Rationality Quotes - June 2009

"Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede; not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people cannot count above fourteen."

-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

related: The Level Above Mine

"People are mostly sane enough, of course, in the affairs of common life: the getting of food, shelter, and so on. But the moment they attempt any depth or generality of thought, they go mad almost infallibly. The vast majority, of course, adopt the local religious madness, as naturally as they adopt the local dress. But the more powerful minds will, equally infallibly, fall into the worship of some intelligent and dangerous lunatic, such as Plato, or Augustine, or Comte, or Hegel, or Marx."
-- David Stove, What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts

"Voting in a democracy makes you feel powerful, much as playing the lottery makes you feel rich." -- Mencius Moldbug

"Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson."

-- Frank Herbert, Dune

"What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite."

Bertrand Russell, "Free Thought and Official Propaganda", in "Sceptical Essays".

"I have now reigned about 50 years in victory or peace, beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In this situation, I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot. They amount to fourteen."
-- Abd Er-Rahman III of Spain, 960 AD.

"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." Christopher Hitchens

"Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do. ... Science advances whenever an Art becomes a Science. And the state of the Art advances too because people always leap into new territory once they have understood more about the old."

-- Donald Knuth

"One can measure the importance of a scientific work by the number of earlier publications rendered superfluous by it."

-- David Hilbert

"The seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency."

-- Alhazen (Abū 'Alī al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haitham)

Once again, we are saddled with a Stone Age moral psychology that is appropriate to life in small, homogeneous communities in which all members share roughly the same moral outlook. Our minds trick us into thinking that we are absolutely right and that they are absolutely wrong because, once upon a time, this was a useful way to think. It is no more, though it remains natural as ever. We love our respective moral senses. They are as much a part of us as anything. But if we are to live together in the world we have created for ourselves, so unlike the one in which our ancestors evolved, we must know when to trust our moral senses and when to ignore them.

--Joshua Greene

"Your superior intellects are no match for our puny weapons!"

(Variously attributed. TV Tropes says the Simpsons.)

Also variously interpreted. I take it as a caution against forgetting to actually win with one's towering genius.

Practically anything can go faster than Disc light, which is lazy and tame, unlike ordinary light. The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles—kingons, or possibly queons—that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that point, the bar closed.

-- Terry Pratchett, Mort, on mind-projection fallacy intuitions (and/or on Jack Sarfatti's theories of superluminal signaling)

"Imagine a world where everything changes to match the state of your mind, where evidence never pushes back against your theories, where your every thought is correct simply because you think it so. Can there be any better definition of hell for a man of learning? "

-- Bradeline, Fall From Heaven

"The lottery is a tax on those incapable of basic math."

-- Ambrose Bierce

It's a wonderful thing to be clever, and you should never think otherwise, and you should never stop being that way. But what you learn, as you get older, is that there are a few million other people in the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever you do with your life will certainly be lost - swallowed up in the ocean - unless you are doing it with like-minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward. That is why the world is divided into tribes.

-- Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age

I neglected to record from which character the quote came.

It's easy to put down the shallow concerns of life, but in a way they are what life is about. Deeper concerns that don't connect in any way to economic wealth, social status, physical pleasure, etc., are not really deep but pointless. The shallow concerns all pertain to the lowest common denominator of human life because they really are the basic fabric of everyone's life. They're concerns that everyone shares and that everyone can easily understand.

—Ben Kovitz, Shallowness

Knowing that one may be subject to bias is one thing; being able to correct it is another.

Jon Elster

In the King-on-the-Mountain style of conversation, one person (the King) makes a provocative statement, and requires that others refute it or admit to being wrong. The King is the judge of whether any attempted refutation is successful. [...] The King's behavior comes down to "you can't stop me". By the rules of his game, no one can make him back down. He treats conversation as a negotiation with his opponent. If his opponent wants him to back down, it's his opponent's responsibility to make him back down, not his responsibility to do something to help his opponent. He himself feels no responsibility to learn or understand or cultivate his mind.

—Ben Kovitz, King on the Mountain

"Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons." - Michael Shermer

"What's troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics - the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and the trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working consensus to tackle any big problem."

• Barack Obama

Mathematics is the only good metaphysics.

Lord Kelvin

We shall not cease from exploration and the end of our exploring shall be to return where we started and know the place for the first time.

-- T.S. Eliot

“If a nation expects to be both ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be” -- Thomas Jefferson

"A few intellectually rigorous killjoys argued that any explanation to which humans could relate was probably anthropomorphic nonsense, but nobody invited them onto talk shows."

--Greg Egan, "Quarantine".

"I don't, I've come to believe, have to agree with you to like you, or respect you."

--Anthony Bourdain.

Never forget that your opponents are not evil mutants. They are the heroes of their own stories, and if you can't fathom why they do what they do, or why they believe what they believe, that's your failing not theirs.

del

"Although the first solution is the one usually given, I prefer this second one because it reduces the need to think, replacing it by the automatic calculus. Thinking is hard, so only use it where essential."

