Rationality quotes: August 2010

Personally, I've been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I'm willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.

-- Patrick Nielsen Hayden

"Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from SCIENCE!"

~Girl Genius

My hotel doesn't have a 13th floor because of superstition, but people on the 14th floor, you should know what floor you're really on. If you jump out the window, you will die sooner than you expect.

-- Mitch Hedberg (Quoted from memory)

When I was a young man about to go out into the world, my father says to me a very valuable thing. He says to me like this... "Son," the old guy says, "I am sorry that I am not able to bank roll you to a very large start, but not having any potatoes which to give you, I am now going to stake you to some very valuable advice. One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to come to you and show you a nice, brand new deck of cards on which the seal has not yet been broken. This man is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of the deck and squirt cider in your ear. Now son, do not bet this man, for as sure as you stand there, you are going to wind up with an earful of cider."

-- Sky Masterson, a character in "Guys and Dolls"

The fact that you are giving money to charity does not mean that you need not try to find out whether that charity is a fraud or not.

-C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Upon his death man must leave everything behind ... and depart forever from the world he has known. He must of necessity go to that foul land of death, a fact which makes death the most sorrowful of all events. ... Some foreign doctrines, however, teach that death should not be regarded as profoundly sorrowful. ... These are all gross deceptions contrary to human sentiment and fundamental truths. Not to be happy over happy events, not to be saddened by sorrowful events, not to show surprise at astonishing events, in a word, to consider it proper not to be moved by whatever happens, are all foreign types of deception and falsehood. They are contrary to human nature and extremely repugnant to me.

-- Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) - quoted from Blocker, Japanese Philosophy, p. 109

Motoori was as far as you can get from being a rationalist but this quote was so Yudkowskian that I felt it belonged here.

... the history of mathematics is a history of horrendously difficult problems being solved by young people too ignorant to know that they were impossible.

-- Freeman Dyson, "Birds and Frogs"

If you do experiments and you're always right, then you aren't getting enough information out of those experiments. You want your experiment to be like the flip of a coin: You have no idea if it is going to come up heads or tails. You want to not know what the results are going to be.

-- Peter Norvig, in an interview about being wrong. When I saw this, I thought it sounded a lot like entropy pruning in decision trees, where you don't even bother asking questions that won't make you update your probability estimates significantly. Then I remembered that Norvig was the co-author of the AI textbook that I had learned about decision trees from. Interesting interview.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

-- William James

Farnsworth: My god, is it possible?
Fry: It must be possible. It's happening.

— Futurama: "The Late Philip J. Fry"

Man cannot understand the perfection and imperfections of his chosen art if he cannot see the value in other arts. Following rules only permits development up to a point in technique and then the student and artist has to learn more and seek further. It makes sense to study other arts as well as those of strategy. Who has not learned something more about themselves by watching the activities of others? To learn the sword study the guitar. To learn the fist study commerce. To just study the sword will make you narrow-minded and will not permit you to grow outward.

-- Musashi, "A Book of Five Rings"

On rationalization, aka the giant sucking cognitive black hole.

Though [Ben Franklin] had been a vegetarian on principle, on one long sea crossing the men were grilling fish, and his mouth started watering:

I balanc'd some time between principle and inclination, till I recollectd that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, "if you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you." So I din'd upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet.

Franklin concluded: "So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do."

-Jonathan Haidt, "The Happiness Hypothesis"

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.

-- Christopher Morley

"A joke told by Warren Buffett comes to mind: a patient, after hearing from a doctor that he has cancer, tells the doctor, “Doc, I don’t have enough money for the surgery, but maybe could I pay you to touch up the x-ray?” Hope and self-deception are not a strategy."

~ Vitaliy Katsenelson

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.

- Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), ch. III

On the nature of ethics:

There is no justice in the laws of Nature, Headmaster, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don't have to! We care! There is light in the world, and it is us.

~ Eliezer Yudkowsky c/o Harry Potter, Methods of Rationality chapter 39.

