Rationality Quotes November 2011

I just noticed CVS has started stocking homeopathic pills on the same shelves with--and labeled similarly to--their actual medicine. Telling someone who trusts you that you're giving them medicine, when you know you’re not, because you want their money, isn’t just lying--it’s like an example you’d make up if you had to illustrate for a child why lying is wrong.

-- Randall, XKCD #971

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

John W. Gardner

Some years ago I was trying to decide whether or not to move to Harvard from Stanford. I had bored my friends silly with endless discussion. Finally, one of them said, “You’re one of our leading decision theorists. Maybe you should make a list of the costs and benefits and try to roughly calculate your expected utility.” Without thinking, I blurted out, “Come on, Sandy, this is serious.”

-Persi Diaconis

By the way, Diaconis stayed at Stanford. He's giving a public lecture on Nov. 30.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

Voltaire

On precision in aesthetics, metaethics:

RS: Butt-Head, I have a question for you. I noticed that you often say, "I like stuff that's cool." But isn't that circular logic? I mean, what is the definition of "cool," other than an adjective denoting something the speaker likes?

BH: Huh-huh. Uh, did you, like, go to college?

RS: You don't have to go to college to know the definition of "redundant." What I'm saying is that essentially what you're saying is "I like stuff that I like."

B: Yeah. Huh-huh. Me, too.

BH: Also, I don't like stuff that sucks, either.

RS: But nobody likes stuff that sucks!

BH: Then why does so much stuff suck?

B: Yeah. College boy! Huh-huh, huh-huh.

-Rolling Stone, Interview with Beavis and Butt-Head

The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.

Gloria Steinem

It is better to destroy one's own errors than those of others.

Democritus

Opening your eyes doesn't make a bad picture worse.

• http://onefte.com/2011/07/17/bully-for-you/

You can't make a movie and say 'It was all a big accident' - no, it has to be a conspiracy, people plotting together. Because in a story, a story is about intention. A story is not about spontaneous order or complex human institutions which are the product of human action but not of human design - no, a story is about evil people plotting together.

• Tyler Cowen, on the danger of narrative for human reasoning, TED talks (TEDxMidAtlantic) 11/5/09, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoEEDKwzNBw

If I let go of a hammer on a planet that has a positive gravity, I need not see it fall to know that it has in fact fallen. [...] Gentlemen, human beings have characteristics just as inanimate objects do.

-Spock, "Court Martial", Star Trek: The Original Series

In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.

~ Orwell

The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it.

-Alan Saporta

Consider an instance close to hand: arguments on the Internet. Whether the discussion is about abortion or the definition of atheism or the advisability of tax cuts, one might think that the longer the debate continues, the more ideas would emerge. In fact, the reverse is the case. A couple of scientists discussing the proper taxonomy of flesh flies will entertain many options, but thousands of people talking about God will endlessly repeat the same rhetorical moves.

Jim Harrison

Expert estimates of probability are often off by factors of hundreds or thousands. [...] I used to be annoyed when the margin of error was high in a forecasting model that I might put together. Now I view it as perhaps the single most important piece of information that a forecaster provides. When we publish a forecast on FiveThirtyEight, I go to great lengths to document the uncertainty attached to it, even if the uncertainty is sufficiently large that the forecast won’t make for punchy headlines.

Nate Silver

People can learn to look you in the eyes even when they're lying to you. But it's kind of like a fake smile; there are involuntary muscles up there. If you know what you're looking for, you can still tell. But what does it mean if they're looking you in the eyes and they mean it? It means that, at least in that moment, they're doing what they really believe is right. That's the definition of integrity.

That part is easy. That's not the surprising thing.

The surprising thing, to me, was that someone can have integrity and still be completely evil. It's kind of obvious in retrospect; the super-villain in an action movie can always look the hero in the eye, and he always does, just to prove it. He has integrity. Evil with integrity is more respectable, somehow, than plain evil. All it takes to have integrity is to do what you think is right, no matter how stupid that may be.

Beware of people with integrity.

