Rationality quotes: April 2010

I listen to all these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness, and the opinion that I come to is that there is no polite way of asking somebody: have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion? But that’s a good question to ask. Of course we should ask that question and of course it’s going to offend people. Tough.

Daniel Dennett, interview for TPM: The Philosopher's Magazine

I recall, for example, suggesting to a regular loser at a weekly poker game that he keep a record of his winnings and losses. His response was that he used to do so but had given up because it proved to be unlucky. - Ken Binmore, Rational Decisions

A side note: All three of the quotes I've posted are from Binmore's Rational Decisions, which I'm about a third of the way through and have found very interesting. It makes a great companion to Less Wrong -- and it's also quite quotable in spots.

My dad used to have an expression: "Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value."

Joe Biden, remarks delivered in Saint Clair Shores, MI, Monday, September 15, 2008

"Everyone thinks they've won the Magical Belief Lottery. Everyone thinks they more or less have a handle on things, that they, as opposed to the billions who disagree with them, have somehow lucked into the one true belief system."

-- R Scott Bakker, Neuropath

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.

Bertrand Russell

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

-- George Eliot

Any technique, however worthy and desirable, becomes a disease when the mind is obsessed with it.

-- Bruce Lee

When I look around and think that everything's completely and utterly fucked up and hopeless, my first thought is "Am I wearing completely and utterly fucked up and hopeless-colored glasses?"

Crap Mariner (Lawrence Simon)

You don't have to believe everything you think.

Seen on bumper sticker, via ^zhurnaly.

Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: 'My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.' The stranger is a theologian.

• Denis Diderot

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."

-- Clay Shirky

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

-- Christopher Hitchens

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.

-- Jack Handey's Deep Thoughts

"All things end badly - or else they wouldn't end"

• Brian Flanagan (Tom Cruise), Cocktail, 1988. He was referring to relationships, but it's actually a surprisingly general rule.

Blind alley, though. If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.

Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The word agnostic is actually used with the two distinct meanings of personal ignorance and intrinsic unknowability in the same context. They are distinguished when necessary with a qualifier.

WEAK agnosticism: I have no fucking idea who fucked this shit up.
STRONG agnosticism: Nobody has any fucking idea who fucked this shit up.

There is a certain confusion with weak atheism which could (and frequently does) arise, but that is properly reserved for the category of theological noncognitivists,

WEAK atheism: What the fuck do you mean with this God shit?
STRONG atheism: Didn't take any God to fuck this shit up.

which is different again from weak theism.

WEAK theism: Somebody fucked this shit up.
STRONG theism: God fucked this shit up.

An interesting cross-categorical theological belief not easily represented above is

DEISM: God set this shit up and it fucked itself.

-- Snocone, in a Slashdot post

An atheist walked into a bar, but seeing no bartender he revised his initial assumption and decided he only walked into a room.

http://friendlyatheist.com/2008/02/29/complete-the-atheist-joke-1/

Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.

WIlliam Thomson, Lord Kelvin

The white line down the center of the road is a mediator, and very likely it can err substantially towards one side the other before the disadvantaged side finds advantage in denying its authority.

Source:
-- Schelling, Strategy of conflict, p144

[The book was mentioned a couple of times here on LW, and is a nice introduction to the use of game theory in geopolitics]

It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.

Charles Darwin, "The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals", ch.3.

"Torture the data long enough and they will confess to anything."

--via The Economist, "a saying of statisticians".

Are the winners the only ones actually writing the history? We need to disabuse ourselves of this habit of saying things because they sound good. ----- Ta-Nehisi Coates

Coates runs a popular culture, black issues, and history blog with a very strong rationalist approach.

[Discarding game] theory in favor of some notion of collective rationality makes no sense. One might as well propose abandoning arithmetic because two loaves and seven fish won't feed a multitude. -- Ken Binmore, Rational Decisions

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

-- Gautama Buddha

"It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." ~William Kingdon Clifford

This is the quote that got me thinking about rationality as something other than "a word you use to describe things you believe so that you can deride those who disagree with you."

The wizard who reads a thousand books is powerful. The wizard who memorizes a thousand books is insane.

Gall's Law:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

John Gall, "Systemantics"

"Face the facts. Then act on them. It's the only mantra I know, the only doctrine I have to offer you, and it's harder than you'd think, because I swear humans seem hardwired to do anything but. Face the facts. Don't pray, don't wish, don't buy into centuries-old dogma and dead rhetoric. Don't give in to your conditioning or your visions or your fucked-up sense of... whatever. FACE THE FACTS. THEN act."

--- Quellcrist Falconer, speech before the assault on Millsport. (Richard Morgan, Broken Angels)

"In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined."

Thomas Szaz

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

"A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if nobody believes it."

-David Stevens

We originally want or desire an object not because it is agreeable or good, but we call it agreeable or good because we want or desire it.

-- Ludwig von Mises, Epistemological Problems of Economics

As you can easily imagine we often ask ourselves here despairingly: "What, oh, what is the use of the war? Why can't people live peacefully together? Why all this destruction?"

