Rationality Quotes Thread February 2015

[Charles] Darwin wrote in his autobiography of a habit he called a "golden rule": to immediately write down any observation that seemed inconsistent with his theories--"for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favorable ones."

-Robert Wright, The Moral Animal, p.280

A passion to make the world a better place is a fine reason to study social psychology. Sometimes, however, researchers let their ideals or their political beliefs cloud their judgment, such as in how they interpret their research findings. Social psychology can only be a science if it puts the pursuit of truth above all other goals. When researchers focus on a topic that is politically charged, such as race relations or whether divorce is bad for children, it is important to be extra careful in making sure that all views (perhaps especially disagreeable ones, or ones that go against established prejudices) are considered and that the conclusions from research are truly warranted.

Roy Baumeister & Brad Bushman, Social Psychology and Human Nature, Belmont, 2008, p. 13

A special technique has been developed in mathematics. This technique, when applied to the real world, is sometimes useful, but can sometimes also lead to self-deception. This technique is called modelling. When constructing a model, the following idealization is made: certain facts which are only known with a certain degree of probability or with a certain degree of accuracy, are considered to be "absolutely" correct and are accepted as "axioms". The sense of this "absoluteness" lies precisely in the fact that we allow ourselves to use these "facts" according to the rules of formal logic, in the process declaring as "theorems" all that we can derive from them.

It is obvious that in any real-life activity it is impossible to wholly rely on such deductions. The reason is at least that the parameters of the studied phenomena are never known absolutely exactly and a small change in parameters (for example, the initial conditions of a process) can totally change the result...

In exactly the same way a small change in axioms (of which we cannot be completely sure) is capable, generally speaking, of leading to completely different conclusions than those that are obtained from theorems which have been deduced from the accepted axioms. The longer and fancier is the chain of deductions ("proofs"), the less reliable is the final result.

Complex models are rarely useful (unless for those writing their dissertations).

The mathematical technique of modelling consists of ignoring this trouble and speaking about your deductive model in such a way as if it coincided with reality. The fact that this path, which is obviously incorrect from the point of view of natural science, often leads to useful results in physics is called "the inconceivable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences" (or "the Wigner principle").

-Vladimir Arnold, On Teaching Mathematics

Focus on what something does, rather than what it is.

-- Joshua Engel, Quora

I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults.

Erasmus, Letter to an unidentified friend (1489)

marketing is only legal because it doesn't work most of the time

Dilbert

Hypocrisy doesn't bother me. Everyone's got his ideal, and then the reality of what he can actually deliver. Scratch hypocrisy, and you're more likely to lose the ideal than the reality.

Milo Behr, Beowulf: A Bloody Calculus.

On the dispersing of memes (note: politicised).

The reason that millions of people read books about Islam (even if they don't believe in it) instead of studying Cosmology is that cosmologist don't go around blowing up train stations, turning school girls into sex slaves, executing cartoonists, and crashing airplanes into skyscrapers. The reason why we are having a worldwide discussion about one of the most ridiculous superstitions in the history of humankind (to depict or not to depict a man who lived in the 7th century) is that people get killed because of that superstition.

-Piero Scaruffi

"Suppose you ask your friend Naomi to roll a die without letting you see the result... Having rolled the die Naomi must write down the result on a piece of paper (without showing you) and place it in an envelope...

So some people are happy to accept that there is genuine uncertainty about the number before it is thrown (because its existence is ‘not a fact’), but not after it is thrown. This is despite the fact that our knowledge of the number after it is thrown is as incomplete as it was before."

• Risk Assessment and Decision Analysis with Bayesian Networks, Norman Fenton and Martin Neil, Chapter 1

it helps to be on board with the quasi-positivist idea that the sets of things that can and can’t be done, by any experiment, are not just random collections of engineering details; rather, they’re the scaffolding on which we need to construct our understanding of what’s real.

Scott Aaronson on memcomputing

On the subject of whether or not you can always be correct about the contents of your consciousness:

"Let us therefore look at the bizarre mirror image to blindsight: Anton’s syndrome. Patients who suddenly become completely blind due to a lesion in the visual cortex in some cases keep insisting on stillbeing visually aware. While claiming to be seeing persons, they bump into furniture and show all the other signs of functional blindness. Still, they act as if the phenomenal disappearance of all visually given aspects of reality is not phenomenally available to them. For instance, when pressed by questions concerning their environment, they produce false, but consistent confabulations. They tell stories about nonexisting phenomenal worlds, which they seem to believe themselves, while denying any functional deficit with regard to their ability to see.

-- I still vividly remember one heated debate at an interdisciplinary conference in Germany a number of years ago, at which a philosopher insisted, in the presence of eminent neuropsychologists, that Anton’s syndrome does not exist because a priori it cannot exist. Anton’s syndrome shows how truthful reports about the current contents about one’s own self-consciousness can be dramatically wrong. It would also be an ideal starting point for philosophical debates concerning the incorrigibility -- On a functional construal of judgment, can there be rational, sentient beings that suffer from such a strong dissociation between consciousness and cognition that they are so systematically out of touch with their own conscious experience? Well, in a domain-specific way restricted to internal self-representation and metacognition, there are. Anton’s syndrome gives us good empirical reasons to believe that self-consciousness actually is “such an ill-behaved phenomenon”. Patients suffering from Anton’s syndrome certainly possess the appropriate conceptual sophistication to form rational judgments about their current visual experience. The empirical material interestingly shows us that they simply do not, and this, in all its domain-specificity, is an important and valuable constraint for philosophical theories of consciousness."

Thomas Metzinger, Being No One, p. 235

Science meant looking -- a special kind of looking. Looking especially hard at the things you didn't understand. Looking at the stars, say, and not fearing them, not worshiping them, just asking questions, finding the question that would unlock the door to the next question and the question beyond that.

