Here's the new quotes thread.
Rules:
The tautological emptiness of a Master's Wisdom is exemplified in the inherent stupidity of proverbs. Let us engage in a mental experiment by way of trying to construct proverbial wisdom out of the relationship between terrestrial life, its pleasures, and its Beyond. If ones says, "Forget about the afterlife, about the Elsewhere, seize the day, enjoy life fully here and now, it's the only life you've got!" it sounds deep. If one says exactly the opposite ("Do not get trapped in the illusory and vain pleasures of earthly life; money, power, and passions are all destined to vanish into thin air - think about eternity!"), it also sounds deep. If one combines the two sides ("Bring Eternity into your everyday life, live your life on this earth as if it is already permeated by Eternity!"), we get another profound thought. Needless to add, the same goes for it's inversion: "Do not try in vain to bring together Eternity and your terrestrial life, accept humbly that you are forever split between Heaven and Earth!" If, finally, one simply gets perplexed by all these reversals and claims: "Life is an enigma, do not try to penetrate its secrets, accept the beauty of its unfathomable mystery!" the result is, again, no less profound than its reversal: "Do not allow yourself to be distracted by false mysteries that just dissimulate the fact that, ultimately, life is very simple - it is what it is, it is simply here without reason and rhyme!" Needless to add that, by uniting mystery and simplicity, one again obtains a wisdom: "The ultimate, unfathomable mystery of life resides in its very simplicity, in the simple fact that there is life."
This is one of the more brilliant illustrations I've seen, and I suspect that what it illustrates is that the Deep Wisdom of a statement is mostly the cumulative Deep Wisdom points scored by each deep-sounding concept. Thus, reversing the meaning of a sentence has little effect on its Deep Wisdom points, so long as the same concepts are being invoked.
It was a good answer that was made by one who when they showed him hanging in a temple a picture of those who had paid their vows as having escaped shipwreck, and would have him say whether he did not now acknowledge the power of the gods,—‘Aye,' asked he again, ‘but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?' And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happens much oftener, neglect and pass them by.
Francis Bacon
Sometimes, apparently rational self-interested strategies turn out (as in the prisoners' dilemma) to be self-defeating. This may look like a defeat for rationality, but it is not. Rationality is saved by its own open-endedness. If a strategy of following accepted rules of rationality is sometimes self-defeating, this is not the end. We revise the rules to take account of this, so producing a higher-order rationality strategy. This in turn may fail, but again we go up a level. At whatever level we fail, there is always the process of standing back and going up a further level.
Quoted in The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
I think of facts as historical events. They cannot change. We just get more of them, and sometimes the more recent ones are more relevant to the near future.
Keynes notion of facts changing strikes me as creepy, with a hint of Orwell's Minitrue employing Winston Smith to change them.
Keynes seems to be peddling a vision in which intellectual progress in not cumulative. Facts are established. Theory accounts for them. Facts change. Theory must also be changed. It leaves open the possibility that facts may change again or even change back!
"When the facts change" must be read as short hand for "When new facts come along that falsify the old theory, the one that did an apparently adequate job on the old facts...". There is an important distinction but it is not between those who change their minds and those who do not. Age and generational forgetting will take care of those who refuse to change. In the fullness of time a new generation will believe in the new facts and the new theories; change is inevitable.
The big distinction is between folk-wisdom, which is content to have the new theory explain the new facts, and science, which holds itself to a higher standard. Science expects the new theory to explain the new facts and the old facts. That tends to be socially awkward, because progress, if it is permitted at all, tends to bring out the ways in which the old facts got bent to better fit the old theories.
Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is "wishful thinking." You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself. When you have checked my figures, then, and then only, will you know whether I have that balance or not. If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic, and the doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant — but only after you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely arithmetical grounds. It is the same with all thinking and all systems of thought. If you try to find out which are tainted by speculating about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of yourself. You must first find out on purely logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break down as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go on and discover the psychological causes of the error.
