Rationality quotes: March 2010

The Patrician took a sip of his beer. "I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to its day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior."

-- Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals

"You know what they say the modern version of Pascal's Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God." - Julie from Crystal Nights by Greg Egan

John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

-Isaac Asimov, The Relativity of Wrong

My genes done gone and tricked my brain
By making fucking feel so great
That's how the little creeps attain
Their plan to fuckin' replicate
But brain's got tricks itself, you see
To get the bang but not the bite
I got this here vasectomy
My genes can fuck themselves tonight.

—The r-selectors, Trunclade, quoted in Blindsight by Peter Watts

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

-John McCarthy, on mainstream environmentalism.

As someone who regularly gets into arguments about this, I can say that he's definitely right; you wouldn't believe the amount of nonsense that can be disposed of simply by looking up the relevant numbers and doing a minute's worth of easy arithmetic.

For example, I've heard some people recently claiming that a combination of solar photovoltaics, electrolysis to produce hydrogen, and these new Bloom box fuel cells are cheaper than nuclear fission. Look up the costs of solar farms; about $3 per peak watt. Their average power output is less; we can very optimistically assume that they run at 20% of capacity on average. Efficiency losses from electrolysis and fuel cells are about 50%. Putting it all together, this would cost about $30 per watt of average power delivered. Not including the cost of the fuel cells.

A little googling will show that the total cost of building two new AP1000 reactors in Georgia is about $14 billion, and they average at least 93% of their peak power, and transmission line losses bring their average power delivered to about 1000 MW each. So their cost is about $7 per watt of average power delivered, or about 23% the cost of solar.

There's a lot of extremely harmful bullshit out there, and defeating most of it doesn't take any advanced techniques; it just takes a willingness to look up some relevant numbers and do a bit of arithmetic.

In an universe full of inanimate material, sentient beings are gods.

-- spire3661, in a Slashdot post

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

-- Isaac Asimov

Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.

--Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline (2009), p 216

"As one shocked 42-year-old manager exclaimed in the middle of a self-reflective career planning exercise, 'Oh, no! I just realized I let a 20-year-old choose my wife and my career!'"

-- Douglas T. Hall, Protean Careers of the 21st Century

...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

-- Herbert Simon 1971

…it is fatally easy to read a pattern into stochastically generated data.

-- John Maynard Smith (The Causes of Extinction, 1989)

"Death is the most terrible of all things; for it is the end, and nothing is thought to be any longer either good or bad for the dead."

-- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

The halt can manage a horse,
the handless a flock,
The deaf be a doughty fighter,
To be blind is better than to burn on a pyre:
There is nothing the dead can do.

-- Havamal

(posted in the right thread this time)

People constantly ignore my good advice by contributing to the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, CARE, and public radio all in the same year--as if they were thinking, "OK, I think I've pretty much wrapped up the problem of heart disease; now let's see what I can do about cancer."

--- Steven Landsburg (original link by dclayh)

It's now well known that if you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.

"It is said that those who appreciate legislation and sausages should not see them being made. The same is true for human emotions." -- Steven Pinker

The man who lies to others has merely hidden away the truth, but the man who lies to himself has forgotten where he put it.

old Arab proverb, according to this page, which is itself interesting

I haven't taken this position just to be difficult. To look around, the world does appear to be flat, so I think it is incumbent on others to prove decisively that it isn't. And I don't think that burden of proof has been met yet.

-- Daniel Shenton, President of the Flat Earth Society as of 2010

"There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you."

-- J.K. Rowling, Harvard commencement address.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Successful zealots don't argue to win. They argue to move the goalposts and to make it appear sane to do so."

-- Seth Godin

"One thousand five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was flat... and fifteen minutes ago, you knew people were alone on this planet. Think about what you'll know tomorrow." -- Agent K, "Men in Black"

The terrible truth is that postmodernism is what happens when somebody who believes what he reads, reads the Philosophy canon.

-- Quee Nelson, The Slightest Philosophy

Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.

--Admiral Hyman G. Rickover

A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual" — find out how he feels about astrology. —Robert Heinlein

"The formal study of complex systems is really, really hard." -David Colander

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions — as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. —Nietzsche

From memory of recently seeing excerpts from The Polymath: The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman:

Delany spent a while living in a hotel which mostly catered to transsexuals, and he found it unnerving to not know what gender the person he was taking to was. He speculated that wanting to be sure about gender was hard-wired.

