rationality

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105 points Rain 03 August 2010 12:56:46AM

    Personally, I've been hearing all my life about the Serious
    Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has
    always been that I'm willing to grapple with those issues for as many
    centuries as it takes.

-- Patrick Nielsen Hayden
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73 points RichardKennaway 02 February 2011 01:07:05AM

    At home there was a game that all the parents played with their
    children. It was called, What Did You See? Mara was about Dann’s age
    when she was first called into her father’s room one evening, where he
    sat in his big carved and coloured chair. He said to her, ‘And now we
    are going to play a game. What was the thing you liked best today?’

    At first she chattered: ‘I played with my cousin . . . I was out with
    Shera in the garden . . . I made a stone house.’ And then he had said,
    ‘Tell me about the house.’ And she said, ‘I made a house of the stones
    that come from the river bed.’ And he said, ‘Now tell me about the
    stones.’ And she said, ‘They were mostly smooth stones, but some were
    sharp and had different shapes.’ ‘Tell me what the stones looked like,
    what colour they were, what did they feel like.’

    And by the time the game ended she knew why some stones were smooth
    and some sharp and why they were different colours, some cracked, some
    so small they were almost sand. She knew how rivers rolled stones
    along and how some of them came from far away. She knew that the river
    had once been twice as wide as it was now. There seemed no end to what
    she knew, and yet her father had not told her much, but kept asking
    questions so she found the answers in herself. Like, ‘Why do you think
    some stones are smooth and round and some still sharp?’ And she
    thought and replied, ‘Some have been in the water a long time, rubbing
    against other stones, and some have only just been broken off bigger
    stones.’ Every evening, either her father or her mother called her in
    for What Did You See? She loved it. During the day, playing outside or
    with her toys, alone or with other children, she found herself
    thinking, Now notice what you are doing, so you can tell them tonight
    what you saw.

    She had thought that the game did not change; but then one evening she
    was there when her little brother was first asked, What Did You See?
    and she knew just how much the game had changed for her. Because now
    it was not just What Did You See? but: What were you thinking? What
    made you think that? Are you sure that thought is true?

    When she became seven, not long ago, and it was time for school, she
    was in a room with about twenty children - all from her family or from
    the Big Family - and the teacher, her mother’s sister, said, ‘And now
    the game: What Did You See?’

    Most of the children had played the game since they were tiny; but
    some had not, and they were pitied by the ones that had, for they did
    not notice much and were often silent when the others said, ‘I saw . .
    .’, whatever it was. Mara was at first upset that this game played
    with so many at once was simpler, more babyish, than when she was with
    her parents. It was like going right back to the earliest stages of
    the game: ‘What did you see?’ ‘I saw a bird.’ ‘What kind of a bird?’
    ‘It was black and white and had a yellow beak.’ ‘What shape of beak?
    Why do you think the beak is shaped like that?’

    Then she saw what she was supposed to be understanding: Why did one
    child see this and the other that? Why did it sometimes need several
    children to see everything about a stone or a bird or a person?

-- Doris Lessing, Mara and Dann
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66 points Grognor 02 May 2012 03:42:19AM

    Tags like "stupid," "bad at __", "sloppy," and so on, are ways of
    saying "You're performing badly and I don't know why." Once you move
    it to "you're performing badly because you have the wrong fingerings,"
    or "you're performing badly because you don't understand what a limit
    is," it's no longer a vague personal failing but a causal necessity.
    Anyone who never understood limits will flunk calculus. It's not you,
    it's the bug.

-- celandine13 (Hat-tip to Frank Adamek.
                In addition, the linked article
                is so good that I had trouble
                picking something to put
                in rationality quotes;
                in other words, I recommend it.)
%
64 points Alicorn 07 April 2011 03:08:53AM

    When confronting something which may be either a windmill or an evil
    giant, what question should you be asking?

    There are some who ask, "If we do nothing, and that is an evil giant,
    can we afford to be wrong?" These people consider themselves to be
    brave and vigilant.

    Some ask "If we attack it wrongly, can we afford to pay to replace a
    windmill?" These people consider themselves cautious and pragmatic.

    Still others ask, "With the cost of being wrong so high in either
    case, shouldn't we always definitively answer the 'windmill vs. giant'
    question before we act?" And those people consider themselves
    objective and wise.

    But only a tiny few will ask, "Isn't the fact that we're giving equal
    consideration to the existence of evil giants and windmills a warning
    sign of insanity in ourselves?"

    It's hard to find out what these people consider themselves, because
    they never get invited to parties.

-- PartiallyClips, Windmill
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63 points RichardKennaway 01 February 2010 10:16:33AM

From a BBC interview with a retiring Oxford Don:

Don: "Up until the age of 25, I believed that 'invective'
      was a synonym for 'urine'."

BBC: "Why ever would you have thought that?"

Don: "During my childhood, I read many of the Edgar Rice Burroughs
'Tarzan' stories, and in those books, whenever a lion wandered into a
clearing, the monkeys would leap into the trees and 'cast streams of
invective upon the lion's head.'"

BBC: long pause "But, surely sir, you now know the meaning of the word."

Don: "Yes, but I do wonder under what other misapprehensions I continue to
labour."
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62 points Solvent 02 February 2012 06:03:59AM

    And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not
    reject ideas because they were bad: Ideas on Earth were badges of
    friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed
    with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with
    enemies, in order to express enmity. The ideas Earthlings held didn’t
    matter for hundreds of thousands of years, since they couldn’t do much
    about them anyway. Ideas might as well be badges as anything.

-- Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
%
60 points MBlume 01 October 2012 07:54:31PM

    Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than
    anyone else might reasonably expect

-- Teller (source)
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60 points fortyeridania 02 November 2012 04:03:56AM

On the error of failing to appreciate your opponents three-dimensionality:

    They had cliche answers but only to their self-created straw-men. To
    exaggerate only slightly, they had never talked to anyone who really
    believed, and had thought deeply about, views drastically different
    from their own. As a result, when they heard real arguments instead of
    caricatures, they had no answers, only amazement that such views could
    be expressed by someone who had the external characteristics of being
    a member of the intellectual community, and that such views could be
    defended with apparent cogency. Never have I been more impressed with
    the advice I once received: "You cannot be sure that you are right
    unless you understand the arguments against your views better than
    your opponents do."

-- Milton Friedman, Schools at Chicago,
    from The Indispensable Milton Friedman
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58 points DanielVarga 04 April 2011 09:06:57PM

Matt: Ok, for all of the people responding above who admit to not having a
soul, I think this means that it is morally ok for me to do anything I
want to you, just as it is morally ok for me to turn off my computer at
the end of the day. Some of us do have souls, though.

Igor: Matt - I agree that people who need a belief in souls to understand
the difference between killing a person and turning off a computer should
just continue to believe in souls.
%
58 points arundelo 05 February 2012 08:54:15PM

    You are not the king of your brain. You are the creepy guy standing
    next to the king going "a most judicious choice, sire".

-- Steven Kaas
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57 points michaelkeenan 01 March 2010 11:00:15AM

    You know what they say the modern version of Pascal's Wager is?
    Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible,
    just in case one of them turns into God.

-- Julie from Crystal Nights by Greg Egan
%
57 points Miller 01 June 2011 11:52:54PM

    The megalomania of the genes does not mean that benevolence and
    cooperation cannot evolve, any more than the law of gravity proves
    that flight cannot evolve. It means only that benevolence, like
    flight, is a special state of affairs in need of an explanation, not
    something that just happens.

-- Pinker, The Blank Slate

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57 points JoshuaZ 03 February 2012 05:33:42AM

    Doctor Slithingly watched the readout on the computer screen and
    rubbed his hands together. ‘Excellent,’ he muttered, his voice a thin,
    rasping hiss. ‘Excellent!’ He laughed to himself in a chilling
    falsetto. ‘Soon my plan will come to fruition. Soon I will destroy
    them all!’ The room resounded with the sound of his insane giggling.
    This was the culmination of years of research - years of testing
    tissue samples and creating unnatural biological hybrids - but now it
    was over. Now, finally, he would destroy them all - every single type
    and variation of leukaemia. In doing so, he would render useless the
    work of thousands of charitable organisations as well as denying
    medical professionals the world over a source of income. He would
    prevent the publication of hundreds of inspiring stories of survival
    and sacrifice which might otherwise have sold millions of copies
    worldwide. ‘Bwahaha!’ he laughed. ‘So long, you meddling
    haematological neoplasm, you!’

