Rationality Quotes - April 2009

Sheldon: "More wrong?" Wrong is an absolute state and not subject to gradation.

Stuart: Of course it is. It's a little wrong to call a tomato a vegetable; it's very wrong to say it's a suspension bridge.

-- The Big Bang Theory

Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.

-- Randall Munroe

If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world, and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

-- E. B. White

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Aristotle

You cannot improve the world just by being right.

-- Confusion, Why functional programming doesn't catch on

I wish to propose for the reader’s favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

Bertrand Russell, ‘Introduction’, in Sceptical Essays, London, 1928

Most things are, in fact, slippery slopes. And if you start backing off from one thing because it's a slippery slope, who knows where you'll stop?

Sean M Burke

When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.

-- Richard Dawkins

One disadvantage of having a little intelligence is that one can invent myths out of his own imagination, and come to believe them. Wild animals, lacking imagination, almost never do disastrously stupid things out of false perceptions of the world about them. But humans create artificial disasters for themselves when their ideology makes them unable to perceive where their own self-interest lies.

-- E.T. Jaynes, Probability Theory as Logic [pdf].

We're descended from the indignant, passionate tellers of half truths who in order to convince others, simultaneously convinved themselves. Over generations success had winnowed us out, and with success came our defect, carved deep in the genes like ruts in a cart track—when it didn't suit us we couldn't agree on what was in front of us. Believing is seeing. That's why there are divorces, border disputes and wars, and why this statue of the Virgin Mary weeps blood and that one of Ganesh drinks milk. And that was why metaphysics and scince were such courageous enterprises, such startling inventions, bigger than the wheel, bigger than agriculture, human artifacts set right against the grain of human nature.

-- Ian McEwan, Enduring Love (1998, p. 181)

There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.

--Daniel Dennett

Reason means truth, and those who are not governed by it take the chance that someday a sunken fact will rip the bottom out of their boat.

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr

The greatest enemy of truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived, and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, pervasive, and unrealistic.

-- John F. Kennedy

(For those interested, I'm pulling most of these quotes from Rational Choice in an Uncertain World by Robyn Dawes, which I just began)

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?

Elizabeth Anscombe: I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Well what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?

Truth emerges much more readily from error than from confusion.

Francis Bacon

He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.

John McCarthy

"Faced with the choice of changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof." -- John Kenneth Galbraith

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

--Aldous Huxley

"Trying to be happy is like trying to build a machine for which the only specification is that it should run noiselessly." -- (unknown)

"Fifth Law of Decision Making: Decisions are justified by benefits to the organization; they are made by considering benefits to the decision makers." - Archibald Putt

We consider ourselves distinguished from the ape by the power of thought. We do not remember that it is like the power of walking in the one-year-old. We think, it is true, but we think so badly that I often feel it would be better if we did not.

-- Bertrand Russell in Faith and Mountains

We learn about who someone is by the choices they make when the choice isn't obvious.

-- Ben Casnocha

When the spiritual teacher and his disciples began their evening meditation, the cat who lived in the monastery made such noise that it distracted them. So the teacher ordered that the cat be tied up during the evening practice. Years later, when the teacher died, the cat continued to be tied up during the meditation session. And when the cat eventually died, another cat was brought to the monastery and tied up. Centuries later, learned descendants of the spiritual teacher wrote scholarly treatises about the religious significance of tying up a cat for meditation practice.

-- Zen Stories to Tell Your Neighbors http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/zenstory/ritualcat.html

You're never aware of your current point of view, only of previous ones.

-- William T. Powers

"They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -- Carl Sagan

"Science is interesting and if you don't agree, you can fuck off."

-- Richard Dawkins quoting a former editor of New Scientist magazine.

"People will then often say, 'But surely it's better to remain an Agnostic just in case?' This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I've been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would choose not to worship him anyway.)" -- Douglas Adams

Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.

-- Scott Adams

Information wants to be anthropomorphized. ~ Anonymous

Over on Hacker News mechanical_fish explains science

I don't believe anything which hasn't been replicated by a skeptic, because people are too trusting and hopeful and are blind to their own mistakes. Frankly, your equipment is probably broken and your students are probably ignorant; I only trust myself. And, come to think of it, I don't even trust me very much -- I should convince my skeptics to replicate my results so that I can believe me.

...natural selection built the brain to survive in the world and only incidentally to understand it at a depth greater than is needed to survive. The proper task of scientists is to diagnose and correct the misalignment.