-Avery Pennarun

The nurse recorded the time of death, 9:21 P.M. He discovered, oddly, that the clock had halted at that moment —just the sort of mystical phenomenon that appealed to unscientific people. Then an explanation occurred to him. He knew the clock was fragile, because he had repaired it several times, and he decided that the nurse must have stopped it by picking it up to check the time in the dim light.

[ James Gleick - Genius - The work and Life of Richard Feynman; this is a really chilling passage, which describes the moments just after Feynman's wife has passed away, which devastated him. Somehow, this struck me.]

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.

-Terry Pratchett, Jingo

Sweetie, if you work reaaaaly hard, and focus reaaaaly well, and there aren't that many people who are still better at what you do than you are despite your best efforts, you can be whatever you want. If you don't die.

Zach Weiner, SMBC]

“Tell me, Eben: how is’t, d’you think, that the planets are moved in their courses?”

“Why, said Ebenezer, “’tis that the cosmos is filled with little particles moving in vortices, each of which centers on a star; and ‘tis the subtle push and pull of these particles in our solar vortex that slides the planets along their orbs – is’t not?”

“So saith Descartes,” Burlingame smiled. “And d’you haply recall what is the nature of light?”

“If I have’t right,” replied Ebenezer, “’tis an aspect of the vortices – of the press of inward and outward forces in ‘em. The celestial fire is sent through space from the vortices by this pressure, which imparts a transitional motion to little light globules – ”

“Which Renatus kindly hatched for that occasion,” Burlingame interrupted. “And what’s more he allows his globules both a rectilinear and a rotatary motion. If only the first occurs when the globules smite our retinae, we see white light; if both, we see color. And if this were not magical enough – mirabile dictu! – when the rotatory motion surpasseth the rectilinear, we see blue; when the reverse, we see red; and when the twain are equal, we see yellow. What fantastical drivel!”

“You mean ‘tis not the truth? I must say, Henry, it sounds reasonable to me. In sooth, there is a seed of poetry in it; it hath an elegance.”

“Aye, it hath every virtue and but one small defect, which is, that the universe doth not operate in that wise.”

-John Barth, the Sot-Weed Factor

All scientists despise the ideology of 'breakthroughs' --- I mean the belief that science proceeds from one revelation to another, each one opening up a new world of understanding and advancing still farther a sharp line of demarcation between what is true and what is false. Everyone actually engaged in scientific research knows that this way of looking at things is altogether misleading, and that the frontier between understanding and bewilderment is rather like the plasma membrane of a cell as it creeps over its substratum, a pushing forward here, a retraction there --- an exploratory probing that will eventually move forward the whole body of the cell... in real life, science does not prance from one mountain top to the next.

-Peter Medawar in "Does Ethology Throw Any Light on Human Behavior?"

[,,,]we don't just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions and we defend our own. We gain and lose ground. We plan and use strategies. If we find a position indefensible, we can abandon it and take a new line of attack. Many of the things we do in arguing are partially structured by the concept of war. Though there is no physical battle, there is a verbal battle, and the structure of an argument--attack, defense, counter-attack, etc.---reflects this. It is in this sense that the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor is one that we live by in this culture; its structures the actions we perform in arguing. Try to imagine a culture where arguments are not viewed in terms of war, where no one wins or loses, where there is no sense of attacking or defending, gaining or losing ground. Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently.

-George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By.

Through the discovery of Buchner, Biology was relieved of yet another fragment of mysticism. The splitting up of sugar into CO2 and alcohol is no more the effect of a "vital principle" than the splitting up of cane sugar by invertase. The history of this problem is instructive, as it warns us against considering problems beyond our reach because they have not yet found their solution.

-Jacques Loeb, 1906, on the discovery of the mechanism of glycolysis

I am thinking of coding up a web app for accumulating, voting, and commenting on quotes. Kind of like bash.org but much fancier.

Is that something you guys would be interested in? If so, what features would you want?

This would be free to use of course, and the site would not lock down the data (ie it would be exportable to various formats).

I am thinking there are a lot of communities that post quotes for internal use, and might be interested in a kind of unified web site for this. My initial thought is that it would be like Reddit, where each tribe/community/subculture/topic/etc gets its own subdirectory.

.

