A monthly thread for posting any interesting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently on the Internet, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages.
During the discussion of Pranknet on Slashdot about a month ago, I saw this comment. It reminded me of our discussions about Newcomb's problem and superrationality.
I also disagree that our society is based on mutual trust. Volumes and volumes of laws backed up by lawyers, police, and jails show otherwise.
That's called selection/observation bias. You're looking at only one side of the coin.
I've lived in countries where there's a lot less trust than here. The notion of returning an opened product to a store and getting a full refund is based on trust (yes, there's a profit incentive, and some people do screw the retailers [and the retailers their customers -- SB], but the system works overall). In some countries I've been to, this would be unfeasible: Almost everyone will try to exploit such a retailer.
When a storm knocks out the electricity and the traffic lights stop working, I've always seen everyone obeying the rules. I doubt it's because they're worried about cops. It's about trust that the other drivers will do likewise. Simply unworkable in other places I've lived in.
I've had neighbors whom I don't know receive UPS/FedEx packages for me. Again, trust. I don't think they're afraid of me beating them up.
There are loads of examples. Society, at least in the US, is fairly nice and a lot of that has to do with a common trust.
Which is why someone exploiting that trust is a despised person.
Perpetually angry dude makes the opposite case. Never get an argument with that guy, by the way.
FWIW, the exact quote (from pp.13-14 of this article) is:
Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than the exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise. [Emphasis in original]
Your paraphrase is snappier though (as well as being less ambiguous; it's hard to tell in the original whether Tukey intends the adjectives "vague" and "precise" to apply to the questions or the answers).
Maybe it needs further explanation? Ink being the object with which books are created, and knowledge put down for others to use, you must be careful to avoid using that object directly and believing you have gained knowledge from it.
The blog post itself isn't the great insight, nor is the Reddit software it's running on, or the comment system, or the upvoting and downvoting. Insight can only come from the mind, and understanding the words and how they all link together into the idea being presented. The idea isn't in the text; it's an abstraction of the human mind.
Perhaps better summarized as, "Don't just read: think."
"What's that saying?" he said, smiling crookedly. "When you've eliminated the impossible, whatever it is that remains--- "
"--- however improbable, must be the truth. Yes, the problem is, the man who wrote that believed in faeries, and that he could photograph them."
We at the Church of Google believe the search engine Google is the closest humankind has ever come to directly experiencing an actual God (as typically defined). We believe there is much more evidence in favour of Google's divinity than there is for the divinity of other more traditional gods.
We reject supernatural gods on the notion they are not scientifically provable. Thus, Googlists believe Google should rightfully be given the title of "God", as She exhibits a great many of the characteristics traditionally associated with such Deities in a scientifically provable manner.
(Moved from the LW/OB Rationality Quotes thread, where is was previously posted by accident)
Heh, it's funny that you first put it in the LW/OB quotes section, because that's actually kind of similar to an out-of-context quote I excerpted from Eliezer Yudkowsky here.
the dream couldn't be evidence because ... only actual sensory impressions of Google results could form the base of a legitimate chain of inferences.
Yeah, I can see why you're worried people might quote you without permission! I mean, I thought I'd seen the worst Google fanboys, but never before did I see anyone claim that Google was the genesis of all valid inferences!
I would roughly divide philosophies into two categories, "crazy" and "sensible". Of the two, I definitely prefer the former. Sensible philosophies are noted for their sobriety, propriety, rationality, analytic skill and other things. One definite advantage they have is that they are usually quite sensible. Crazy philosophies are characterized by their madness, spontaneity, sense of humor, total freedom from the most basic conventions of thought, amorality, beauty, divinity, naturalness, poesy, absolute honesty, freedom from inhibitions, contrariness, paradoxicalness, lack of discipline and general yum-yummyness. ... ... In general I would say that psychologist, psychiatrist, economists, sociologists and political scientists tend towards the "sensible", whereas artists, poets, musicians and (to my great delight!) chemists, theoretical physicists, mathematicians - especially mathematical logicians - tend towards what I call "crazy".
Raymond M. Smullyan, The Tao Is Silent
The word “philosopher” has its origins in the Greek, where its root is a “lover of wisdom.” There is no assurance that a lover of wisdom has any, just as an anglophile is not assured to have an Englishman locked in the basement.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence -- Carl Sagan
(I know this quote is very much a cliche -- but, as a realized a long time after seeing it, it is not only a nice heuristic, but it also emphasizes the bayesian, probabilistic view of knowledge over the popperian one.)
Great thinkers build their edifices with subtle consistency. We do our intellectual forebears an enormous disservice when we dismember their visions and scan their systems in order to extract a few disembodied “gems”—thoughts or claims still accepted as true. These disarticulated pieces then become the entire legacy of our ancestors, and we lose the beauty and coherence of older systems that might enlighten us by their unfamiliarity—and their consequent challenge—in our fallible (and complacent) modern world.
-- Stephen Jay Gould