Rationality Quotes: March 2011

On the living/non-living part, yeah. (They're all dead.)

For a certain value of 'dead'.

Brilliantly done, no matter the point they were trying to make. The headings say it all...

Evidence based pride and observational prejudice

Natural history of gravitational challenge

The parachute and the healthy cohort effect

The medicalisation of free fall

Parachutes and the military industrial complex

A call to (broken) arms

They're technically not incorrect, but they are on the wrong side of the debate. It's true that we can occasionally understand things without directly experimenting on them, but we could use more experiment, not less.

Oh boy.

"If a man heareth me and believeth not, I shall not judge him." or words to that effect.

I think it's somewhere around John 12, or is that Luke 12?, quoting Jesus.

Sorry, it's been a while since I last checked.

Rich may well be generalizing from one example. On the other hand, people do affect each other quite a bit.

I see, thanks.

That just is not what the statement means

That may not be what it's supposed to mean, but I've heard people use it that way.

If there were no players, then there would be no game.

That just is not what the statement means.

Given the context, I stand by my interpretation.

Yes, blaming the failure on self-serving behaviour is futile, but its imperative that you account for people's tendency to do this when you design a system.

You're right. We punish the weak. The piling-on effect I see sometimes sickens me; once someone is already roundly criticized, all sorts of cheap moral-enforcement-altruism-signalers latch on.

I think it's the type of inaccurate verbiage typical of writers trying to write above their ability.

Not at all. It is more accurate and clear than the vast majority of quotes in the quotes threads. It does a good job of translating the implied meaning (such as of the word 'hate' in the context) into more tangible descriptions.

Do you perhaps have a particular problem with semicolons? Or consider the status of urban dictionary authors insufficient to permit them the use of words like 'rebuke' and 'participant'?

It is this urban dictionary definition that earned my upvote in this case (even though DHTP;HTG probably would have scraped through on its own).

They don't really. Or if they do, with very much less urgency than when confronted with the possibility of being eaten by a tiger.

I'm reminded of movies where people in impossibly tough situations stick to impossibly idealistic principles. The producers of the movie want to hoodwink you into thinking they would stand by their luxurious morality even when the going gets tough. When the truth is, their adherence to such absurdly costly principles is precisely to signal that, compared to those who cannot afford their morality, they have it easy.

Pascal's wager was a very detached and abstract theological argument. If Pascal's heart rate did increase from considering the argument, it was from being excited about showing off his clever new argument, than from the sense of urgency the expected utility calculation was supposed to convey, and which he insincerely sold the argument with.

Chesterton believed so, but he was an apologist rather than a theologian. Theologians of the older Christian denominations have been increasingly resistant to this sentiment, in general. (Theologians of the newer Protestant denominations are better described as apologists, anyhow.)

It does on rare occasion. And then that particular subfield is no longer called philosophy.

I think that would result in lots of maimed philosophers -- while it would serve as example for future generations, I'm not sure it would be a net positive. :D

To be fair, I think he was using "we" to refer to the Conservative party.

As another poster mentioned the Anthroprogenic Climate Change debate. There is still debate about it, and the more light that is shown into the data, data gathering and processing methods of the primary investigators the more questions there are. Other statisticians and researchers have had to use FOIA (and the British equivalent) to get "raw" data and other information from researchers. If you won't release your raw data, and you won't release methods for processing that data then you really can't agree on anything, now can you?

So-called Alternative and Complementary "Medicine" being taken seriously by journals and organisations who should know better. And this is when the good studies show very, very little real effect these frauds. Especially things like Acupuncture and (for things like pneumonia and cancer) chiropractic care (I will note that spinal adjustments can be very valuable for some spinal problems).

Meaning stuff like this: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=9912 (note that one of the main complaints of the author of that post is not that Chinese Medicine calls stuff by different (and humorous) names, but rather how it classifies and recommends treatment. This is a MAJOR point).

I also know people who've worked inside NASA and other labs and I know how much worldview and localized politics have influenced what got funded, and what was done with the funding. Not enough of the story to recount with any accuracy, but enough to know that there was a hand on the scales as it were.

I have a Popperish view of science, and I'm perfectly willing to accept that humans have some influence on temperature, I'm willing to buy that chemicals compounded by nature have greater effectiveness (or equal effectiveness with few undesirable effects) than chemicals compounded in a laboratory, but science is never settled, and if you want to hide your work you really don't deserve benefit of the doubt.

The whole "science is settled" debacle in climate change? I'm not going to take a position on it, but it certainly seems to have become about that particular theory rather than the scientific method.

Thanks. I watched the episode and remember the context, but I still want to know why wonder that depends on ignorance is literally illusory.

