Rationality quotes - May 2009

And when someone makes a statement you don't understand, don't tell him he's crazy. Ask him what he means.

-- H Beam Piper, "Space Viking"

"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."

-- H. L. Mencken

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." - Peter Drucker

"From the inside, ideology usually looks like common sense."

--John Quiggin

http://crookedtimber.org/2009/04/22/the-ideology-that-dare-not-speak-its-name/

Truth comes out of error more readily than out of confusion.

-- Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620)

"The trouble with trying to be more stupid than you really are is that you very often succeed" - C.S.Lewis The Magician's Nephew

Don't forget, your mind only simulates logic.

Used as .sig quote by Glen C. Perkins e.g. here.

In the future, as science becomes more and more oriented to thinking in terms of information content, Godel's result will be seen as more of a platitude than a paradox.

--E. T. Jaynes (on the infamous eponymous theorem)

Some people revel in complexity, and what's worse they have the brain power to deal with vast systems of arcane equations. This ability can be a handicap because it leads to overlooking simple solutions.

William T. Powers

A competitive game, to me, is a debate. You argue your points with your opponent, and he argues his. “I think this series of moves is optimal,” you say, and he retorts, “Not when you take this into account.”

Debates in real life are highly subjective, but in games we can be absolutely sure who the winner is.

-- David Sirlin, Playing to Win

That, I think, is part of the nature of beliefs about justice—they are absolute, bright edged, in a way in which preferences are not. The point is summed up in the Latin phrase Fiat justicia, ruat coelum—let justice be done though the sky falls. Those whose bumper stickers read "If you want peace, work for justice" simply take it for granted that there is no question what is just; if you want to find out, just ask them. The problem with the world as they see it is merely that other people are insufficiently virtuous to act accordingly.

-- David D. Friedman, If you want war, work for justice

People normally read only their own horoscope in the newspaper. If they forced themselves to read the other 11 they'd be far less impressed with the accuracy of their own.

-- Richard Dawkins, "Unweaving the Rainbow"

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

-- Donald E. Knuth

“Whether and when law is more effective than code is an empirical matter — something to be studied, and considered, not dismissed by banalities spruced up with italics.” - Lawrence Lessig

As a rule of thumb, anything particularly ridiculous in an otherwise reasonable context is probably due to a law.

-- "TheWama" on Reddit

Some people dream of great things. Others stay awake and do them.

-Poster found in school classrooms

(Anyone know the original source?)

...look at 9/11 tower destruction theories. They want to believe something other than the planes caused the buildings to collapse. OK fine, let them bark up that tree if they want, but why must they leap to bizarre stories about government agents and secret operations? None of that is necessitated by the idea that another mechanism was fully or partially responsible. Why don't they suspect that Al-Quaeda planted a bomb in the basement in order to hasten the building's collapse, as a secondary part of their operation? Why leap to the US government as the culprit? Why not suspect that there was a flaw in the building construction, and that the blueprints don't reflect it because the building contractor covered it up? Why not suspect Martians? They create an incredibly open-ended doubt into which you could plug anything, and then they fill this void with (you guessed it) a story, with completely arbitrary elements.

-- Mike Wong

Polemic—persuasive writing—only works when it doesn't feel like propaganda. The audience must feel that you're being absolutely fair to people on the other side.

-- Orson Scott Card, "Characters and Viewpoint"

It is the mark of an instructed mind to rest assured with that degree of precision that the nature of the subject admits, and not to seek exactness when only an approximation of the truth is possible.

-- Aristotle

"If our Gods and our hopes are nothing but scientific phenomena, then let us admit it must be said that our love is scientific as well." -Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

I desire to know which interpretation of this quote was intended by the author, but I know which one I prefer.

Mr. President, it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and, having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.

-Patrick Henry

Most of us, I suspect, would rather believe that the devil is running things than that no one is in charge, that our lives, our loves, World Series victories, hang on the whims of fate and chains of coincidences, on God throwing dice, as Einstein once referred to quantum randomness. I've had my moments of looking back with a kind of vertigo realizing how contingent on chance my life has been, how if I'd gotten to the art gallery earlier or later or if the friend I was supposed to have dinner with had showed up, I might not have met my wife that night, and our daughter would still be in an orphanage in Kazakhstan.

-- Dennis Overbye

"First Law of Communication: The purpose of communication is to advance the communicator." - Putt's Law and the Successful Technocrat

The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.

Edsger W. Dijkstra, "Selected Writings on Computing"

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

G.K. Chesterton

Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.

-G. K. Chesterton

(Osmo A.) Wiio's first law of communication

Communication usually fails, except by accident

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/wiio.html

"Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed."

C. S. Lewis "The Magician's Nephew"

Nothing greater can happen to men than the perfection of their mental functions.

Leibniz (quoted in Maat, "Philosophical languages in the Seventeenth Century: Dalgarno, Wilkins, Leibniz")

"If you understand something in only one way, then you do not really understand it at all." -- Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind

From comp.lang.c++.moderated:

This is just a simple example to illustrate the mechanics of the problem. The actual system is far more complex. For the sake of argument suppose that f passes the Handle to a different thread context that destroys the Handle during one of three distinct timeframes depending on the runtime environment. Either (1) before the constructor returns; (2) after the constructor returns and before the assigned handle is destroyed; or (3) after the assigned handle is destroyed. The problem occurs in case 1. -Andrew.