-- Joel Stickley, How To Write Badly Well
%
57 points baiter 02 March 2012 12:52:37PM

    "...I always rejoice to hear of your being still employ'd in
    experimental Researches into Nature, and of the Success you meet with.
    The rapid Progress true Science now makes, occasions my regretting
    sometimes that I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the
    Height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the Power of Man
    over Matter. We may perhaps learn to deprive large Masses of their
    Gravity, and give them absolute Levity, for the sake of easy
    Transport. Agriculture may diminish its Labor and double its Produce;
    all Diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, not excepting
    even that of Old Age, and our Lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond
    the antediluvian Standard. O that moral Science were in as fair a way
    of Improvement, that Men would cease to be Wolves to one another, and
    that human Beings would at length learn what they now improperly call
    Humanity!"

-- Benjamin Franklin, Letter to Joseph Priestley, 8 Feb 1780
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57 points Alejandro1 01 October 2012 08:00:01PM

    This time he covered a lot more ground and was willing to talk about
    the mundane details of presidential existence. "You have to exercise,"
    he said, for instance. "Or at some point you’ll just break down." You
    also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb
    most people for meaningful parts of their day. "You’ll see I wear only
    gray or blue suits," he said. "I’m trying to pare down decisions. I
    don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because
    I have too many other decisions to make." He mentioned research that
    shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to
    make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. "You need
    to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself.
    You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia."

-- Michael Lewis profile of Barack Obama
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56 points Oscar_Cunningham 01 June 2011 08:20:21AM

    Just because you two are arguing, doesn't mean one of you is right.

-- Maurog: http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=9t=14222
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56 points RomeoStevens 06 November 2012 11:27:06PM

    If any idiot ever tells you that life would be meaningless without
    death, Hyperion corporation recommends killing them.

-- Borderlands 2
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55 points James_Miller 01 September 2011 05:13:46PM

    It is a vast, and pervasive, cognitive mistake to assume that people
    who agree with you (or disagree) do so on the same criteria that you
    care about.

-- Megan McArdle
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55 points James_Miller 02 November 2012 05:43:50PM

    A Bet is a Tax on Bullshit

-- Alex Tabarrok
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54 points Yvain 01 September 2012 02:20:44PM

    Do unto others 20% better than you expect them to do unto you, to
    correct for subjective error.

-- Linus Pauling
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53 points gRR 01 May 2012 12:10:20PM

    Once upon a time, there was a man who was riding in a horse drawn
    carriage and traveling to go take care of some affairs; and in the
    carriage there was also a very big suitcase. He told the driver to of
    the carriage to drive non-stop and the horse ran extremely fast.

    Along the road, there was an old man who saw them and asked, "Sir, you
    seem anxious, where do you need to go?"

    The man in the carriage then replied in a loud voice, "I need to go to
    the state of Chu." The old man heard and laughing he smiled and said,
    "You are going the wrong way. The state of Chu is in the south, how
    come you are going to to the north?"

    "That’s alright," The man in the carriage then said, "Can you not see?
    My horse runs very fast."

    "Your horse is great, but your path is incorrect."

    "It’s no problem, my carriage is new, it was made just last month."

    "Your carriage is brand new, but this is not the road one takes to get
    to Chu."

    "Old Uncle, you don’t know," and the man in the carriage pointed to
    the suitcase in the back and said, "In that suitcase there’s alot of
    money. No matter how long the road is, I am not afraid."

    "You have lots of money, but do not forget, The direction which you
    are going is wrong. I can see, you should go back the direction which
    you came from."

    The man in the carriage heard this and irritated said, "I have already
    been traveling for ten days, how can you tell me to go back from where
    I came?" He then pointed at the carriage driver and said, "Take a
    look, he is very young, and he drives very well, you needn’t worry.
    Goodbye!"

    And then he told the driver to drive forward, and the horse ran even
    faster.

-- Chinese Tale
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51 points Ezekiel 01 September 2012 11:27:29AM

    "Wait, Professor... If Sisyphus had to roll the boulder up the hill
    over and over forever, why didn't he just program robots to roll it
    for him, and then spend all his time wallowing in hedonism?"

    "It's a metaphor for the human struggle."

    "I don't see how that changes my point."

-- SMBC Comics #2718

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50 points anonym 03 November 2010 06:30:42AM

    If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top …
    that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to
    say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a
    piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in
    accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings.

-- Buckminster Fuller
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50 points GabrielDuquette 01 February 2012 03:34:11PM

    It shouldn't be disrespectful to the complexity of the human condition
    to say that despair is also, often, just low blood sugar.

-- Alain de Botton
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49 points Delta 03 August 2012 10:41:45AM

    Ignorance killed the cat; curiosity was framed!

-- C.J. Cherryh
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49 points Kaj_Sotala 01 September 2012 06:08:27PM

    The person who says, as almost everyone does say, that human life is
    of infinite value, not to be measured in mere material terms, is
    talking palpable, if popular, nonsense. If he believed that of his own
    life, he would never cross the street, save to visit his doctor or to
    earn money for things necessary to physical survival. He would eat the
    cheapest, most nutritious food he could find and live in one small
    room, saving his income for frequent visits to the best possible
    doctors. He would take no risks, consume no luxuries, and live a long
    life. If you call it living. If a man really believed that other
    people's lives were infinitely valuable, he would live like an
    ascetic, earn as much money as possible, and spend everything not
    absolutely necessary for survival on CARE packets, research into
    presently incurable diseases, and similar charities.

    In fact, people who talk about the infinite value of human life do not
    live in either of these ways. They consume far more than they need to
    support life. They may well have cigarettes in their drawer and a
    sports car in the garage. They recognize in their actions, if not in
    their words, that physical survival is only one value, albeit a very
    important one, among many.

-- David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
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48 points MichaelHoward 02 February 2011 11:31:14AM

    I will not procrastinate regarding any ritual granting immortality.

-- Evil Overlord List #230
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48 points NihilCredo 01 June 2011 03:06:46PM

    "Other men were stronger, faster, younger, why was Syrio Forel the
    best? I will tell you now." He touched the tip of his little finger
    lightly to his eyelid. "The seeing, the true seeing, that is the heart
    of it.

    "Hear me. The ships of Braavos sail as far as the winds blow, to lands
    strange and wonderful, and when they return their captains fetch queer
    animals to the Sealord’s menagerie. Such animals as you have never
    seen, striped horses, great spotted things with necks as long as
    stilts, hairy mouse-pigs as big as cows, stinging manticores, tigers
    that carry their cubs in a pouch, terrible walking lizards with
    scythes for claws. Syrio Forel has seen these things.

    "On the day I am speaking of, the first sword was newly dead, and the
    Sealord sent for me. Many bravos had come to him, and as many had been
    sent away, none could say why. When I came into his presence, he was
    seated, and in his lap was a fat yellow cat. He told me that one of
    his captains had brought the beast to him, from an island beyond the
    sunrise. ‘Have you ever seen her like?’ he asked of me.

    "And to him I said, ‘Each night in the alleys of Braavos I see a
    thousand like him,’ and the Sealord laughed, and that day I was named
    the first sword."

    Arya screwed up her face. "I don’t understand."

    Syrio clicked his teeth together. "The cat was an ordinary cat, no
    more. The others expected a fabulous beast, so that is what they saw.
    How large it was, they said. It was no larger than any other cat, only
    fat from indolence, for the Sealord fed it from his own table. What
    curious small ears, they said. Its ears had been chewed away in kitten
    fights. And it was plainly a tomcat, yet the Sealord said ‘her,’ and
    that is what the others saw. Are you hearing?"

    Arya thought about it. "You saw what was there."