Writers of all stripes enjoy engaging in the most cynical readings of human behavior because they think it makes them appear hyper-rational. But in fact here is a perfect example of how trying to achieve that makes you irrational. Human emotion is real. It is an observable phenomenon. It observably influences behavior. Therefore to fail to account for it when discussing coupling and relationships is the opposite of cold rationality; it is in fact a failure of empiricism.

-L'Hote on Kate Bolick's "All the Single Ladies"

Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.

--Thomas Sowell

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

John Adams, Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials

Who first called Reason sweet, I don't know. I suspect that he was a man with very few responsibilities, no children to rear, and no payroll to meet. An anchorite with heretical tendencies, maybe, or the idle youngest son of a wealthy Athenian. The dictates of Reason are often difficult to figure out, rarely to my liking, and profitable only by what seems a happy but remarkably unusual accident. Mostly, Reason brings bad news, and bad news of the worst sort, for, if it is truly the word of Reason, there is no denying it or weaseling out of its demands without simply deciding to be irrational. Thus it is that I have discovered, and many others, I notice, have also discovered, all sorts of clever ways to convince myself that Reason is "mere" Reason, powerful and right, of course, but infinitely outnumbered by reasons, my reasons.

Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire

"The method of 'postulating' what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil. Let us leave them to others and proceed with our honest toil."

Bertrand Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy 1919 ( http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-construction/#Hon )

All scientific work is liable to be upset or modified by advancing knowledge. That does not confer upon us a freedom to ignore the knowledge we already have, or to postpone the action that it appears to demand at a given time.

Who knows, asked Robert Browning, but the world may end tonight? True, but on available evidence most of us make ready to commute on the 8.30 next day.

Austin Bradford Hill, "The Environment and Disease: Association or Causation?"

At sea once more we had to pass the Sirens, whose sweet singing lures sailors to their doom. I had stopped up the ears of my crew with wax, and I alone listened while lashed to the mast, powerless to steer toward shipwreck.

-- Odysseus in Odyssey

A lot of people are interested in predicting the future so that they can orient their present activities accordingly. With a few exceptions we can discuss, I think the future is inherently uncertain and unpredictable. We are way better off if we accept the enormous uncertainty that pervades the world and approach it with a sense of adventure and mystery... There are a couple of small but important exceptions to the unpredictability of the unfolding. We can notice a current reality that is hidden or nonobvious. We might notice the reality by looking at data, watching conversations, or observing practices. We then discuss the reality and its consequences in the near term -- a year or two is easiest, but sometimes we can go up to five years. Management guru Peter Drucker was a master at this; he said that others who rated him as a good prognosticator were wrong because all he was doing was revealing current truths that most of them had missed.

-Peter Denning

I want to give thanks to the divine
Labyrinth of causes and effects
For the diversity of beings
That form this singular universe,
For Reason, that will never give up its dream
Of a map of the labyrinth,

Jorge Luis Borges, “Another poem of gifts” (opening lines).

I never studied science or physics at school, and yet when I read complex books on quantum physics I understood them perfectly because I wanted to understand them. The study of quantum physics helped me to have a deeper understanding of The Secret, on an energetic level.

--Rhonda Byrne (Author of The Secret) (p. 156)

http://lesswrong.com/lw/ip/fake_explanations/
http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical

We do what we must
because we can. 
For the good of all of us.
Except the ones who are dead.

(^_^)

There are not books enough on earth to contain the record of the prophecies Indians and other unauthorized parties have made; but one may carry in his overcoat pockets the record of all the prophecies that have been fulfilled.

-- Mark Twain

We have two classes of forecasters: Those who don't know and those who don't know they don't know.

John Kenneth Galbraith

The captain had a sudden awful thought.
"What's the chance that they've detected the dilithium?"
T'Vau said, "I can only estimate."
"Then do it."
T'Vau said, "Estimated probability one hundred percent."
Trofimov turned to stare at the Vulcan. "That's your guess?"
"It is an estimate," T'Vau said stiffly, "based on the level of Hecht radiation, and a standard survey of Klingon monitoring--"
"Your guess is that you're certain," Trofimov said, feeling slightly dizzy.

John M. Ford, How Much for Just the Planet?

