Rationality Quotes May 2012

Another quote from the same piece, just before that para:

Once you start to think of mistakes as deterministic rather than random, as caused by "bugs" (incorrect understanding or incorrect procedures) rather than random inaccuracy, a curious thing happens.

You stop thinking of people as "stupid."

I really, really like this. Thanks for posting it!

To elucidate the "bug model" a bit, consider "bugs" not in a single piece of software, but in a system. The following is drawn from my professional experience as a sysadmin for large-scale web applications, but I've tried to make it clear:

Suppose that you have a web server; or better yet, a cluster of servers. It's providing some application to users — maybe a wiki, a forum, or a game. Most of the time when a query comes in from a user's browser, the server gives a good response. However, sometimes it gives a bad response — maybe it's unusually slow, or it times out, or it gives an error or an incomplete page instead of what the user was looking for.

It turns out that if you want to fix these sorts of problems, considering them merely to be "flakiness" and stopping there is not enough. You have to actually find out where the errors are coming from. "Flaky web server" is an aggregate property, not a simple one; specifically, it is the sum of all the different sources of error, slowness, and other badness — the disk contention; the database queries against un-indexed tables; the slowly failing NIC; the excess load from the web spider that's copying the main page ten times a second looking for updates; the design choice of retrying failed transactions repeatedly, thus causing overload to make itself worse.

There is some fact of the matter about which error sources are causing more failures than others, too. If 1% of failed queries are caused by a failing NIC, but 90% are caused by transactions timing out due to slow database queries to an overloaded MySQL instance, then swapping the NIC out is not going to help much. And two flaky websites may be flaky for completely unrelated reasons.

Talking about how flaky or reliable a web server is lets you compare two web servers side-by-side and decide which one is preferable. But by itself it doesn't let you fix anything. You can't just point at the better web server and tell the worse one, "Why can't you be more like your sister?" — or rather, you can, but it doesn't work. The differences between the two do matter, but you have to know which differences matter in order to actually change things.

To bring the analogy back to human cognitive behavior: yes, you can probably measure which of two people is "more rational" than the other, or even "more intelligent". But if someone wants to become more rational, they can't do it by just trying to imitate an exemplary rational person — they have to actually diagnose what kinds of not-rational they are being, and find ways to correct them. There is no royal road to rationality; you have to actually struggle with (or work around) the specific bugs you have.

Author used to post here as __, but I think her account's been deleted.

ETA: removed username as I realized this comment kind of frustrates the presumable point of the account deletion in the first place.

I already upvoted this but want to emphasize that the article is really good.

I've been trying to change my impulse to think "this person is an idiot!" into "this person is a noob," because the term still kinda has that slightly useful predictive meaning that suggests incompetence, but it also contains the idea that they have the potential to get better, rather than being inherently incompetent.

Excellent article, thank you for the link!

Great article. One thing:

If the attacker, whenever he pulls a red ball out of the urn, puts it back and keeps pulling until he gets a blue ball, the Bayesian "rational mind" will conclude that the urn is entirely full of blue balls. ... [But it's] not approaching the most important job of teachers, which is to figure out why you're getting things wrong -- what conceptual misunderstanding, or what bad study habit, is behind your problems.

I don't know much about Knewton, but it seems like it could address this - at least in some cases - and possibly better than teachers. Knewton and programs like it can keep track of success rates at the individual problem level, rather than the test or semester level. Such data could be used to identify the 'bugs' the author speaks of. All Knewton needs is knowledge of common 'bugs' and what problems they make students get wrong.

This article also recalls to mind http://lesswrong.com/lw/6ww/when_programs_have_to_work_lessons_from_nasa/, specifically the part where problems are considered to be the fault of the system, not of the people involved and are treated by changing the system, not by criticizing the people.

I always use the metaphor of the fast car to distinguish between intelligence and rationality.

That's a very handy assortment of fallacies. Where did you find it?

They had too much time to talk, if one of them was that fast. Can't help, but this technicality bothers me.

This reminds me of the following passage from We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver:

But keeping secrets is a discipline. I never use to think of myself as a good liar, but after having had some practice I had adopted the prevaricator's credo that one doesn't so much fabricate a lie as marry it. A successful lie cannot be brought into this world and capriciously abandoned; like any committed relationship it must be maintained, and with far more devotion than the truth, which carries on being carelessly true without any help. By contrast, my lie needed me as much as I needed it, and so demanded the constancy of wedlock: Till death do us part.

