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Comment by snafoo on Rationality Quotes February 2014 · 2014-02-18T20:49:06.511Z · LW · GW

Quantum mechanics is infinitely easier to understand than to discover.

Comment by snafoo on Rationality Quotes February 2014 · 2014-02-18T20:44:25.219Z · LW · GW

Charlatans also tend to do this.

Often, a charlatan would dedicate her life to selling boats. When questioned if she really believes in the floods, obviously she does! Why else would she be wasting her life as a boatwright?

Comment by snafoo on Rationality Quotes December 2013 · 2014-01-28T06:49:26.947Z · LW · GW

But if you're middle class the price has gone up and may be unaffordable.

My basic point was just the fact that the numbers we compare have nothing to do with each other. (The really don't.)

And the ratio of administrators to professors has also exploded.

The number of administrators, as traditionally defined, has changed little, though the number of professional staff has increased a lot. The biggest increase has been the growth of IT, though it goes beyond that. The part of this which is IT-related is somewhat mirrored by most other labor-intensive stuff.

Comment by snafoo on Rationality Quotes December 2013 · 2013-12-30T19:02:45.833Z · LW · GW

College tuition inflation is often talked about but rarely dealt with sensibly. To understand the nature and extent of college tuition inflation, it's important to understand

  1. Looking at the sticker price isn't comparing apples to apples. Aid has gone up drastically. It's never been cheaper for a kid from a poor family to get an education. Although a lot of the increases at state schools relate to decreasing funding, a huge amount of them at private schools (and a lesser extent at state schools) is their financial aid programs. Tuition has become more progressive and we're comparing the top prices.

  2. Running a college is about as labor-intensive as it ever has been, which is to say, very. Prices in all labor-intensive stuff have gone up faster than CPI.

There has been a real increase, but it's not all real and it's not all for the reasons a lot of people assume.

Comment by snafoo on Rationality Quotes December 2013 · 2013-12-18T19:35:39.303Z · LW · GW

The quote is a good one, and not because it's true.

Comment by snafoo on Rationality Quotes November 2013 · 2013-11-05T22:03:11.060Z · LW · GW

"The enemy of my enemy has their own relationship with me."

Comment by snafoo on Rationality Quotes November 2013 · 2013-11-05T22:02:17.311Z · LW · GW

See also: the distinction between verification and validation, or between quality control and quality assurance.

Comment by snafoo on Rationality Quotes November 2013 · 2013-11-04T02:33:51.543Z · LW · GW

"I don't understand why a question is interesting, so clearly it's meaningless."

Comment by snafoo on Rationality Quotes October 2013 · 2013-10-09T20:35:44.897Z · LW · GW

Hyperbole.

Comment by snafoo on Rationality Quotes September 2013 · 2013-10-01T00:27:16.467Z · LW · GW

Let's get one thing straight: ignorance killed the cat.

Curiosity was framed.

Comment by snafoo on Rationality Quotes September 2013 · 2013-09-05T14:22:22.804Z · LW · GW

Yeah.

It's like when those stupid car buffs say "Hmmm...yeah, transmission fluid" when telling each other what they think is wrong rather than "It sounds like the part that changes the speed and torque with which the wheels turn with respect to the engine isn't properly lubricated and able to have the right hydraulic pressure, so you should add some green oil product."

-rekam

Comment by snafoo on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 26, chapter 97 · 2013-08-16T22:03:16.503Z · LW · GW

CONSTANT VIGILANCE

Comment by snafoo on Rationality Quotes August 2013 · 2013-08-09T05:11:04.710Z · LW · GW

Can you not empathise in even a small part with the aesthetic aversion many people have to contaminating things with used currency?

Are you sure you didn't just go ahead and basically make up these people who don't want money to touch their book because it's dirty?

Comment by snafoo on Rationality Quotes August 2013 · 2013-08-04T17:53:01.322Z · LW · GW

When you were what?

Comment by snafoo on Rationality Quotes August 2013 · 2013-08-04T17:51:26.055Z · LW · GW

When the axe came into the woods, many of the trees said, "At least the handle is one of us.

Turkish proverb

Comment by snafoo on Rationality Quotes August 2013 · 2013-08-04T17:50:23.520Z · LW · GW

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Stephen Jay Gould

Comment by snafoo on Rationality Quotes August 2013 · 2013-08-04T17:48:35.578Z · LW · GW

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

misattributed often to Plato

Comment by snafoo on Rationality Quotes August 2013 · 2013-08-04T17:46:45.143Z · LW · GW

Some say imprisoning three women in my home for a decade makes me a monster, I say it doesn’t, and of course the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Ariel Castro (according to The Onion)