If you don't believe in the innate unreasonableness of human beings, just try raising children.

--Thomas Sowell

If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?

• American proverb

I think, therefore I am perhaps mistaken.

Sharon Fenick

As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.

~Commissioner Pravin Lal, fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

Power is nothing without control.

• a comercial slogan of Pirelli Tyre Company

The correctness of a decision can’t be judged from the outcome. Nevertheless, that’s how people assess it. A good decision is one that’s optimal at the time it’s made, when the future is by definition unknown. Thus, correct decisions are often unsuccessful, and vice versa.

--Howard Marks, The Most Important Thing p.136 (about investing, but applies to other things)

Our civilization is still in a middle stage: scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly ruled by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly ruled by reason.

Theodore Dreiser

As a team converges on a decision—and especially when the leader tips her hand—public doubts about the wisdom of the planned move are gradually suppressed and eventually come to be treated as evidence of flawed loyalty to the team and its leaders.

--Daniel Kahneman

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A Being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much;
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus'd;
Still by himself, abus'd or disabus'd;
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all,
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd;
The glory, jest and riddle of the world.

Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides,
Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;
Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,
Correct old time, and regulate the sun;
Go, soar with Plato to th’ empyreal sphere,
To the first good, first perfect, and first fair;
Or tread the mazy round his followers trod,
And quitting sense call imitating God;
As Eastern priests in giddy circles run,
And turn their heads to imitate the sun.
Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule—
Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!

Alexander Pope

Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens. Thus they might come to be stamped as "necessities of thought," "a priori givens," etc. The path of scientific progress is often made impassable for a long time by such errors. Therefore it is by no means an idle game if we become practiced in analysing long-held commonplace concepts and showing the circumstances on which their justification and usefulness depend, and how they have grown up, individually, out of the givens of experience. Thus their excessive authority will be broken. They will be removed if they cannot be properly legitimated, corrected if their correlation with given things be far too superfluous, or replaced if a new system can be established that we prefer for whatever reason.

— Albert Einstein, obituary for Ernst Mach (1916)

Yet conscious cynicism is much rarer than you might suppose. Few of us have the self-knowledge and emotional discipline to say one thing while meaning another.

David Frum

Look at any photograph or work of art. If you could duplicate exactly the first tiny dot of color, and then the next and the next, you would end with a perfect copy of the whole, indistinguishable from the original in every way, including the so-called "moral value" of the art itself. Nothing can transcend its smallest elements.

~CEO Nwabudike Morgan, fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri...or is he?

Almost anything can be attacked as a failure, but almost anything can be defended as not a significant failure. Politicians do not appreciate the significance of 'significant'.

-- Sir Humphrey Appleby

Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense.

Henry St. John

Science is the assurance of things that exist, hoped for or not, the conviction of things that are actually seen.

Jerry Coyne

I have no fear of ghosts, and I have never heard it said that so much harm had been done by the dead during six thousand years as is wrought by the living in a single day.

-- The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas.

Even more than the easier problem of remembering faces and matching them to favors, the ability of both parties to agree with sufficient accuracy on an estimate of the value of a favor in the first place is probably the main barrier to reciprocal altruism among animals. It is also likely the most important barrier to exchange among humans. Many kinds of exchange, probably many more than most economists perceive, are rendered infeasible by the inability of one or both parties to the exchange to estimate its value.

-Nick Szabo

"If you think a weakness can be turned into a strength, I hate to tell you this, but that's another weakness."

-- Jack Handey

"I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it."

-- Jack Handey

I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even five hundred would be pretty nice.

~CEO Nwabudike Morgan, fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri...or is he?

Your moral feelings are attached to frames, to descriptions of reality rather than to reality itself.

--Daniel Kahneman

It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.

Jacob Bronowski

It seems to me as though people can only manage to see things at all clearly when some political wind or other is blowing from behind them; if they turn against it, it blows directly into their eyes, and they become blinded.

-Hans Georg Fritzsche

I must study the plain physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible, and learn what appears to be wise and right. The subject is difficult, and good men do not agree.

