Rationality Quotes October 2012

Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect

--Teller (source)

This time he covered a lot more ground and was willing to talk about the mundane details of presidential existence. “You have to exercise,” he said, for instance. “Or at some point you’ll just break down.” You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”

--Michael Lewis' profile of Barack Obama

A lot of outcomes about which we care deeply are not very predictable. For example, it is not comforting to members of a graduate school admissions committee to know that only 23% of the variance in later faculty ratings of a student can be predicted by a unit weighting of the student's undergraduate GPA, his or her GRE score, and a measure of the student's undergraduate institution selectivity -- but that is opposed to 4% based on those committee members' global ratings of the applicant. We want to predict outcomes important to us. It is only rational to conclude that if one method (a linear model) does not predict well, something else may do better. What is not rational -- in fact, it's irrational -- is to conclude that this "something else" necessarily exists and, in the absence of any positive supporting evidence, is intuitive global judgment.

Hastie & Dawes, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World, pp. 67-8.

“You’re saying I’ll get used to being a warlock, or whatever it is that I am.”
“You’ve always been what you are. That’s not new. What you’ll get used to is knowing it.”

Jem and Tessa, Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare

The late F.W.H. Myers used to tell how he asked a man at a dinner table what he thought would happen to him when he died. The man tried to ignore the question, but on being pressed, replied: "Oh well, I suppose I shall inherit eternal bliss, but I wish you wouldn't talk about such unpleasant subjects."

--Bertrand Russell (Google Books attributes this to In praise of idleness and other essays, pg 133)

Curiosity was framed. Avoid it at your peril. The cat's not even sick. If you don't know how it works, find out. If you're not sure if it will work, try it. If it doesn't make sense, play with it until it does. If it's not broken, break it. If it might not be true, find out. And most of all, if someone says it is none of your business, prove them wrong.

-Seth Godin

To succeed in a domain that violates your intuitions, you need to be able to turn them off the way a pilot does when flying through clouds. You need to do what you know intellectually to be right, even though it feels wrong.

-- Paul Graham

Will Smith don't gotta cuss in his raps to sell his records;

well I do, so fuck him and fuck you too!

--Eminem, "The Real Slim Shady"

Eminem seeks his comparative advantage and avoids self-handicapping.

And who shows greater reverence for mystery, the scientist who devotes himself to discovering it step by step, always ready to submit to facts, and always aware that even his boldest achievement will never be more than a stepping-stone for those who come after him, or the mystic who is free to maintain anything because he need not fear any test?

Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies

“But can’t you just wave your hand and make all the dirt fly away, then?”

“The trouble is getting the magic to understand what dirt is,” said Tiffany, scrubbing hard at a stain. “I heard of a witch over in Escrow who got it wrong and ended up losing the entire floor and her sandals and nearly a toe.”

Mrs. Aching backed away. “I thought you just had to wave your hands about,” she mumbled nervously.

“That works,” said Tiffany, “but only if you wave them about on the floor with a scrubbing brush.”

Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith

Understanding an idea meant entangling it so thoroughly with all the other symbols in your mind that it changed the way you thought about everything.

Greg Egan, Diaspora

.

It is easier to love humanity than to love one's neighbor.

--Eric Hoffer, on Near/Far

I love uncertainty. In many situations I'd rather try something just to see what happens. I'm the character that gets killed first in every horror movie, but that's fine with me, since life is not generally like a horror movie.

Noah Smith

The truth is out there, but so are the lies.

-Dana Scully, The X-Files, Season 1, Episode 17

Lastly, there is an attitude not unknown in the crisis against which I should particularly like to protest. I should address my protest especially to those lovers and pursuers of Peace who, very short-sightedly, have occasionally adopted it. I mean the attitude which is impatient of these preliminary details about who did this or that, and whether it was right or wrong. They are satisfied with saying that an enormous calamity, called War, has been begun by some or all of us; and should be ended by some or all of us. To these people this preliminary chapter about the precise happenings must appear not only dry (and it must of necessity be the driest part of the task) but essentially needless and barren. I wish to tell these people that they are wrong; that they are wrong upon all principles of human justice and historic continuity: but that they are specially and supremely wrong upon their own principles of arbitration and international peace.