-E. O. Wilson

"[T]he purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity." - Calvin, Bill Watterson's "Calvin and Hobbes"

"Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned." -- Avicenna, Medieval Philosopher

Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

Alan Perlis (concerning computer programs, but I think the same is commonly true elsewhere)

The fundamental insight triggered by memetic studies is that a belief may spread without necessarily being true or helping the human being holding the belief in any way.

-- Keith Stanovich, The Robot's Rebellion (p. xii)

Protein engineering is often approached as if it were part of biology. Imagine approaching aerospace engineering as if it were part of ornithology: Although the pioneers of human flight learned a lot about wings from birds, if they had waited for success in making artificial feathers and artificial muscle, we’d still be on the ground.

--K. Eric Drexler

Philosophy easily triumphs over past and future evils. But present ones, prevail over it.

Maxim 22 François de La Rochefoucauld

I worry far more about the "promising" stock market, particularly the "safe" blue chip stocks, than I do about speculative ventures -- the former present invisible risks, the latter offer no surprises since you know how volatile they are and can limit your downside by investing smaller amounts... I am very aggressive when I can gain exposure to positive Black Swans -- when a failure would be of small moment -- and very conservative when I am under threat from a negative Black Swan. I am very aggressive when an error in a model can benefit me, and paranoid when an error can hurt.

-- Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan

"Even in the games of children there are things to interest the greatest mathematician." G.W. Leibniz

"Dear is Plato, dearer still is truth."

-Aristotle

There will always be a large difference between those who'd ask themselves "why won't things work as they are meant to" and those asking themselves "how could I get them to work". For the moment being, the human world belongs to those who would ask "why". But the future belongs, necessarily, to those who'd ask themselves "how".

Bernard Werber

"This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." -- Wolfgang Pauli, on a paper submitted by a physicist colleague

Reposting from the Open Thread:

From the Profit by "Kehlog Albran":

What lives longer? A Mayfly or a Cyprus tree?

If you answer a Mayfly then you are very perceptive: you realize that in time and space, time is relative and the short life of the Mayfly could be mysteriously longer than the life of the mighty Cyprus.

If you answered a Cyprus then you are unimaginative, but correct.

If it were true that every innate predisposition of an organism were the result of some selectional pressure, then I would have to conclude that my dog has been selected for chasing tennis balls.

-- John Searle

I am not looking for intelligent disagreement any longer.... What I am looking for is intelligent agreement. ~ Ayn Rand

Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.

-- St. Paul. (Phillipians 4:8)

(Yes, yes, someone who had a major hand in creating Christianity. I know. As context, I first encountered these words in the 1999 "Doomwatch" pilot, where they are spoken at the funeral of Dr Quist, and then googled it.)

Life is short, and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.

--Arthur Schopenhauer

Nature understands no jesting. She is always true, always serious, always severe. She is always right, and the errors are always those of man.

--Goethe

Not exactly a quote, but close enough - http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1993-02-07/

In science there are no “depths”; there is surface everywhere[.]

Otto Neurath, ‘The Scientific Conception of the World: the Vienna Circle’, in Marie Neurath and Robert S. Cohen (eds.), Otto Neurath: Empiricism and Sociology, Dordrecht, 1973, p. 306

"I have no need of that hypothesis." -- Laplace to Napoleon

Fifth and last.

Don't learn tricks, learn juggling.

-- Anon

The man of science, whatever his hopes may be, must lay them aside while he studies nature; and the philosopher, if he is to achieve truth, must do the same. Ethical considerations can only legitimately appear when the truth has been ascertained: they can and should appear as determining our feeling towards the truth, and our manner of ordering our lives in view of the truth, but not as themselves dictating what the truth is to be.

Bertrand Russell, ‘Mysticism and Logic’, in John G. Slater (ed.), The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, London, 1986, vol. 8, p. 33

Before we study Zen, the mountains are mountains and the rivers are rivers. While we are studying Zen, however, the mountains are no longer mountains and the rivers are no longer rivers. But then, when our study of Zen is completed, the mountains are once again mountains and the rivers once again rivers.

-- Buddhist saying

I wish I loved the Human Race; I wish I loved its silly face; I wish I liked the way it walks; I wish I liked the way it talks; And when I'm introduced to one, I wish I thought "What Jolly Fun!"

~Sir Walter A Raleigh

"The First Law of Innovation Management: Management by objectives is no better than the objectives." - Archibald Putt

"Nature cannot be fooled."