--Dennis Lindley, Understanding Uncertainty

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw

"Fierce battles are fought within the confines of our goal systems. Inside the closed walls the essence of right and wrong is at stake as the rebels engage the guards of the evolutionary past. After the violent confrontations, the old kings rejoice their triumph or get beheaded to become but ghosts of their former glory. And again and again our inner book of morals gets revised... — Nevertheless, whatever the outcome is, it is, by definition, good."
-- Mika

Monroe Fieldbinder sees psychologist to bounce ideas off him. One of Fieldbinder's ideas is that the phenomenon of modern party-dance is incompatible with self-consciousness, makes for staggeringly unpleasant situations (obvious resource: Amherst/Mt. Holyoke mixer '68) for the all self-conscious person. Modern party-dance is simply writhing to suggestive music. It is ridiculous, silly to watch and excruciatingly embarrassing to perform. It is ridiculous, and yet absolutely everyone does it, so that it is the person who does not want to do the ridiculous thing who feels out of place and uncomfortable and self-conscious . . . in a word, ridiculous.

David Foster Wallace (The Broom Of The System, pg. 158)

"Train yourself to get suspicious every time you see simplicity. Any claim that the root of a problem is simple should be treated the same as a claim that the root of a problem is Bigfoot. Simplicity and Bigfoot are found in the real world with about the same frequency." -- David Wong

http://math.boisestate.edu/gas/princess_ida/webop/pi_06.html

"No matter how the next forty-seven thousand years turn out, whether they are ages of liberty or tyranny, happiness or misery, by the time two hundred thousand million years are passed, the civilization that rules the sevagram will occupy basically the same area of the local galactic supercluster, and achieve roughly the same height of enlightenment and technical advancement. You are wasting my time with trifles."
-- John C. Wright, Null-A Continuum

On an advertisement for a fitness product: "WHAT'S STRONGER? YOU, or YOUR EXCUSES?"

Loyalty mods don't whisper propaganda in your skull. They don't bombard you with images of the object of devotion while stimulating the pleasure centres of your brain, or cripple you with pain and nausea if you stray from correct thought. They don't cloud your mind with blissful euphoria, or feverish zealotry; nor do they trick you into accepting some flawed but elegant piece of casuistry. No brainwashing, no conditioning, no persuasion. A loyalty mod isn't an agent of change; it's the end product, a fait accompli. Not a cause for belief, but belief itself, belief made flesh - or rather, flesh made into belief.

--Greg Egan, "Quarantine".

"Student: How can one realize his Self-nature? I know so little about the subject.

Yasutani: First of all, you must be convinced you can do so. The conviction creates determination, and the determination zeal.

But if you lack conviction, if you think 'maybe I can get it, maybe I can't', or even worse, 'This is beyond me!' - you won't awaken no matter how much you do zazen."

pg 126, The Three Pillars of Zen, ISBN 8070-5979-7

When I came across this quote, I was struck by its relevance to one of Eliezer's beisutsukai posts about finding the successor to quantum mechanics ("The Failures of Eld Science"; on a side note, are there any 'internal'/wikilinks to LW articles for us to use, instead of hardwiring lesswrong.com URLs?).

I meant to write a post on how interesting it is that we intellectually know that many of our current theories must be wrong, and even have pretty good ideas as to which ones, but we still cannot psychologically tackle them with the same energy as if we had some anomaly or paradox to explain, or have the benefit of hindsight. The students in Eliezer's story know that quantum mechanics is wrong; someone with a well-verified observation contradicting quantum mechanics knows that it is wrong (replace 'quantum' with 'classical' as you wish). They will achieve better results than a battalion of conventional QMists.

But nothing quite gelled.

"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them" - Mr Gradgrind, Hard Times (Dickens)

An anti-rationalist quote. Dickens believes there is more to life than rationality. Does his satire upon us here have any basis in reality?

"Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so. " - Marcus Aurelius

I quoted this in another comment, but I think it deserves to be in here as well. It used to be in the rec.backcountry FAQ.

"You have before you the disassembled parts of a high-powered hunting rifle, and the instructions written in Swahili. In five minutes an angry Bengal tiger will walk into the room."

-- Eugene Miya

"We have tried to do this in a hypothesis-independent manner because there is nothing more dangerous in life than a good hypothesis."

--Kári Stefánsson, deCODE Genetics

Two very similar quotes:

"It would not be a bad definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise meanings." - Paul Graham

"Mathematics is the study of precisely defined objects." - Norman Gottlieb

For an idea to have survived so long across so many cycles is indicative of its relative fitness. Noise, at least some noise, was filtered out. Mathematically, progress means that some new information is better than past information, not that the average of new information will supplant past information, which means that it is optimal for someone, when in doubt, to systematically reject the new idea, information, or method. Clearly and shockingly, always. -Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness p.52

"I hold that moral intuitions are nothing but learned prejudices. Historic examples from slavery to the divine right of kings to tortured confessions of witchcraft or Judaism to the subjugation of women to genocide all point to the fallibility of these 'moral intuitions'. There is absolutely no sense to the claim that its conclusions are to be adopted before those of a reasoned argument." - Alonzo Fyfe

It is theory that decides what can be observed.

