LESSWRONG

elharo

Dec 2, 2015

78 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 Do not quote with only a name.
Please 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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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.

5 points

elharo

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rationalnoodles

16 points

Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach, because we ask “Can I believe it?” when we want to believe something, but “Must I believe it?” when we don’t want to believe. The answer is almost always yes to the first question and no to the second.

--Jon Haidt, The Righteous Mind

16 points

Sarunas

1 point

I remember reading the idea expressed in this quote in an old LW post, older than Haidt's book which was published in 2012, and it is probably older than that.

In any case, I think that this is a very good quote, because it highlights a bias that seems to be more prevalent than perhaps any other cognitive bias discussed here and motivates attempts to find better ways to reason and argue. If LessWrong had an introduction whose intention was to motivate why we need better thinking tools, this idea could be presented very early, maybe even in a second or third paragraph.

1 point

Unnamed

9 points

I think psychologist Tom Gilovich is the original source of the "Can I?" vs. "Must I?" description of motivated reasoning. He wrote about it in his 1991 book How We Know What Isn't So.

For desired conclusions, we ask ourselves, "Can I believe this?", but for unpalatable conclusions we ask, "Must I believe this?

9 points

27chaos

11 points

The key to avoiding rivalries is to introduce a new pole, which mediates your relationship to the antagonist. For me this pole is often Scripture. I renounce my claim to be thoroughly aligned with the pole of Scripture and refocus my attention on it, using it to mediate my relationship with the antagonistic party. Alternatively, I focus on a non-aggressive third party. You may notice that this same pattern is observed in the UK parliamentary system of the House of Commons, for instance. MPs don’t directly address each other: all of their interactions are mediated by and addressed to a non-aggressive, non-partisan third party – the Speaker. This serves to dampen antagonisms and decrease the tendency to fall into rivalry. In a conversation where such a ‘Speaker’ figure is lacking, you need mentally to establish and situate yourself relative to one. For me, the peaceful lurker or eavesdropper, Christ, or the Scripture can all serve in such a role. As I engage directly with this peaceful party and my relationship with the aggressive party becomes mediated by this party, I find it so much easier to retain my calm.

Alastair Roberts

11 points

Benito

2 points

Having recently watched a few of these discussions/debates in the commons (watched via youtube) it is noticeable how the speaker is able to temper the mood and add a little levity.

There is one popular political youtube account called 'Incorrigible Delinquent' and he begins each of his uploads with the speaker quite humorously saying " You are an incorrigible delinquent! "

2 points

Romashka

1 point

This should be developed into a Discussion post (if it hasn't.)

1 point

Curiouskid

10 points

Probably people have seen this before, but I really like it:

People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing, that's why we recommend it daily.

-Zig Ziglar

10 points

lmm

1 point

I don't see the point. The whole point of "motivating doesn't last" is "you will only be able to sustain effort if there is something in your day-to-day that motivates you to continue, not some distant ideal.

1 point

Lumifer

7 points

There’s nothing rigorous about looking for shiny objects that happen to be statistically significant.

Andrew Gelman

7 points

RichardKennaway

5 points

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

Cardinal Richelieu

5 points

aausch

5 points

"Update: many people have read this post and suggested that, in the first file example, you should use the much simpler protocol of copying the file to modified to a temp file, modifying the temp file, and then renaming the temp file to overwrite the original file. In fact, that’s probably the most common comment I’ve gotten on this post. If you think this solves the problem, I’m going to ask you to pause for five seconds and consider the problems this might have. (...) The fact that so many people thought that this was a simple solution to the problem demonstrates that this problem is one that people are prone to underestimating, even they’re explicitly warned that people tend to underestimate this problem!" -- @danluu, "Files are hard"

5 points

5 points

I want you to be the Admiral Nagumo of my staff. I want your every thought, every instinct as you believe Admiral Nagumo might have them. You are to see the war, their operations, their aims, from the Japanese viewpoint and keep me advised what you are thinking about, what you are doing, and what purpose, what strategy, motivates your operations. If you can do this, you will give me the kind of information needed to win this war.

-Admiral Nimitz from Edwin Layton, And I Was There, 1985, p. 357.

5 points

flexive

5 points

"Direct action is not always the best way. It is a far greater victory to make another see through your eyes than to close theirs forever."

Kreia, KOTOR 2

5 points

dspeyer

5 points

I think the common thread in a lot of these [horrible] relationships is people who have managed to go through their entire lives without realizing that “Person did Thing, which caused me to be upset” is not the same thing as “Person did something wrong”, much less “I have a right to forbid Person from ever doing Thing again”.