--Richard Feynman

Want to know / How you feel / Want to know / What is real / I want to know / Everything / Everything

--Avril Lavigne

Information wants to be anonymous.

--Anonymous

Give to any hypothesis which is worth your while to consider just that degree of credence which the evidence warrants.

Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, New York, 1945, p. 816

[God] lives on pain. And He must be starved to death.

-- http://www.necronomi.com/projects/amor/

del

In a manner which matches the fortuity, if not the consequence, of Archimedes' bath and Newton's apple, the [3.6 million year old] fossil footprints were eventually noticed one evening in September 1976 by the paleontologist Andrew Hill, who fell while avoiding a ball of elephant dung hurled at him by the ecologist David Western.

~John Reader, Missing Links: The Hunt for Earliest Man

"Never believe a thing simply because you want it to be true." - Diax

'The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.'

• Thomas Jefferson

I had recourse to use this one recently.

Quoting XKCD for cheap points Eliezer - I'll have to pull one of those out next month!

We live in a state of uncertainty, not just in Northern Ireland, but by virtue of being human. What I have tried to do over the last decade is to subject my former beliefs to ruthless scrutiny. Instead of searching for ways to confirm my beliefs, I have searched for ways to prove them false. When, after dispassionate examination, you cannot prove your beliefs false, then perhaps you are on the way to discovering some sort of truth.

-- Eamon Collins, terrorist-turned-informer, from his memoir Killing Rage

"Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason." - David Hume

Note about the selection of this quote: While I am not inclined towards the position that reason is (and ought to be) slave to the passions, I considered this a good quote on the topic of rationality because it concisely presents one of the most fundamental challenges for rationalism as such.

The rationality of our universe is best suggested by the fact that we can discover more about it from any starting point, as if it were a fabric that will unravel from any thread.

George Zebrowski

Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvelous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified.

Thomas Henry Huxley

We define the art of conjecture, or stochastic art, as the art of evaluating as exactly as possible the probabilities of things, so that in our judgments and actions we can always base ourselves on what has been found to be the best, the most appropriate, the most certain, the best advised; this is the only object of the wisdom of the philosopher and the prudence of the statesman.

Jacob Bernoulli

Anthropologist: What's the most important thing to get right when you do a rain dance?

Indian Chief: Timing.

-- Terence Kelly

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth

"I don't like spinach and I'm glad I don't because if I liked it I'd eat it, and I just hate it." -- (unknown)

"First Law of Advice: The correct advice to give is the advice that is desired." - Archibald Putt

The best intelligence test is what we do with our leisure.

• • Dr Laurence J Peter

The difficult thing here is not, to dig down to the ground; no, it is to recognize the ground that lies before us as the ground.

-- Wittgenstein

He that uses his words loosely and unsteadily will either not be minded or not understood. - John Locke

"To understand the secret laws and relations of those high faculties of thought by which all beyond the merely perceptive knowledge of the world and of ourselves is attained or matures, is an object which does not stand in need of commendation to a rational mind."

-George Boole

"It is curious how often you humans manage to obtain that which you do not want."

-Spock

To conquer Chaos one must Learn, To maintain Stability one must Know, The dual struggle can be exhausting. --Donald Kingsbury

Explanations come to an end somewhere.

Ludwig Wittgentstein

"I could beg you to do it in order to save me. I could beg you to do it in order to avert a national disaster. But I won't. These may not be valid reasons. There is only one reason: you must say it, because it is true."

--from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

We never desire passionately what we desire by reason alone.

La Rochefoucauld

deleted

Is it decisive after all that we arrive at that view of God, world, and reconciliation which makes us feel most comfortable? Rather, is not the result of his inquiries something wholly indifferent to the true inquirer? Do we after all seek rest, peace, and pleasure in our inquiries? No, only truth—even if it be most abhorrent and ugly.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Engineering should learn from evolution, but never blindly obey it.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, Creating Friendly AI, 2001

"As far as I know, this computer has never had an undetected error." -- (unknown)

[God] lives on pain. And He must be starved to death.

-- http://www.necronomi.com/projects/amor/

"After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting."

-Spock

"People are limited in their ability to integrate many different pieces of evidence. Computers are not." -- Daphne Koller

"Information wants to be WRONG!" - Sam & Max: Moai Better Blues

"Eat shit. 50 million flies can't be wrong." -- (unknown)