Rationality Quotes Thread May 2015

During the conference I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I brought the paper home and said to her, "I can't understand these things that Lee and Yang are saying. It's all so complicated."

"No," she said, "what you mean is not that you can't understand it, but that you didn't invent it. You didn't figure it out your own way, from hearing the clue. What you should do is imagine you're a student again, and take this paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations. Then you'll understand it very easily."

I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to be very obvious and simple. I had been afraid to read it thinking it, was too difficult.

Richard Feynman uses the try harder in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman ("The 7 Percent Solution" in chapter 5)

A prima facie argument in favour of the efficacy of prayer is […] to be drawn from the very general use of it. The greater part of mankind, during all the historic ages, has been accustomed to pray for temporal advantages. How vain, it may be urged, must be the reasoning that ventures to oppose this mighty consensus of belief! Not so. The argument of universality either proves too much, or else it is suicidal. It either compels us to admit that the prayers of Pagans, of Fetish worshippers and of Buddhists who turn praying wheels, are recompensed in the same way as those of orthodox believers; or else the general consensus proves that it has no better foundation than the universal tendency of man to gross credulity.

Francis Galton, ‘Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer’, Fortnightly Review, vol. 12, no. 68 (August, 1872), pp. 125–135

We wanted the best, but it turned out as always.

-- Viktor Stepanovich Chernomyrdin, about economical reforms in Russia

(Not a rationality quote per se, but this is how I would start a lecture on outside view / planning fallacy.)

Which Constraints Should You Accept?

The best constraints to accept seem to be, first, the ones which actually exist.

Scott Young

A man must be excessively stupid, as well as uncharitable, who believes that there is no virtue but on his own side, and that there are not men as honest as himself who may differ from him in political principles.

Joseph Addison, The Spectator No. 243 (8 December 1711).

Be nice to nice people
Be rude to rude people

The theory of iterated games explained in a Eurovision song.

By chance, shortly after reading Mark Friedenbach's parting message, I saw this on Seth Godin's blog:

Is it meeting your needs…

Or merely creating new wants?

Is it honoring your time or squandering your time?

Is it connecting you with those you care about, or separating you from them?

Is it exposing you or giving you a place to hide?

Is it important, or only urgent?

Is it right, or simply convenient?

Is it making things better, or merely more pressing?

Is it leveraging your work or wasting it?

What is it for?

Good questions to ask, especially of any habit one has not reexamined in a long time.

"You say that every man thinks himself to be on the good side, that every man who opposed you was deluding himself. Did you ever stop to consider that maybe you were the one on the wrong side?"

-- Vasher (from Warbreaker) explaining how that particular algorithm looks from the inside.

The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,

All centuries but this and every country but his own.

W.S. Gilbert, in The Mikado.

To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar.

-- Francis Bacon

The real problem with the interface is that it is an interface. Interfaces get in the way. I don’t want to focus my energies on an interface. I want to focus on the job…I don’t want to think of myself as using a computer, I want to think of myself as doing my job.

-- Donald A. Norman The Art of Computer-Human Design p. 120, see e.g. here

Reasonableness is, I believe, and underrated trait in research. By “reasonable,” I don’t mean a supine acceptance of the status quo, but rather a sense of the connections of the world, a sort of generalized numeracy, an openness and honesty about one’s sources of information.

Andrew Gelman

At this point in my story, you might have the following question: What kind of idiot puts himself in a position to be humiliated in front of a thousand people?

It’s a fair question. The answer is a long one. It will take this entire book to answer it right. The short answer is that over the years I have cultivated a unique relationship with failure. I invite it. I survive it. I appreciate it. And then I mug the shit out of it. Failure always brings something valuable with it. I don’t let it leave until I extract that value.

-- Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big (Amazon)

In scientific thought we adopt the simplest theory which will explain all the facts under consideration and enable us to predict new facts of the same kind. The catch in this criterion lies in the word "simplest." It is really an aesthetic canon such as we find implicit in our criticisms of poetry or painting. The layman finds such a law as much less simple than "it oozes," of which it is the mathematical statement. The physicist reverses this judgment, and his statement is certainly the more fruitful of the two, so far as prediction is concerned. It is, however, a statement about something very unfamiliar to the plainman, namely, the rate of change of a rate of change.

• J B S Haldane, Possible Worlds and Other Papers (1927), p. 227

Pedantry and mastery are opposite attitudes toward rules.

To apply a rule to the letter, rigidly, unquestioningly, in cases where it fits and in cases where it does not fit, is pedantry. Some pedants are poor fools; they never did understand the rule which they apply so conscientiously and so indiscriminately. Some pedants are quite successful; they understood their rule, at least in the beginning (before they became pedants), and chose a good one that fits in many cases and fails only occasionally.

To apply a rule with natural ease, with judgment, noticing the cases where it fits, and without ever letting the words of the rule obscure the purpose of the action or the opportunities of the situation, is mastery...

...if you are inclined to be a pedant and must rely upon some rule learn this one: Always use your own brains first.

--George Polya, How to Solve It

Our brain does not operate by the principles of logic. It operates by a selection of pattern recognition. It's a dynamic network. It's not a "if-then" logic machine. Dr. Ralph Greenspan Seeking Wisdom p. 18

If we seek to change the inner state of an application but we cannot change its code, then we must change its inputs and hope for the best.

-- The Codeless Code, case 127.

“It’s not a kid’s television show,” Andy told me, “Where the antagonist makes the Machiavellian plan and then abandons that plan completely the first time it fails. People fail, they revise, they adjust parameters, they you achieve victory through persistence and hard work.”