--Abraham Lincoln

Hecataeus of Abdera, a Greek historian who lived at the end of the fourth century BCE, tells an amusing story about a certain march in which he participated during, or just following, Alexander the Great's conquest of the ancient Near East:

"When I was on the march toward the Red Sea, among the escort of Jewish cavalrymen who accompanied us was a certain Mosollamus [Hebrew Meshullam], a very intelligent man, robust, and by common consent, the very best of bowmen, whether Greek or barbarian.

This man, noticing that a number of people were now idling on the path and that the whole force was being held up by a seer who was taking the auguries, asked why they were stopping. The seer pointed to a certain bird he was observing, and told him that if it stayed in that spot, they would do well to wait around for a while. If it got up and flew forward, then they would be free to proceed; if, however, it flew backward, they were to turn back.

The Jew, without saying a word, drew his bow and shot, hitting the bird and killing it. The seer and some of the others became indignant and began heaping curses on him. "What you poor people getting so upset about?" he asked. Then, picking up the bird in his hand, he said: "How could any sound information about our journey have been provided by this poor creature, who was unable to make provision for his own safety? For if he had any gift for divination, he never would have come to this place, for fear of being killed by an arrow from Mosollamus the Jew."

--James L. Kugel, In the Valley of the Shadow pg 156-157 (doesn't provide any further reference)

I used to Code Fearlessly all the time, tearing up everything whenever I had a thought about a better way of doing something. (...) There are all sorts of opportunities to avoid making honest comparisons between the new way and the old way.

-- John Carmack

Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist.

~Academician Prokhor Zakharov, fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. God I wish Zakharov was real.

We cannot defy the laws of probability, because they capture important truths about the world.

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, p. 98

Let us take what the terrain gives.

-Amos Tversky

Reach out and take also from the Tree of Life and eat, and live forever.

David Brin

For Wits are treated just like Common Whores; First they're enjoy'd, and then kickt out of Doors.

--John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester

Why do you insist that the human genetic code is "sacred" or "taboo"? It is a chemical process and nothing more. For that matter -we- are chemical processes and nothing more. If you deny yourself a useful tool simply because it reminds you uncomfortably of your mortality, you have uselessly and pointlessly crippled yourself.

~Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Looking God in the Eye", fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

...ennui is an emotion for rich people. It is like boredom, but more refined, like high-thread-count bed-sheets.

• Charles Yu, Third Class Superhero

The facts are always friendly, every bit of evidence one can acquire, in any area, leads one that much closer to what is true.

-Carl Rogers

Less redundantly,

The facts are always friendly.

The moral, children, is approximately Baconian. Don't think; look. Try not to argue.

Jerry Fodor

"We promise according to our hopes; we fulfill according to our fears."

François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes 38

We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled. But how can we be sure our senses are not being deceived at any particular time, or even all the time? Might I just be a brain in a tank somewhere, tricked all my life into believing in the events of this world by some insane computer? And does my life gain or lose meaning based on my reaction to such solipsism?

-Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7. Activity recorded M.Y. 2302.22467. (TERMINATION OF SPECIMEN ADVISED)

~Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill.

~CEO Nwabudike Morgan, fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri...or is he?

Face your fears or they will climb over your back - Odrade in Frank Herbert’s Chapterhouse: Dune

"It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy, it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either."

-Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light

But wise men pierce this rotten diction
and fasten words again
to visible things.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"We've taken too much for granted And all the time it had grown From the techno seeds we first planted Evolved a mind of its' own"

-Judas Priest 'Metal Gods'

So I found [wrong] things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down--or hardly going up in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress--lots of theory, but no progress--in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.

Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way--or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do "the right thing," according to the experts.

Richard Feynman, "Cargo Cult Science"

I am thinking of coding up a web app for accumulating, voting, and commenting on quotes. Kind of like bash.org but much fancier.

Is that something you guys would be interested in? If so, what features would you want?

This would be free to use of course, and the site would not lock down the data (ie it would be exportable to various formats).

I am thinking there are a lot of communities that post quotes for internal use, and might be interested in a kind of unified web site for this. My initial thought is that it would be like Reddit, where each tribe/community/subculture/topic/etc gets its own subdirectory.