Robert Charles Wilson, Darwinia

“I’ve said I understand. Stop fighting after you have won.”

Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

This type of man who is devoted to the study of wisdom is always most unlucky in everything, and particularly when it comes to procreating children; I imagine this is because Nature wants to ensure that the evils of wisdom shall not spread further throughout mankind.

Erasmus, The Praise of Folly

"Applause, n. The echo of a platitude."

--Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Word Book

I must respect you before your insults matter to me.

Brandon_Nish Concerning Cyberbullying

Another important factor that influences attraction is similarity… elementary school students prefer other children who perform about as well as they do in academics, sports, and music, and best friends in high school tend to resemble each other in age, race, year in school, and grades. Attributes such as race, ethnic origin, social and educational level, family background, income, and religion do affect attraction in general and marital choice in particular. Also relevant are behavioral patterns such as the degree of gregariousness and drinking and smoking habits. Like pairs with like, and heiresses rarely marry the butler except in the movies.

-P.536-537, Psychology, 8th ed., by Gleitman, Gorss, and Reisberg.

I knew a guy with passion to be a pro golfer and the brain to be a great accountant. He followed his passion. He's homeless now.

I have a 7-second rule. If I need to write down an idea I have about seven seconds before a distraction replaces it. Notepad in all rooms.

Note to terrorists: We cartoonists aren't all unarmed.

Memo to everyone: Unhealthy food is not a gift item.

I need to stop being surprised at how many problems can be solved with clarity alone.

From the Scott Adams (Dilbert creator) Twitter account.

Quote from the comedian Frankie Boyle in his new blog post, about people deciding whether they're offended by his jokes:

Also, a lot of people would form an opinion about the joke without having heard it. It's a feature of late capitalism that we get a lot of information thrown at us, and we have to make snap decisions and form strong opinions without really knowing anything. Sure, if our football club buys a new centre half we might do a bit of research. But often we're just being asked if we should bomb Syria or not, and we're busy, and we just have to say fuck it, yeah, my mate Gavin's in the army, so yeah.

I don’t think you can reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.

– Ben Goldacre

Removed due to formatting issues.

He who wants to know too much knows in the end nothing, and he who conversely believes that some things do not concern him, often victimizes himself, when, for example, the philosopher believes that history is dispensable to him.

-Immanuel Kant, Logic

Bean came up with his plan (the Third Invasion) because he thought there was no ansible, so the invasion fleet would hit the formics just when they found out they had lost the Second Invasion. When he found out there was an ansible, if he'd had the slightest sense in his head, he should have realised that the formics therefore knew they lost the moment it happened, seventy years ago, and thus could have launched their own fleet just as long ago.

• Will Wildman

And even when "truth" can be clearly defined, it is a concept to which natural selection is indifferent.

-Robert Wright, The Moral Animal, p. 272

If you want to use google instead of science to "prove me wrong" then I am happy to call you an imbecile as well as misinformed.

-- Jennifer Hibben-White, "My 15-Day-Old Son May Have Measles", 02/11/2015

If a person doesn’t believe climate change is real, despite all the evidence to the contrary, is that a case of a dumb human or a science that has not earned credibility? We humans operate on pattern recognition. The pattern science serves up, thanks to its winged monkeys in the media, is something like this:

Step One: We are totally sure the answer is X.

Step Two: Oops. X is wrong. But Y is totally right. Trust us this time.

Science isn’t about being right every time, or even most of the time. It is about being more right over time and fixing what it got wrong. So how is a common citizen supposed to know when science is “done” and when it is halfway to done which is the same as being wrong?

You can’t tell. And if any scientist says you should be able to tell when science is “done” on a topic, please show me the data indicating that people have psychic powers.

So maybe we should stop scoffing at people who don’t trust science and ask ourselves why. Ignorance might be part of the problem. But I think the bigger issue is that science is a “mostly wrong” situation by design that is intended to become more right over time. How do you make people trust a system that is designed to get wrong answers more often than right answers? And should we?

Scott Adams

(I think he is wrong about what most climate skeptics are thinking. It seems to me more of a selective reading thing; if the media you see tells you that it's fiercely debated, you're going to think it's fiercely debated by default, rather than know enough to look up the actual state of the field.)

We can't go back, Mat. The Wheel has turned, for better or worse. And it will keep on turning, as lights die and forests dim, storms call and skies break. Turn it will. The wheel is not hope, and the Wheel does not care, the Wheel simply is. But so long as it turns, folk may hope, folk may care. For with light that fades, another will eventually grow, and each storm that rages must eventually die. Thom Merrilin, The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

(For those unfamiliar with the series, the Wheel is basically reality/the universe)

Indecision and delays are the parents of failure.

George Canning, source.

For example: most men have inner conflicts of values; these conflicts, in most lives, take the form of small irrationalities, petty inconsistencies, mean little evasions, shabby little acts of cowardice, with no crucial moments of choice, no vital issues or great, decisive battles--and they add up to the stagnant, wasted life of a man who has betrayed all his values by the method of a leaking faucet.

--Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto

“What about honor and ethics?” “We’ve got honor in us, but it’s our own code...not the make-believe rules some frightened little man wrote for the rest of the frightened little men. Every man’s got his own honor and ethics, and so long as he sticks to ’em, who’s anybody else to point the finger? You may not like his ethics, but you've no right to call him unethical.”

-Alfred Bester, in The Demolished Man chapter 6 p 84, according to wikiquote

An open mind is like to an open wound. Vulnerable to poison. Liable to fester. Apt to give its owner only pain.

Joe Abercrombie, Before They Are Hanged

Just something I've observed:

When "denial of death" can actually keep people from dying, we call it "effective health care," or words to that effect.