That doesn't make it any less flawed; it just demonstrates that it's flawed in a complex manner.

Kevin P. Barry

"Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

God grant me the strength to change the things I must, the wisdom to know what I must change, and the rationality to know God isn't the key person here.

-- Eliezer Yudkowsky (pre-LW/OB, so it counts)

All advances of scientific understanding, at every level, begin with a speculative adventure, an imaginative preconception of what might be true — a preconception that always, and necessarily, goes a little way (sometimes a long way) beyond anything which we have logical or factual authority to believe in. It is the invention of a possible world, or of a tiny fraction of that world. The conjecture is then exposed to criticism to find out whether or not that imagined world is anything like the real one. Scientific reasoning is therefore at all levels an interaction between two episodes of thought — a dialogue between two voices, the one imaginative and the other critical; a dialogue, as I have put it, between the possible and the actual, between proposal and disposal, conjecture and criticism, between what might be true and what is in fact the case.

In this conception of the scientific process, imagination and criticism are integrally combined. Imagination without criticism may burst out into a comic profusion of grandiose and silly notions. Critical reasoning, considered alone, is barren. The Romantics believed that poetry, poiesis, the creative exploit, was the very opposite of analytic reasoning, something lying far above the common transactions of reason with reality. And so they missed one of the very greatest of all discoveries, of the synergism between imagination and reasoning, between the inventive and critical faculties.

Peter Medawar — Pluto’s Republic, “Science and Literature”, p. 46

That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.

-- P. C. Hodgell

Mens cujusque is est quisque. ("What a man's mind is, that is what he is.")

Cicero, De Re Publica

Just how animated objects perceived their surroundings was a mystery even to the wizards who created them; when customers asked, the universal reply was simply, "It's magic."

-- Lawrence Watt-Evans, Ithanalin's Restoration

Nobody actually wants to catch up with their heroes. It's depressing.

-- Apenwarr

"There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California." -- Edward Abbey

"You are a woman: you must never speak what you think; your words must contradict your thoughts, but your actions may contradict your words." -- William Congreve

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Umberto Eco, "Foucault's Pendulum"

"Plod forever, but never believe you are going to get there."

-Sir Ranulph Fiennes

EDIT: I found this quote funny and strangely motivational, if you read it within the context. But looks like some people really dislike it.

It is the mark of an instructed mind to rest assured with that degree of precision that the nature of the subject admits, and not to seek exactness when only an approximation of the truth is possible.

-- Aristotle

Someone is always praying as the plane Breaks up, and smoke and cold and darkness blow Into the cabin. Praying as it happens, Praying before it happens that it won't. Someone was praying that it never happen Before the first window on Kristallnacht Broke like a wine glass wrapped in bridal linen. Before it was imagined, someone was praying That it be unimaginable. And then, The bolts blew off and people fell like bombs Out of their names, out of the living sky. Surely, someone was praying. And the prayer Stuck the blank face of the earth, the ocean's face, The rockhard, rippled face of facelessness. -Mark Jarman

Partisans, or at least partisan commenters, are like hobbyists in a hundred other fields. "I collect model trains, but only Lionel from 1956-64," "Bottles. But only patent medicine," or "19th C Danish needlecraft."

"I collect factoids about Obama, but only the ones that make him look like a stealth Moslem."

"I really read up on Iraq and Afghanistan, but only the stuff that makes Bush look bad."

"I follow energy policy really closely, I've got bookshelves and bookmarks galore. But I only collect the things that say oil companies suck."

It's not just humor on my part. I actually think the mentality is similar.

-- Assistant Village Idiot

Our value judgements. -- All actions proceed from value judgements, all value judgements are either our own or accepted - the latter are by far the majority. Why do we accept them? Out of fear - that is: we consider it wiser to pretend that they have been our own as well - and we get used to this pretence, so that it eventually becomes our nature. Our own value judgement: that means measuring a thing on the basis of how much it pleases or displeases just us and nobody else - something exceedingly rare! But our judgement of another, that in which lies the reason why we so often rely on his judgement, should that at least come from us, be our own judgement? Yes, but we do this as children and rarely learn again in a different way; for our whole life, moreover, we are the fools of judgments to which we got used as children, if one considers the way we judge our neighbour (his spirit, his rank, his morality, his exemplarity, his loathsomeness) and hold it necessary to bow before his value judgements.

Friedrich Nietzsche, "Daybreak"

"If something's hard to do, it's probably not worth doing!" - Homer Simpson, slightly misquoted

"...any inward-oriented and continued effort to improve the match-up of concept with observed reality will only increase the degree of mismatch...Put another way, we can expect unexplained and disturbing ambiguities, uncertainties, anomalies, or apparent inconsistencies to emerge more and more often. Furthermore, unless some kind of relief is available, we can expect confusion to increase until disorder approaches chaos— death.

Fortunately, there is a way out."

~ John Boyd, Destruction and Creation