These sincere and high-minded peace-lovers are always telling us that citizens no longer settle their quarrels by private violence; and that nations should no longer settle theirs by public violence. They are always telling us that we no longer fight duels; and need no longer wage wars. In short, they perpetually base their peace proposals on the fact that an ordinary citizen no longer avenges himself with an axe. But how is he prevented from revenging himself with an axe? If he hits his neighbour on the head with the kitchen chopper, what do we do? Do we all join hands, like children playing Mulberry Bush, and say "We are all responsible for this; but let us hope it will not spread. Let us hope for the happy day when he shall leave off chopping at the man's head; and when nobody shall ever chop anything for ever and ever." Do we say "Let byegones be byegones; why go back to all the dull details with which the business began; who can tell with what sinister motives the man was standing there within reach of the hatchet?" We do not. We keep the peace in private life by asking for the facts of provocation, and the proper object of punishment. We do go into the dull details; we do enquire into the origins; we do emphatically enquire who it was that hit first. In short we do what I have done very briefly in this place.

-- G. K. Chesterton, "The Appetite of Tyranny", arguing against pretending to be wise

I prefer this sort of distant, reductionist, structural approach to analysing the race because there's little reason to believe in the validity of the implicit theories or "models" lurking behind pundits' gut judgments. When I heard Mr Romney's 47% comments, I thought "Oooh, he's toast!" and then I stopped myself and acknowledged that I actually have no rational basis for believing that his remarks would in the final analysis hurt Mr Romney at all. What percentage of undecided or weakly-decided swing-state voters ever caught wind of Mr Romney's embarrassing chat? I didn't know! Of those who became aware of it, how many cared? I didn't know! So why did I think "Oooh, he's toast!" Because I am human, and I make most judgments and decisions on the basis of crackpot hunches, the underlying logic of which is almost completely inscrutable to me.

--Will Wilkinson

My wife and I, since we'd been in lock-down with each other, oh, these past nine years, have developed a bit of shorthand. If one of us says something the other has heard so many times before that tears of boredom flow, the victim has a right to protest. The victim says, "That's on the tape." As in, that's on your tape -- the list of stories and obsessions you've rewound so often I could sing along with them in my sleep.

-- Mark Schone

I can pick up a mole (animal) and throw it. Anything I can throw weighs one pound. One pound is one kilogram.

--Randal Munroe, A Mole of Moles

Despite the difficulty of exact Bayesian inference in complex mathematical models, the essence of Bayesian reasoning is frequently used in everyday life. One example has been immortalized in the words of Sherlock Holmes to his friend Dr. Watson: “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” (Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four, 1890, Ch. 6). This reasoning is actually a consequence of Bayesian belief updating, as expressed in Equation 4.4. Let me re-state it this way: “How often have I said to you that when p(D|θ_i ) = 0 for all i!=j, then, no matter how small the prior p(θ_j ) > 0 is, the posterior p(θ_j |D) must equal one.” Somehow it sounds better the way Holmes said it.

--Kruschke 2010, Doing Bayesian Data Analysis, pg56-57

Frodo: Those that claim to oppose the Enemy would do well not to hinder us.

Faramir: The Enemy? (turns over body of an enemy soldier) His sense of duty was no less than yours, I deem. You wonder what his name is, where he came from, and if he was really evil at heart. What lies or threats led him on this long march from home, and if he'd not rather have stayed there... in peace. War will make corpses of us all.

-- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (extended edition)

It's all fine and good to declare that you would have freed your slaves. But it's much more interesting to assume that you wouldn't have and then ask, "Why?"