After about five weeks, he realized he'd taken elevator rides with people of non-obvious gender, and it didn't bother him at all.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science

—Charles Darwin

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

-- William Ernest Henley (1875)

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today -- but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

-- Isaac Asimov

The reason you feel most comfortable with a job (unless, like me, you're in the minority - a job would destroy my psyche) is that you've been brainwashed by many years of school, socialization and practice. I pick the word brainwashed carefully, because it's more than training or acclimation. It's something that's been taught to you by people who needed you to believe it was the way things are supposed to be.

-- Seth Godin

"If it works for you, it works because of you." -- Mark Greenway on marriage

Develop the habit of asking yourself, "Will I definitely use this information for something immediate and important?"

-- Timothy Ferriss - The 4 Hour Workweek

“Still seems it strange, that thou shouldst live forever? Is it less strange, that thou shouldst live at all? This is a miracle; and that no more.” Edward Young

...it would be a mistake to suppose that the difficulty of the case [for gender equality] must lie in the insufficiency or obscurity of the grounds of reason on which my convictions rests. The difficulty is that which exists in all cases in which there is a mass of feeling to be contended against. So long as opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old. And there are so many causes tending to make the feelings connected with this subject the most intense and most deeply-rooted of those which gather round and protect old institutions and custom, that we need not wonder to find them as yet less undermined and loosened than any of the rest by the progress the great modern spiritual and social transition; nor suppose that the barbarisms to which men cling longest must be less barbarisms than those which they earlier shake off.

— John Stuart Mill, 1869

Learn to criticize ideas, especially your own. Most new ideas are wrong or inadequate. If you don't reject most of your ideas promptly, then you're almost surely fooling yourself, and if you also spread them, you're almost surely polluting the intellectual world. But if an idea really seems to stand up under testing, try filling in more details, and criticizing it again.

— K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation 2.0: Advice To Aspiring Nanotechnologists

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand. Leonardo da Vinci

"There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere." -- Isaac Asimov

Devotees of grammatical studies have not been distinguished for any very remarkable felicities of expression.

-- Amos Bronson Alcott

Reasoning is generally seen as a mean to improve knowledge and make better decisions. Much evidence, however, shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests rethinking the function of reasoning. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade.

-- Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber, Why do humans reason? (PDF)

(Further comment on the paper turned into a full post)

Three ways to increase your intelligence

Continually expand the scope, source, intensity of the information you receive. Constantly revise your reality maps, and seek new metaphors about the future to understand what's happening now. Develop external networks for increasing intelligence. In particular, spend all your time with people as smart or smarter than you.

I'll give an upvote to whoever knows the source of that.

•The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants – Albert Camus

Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

--Hunter S. Thompson

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

-- Henry David Thoreau

If you get it, it will be in spite of any method you use.

You must have a method.

-- K. Bradford Brown

You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.

–xkcd

Rational thought is an interpretation according to a scheme we cannot escape. -Frederich Nietzsche

"There's only so many ways to be smart, but idiocy is Legion." - The TV Tropes Wiki

This painting — which we call human life and experience — evolved gradually, and is indeed still in process of evolving — and should not therefore be regarded as a fixed quantity…. We have, through millennia, gazed into the world with blind inclinations, passions, and fears; with moral, religious, or aesthetic demands; and have so wallowed in the bad manners of illogical thought that the world has become amazingly variegated, fearsome, rich in spirit and meaning. It has acquired color, but we were the colorists. The human intellect has allowed the world of appearance to appear, and exported its erroneous presuppositions into reality.

— Nietzsche

Emotions are the lubricants of reason. —Nicholas Nassim Taleb

When the means are autonomous, they are deadly

--Charles Williams

Link

One of the points Lesley makes is that the idea of ‘nature’ is actually a cultural construct. What do we mean when we say something is ‘natural’? I think that, in general, we mean that it hasn’t been altered or intervened with in anyway. Which is completely impossible. Everything we do changes our body in some way. Not doing something changes our body in some other way. Everything you eat becomes a part of you. And if you don’t eat, well, that has other implications. Breathing air, drinking water, wearing clothes, walking, driving, sitting, standing, sleeping, all of these things alter the body in some way. The body is always in flux, and we can’t live without taking in things from our environment, things which change us. An unaltered body is, by definition, not alive. (This is highly influenced by a presentation I recently attended by Rachael Kendrick on metabolism, and while I’m sure I’m this is an obscene misappropriation of her argument, I found it very interesting. Kendrick isn’t always entirely fat-positive, but she does an excellent critique of medial science and obesity epidemic discourse.)