Albert Einstein

It really is a nice theory. The only defect I think it has is probably common to all philosophical theories. It’s wrong.

Saul Kripke

A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems; a better mathematician is one who can see analogies between proofs and the best mathematician can notice analogies between theories. One can imagine that the ultimate mathematician is one who can see analogies between analogies.

Stefan Banach

I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid. Most often two of these qualities come together. The officers who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Those who are stupid and lazy make up around 90% of every army in the world, and they can be used for routine work. The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!

Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord

"A person is best defined by the nature of his evil."
-- Piers Anthony, "On a Pale Horse"

So, if we can't derive 'ought' from 'is' - then we have no reason to keep 'ought' around at all. We have no reason not to discard it and toss it in the same bin with God, devils, souls, [non-deterministic] free will, and other mythical entities that more primitive cultures once accepted.

-- Alonzo Fyfe

Words that are used to describe psychological phenomena are almost all informal layman's terms that have negative scientific meaning: they imply the existence of things that don't exist, like "intelligence" or "aggressiveness" or "altruism." Or "conditioning" or "habits" or "aptitudes" or -- see the literature.

-- William T. Powers

I have suspected that history, real history, is more modest and that its essential dates may be, for a long time, secret. A Chinese prose writer has observed that the unicorn, because of its own anomaly, will pass unnoticed. Our eyes see what they are accustomed to seeing.

--Jorge Luis Borges

There's no point in asking for things we can't have; we can only look for the best way to fight with the things we do have, for our entire life.

-- Hiruma Yoichi, Eyeshield 21

"Here it is difficult as it were to keep our heads up, - to see that we must stick to the subjects of our every-day thinking, and not go astray and imagine that we have to describe extreme subtleties, which in turn we are after all quite unable to describe with the means at our disposal. We feel as if we had to repair a torn spider's web with our fingers."

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 106

The Paradoxical Commandments

I didn't want to ruin the pretty formatting by posting it here, so go follow the link.

"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." - Mao Zedong

What you get by studying control systems as input-output systems is exactly what you have in the social sciences—a confusing and often inconsistent array of findings, only weakly reproducible and little more than verbal models to account for them, models with virtually no predictive or explanatory power.

-- Dr. Richard Marken, Teaching Dogma In Psychology (PDF)

Statistical findings are worse than useless. They give the illusion of knowledge. Even when they're true for a population, they're false when applied to any given person. To rely on statistics as a way of understanding how people work is to take up superstition in the name of science.

-- William T. Powers

What is truth?— Inertia; that hypothesis which gives rise to contentment; smallest expenditure of spiritual force, etc...

The easier mode of thought conquers the harder mode;— as dogma: "simplicity is the seal of truth"— I say: to suppose that clarity proves anything about truth is perfect childishness—

Parmenides said, "one cannot think of what is not";—we are at the other extreme, and say "what can be thought of must certainly be a fiction."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (from fragments 537-539)

Intellect distinguishes between the possible and the impossible; reason distinguishes between the sensible and the senseless. Even the possible can be senseless.

-Max Born

If you give me your attention, I will tell you what I am:

I'm a genuine philanthropist — all other kinds are sham.

Each little fault of temper and each social defect

In my erring fellow-creatures, I endeavour to correct.

To all their little weaknesses I open people's eyes;

And little plans to snub the self-sufficient I devise;

I love my fellow creatures — I do all the good I can —

Yet ev'rybody says I'm such a disagreeable man!

And I can't think why!

To compliments inflated I've a withering reply;

And vanity I always do my best to mortify;

A charitable action I can skillfully dissect;

And interested motives I'm delighted to detect;

I know ev'rybody's income and what ev'rybody earns;

And I carefully compare it with the income-tax returns;

But to benefit humanity however much I plan,

Yet ev'rybody says I'm such a disagreeable man!

And I can't think why!

I'm sure I'm no ascetic; I'm as pleasant as can be;

You'll always find me ready with a crushing repartee,

I've an irritating chuckle, I've a celebrated sneer,

I've an entertaining snigger, I've a fascinating leer.

To ev'rybody's prejudice I know a thing or two;

I can tell a woman's age in half a minute — and I do.

But although I try to make myself as pleasant as I can,

Yet ev'rybody says I'm such a disagreeable man!

And I can't think why!

From "Princess Ida" by Gilbert and Sullivan

when the small projects upon the great, it can only come up with a small answer

--JD krishnamurthy

The biggest myth I’ve encountered in my life is as follows: that the road from practical know-how to theoretical knowledge is reversible—in other words, that theoretical knowledge can lead to practical applications, just as practical applications can lead to theoretical knowledge.

-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, History Written By The Losers