Some rationalistic aphorisms

If you like rationalist aphorisms, you might like Aaron Haspel's Twitter feed. Examples:

Once you start to view human interaction as a contest to signal mating fitness, it becomes hard to view it as anything else.

Nothing is art, but anything can be treated as art.

Even the most disinterested truth-seeker is angling for a world of greater rewards for disinterested truth-seekers.

Polytheism is pre-scientific: monotheism is anti-scientific.

Whatever you do for the sake of the children is probably wrong.

Whatever you do for someone's own good is probably mischief.

Better that X guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted. Solve for X.

Tact consists mostly in disguising the fact that some people are better than others.

Adaptive is not optimal.

You are what you fear to appear to be.

The chief problems in moral philosophy are akrasia and imperfect information. It has mostly pretended that they do not exist.

Whatever you have done, you are the sort of person who would do that.

Misspellers learn from speech, mispronouncers from books.

We all have the strength to refuse what we are not offered.

The people are flattered more obsequiously than the monarch ever was.

The incorruptible politician merely prefers power to money.

Katja Grace pointed out something interesting about aphorisms:

Why do aphorisms and cynicism go together?

A good single sentence saying can’t require background evidencing or further explanation. It must be instantly recognizable as true. It also needs to be news to the listener. Most single sentences that people can immediately verify as true they already believe. What’s left? One big answer is things that people don’t believe or think about much for lack of wanting to, despite evidence. Drawing attention to these is called cynicism.

I find these posts very low value. Short sentences like these seem optimised for wit, rather than truth, usefulness or insight. While I suppose theoretically there's no reason why a brilliant and startling idea couldn't be communicated by a simple, short sentence, everything I've ever read on Less Wrong and found useful, interesting and new has been an idea that requires some explanation.

Several theories:

• A shorter sentence can play with language tricks, whereby something sounds profound without being so. A longer explanation by virtue of its length cannot sustain itself on mere language trickery.
• A more detailed explanation has time and space to fully, or at least partially, reveal and explore the implications of the idea, where a shorter sentence can sound wise but have no real implications.
• The more startling and potentially groundbreaking an idea is, the more actual work needs to be done to set it up properly. For instance, by itself saying "Thou art physics." while it might sound wise, wouldn't lead to a proper understanding of how that dissolves the question of free will. That requires a rather extensive explanation.

"I wish people would just update on the expectation of being Dutch booked due to inconsistent preferences and give me money."

This sounds like something Steven Wright would say in an alternate universe where I would prefer to be living.

The feeling of knowing that one knows more than others is addicting and almost always wrong.

Oddly, the same seems to be true of feeling that one knows less than others.

Why "Facebook"? Where do these (admittedly neat) aphorisms come from? From stevenkaas's twitter? His (non-public?) facebook? A bit more context would make this post more understandable.

One of my goals lately has been to write a thousand words a day. I've noticed that the first three hundred are difficult but the last three thousand come naturally.

300+3000=1000?

What is a timeless analysis of a verb?

Also, the current motto of the planned Visiting Fellows program curriculum is "You have to have faith or this magic won't work." Unfortunately this only makes sense if you already have an ontology for things like magic and faith.