Rationality Quotes: April 2011

When confronting something which may be either a windmill or an evil giant, what question should you be asking?

There are some who ask, "If we do nothing, and that is an evil giant, can we afford to be wrong?" These people consider themselves to be brave and vigilant.

Some ask "If we attack it wrongly, can we afford to pay to replace a windmill?" These people consider themselves cautious and pragmatic.

Still others ask, "With the cost of being wrong so high in either case, shouldn't we always definitively answer the 'windmill vs. giant' question before we act?" And those people consider themselves objective and wise.

But only a tiny few will ask, "Isn't the fact that we're giving equal consideration to the existence of evil giants and windmills a warning sign of insanity in ourselves?"

It's hard to find out what these people consider themselves, because they never get invited to parties.

-- PartiallyClips, "Windmill"

It is not really a quote, but a good quip from an otherwise lame recent internet discussion:

Matt: Ok, for all of the people responding above who admit to not having a soul, I think this means that it is morally ok for me to do anything I want to you, just as it is morally ok for me to turn off my computer at the end of the day. Some of us do have souls, though.

Igor: Matt - I agree that people who need a belief in souls to understand the difference between killing a person and turning off a computer should just continue to believe in souls.

 n=0
 sumterms=0
 while True:
      term=(-1)**n/(2*n+1) # Gregory-Leibniz series
      sumterms+=term
      pi=4*sumterms
      print(pi)
      n+=1

Luck is statistics taken personally.

Penn Jellete

On the plus side, bad things happening to you does not mean you are a bad person. On the minus side, bad things will happen to you even if you are a good person. In the end you are just another victim of the motivationless malice of directed acyclic causal graphs.

-Nobilis RPG 3rd edition

But, there's another problem, and that is the fact that statistical and probabilistic thinking is a real damper on "intellectual" conversation. By this, I mean that there are many individuals who wish to make inferences about the world based on data which they observe, or offer up general typologies to frame a subsequent analysis. These individuals tend to be intelligent and have college degrees. Their discussion ranges over topics such as politics, culture and philosophy. But, introduction of questions about the moments about the distribution, or skepticism as to the representativeness of their sample, and so on, tends to have a chilling affect on the regular flow of discussion. While the average human being engages mostly in gossip and interpersonal conversation of some sort, the self-consciously intellectual interject a bit of data and abstraction (usually in the form of jargon or pithy quotations) into the mix. But the raison d'etre of the intellectual discussion is basically signaling and cuing; in other words, social display. No one really cares about the details and attempting to generate a rigorous model is really beside the point. Trying to push the N much beyond 2 or 3 (what you would see in a college essay format) will only elicit eye-rolling and irritation.

-- Razib Khan

From a forum signature:

The fool says in his heart, "There is no God." --Psalm 14:1

It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak. --Neil Gaiman, Sandman 3:3:6

People commonly use the word "procrastination" to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working.

-- Paul Graham

Should we then call the original replicator molecules 'living'? Who cares? I might say to you 'Darwin was the greatest man who has ever lived', and you might say 'No, Newton was', but I hope we would not prolong the argument. The point is that no conclusion of substance would be affected whichever way our argument was resolved. The facts of the lives and achievements of Newton and Darwin remain totally unchanged whether we label them 'great' or not. Similarly, the story of the replicator molecules probably happened something like the way I am telling it, regardless of whether we choose to call them 'living'. Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use, and that the mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world. Whether we call the early replicators living or not, they were the ancestors of life; they were our founding fathers.

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene.

(cf. Disguised Queries.)

My friend, Tony, does prop work in Hollywood. Before he was big and famous, he would sell jewelry and such at Ren Faires and the like. One day I'm there, shooting the shit with him, when a guy comes up and looks at some of the crystals that Tony is selling. he finally zeroes in on one and gets all gaga over the bit of quartz. He informs Tony that he's never seen such a strong power crystal. Tony tells him it a piece of quartz. The buyer maintains it is an amazing power crystal and demands to know the price. Tony looks him over for a second, then says "If it's just a piece of quartz, it's $15. If it's a power crystal, it's $150. Which is is?" The buyer actually looked a bit sheepish as he said quietly "quartz", gave Tony his money and wandered off. I wonder if he thought he got the better of Tony.

-- genesplicer on Something Awful Forums, via

Complex problems have simple, easy to understand wrong answers.

— Grossman's Law

Part of the potential of things is how they break.