Possible additional factor: The truth is frequently boring-- it helps to add some absurdity just to get people's attention. Once you've got people's attention, proof of loyalty can come into play.

Also relevant.

This reminds me of Baudrillard, I might come back in a few days with a Baudrillard rationality quote.

More quotes by Mencius Moldbug:

When they say things like "in cognitive science, Bayesian reasoner is the technically precise codeword that we use to mean rational mind," they really do mean it. Move over, Aristotle!

Of course, in Catholicism, Catholic is the technically precise codeword that they use to mean rational mind. I am not a Catholic or even a Christian, but frankly, I think that if I had to vote for a dictator of the world and the only information I had was whether the candidate was an orthodox Bayesian or an orthodox Catholic, I'd go with the latter.

The only problem is that this little formula is not a complete, drop-in replacement for your brain. If a reservationist is skeptical of anything on God's green earth, it's people who want to replace his (or her) brain with a formula.

To make this more concrete, let's look at how fragile Bayesian inference is in the presence of an attacker who's filtering our event stream. By throwing off P(B), any undetected pattern of correlation can completely foul the whole system. If the attacker, whenever he pulls a red ball out of the urn, puts it back and keeps pulling until he gets a blue ball, the Bayesian "rational mind" will conclude that the urn is entirely full of blue balls. And Bayesian inference certainly does not offer any suggestion that you should look at who's pulling balls out of the urn and see what he has up his sleeves. Once again, the problem is not that Bayesianism is untrue. The problem is that the human brain has a very limited capacity for analytic reasoning to begin with.

They are all from the article A Reservationist Epistemology

And yet he wants a pragmatically motivated society.

Forgive my stupidity, but I'm not sure I get this one. Should I read it as "[...] it's probably for the same reasons you haven't done it yourself."?

Pardon my ignorance, but could anyone explain this quote or give an example where it applies? Also, how is it related to anarchism? I don't get it...

Sometimes I check the original and am surprised by how little I actually diverged from Rowling's Dumbledore.

From my limited experience with buying cars, as well as from theoretical considerations, this won't work because you lack the pre-commitment to buy at the price offered. Once they give you a favorable price, you can try to push it even further downwards, possibly by continuing to play the dealerships against each other. So they'll be afraid to offer anything really favorable. (The market for new cars is a confusopoly based on concealing the information about the dealers' exact profit margins for particular car models, which is surprisingly well-guarded insider knowledge. So once you know that a certain price is still profitable for them, it can only be a downward ratchet.)

The problem can be solved by making the process double-blind, i.e. by sending the message anonymously through a credible middleman, who communicates back anonymous offers from all dealers. (The identities of each party are revealed to the other only if the offer is accepted and an advance paid.) Interestingly, in Canada, someone has actually tried to commercialize this idea and opened a website that offers the service for $50 or so (unhaggle.com); I don't know if something similar exists in the U.S. or other countries. (They don't do any sort of bargaining, brokering, deal-hunting, etc. on your behalf -- just the service of double-anonymous communication, along with signaling that your interest is serious because you've paid their fee.) From my limited observations, it works pretty well.

I take he does not discuss whether he actually ever did that.

Having bought/leased a few new and used cars over the years, I immediately think of a number of issues with this, mainly because this trips their "we don't do it this way, so we would rather not deal with you at all" defense. This reduces the number of dealers willing to engage severely. Probably is still OK in a big city, but not where there are only 2 or 3 dealerships of each kind around. There are other issues, as well:

• Bypassing the salesperson and getting to talk to the manager directly is not easy, as it upsets their internal balance of fairness. The difference is several hundred dollars.

• The exact model may not be available unless it's common, and the wait time might be more than you are prepared to handle. Though the dealers do share the inventory and exchange cars, they are less likely to bother if they know that the other place will get the same request.

• They are not likely to give you the best deal possible, because they are not invested in the sale (use sunk cost to your advantage)

• They are not likely to believe that you will do as you say, because why should they? There is nothing for you to lose by changing your mind. In fact, once you have all the offers, you ought to first consider what to do next, not blindly follow through on the promise.

