Rationality Quotes - September 2009

During the discussion of Pranknet on Slashdot about a month ago, I saw this comment. It reminded me of our discussions about Newcomb's problem and superrationality.

I also disagree that our society is based on mutual trust. Volumes and volumes of laws backed up by lawyers, police, and jails show otherwise.

That's called selection/observation bias. You're looking at only one side of the coin.

I've lived in countries where there's a lot less trust than here. The notion of returning an opened product to a store and getting a full refund is based on trust (yes, there's a profit incentive, and some people do screw the retailers [and the retailers their customers -- SB], but the system works overall). In some countries I've been to, this would be unfeasible: Almost everyone will try to exploit such a retailer.

When a storm knocks out the electricity and the traffic lights stop working, I've always seen everyone obeying the rules. I doubt it's because they're worried about cops. It's about trust that the other drivers will do likewise. Simply unworkable in other places I've lived in.

I've had neighbors whom I don't know receive UPS/FedEx packages for me. Again, trust. I don't think they're afraid of me beating them up.

There are loads of examples. Society, at least in the US, is fairly nice and a lot of that has to do with a common trust.

Which is why someone exploiting that trust is a despised person.

I am only one, but I am still one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and just because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

-Helen Keller

Reality is not optional.

Thomas Sowell

"You can safely say that you have made God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." -- Reverend Robert Cromey

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

-Bertrand Russell

It is better to have an approximate answer to the right question than an exact answer to the wrong question.

-- John Tukey

Wisdom is not only to be acquired, but also to be utilized.

-Marcus Tullius Cicero

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them; this skill is most needed in times of stress and darkness.

-Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

I would roughly divide philosophies into two categories, "crazy" and "sensible". Of the two, I definitely prefer the former. Sensible philosophies are noted for their sobriety, propriety, rationality, analytic skill and other things. One definite advantage they have is that they are usually quite sensible. Crazy philosophies are characterized by their madness, spontaneity, sense of humor, total freedom from the most basic conventions of thought, amorality, beauty, divinity, naturalness, poesy, absolute honesty, freedom from inhibitions, contrariness, paradoxicalness, lack of discipline and general yum-yummyness. ... ... In general I would say that psychologist, psychiatrist, economists, sociologists and political scientists tend towards the "sensible", whereas artists, poets, musicians and (to my great delight!) chemists, theoretical physicists, mathematicians - especially mathematical logicians - tend towards what I call "crazy".

Raymond M. Smullyan, The Tao Is Silent

"What's that saying?" he said, smiling crookedly. "When you've eliminated the impossible, whatever it is that remains--- "

"--- however improbable, must be the truth. Yes, the problem is, the man who wrote that believed in faeries, and that he could photograph them."

• S. M. Stirling, The Peshawar Lancers

Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.

-Benjamin Franklin

You won't gain knowledge by drinking ink.

-Arab proverb

"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into." (Jonathan Swift )

A person's greatest virtue is his ability to correct his mistakes and continually make a new person of himself.

-Wang Yang-Ming

We see things as we are, not as they are.

-Leo Rosten

We at the Church of Google believe the search engine Google is the closest humankind has ever come to directly experiencing an actual God (as typically defined). We believe there is much more evidence in favour of Google's divinity than there is for the divinity of other more traditional gods.

We reject supernatural gods on the notion they are not scientifically provable. Thus, Googlists believe Google should rightfully be given the title of "God", as She exhibits a great many of the characteristics traditionally associated with such Deities in a scientifically provable manner.

-- The Church of Google

(Moved from the LW/OB Rationality Quotes thread, where is was previously posted by accident)

Follow the man who seeks the truth; run from the man who has found it.

-- Vaclav Havel

The right answer is seldom as important as the right question.

Kip Thorne

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency, a great soul has simply nothing to do.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.