But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

> Our civilization is still in a middle stage: scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly ruled by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly ruled by reason.

Theodore Dreiser

Nature uses only the longest thread to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

Feynman

Fine.

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

-John Cage

Retracted: More I think about it, the less this quote makes sense.

"Nobody ever gets that really mad at somebody unless they are telling the truth."

--Gregory Cochran

Which I would modify to:

Nobody ever gets that really mad at somebody unless they think they are telling the truth.

Which based on feedback I would modify to:

"Nobody ever gets that really mad at somebody unless they fear he will be believed."

I think, and my thoughts cross the barrier into the synapses of the machine - just as the good doctor intended. But what I cannot shake, and what hints at things to come, is that thoughts cross back. In my dreams the sensibility of the machine invades the periphery of my consciousness. Dark. Rigid. Cold. Alien. Evolution is at work here, but just what is evolving remains to be seen.

~Commissioner Pravin Lal, "Man and Machine", "We must Dissent", fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.

Einstein

It is far easier to concentrate power than to concentrate knowledge.

--Thomas Sowell

There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all.

• Bob Dylan (Love minus Zero / No limit)

Tau Ceti flowering: Horrors visited upon neighboring systems must never be repeated. Therefore: if it means the end of our evolution as a species, so be it..

~Caretaker Lular H'minee, "Sacrifice : Life", fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

vs.

Risks of Flowering: considerable. But rewards of godhood: who can measure?

~Usurper Judaa Marr, "Courage : To Question", fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

Where do you stand?

Imagine the entire contents of the planetary datalinks, the sum total of human knowledge, blasted into the Planetmind's fragile neural network with the full force of every reactor on the planet. That is our last-ditch attempt to win humanity a reprieve from extinction at the hands of an awakened alien god.

~Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "Planet Speaks", fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

Seems like a bad strategy of trying to make the planetmind not wipe out humans. It might however preserve some human value in future universe states in those particular circumstances (where the planet mind was awakening and it was going to grow to goodhood and wipe out humans no matter what), since planet mind will probably be infected by some human memes.

"Don't sell yourself to your enemy in advance, in your mind. You can only be defeated here." He touched his hands to his temples.

• Admiral Aral Vorkosigan, Mirror Dance

"Do you know that a man has only one eye which sees and registers everything; this eye, like a superb camera which takes minute pictures, very sharp, tiny -- and with that picture man tells himself: 'This time I know the reality of things,' and he is calm for a moment. Then, slowly superimposing itself on the picture, another eye makes its appearance, invisibly, which makes an entirely different picture for him. Then our man no longer sees clearly, a struggle begins between the first and second eye, the fight is fierce, finally the second eye has the upper hand, takes over and that's the end of it. Now it has command of the situation, the second eye can then continue its work alone and elaborate its own picture according to the laws of interior vision. This very special eye is found here," says Matisse, pointing to his brain.

Let any one examine the wonderful self-regulating and self-adjusting contrivances which are now incorporated with the vapour-engine, let him watch the way in which it supplies itself with oil; in which it indicates its wants to those who tend it; in which, by the governor, it regulates its application of its own strength; let him look at that store-house of inertia and momentum the fly-wheel, or at the buffers on a railway carriage; let him see how those improvements are being selected for perpetuity which contain provision against the emergencies that may arise to harass the machines, and then let him think of a hundred thousand years, and the accumulated progress which they will bring unless man can be awakened to a sense of his situation, and of the doom which he is preparing for himself... we must choose between the alternative of undergoing much present suffering, or seeing ourselves gradually superseded by our own creatures, till we rank no higher in comparison with them, than the beasts of the field with ourselves...

There is reason to hope that the machines will use us kindly, for their existence will be in a great measure dependent upon ours; they will rule us with a rod of iron, but they will not eat us; they will not only require our services in the reproduction and education of their young, but also in waiting upon them as servants; in gathering food for them, and feeding them; in restoring them to health when they are sick; and in either burying their dead or working up their deceased members into new forms of mechanical existence.

-- Samuel Butler, Darwin Among the Machines 1863

A witty quote proves nothing.

Voltaire

Avoid using ad hominems. Instead, use ad meme-inems.