Rationality Quotes Thread February 2016

The truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest.

Rabindranath Tagore in The Fourfold Way of India (1924)

“It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously,” Daniel Kahneman noted, “but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.”

Superforcasting, p. 85

"The remedy lies, indeed, partly in charity, but more largely in correct intellectual habits, in a predominant, ever-present disposition to see things as they are, and to judge them in the full light of an unbiased weighing of evidence applied to all possible constructions, accompanied by a withholding of judgment when the evidence is insufficient to justify conclusions.

I believe that one of the greatest moral reforms that lies immediately before us consists in the general introduction into social and civic life of that habit of mental procedure which is known in investigation as the method of multiple working hypotheses. "

-T. C. Chamberlin from: http://www.mantleplumes.org/WebDocuments/Chamberlin1897.pdf

It is knowledge, in general, which is pursued solely by man, and which is pursued for the sake of knowledge itself, because its acquisition is truly delightful, and is unlike the pleasures desirable from other pursuits [...] For the good cannot be brought forth, and evil cannot be avoided, except by knowledge.

Abu Rayhan al-Birūni

For superforecasters, beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded. It would be facile to reduce superforecasting to a bumper-sticker slogan, but if I had to, that would be it.

Philip E. Tetlock in Superforecasting

Context: Brady is talking about a safari he took and the life the animals he saw were leading.

Brady: It really was very base, everything was about eating and not dying, pretty amazing.

Grey: Yeah, that is exactly what nature is, that's why we left.

-- Hello internet (link, animated)

Might be more anti-naturalist than strictly rationalist, but I think it still qualifies.

If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so. Words and thoughts don’t change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart—reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn’t care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn’t. You deal with it, and you get on with your life.

Little children don’t know that. Magical thinking: that’s what Freud called it. Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children. The separation of word and thing are the essential facts on which our adult lives are founded.

--Professor Fogg in The Magicians by Lev Grossman, p. 248

No matter how brilliant our scientist is, or how intricately he himself understands his discovery, if he fails to convey it to the scientific community in such a way that they have ready access to it and can understand it, unfortunately that community will not benefit from what he has discovered. The moral of this story is that the means by which knowledge is conveyed are every bit as important as that knowledge itself.

Barry Smith in Applied Ontology

Though evolution, as such, did encounter resistance, particularly from some religious groups, it was by no means the greatest of the difficulties the Darwinians faced. That difficulty stemmed from an idea that was more nearly Darwin’s own. All the well-known pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories—those of Lamarck, Chambers, Spencer, and the German Naturphilosophen—had taken evolution to be a goal-directed process.

The “idea” of man and of the contemporary flora and fauna was thought to have been present from the first creation of life, perhaps in the mind of God. That idea or plan had provided the direction and the guiding force to the entire evolutionary process.

For many men the abolition of that teleological kind of evolution was the most significant and least palatable of Darwin’s suggestions. The Origin of Species recognized no goal set either by God or nature.

Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

In my experience on this planet, anything that is both important and corruptible (without detection) is already corrupted.

Scott Adams

Does this fit with your experience? As a cynical economist, I'm pleasantly surprised at how non-corrupt grading is at U.S. colleges.

Waste not your Hour, nor in the vain pursuit Of This and That endeavour and dispute; Better be jocund with the fruitful Grape Than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit.

Omar Khayyam http://classics.mit.edu/Khayyam/rubaiyat.html Verse LIV

Part of what the acceptance of Ohm’s Law demanded was a redefinition of both ‘current’ and ‘resistance’; if those terms had continued to mean what they had meant before, Ohm’s Law could not have been right; that is why it was so strenuously opposed as, say, the Joule-Lenz Law was not.

Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

I will either find a way, or make one. God has given to man no sharper spur to victory than contempt of death.

As quoted by Livy, Ab urbe condita Book XXI, 44, as translated by Aubrey De Sélincourt, in The War with Hannibal (1965). - Wikiquote

If the development by the enemy as well as by us of thermonuclear weapons could have been averted, I think we would be in a somewhat safer world today than we are...I do not think we want to argue technical questions here, and I do not think it is very meaningful for me to speculate as to how we would have responded had the technical picture at that time been more as it was later.

However, it is my judgement in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. I do not think anybody opposed making it; there were some debates about what to do with it after it was made. I cannot very well imagine if we had known in late 1949 what we got to know by early 1951 that the tone of our report would have been the same.

--Robert Oppenheimer testifying in his defense in his 1954 security hearings, discussing the American reaction to the first successful Russian test of an atomic bomb and the debate whether to develop the "super" hydrogen bombs with vastly higher explosive power; from volume II of the Oppenheimer hearing transcripts, pg 95/266

It really is a nice theory. The only defect I think it has is probably common to all philosophical theories. It's wrong. You may suspect me of proposing another theory in its place; but I hope not, because I'm sure it's wrong too if it is a theory.