Niels Bohr

When the time comes, there is no moment for reasoning. And if you have not done your inquiring beforehand, there is most often shame. Reading books and listening to people's talk are for the purpose of prior resolution.

Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

The word “philosopher” has its origins in the Greek, where its root is a “lover of wisdom.” There is no assurance that a lover of wisdom has any, just as an anglophile is not assured to have an Englishman locked in the basement.

John D. Norton

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence -- Carl Sagan

(I know this quote is very much a cliche -- but, as a realized a long time after seeing it, it is not only a nice heuristic, but it also emphasizes the bayesian, probabilistic view of knowledge over the popperian one.)

Economic growth occurs whenever people take resources and rearrange them in ways that are more valuable. A useful metaphor for production in an economy comes from the kitchen. To create valuable final products, we mix inexpensive ingredients together according to a recipe. The cooking one can do is limited by the supply of ingredients, and most cooking in the economy produces undesirable side effects. If economic growth could be achieved only by doing more and more of the same kind of cooking, we would eventually run out of raw materials and suffer from unacceptable levels of pollution and nuisance. Human history teaches us, however, that economic growth springs from better recipes, not just from more cooking. New recipes generally produce fewer unpleasant side effects and generate more economic value per unit of raw material.

. . .

Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. The difficulty is the same one we have with compounding: possibilities do not merely add up; they multiply.

- Paul M. Romer, "Economic Growth", The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, 2007

(Related to a theme in We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think, which is about failure to grasp the other arguments one could have considered, and to a theme in arguments about the consequences of intelligence (Expected Creative Surprises, Belief in Intelligence, Efficient Cross-Domain Optimization, Recursive Self-Improvement, Dreams of Friendliness, That Alien Message, or The AI-Box Experiment), which are about failure to grasp the strategies that something more intelligent than oneself could find.

People usually can't feel loss of opportunities unless they are already able to imagine the details of the opportunity. To be rational, one should have a habit of making well-calibrated estimates of how much opportunity would be felt by the sort of person who would have investigated the details.)

Great thinkers build their edifices with subtle consistency. We do our intellectual forebears an enormous disservice when we dismember their visions and scan their systems in order to extract a few disembodied “gems”—thoughts or claims still accepted as true. These disarticulated pieces then become the entire legacy of our ancestors, and we lose the beauty and coherence of older systems that might enlighten us by their unfamiliarity—and their consequent challenge—in our fallible (and complacent) modern world.

-- Stephen Jay Gould

Elpinice was skeptical. She likes evidence. That means a well-made argument. For Greeks, the only evidence that matters is words. They are masters of making the fantastic sound plausible.

-- Gore Vidal, "Creation" (narrator Cyrus Spitama)

You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.

— Malcolm X (By Any Means Necessary)

First the sign describes reality. Then the sign replaces reality. - Last Psychiatrist, on the role of media.

Don’t just do something, stand there.

-- George Shultz.

HT: Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP.

Believing presupposes understanding.

-al-Ghazali (theologian)

'Tis with our Judgments as our Watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.

Pope, Essay on Criticism

[Others] note that my 'avoidance of the standard philosophical terminology for discussing such matters' often creates problems for me; philosophers have a hard time figuring out what I am saying and what I am denying. My refusal to play ball with my colleagues is deliberate, of course, since I view the standard philosophical terminology as worse than useless — a major obstacle to progress since it consists of so many errors. – Daniel Dennett, The Message is: There is no Medium

Our pride is often increased by what we retrench from our other faults.

-- La Rochefoucauld

The art of life is a constant readjustment to our surroundings.

-Kakuzo Okakura

A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

-H.P. Lovecraft

In the words of the ancients, one should make his decisions within the space of seven breaths. Lord Takanobu said, "If discrimination is long, it will spoil." Lord Naoshige said, "When matters are done leisurely, seven out of ten will turn out badly. A warrior is a person who does things quickly."

Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

They throw the ball, I hit it. They hit the ball, I catch it.

-Willie Mays