Is this quote just a motivational tool designed to help us seek truth, or is there some true propositional content to it? If the latter, what are some situations where there was in fact some wonder? Also, what is or might be the causal mechanism by which dependence on ignorance leads to the no-wonder state?

I ask because when I am amazed by a magic trick or by a feat of practical engineering whose exact principles are unknown to me, and say "Wow!" and experience what I usually describe as "wonder," and then someone explains it and it seems relatively less wondrous, I do not usually retroactively downgrade my (temporary) experience of wonder -- rather, I note that at the time it seemed particularly wonderful and that now it seems less so.

For all that, I value truth much higher than wonder, and people are perfectly welcome to explain things to me -- but I doubt that House's quote is literally correct.

http://everything2.com/title/Pattern+Identity+Theory

You realize, I hope, that the following are true?

1. The fission reaction was stopped long before things got dodgy. The problem was the decay heat of fission products still left in the fuel.

2. Containment is still in place. The worst radiation releases have been some very short-lived isotopes in steam, at low concentrations.

3. Radiation exposure to the workers is well within safe limits, as measured by their dosimeters, and they're the ones closest to the reactors.

4. Japan has been hit by a huge earthquake, with a death toll of more than a thousand people. To fixate on a (nuclear, and therefore scary) power plant accident that hasn't endangered the public , when there are so many worse things to be worrying about, is exactly the kind of irrational double standard that Less Wrong readers should endeavor to recognize and avoid.

If you want to improve safety, focus on the things that are actually dangerous.

And succeed, if the worst that's released is irradiated steam. Failing non-catastrophically is also a part of control.

Google suggestions: "quarantine fiction", "quarantine wavefunction".

None of the physics textbooks I have ever read have required any special qualifications for a system to play the role of measurer, and in many cases use elementary particles as the measurers. There are only three places I recall hearing that claim: Werner Heisenberg, confused non-physicists, and advertising for quantum woo.

I definitely missed the literal meaning -- thanks.

I looked and couldn't find a definitive source, and really only posted it as sort of a neuron-jerk response.

I first heard it from some old Cajun sounding general talking about something to do with (IIRC) the Katrina response.

No, that was a different stupidity quote. "Don't get stuck on stupid".

It is hardly a coincidence that Epicureans (with Lucretius as their most prestigious Latin representative) became the subjects of a massive smear campaign by the early Christian Church.

That's either Iphigenia or just possibly some poor nameless girl who was killed so that a local fishing fleet would have a good catch.

Right or Wrong (by who's definition) is more in how you base your decisions, not in whether you make the decisions.

If you can only save one person, and all other things being equal, is it wrong to save the more attractive person because they are more attractive. If so, should you NOT save the more attractive person, just in case their attractiveness may be biasing your decision?

What if $4000 is spent on equipment to save one premature infant per year, who will probably be permanently impaired anyway, when the same money could have saved two or more adults per year?

The alleged ironic lack of discipline or rigour occurred when reading the book, not when posting the quote. But also, it looks like it was just a joke.

The bible doesn't say "don't kill". In KJV times, "kill" meant what we mean by "murder", and "slay" was the neutral form (what we now mean by "kill"). (This, by the way, actually corresponds to the Hebrew version)

This post brought to you by the vast inferential distance you have from the people who wrote KJV

the Bible is pretty consistent with that "no killing" thing.

Except for the countless times when killing is outright mandated on, well, pain of death.

Or that they acheive interesting side projects in their down time from working on the impossible.

That is a good one (that applies even under strict definitions of 'the impossible'). Closely related is if they make valuable tangential contributions to the non-impossible while working on the impossible.

"Hell" is the default translation, and definitely the correct one here, in my opinion (just as it is, for example, in Dante).

"Inferno" in English should just be a fancy Italianate way of saying "hell", but seems to have acquired a connotation of literal heat and flames. (That is, it's as if people have forgotten that "the blazing inferno of a burning building" is a metaphor.) In any case, neither cultured fanciness nor literal flames are intended by Calvino in that passage, as far as I can tell.

I'm not sure prudishness is necessarily to blame; it may just be a case of that all-too-common translator syndrome of reaching for a word that looks like the original word, rather than the word that the author would have used if he or she were actually a native speaker of the language you're translating into.

Here's the passage in the original, for those interested (source):

L'inferno dei viventi non è qualcosa che sarà; se ce n'è uno, è quello che è già qui, l'inferno che abitiamo tutti i giorni, che formiamo stando insieme. Due modi ci sono per non soffrirne. Il primo riesce facile a molti: accettare l'inferno e diventarne parte fino al punto di non vederlo più. Il secondo è rischioso ed esige attenzione e apprendimento continui: cercare e saper riconoscere chi e cosa, in mezzo all'inferno, non è inferno, e farlo durare, e dargli spazio.