Vi Hart, How To Snakes

I recently posted these in another thread, but I think they're worth putting here to stand on their own:

"Magic is just a way of saying 'I don't know.'"

Terry Pratchett, "Nation"

The essence of magic is to do away with underlying mechanisms. ... What makes the elephant disappear is the movement of the wand and the intent of the magician, directly. If there were any intervening processes, it would not be magic but just engineering. As soon as you know how the magician made the elephant disappear, the magic disappears and -- if you started by believing in magic -- the disappointment sets in.

William T. Powers (CSGNET mailing list, April 2005)

True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer.

— David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

A fable:

In Persia many centuries ago, the Sufi mullah or holy man Nasruddin was arrested after preaching in the great square in front of the Shah's palace. The local clerics had objected to Mullah Nasruddin's unorthodox teachings, and had demanded his arrest and execution as a heretic. Dragged by palace guards to the Shah's throne room, he was sentenced immediately to death.

As he was being taken away, however, Nasruddin cried out to the Shah: "O great Shah, if you spare me, I promise that within a year I will teach your favourite horse to sing!"

The Shah knew that Sufis often told the most outrageous fables, which sounded blasphemous to many Muslims but which were nevertheless intended as lessons to those who would learn. Thus he had been tempted to be merciful, anyway, despite the demands of his own religious advisors. Now, admiring the audacity of the old man, and being a gambler at heart, he accepted his proposal.

The next morning, Nasruddin was in the royal stable, singing hymns to the Shah's horse, a magnificent white stallion. The animal, however, was more interested in his oats and hay, and ignored him. The grooms and stablehands all shook their heads and laughed at him. "You old fool", said one. "What have you accomplished by promising to teach the Shah's horse to sing? You are bound to fail, and when you do, the Shah will not only have you killed - you'll be tortured as well, for mocking him!"

Nasruddin turned to the groom and replied: "On the contrary, I have indeed accomplished much. Remember, I have been granted another year of life, which is precious in itself. Furthermore, in that time, many things can happen. I might escape. Or I might die anyway. Or the Shah might die, and his successor will likely release all prisoners to celebrate his accession to the throne".

"Or...". Suddenly, Nasruddin smiled. "Or, perhaps, the horse will learn to sing".

The original source of this fable seems to be lost to time. This version was written by Idries Shah.

We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones.

-Robert Wright, The Moral Animal

Most people would rather die than think; many do.

– Bertrand Russell

using the word “science” in the same way you’d use the word “alakazam” doesn’t count as being smarter

-Kris Straub, Chainsawsuit artist commentary

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

– Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

The correct question to ask about functions is not „What is a rule?” or „What is an association?” but „What does one have to know about a function in order to know all about it?” The answer to the last question is easy – for each number x one needs to know the number f(x) (…)

– M. Spivak: Calculus

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

~ Story, used most famously in David Foster Wallace's Commencement Address at Kenyon College

The most important relic of early humans is the modern mind.

-Steven Pinker

Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.

Paul Graham "What I've learned from Hacker News"

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.

-- Richard Feynman

(I don't think he originally meant this in the context of overcoming cognitive bias, but it seems to apply well to that too.)

On perseverance:

It's a little like wrestling a gorilla. You don't quit when you're tired, you quit when the gorilla is tired.

-- Robert Strauss

(Although the reference I found doesn't say which Robert Strauss it was)

I think it goes well with the article Make an Extraordinary Effort.

Virtually everything in science is ultimately circular, so the main thing is just to make the circles as big as possible.

Richard D. Janda and Brian D. Joseph, 2003, The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, p. 111.

“In life as in poker, the occasional coup does not necessarily demonstrate skill and superlative performance is not the ability to eliminate chance, but the capacity to deliver good outcomes over and over again. That is how we know Warren Buffett is a skilled investor and Johnny Chan a skilled poker player.” — John Kay, Financial Times

To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behaviour of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is one needs to know. And yet those with the courage to tread this path to real discovery are not only offered practically no guidance on how to do so, they are actively discouraged and have to set abut it in secret, pretending meanwhile to be diligently engaged in the frantic diversions and to conform with the deadening personal opinions which are continually being thrust upon them.

--George Spencer Brown in The Laws of Form, 1969.

The north went on forever. Tyrion Lannister knew the maps as well as anyone, but a fortnight on the wild track that passed for the kingsroad up here had brought home the lesson that the map was one thing and the land quite another.

