Rationality Quotes January 2015

Although the main point of this quote is valid (that sound policies rather than great men are the cause of good government), criticizing Lord of the Rings for having a “medieval philosophy” is a bit silly – it is like criticizing Johnny Cash for sounding “kind of country”. More so than an author of fiction, Tolkien was a scholar who focused much of his effort on studying medieval literature and translating that literature into modern English. Medieval literature was an inspiration and a major influence on his fiction. Of course the Lord of the Rings has a medieval philosophy; it was intended to have a medieval philosophy.

In fairness, real life kings were essentially indifferent to commoners a lot of the time. Having good intentions is a good start to being a better ruler than them.

Being good isn't enough, but being wise and good is. Tolkien may not be able to answer all those questions, because he's probably not wise enough to make those hard decisions well, but Aragorn was.

Yes, these are interesting questions. They're beyond the scope of what he wanted to write, and I don't think it's wrong for him to ignore them. It is also right for Mr. Martin to write about them, because they are within the scope of what he wants to write.

I have seen escalators sufficiently out-of-order that they were completely non-traversable.

'I got an idea for sweatshops - air conditioning' Mitch Hedberg

Development Economists are say we shouldn't close sweatshops as they are the workers best options. I don't see why altruists can't pay for air conditioners to be installed in sweat shops.

It's not just information age, but also freedom of speech. Many people in regimes without free speech sincerely believe that there is no crime (except by people corrupted by other countries), no drug abuse, etc., simply because they can never read about it in the newspapers. So when the regime later changes, they will believe that things got worse, because now they can read about all the bad stuff (and of course some politicians will use this bias to say "this wasn't happening before when we had the power, so... vote for us again").

This is something, I find a lot of people don't realize(by virtue of never testing their boundaries). It's not that the universe* has become suddenly maleficient, it was indifferent / mildly maleficient(think increasing entropy rule, if you prefer), we just didn't realize it and it's getting harder to ignore.

*-- Edit Clarification: Universe - Humans. (- being set difference here.)

"For example, I wonder if a person over the age of twenty who likes robot anime is really happy. He could find greater happiness elsewhere. Regrettably, I have my doubts about his happiness."

--Hideaki Anno, "Skill Up"; ("From Newtype, April 4, p. 4, article entitled 'Skill Up'." Interview ~April 1995)

I disagree. Perhaps this is true in already well understood fields of study, but in others we do not have any trunks or branches. Trying to understand general guidelines and principles in such situation necessitates first manufacturing them without much empirical evidence, which seems like a large mistake. In my opinion, the best thinkers are those who try to use general principles and specific details simultaneously, and in turn the best of those ones tend to look at details slightly more often.

I disagree. Perhaps this is true in already well understood fields of study, but in others we do not have any trunks or branches. Trying to understand general guidelines and principles in such situation necessitates first manufacturing them without much empirical evidence, which seems like a large mistake. In my opinion, the best thinkers are those who try to use general principles and specifc details simultaneously, and in turn the best of those ones tend to look at details slightly more often.

I disagree. Perhaps this is true in already well understood fields of study, but in others we do not have any trunks or branches. Trying to understand general guidelines and principles in such situation necessitates first manufacturing them without much empirical evidence, which seems like a large mistake. In my opinion, the best thinkers are those who try to use general principles and relevant details in conjunction with each other, and in turn the best of those ones are people who look at details slightly more than the guidelines.

I disagree. Perhaps this is true in already well understood fields of study, but in others we do not have any trunks or branches. Trying to understand general guidelines and principles in such situation necessitates first manufacturing them without much empirical evidence, which seems like a large mistake. In my opinion, the best thinkers are those who try to use general principles and relevant details in conjunction with each other, and the best of those thinkers tend to look at details slightly more.

That's not literally true. It's just booing irrational people. Which is appropriate for Ozy on zher own blog, but not for this thread of useful quotes.