    "Just so. Opening your eyes is all that is needing. The heart lies and
    the head plays tricks with us, but the eyes see true. Look with your
    eyes. Hear with your ears. Taste with your mouth. Smell with your
    nose. Feel with your skin. Then comes the thinking, afterward, and in
    that way knowing the truth."

-- George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
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48 points Bugmaster 01 December 2011 03:17:24AM

    Miss Tick sniffed. "You could say this advice is priceless," she said,
    "Are you listening?"

    "Yes," said Tiffany.

    "Good. Now...if you trust in yourself..."

    "Yes?"

    "...and believe in your dreams..."

    "Yes?"

    "...and follow your star..." Miss Tick went on.

    "Yes?"

    "...you’ll still be beaten by people who spent their time working hard
    and learning things and weren’t so lazy. Goodbye."

-- Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
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47 points Tesseract 03 December 2010 09:21:13AM

    He uses statistics as a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not for
    illumination.

-- G.K. Chesterton
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47 points Costanza 01 February 2011 09:31:17PM

    . . . once upon a time men lived among the giants, who were like
    themselves but far more powerful, and these giants always had a supply
    of bread, fruit, milk, and all that was necessary to sustain life,
    which they must have acquired in ways that cost them little, for they
    would always give away their goods to whoever knew how to please them.
    And the giants would also carry them wherever they wanted to go,
    provided they asked in the proper way. So it came about that men never
    thought of working, nor of walking, nor of building wagons or ships;
    instead they became natural orators, and spent all of their time
    watching the giants, figuring out what would please or displease them,
    smiling at them or imploring them with tears in their eyes; or else
    simply pronouncing the necessary words, which had to be memorized
    exactly, though they had no understanding of the changes of humor that
    would come over the giants, their brusque refusals, or their sudden
    willingness. Now, if some man, in those days, had tried to get
    something for himself by his own industry, they would have laughed him
    to scorn; for the results of his labor would have been puny beside the
    immense provisions the giants had amassed; and besides with one false
    step the giants could easily have crushed those little beginnings of
    labor out of existence. That is why all human wisdom came down to
    knowing how to speak and how to persuade; and, rather than move things
    about with great effort, men chose to learn what words it would take
    to get one of the giants to do their moving. In short, their main
    business, or rather their only business, was to please, and above all
    not to displease, their incomprehensible masters, who seemed
    nevertheless to be charged with nourishing them and housing them and
    transporting them, and who eventually carried out their duties,
    provided they were prayed to. This kind of existence, in which men
    never knew whether they were the masters or the slaves, lasted for a
    long time, so that the habit of asking, of hoping, of counting on
    those stronger than themselves left indelible traces in human nature.
    . . . That is why, as if they were still waiting for the return of the
    giants, men do not forget to pray and make offerings, though no giant
    has ever shown himself . . .

-- Alain (Émile Chartier) The Gods. A meditation on childhood.
%
46 points Bongo 04 July 2011 04:25:00PM

    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."

-- Slavoj Zizek

(I'm not recommending Zizek in general)
%
46 points Delta 05 September 2012 01:09:15PM

    A writer who says that there are no truths,
    or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’
    is asking you not to believe him. So don’t."

-- Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey
%
45 points DSimon 03 January 2011 06:20:37PM

    In 1736 I lost one of my Sons, a fine Boy of 4 Years old, by the
    Smallpox taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly and still
    regret that I had not given it to him by Inoculation. This I mention
    for the Sake of Parents who omit that Operation on the Supposition
    that they should never forgive themselves if a Child died under it; my
    Example showing that the Regret may be the same either way, and that
    therefore the safer should be chosen.

-- Benjamin Franklin

(To provide some context: at the time, the smallpox vaccine used a live
virus, and carried a non-trivial risk of death for the recipient. However,
it was still safer on the whole than not being immunized.)
%
45 points Mycroft65536 04 April 2011 02:03:38PM

    Luck is statistics taken personally.

-- Penn Jellete
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44 points Yvain 01 February 2010 12:21:53PM

On utility:

    culturejammer: you know what pennies are AWESOME for?

    culturejammer: throwing at cats

    culturejammer: it only costs a single penny

    culturejammer: and they'll either chase it, or get hit by it and look
    pissed off

    culturejammer: i now use that system to value prices of things

    culturejammer: for example, a thirty dollar game has to be at least as
    awesome as three thousand catpennies

-- bash.org
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44 points CronoDAS 01 March 2010 09:30:58PM

    The Patrician took a sip of his beer. "I have told this to few people,
    gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a
    young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a
    stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing
    sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother
    otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she
    subdued and dragged onto a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of
    course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to its day
    the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the
    delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on
    the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen: mother and children
    dining upon mother and children. And that's when I first learned about
    evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world
    spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself,
    it is up to all of us to become his moral superior."

-- Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals
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44 points dvasya 02 August 2011 06:39:01PM

    ...the discovery of computers and the thinking about computers has
    turned out to be extremely useful in many branches of human reasoning.
    For instance, we never really understood how lousy our understanding
    of languages was, the theory of grammar and all that stuff, until we
    tried to make a computer which would be able to understand language.
    We tried to learn a great deal about psychology by trying to
    understand how computers work. There are interesting philosophical
    questions about reasoning, and relationship, observation, and
    measurement and so on, which computers have stimulated us to think
    about anew, with new types of thinking. And all I was doing was hoping
    that the computer-type of thinking would give us some new ideas, if
    any are really needed.

-- Richard P. Feynman, Simulating Physics with Computers, International
Journal of Theoretical Physics, Vol 21, Nos. 6/7, 1982
%
43 points Liron 04 January 2011 12:27:44AM

    It's not renting a house vs. owning a house, it's renting a house vs.
    renting a bunch of money from the bank.

-- Salman Khan, Khan Academy
%
43 points Alejandro1 06 December 2011 09:10:10PM

On the difficulties of correctly fine-tuning your signaling:

    I once expressed mild surprise at the presence of a garden gnome in an
    upper-middle-class garden …. The owner of the garden explained that
    the gnome was "ironic". I asked him, with apologies for my ignorance,
    how one could tell that his garden gnome was supposed to be an ironic
    statement, as opposed to, you know, just a gnome. He rather sniffily
    replied that I only had to look at the rest of the garden for it to be
    obvious that the gnome was a tounge-in-cheek joke.

    But surely, I persisted, garden gnomes are always something of a joke,
    in any garden—I mean, no-one actually takes them seriously or regards
    them as works of art. His response was rather rambling and confused
    (not to mention somewhat huffy), but the gist seemed to be that while
    the lower classes saw gnomes as intrinsically amusing, his gnome was
    amusing only because of its incongruous appearance in a "smart"
    garden. In other words, council-house gnomes were a joke, but his
    gnome was a joke about council-house tastes, effectively a joke about
    class….

    The man’s reaction to my questions clearly defined him as
    upper-middle, rather than upper class. In fact, his pointing out that
    the gnome I had noticed was "ironic" had already demoted him by half a
    class from my original assessment. A genuine member of the upper
    classes would either have admitted to a passion for garden gnomes … or
    said something like "Ah yes, my gnome. I’m very fond of my gnome." and
    left me to draw my own conclusions.

-- Kate Fox, Watching the English (quoted here).
%
43 points Manfred 01 December 2011 12:05:32AM

    "Should we trust models or observations?" In reply we note that if we
    had observations of the future, we obviously would trust them more
    than models, but unfortunately observations of the future are not
    available at this time.

-- Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of Climate, 2005.
%
43 points peter_hurford 30 November 2011 09:06:07PM

    Most people don't know the basic scientific facts about
    happiness—about what brings it and what sustains it—and so they don't
    know how to use their money to acquire it. It is not surprising when
    wealthy people who know nothing about wine end up with cellars that
    aren't that much better stocked than their neighbors', and it should
    not be surprising when wealthy people who know nothing about happiness
    end up with lives that aren't that much happier than anyone else's.
    Money is an opportunity for happiness, but it is an opportunity that
    people routinely squander because the things they think will make them
    happy often don't.