• This approach, while seemingly neutral, comes across as hostile, because it's so impersonal. This has extra cost in human interactions.

• "Searching online" is no substitute to kicking the tires for most people. The last two cars I leased I found on dealers' lots after driving around (way after I researched the hell out of it online), and they were not the ones I thought I would get.

• And the last one: were this so easy, the various online car selling outfits, like autobytel would do so much better.

So, while this strategy is possibly better than the default of driving around the lots and talking to the salespeople, it is far from the best way to buy a car.

In this case, isn't it equally true that no wind is unfavourable?

"When life hands you lemons, make lemonade" = "I have water and sugar and you don't, aren't I awesome"

— Steven Kaas

When life gives you lemons, order miracle berries.

I say, when life gives you a lemon, wing it right back and add some lemons of your own!

Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes

When life gives you lemons, lemon canon.

"He says what we're all thinking!"

---GlaDOS, Portal 2, in response to above quote

I like lemons...

Huh, I scrolled past this and read Nisan's post first, by the time I got any further this was already running through my head.

Not so sure that this is a good rationalist quote though.

Huh, I scrolled past this and read Nisan's post first, by the time I got any further this was already running through my head.

Not so sure that this is a good rationalist quote though.

Huh, I scrolled past this and read Nisan's post first, by the time I got any further this was already running through my head.

Not so sure that this is a good rationalist quote though.

It's in WikiQuotes.

Because instead of pissing them off you get to terrify them?

I am consistently impressed by the quality of the writing that comes out of Cracked, especially relative to what one might expect given its appearance.

instead of covering pending legislation or the impact it could have on your life

If "impact on your life" is the relevant criterion, then it seems to me Wong should be focusing on the broader mistake of watching the news in the first place. If the average American spent ten minutes caring about e.g. the Trayvon Martin case, then by my calculations that represents roughly a hundred lifetimes lost.

It bothers me how there are no replies to this quote that aren't replies to gwern's prediction comment.

I merely said

23:18 <@gwern> Grognor: it's certainly short. it's worth a try although don't expect it to go outside -2<=x<=15

If anyone was wondering. (So far my prediction is right...)

I really like this passage, and Vetinari in general, but I downvoted your quote simply because it's too long. It would be better if you could somehow condense it into a single paragraph.

Vimes has the right of it here, I think. They are just people, they are just doing what people do. And even if what people do isn't always as good as it could be, it is far from being as bad as it could be. Mankind is inherently good at a level greater than can be explained by chance alone, p<.05.

Only while the island is smaller than half the world :-)

Anyway, I can always measure your shore and get any result I want.

A short shoreline of wonder is a good sign that the island of knowledge is small.

Both operations seem vitally necessary, but he's probably right that you should start with the latter.

Has this actually been working?

I maintain you should use the lemons as an offering to appease your angry new god.

If you liked Powerthirst, there's a similar thing called "SHOWER PRODUCTS FOR MEN" on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUjh4DE8FZA

(Pliny, not Plinty.)

The article is not about antisemitism, by the way. It's about one Dr. Castro's alarm over a "linguistic disorder in Buenos Aires" — i.e. a putative decline in the quality of Argentinian Spanish usage.

I'm going to be unfair here - there is a limit to how much specificity one can expect in a brief quote but: In what sense is the difficulty "mathematical in essence", and just how ignorant of how much mathematics are the physiologists in question? Consider a problem where the exact solution of the model equations turns out to be an elliptic integral - but where the practically relevant range is adequately represented by a piecewise linear approximation, or by a handful of terms in a power series. Would ignorance of the elliptic integral be a fatal flaw here?

If you have a result with a p value of p<0.05, the universe could be kidding you up to 5% of the time. You can reduce the probability that the universe is kidding you with bigger samples, but you never get it to 0%.

OTOH it could be that the "you" in the above knows little to nothing about computer simulation.

For example a moderately competent evolutionary virologist might have theory about how viruses spread genes across species, but have only a passing knowledge of LaTeX and absolutely no idea how to use bio-sim software.

Or worse, CAN explain, but their explanation demonstrates that lack of knowledge.

Such as set theory?

Heh, I bet he was being coy. In my experience, people who can't get any enjoyment out of wearing a clown suit (or, indeed, a scary uniform) - and aren't somewhat, well, autistic - actively avoid saying contrarian things; it's more or less social autopilot.