C.S. Lewis, "Bulverism"
(It's not exactly correct- evidence of bias is some evidence against a belief- but not always as strong of evidence as it's assumed to be.)
I've actually always found C.S. Lewis to be one of the single most fascinating and compelling Christian writers. Obviously I think he makes some very fundamental mistakes, but his approach to Christianity is about as rationalist as you can get. He really emphasizes that if you're going to believe in something, it better really be true not just "worth believing in" or "virtuous" or "helpful" -- he himself could have written Belief in Belief. Furthermore, he seems committed to a conception of "faith" that doesn't involve any conflict with rationality -- he thinks that the logical arguments for the existence of God do a lot of work, and he's fairly sophisticated scientifically (seems reasonably knowledgeable about evolution, quantum mechanics, etc.). I would actually highly recommend The Screwtape Letters to any rationalists who find religious arguments interesting (if not compelling).
He really emphasizes that if you're going to believe in something, it better really be true not just "worth believing in" or "virtuous" or "helpful" -- he himself could have written Belief in Belief.
One gets that impression if one reads Mere Christianity and the Screwtape Letters. But if one reads his works aimed at children one gets the impression that he wants children to believe despite evidence. See for example the scene in The Silver Chair where the protagonists are trapped underground and the Lady of the Green Kirtle tries to enchant them to think that Narnia, Aslan and the Sun are all things they made up as part of a game. They are almost taken in until they declare that they will believe in Aslan even if there's is no Aslan because the world they've imagined if it has been imagined is a better world than the one they live in.
I had a scheme, which I still use today when somebody is explaining something that I'm trying to understand: I keep making up examples. For instance, the mathematicians would come in with a terrific theorem, and they're all excited. As they're telling me the conditions of the theorem, I construct something which fits all the conditions. You know, you have a set (one ball) – disjoint (two balls). Then the balls turn colors, grow hairs, or whatever, in my head as they put more conditions on. Finally they state the theorem, which is some dumb thing about the ball which isn't true for my hairy green ball thing, so I say, 'False!'
-Richard Feynman
One of the most serious problems with modern "management" is that the incentives are all wrong. Imagine that I hire a programmer and pay him by the line of code. This idea has been so thoroughly debunked that it is nearly impossible to write out the consequences without sounding cliché. Yet it happens all the time: Companies promote "Architects" who are evaluated by the weight of their "architecture." The result is stultifying and demoralizing. The architect does not work to facilitate the programmer's work, he works to produce evidence of his contribution in the form of frameworks, standards, and software process.
So, how are most managers evaluated? By the amount of "managing" they do, as measured by the amount of process they impose on their team. Evaluating a manager by the amount of managing they do is exactly the same thing as evaluating a programmer by the amount of code they write. And it produces results like you describe, where the manager works to produce evidence of their management in the form of processes and decisions from the top down, rather than facilitating the work actually being done.
-raganwald, HN, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2423236
Hmmm, maybe a bit of an overgeneralization? Or a US-thing? I've never seen a manager being rewarded for the amount of "process" they impose on their team. I'm sure there are many bad managers, but it's also somewhat of a cliché for programmers to blame management for the parts of the work they don't like.
"Aaron, you always criticize religious people for adhering to their beliefs... but the beliefs you have about evolution, global warming, or the lack of god are just as passionate as any fundamentalist. How are you any better?"
"There's one big difference. I know what it would take for me to change my mind."
— Raymond and Aaron, Calamities of Nature
"Death is the termination of life, not a creature with a scythe who has a just claim to the lives he takes. (Death hates to be anthropomorphized.)" -- Ben Best, Cryonics − Frequently Asked Questions
In an article in a women’s magazine many years ago we advised the readers to buy their stocks as they bought their groceries, not as they bought their perfume.
-- Benjamin Graham The Intelligent Investor, 1949.
