Rationality Quotes November 2009

It has always appalled me that really bright scientists almost all work in the most competitive fields, the ones in which they are making the least difference. In other words, if they were hit by a truck, the same discovery would be made by somebody else about 10 minutes later.

--Aubrey de Grey

"When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to?"

--George Bernard Shaw, A Treatise on Parents and Children (1910)

Today, safe flight inside clouds is possible using gyroscopic instruments that report the airplane’s orientation without being misled by centrifugal effects. But the pilot’s spatial intuition is still active, and often contradicts the instruments. Pilots are explicitly, emphatically trained to trust the instruments and ignore intuition—precisely the opposite of the Star Wars advice—and those who fail to do so often perish.

-- Gary Drescher "Good and Real"

(I really like this quote as a counterweight to the ubiquitous cliche-advise to follow you intuition. Often, your intuition may be fooled. And, it cannot be repeated often enough, Good and Real is a must-read for LW-minded folks)

CAESAR [recovering his self-possession]: "Pardon him. Theodotus, he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."

--George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra (1898)

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying." --Woody Allen

It helps to stop worrying about what you are and concentrate on what you do. If you think of a poet as a person with some special qualifications that come by nature (or divine favor), you are likely to make one of two mistakes about yourself. If you think you've got what it takes, you may fail to learn what you need to know in order to use whatever qualities you may have. On the other hand, if you think you do not have what it takes, you may give up too easily, thinking it is useless to try. A poet is someone - you, me, anyone - who writes poems. That question out of the way, now we can learn to write poems better.

Judson Jerome, The Poet's Handbook, Chap. 1 ("From Sighs and Groans to Art")

Your calendar never lies. All we have is our time. The way we spend our time is our priorities, is our "strategy." Your calendar knows what you really care about. Do you?

-- Tom Peters, HT Ben Casnocha

Just a few centuries ago, the smartest humans alive were dead wrong about damn near everything. They were wrong about gods. Wrong about astronomy. Wrong about disease. Wrong about heredity. Wrong about physics. Wrong about racism, sexism, nationalism, governance, and many other moral issues. Wrong about geology. Wrong about cosmology. Wrong about chemistry. Wrong about evolution. Wrong about nearly every subject imaginable.

-- Luke Muehlhauser

In general, we are least aware of what our minds do best.

— Marvin Minsky

As a rule, people judged themselves according to their intentions and others according to results. In study after study, individuals ranked themselves as more charitable, more compassionate, more conscientious than others, not because they in fact were - but because they wanted to be these things and were almost entirely blind to the fact that others wanted the same. Intentions were all important when it came to self-judgement, and pretty much irrelevant when it came to judging others. The only exceptions, it turned out, were loved ones.

That was what it meant to be a 'significant' other: to be included in the circle of delusions that everyone used to exempt themselves.

-- Scott Bakker, Neuropath

Politicians compete to bribe voters with their own money.

--Adapted from something in The Economist (sorry, they don't have bylines)

I will repeat this point again until I get hoarse: a mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point. —Nicholas Nassim Taleb

"My style" sure makes a great crutch for putting off learning how to draw better, doesn't it?

Egypt "peganthyrus" Urnash, comment thread, "a quick drawing lesson", July 17, 2008

... by natural selection our mind has adapted itself to the conditions of the external world. It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

— Henri Poincaré

"Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened."

-- Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

"Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite."

--Andrew S. Grove

„The hard part is actually being rational, which requires that you postpone the fun but currently irrelevant arguments until the pressing problem is solved, even perhaps with the full knowledge that you are actually probably giving them up entirely. Delaying gratification in this manner is not a unique difficulty faced by transhumanists. Anyone pursuing a long-term goal, such as a medical student or PhD candidate, does the same. The special difficulty that you will have to overcome is the difficulty of staying on track in the absence of social support or of appreciation of the problem, and the difficulty of overcoming your mind’s anti-religion defenses, which will be screaming at you to cut out the fantasy and go live a normal life, with the normal empty set of beliefs about the future and its potential.”

– Michael Vassar

The whole of science consists of data that, at one time or another, were inexplicable.