The ideal ‘natural’ body is also frequently invoked in anti-fat rhetoric, particularly in the figure of the ‘caveman’. In fact, some people call for a return to this way of eating (if not this way of living). The idea is that the human body is ideally suited to a palaeolithic lifestyle and that our digestive systems work best if we eat only foods that were around 2 million years ago, and avoid all that new-fangled stuff like ‘grains’ and ‘beans’. This idea basically harnesses the discourse of evolution in the service of what amounts to a creationist argument. It posits that the ideal human design was arrived at somewhere in the deep and distant past, and has remained constant ever since. It denies evolution as an ongoing process, and most importantly, ignores the fact that the caveman body was as much a product of its environment as the modern human body is.

I think "natural" can work as a hypothesis for making things better, but it's just a hypothesis, not a source of reliable truth.

"You don't need to be an ichthyologist to know when a fish stinks." (Unattributed)

"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." ~HD Thoreau

Scrapheap Transhumanism:

"I’m sort of inured to pain by this point. Anesthetic is illegal for people like me, so we learn to live without it; I’ve made scalpel incisions in my hands, pushed five-millimeter diameter needles through my skin, and once used a vegetable knife to carve a cavity into the tip of my index finger. I’m an idiot, but I’m an idiot working in the name of progress: I’m Lepht Anonym, scrapheap transhumanist. I work with what I can get."

Here is more: http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/enhanced/scrapheap-transhumanism

HT:Tyler Cowen

While discussing the reliability of pundits:

Pundits are more like cheerleaders. Ugly ones.

--Gregory Cochran

scientia potentia est

Knowledge is power.

--This quote is attributed to Sir Francis Bacon, but we don't really know.

And I still can't see how [Matthew 21:18-21] is metaphorical unless you just take it that way. But I may as well open a history book and read "Napoleon crossed the Alps" and read that as a metaphor that even the best of us have to travel. --Hariant

"Study strategy over the years and achieve the spirit of the warrior. Today is your victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men."

--Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

As soon as you speak about a thing, you miss the mark.

-Nangaku

"The probability of bumping into Thomas Bayes is rather low. " - Koert Debyser, "What is Bayesian Average", Board Game Geek Forums

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science

Charles Darwin

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science

—Charles Darwin

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science

—Charles Darwin

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science

—Charles Darwin

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science

—Charles Darwin

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

-- William Ernest Henley (1875)

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

-- William Ernest Henley (1875)

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

Alan Kay

I enjoyed this proposal for a 24-issue Superman run: http://andrewhickey.info/2010/02/09/pop-drama-superman/

There are several Less Wrongish themes in this arc: Many Worlds, ending suffering via technology, rationality:

"...a highlight of the first half of this first year will be the redemption of Lex Luthor – in a forty-page story, set in one room, with just the two of them talking, and Superman using logic to convince Luthor to turn his talents towards good..."

The effect Andrew's text had on me reminded me of how excited I was when I first had read Alan Moore's famous Twilight of the Superheroes. (I'm not sure about how well "Twilight" stands the test of time but see Google or Wikipedia for links to the complete Moore proposal.)

Batmanuel: In my experience, there's only one guaranteed way to ever really know the truth - you must create it yourself.
Captain Liberty: And how do you do that?
Batmanuel: Lie.

-- The Tick, live-action series

The three laws of sanity:

1. The world is mad.

2. Your own theories and grand ideas about the world are also mad, except where this contradicts the first law. (In which case you are merely slightly more sane than average).

3. The world is sufficiently mad that your being sane is actually a disadvantage, except where this contradicts the first two laws.

The limits of my language are the limits of my world. —Ludwig Wittgenstein

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a paperclip. The other is as though everything is a paperclip. -- Almost Albert Einstein

If we could see the miracle of a single paperclip clearly, our whole life would change. -- Almost Buddha