Saul A. Kripke in Naming and Necessity

The actual developments of society during this period were determined, not by a battle of conflicting ideals, but by the contrast between an existing state of affairs and that one ideal of a possible future society which the socialists alone held up before the public. Very few of the other programs which offered themselves provided genuine alternatives. Most of them were mere compromises or half-way houses between the more extreme types of socialism and the existing order. All that was needed to make almost any socialist proposal appear reasonable to these "judicious" minds who were constitutionally convinced that the truth must always lie in the middle between the extremes, was for someone to advocate a sufficiently more extreme proposal. There seemed to exist only one direction in which we could move, and the only question seemed to be how fast and how far the movement should proceed.

FA Hayek, Intellectuals and Socialism. The warning against the golden mean fallacy is useful but standard, what I like best about this quote is that it brought to my attention the importance of imagination in political reforms. I think this implies we'll get more and better thinking at the margins of policy if there are many different views about policy's grand goals.

If we consider an actual territory (a) say, Paris, Dresden, Warsaw, and build up a map (b) in which the order of these cities would be represented as Dresden, Paris, Warsaw; to travel by such a map would be misguiding, wasteful of effort. In case of emergencies, it might be seriously harmful. We could say that such a map was 'not true', or that the map had a structure not similar to the territory (...). We should notice that:

A) A map may have a structure similar ot dissimilar to the structure of the territory.

B) Two similar structures have similar 'logical' characteristics. Thus, if in a correct map, Dresden is given as between Paris and Warsaw, a similar relation is found in the actual territory.

C) A map is not the territory.

D) An ideal map would contain the map of the map, the map of the map of the map, etc. endlessly. (...) We may call it self-reflexiveness.

Languages share with the map the above four characteristics.

A) Languages have structure, thus we may have languages of elementalistic structure such as 'space' and 'time', 'observer' and 'observed', 'body' and 'soul', 'senses' and 'mind', 'intellect' and 'emotions', 'thinking' and 'feeling', 'thought' and 'intuition', etc., which allow verbal division or separation. Or we may have languages of non-elementalistic structure such as 'space-time', the new quantum languages (...); also the mathematical languages of 'order', 'relation', 'structure', 'function', 'variable', 'invariant', 'difference', 'addition', 'division' (...).

B) If we use languages of a structure non-similar to the world and our nervous system, our verbal predictions are not verified empirically, we cannot be 'rational' or adjusted. We would have to copy the animals in their wasteful and painful 'trial and error' performances, as we have done through human history. In science we would be handicapped by semantic blockages, lack of creativeness, lack of understanding, lack of vision, disturbed by inconsistencies, paradoxes, etc.

C) Words are not the things they represent.

D) Language also has self-reflective characteristics. We use language to speak about language (...).

-- Alfred Korzybski: Science and Sanity

People think you speak your own pain because you demand recognition and sympathy or you're playing a victim. Rarely do you realise you speak your pain to save someone else from the demons in their own mind. That's what it's like being a survivor.

-Grace Durbin in The Survivor

If you are willing to do only what is easy, life will be hard. But if you are willing to do what’s hard, life will be easy

The mentality of victim hood and self pity are the worst things that can happen a person. Whether you’ve got a mentall illness, or an offended social justice warrior, islamphobe or racist labeller, or you’re a chansurfing gynophobe or redpiller, it’s better to look at yourself than see hatred in the world.

The actual developments of society during this period were determined, not by a battle of conflicting ideals, but by the contrast between an existing state of affairs and that one ideal of a possible future society which the socialists alone held up before the public. Very few of the other programs which offered themselves provided genuine alternatives. Most of them were mere compromises or half-way houses between the more extreme types of socialism and the existing order. All that was needed to make almost any socialist proposal appear reasonable to these "judicious" minds who were constitutionally convinced that the truth must always lie in the middle between the extremes, was for someone to advocate a sufficiently more extreme proposal. There seemed to exist only one direction in which we could move, and the only question seemed to be how fast and how far the movement should proceed.

FA Hayek, Intellectuals and Socialism.

The warning against the golden mean fallacy is useful but standard, what I like best about this quote is that it brought to my attention the importance of constructive imagination in political reforms. I think this implies we'll get more and better thinking at the margins of policy if there are many different views about what policy's grand goals ought to be.

I was early taught to work as well as play, My life has been one long, happy holiday; Full of work and full of play — I dropped the worry on the way — And God was good to me every day.

I do not think that there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature.

-Verses written on his eighty-sixth birthday (8 July 1925)

• Measured in today's dollars, Rockefeller is the richest person in the history of mankind.

Any real process physically possible is able to be performed provided the knowledge to do so has been acquired.

-Wiki: The beginning of infinity

No one is in control of your happiness but you; therefore, you have the power to change anything about yourself or your life that you want to change.

-Barbara de Angelis

This is an instrumental rationality quote.