LESSWRONG

bbleeker

Aug 1, 2016

18 comments

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
Post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

2 points

bbleeker

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10 points

In the second grade I actually gave a teacher a black eye — I punched my music teacher because I didn’t think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled.

-Donald Trump

10 points

-7 points

Downvoted. Punching teachers in the eye because you don't think they know enough is generally counterproductive. This mostly tells us that in second grade Donald Trump had an overdeveloped sense of entitlement and underdeveloped sense of control. How could this possibly be a "rationality quote"?

-7 points

3 points

It's not good nor optimal behavior, but it was coming from a 7 year old, so that's to be expected. The assessment and decisive action were a model, to be sure.

Perhaps you'd prefer it if he bit a math teacher instead?

3 points

Fyrius

-10 points

I wonder, does LW have active mods? Surely there must be rules against manipulating the karma system.

Because last night this post was still downvoted to heck, and now it's suddenly at the top. That's at least 15 upvotes in less than ten hours, in a largely deserted thread. On a quote where Trump brags about assaulting his teacher.
And the other four top comments are also unimpressive Trump quotes posted by cody-bryce, which had negative scores last night, and the comments calling them out – which had noticeably positive scores last night – are now all below the score threshold.

-10 points

Lumifer

-10 points

Mods, yes, active, no. Mass up- and down-voting sprees are a thing, but no one cares enough to effectively combat them. There is a user, Multi-Banned Eugine Of Many Names, who is prone to this.

-10 points

4 points

Sometimes your best investments are the ones you don't make.

-Donald Trump

4 points

Fyrius

-7 points

That doesn't even make sense...

Yes, sometimes it's best not to make an investment, obviously, trivially. But surely it makes no sense to include that decision in the category of 'your investments', good or bad.

-7 points

5 points

You can fuss about how to count things, but a basic understanding of math/economics makes us conclude quite clearly that inaction can have the same sort of benefits as action, though we know people tend to overlook it. No one remembers the huge mistake someone steered away from--bad wars never started, investments not made, precedents not set (no matter how tempting all of these may be at the time)--the way they remember active decisions. We're usually operating with just half the story.

5 points

4 points

If you're interested in 'balancing' work and pleasure, stop trying to balance them. Instead make your work more pleasurable.

-Donald Trump

4 points

-7 points

Much easier for some people, and some varieties of work, than others. (That "privilege" thing social-justice types like to talk about? You can see it in Trump's remark here. He has the power and the freedom to change the work he does and how he does it to make it more fun for him, and he shows no sign of awareness that anyone else is in a very different situation.)

Adjusting your work and/or your attitude to your work to make it more pleasurable is a good idea for anyone who can do it, but I think it's only a very small fraction of the population who can do it enough that it no longer makes sense to talk about balancing work with not-work.

-7 points

4 points

I’ve always thought about the issue of nuclear war; it’s a very important element in my thought process. It’s the ultimate, the ultimate catastrophe, the biggest problem this world has, and nobody’s focusing on the nuts and bolts of it. It’s a little like sickness. People don’t believe they’re going to get sick until they do. Nobody wants to talk about it. I believe the greatest of all stupidities is people’s believing it will never happen, because everybody knows how destructive it will be, so nobody uses weapons. What bullshit.

-Donald Trump

4 points

-7 points

Five Trump quotations in "Rationality Quotes" posted within about a minute of one another. Is this some sort of experiment to see how LW reacts to the name of Trump? (With one possible exception they do not in fact seem to me to be rationality quotes in any useful sense.)

-7 points

3 points

There are people — I categorize them as life’s losers — who get their sense of accomplishment and achievement from trying to stop others. As far as I’m concerned, if they had any real ability...they’d be doing something constructive themselves

-Donald Trump

3 points

-7 points

Downvoted. This isn't entirely wrong -- surely there are some people who "get their sense of accomplishment and achievement from trying to stop others" -- but I strongly suspect that Trump is exaggerating how many people are actually in that category and I would expect (for fundamental-attribution-error reasons) that this is a commoner error than its opposite; and this sort of dismissive attitude to other people is usually unhelpful as well as unpleasant.

-7 points

Jayson_Virissimo

3 points

Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.

-- Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress

3 points

Clarity

1 points

“We understand the world by how we retrieve memories, re-order information into stories to justify how we feel.”

― Stephen Elliott, The Adderall Diaries

1 points

Fyrius

0 points

"Why live alone on a mountain if you love conversation?"
"There are many hungers it is better to deny than to feed. Discipline against the lesser aids in denial of the greater."

-- Paarthurnax (Skyrim)

(I edited out the bits of gratuitous dragon language.)

0 points

Clarity

0 points

‘We can forget that it is often painful to be a narcissist. It is not easy always having to be Admired/Admiring or Contemptuous, in order to avoid - desperately - the Contemptible pole. If we are lucky enough to usually inhabit a more normal Self-State (e.g. "reasonably competent; Respectful of-Respected by others; relaxed about being Ordinary"), can we find compassion for Narcissists who have not achieved this?’

http://www.acat.me.uk/reformulation.php?issue_id=36&article_id=373

0 points