From "If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending
it right" by Elizabeth W. Dunn, Daniel T. Gilbert, Timothy D. Wilson in
the Journal of Consumer Psychology.
(http://dunn.psych.ubc.ca/files/2011/04/Journal-of-consumer-psychology.pdf)
%
43 points peter_hurford 01 January 2012 11:23:36PM

    if we offer too much silent assent about mysticism and superstition -
    even when it seems to be doing a little good - we abet a general
    climate in which skepticism is considered impolite, science tiresome,
    and rigorous thinking somehow stuffy and inappropriate. Figuring out a
    prudent balance takes wisdom.

-- Carl Sagan
%
43 points tingram 01 January 2012 12:38:52AM

    Everyday words are inherently imprecise. They work well enough in
    everyday life that you don't notice. Words seem to work, just as
    Newtonian physics seems to. But you can always make them break if you
    push them far enough.

-- Paul Graham, How to Do Philosophy
%
43 points Oscar_Cunningham 01 April 2012 02:08:01PM

    I understand what an equation means if I have a way of figuring out
    the characteristics of its solution without actually solving it.

-- Paul Dirac
%
43 points alex_zag_al 06 September 2012 07:56:42PM

    There is something about practical things that knocks us off our
    philosophical high horses. Perhaps Heraclitus really thought he
    couldn't step in the same river twice. Perhaps he even received tenure
    for that contribution to philosophy. But suppose some other ancient
    had claimed to have as much right as Heraclitus did to an ox
    Heraclitus had bought, on the grounds that since the animal had
    changed, it wasn't the same one he had bought and so was up for grabs.
    Heraclitus would have quickly come up with some ersatz, watered-down
    version of identity of practical value for dealing with property
    rights, oxen, lyres, vineyards, and the like. And then he might have
    wondered if that watered-down vulgar sense of identity might be a
    considerably more valuable concept than a pure and philosophical sort
    of identity that nothing has.

-- John Perry, introduction to Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self
%
43 points AlexSchell 01 October 2012 08:39:25PM

    A lot of outcomes about which we care deeply are not very predictable.
    For example, it is not comforting to members of a graduate school
    admissions committee to know that only 23% of the variance in later
    faculty ratings of a student can be predicted by a unit weighting of
    the student's undergraduate GPA, his or her GRE score, and a measure
    of the student's undergraduate institution selectivity -- but that is
    opposed to 4% based on those committee members' global ratings of the
    applicant. We want to predict outcomes important to us. It is only
    rational to conclude that if one method (a linear model) does not
    predict well, something else may do better. What is not rational -- in
    fact, it's irrational -- is to conclude that this something else
    necessarily exists and, in the absence of any positive supporting
    evidence, is intuitive global judgment.

-- Hastie Dawes, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World, pp. 67-8.
%
42 points MichaelGR 30 November 2009 12:23:59AM

    It has always appalled me that really bright scientists almost all
    work in the most competitive fields, the ones in which they are making
    the least difference. In other words, if they were hit by a truck, the
    same discovery would be made by somebody else about 10 minutes later.

-- Aubrey de Grey
%
42 points gwern 01 February 2012 03:23:59PM

    "He [H.G. Wells] has abandoned the sensational theory with the same
    honourable gravity and simplicity with which he adopted it. Then he
    thought it was true; now he thinks it is not true. He has come to the
    most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion
    that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and
    wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand
    people and tell them that twice two is four."

-- Heretics, G. K. Chesterton
%
41 points knb 03 May 2010 03:06:59AM

From Thomas Macaulay's 1848 History of England.

    [W]e are under a deception similar to that which misleads the traveler
    in the Arabian desert. Beneath the caravan all is dry and bare; but
    far in advance, and far in the rear, is the semblance of refreshing
    waters... A similar illusion seems to haunt nations through every
    stage of the long progress from poverty and barbarism to the highest
    degrees of opulence and civilization. But if we resolutely chase the
    mirage backward, we shall find it recede before us into the regions of
    fabulous antiquity. It is now the fashion to place the golden age of
    England in times when noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of
    which would be intolerable to a modern footman, when farmers and
    shopkeepers breakfasted on loaves the very sight of which would raise
    a riot in a modern workhouse, when to have a clean shirt once a week
    was a privilege reserved for the higher class of gentry, when men died
    faster in the purest country air than they now die in the most
    pestilential lanes of our towns, and when men died faster in the lanes
    of our towns than they now die on the coast of Guiana.

.................................

    We too shall in our turn be outstripped, and in our turn be envied. It
    may well be, in the twentieth century, that the peasant of Dorsetshire
    may think himself miserably paid with twenty shillings a week; that
    the carpenter at Greenwich may receive ten shillings a day; that
    laboring men may be as little used to dine without meat as they are
    now to eat rye bread; that sanitary police and medical discoveries may
    have added several more years to the average length of human life;
    that numerous comforts and luxuries which are now unknown, or confined
    to a few, may be within the reach of every diligent and thrifty
    workingman. And yet it may then be the mode to assert that the
    increase of wealth and the progress of science have benefited the few
    at the expense of the many, and to talk of the reign of Queen Victoria
    as the time when England was truly merry England, when all classes
    were bound together by brotherly sympathy, when the rich did not grind
    the faces of the poor, and when the poor did not envy the splendor of
    the rich.
%
41 points benelliott 02 February 2011 09:05:24PM

    Day ends, market closes up or down, reporter looks for good or bad
    news respectively, and writes that the market was up on news of
    Intel's earnings, or down on fears of instability in the Middle East.
    Suppose we could somehow feed these reporters false information about
    market closes, but give them all the other news intact. Does anyone
    believe they would notice the anomaly, and not simply write that
    stocks were up (or down) on whatever good (or bad) news there was that
    day? That they would say, hey, wait a minute, how can stocks be up
    with all this unrest in the Middle East?

-- Paul Graham
%
41 points Alejandro1 02 October 2011 03:08:18AM

    Sometimes you hear philosophers bemoaning the fact that philosophers
    tend not to form consensuses like certain other disciplines do
    (sciences in particular). But there is no great mystery to this. The
    sciences reward consensus-forming as long as certain procedures are
    followed: agreements through experimental verification, processes of
    peer review, etc. Philosophy has nothing like this. Philosophers are
    rewarded for coming up with creative reasons not to agree with other
    people. The whole thrust of professional philosophy is toward
    inventing ways to regard opposing arguments as failure, as long as
    those ways don't exhibit any obvious flaws. However much philosophers
    are interested in the truth, philosophy as a profession is not
    structured so as to converge on it; it is structured so as to have the
    maximal possible divergence that can be sustained given common
    conventions. We are not trained to find ways to come to agree with
    each other; we are trained to find ways to disagree with each other.

-- Brandon Watson
%
41 points Maniakes 02 November 2011 01:12:00AM

    The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity
    and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted
    activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither
    its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

-- John W. Gardner
%
41 points Andy_McKenzie 01 April 2012 10:10:38PM

    A few years into this book, I was diagnosed as diabetic and received a
    questionnaire in the mail. The insurance carrier stated that diabetics
    often suffer from depression and it was worried about me. One of the
    questions was "Do you think about death?" Yes, I do. "How often?" the
    company wanted to know. "Yearly? Monthly? Weekly? Daily?" And if
    daily, how many times per day? I dutifully wrote in, "About 70 times
    per day." The next time I saw my internist, she told me the insurer
    had recommended psychotherapy for my severe depression. I explained to
    her why I thought about death all day—merely an occupational
    hazard—and she suggested getting therapy nonetheless. I thought, fine,
    it might help with the research.

    The therapist found me tragically undepressed, and I asked her if she
    could help me design a new life that would maximize the few years that
    I had left. After all, one should have a different life strategy at
    sixty than at twenty. She asked why I thought I was going to die and
    why I had such a great fear of death. I said, I am going to die. It’s
    not a fear; it’s a reality. There must be some behavior that could be
    contraindicated for a man my age but other normally dangerous behavior
    that takes advantage of the fact that I am risking fewer years at
    sixty or sixty-five years of age than I was at twenty or twenty-five
    (such as crimes that carry a life sentence, crushing at age twenty but
    less so at age sixty-five). Surely psychology must have something to
    say on the topic. Turns out, according to my therapist, it does not.
    There was therapy for those with terminal illness, for the bereaved,
    for the about-to-be-bereaved, for professionals who dealt with
    terminal patients, and so on, but there was nothing for people who
    were simply aware that their life would come to a natural end. It
    would seem to me that this is a large, untapped market. The therapist
    advised me not to think about death.