The question is very understandable, but no one has found a satisfactory answer to it so far. Yes, why do they make still more gigantic planes, still heavier bombs and, at the same time, prefabricated houses for reconstruction? Why should millions be spent daily on the war and yet there's not a penny available for medical services, artists, or for poor people?

Why do some people have to starve, while there are surpluses rotting in other parts of the world? Oh, why are people so crazy?

I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone, are guilty of the war. Oh no, the little man is just as guilty, otherwise the peoples of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There's in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated, and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again.

-- Anne Frank, 3 May 1944, aged 14

Evolving a threat response over a half-million years on the African savannah hasn't really left me with any good mechanisms for dealing with a threatening number.

PartiallyClips

Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.

Alfred North Whitehead

If you can be sure of being right only 55 percent of the time, you can go down to Wall Street and make a million dollars a day. If you can't be sure of being right even 55 percent of the time, why should you tell other people they are wrong?

Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

O Lord, make our enemies quite ridiculous!

--Voltaire

A final goal of any scientific theory must be the derivation of numbers. Theories stand or fall, ultimately, upon numbers.

Richard Bellman, "Eye of the Hurricane"

True Knowledge:

Life is a process of breaking down and using other matter, and if need be, other life. Therefore, life is aggression, and successful life is successful aggression. Life is the scum of matter, and people are the scum of life. There is nothing but matter, forces, space and time, which together make power. Nothing matters, except what matters to you. Might makes right, and power makes freedom. You are free to do whatever is in your power, and if you want to survive and thrive you had better do whatever is in your interests. If your interests conflict with those of others, let the others pit their power against yours, everyone for theirselves. If your interests coincide with those of others, let them work together with you, and against the rest. We are what we eat, and we eat everything.

All that you really value, and the goodness and truth and beauty of life, have their roots in this apparently barren soil.

This is the true knowledge.

We had founded our idealism on the most nihilistic implications of science, our socialism on crass self-interest, our peace on our capacity for mutual destruction, and our liberty on determinism. We had replaced morality with convention, bravery with safety, frugality with plenty, philosophy with science, stoicism with anesthetics and piety with immortality. The universal acid of the true knowledge had burned away a world of words, and exposed a universe of things.

Things we could use.

--Ken MacLeod, The Cassini Division

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -- Bertrand Russell

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

-- Wayne Gretzky (but I've seen it attributed to Michael Jordan and Joe Ledbetter, HS coach)

There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses.

-Louis Aragon

Since a gene is just a molecule, it can't choose to maximize its fitness, but evolution makes it seem as though it had.... Why, for example, do songbirds sing in the early spring? The proximate cause is long and difficult. This molecule knocked against that molecule. This chemical reaction is catalyzed by that enzyme. But the ultimate cause is that birds are signalling territorial claims to each other in order to avoid unnecessary conflict. They just do what they do. But the net effect of an immensely complicated evolutionary process is that songbirds behave as though they had rationally chosen to maximize their fitness.

Laboratory experiments on pigeons show that they sometimes honor various consistency requirements of rational choice theory better than humans (Kagel, Battalio, and Green 1995). We don't know the proximate explanation. Who knows what goes on inside the mind of a pigeon? Who knows what goes on in the minds of stockbrokers for that matter? -- Ken Binmore, Rational Decisions

This is not to say that M. Legrandin was anything but sincere when he inveighed against snobs. He could not (from his own knowledge, at least) be aware that he himself was one, since it is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them. Upon ourselves they react only indirectly, through our imagination, which substitutes for our primary motives other, auxiliary motives, less stark and therefore more seemly. Never had Legrandin's snobbishness prompted him to make a habit of visiting a duchess as such. Instead, it would encourage his imagination to make the duchess appear, in his eyes, endowed with all the graces. He would gain acquaintance with the duchess, assuring himself that he was yielding to the attractions of mind and heart which the vile race of snobs could never understand. Only his fellow-snobs knew that he was of their number, for, owing to their inability to appreciate the intervening efforts of his imagination, they saw in close juxtaposition the social activity of Legrandin and its primary cause.

-- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

Such sad statistical situations suggest that the marriage of science and math may be desperately in need of counseling. Perhaps it could be provided by the Rev. Thomas Bayes.

Tom Siegfried, Odds Are, It's Wrong, on the many failings of traditional statistics in modern science.

""Not evil, but longing for that which is better, more often directs the steps of the erring"

Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie

I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four, A Scandal in Bohemia

I could be wrong, but I'd like to see some evidence.

--- Mark Liberman

Social scientists are experts at having an explanation for the results, no matter how they come out, so long as they are statistically significant. It is easy to turn the statistical crank. With sufficiently powerful statistical tools, you can find a significant statistical relationship between just about anything and anything else.

Psychologists see no real problem with the current dogma. They are used to getting messy results that can be dealt with only by statistics. In fact, I have now detected a positive suspicion of quality results amongst psychologists. In my experiments I get relationships between variables that are predictable to within 1 percent accuracy. The response to this level of perfection has been that the results must be trivial! It was even suggested to me that I use procedures that would reduce the quality of the results, the implication being that noisier data would mean more.