--George R. R. Martin A Game of Thrones

This one's for you, Clippy:

The specialist makes no small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.

—Marshall McLuhan

A tadpole doesn’t know
It’s gonna grow bigger.
It just swims,
and figures limbs
are for frogs.

People don’t know
the power they hold.
They just sing hymns,
and figure saving
is for god.

• Andrea Gibson, Tadpoles (source)

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

– Mencken, quoted in Pinker: How the Mind Works

Bertrand Russell, in his Autobiography records that his rather fearsome Puritan grandmother:

gave me a Bible with her favorite texts written on the fly-leaf. Among these was "Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil." Her emphasis upon this text led me in later life to be not afraid of belonging to small minorities.

It's rather affecting to find the future hammer of the Christians being "confirmed" in this way. It also proves that sound maxims can appear in the least probable places.

-- Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

Douglas Adams

This quote defines my approach to science and philosophy; a phenomenon can be wondrous on its own merit, it need not be magical or extraordinary to have value.

Wisdom is easy: just find someone who trusts someone who trusts someone who trusts someone who knows the truth.

– Steven Kaas

I will repost a quote that I posted many moons ago on OB, if you don't mind. I don't THINK this breaks the rules too badly, since that post didn't get its fair share of karma. Here's the first time: http://lesswrong.com/lw/uj/rationality_quotes_18/nrt

"He knew well that fate and chance never come to the aid of those who replace action with pleas and laments. He who walks conquers the road. Let his legs grow tired and weak on the way - he must crawl on his hands and knees, and then surely, he will see in the night a distant light of hot campfires, and upon approaching, will see a merchants' caravan; and this caravan will surely happen to be going the right way, and there will be a free camel, upon which the traveler will reach his destination. Meanwhile, he who sits on the road and wallows in despair - no matter how much he cries and complains - will evoke no compassion in the soulless rocks. He will die in the desert, his corpse will become meat for foul hyenas, his bones will be buried in hot sand. How many people died prematurely, and only because they didn't love life strongly enough! Hodja Nasreddin considered such a death humiliating for a human being.

"No" - said he to himself and, gritting his teeth, repeated wrathfully: "No! I won't die today! I don't want to die!""

Clevinger exclaimed to Yossarian in a voice rising and falling in protest and wonder. "It's a complete reversion to primitive superstition. They're confusing cause and effect. It makes as much sense as knocking on wood or crossing your fingers. They really believe that we wouldn't have to fly that mission tomorrow if someone would only tiptoe up to the map in the middle of the night and move the bomb line over Bologna. Can you imagine? You and I must be the only rational ones left." In the middle of the night Yossarian knocked on wood, crossed his fingers, and tiptoed out of his tent to move the bomb line up over Bologna.

Joseph Heller (Catch-22)

I meant to say that I think the theory I was testing has been disproved, or at least dealt a major blow, which is why I'm shifting my thinking towards something a bit different. Mission of being wrong accomplished!

On boldness:

If you're gonna make a mistake, make it a good, loud mistake!

-- Augiedog, Half the Day is Night

(Edit: I should mention that the linked story is MLP fanfic. The MLP fandom may be a memetic hazard; it seems to have taken over my life for the past several days, though I tend to do that with most things, so YMMV. Proceed with caution.)

He who pours out thanks for a favourable verdict runs the risk of seeming to betray not only a bad conscience, but also a poor idea of the judge's office.

Francis Paget, preface to the 2nd ed. of "The Spirit of Discipline", 1906
http://www.archive.org/details/thespiritofdisc00pageuoft

The book also contains material on accidie (the Introductory Essay and the preface to the seventh edition), which is probably how I came across it.

(Courtesy of my dad)

One must be absolutely modern. No hymns! Hold the ground gained.

Arthur Rimbaud, 1873

"Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."

-Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding

"I can't make myself believe something that I don't believe" —Ricky Gervais, in discussing his atheism

Reminds me of the scene in HPMOR where Harry makes Draco a scientist.

You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

~ David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I don't have a simple answer

But I know that I could answer

-- The Killers in This is Your Life

Most libertarians would agree that it’s a messed-up state that:

• Creates a massive crime problem in poor minority neighborhoods with a futile, vicious and every more far-reaching attempt to prevent commerce in popular, highly portable intoxicants that leaves absurd numbers of young men with felony records, making them marginally employable.