And yet, I also have packed my backpack, embarked in the air, and woken up in Rome, and unlike Emerson have indeed been intoxicated in contemplation of the things that were. And as in Rome, so also in Florence, and Prague, and London, and the cave monasteries of Turkey, and the Alhambra, and the temples of Japan, and other places also.

In other words, YMMV.

This reminds me of Socrates' quip:

How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you?

This is a great quote that draws attention to a very common human mental failing --intellectual dishonesty.

"It is braver to be intellectually honest than it is to be ready to do physical battle. In the latter case, the most you risk is torture and death, in the former, you risk being held accountable for the flaws in your character, ideas, and choices. A great many men are physically brave, but intellectually cowardly, dishonest, and unfaithful to exploring the reality they secretly suspect exists. Most men shun knowledge from a fear of it."

Everest is probably an atypical example (though maybe not in the context of a joke), but Into Thin Air made it sound like base camp is a pretty unpleasant place to spend any time, because no-one really cares much about making it a nice place (and thus there is e.g. terrible hygiene, litter everywhere)

I know who Dijkstra was, respect him greatly, and agree with most of that article, and indeed, most of everything he wrote. But this is something I disagree about. He would (here) have us speak of a computer's "store" instead of its "memory", and there were various other substitutions that he would have us do. All that that would achieve would be to develop a parallel vocabulary, one for computing machines and one for thinking beings, and an injunction to always use the right vocabulary for the right context.

What it is for a human being to try things, want things, believe things, know things, etc. is different from what it is for a program to do these things. But they also have an amount of commonality that makes insisting on separate vocabulary an unproductive ritual.

So when, for example, a compiler complains to me (must I say "issues an error message"?) that it couldn't find a file, I want it to give me the answers to questions such as "why did you look for that file?" (i.e. show me the place where you were instructed to access it), "what were you looking for?" (i.e. show me the file name exactly as you received it), "where did you look for it?" (i.e. show me the directory search path in force at the point where you looked for it), and "why did you look there?" (i.e. show me where you got that search path from). This seems to me an entirely natural and unproblematic way of speaking, and not at all in conflict with his larger message, which is of fundamental importance for programming, that programming is a mathematical activity which, when done right, carries mathematical guarantees of correctness.

That message is especially important to the task of designing superintelligent machines.

BTW, It's "Edsger".

I also don't think this is a concern. It's just analogy, metaphor, figurative language, which is more or less what the human mind runs on. I also don't think it leads to real anthropomorphization in the minds of those using it; it's more just a useful shorthand. Compare something I overheard once about atoms of a certain reactive element "wanting" to bond with other atoms. I don't think either party was ascribing agency to those atoms in this case; rather, "it wants X" is commonly understood as a useful shorthand for "it behaves as if it wanted X".

Edit: see also: http://catb.org/jargon/html/anthropomorphization.html

Thus it is common to hear hardware or software talked about as though it has homunculi talking to each other inside it, with intentions and desires. Thus, one hears “The protocol handler got confused”, or that programs “are trying” to do things, or one may say of a routine that “its goal in life is to X”. Or: “You can't run those two cards on the same bus; they fight over interrupt 9.”

One even hears explanations like “... and its poor little brain couldn't understand X, and it died.” Sometimes modelling things this way actually seems to make them easier to understand, perhaps because it's instinctively natural to think of anything with a really complex behavioral repertoire as ‘like a person’ rather than ‘like a thing’.

At first glance, to anyone who understands how these programs actually work, this seems like an absurdity. As hackers are among the people who know best how these phenomena work, it seems odd that they would use language that seems to ascribe consciousness to them. The mind-set behind this tendency thus demands examination.

The key to understanding this kind of usage is that it isn't done in a naive way; hackers don't personalize their stuff in the sense of feeling empathy with it, nor do they mystically believe that the things they work on every day are ‘alive’. To the contrary: hackers who anthropomorphize are expressing not a vitalistic view of program behavior but a mechanistic view of human behavior.

Not for the first time, someone on LW links a West Hunter page that isn't content to make a reasonable point, but has to exaggerate that point and present it with sneering.

