and this forced an enormous pressure to be clear, and to have a good sense as to when people are about to go berserk with too many terms and stuff and like when you have to stop and give an anecdote or metaphor or something, so I think in retrospect it was actually very good training. I know every one of those people is now a chief of neurosurgery at a major medical center.

Robert Sapolsky

The only way to truly know a person is to argue with them. For when they argue in full swing, then they reveal their true character.

Anne Frank

(h/t Jonas Muller)

My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.

Thomas Huxley

But history always moves in a progressive direction.

We know this because history always gets rewritten to attribute all the progressive notions that failed to other people.

Marry

Ducard: Are you ready to begin?

Bruce Wayne: I… I can barely stand...

Ducard: Death does not wait for you to be ready!! Death is not considerate, or fair! And make no mistake: here, you face Death.

Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan, 2005

One does not have to see something to know that it is there

-- Havelock Vetinari, Going Postal, Terry Pratchett

At first James thought they were joking because, "You know, Hidden Object Games". But then, after a moment, James realised they were absolutely right. Why hadn't we done a show on Hidden Object Games?

Extra Credits react to their surprise.

One of my professors, in a lecture covering compulsory cache misses and prefetching:

Well... the engineers won't give up that easily, just because you called it "compulsory." The competitors are climbing on Moore's Law Ladder, we better do something!

Unrelated to the rationality content of this quote, he thinks Moore's Law is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because how fast chip manufacturing improves depends on how hard engineers work, which depends on how hard they think their competition will work, which is an interesting idea that I hadn't heard before him.

Sometimes I think that I'm surrounded by idiots everywhere. Then I remind myself that that's exactly what an idiot would think.

Abstruse Goose (alt text)

Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

Maybe Einstein, maybe not.

What makes a mind powerful--indeed, what makes a mind conscious--is not what it is made of, or how big it is, but what it can do. Can it concentrate? Can it be distracted? Can it recall earlier events? Can it keep track of several different things at once? Which features of its own current activities can it notice or monitor? When such questions as these are answered, we will know everything we need to know about those minds in order to answer the morally important questions. These answers will capture everything we want to know about the concept of consciousness, except the idea of whether, as one author has recently said, "the mental lights would be out" in such a creature. But that is just a bad idea--in spite of its popularity. (...) For suppose that we have answered all the other questions about the mind of some creature, and now some philosophers claim that we still don't know the answer to that all-important question, Is the mental light on--yes or no? Why would either answer be important? We are owed an answer to this question, before we need to take their question seriously.

Daniel Dennet, Kinds of Minds

Moral courage doesn't reside in "doing good" so much as in fighting the bad.

Nassim Taleb

I suggest a new rule: the source of the quote should be at least three months old. It's too easy to get excited about the latest blog post that made the rounds on Facebook.

I never am really satisfied that I understand anything; because, understand it well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand about the many connections and relations which occur to me, how the matter in question was first thought of or arrived at, etc., etc

Ada Lovelace

In all our eons, we've seen continents frozen and the sun blotted out by ash—and we're still here. A decade after K-Day, and we're still here. I've never believed in the end times. We are mankind. Our footprints are on the moon. When the last trumpet sounds and the beast rises from the pit—we will kill it!

Stacker Pentecost, Pacific Rim: Tales from Year Zero

If you agree that God wouldn't have a human-like personality and human-like needs and ambitions, you end up with a God who is indistinguishable from the sum of the laws of physics.

Scott Adams arguing that "that human personalities are nothing but weaknesses and defects that we romanticize" and that God would have no weaknesses and therefore no personality.

Since the local idea of a superintelligence implies that a foomed AGI would have no human weaknesses (and likely a goal system that is so incomprehensible to humans as to be indistinguishable from no goal system at all), this would imply that we would not notice a superintelligence if it were staring us in the face, provided it decided to keep humans around. There are some obvious flaws in his speculation, however. But the post is still well worth reading.

To function as a Human being, you are forced to accept a minimum level of deception in your life. The more complex and challenging your life the higher this minimum. At any given level of moral and intellectual development, there is an associated minimum level of deception in your life. If you aren't deceiving others, you are likely deceiving yourself. Or you're in denial

You can only lower the level of deception in your life through further intellectual and moral development. In other words, you have to earn higher levels of truth in your life.

--- VGRao (Be Slightly evil)

The needs of the many...outweigh...the needs of the few."