J. C. McCrae, Pact WebSerial

“Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”

-- Otto von Bismarck

The German original is somewhat stronger:

"Ihr seid alle Idioten zu glauben, aus Eurer Erfahrung etwas lernen zu können, ich ziehe es vor, aus den Fehlern anderer zu lernen, um eigene Fehler zu vermeiden."

Since a tradition of behaviour is not susceptible of the distinction between essence and accident), knowledge of it is unavoidably knowledge of its detail: to know only the gist is to know nothing.

Michael Oakeshott, Political Education.

Father spoke again, his eyes still closed, “Reality is what’s not the voting booth and not the salad bar. When you don’t get to vote and don’t get to pick,” he spoke louder. “That’s reality.”

--John C. Wright, Somewhither

Popular [scientific] book must be strictly scientific. Care for the simplicity of writing should not result in simplification of the problem ... presenting a hypothesis as an indestructible truth, describing one hypothesis but leaving out other ones, the popularizer nurtures in the reader primitiveness of reasoning.

Ye. Lichtenstein, Editing a scientific book, 1957.

Complexity only makes it an art. It is the apparent simplicity that makes it subtle. How simple it is to declare a static hashtable, and yet how perilous! The first challenge of a Subtle Art is recognizing that it even exists in the first place.

--Master Bawan, from case 148 of the Codeless Code.

The so-called "EPR Paradox" that is not a paradox at all. (well it is if you assume a deterministic physics with hidden variables, which is just wrong; it should be called the EPR Proof that Einstein was Wrong Sometimes).

-- Charles Bloom

Irresolute republics never choose the right alternative unless they are driven to it, for their weakness does not allow them to arrive at a decision where there is any doubt; and, unless this doubt is removed by some compelling act of violence, they remain ever in suspense.

--Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy

The institutionizing on a large scale of any natural combination of need and motive always tends to run into technicality and to develop a tyrannical Machine with unforeseen powers of exclusion and corruption.

-- William James, The Ph.D. Octopus

Responding to an argument for skepticism:

That is to say, though, as I have said, I agree with Russell that (1), (2), and (3) are true; yet of no one even of these three do I feel as certain as that I do know for certain that this is a pencil. Nay more: I do not think it is rational to be as certain of any one of these four propositions, as of the proposition that I do know that this is a pencil.

- G.E. Moore, quote found here.

To help you see what some of the problems with Chetty’s work is, let’s walk through the top and bottom of his new rankings of 2,478 counties. When thinking about Big Data, I’ve long found it extremely useful to look at the highest and lowest examples in detail to see what kind of patterns leap out. It’s extremely easy these days to look up facts about outliers, so more people should do it. This doesn’t seem to be a common practice among academic data analysts, however, who evidently fear contamination by bias and stereotypes. But instead they wind up suffering from ignorance, which is worse.

Steve Sailer

Depending on the perspective of the reader, this one's an attack either on faith or on explanations.

"To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible."

-St. Thomas Aquinas

Now, gentlemen, let us do something today which the world may talk of hereafter.

Admiral Collingwood.

Of course, refusing to examine oneself is the shortest distance to becoming an a**hole.

YorkNecromancer @ belloflostsouls

If a scientific hypothesis were a self-generated bright idea which owed nothing to scientific activity, then empiricism governed by hypothesis could be considered to compose a self-contained manner of activity; but this certainly is not its character. The truth is that only a man who is already a scientist can formulate a scientific hypothesis; that is, an hypothesis is not an independent invention capable of guiding scientific inquiry, but a dependent supposition which arises as an abstraction from within already existing scientific activity. Moreover, even when the specific hypothesis has in this manner been formulated, it is inoperative as a guide to research without constant reference to the traditions of scientific inquiry from which it was abstracted... Or consider the example of cookery. It might be supposed that an ignorant man, some edible materials, and a cookery book compose together the necessities of a self-moved (or concrete) activity called cooking. But nothing is further from the truth. The cookery book is not an independently generated beginning from which cooking can spring; it is nothing more than an abstract of somebody's knowledge of how to cook: it is the stepchild, not the parent of the activity. The book... speaks only to those who know already the kind of thing to expect from it and consequently how to interpret it.

Michael Oakeshott, Political Education.

To have a stable social life, filter out those who get easily offended by offending them early on.

Nassim Taleb

When due process fails us, we really do live in a world of terror.

-- JC Denton, Deus Ex.

May be a bad one but at least Deus Ex is an excellent game.

Social science epistemology, afaict:

1. Ignore all the interesting and replicable phenomena

2. Find data sets that can be interpreted in isolation as Cutting Social Commentary

3. Wonder why your interventions never work, findings never replicate, and you can't predict anything.

How it should be done:

1. Separate experimental studies from social commentary. Build a corpus of replicated phenomena that need explanation

2. Find a-priori plausible explanatory hypotheses or laws that explain the replicated phenomena.

3. Favor hypotheses that predict better, are simpler, and integrate with other theories

4. Check your work by building working social technology, making novel predictions, or otherwise demonstrating veracity

Note that my recommended social science epistemology is physics epistemology. Soc sci needs more physics envy and fewer linear regressions.

Oops forgot step 0. ASSUME AN UNUPPORTED IMPLAUSIBLE FALSEHOOD (SSSM) AS AXIOMATIC

Nyan Sandwich

you do realize that Arthur Chu's actions have no bearing on whether GamerGate is terrible or not, right?

Ben Cotton