Rationality Quotes Thread December 2015

Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach, because we ask “Can I believe it?” when we want to believe something, but “Must I believe it?” when we don’t want to believe. The answer is almost always yes to the first question and no to the second.

--Jon Haidt, The Righteous Mind

Probably people have seen this before, but I really like it:

People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing, that's why we recommend it daily.

-Zig Ziglar

The key to avoiding rivalries is to introduce a new pole, which mediates your relationship to the antagonist. For me this pole is often Scripture. I renounce my claim to be thoroughly aligned with the pole of Scripture and refocus my attention on it, using it to mediate my relationship with the antagonistic party. Alternatively, I focus on a non-aggressive third party. You may notice that this same pattern is observed in the UK parliamentary system of the House of Commons, for instance. MPs don’t directly address each other: all of their interactions are mediated by and addressed to a non-aggressive, non-partisan third party – the Speaker. This serves to dampen antagonisms and decrease the tendency to fall into rivalry. In a conversation where such a ‘Speaker’ figure is lacking, you need mentally to establish and situate yourself relative to one. For me, the peaceful lurker or eavesdropper, Christ, or the Scripture can all serve in such a role. As I engage directly with this peaceful party and my relationship with the aggressive party becomes mediated by this party, I find it so much easier to retain my calm.

Alastair Roberts

"Update: many people have read this post and suggested that, in the first file example, you should use the much simpler protocol of copying the file to modified to a temp file, modifying the temp file, and then renaming the temp file to overwrite the original file. In fact, that’s probably the most common comment I’ve gotten on this post. If you think this solves the problem, I’m going to ask you to pause for five seconds and consider the problems this might have. (...) The fact that so many people thought that this was a simple solution to the problem demonstrates that this problem is one that people are prone to underestimating, even they’re explicitly warned that people tend to underestimate this problem!" -- @danluu, "Files are hard"

If anyone is trying to tell you it’s not complicated, be very, very suspicious

-- Tyler Cowen

Each individual instance of outperformance can be put into its own coherent narrative, can be made to look logical and earned on its own terms. But when you throw them together it's hard to escape the impression of a coin-flipping contest with a song and dance at the end.

Matt Levine

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

Cardinal Richelieu

I want you to be the Admiral Nagumo of my staff. I want your every thought, every instinct as you believe Admiral Nagumo might have them. You are to see the war, their operations, their aims, from the Japanese viewpoint and keep me advised what you are thinking about, what you are doing, and what purpose, what strategy, motivates your operations. If you can do this, you will give me the kind of information needed to win this war.

-Admiral Nimitz from Edwin Layton, And I Was There, 1985, p. 357.

There’s nothing rigorous about looking for shiny objects that happen to be statistically significant.

Andrew Gelman

"Direct action is not always the best way. It is a far greater victory to make another see through your eyes than to close theirs forever."

Kreia, KOTOR 2

I think the common thread in a lot of these [horrible] relationships is people who have managed to go through their entire lives without realizing that “Person did Thing, which caused me to be upset” is not the same thing as “Person did something wrong”, much less “I have a right to forbid Person from ever doing Thing again”.

--Ozymandias (most of the post is unrelated)

Looking for mental information in individual neuronal firing patterns is looking at the wrong level of scale and at the wrong kind of physical manifestation. As in other statistical dynamical regularities, there are a vast number of microstates (i.e., network activity patterns) that can constitute the same ghloal attractor, and a vast numbmer of trajectories of microstate-to-microstate changes that will tend to converge to a common attractor. But it is the final quasi-regular network-level dynamic, like a melody played by a million-instrument orchestra, that is the medium of mental information. - Terrence W. Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, pp. 516 - 517.

Harms take longer to show up & disprove than benefits. So evidence-based medicine disproportionately channels optimism

Saurabh Jha

"The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur."

Elon musk

If you want to understand another group, follow the sacredness.

--Jon Haidt, The Righteous Mind

If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

-- The killer shortly before killing his victim in No Country for Old Men

And we must study through reading, listening, discussing, observing and thinking. We must not neglect any one of those ways of study. The trouble with most of us is that we fall down on the latter -- thinking -- because it's hard work for people to think, And, as Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler said recently, 'all of the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think.'

Thomas Watson

The basic key that I follow when engaging with antagonistic individuals is to recognize that we will always tend to imitate someone. In mimetic rivalries, the antagonism can come to dominate so much that the third pole (and there is always a third pole – a relationship, an issue, a symptom, etc.) becomes interchangeable. The key to avoiding rivalries is to introduce a new pole, which mediates your relationship to the antagonist. For me this pole is often Scripture. I renounce my claim to be thoroughly aligned with the pole of Scripture and refocus my attention on it, using it to mediate my relationship with the antagonistic party. Alternatively, I focus on a non-aggressive third party. You may notice that this same pattern is observed in the UK parliamentary system of the House of Commons, for instance. MPs don’t directly address each other: all of their interactions are mediated by and addressed to a non-aggressive, non-partisan third party – the Speaker. This serves to dampen antagonisms and decrease the tendency to fall into rivalry. In a conversation where such a ‘Speaker’ figure is lacking, you need mentally to establish and situate yourself relative to one. For me, the peaceful lurker or eavesdropper, Christ, or the Scripture can all serve in such a role. As I engage directly with this peaceful party and my relationship with the aggressive party becomes mediated by this party, I find it so much easier to retain my calm.

Alastair Roberts

Consensus tends to be dominated by those who will not shift their purported beliefs in the face of evidence and rational argument.

Jim

"For it is easy to criticise and break down the spirit of others, but to know yourself takes maybe a lifetime" Bruce Lee

"Remember, my friend to enjoy your planning as well as your accomplishment, for life is too short for negative energy". -Bruce Lee

"We should devote outselves to being self-sufficient and must not depend upon the external rating by others for our happiness" -Bruce

"Remember, my friend, to ejoy your plannng as well as your accomplishment, for life is too short for negative neergy" Lee *Just realised after writing that I already copied out this quote. Keeping it here as a record of my failing memory :(

Because we live in a culture that fears being alone, being rejected, feeling unworthy and unlovable, we confuse love with attachment, dependency, sexual attraction, romantic illusion, lust, infatuation, or obligation.

-Loner Wolf

How to predict if bombing ISIS in Syria is a good idea:

1. Draw up a comprehensive spreadsheet of every 'Western' intervention (and almost-but-not-quite-intervention) in a >foreign country.

2. Rate each case by how similar it is to the present case (e.g. location, how long ago it was, civil war vs no civil war, >religious war vs non-religious war, how many countries support the intervention, cultural differences between the >countries involved, level of involvement, etc).

3. Rate how much each intervention (or decision not to intervene) helped or hurt the situation, in retrospect, on a >scale from -10 to +10.

4. Take a weighted average.

5. If on average intervention makes things worse, do nothing. If it makes things better, decide if the level of improvement created in such cases is worth the cost in dollars and dead people.

-robert wiblin

" 'Bill is wrong, but bill works hard, so even though its the wrong solution, he's likely to succeed', and that the best compliment I ever received"

-Bill Gates, quoting someone else

If you were to rank order and say, I'm going to start a company, what's the highest return on investment for the risk? Space and Cars would be at the bottom.

-Elon Musk in the same vid