Cochran's post is short, but to make it even shorter:

Some people claim that it is really, really difficult for humans to psych themselves up to kill another human. They often cite a claim by S. L. A. Marshall that only a small fraction – less than 25% – of WWII American combat infantrymen fired their weapons in battle.

[...] it’s all bullshit. S.L.A Marshall’s ‘data’ is vapor; there was and is nothing to it. He made shit up, not just on this topic. There’s every to reason to think that the vast majority of infantrymen throughout history did their level best to kill those on the other side [...]

You have to wonder about a universal human instinct that apparently misfired in every battle in recorded history.

It's true that Marshall's claim about WWII soldiers isn't trustworthy. (I haven't spent enough time with the literature to go further and confirm the claim's made-up bullshit vapour. But it wouldn't surprise me.) Unfortunately Cochran has to have his cherry on top; he writes off not only Marshall but the general idea of soldiers, and people in general, finding it hard to kill other people.

Now, I first read about that idea, and about Marshall's dodgy WWII work, in (I'm fairly sure) Randall Collins's Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory, which quotes Marshall at length and cites him for various (alleged) results, among them the WWII statistic. According to Collins, the famous statistic "has been controversial", though he also writes "Marshall is not presenting a statistical argument, but was summarizing his judgment".

That's not really good enough. But Collins doesn't rely exclusively on Marshall — the chapter where Collins goes on & on about Marshall cites many other sources which contradict Cochran's sarcasm & scepticism. They include five citations to affirm that a nontrivial number of soldiers soil themselves in battle, with one of those five mentioning soldiers trying to hide on the ground or under "blankets or sleeping bags"; Marshall's predecessor Colonel Charles Ardant du Picq, who gave "questionnaires to French army officers in the 1860s, who reported a tendency for soldiers to fire wildly in the air"; John Keegan's Face of Battle, which reveals that "eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century massed firing formations" often included NCOs pressing their swords against soldiers' backs "to force them to hold their position"; Paddy Griffith on a "pervasiveness of fear and firing incompetence" in the US Civil War; Richard Holmes and Dave Grossman on the same "pervasiveness" "for twentieth-century wars"; a conclusion "that the level of non-firing was similar [in WWII] in all armies" from Dyer's 1985 edition of War; Ulysses S. Grant's description of newly equipped troops fleeing in panic on the first day of the Battle of Shiloh; and Martin Gilbert's First World War to show that "[m]utinies in World War I occurred among all the armies that had been long in action, or had taken accumulated casualties [on the order of 100%]".

Collins also tabulates observations from a collection of combat photographs and from Russell W. Glenn's Reading Athena's Dance Card, finding that more US infantry in Vietnam reported firing "Rarely" or "Sometimes" (54% in total) than "Virtually always" (46%) in "life-threatening enemy confrontations", and that most of his photos show no troops firing at all.

I could go on. This is just the first half of chapter 2. Some of the evidence is anecdotal and could be cherry-picked, but the broad drift seems really very clear, and the rest of the book compiles further evidence that people tend to experience "confrontational tension and fear" in the face of potential violence, which leads them to back down or fumble — though competent violence can still occur when people overcome that tension & fear.

Cochran is probably right about Marshall, but probably wrong about the ease with which people kill each other. Perhaps Cochran should be less keen to call others idiots in the future.

That is a really clever mixup of different argumentation modes. That being said, Mr. Cochran strangling one of his opponents would still be only weak evidence that it is not so difficult for humans to psych themselves up to kill another human.

First of all, he hasn't actually done it (I presume).

Secondly, we know it's difficult, not impossible.

Thirdly, we know there are sociopaths and psychopaths who can do this without much thought, as well as perhaps normal people who have become desensitized to killing. Fortunately these are a small percentage of the populace.