--Ta-Nehisi Coates, "A Muscular Empathy"

To say our predictions are no worse than the experts’ is to damn ourselves with some awfully faint praise.

Nate Silver

From the stories I expected the world to be sad

And it was.

And I expected it to be wonderful.

It was.

I just didn't expect it to be so big.

-- xkcd: Click and Drag

A common mistake is to suppose that scientists are such admirable people that they can be safely entrusted with the ultimate responsibil­ity for guiding scientific research. In fact they are no more admirable than any other type of worker. Neither selection nor self-selection tor a scientific career is based on admirableness. Though the conventions and protocols of science enforce on scientists, in comparison to astrologers and English professors—and lawyers—a high degree of objec­tivity when they are doing science, it does not follow that such indi­viduals can be depended on to be objective policy analysts. That is a role for which they are not trained (but is anyone?) and that does not impose the constraints that science imposes.

Richard Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response

From the leavings of memory and forgetfulness we could create a nearly complete map, I think, of a person's values. What you don't even see -- the subtle sadness in a colleague's face? -- and what you might briefly see but don't react to or retain, is in some sense not part of the world shaped for you by your interests and values. Others with different values will remember a very different series of events.

Michelangelo is widely quoted as having said that to make David he simply removed from the stone everything that was not David. Remove from your life everything you forget; what is left is you.

Eric Schwitzgebel

"People who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds.”

Jeff Bezos

Paths are made by walking

-Franz Kafka (quoted in Joy of Clojure)

Why, I wonder, didn't he say something like: 'Great Scott, the ontological argument seems to be plausible. But isn't it too good to be true that a grand truth about the cosmos should follow from a mere word game?

...

My own feeling, to the contrary, would have been an automatic, deep suspicion of any line of reasoning that reached such a significant conclusion without feeding in a single piece of data from the real world.

--Richard Dawkins on the ontological argument for theism, from The God Delusion, pages 81-82.

To think only of winning is sickness. To think only of using the martial arts is sickness. To think only of demonstrating the results of one's training is sickness, as is thinking only of making an attack or waiting for one. To think in a fixated way only of expelling such sickness is also sickness. Whatever remains absolutely in the mind should be considered sickness. As these various sicknesses are all present in the mind, you must put your mind in order and expel them.

Yagyu Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword (translated by William Scott Wilson).

We keep the wheel turning slowly and smoothly. Some anonymous Corpsman put it into words a long time ago: "When in doubt, delay the big ones and speed the little ones.''

--Frank Herbert, The Tactful Saboteur

A good heuristic. Barack Obama limits his wardrobe choices, Feynman decides to just always order chocolate ice cream for dessert. Leaves more time and energy for important stuff.

The moment when someone attaches to a philosophy or a movement, then they assign all the baggage and all the rest of the philosophy that goes with it to you, and when you want to have a conversation they will assert that they already know everything important there is to know about you because of that association.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Atheist or Agnostic?”

"...city law states that 'children under the age of twelve must attend school,' but it never said they had to 'attend school' more than once."

Hermione's mouth moved, but no words came out.

"It's funny, I got an A in my Munchkinry course without ever showing up past the first lesson. All the other students failed."

-- Harry Potter and the Natural 20

People tend to be way more helpful than one expects, especially Americans, museum workers, librarians and musicians. I think of it as one of the world's cool hidden features.

-- mme_n_b

[W]hen one hasn't gone wrong, it's often because one hasn't the chance.

Émile Zola

No, correlation does not imply causation, but it sure as hell provides a hint.

A good article on Slate.com by Daniel Engber

The mind has its illusions as the sense of sight; and in the same manner as feeling corrects the latter, reflection and calculation correct the former.

Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace, "A Philosophical Essay On Probabilities", quoted here. (Hat tip.)

Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.

James Stephens

Learn from science that you must doubt the experts... Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

Richard Feynman

(Partially quoted here, but never given in a Rationality Quotes thread before.)