I entered the Lager (Auschwitz) as a non-believer, and as a non-believer I was liberated and have lived to this day. Actually, the experience of the Lager with its frightful iniquity confirmed me in my nonbelief. It has prevented me, and still prevents me, from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice. . . . I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in October 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death . . . naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the “commission” that with one glance would decide whether I should go immediately into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instance I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed; one does not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a nonbeliever is capable. I rejected the temptation; I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it

-- Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (quoted by Damon Linker at The New Republic ; h/t Andrew Sullivan)

In short, whatever emotional impulse we may have toward altruism and empathy, and to whatever extent it may be genetically hardwired, it does not obviate the need for explicit judgments about right and wrong. If it did not seem correct to act with kindness and fairness, even at a net personal cost—if there were no sensible reason for so acting, beyond a raw impulse to do so—then we would have reason to regard the raw impulse as pointlessly self-destructive—like a disposition to alcoholism or a purely visceral (so to speak) aversion to surgery—and we would have a reason to attempt to overcome it.

• Gary Drescher, Good and Real

Your imaginings can have as much power over you as your reality, or even more.

-- Charles T. Tart

"There are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example."

~ Paul Graham

Therefore, after intellectually evaluating your problems through common sense and drawing on what psychiatry has taught us, if you still cannot emotionally release yourself from unwarranted guilt, and put your theories into action, then you should learn to make your guilt work for you. You should act upon your natural instincts, and then, if you cannot perform without feeling guilty, revel in your guilt. This may sound like a contradiction in terms, but if you will think about it, guilt can often add a fillip to the senses. Adults would do well to take a lesson from children: children often take great delight in doing something they know they are not supposed to.

-- Howard Stanton Levey, The Satanic Bible

(hopefully unnecessary disclaimer: I am in no way a Satanist)

You use a metaphor to describe some concept. The metaphor isn’t the thing you describe - it’s just a tool that you use. But someone takes the metaphor, and runs with it, making arguments that are built entirely on metaphor, but which bear no relation to the real underlying concept. And they believe that whatever conclusions they draw from the metaphor must, therefore, apply to the original concept.

— Mark Chu-Carroll, Metaphorical Crankery: a bad metaphor is like a steaming pile of …

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. It can convince you that an argument this idiotic and this sloppy is actually profound. It can convince you to publicly make a raging jackass out of yourself, by rambling on and on, based on a stupid misunderstanding of a simplified, informal, intuitive description of something complex.

— Mark Chu-Carroll, The Danger When You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know : Good Math, Bad Math

I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it.

-- Isaac Asimov

"Someday I want to be so powerful that I can defeat myself in a single blow." -- Silence, commenting on a character in Prism Ark that says they want to be stronger.

Sometimes, I feel the fear of uncertainty stinging clear
And I can't help but ask myself how much I let the fear
Take the wheel and steer
It's driven me before
And it seems to have a vague, haunting mass appeal
But lately I'm beginning to find that I
Should be the one behind the wheel

- Incubus, Drive

On the subject of noble lies:

No: at all costs, it is to be prayed by all men that shams may cease. Good heavens, to what depths have we got, when this to many a man seems strange! Yet strange to many a man it does seem; and to many a solid Englishman, wholesomely digesting his pudding among what are called the cultivated classes, it seems strange exceedingly; a mad ignorant notion, quite heterodox, and big with mere ruin. He has been used to decent forms long since fallen empty of meaning, to plausible modes, solemnities grown ceremonial,--what you in your iconoclast humour call shams,—all his life long; never heard that there was any harm in them, that there was any getting-on without them.

Thomas Carlyle--The Latter-Day Pamphlets

I had just recently seen the two Christopher Nolan Batman movies (Batman Begins and The Dark Knight). Here are my favorite quotes; please add any that you like. (Character attribution left off to prevent pre-judgment.) Wikiquote lists.

"It's not who you are on the inside; it’s what you do that defines you." (Compare: Functionalism, substrate independence, timeless identity – I know, that’s probably not what was intended, but note how it’s used in other contexts.)

"Criminals thrive on the indulgence of society's understanding." (Compare to counterfactual reasoning: if we would sympathize with every defection, and felt that “the past is the past”, those wishing to defect would have no reason not to.)