-- Dick Teresi, The Undead
%
40 points Unnamed 15 June 2009 01:06:29AM

    Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain
    insects come by the name of centipede; not because they have a hundred
    feet, but because most people cannot count above fourteen."

-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
%
40 points MinibearRex 02 March 2011 03:37:42PM

    The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the
    illusion of knowledge.

-- Daniel J. Boorstin
%
40 points bentarm 02 March 2011 01:53:46PM

    Cryonics is an experiment. So far the control group isn't doing very
    well.

-- Dr. Ralph Merkle (quoted on the Alcor website)
%
40 points RichardKennaway 01 June 2011 11:00:49AM

    If the fossil record shows more dinosaur footprints in one period than
    another, it does not necessarily mean that there were more dinosaurs
    -- it may be that there was more mud.

-- Elise E. Morse-Gagné
%
39 points GabrielDuquette 02 June 2012 05:40:17AM

    You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can
    make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.

-- Pearl S. Buck
%
39 points GabrielDuquette 02 November 2012 12:57:17AM

    People say "think outside the box," as if the box wasn't a fucking
    great idea.

-- Sean Thomason
%
38 points gwern 30 November 2009 02:04:43AM

    "When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to
    anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine
    carefully everything we have become accustomed to?"

-- George Bernard Shaw, A Treatise on Parents and Children (1910)
%
38 points MichaelGR 01 March 2010 10:26:40PM

    John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When
    people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you
    think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as
    thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of
    them put together.

-- Isaac Asimov, The Relativity of Wrong
%
38 points MichaelGR 03 December 2010 05:39:42PM

    The Noah principle: predicting rain doesn’t count, building arks does.

-- Warren E. Buffett
%
38 points Nominull 04 April 2011 01:35:51PM

    On the plus side, bad things happening to you does not mean you are a
    bad person. On the minus side, bad things will happen to you even if
    you are a good person. In the end you are just another victim of the
    motivationless malice of directed acyclic causal graphs.

-- Nobilis RPG 3rd edition
%
38 points anonym 02 October 2011 02:17:17AM

    Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by
    the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the
    exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an
    inexact man.

-- Bertrand Russell
%
38 points GabrielDuquette 02 February 2012 12:37:31AM

    The point of rigour is not to destroy all intuition; instead, it
    should be used to destroy bad intuition while clarifying and elevating
    good intuition.

-- Terence Tao
%
38 points summerstay 04 August 2012 02:41:24PM

Interviewer: How do you answer critics who suggest that your team is
playing god here?

Craig Venter: Oh... we're not playing.
%
38 points NancyLebovitz 06 November 2012 02:59:40PM

    Let me differentiate between scientific method and the neurology of
    the individual scientist. Scientific method has always depended on
    feedback [or flip-flopping as the Tsarists call it]; I therefore
    consider it the highest form of group intelligence thus far evolved on
    this backward planet. The individual scientist seems a different
    animal entirely. The ones I've met seem as passionate, and hence as
    egotistic and prejudiced, as painters, ballerinas or even, God save
    the mark, novelists. My hope lies in the feedback system itself, not
    in any alleged saintliness of the individuals in the system.

-- Robert Anton Wilson
%
37 points Cyan 01 March 2010 04:14:28PM

    My genes done gone and tricked my brain

    By making fucking feel so great

    That's how the little creeps attain

    Their plan to fuckin' replicate

    But brain's got tricks itself, you see

    To get the bang but not the bite

    I got this here vasectomy

    My genes can fuck themselves tonight.

-- The r-selectors, Trunclade, quoted in Blindsight by Peter Watts
%
37 points Kutta 02 July 2010 07:38:00AM

    If anything of the classical supernatural existed, it would be a
    branch of engineering by now.

-- Steve Gilham
%
37 points Jayson_Virissimo 04 January 2011 05:46:11AM

    It’s easy to lie with statistics, but it’s easier to lie without them.

-- Fred Mosteller
%
37 points Eugine_Nier 02 February 2011 07:21:19AM

    In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human
    societies were kept in touch with physical reality.

    (...)

    In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might
    make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had
    to make four.

-- George Orwell, 1984
%
37 points Grognor 03 March 2012 08:57:49AM

    "Stupider" for a time might not have been a real word, but it
    certainly points where it’s supposed to. The other day my sister used
    the word "deoffensify". It’s not a real word, but that didn’t make it
    any less effective. Communication doesn’t care about the "realness" of
    language, nor does it often care about the exact dictionary
    definitions. Words change through every possible variable, even time.
    One of the great challenges of communication has always been making
    sure words mean the same thing to you and your audience.

-- Michael Kayin OReilly
%
37 points Konkvistador 01 May 2012 01:06:48PM

    For example, in many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool
    than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in
    nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a
    political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.

-- Mencius Moldbug, on belief as attire and conspicuous wrongness.
%
37 points wallowinmaya 01 June 2012 09:45:47PM

    The categories and classes we construct are simply the semantic sugar
    which makes the reality go down easier. They should never get confused
    for the reality that is, the reality which we perceive but darkly and
    with biased lenses. The hyper-relativists and subjectivists who are
    moderately fashionable in some humane studies today are correct to
    point out that science is a human construction and endeavor. Where
    they go wrong is that they are often ignorant of the fact that the
    orderliness of many facets of nature is such that even human ignorance
    and stupidity can be overcome with adherence to particular methods and
    institutional checks and balances. The predictive power of modern
    science, giving rise to modern engineering, is the proof of its
    validity. No talk or argumentation is needed. Boot up your computer.
    Drive your car.

-- Razib Khan
%
37 points GabrielDuquette 04 November 2012 08:37:22AM

    Diogenes was knee deep in a stream washing vegetables. Coming up to
    him, Plato said, "My good Diogenes, if you knew how to pay court to
    kings, you wouldn't have to wash vegetables."

    "And," replied Diogenes, "If you knew how to wash vegetables, you
    wouldn't have to pay court to kings."

-- Teachings of Diogenes
%
36 points benelliott 02 March 2011 03:26:27PM

    When things get too complicated, it sometimes makes sense to stop and
    wonder: Have I asked the right question?

-- Enrico Bombieri
%
36 points RichardKennaway 02 March 2011 11:56:33AM

    Education is implication. It is not the things you say which children
    respect; when you say things, they very commonly laugh and do the
    opposite. It is the things you assume which really sink into them. It
    is the things you forget even to teach that they learn.

-- G. K. Chesterton, article in the Illustrated London News, 1907,
    collected in "The Man Who Was Orthodox", p.96.
%
36 points scav 02 November 2011 03:36:55PM

    I just noticed CVS has started stocking homeopathic pills on the same
    shelves with--and labeled similarly to--their actual medicine. Telling
    someone who trusts you that you're giving them medicine, when you know
    you’re not, because you want their money, isn’t just lying--it’s like
    an example you’d make up if you had to illustrate for a child why
    lying is wrong.

-- Randall, XKCD #971
%
36 points lukeprog 02 February 2012 07:14:13PM

    Just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can fill
    in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.

-- Dara OBriain
%
36 points cata 02 November 2012 06:56:18PM

In which Winnie-the-Pooh tests a hypothesis about the animal tracks that
he is following through the woods:

    "Wait a moment," said Winnie-the-Pooh, holding up his paw.

    He sat down and thought, in the most thoughtful way he could think.
    Then he fitted his paw into one of the Tracks…and then he scratched
    his nose twice, and stood up.

    "Yes," said Winnie-the Pooh.

    "I see now," said Winnie-the-Pooh.

    "I have been Foolish and Deluded," said he, "and I am a Bear of No
    Brain at All."