-Mr Spock, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

In a less regular, or low-validity, environment, the heuristics of judgement are invoked. System 1 is often able to produce quick answers to difficult questions by substitution, creating coherence where there is none. The question that is answered is not the one that was intended, but the answer is produced quickly and may be sufficiently plausible to pass the lax and lenient review of System 2. You may want to forecast the commercial future of a company, for example, and believe that this is what you are judging, while in fact your evaluation is dominated by your impressions of the energy and competence of its current executives. Because substitution occurs automatically, you often do not know the origin of a judgement that you (your System 2) endorse and adopt. If it is the only one that comes to mind, it may be subjectively undistinguishable from valid judgements that you make with expert confidence. This is why subjective confidence is not a good diagnostic of accuracy: judgements that answer the wrong question can also be made with high confidence.

~Daniel Kahneman (Thinking fast and slow)

The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.

--E.O. Wilson

A heroine needs a more supple courage. She must negotiate: with her emotions, with her adversaries, with her family, with hypocrisies. But not, if she can help it, with her ambition.

-Rahul Bhattacharya on Humaira Bachal

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.

-- Oliver Cromwell

Previously posted two years ago. I'm curious if some things bear repeating. Is there any accepted timeframe for duplicates?

“By poet, I mean that farmer who plows his field with a plow that differs, however little, from the plow he inherited from his father, in order that someone will come after him to give the new plow a new name; I mean that gardener who breeds an orange flower and plants it between a red flower and a yellow flower, in order that someone will come after him to give the new flower a new name; or that weaver who produces on his loom patterns and designs that differ from those his neighbors weave, in order that someone will give his fabric a new name. By poet, I mean the sailor who hoists a third sail on a ship that has only two, or the builder who builds a house with two doors and two windows among houses built with one door and one window, or the dyer who mixes colors that no one before him has mixed, in order to produce a new color for someone who arrives later on to give the ship of the language a new sail, the house a new window, and the garment a new color.”

-Khalil Gibran, quoted in Reza Aslan's "Tablet and Pen"

"That which can be destroyed by the truth should be." - P. C. Hodgell

Love survives the truth.

Sam Harris

(I am aware that the first would be inappropriate alone, but I felt it provided the correct setup for the Sam Harris, which he said at the Festival of Dangerous Idea in the questions)

Added: The context of Harris was a questioner asking 'If contra-causal free will doesn't exist, then do our decisions to love people not exist?' Harris was saying his argument forced us to give up false beliefs and the false emotions that followed from them (hatred), but our belief that love exists is still correct.

Great damage is usually caused by those who are too scrupulous to do small harm.

This Darwin, whoever he was, who had designed mankind for no better fate than to wail and weep and war and die, obviously was a villain, and enemy, someone as evil as the Venom Queen of Venus, who poisoned all her lovers. He was the one who stopped the future from coming.

Some of his friends said you had to prick your finger with a pin to make the oath valid; and boys of particular boldness used a rusty pin, as if daring the Jihad plague to strike. Menelaus knew that was all nonsense: it was the willpower that decided oaths, nothing else. No pin would be as sharp as what he felt beating in his angry young heart.

This Darwin pretty sure had clout, if he could do all this stuff. Could be, he was some bigwig from Houston. Mom had also mentioned Malthus. Obviously his henchman.

Or maybe he was a guy long dead, since it sounded like he did his dirt long ago, and meddled with the gene-stuff, like those tragic transhumanist experiments the library had told him about. But it did not matter if Darwin was alive, or dead, or long dead.

Didn't matter: because he vowed to defeat Darwin, somehow. Some-day.

---Count to a Trillion by John C. Wright

Holden: Oh, my God!

Buffy: Oh, your God what?

Holden: Oh, well, you know, not my God, because I defy him and all of his works, but—Does he exist? Is there word on that, by the way?

Buffy: Nothing solid.

— "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" Season 7, Episode 7 "Conversations with Dead People"

In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king^Wa dangerous heretic^W^W^Wangry that no one cares about visual design.

[where ^W represents the EMACS "delete word" command and my annoyance at LW's lack of a strikethrough formatting option]

No discord,
Diminished crown,
Heaven and hell are both right here.
Translation,
Speculation,
They started a fire with our fear.
Analyze,
Remove folklore,
What's left of the pretty story?
Open mind,
Extract morals,
No reason to become the quarry.
Hard to fake a sinless state:
But keep a golden rule in mind.
We are dying,
We are falling,
But there's no reason why we can't rise.
While we're here, while we're here.
But there's no reason why we can't rise.
While we're here.

I:Scintilla - Dying and Falling