Rationality Quotes 27
post by Eliezer Yudkowsky (Eliezer_Yudkowsky) · 2009-02-22T01:55:48.000Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 8 commentsContents
8 comments
"Believing this statement will make you happier."
-- Ryan Lortie
"Make changes based on your strongest opportunities, not your most convenient ones."
-- MegaTokyo
"The mind is a cruel, lying, unreliable bastard that can't be trusted with even an ounce of responsibility. If you were dating the mind, all your friends would take you aside, and tell you that you can really do better, and being alone isn't all that bad, anyway. If you hired the mind as a babysitter, you would come home to find all but one of your children in critical condition, and the remaining one crowned 'King of the Pit'."
-- Lore Sjoberg
"Getting bored is a non-trivial cerebral transformation that doubtlessly took many millions of years for nature to perfect."
-- Lee Corbin
"The views expressed here do not necessarily represent the unanimous view of all parts of my mind."
-- Malcolm McMahon
"The boundary between these two classes is more porous than I've made it sound. I'm always running into regular dudes--construction workers, auto mechanics, taxi drivers, galoots in general--who were largely aliterate until something made it necessary for them to become readers and start actually thinking about things. Perhaps they had to come to grips with alcoholism, perhaps they got sent to jail, or came down with a disease, or suffered a crisis in religious faith, or simply got bored. Such people can get up to speed on particular subjects quite rapidly. Sometimes their lack of a broad education makes them over-apt to go off on intellectual wild goose chases, but, hey, at least a wild goose chase gives you some exercise."
-- Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning was the Command Line
8 comments
Comments sorted by oldest first, as this post is from before comment nesting was available (around 2009-02-27).
comment by anonymous_coward7 · 2009-02-22T20:08:31.000Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I feel doubly let down. Not only did I too go and read the peice by Stephenson, which was disappointing, but when I came back here to express my disappointment I found I'd been beaten to it.
The quote itself is still a very good one, though.
comment by Eliezer Yudkowsky (Eliezer_Yudkowsky) · 2009-02-22T20:13:54.000Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Sorry about that. It's been a long time since I read the Stephenson piece in question, and all I had was the quote in my file. If I'd realized, I wouldn't have quoted it, or would have dropped a warning in the comments.
comment by Dmitriy_Kropivnitskiy · 2009-02-23T21:31:04.000Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I cannot seem to google the Ryan Lortie quote. Where did that come from?
comment by Fredrik_Bränström · 2009-02-23T23:37:09.000Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
anonymous coward & pdf23ds: Interesting that you went off on such an intellectual wild goose chase... ;)
comment by Paul_Gowder2 · 2009-02-24T06:21:18.000Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Lore Sjoberg is my new hero.