(I really like Graham's rational, down-to-earth approach to investing, and this quote is a good example of the kind of thinking he wants to convey)
Bill James was asked about the Holmes saying "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth". He responded:
That Sherlock Holmes line is very, very interesting. It's false, and extremely arrogant, and very dangerous. That's not a real way to think about the world. This concept of eliminating the impossible -- we could never do that. The whole idea of Sherlock Holmes is dangerous because it encourages people to think that -- if they're intelligent enough -- they could put all the pieces together in absolute terms. But the human mind is not sophisticated enough to do that. People are not that smart. It's not that Sherlock Holmes would need to be twice as smart as the average person; he'd have to be a billion times as smart as the average person.
Surely that also depends on the domain you are reasoning about? For example, when debugging computer programs it seems that I am eliminating the impossible all the time. "Hm, this function is not returning the answer I expect. Am I calling it with the wrong argument? (Printf -- no.) Are the calculations right up to this point? (Printf -- yes). Aha, this must be the line that's wrong!"
True! However, I know I've had times in program debugging (though I can't remember a specific one) when I eliminated something "impossible" and it turned out not to be. I think there was usually a flaw in my reasoning though, rather than a flaw in my knowledge of what's possible. (In other words, I overlooked some simple possibility.) Anyway, when I feel like I'm at the end of my debugging rope, I just start from the beginning with an eye towards stuff I could have missed the first time around, including stuff that I disregarded as "impossible".
Related: "select" Isn't Broken".
"I would not give a farthing for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity."
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes (quoted by Venkatesh Rao; thanks to InquilineKea)
I think the simplicity on this side of complexity is naive theories that "just make sense" and the simplicity on the other side of complexity is mathematical elegance.
When one of the commenters in the Amanda Knox thread said yesterday that the probability has to be either 0 or 1 because either she did it or she didn't, that sounds simple. The mathematics of Bayesian probability are also simple, in that they can be derived from a few premises and explain a wide variety of disparate situations. But they're not the same sort of simplicity.
Holmes is revered as a quasi-deity among most legal academics, and while I think he's entitled to far less respect than he generally receives, I've always appreciated this sentiment. Basically, "the simplicity on the other side of complexity" is the lawyer's way of stating "it all adds up to normality."
So, the simplicity on this side of complexity would be something like naive free will theory -- basically, "it feels like I have free will, so something magic must happen that gives me true power to choose." If you reject this simplicity, but don't make it to the other side of complexity, you might end up saying silly things like "free will doesn't exist, so all of our choices are meaningless -- everything is determined for us." You need to work your way through the complexity to reach the simplicity that says "yeah, the experience of making decisions is real, and that's what matters -- this is just a normal part of physics, not something magic." Sometimes, simple truths really are correct -- but you need to work through a bit of complexity to understand why that's the case.
Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after death? No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no. One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out "Don't you believe in anything?" "Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be."
Isaac Asimov
"There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same." -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb (HT: Fugitive Knowledge)
Our brains are like lawyers, not scientists.
-- Michael Shermer (one minute into the clip)
One perennial problem is the overwhelming incentive for analysts to issue “Buy” recommendations. The universe of stocks not owned by a customer is always much larger than the list of those currently owned. Consequently, it’s much easier to generate commissions from new “Buy” recommendations than from recommendations to sell.
-Joel Greenblatt
"I find it deeply unimpressive that the bible can be said to predict the big bang. There are only two possibilities: either the universe began or it's been here forever. Just two possibilities. To get one of them is really not that impressive."
~ Richard Dawkins, in response to John Lennox's claim that the bible predicted that the universe had a beginning.
Between 1880 and 1887, Heaviside developed the operational calculus (involving the D notation for the differential operator, which he is credited with creating), a method of solving differential equations by transforming them into ordinary algebraic equations which caused a great deal of controversy when first introduced, owing to the lack of rigour in his derivation of it. He famously said, “Mathematics is an experimental science, and definitions do not come first, but later on.” He was replying to criticism over his use of operators that were not clearly defined. On another occasion he stated somewhat more defensively, “I do not refuse my dinner simply because I do not understand the process of digestion.”
Oliver Heaviside