— Brendan O’Regan

"But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil." - Robert Heinlein (SISL)

Quotation - yes, but how differently persons quote! I am as much informed of your genius by what you select, as by what you originate. I read the quotation with your eyes, & find a new & fervent sense... For good quoting, then, there must be originality in the quoter - bent, bias, delight in the truth, & only valuing the author in the measure of his agreement with the truth which we see, & which he had the luck to see first. And originality, what is that? It is being; being somebody, being yourself, & reporting accurately what you see & are. If another's words describe your fact, use them as freely as you use the language & the alphabet, whose use does not impair your originality. Neither will another's sentiment or distinction impugn your sufficiency. Yet in proportion to your reality of life & perception, will be your difficulty of finding yourself expressed in others' words or deeds.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, Oct.-Nov. 1867

"I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this." - Emo Phillips

"Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms." - Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair

There are two different types of people in the world,those who want to know,and those who want to believe.--Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche

"You can tell the truth but you better have a fast horse." - Rita Mae Brown

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.

-- Dorothy L. Sayers

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience, it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

— Leonardo da Vinci

Memory belongs to the imagination. Human memory is not like a computer which records things; it is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention.

— Alain Robbe-Grillet

A cynic is what an idealist calls a realist.

From the Yes, Minister TV show.

Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has come, stop thinking and go in.

-- Napoleon Bonaparte

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

-- G. K. Chesterton

No man knows the state of another; it is always to some more or less imaginary man that the wisest and most honest adviser is speaking.

-- Thomas Carlyle, Advice to Young Men

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

-- Alan Kay

"We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones." - Francois de La Rochefoucauld

A pair of the same species:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. —Yeats

The trouble with this world is that the ignorant are certain, and the intelligent are full of doubt. —George Bernard Shaw

Phfft! Facts. You can use them to prove anything.

-- Homer Simpson

There's no difference between a pessimist who says, "Oh it's hopeless, so don’t bother doing anything." and an optimist who says, "Don't bother doing anything, it's going to turn out fine anyways. Either way, nothing happens.

--Yvon Chouinard

Never give in - never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

Winston Churchill, 29 October 1941

"Isn't it pretty to think so."

-- Ernest Hemingway, The Sun also Rises

"In Life's name, and for Life's sake, I say that I will use the Art for nothing but the service of Life. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; and I will change no object or creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so---till Universe's end."

-- The Wizard's Oath (from So You Want To Be A Wizard by Diane Duane)

I don’t want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to — I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine, and I can know much more, I could experience so much more, but I’m trapped in this absurd body.

-- John Cavil (Battlestar Galactica character)

Isn't it interesting how many of us will spend a lot of money on clothes (or for that matter, other valued possessions) we rarely use-- that beautiful cocktail dress or sharp looking shirt. But in our every day, we much prefer to wear clothes that are years old, beat up, and probably cost little when we bought them. Yes, the comfort factor plays heavily into this, but recently when I came home wearing a very nice suit and tie and couldn't WAIT to tear them off and change into some old jeans and a ten year old sweatshirt, I suddenly thought something's odd about this. An expensive suit, or a fountain pen you only use to write your name occasionally, a new car you're often worried about driving because someone might scratch it, the crazy-expensive shoes you never wear in bad weather, the fabulously delicate silk lingerie you haven't worn since buying it six months ago... the list is surprisingly long. In other words for many, we continue to pay lots of money for things that make us uncomfortable, worried, wary or worse.

Jonathan Carroll

Objectivity must be operationally defined as fair treatment of data, not absence of preference. —Stephen Jay Gould

Our actions generally satisfy us: we recognize that they are in the main coherent, and that they make appropriate, well-timed contributions to our projects as we understand them. So we safely assume them to be the product of processes that are reliably sensitive to ends and means. That is, they are rational, in one sense of that word. But that does not mean they are rational in a narrower sense: the product of serial reasoning.

-- Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained

The history of the world is the history of the triumph of the heartless over the mindless.

From the Yes, Minister TV show.

Logical positivism was the most valiant concerted effort ever mounted by modern philosophers. Its failure, or put more generously, its shortcoming, was caused by ignorance of how the brain works. That in my opinion is the whole story. No one, philosopher or scientist, could explain the physical acts of observation and reasoning in other than highly subjective terms. [...] The canonical definition of objective scientific knowledge avidly sought by the logical positivists is not a philosophical problem nor can it be attained, as they hopes, by logical and semantic analysis. It is an empirical question that can be answered only by a continuing probe of the physical basis of the thought process itself. The most fruitful procedures will almost certainly include the use of artificial intelligence, aided in time by the still embryonic field of artificial emotion, to simulate complex mental operations.