-- A. A. Milne (via John Regehr)
%
36 points Matt_Caulfield 01 December 2012 08:08:42PM

    Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that
    dimension of social life in which things really do become true if
    enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the
    game effectively, one can never acknowledge this: it may be true that,
    if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of
    France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never
    work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim.

-- David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
%
36 points James_Miller 01 December 2012 08:51:39PM

    politicians and leaders worldwide don’t like to be associated with
    toilets, even state-of-the-art toilets. This sanitation stigma
    distorts international and national development agendas.

-- chairman of the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Board on
    Water and Sanitation
%
35 points Kutta 03 January 2011 09:17:20AM

    This idea that whenever something evil happens someone particular can
    be blamed and punished for it, in life and in politics is hopeless.

-- Hayao Miyazaki
%
35 points gwern 01 February 2011 06:03:48PM

    "Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or
    worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and
    these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact
    when debugging and maintenance are considered.

    We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time;
    premature optimization is the root of all evil."

-- Donald Knuth (see also Amdahls law)
%
35 points CronoDAS 04 April 2011 11:29:10PM

From a forum signature:

    The fool says in his heart, "There is no God."

-- Psalm 14:1

    It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will
    speak.

-- Neil Gaiman, Sandman 3:3:6
%
35 points Automaton 02 October 2011 03:00:47AM

    Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part,
    lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality. When
    you tell the truth, you have nothing to keep track of. The world
    itself becomes your memory, and if questions arise, you can always
    point others back to it. You can even reconsider certain facts and
    honestly change your views. And you can openly discuss your confusion,
    conflicts, and doubts with all comers. In this way, a commitment to
    the truth is naturally purifying of error.

-- Sam Harris, Lying
%
35 points Oscar_Cunningham 01 June 2012 02:31:58PM

    Two very different attitudes toward the technical workings of
    mathematics are found in the literature. Already in 1761, Leonhard
    Euler complained about isolated results which "are not based on a
    systematic method" and therefore whose "inner grounds seem to be
    hidden." Yet in the 20'th Century, writers as diverse in viewpoint as
    Feller and de Finetti are agreed in considering computation of a
    result by direct application of the systematic rules of probability
    theory as dull and unimaginative, and revel in the finding of some
    isolated clever trick by which one can see the answer to a problem
    without any calculation.

    [...]

    Feller's perception was so keen that in virtually every problem he was
    able to see a clever trick; and then gave only the clever trick. So
    his readers get the impression that:

        Probability theory has no systematic methods; it is a collection
        of isolated, unrelated clever tricks, each of which works on one
        problem but not on the next one.  Feller was possessed of
        superhuman cleverness.  Only a person with such cleverness can
        hope to find new useful results in probability theory.

    Indeed, clever tricks do have an aesthetic quality that we all
    appreciate at once. But we doubt whether Feller, or anyone else, was
    able to see those tricks on first looking at the problem. We solve a
    problem for the first time by that (perhaps dull to some) direct
    calculation applying our systematic rules. After seeing the solution,
    we may contemplate it and see a clever trick that would have led us to
    the answer much more quickly. Then, of course, we have the opportunity
    for gamesmanship by showing others only the clever trick, scorning to
    mention the base means by which we first found.

-- E. T. Jaynes Probability Theory, The Logic of Science
%
34 points cousin_it 22 October 2009 06:04:21PM

    However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the
    results.

-- Winston Churchill
%
34 points RobinZ 01 April 2010 11:44:06PM

    I listen to all these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness,
    and the opinion that I come to is that there is no polite way of
    asking somebody: have you considered the possibility that your entire
    life has been devoted to a delusion? But that’s a good question to
    ask. Of course we should ask that question and of course it’s going to
    offend people. Tough.

-- Daniel Dennett, interview for TPM: The Philosophers Magazine
%
34 points Oscar_Cunningham 02 May 2011 02:02:00PM

    If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to
    notice if you're doing it wrong.

-- Paul Graham
%
34 points Patrick 03 June 2011 02:13:04PM

    If a process is potentially good, but 90+% of the time smart and
    well-intentioned people screw it up, then it's a bad process. So they
    can only say it's the team's fault so many times before it's not
    really the team's fault.

-- Steve Yegge
%
34 points jaimeastorga2000 01 June 2011 03:58:08PM

    The bulk of political discourse today is purposefully playing
    telephone with facts in ways that couldn't be done in the Information
    Age if people just had the know-how to check for themselves.
    Comprehending complex sentences is something that can be done by first
    grade, and comprehending complex concepts and issues is without a
    doubt something better learned in math than in English, where one
    learns to obfuscate concepts and issues, and to play to baser
    emotions. Granted, one also learns to recognize and to defend against
    these tactics, but it still can't hold a candle to the "mental
    gymnastics" referenced above. Do you realize what the world looks like
    if you've got a background in math? Imagine signs reading DANGER: KEEP
    OUT are planted everywhere, but people purposefully and proudly ignore
    them, treating it as laughably eccentric to have learned more than
    half the alphabet, approaching en masse and dragging you with them.

From the Math It Just Bugs Me page, TV Tropes
%
34 points scmbradley 02 February 2012 01:43:12PM

    The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem, in a way
    that will allow a solution

-- Bertrand Russell
%
34 points Jayson_Virissimo 02 February 2012 08:59:37AM

    It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by
    statistics.

-- George Bernard Shaw
%
34 points Konkvistador 01 March 2012 09:09:23PM

    False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men
    and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime
    without knowing what they are doing

-- Joseph de Maistre, Les soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, Ch. I
%
34 points Yvain 02 April 2012 12:55:42PM

On counter-signaling, how not to do:

    US police investigated a parked car with a personalized plate reading
    "SMUGLER". They found the vehicle, packed with 24 lb (11 kg) of
    narcotics, parked near the Canadian border at a hotel named "The
    Smugglers' Inn." Police believed the trafficker thought that being so
    obvious would deter the authorities.

-- The Irish Independent, News In Brief
%
34 points mindspillage 04 July 2012 06:08:12AM

    The words "I am..." are potent words; be careful what you hitch them
    to. The thing you're claiming has a way of reaching back and claiming
    you.

-- A.L. Kitselman
%
34 points Alejandro1 02 August 2012 08:52:13PM

    British philosophy is more detailed and piecemeal than that of the
    Continent; when it allows itself some general principle, it sets to
    work to prove it inductively by examining its various applications.
    Thus Hume, after announcing that there is no idea without an
    antecedent impression, immediately proceeds to consider the following
    objection: suppose you are seeing two shades of colour which are
    similar but not identical, and suppose you have never seen a shade of
    colour intermediate between the two, can you nevertheless imagine such
    a shade? He does not decide the question, and considers that a
    decision adverse to his general principle would not be fatal to him,
    because his principle is not logical but empirical. When--to take a
    contrast--Leibniz wants to establish his monadology, he argues,
    roughly, as follows: Whatever is complex must be composed of simple
    parts; what is simple cannot be extended; therefore everything is
    composed of parts having no extension. But what is not extended is not
    matter. Therefore the ultimate constituents of things are not
    material, and, if not material, then mental. Consequently a table is
    really a colony of souls.

    The difference of method, here, may be characterized as follows: In
    Locke or Hume, a comparatively modest conclusion is drawn from a broad
    survey of many facts, whereas in Leibniz a vast edifice of deduction
    is pyramided upon a pin-point of logical principle. In Leibniz, if the
    principle is completely true and the deductions are entirely valid,
    all is well; but the structure is unstable, and the slightest flaw
    anywhere brings it down in ruins. In Locke or Hume, on the contrary,
    the base of the pyramid is on the solid ground of observed fact, and
    the pyramid tapers upward, not downward; consequently the equilibrium
    is stable, and a flaw here or there can be rectified without total
    disaster.

-- Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy
%
34 points J_Taylor 03 August 2012 02:09:49AM

    If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get
    the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for
    not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not
    hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb
    certainties of experience.

-- G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
%
34 points wallowinmaya 02 September 2012 10:30:35PM

    Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.