• Fails to provide adequate policing for such neighborhoods.

• Fails to provide effective education in such neighborhoods after installing itself as the educator of first resort.

• Uses regulatory power to sharply curtail entry into lines of business from hair-care to ride provision, further limiting the employment options of people in such neighborhoods.

• Has in the past actively fostered the oppression of said minority, up to and including spending state money and time in keeping its members in bondage.

• To make up for all of the above, provides a nominal amount of tax-financed welfare for the afflicted.

But it’s a messed-up libertarianism that looks at that situation and says, "Man, first thing we gotta do is get rid of that welfare!"

-- Jim Henley, via Alas A Blog

You know, in the comic books where super-powered mutants are real, no one seems to question the theory of evolution. Maybe we're going about this all wrong.

-- Surviving The World

"If you choose to follow a religion where, for example, devout Catholics who are trying to be good people are all going to Hell but child molestors go to Heaven (as long as they were "saved" at some point), that's your choice, but it's fucked up. Maybe a God who operates by those rules does exist. If so, fuck Him." --- Bill Zellar's suicide note, in regards to his parents' religion

I love this passage. If a god as described in the Bible did exist, following him would be akin to following Voldemort: fidelity simply because he was powerful. This isn't precisely a rationality quote, but it does have a bit of the morality-independent-of-religion thing. (The rest of the note is beautiful and eloquent as well.)

Make no mistake about it: Computers process numbers - not symbols. We measure our understanding (and control) by the extent to which we can arithmetize an activity.

-- Alan Perlis

Since I discovered them through SICP, I always liked the 'Perlisims' -- many of his Epigrams in Programming are pretty good. There's a hint of Searle/Chinese Room in this particular quote, but he turns it around by implying that in the end, the symbols are numbers (or that's how I read it).

The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education.

-- Paul Feyerabend

Science is interesting, and if you don't agree you can fuck off.

By Richard Dawkins, quoting a former editor of New Scientist (here's at least one source). I don't think this quote contains any deep wisdom as such, but it made me laugh. Actually you could replace the word science with any other noun and it would still make grammatical sense.

Water has memory! And while it’s memory of a long lost drop of onion juice is Infinite It somehow forgets all the poo it’s had in it!

• Tim Minchin

In what circumstances shall I say that a tribe has a chief? And the chief must surely have consciousness. Surely we can't have a chief without consciousness!

But can't I imagine that the people around me are automata, lack consciousness, even though they behave in the same way as usual?--If I imagine it now--alone in my room--I see people with fixed looks (as in a trance) going about their business--the idea is perhaps a little uncanny. But just try to keep hold of this idea in the midst of your ordinary intercourse with others, in the street, say! Say to yourself, for example: "The children over there are mere automata; all their liveliness is mere automatism." And you will either find these words becoming quite meaningless; or you will produce in yourself some kind of uncanny feeling, or something of the sort.

Seeing a living human being as an automaton is analogous to seeing one figure as a limiting case or variant of another; the cross-pieces of a window as a swastika, for example.

--Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations) hinting at the true nature of the concept 'consciousness vs zombiehood'.

Procrastination is one of the most common and deadliest of diseases and its toll on success and happiness is heavy.

Also:

You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

-Wayne Gretsky

.

...the best lesson our readers can learn is to give up the childish notion that everything that is interesting about nature can be understood... It might be interesting to know how cognition (whatever that is) arose and spread and changed, but we cannot know. Tough luck.

Richard Lewontin

Strange but true: those who have loved God most have loved men least.

-- Ingersoll

"Take up the White Man's burden-- The savage wars of peace-- Fill full the mouth of Famine, And bid the sickness cease; And when your goal is nearest (The end for others sought) Watch sloth and heathen folly Bring all your hope to nought." -Rudyard Kipling

A true friend stabs you in the front.

—Oscar Wilde

Son, you’re a body, son. That quick little scientific-prodigy’s mind she’s so proud of and won’t quit twittering about: son, it’s just neural spasms, those thoughts in your mind are just the sound of your head revving, and head is still just body, Jim. Commit this to memory. Head is body. Jim, brace yourself against my shoulders here for this hard news, at ten: you’re a machine a body an object, Jim, no less than this rutilant Montclair, this coil of hose here or that rake there for the front yard’s gravel or sweet Jesus this nasty fat spider flexing in its web over there up next to the rake-handle, see it?

Infinite Jest, page 159