The real sharp ones also learn from the mistakes of others.

Others rarely collect enough data when making mistakes. Sometimes you need to go make the mistake yourself.

I'm not going to search for it, but I recall having heard that saying well before 2006.

Then you can commit suicide without worries.

I'm pretty sure Plato was quoting Socrates.

There is a corollary of the Law of Fives in Discordianism, as follows: Whenever you think that there are only two possibilities (X, or else Y), there are in fact at least five: X; Y; X and Y; neither X nor Y; and J, something you hadn't thought of before.

This criticism of instrumentalism only works in so far as instrumentalism is descriptive, rather than prescriptive.

Just because you are choosing between two theories, doesn't mean one of them is right.

Atheism is an excellent excuse for skipping church.

Reversed stupidity is not intelligence!

Almost the same as the one Eliezer used here

Noticing this moment is important!

Of course, we shouldn't stop when we notice this. We should keep getting more specific, and we should begin testing whether we are mistaken.

Contrarians of LW, if you want to be successful, please don't follow this strategy. Chances are that many people have raised the same possibility before, and anyway raising possibilities isn't Bayesian evidence, so you'll just get ignored. Instead, try to prove that the stuff is bullshit. This way, if you're right, others will learn something, and if you're wrong, you will have learned something.

Related: this slide

This struck me as an odd position for a Christian apologist. I know that if I didn't see us all as idiots, I might think we all deserved to die -- oh, wait.

Of course, if you can compute the way an Argus would see an obscured object, or a Briareus would approach a dexterity-testing-task, that might be useful in evaluating our approaches to similar problems.

(1) Do people act more rationally when their interests are more directly concerned? (2) Are scientists' interests more directly concerned with winning grants than with making correct scientific inferences?

If the answer to both is "yes," then I think we should raise our confidence in jackal rituals relative to the current methodologies of statistical inference.

"Well it's alright for you, Confucius, living in 5th Century feudal China. Between all the documentation I have to go through at work, and all the blogs I'm following while pretending to work, and all the textbooks I have to get through before my next assignment deadline, I don't have time to read!"

Why that citation?

Edit: Question answered below.

Has anyone tried to put Ferriss's 4-Hour Workweek plan into practice? If so, did it make you better off than you were a month ago?

EDIT: Ferriss recommends (among other things) that readers invent and market a simple product that can be sold online and manufactured in China, yielding a steady income stream that requires little or no ongoing attention. There are dozens of anecdotes on his website and in his book that basically say "I heard that idea, I tried it, it worked, and now I'm richer and happier." These anecdotes (if true) indicate that the plan is workable for at least some people. What I don't see in these anecdotes is people who say "I really didn't think of myself as an entrepreneur, but I forced myself to slog through the exercises anyway, and then it worked for me!"

So, I'm trying to elicit that latter, more dramatic kind of anecdote from LWers. It would help me decide if most of the value in Ferriss's advice lies in simply reminding born entrepreneurs that they're allowed to execute a simple plan, or if Ferriss's advice can also enable intelligent introverts with no particular grasp of the business world to cast off the shackles of office employment.

Hey, I can hack and whine at the same time!

Attempting this just reallocates all whining to being about inability to start hacking.

Kane: Quit griping!
Lambert: I like griping.

(from Alien)

Stop whining and do something

Might be a better phrasing? It also accounts for doing good things even if you can't solve the current problem.

I claim that the success of current scientific theories is no miracle. It is not even surprising to the scientific (Darwinist) mind. For any scientific theory is born into a life of fierce competition, a jungle red in tooth and claw. Only the successful theories survive — the ones which in fact latched on to actual regularities in nature.

-Bas van Fraassen

One quote per post, please.

Edit: Belated thanks!

Putnam of all people really should have known better than to use the word 'miracle'.

Love the story, but the punchline shouldn't be spoiled in the title!

Is this a true story, and if so, did it work?

I'm not sure I get this. Could you explain, please?

Great video, too.

Good memory. The original reads:

Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny.

Not sure if finding something funny in the context of a joke necessarily leads to one not taking it seriously in other contexts. [E.g. when xkcd and smbc make science jokes I don't think my belief in the science they are referencing diminishes.]