--- Edward O. Wilson, Consilience

"The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"Construing a rock as conscious via a joke interpretation is paradoxical only insofar as it seems to suggest that we should therefore respect and care about rocks. Resolving the paradox requires a theory of what we are obligated to respect or care about, and why." - Gary Drescher

Isn't it interesting how many of us will spend a lot of money on clothes (or for that matter, other valued possessions) we rarely use-- that beautiful cocktail dress or sharp looking shirt. But in our every day, we much prefer to wear clothes that are years old, beat up, and probably cost little when we bought them. Yes, the comfort factor plays heavily into this, but recently when I came home wearing a very nice suit and tie and couldn't WAIT to tear them off and change into some old jeans and a ten year old sweatshirt, I suddenly thought something's odd about this. An expensive suit, or a fountain pen you only use to write your name occasionally, a new car you're often worried about driving because someone might scratch it, the crazy-expensive shoes you never wear in bad weather, the fabulously delicate silk lingerie you haven't worn since buying it six months ago... the list is surprisingly long. In other words for many, we continue to pay lots of money for things that make us uncomfortable, worried, wary or worse.

(Jonathan Carroll)[http://www.jonathancarroll.com/blog1/2009/12]/carrollblog_125_9.html

Love consists of overestimating the differences between one woman and another. —George Bernard Shaw

(OK, it's sexist. I admit it.)

I believe that scientists can change fields easily and sometimes make bigger impact in the new fields they enter. I think it’s because people who move do not look at the same problem from the traditional point-of-view. This enables us to come up with unique solutions. We are not trapped by dogma and if we are bold we can rise quickly.

-- Aubrey de Grey

Perhaps he thinks that philosophy is the creation of a man, a book like the Iliad or Orlando Furioso, in which the least important thing is whether what is written in them is true.

-- Galileo Galilei, The Assayer

We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.

--Harold Bloom

"Admiration is the state furthest from understanding." - Sosuke Aizen, Bleach

Who stops you from inventing waterproof gunpowder?

-- Kozma Prutkov

"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence." - Robert Frost

What do I care for your suffering? Pain, even agony, is no more than information before the senses, data fed to the computer of the mind. The lesson is simple: you have received the information, now act on it. Take control of the input and you shall become master of the output.

-- Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

„Someone willing to embrace unreasonable arguments for his group shows a willingness to continue supporting them no matter which way the argument winds blow."

– Robin Hanson

Infinite is an undirect way to speak of the finite; more precisely infinity is about finite dynamical processes.

-- Jean-Yves Girard

Science involves confronting our ‘absolute stupidity’. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown.

Martin A. Schwartz

“I was forced into a measure that no one ever adopts voluntarily: I was impelled to think. God, was it difficult! The moving about of great secret trunks. In the first exhausted halt, I wondered whether I had ever thought.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, found here.

Wondrous yes, but not miraculous

Star Trek, Richard Manning & Hans Beimler, Who Watches the Watchers? (reworded)

„Most people become uninsurable at some point in their lives. It therefore makes sense to find out how affordable it can be to fund your (cryonic) suspension with the incredible financial leverage that only life insurance provides. It the case of cryonicists, the policy can truly become LIFE insurance-- not DEATH insurance.”

– Rudi Hoffman

So few of us really think. What we do is rearrange our prejudices.

-- George Vincent

I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.

-- A. R. Ammons

This is my last one for the month, it seems.

"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things." - Rene Descartes

"It is one thing to show a man that he is in error,| and another to put him in possession of the truth." (John Locke)

http://www.dorktower.com/2009/12/04/dork-tower-friday-december-4-2009-mayadamus/

Never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity.

-- unknown

The second advantage claimed for naturalism is that it is equivalent to rationality, because it assumes a model of reality in which all events are in principle accessible to scientific investigation.

-- Phillip E. Johnson

You need someone who can convert philosophical verbiages into rigorous models. Physicists are best trained to model things. Mathematicians/Logicians best trained to deeply analyze such models. Computer scientists are best trained to finding efficient algorithms for (relatively) well-defined problems. It is likely that all make valuable and essential contributions to the grand goal of AI.

-- Marcus Hutter

The absence of alternatives clarifies your mind marvelously. —Kissinger

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

-- Albert Einstein

Disillusionment is what little heroes are made of.

E.K. Hornbeck in Inherit the wind

... If the machine seemed a functional object to the artist, an instrument whose significance was that it was there to be used - as a typewriter was used for typing a manuscript - so to the engineer it was the communication that was functional. The machine was the art.

• N. Mailer, Of a fire on the moon, 1969

An enemy is a remedy to a malady in your melody, if you're strong not brittle.

The Cat Empire - Protons, Neutrons, Electrons

The weakness of thinking machines is that they actually believe all the information they receive, and react accordingly.

• Dune: The Machine Crusade

Methusaleh lived nine hundred years. But who calls dat livin’ when no gal will give in, to no one who’s nine hundred years?

Attributed to Gershwin by Donald Knuth