“And what about escalation? […] We start carrying semi-automatics, they buy automatics. We start wearing Kevlar, they buy armor-piercing rounds. […] And you’re wearing a mask, and jumping off rooftops!”

(Also, I watched the earlier Batman movies after seeing this, and frankly, by comparison, they look like campy garbage.)

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

-H.P. Lovecraft

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

-- John Donne

“The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.” -- Daniel Boorstin

• If I understand it, I can build it.

Richard Feynman's inverted (not A implies not B == B implies A) quote.

Dear Miss Manners: How is a hat correctly worn?

Gentle Reader: Same as always; on the head.

-- Judith Martin ("Miss Manners")

See also: The Simple Truth.

I cannot prove, but am prepared to affirm, that if you take care of clarity in reasoning, most good causes will take care of themselves, while some bad ones are taken care of as a matter of course.

-Anthony de Jasay

A drawing instead of a quote.

(This one is also interesting. I didn't spot much else worth sharing in the rest of the "comic", however.)

"...you must consider what you are, seeking to know yourself, which is the most difficult task conceivable. From self knowledge you will learn not to puff yourself up, like the frog who wanted to be as big as an ox." -- Don Quijote

Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

-- C.S. Peirce

"They never do tests. Not many real deeds either. Oh, conversation with your grandmother's shade in a darkened room, the odd love potion or two, but comes a doubter, why, then it's the wrong day, the planets are not in line, the entrails are not favorable, we don't do tests!" -Tyrian, Dragonslayer

I propose that answers to questions of human value can be visualized on a “moral landscape” — a space of real and potential outcomes whose peaks correspond to states of the greatest possible wellbeing and whose valleys represent the deepest depths of suffering. Different ways of thinking and behaving — different cultural practices, ethical codes, modes of government, etc. — translate into movements across this landscape. Such changes can be analyzed objectively on many levels — ranging from biochemistry to economics — but they have their crucial realization as states and capacities of the human brain.

— Sam Harris, Edge: THE NEW SCIENCE OF MORALITY

Edit: It was of course Sam Harris who said this.

We must work and strive,
If we expect to thrive.
We've not that long to be alive.
This isn't forever.
But if it isn't forever, what's it for?
And if it isn't forever, how is it worth dying for?

-Alive by The Land Canaan

The song is about creation of the first FAI, and has tons of amazing lyrics. I couldn't find the full lyrics online, and I'm too lazy to transcribe them, so you'll have to listen for yourselves: http://www.archive.org/details/OnLeaving

I also recommend Wild Child which is about a not so friendly AI.

On the nature of courageous nature of atheism:

Men who, turning away in utter disgust and doubt from the heathen faith, placed their reliance on their own strength and virtue. Thus in the Sôlar lioð 17 we read of Vêbogi and Râdey â sik þau trûðu, "in themselves they trusted".

-Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology

There ain't no such thing as government interference.

--Robert Anton Wilson

Numerical precision is the very soul of science, and its attainment affords the best, perhaps the only criterion of the truth of theories and the correctness of experiments.

-- D'Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form (1917)

That is not dead which can eternal lie / And with strange aeons, even death may die

-- H.P. Lovecraft

I believe in one God, Nature, omnipotent Mother, generator of the heavens and earth, of all things visible and invisible.

I believe in one Lord, Man, non-unique son of Nature, born of the Mother at the end of all centuries: nature from Nature, matter from Matter, true nature from true Nature, generated, not created, of the same substance as the Mother.

I believe in the Spirit, which is Lord and gives consciousness to life, and proceeds from the Mother to the Son, and with the Mother and the Son is worshiped and glorified, and has spoken by means of the prophets of the Intellect.

I await the dissolution of death, but not another life in a world which will not come.

-- Piergiorgio Odifreddi (parodying the Nicene Creed)

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

-- Blaise Pascal

Hello. I am a time traveler. Be not afraid. I come from the past and I travel into the future at a rate of one second per second.

-- Citizen of Earth, in a Slashdot post