For purely practical reasons we count one human body as one "person." That makes sense for all sorts of legal and economic purposes. But it sure doesn't feel as if I have only one person in my head. It feels like a conversation between two friends.

Scott Adams

While I don't ever feel that way, I understand that many people have such internal verbal or non-verbal conversations with one or more other "selves". These are also common in fiction, probably in part as a literary device, but also probably as a reflection of the author's mind. Hmm, maybe it is worth a poll.

Sometimes adults don't know what they're talking about.

Frankenweenie

The formalization of knowledge — which includes giving precise definitions — usually comes at the end of the original research in a given field, not at the very beginning. A particularly illuminating example is the concept of number, which was properly defined in the modern sense only after the development of axiomatic set theory in the… twentieth century.

Milan Cirkovic

The belief that one can find out something about real things by speculation alone is one of the most long-lived delusions in human thought. It is the spirit of antiscience which is always trying to lead men away from the study of reality to the spinning of fanciful theories out of their own minds. It is the spirit which every one of us (whether he is engaged in scientific investigation or in deciding how to use his vote in an election) must cast out of his own mind. Mastery of the art of thought is only the beginning of the task of understanding reality. Without the correct facts it can only lead us into error.

-- Robert H. Thouless, Straight and Crooked Thinking

Experience trumps brilliance.

— Thomas Sowell

The best description of the scientific method I have ever seen is from a conceptual physics textbook by Hobson. Paraphrasing:

The scientific method involves the dynamic interplay between theory and experiment.

That’s it. Perfect. As a scientist, I don’t come to work on Monday and make an observation, then form a hypothesis on Tuesday, devise an experiment to test some prediction on Wednesday, perform the experiment Thursday, and interpret the result on Friday. On any given day I would be hard pressed to tell you where I am in the process. All of the above, really. It’s a mess. It’s a constant back and forth comparing theoretical expectations to the final arbiter of any dispute: nature. Some people specialize in one aspect of the process, and can spend years chewing on some piece of it. But it is seldom done in isolation.

Meanwhile, science fair projects across the nation—under the advisement of teachers who themselves often do not have personal experience in how science really works—approach their subject in an uncharacteristically formulaic way. Nine times out of ten the effort culminates in a proof that the initial hypothesis was right; as if that were the goal and criterion for success. The rare student is surprised by the data, admitting to a failure of the hypothesis, quickly reconsidering initial assumptions and driving into an unexpected yet rewarding direction (dynamic interplay). That’s the real scientist at work. Too bad the judges (in my experience as a judge) often don’t recognize this apparent failure as the true success.

I can’t pass up the opportunity to share with you the “best” high school science fair project I ever saw (when I was myself a student participant in the fair—and no, it was not my project): “Does light travel through the dark?” Setup: light-tight cardboard box painted black on the inside; flashlight shining through a hole in one end; a peephole in the other end to see if the light made it. Any guesses?

-- Tom Murphy

Talking is easy, listening is hard.

Fred de Martines, a pork farmer who does direct marketing

"Anything that real people do in the world is by definition interesting. By 'interesting', I mean worthy of the kind of investigation that puts curiosity and honesty well before judgment. Judgment may come, but only after you’ve done some work." - Timothy Burke

People, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain. Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions, and then again within those twenty-four hours. It's a daily pantomime, one man yielding control to the next: a backstage crowded with old hacks clamoring for their turn in the spotlight. Every week, every day. The angry man hands the baton over to the sulking man, and in turn to the sex addict, the introvert, the conversationalist. Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots.

This is the tragedy of life. Because for a few minutes of every day, every man becomes a genius. Moments of clarity, insight, whatever you want to call them. The clouds part, the planets get in a neat little line, and everything becomes obvious. I should quit smoking, maybe, or here's how I could make a fast million, or such and such is the key to eternal happiness. That's the miserable truth. For a few moments, the secrets of the universe are opened to us. Life is a cheap parlor trick.