This point was made long ago by J.L. Austin in (I believe) Sense and Sensibilia. Austin points out several things about "real", among them that "real" is substantive-hungry: You can't answer "Is such-and-so real?" without asking first, "Is it a real what?"

A decoy duck is not a real duck, but it is a real decoy -- whereas a rubber duck is not a real decoy; and a decoy coot might be mistaken for a decoy duck if you know little of waterfowl, but isn't a real decoy duck.

There is no sense of "real" that applies to all substantives that we would describe as real. The word makes sense only in contrast to specific ways of being unreal: being a forgery, a toy, an hallucination, a fictional character, an exaggeration, a case of mistaken identity, a doctored picture, etc. It is these negative concepts, and not the concept of "real", that actually do all the explanatory work. "Real" is both ambiguous and negative.

It's hard to define 'real'; it's not clear that it's doing any work.

"Hard to define" and "not clearly doing any work" are distinct properties; I'd agree about the former and not the latter. I do find it difficult to give a definition of "real" that isn't going to break when dealing with unusual border cases; but nevertheless, if I consider the question "Is Harry Potter real?", or "Is Barack Obama real?", or "Are atoms real?", then the two possible answers I could give for each will imply distinct models of reality that anticipate different experiences, and furthermore the word "real" can transfer such a model into someone else's mind pretty successfully. It doesn't particularly seem to have any of the characteristics of a non-descriptive term.

Err no! He says that 'real' means something like causally accessible from where we are. It's something like "from my perspective I am real, but from the perspective of a fictional-me in a fictional-universe, I am not, while the fictional me is real". Except this is not a very helpful way to define 'real'. There is no meta-realness, but relativistic-realness is quite as useless. Drescher dissolves the issue, by reducing 'real' to something like "whatever we can possibly get at from where we are in this universe".

If "real" is an honorific, then it can also be used as a descriptive term.

If "Gary Drescher is not real" is false, then clearly we mean something by the word, which makes it a bit tricky to show that it's not meaningful. Maybe you could show that real and unreal things have identical properties, aside from their "honorific?" Monsters under the bed refute that one though...

As in my reply to gwern, I was thinking "If "real" is an honorific, then it can also be used as a descriptive term."

I have you to thank for that insight, actually.

If I hadn't read "Conservation of Expected Evidence" , it would never have occurred to me to think of truth-seeking as a zero-sum game and ask, if we have something extraordinary over here, then what is forced to be ordinary to compensate?

Email sent. (Gosh, I think this will be the second book I'll be mentioned in. How thrilling.)

This may sound clever but it simply isn't true. It is perfectly possible to find extraordinary evidence for a merely ordinary claim.

I'm sure I could find huge amounts of evidence for the claim the high speed car crashes are frequently fatal, but this doesn't mean the claim "slamming into a large metal object at 70mph may kill you" ever deserved a low prior.

In this case, the easy problem is still easy without using any resources currently being applied to the hard problem. There should not be a trade off here.

"put the large rocks in first"

Do you happen to know where that quote is from? My dad uses it a lot and I had the vague impression it was from a self-help book.

Since this denies the batter the opportunity to even try to get a hit, some consider it to be unsportsmanlike, and when overused it makes a baseball game less interesting.

... to some. There are others who enjoy watching games being played strategically. I don't, for example, take basketball seriously unless the teams are using a full court press.

What do you do, for example, if all the bases are loaded and the good hitter comes in? Do you give away the run? It may depend on the score and it would involve some complex mathematical reasoning. That single decision would be more memorable to me than the rest of the entire game of baseball!

A culture of good sportsmanship and interesting games are communal goods in baseball-- the former keeps a spirit of goodwill, and the latter increases profitability-- so at a stretch, you might say Paige advises defecting in Prisoner's Dilemma type problems.

The latter wouldn't be a reasonable claim to make, even taking your premises regarding what sportsmanship is and what is good for the game for granted. For Paige to be claimed to be advising defection in the Prisoner's Dilemma Paige would have to be asserting or at least believe that the payoffs are PDlike. Since Paige doesn't give this indication he instead seems to be advocating thinking strategically instead of following your pride.

Curiously, assuming another set of credible beliefs Paige could consider walking the batter to be the cooperation move in the game theoretic situation. Specifically, when there is another pitcher known to walk who cannot be directly influenced. If all the other pitchers publicly declare that the game's rules should be changed in such a way that free walking is less desirable and then free walk hitters whenever it is is strategic to do so they may force the rule-makers' hands. If just one pitcher tried this strategy of influence then he would lose utility, sacrificing his 'good guy' image without even getting all the benefits that the original free-walker got for being the 'lone bad boy strategic prick pitcher'. If all the pitchers except one cooperate then the one pitcher who lets himself be hit out of the park cleans up on the approval-by-simplistic-folks stakes by being the 'boy scout only true sportsman' guy while everyone else does the hard work of looking bad in order to improve the rules, the game in the long term and the ability of pitchers not to be competitively disadvantaged for being 'sportsmanlike'. (All of this is again assuming that no-free-walking is intrinsically good.)