-- Ken Wilber
%
34 points GabrielDuquette 01 December 2012 03:45:57PM

    "Working in mysterious ways" is the greatest euphemism for failure
    ever devised.

-- TheTweetOfGod
%
33 points Kyre 02 September 2010 05:41:48AM

Comic Quote Minus 37

-- Ryan Armand
%
33 points RichardKennaway 05 October 2010 01:33:08PM

    One thing I have advocated, without much success, is that children be
    taught social rules (when they are ready) in exactly the same way they
    are taught and teach each other games. The point is not whether the
    rules are right or wrong. Are the rules of 5-card stud poker or
    hopscotch right or wrong? It's that we're playing a certain game here,
    and there are rules to this game just as in any other game. If you
    want to be in the game, then you have to learn how to play it.
    Different groups of people play different games (different rules =
    different game), so if you want to play in different groups, you have
    to learn the games they play. When you develop the levels of
    understanding above the rule level, you'll be able to understand all
    games, and be able to join in anywhere. You won't be stuck knowing how
    to play only one game.

    My problem with selling this idea is that people tend to think that
    their game is the only right one. In fact, being told that they are
    playing a game with arbitrary rules is insulting or frightening. They
    want to believe that the rules they know are the ones that everyone
    ought to play by; they even set up systems of punishment and reward to
    make sure that nobody tries to play a different game. They turn the
    game into something that is deadly serious, and so my idea simply
    seems frivolous instead of liberating.

-- William T. Powers
%
33 points GabrielDuquette 01 September 2011 02:43:49PM

    If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of
    their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to
    let as few things into your identity as possible.

-- Paul Graham
%
33 points Lightwave 01 January 2012 12:24:52PM

    Do not accept any of my words on faith, Believing them just because I
    said them.  Be like an analyst buying gold, who cuts, burns, And
    critically examines his product for authenticity.  Only accept what
    passes the test By proving useful and beneficial in your life.

-- The Buddha, Jnanasara-samuccaya Sutra
%
33 points shokwave 03 July 2012 05:09:07AM

    Person: "It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you."

    Robot: " ... Paranoia is such a childish emotion. You're an adult. Why
    aren't all your enemies dead by now?"

-- RStevens
%
33 points katydee 02 September 2012 09:01:21PM

    Lady Average may not be as good-looking as Lady Luck, but she sure as
    hell comes around more often.

-- Anonymous
%
33 points Jayson_Virissimo 03 September 2012 08:59:50AM

    ...beliefs are like clothes. In a harsh environment, we choose our
    clothes mainly to be functional, i.e., to keep us safe and
    comfortable. But when the weather is mild, we choose our clothes
    mainly for their appearance, i.e., to show our figure, our creativity,
    and our allegiances. Similarly, when the stakes are high we may mainly
    want accurate beliefs to help us make good decisions. But when a
    belief has few direct personal consequences, we in effect mainly care
    about the image it helps to project.

-- Robin Hanson, Human Enhancement
%
32 points MichaelHoward 01 May 2010 10:11:56AM

    The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing
    that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot
    possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to
    get at and repair.

-- Douglas Adams
%
32 points Lightwave 02 September 2010 10:59:12AM

    When people ask me what philosophy is, I say philosophy is what you do
    when you don't know what the right questions are yet. Once you get the
    questions right, then you go answer them, and that's typically not
    philosophy, that's one science or another. Anywhere in life where you
    find that people aren't quite sure what the right questions to ask
    are, what they're doing, then, is philosophy.

-- Daniel Dennett
%
32 points cousin_it 04 April 2011 12:11:00PM

    People commonly use the word "procrastination" to describe what they
    do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's
    happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination
    when someone gets drunk instead of working.

-- Paul Graham
%
32 points Tesseract 03 July 2011 04:19:04AM

    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
%
32 points Stabilizer 02 December 2011 09:40:22AM

    (Tuco is in a bubble bath. The One Armed Man enters the room)

    One Armed Man: I've been looking for you for 8 months. Whenever I
    should have had a gun in my right hand, I thought of you. Now I find
    you in exactly the position that suits me. I had lots of time to learn
    to shoot with my left.

    (Tuco kills him with the gun he has hidden in the foam)

    Tuco: When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk.

-- The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
%
32 points Grognor 01 December 2011 04:11:53AM

    What is more important in determining an (individual) organism's
    phenotype, its genes or its environment? Any developmental biologist
    knows that this is a meaningless question. Every aspect of an
    organism's phenotype is the joint product of its genes and its
    environment. To ask which is more important is like asking, Which is
    more important in determining the area of a rectangle, the length or
    the width? Which is more important in causing a car to run, the engine
    or the gasoline? Genes allow the environment to influence the
    development of phenotypes.

-- Tooby and Cosmides. It occurred to someone on the
Less Wrong IRC channel how good this is an isomorphism of,
"You have asked a wrong question."
%
32 points khafra 03 January 2012 05:02:23AM

    An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a
    cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

-- H. L. Mencken, describing halo bias before it was named
%
32 points Stephanie_Cunnane 04 April 2012 03:27:55AM

    Another learning which cost me much to recognize, can be stated in
    four words. The facts are friendly.

    It has interested me a great deal that most psychotherapists,
    especially the psychoanalysts, have steadily refused to make any
    scientific investigation of their therapy, or to permit others to do
    this. I can understand this reaction because I have felt it.
    Especially in our early investigations I can well remember the anxiety
    of waiting to see how the findings came out. Suppose our hypotheses
    were disproved! Suppose we were mistaken in our views! Suppose our
    opinions were not justified! At such times, as I look back, it seems
    to me that I regarded the facts as potential enemies, as possible
    bearers of disaster. I have perhaps been slow in coming to realize
    that the facts are always friendly. Every bit of evidence one can
    acquire, in any area, leads one that much closer to what is true. And
    being closer to the truth can never be a harmful or dangerous or
    unsatisfying thing. So while I still hate to readjust my thinking,
    still hate to give up old ways of perceiving and conceptualizing, yet
    at some deeper level I have, to a considerable degree, come to realize
    that these painful reorganizations are what is known as learning, and
    that though painful they always lead to a more satisfying because
    somewhat more accurate way of seeing life. Thus at the present time
    one of the most enticing areas for thought and speculation is an area
    where several of my pet ideas have not been upheld by the evidence, I
    feel if I can only puzzle my way through this problem that I will find
    a much more satisfying approximation to the truth. I feel sure the
    facts will be my friends.

-- Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy
(1961)
%
32 points VKS 04 April 2012 10:23:55AM

    Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as
    sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths
    of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste. Why then, given
    our brains wired the way they are, does the remark, "Perhaps there are
    thoughts we cannot think," surprise you?

-- Richard Hamming
%
32 points chaosmosis 04 May 2012 07:00:21PM

    Being - forgive me - rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend
    to be correspondingly huger.

-- Albus Dumbledore
%
32 points paper-machine 01 May 2012 08:27:25AM

    If there is something really cool and you can't understand why
    somebody hasn't done it before, it's because you haven't done it
    yourself.

-- Lion Kimbro, The Anarchist's Principle
%
32 points lukeprog 09 September 2012 01:36:00AM

    A problem well stated is a problem half solved.

-- Charles Kettering
%
32 points Jayson_Virissimo 01 September 2012 08:25:27AM

    Infallible, adj. Incapable of admitting error.

-- L. A. Rollins, Lucifer's Lexicon: An Updated Abridgment
%
31 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 15 June 2009 01:17:40AM

    "People are mostly sane enough, of course, in the affairs of common
    life: the getting of food, shelter, and so on. But the moment they
    attempt any depth or generality of thought, they go mad almost
    infallibly. The vast majority, of course, adopt the local religious
    madness, as naturally as they adopt the local dress. But the more
    powerful minds will, equally infallibly, fall into the worship of some
    intelligent and dangerous lunatic, such as Plato, or Augustine, or
    Comte, or Hegel, or Marx."

-- David Stove, What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts
%
31 points James_Miller 22 October 2009 05:33:12PM

    You want to learn from experience, but you want to learn from other
    people’s experience when you can.