But then the genius, the savant, has to hand over the controls to the next guy down the pike, most likely the guy who just wants to eat potato chips, and insight and brilliance and salvation are all entrusted to a moron or a hedonist or a narcoleptic.

The only way out of this mess, of course, is to take steps to ensure that you control the idiots that you become. To take your chain gang, hand in hand, and lead them.

From Memento Mori by Jonathan Nolan

We should try to deserve such luck; we may deserve it by exploiting it.

—George Polya, How to Solve It

Everyone takes the limits of [their] own vision for the limits of the world.

Arthur Schopenhauer

The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. Because, if you can do that, you can do anything. -Waking life (2001)

But mostly there was the knowledge that one day, quite soon, it would be all over. ‘Ah, well, life goes on,’ people say when someone dies. But from the point of view of the person who has just died, it doesn't. It's the universe that goes on. Just as the deceased was getting the hang of everything it's all whisked away, by illness or accident or, in one case, a cucumber. Why this has to be is one of the imponderables of life, in the face of which people either start to pray… or become really, really angry.

Terry Pratchett, The Last Hero

Solve the problem, not the person

Found here.

It seems to be a misquotation of this.

We are 'naturally' in ideology, our natural sight is ideological.

-- Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies

"A car with a broken engine cannot drive backward at 200 mph, even if the engine is really really broken."

--Eliezer

If goods don't cross borders, armies will.

Frédéric Bastiat.

[The people of my kingdom] rely on me. I can't imagine what might happen to them if I was gone. But after my brush with death at the hands of the Lich, I realized something: I'm not going to live forever, Finn. I would if I could. But modern science just isn't there yet. So I engineered a replacement who can live forever.

-- Princess Bubblegum

Trinity: "You always told me to stay off the freeway." Morpheus: "Yes, that's true." Trinity: "You said it was suicide." Morpheus: "Then let us hope that I was wrong."

— The Matrix Reloaded

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues.

• G.K. Chesterton

Suppose you were misguidedly to give your own child poison. The fact that you might think the poison you were administering was good for your child, the fact that you might have gone to a lot of trouble to obtain this poison, and that if it were not for all your efforts your child would not even been there to be offered it, none of this would give you a right to administer the poison—at most, it would only make you less culpable when the child died.

• Nicholas Humphrey

We could bemoan these legacies, but it makes more sense to confront them head on, to consider just how we should live not in light of the bodies we wish we had but instead with the ones we are born with, bodies that evolved in the wild, thanks to ancestors who only just barely got away.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_evolution/2012/10/evolution_of_anxiety_humans_were_prey_for_predators_such_as_hyenas_snakes.2.html

Something now appears to you as an error which you used to love as a truth, or as a probability. You cast this opinion aside and imagine that your reason has thereby gained a victory. But perhaps that error was as necessary for you then - for the old "you" (you are always another person) - as all your current "truths" : that "error" being a skin as it were which concealed and veiled from you much that you were not yet permitted to see. Your new life and not your reason has killed that opinion for you: you do not need it any longer, and now it breaks down of its own accord and the irrationality crawls out of it as a worm into the light. When we criticize something it is not something arbitrary and impersonal, it is, at least very often, a proof that there are lively, active forces in us which are growing and need to shed a skin. We deny, and must deny, because something in us wants to live and affirm itself, something which we perhaps do not as yet know or do not as yet see! There is so much in favour of criticism.

Nietzsche, The Gay Science

The only truly lost cause is that which has been abandoned / Being able to accept defeat is part of winning / But if I must die, it is better to die fighting

-Mägo de Oz

The woman's prefix indicated that she was stationed in Nebraska, at the new North Platte Special Routing Facility, which specializes in mental-health emergencies among a selected group of high-risk clients who aren't aware of having been so identified. Because of the late hour, North Platte must have been experiencing a lull and taking on non-specific system demands.

The Unbinding by Walter Kirn