After some recovery period I realized that this attitude is to be expected from anyone trying to see the failure of the input-output model as a success. Social scientists are used to accounting for perhaps 80% (at most) of the variance in their data. They then look for other variables that will account for more variance. This is what gives them future research studies. The premise is that behavior is caused by many variables. If I account for all the variance with just one variable, it’s no fun and seems trivial.

If psychologists had been around at the time that physics was getting started, we’d still be Aristotelian, or worse. There would be many studies looking for relationships between one physical variable and another—e.g., between ball color and rate of fall, or between type of surface and the amount of snow in the driveway. Some of these relationships would prove statistically significant. Then when some guy comes along and shows that there is a nearly perfect linear relationship between distance traveled and acceleration, there would be a big heave of “trivial” or “too limited”—what does this have to do with the problems we have keeping snow out of the driveway?

Few psychologists recognize that, whatever their theory, it is based on the open-loop input-output model. There is no realization that the very methods by which data are collected imply that you are dealing with an open-loop system. To most psychologists, the methods of doing research are simply the scientific method—the only alternative is superstition. There is certainly no realization that the input-output model is testable and could be shown to be false. In fact, the methods are borrowed, in caricature, from the natural sciences, where the open-loop model works very well, thank you. Progress in the natural sciences began dramatically when it was realized that the inanimate world is not purposive.

Psychologists have mistakenly applied this model of the inanimate world to the animate world, where it simply does not apply.

This was a forgivable mistake in the days before control theory, because before 1948 there was no understanding of how purposive behavior could work. Now we know, but the social sciences have their feet sunk in conceptual concrete. They simply won’t give up what, to them, simply means science.

• Richard Marken in a May 15, 1985 lecture titled "Teaching Dogma in Psychology"

The author was transformed by reading "Behavior: The Control of Perception"(1973) and began a research program whose early years(?) seem to have been summarized in "Mind Readings: Experimental Studies of Purpose"(1992)

"Hypocrisy and dissimulation are what keeps social systems strong; it is intellectual honesty that destroys them."

Theodore Dalrymple- The New Vichy Syndrome p. 26.

At this point I reveal myself in my true colours as a stick-in-the-mud. I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years. And in consequence, we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves.

Sir Kenneth Clarke, "Civilisation" (Excerpt on YouTube.)

True, I did not escape some unpleasant conversations with political figures To them I repeated the same thing: all contemporary conflicts I considered to be temporary phenomena, as the reigns of Alexander the Great and Napoleon were temporary. Every world crisis could be viewed in strategic terms, as long as the consequence of that approach was not our potential destruction as a biological species. But when the fate of the species became one of the members of the equation, the choice had to be automatic, a foregone conclusion, and appeals to the American way, the patriotic spirit, to democracy or anything else lost all meaning.

• In Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice (fiction)

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

Phillip K. Dick

We must be careful who we let define what is sustainable.

Jason Stoddard in Shine, an anthology of near-future optimistic science fiction.

Deleated as a repeat.

"O my friend, if we, leaving this war, could escape from age and death, I should not here be fighting in the van; but now, since many are the modes of death impending over us which no man can hope to shun, let us press on and give renown to other men, or win it for ourselves."

--Sarpedon, The Iliad, as quoted in Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation

You can speed up your math reading skill by practicing, but be careful. Like any skill, trying too much too fast can set you back and kill your motivation. Imagine trying to do an hour of high-energy aerobics if you have not worked out in two years. You may make it through the first class, but you are not likely to come back.

Shai Simonson and Fernando Gouvea, "How to Read Mathematics"

The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed.

--Robert A. Heinlein

Sad, but true.

I hold that information is not neutral. Never give a (fallible) human sterile information. He will not ignore it. These models led to an increase of risk in society, period. The providers are responsible.

Nasim Taleb

We lost the documentation on quantum mechanics. You'll have to decode the regexes for yourself.

-- The Gods, XKCD

"If A=B and B=C and C=D, then do not get a job proofreading." - Quid's Theorem

"Wow! That seems…incredibly hard to believe. I’m not saying that just because it sounds crazy means its not true. Plenty of crazy things are true. But this claim is based on the results of just one study, conducted with the help of a biased author." --Jason Swett (my older brother)

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to close it again on something solid

G. K. Chesterton

not trying to be glib here, but:

"• Do not quote yourself." -4wnoise

If I let everyone I thought was an idiot die, there wouldn't be many people left.

-Gilgamesh Wulfenbach

A witty saying proves nothing.

Voltaire

Edit: All right, then, here's another one:

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.

Robert Heinlein

Economists did something even better than predict the crisis. We correctly predicted that we would not be able to predict it.

-William Easterly

Do not sacrifice truth on the altar of comfort

"The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments." - Nietzsche

“It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.”

--Sir Edmund Hillary (1919-2008) - New Zealand Mountaineer and First man to Climb Mt. Everest