There is, in fact, a large amount of research that has gone into studying the minds of people who kill: in wartime, in criminal activity, in law enforcement, and so forth; and there is a strong consensus that for most people intentional killing is hard. For example,

In World War Two, it is a fact that only 15-20 percent of the soldiers fired at the enemy. That is one in five soldiers actually shooting at a Nazi when he sees one. While this rate may have increased in desperate situations, in most combat situations soldiers were reluctant to kill each other. The Civil War was not dramatically different or any previous wars.

In WW2 only one percent of the pilots accounted for thirty to forty percent of enemy fighters shot down in the air. Some pilots didn't shoot down a single enemy plane.

In Korea, the rate of soldiers unwilling to fire on the enemy decreased and fifty five percent of the soldiers fired at the enemy. In Vietnam, this rate increased to about ninety five percent but this doesn't mean they were trying to hit the target. In fact it usually took around fifty-two thousand bullets to score one kill in regular infantry units! It may be interesting to not that when Special Forces kills are recorded and monitored this often includes kills scored by calling in artillery or close air support. In this way SF type units could score very high kill ratios like fifty to a hundred for every SF trooper killed. This is not to say these elite troops didn't score a large number of bullet type kills. It is interesting to note that most kills in war are from artillery or other mass destruction type weapons.

If one studies history and is able to cut through the hype, one will find that man is often unwilling to kill his fellow man and the fighter finds it very traumatic when he has to do so. On the battlefield the stress of being killed and injured is not always the main fear.

-- William S. Frisbee, The Psychology of Killing

If you want a more detailed look at this, including lots of references to the original Defense Department research, there are a number of good books by army officers including On Killing by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman. One of the originals is Men Against Fire by World War I Officer S. L. A Marshall. Bruce Siddle's work, more focused on law enforcement, is also worth a look. E.g. Sharpening the Warrior's Edge.

None of these are perfect or irrefutable evidence. For instance, the research I'm aware focuses primarily on U.S. and British troops and police officers. It's certainly possible that this is culturally conditioned and the results might be different elsewhere. However, I've yet to see any strong critiques of the general consensus about the difficulty of killing in war. The best evidence we have is that killing is in fact difficult for most people, most of the time, even in war.

Killing them would be introducing valid evidence. Talking about it is just fictional evidence.

Any context? (e.g. what the suggestion is)

This is an anti-rationality quote, right?

Possible interpretation:

If a team wants to do something smart together, the team members have to (a) communicate, or at least (b) be really good at guessing what the other team members are thinking.

First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group.

communication

Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible.

mind reading

I'm open to the idea that the factors informing group performance might not be identical to those informing individual performance, and it seems plausible that intra-group communication could play a strong role in that, but this is a result suspiciously amenable to the NYT's politics. Probably deserves a grain or two of salt.

While a cute quote, I'm not sure it involves much (or any) rationality.

A similar example, from a Chris Farley movie:

Tommy: Let's think about this for a sec, Ted, why do they put a guarantee on a box? Hmm, very interesting.

Ted: I'm listening.

Tommy: Here's how I see it. A guy puts a guarantee on the box 'cause he wants you to fell all warm and toasty inside.

Ted: Yeah, makes a man feel good.

Tommy: 'Course it does. Ya think if you leave that box under your pillow at night, the Guarantee Fairy might come by and leave a quarter.

Ted: What's your point?

Tommy: The point is, how do you know the Guarantee Fairy isn't a crazy glue sniffer? "Building model airplanes" says the little fairy, but we're not buying it. Next thing you know, there's money missing off the dresser and your daughter's knocked up, I seen it a hundred times.

Ted: But why do they put a guarantee on the box then?

Tommy: Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of shit. That's all it is. Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for right now, for your sake, for your daughter's sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality item from me.

How is this a rationality quote?

Why is this a rationality quote?

I honestly don't understand whether this is criticising Matt Taylor or criticising Taylor's critics.

One of the replies there is,

@RachelHaywire diverse sci/astro ppl I follow, male+female believe far more women driven from phys sci by harassment than men by geekshaming.

Reminds me of Twain's comparison of the two Reigns of Terror.

Edit: Not to mention that we didn't lose Matt Taylor. He still has the same job as a scientist with the ESA.