I use an analogous strategy when playing the 500. I like to arrange house rules that put a suitable restriction (or incentive modification) for misere calls. If the opponents have their egos particularly attached to standard misere rules I allow their rules to be used and then bid open misere whenever it is rational to do so. Which is a lot.

The above is not exactly a threat simply for the purpose of enforcing my will. It is to a significant extent a simple warning. Some people sulk if they rarely get the kitty when they have the joker and 4 jacks. At least this way they are forewarned.

I'm sorry but I'm not very familiar with baseball. Does walking a batter mean something like intentionally throwing the ball to third or fourth base so he doesn't get caught out but can't do a home run?

If this is the case then it seems like the advice is more about knowing when to lose.

I apologize, for I spoke far too strongly. I should not have made such a claim. Nor do I on reflection think this is the place to start actually doing said math, and your belief being so strong made me call up a friend to go over the problem. I would however strongly dispute that this thread makes it clear that this should run the other way, and continue to believe with p~.9 that there are in fact too many intentional walks (I would have said p~.99 before this thread, my friend after consideration said .95).

This thread seems to be saying as evidence for there being too few: There exists a cognitive bias that, all things being equal, will cause managers to be reluctant to walk a batter intentionally.

I agree that this bias exists. However, I think there's a directly opposite bias that says "don't lose to their best guy" regardless of whether it's right to do so and a bias much stronger than either that says "do the thing that won't get me hammered in the press if I lose." I would guess there's also Overconfidence Bias at work here: Managers think that better matchups are more distinct from worse matchups than they actually are. There are a lot of biases surrounding this decision, they run in both directions and only a small (if growing) number of teams are willing to sit down, do math and try and figure out the right answer.

The only way to actually know which way this runs is to observe what managers actually do and compare that to a well developed model that evaluates the chances of each team winning given each potential decision.

My observations over the years is that these are the categories of situations involving possible intentional walks: 1) Conventional wisdom automatic walks. You need to walk him, and you do. 2) Conventional wisdom "free" walks. CV says that the run doesn't matter so put the guy on. Given the option value of being able to walk a guy, I think managers use this far too often; they essentially use it as long as the next guy is worse. 3) Getting to the pitcher. This is done at least as much as is reasonable given the lineup effects of doing this. 4) Walking the obviously more dangerous guy because there are men on base. This is the situation where it is possible they walk too rarely; I am willing to accept that some managers do this too rarely. Some clearly do it too often. 5) Walking the dangerous guy because you flat out won't pitch to him. This requires such a strong hitter to be right due to the value of an out. I'd have a very hard time believing this is substantially underused. 6) Walking one guy to get to another somewhat similar guy. This is done way too often, many times in places that boggles the mind.

I suspect that what happened is that the quote comes from a time when the conventional wisdom was different and managers did in fact walk batters too rarely, especially due to issues of sportsmanlike conduct, but such considerations seem to be almost entirely gone.

The book is quite clearly propaganda. It sets out to advance a specific thesis, and there is literally no evidence provided against that idea. The bottom line was written at the beginning of the book, and he spent the rest of the book providing arguments for it. That doesn't mean, however, that his positions are necessarily wrong (see the addendum on the link above). Certainly, Zinn's positions have some flaws, but he does raise some issues that haven't been raised with other history texts.

There is some value in criticizing that which has been improperly popularly lionized, but this introduces its own skew. Zinn managed to truly piss me off because in his chapter on WWII he either did not mention or mentioned only in passing the rape of Nanking and similar Japanese atrocities, spent a few paragraphs on the Holocaust, surprisingly didn't particularly mention the firebombings of Dresden or Tokyo, but harped for several pages on the atomic bombs. Perhaps they needed examination, but incessantly and loudly examining them at the expense of everything else leaves the reader with a distinct impression of Zinn's own political beliefs.

I think this might be behind much of (American) conservatives' anger with liberals in the foreign policy domain, as exemplified by the insult "blame-America-first". Liberals are questioning America's policies, which is well and good, while leaving it as read that the actions of their adversaries (since the dynamic evolved, usually USSR or terrorists) are much worse. Conservatives see that apparent bias and gain the impression that all liberals hate America in particular. The situation is not improved by much political mind-death on all sides. This is probably going off on a bit of a tangent, but it's at least marginally relevant.

Regarding tools (for building tools)* check out the flying sorcerers by Nieven and Pournelle.

That sounds good to me.

Edit: Ah, I see that there is disagreement. I think this calls for a poll - I'll make one in the Open Thread.

Edit 2: Poll

Poll