--Ozymandias (most of the post is unrelated)

5 points

Lumifer

4 points

If anyone is trying to tell you it’s not complicated, be very, very suspicious

-- Tyler Cowen

4 points

RichardKennaway

7 points

Seek simplicity and distrust it.

A.N. Whitehead

7 points

VoiceOfRa

3 points

I'd be even more suspicious of someone telling me that it's not that simple.

3 points

dxu

2 points

Depends on what the subject matter is. Sometimes, it really doesn't need to be complicated.

2 points

VoiceOfRa

4 points

Harms take longer to show up & disprove than benefits. So evidence-based medicine disproportionately channels optimism

Saurabh Jha

4 points

DanArmak

6 points

That seems like selection bias.

You do a lot of studies and experiments, and filter out most proposed medicine because it causes harm quickly, or doesn't cause benefits quickly enough or at all. Then you market whatever survived testing. Obviously, if it's still harmful, the harms will show up only slowly, while the benefits will show up quickly - otherwise you would have filtered it out before it reached the consumer.

This is like saying engineering disproportionately channels optimism, because almost all the appliances you buy in the store work now and only fail later. If they had failed immediately, they would have been flagged in QC and never got to the shop.

6 points

ike

3 points

Each individual instance of outperformance can be put into its own coherent narrative, can be made to look logical and earned on its own terms. But when you throw them together it's hard to escape the impression of a coin-flipping contest with a song and dance at the end.

Matt Levine

3 points

common_law

3 points

Looking for mental information in individual neuronal firing patterns is looking at the wrong level of scale and at the wrong kind of physical manifestation. As in other statistical dynamical regularities, there are a vast number of microstates (i.e., network activity patterns) that can constitute the same ghloal attractor, and a vast numbmer of trajectories of microstate-to-microstate changes that will tend to converge to a common attractor. But it is the final quasi-regular network-level dynamic, like a melody played by a million-instrument orchestra, that is the medium of mental information. - Terrence W. Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, pp. 516 - 517.

3 points

2 points

"The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur."

Elon musk

2 points

2 points

"It is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate for talent in getting the right answer (two people who don't know something are no better than one), will tend to slow down progress, and will make the task incredibly expensive."

Elon musk

Merry Christmas beloved LessWrong family. I think I finally get the format of these threads. How did I not read them properly earlier!

2 points

2 points

"My biggest mistake is probably weighing too much on someone's talent and not someone's personality. I think it matters whether someone has a good heart."

I recently watched a company go from a billion in revenues to zero when a founder stole $90 million from the company.

Integrity, humility, and doing your best is by far the most important consideration when evaluating whether to work for someone.

Elon musk

2 points

roland

2 points

If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

-- The killer shortly before killing his victim in No Country for Old Men

2 points

gwern

7 points

"A well-laid plan is always to my mind most profitable; even if it is thwarted later, the plan was no less good, and it is only chance that has baffled the design; but if fortune favors one who has planned poorly, then he has gotten only a prize of chance, and his plan was no less bad."

--Artabanus, uncle of Xerxes; book 7 of Herodotus's Histories (I could swear I'd seen this on a LW quote thread before, but searching turns up nothing.)

7 points

Glen

4 points

(To make it clear: I have never seen the movie in question, so this is not a comment on the specifics of what happened) Just because it turned out poorly doesn't make it a bad rule. It could have had a 99% chance to work out great, but the killer is only seeing the 1% where it didn't. If you're killing people, then you can't really judge their rules, since it's basically a given that you're only going to talk to them when the rules fail. Everything is going to look like a bad rule if you only count the instances where it didn't work. Without knowing how many similar encounters the victim avoided with their rule, I don't see how you can make a strong case that it's a bad (or good) rule.

4 points

Lumifer

1 point

Just because it turned out poorly doesn't make it a bad rule.

That kinda depends on the point of view.

If you take the frequentist approach and think about limits as n goes to infinity, sure, a single data point will tell you very little about the goodness of the rule.

But if it's you, personally you, who is looking at the business end of a gun, the rule indeed turned out to be very very bad. I think the quote resonates quite well with this.

Besides, consider this. Let's imagine a rule which works fine 99% of the time, but in 1% of the cases it leaves you dead. And let's say you get to apply this rule once a week. Is it a good rule? Nope, it's a very bad rule. Specifically, your chances of being alive at the end of the year are only 0.99^52 = about 60%, not great. Being alive after ten years? About half a percent.

1 point

rationalnoodles

2 points

If you want to understand another group, follow the sacredness.

--Jon Haidt, The Righteous Mind

2 points