The bit about "trained to act as if" is very astute. The same training can be applied to overvaluing things with little or no apparent value.

But why?

And here's some rather... more spicy stuff from him:

The seventh rule of the ethics of means and ends is that generally success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics. The judgment of history leans heavily on the outcome of success or failure; it spells the difference between the traitor and the patriotic hero. There can be no such thing as a successful traitor, for if one succeeds he becomes a founding father.

The ninth rule of the ethics of means and ends is that any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.

In this world laws are written for the lofty aim of "the common good" and then acted out in life on the basis of the common greed. In this world irrationality clings to man like his shadow so that the right things get done for the wrong reasons—afterwards, we dredge up the right reasons for justification. It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral; a world where "reconciliation" means that when one side gets the power and the other side gets reconciled to it, then we have reconciliation.

Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have. The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action or tactic is outside the experience of the people, it results in confusion, fear, and retreat. [...] The third rule is: Whenever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

Alinsky is interesting to me because it seems like he was one of the first to notice a new, likely to be effective method of social change - and he used up all the effectiveness of the technique.

I wouldn't expect non-violent protest (in America) to be capable of that kind of social change in the future, because those in power have learned how to deal with it effectively (mass arrest for minor infractions and an absolute refusal to engage in political grandstanding). By this point, mass protests are quite ineffective at creating social change here in the US (consider the relatively pointlessness of the Occupy movement)

I'm sure there are other examples of techniques of social change becoming totally ineffective as authorities learned how to respond better, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.

I'd also like to mention that the American Right's treatment of Alinsky is really depressing. Just one random quote: "Alinsky got what he wanted in the form of 90% illegitimacy rates among American blacks and poverty wholly dominated by single mothers."

Really? A guy who taught little people how to stand up for themselves in ruthless tribal politics... somehow single-handedly (or with his evil college student henchmen) caused a complicated social problem that existed since Segregation's end - instead of, I dunno, making communities more unified and more conscious of the war that is life (like trade unions become with good non-dogmatic leadership)?

(Another stunning lie: "Alinsky’s entire adult life was devoted to destroying capitalism in America — an economic system he considered to be oppressive and unjust."

He talked of working within the system and changing it slowly and patiently all the time - for moral as well as tactical reasons. "Those who enshrine the poor or Have-Nots are as guilty as other dogmatists and just as dangerous", he wrote. And: "The political panaceas of the past[2], such as the revolutions in Russia and China, have become the same old stuff under a different name... We have permitted a suicidal situation to unfold wherein revolution and communism have become one. These pages are committed to splitting this political atom, separating this exclusive identification of communism with revolution."

"Let us in the name of radical pragmatism not forget that in our system with all its repressions we can still speak out and denounce the administration, attack its policies, work to build an opposition political base. True, there is government harassment, but there still is that relative freedom to fight. I can attack my government, try to organize to change it. That's more than I can do in Moscow, Peking, or Havana. Remember the reaction of the Red Guard to the "cultural revolution" and the fate of the Chinese college students.[1] Just a few of the violent episodes of bombings or a courtroom shootout that we have experienced here would have resulted in a sweeping purge and mass executions in Russia, China, or Cuba. Let's keep some perspective.")

Sadly, even M.M. chimed in when that hysteria was at its peak around the 2008 elections, with Obama's supposed methodological connection to the evil treasonous commie terrorist trumpeted everywhere on the "fringe" websites. And that's the kind of people most likely to boast of their reasoning and objectivity online?

Mencius also blasted the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) who used Gandhi's nonviolent tactics to attack the very literal Ku Klux Klan rule in Mississippi during the so-called Freedom Summer, risking life and limb, and a small part of whose members formed the semi-violent terrorist group Weather Underground a decade later.

[1] Yep, the "Cultural Revolution" was less a government-initiated purge in the image of 1937 than it was a little civil war between two slightly different factions of zealots.

2] For a brilliant example of this madness dressed as conservatism, just look at this idiot. He took Alinsky's sardonic reference to those revolutions' hype as "panaceas" as a sign of approval!

America, Fuck Yeah.

P.S. To be fair, here's a voice of sanity from some libertarian dude, who has the misfortune of posting at a site that even Moldbug rightly called a useless dump.