-- Warren Buffett
%
31 points gwern 15 December 2010 08:05:51PM

    'One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston
    surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large
    number of patients who had undergone successful operations for
    vascular reconstruction.

    At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room
    timidly asked, "Do you have any controls?" Well, the great surgeon
    drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, "Do you
    mean did I not operate on half the patients?" The hall grew very quiet
    then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, "Yes,
    that’s what I had in mind." Then the visitor’s fist really came down
    as he thundered, "Of course not. That would have doomed half of them
    to their death."

    God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice
    ask, "Which half?"'

-- Dr. E. E. Peacock, Jr., quoted in Medical World News
    (September 1, 1972), p. 45,
    as quoted in Tufte's 1974 book Data Analysis for Politics and Policy;
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/12/the-ethics-of-random-clinical-trials.html
%
31 points RobinZ 05 April 2011 05:04:14PM

    Should we then call the original replicator molecules 'living'? Who
    cares? I might say to you 'Darwin was the greatest man who has ever
    lived', and you might say 'No, Newton was', but I hope we would not
    prolong the argument. The point is that no conclusion of substance
    would be affected whichever way our argument was resolved. The facts
    of the lives and achievements of Newton and Darwin remain totally
    unchanged whether we label them 'great' or not. Similarly, the story
    of the replicator molecules probably happened something like the way I
    am telling it, regardless of whether we choose to call them 'living'.
    Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp
    that words are only tools for our use, and that the mere presence in
    the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily
    has to refer to something definite in the real world. Whether we call
    the early replicators living or not, they were the ancestors of life;
    they were our founding fathers.

-- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene.

(cf. Disguised Queries.)
%
31 points Risto_Saarelma 05 April 2011 05:48:11AM

    But, there's another problem, and that is the fact that statistical
    and probabilistic thinking is a real damper on "intellectual"
    conversation. By this, I mean that there are many individuals who wish
    to make inferences about the world based on data which they observe,
    or offer up general typologies to frame a subsequent analysis. These
    individuals tend to be intelligent and have college degrees. Their
    discussion ranges over topics such as politics, culture and
    philosophy. But, introduction of questions about the moments about the
    distribution, or skepticism as to the representativeness of their
    sample, and so on, tends to have a chilling affect on the regular flow
    of discussion. While the average human being engages mostly in gossip
    and interpersonal conversation of some sort, the self-consciously
    intellectual interject a bit of data and abstraction (usually in the
    form of jargon or pithy quotations) into the mix. But the raison
    d'etre of the intellectual discussion is basically signaling and
    cuing; in other words, social display. No one really cares about the
    details and attempting to generate a rigorous model is really beside
    the point. Trying to push the N much beyond 2 or 3 (what you would see
    in a college essay format) will only elicit eye-rolling and
    irritation.

-- Razib Khan
%
31 points Risto_Saarelma 04 April 2011 01:03:01PM

    My friend, Tony, does prop work in Hollywood. Before he was big and
    famous, he would sell jewelry and such at Ren Faires and the like. One
    day I'm there, shooting the shit with him, when a guy comes up and
    looks at some of the crystals that Tony is selling. he finally zeroes
    in on one and gets all gaga over the bit of quartz. He informs Tony
    that he's never seen such a strong power crystal. Tony tells him it a
    piece of quartz. The buyer maintains it is an amazing power crystal
    and demands to know the price. Tony looks him over for a second, then
    says "If it's just a piece of quartz, it's $15. If it's a power
    crystal, it's $150. Which is is?" The buyer actually looked a bit
    sheepish as he said quietly "quartz", gave Tony his money and wandered
    off. I wonder if he thought he got the better of Tony.

-- genesplicer on Something Awful Forums, via
%
31 points CharlesR 02 May 2011 04:15:40AM

    The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

-- Paul Graham, Keep Your Identity Small
%
31 points kalla724 03 October 2011 06:50:07PM

    What do you think the big headlines were in 1666, the year Newton
    posited gravitation as a universal force, discovered that white light
    was composed of the colors of the spectrum, and invented differential
    calculus, or in 1905, the "annus mirabilis" when Einstein confirmed
    quantum theory by analyzing the photoelectric effect, introduced
    special relativity, and proposed the formulation that matter and
    energy are equivalent? The Great Fire of London and the Anglo-Dutch
    War; The Russian Revolution and the Russo-Japanese War. The posturing
    and squabbling of politicians and the exchange of gunfire over issues
    that would be of little interest or significance to anyone alive now.
    In other words, ephemeral bullshit.  These insights and discoveries
    are the real history of our species, the slow painstaking climb from
    ignorance to understanding."

-- Tim Kreider
%
31 points GabrielDuquette 02 October 2011 04:39:44AM

    There is one rule that's very simple, but not easy: observe reality
    and adjust.

-- Ran Prieur
%
31 points wallowinmaya 31 October 2011 07:55:56PM

    Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

-- Voltaire
%
31 points Vladimir_M 02 December 2011 05:32:21AM

    Every time that a man who is not an absolute fool presents you with a
    question he considers very problematic after giving it careful
    thought, distrust those quick answers that come to the mind of someone
    who has considered it only briefly or not at all. These answers are
    usually simplistic views lacking in consistency, which explain
    nothing, or which do not bear examination.

-- Joseph de Maistre (St. Petersburg Dialogues, No. 7)
%
31 points Jayson_Virissimo 02 January 2012 07:11:34AM

    Not everything that is more difficult is more meritorious.

-- Saint Thomas Aquinas
%
31 points fortyeridania 02 November 2012 05:25:58AM

    Therefore, the first and most important duty of philosophy is to test
    impressions, choosing between them and only deploying those that have
    passed the test. You know how, with money--an area where we believe
    our interest to be at stake--we have developed the art of assaying,
    and considerable ingenuity has gone into developing a way to test if
    coins are counterfeit, involving our senses of sight, smell, hearing,
    and touch. The assayer will let the denarius drop and listen intently
    to its ring; and he is not satisfied to listen just once: after
    repeated listenings he practically acquires a musician's subtle ear.
    It is a measure of the effort we are prepared to expend to guard
    against deception when accuracy is at a premium.

    When it comes to our poor mind, however, we can't be bothered; we are
    satisfied accepting any and all impressions, because here the loss we
    suffer is not obvious. If you want to know just how little concerned
    you are about things good and bad, and how serious about things
    indifferent, compare your attitude to going blind with your attitude
    about being mentally in the dark. You will realize, I think, how
    inappropriate your values really are.

-- Epictetus, Discourses I.20.7-12 (pages 51-52 of this edition)
    (original Greek, with alternate translations at the link)
%
30 points Jayson_Virissimo 02 July 2010 05:35:48PM

    Doubt, n. The philosophical device Descartes so cleverly used to prove
    everything he previously believed.

-- L. A. Rollins, Lucifer's Lexicon
%
30 points Yvain 07 October 2010 07:00:04PM

    Even after ten thousand explanations, a fool is no wiser, but an
    intelligent man requires only two thousand five hundred.

-- Brahma, Mahabharata
%
30 points anonym 03 December 2010 08:36:05AM

    Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.

-- John Von Neumann
%
30 points billswift 03 December 2010 05:21:36AM

    A little learning is not a dangerous thing to one who does not mistake
    it for a great deal.

-- William A White
%
30 points Alexandros 02 March 2011 11:15:08AM

    Don't hate the playa, hate the game

-- Ice-T

Or, as the Urban Dictionary puts it:

    Do not fault the successful participant in a flawed system; try
    instead to discern and rebuke that aspect of its organization which
    allows or encourages the behavior that has provoked your displeasure.

A meta-comment:
    It's always good to have an arsenal of mainstream-accessible quotes to
    use for those times when explaining game theory is just loo much of an
    inferential leap. I'd like to find more of these.
%
30 points peter_hurford 03 October 2011 06:45:23PM

    Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no
    one was listening, everything must be said again.

-- André Gide
%
30 points Grognor 02 February 2012 03:29:36AM

    Il est dangereux d’avoir raison dans des choses où des hommes
    accrédités ont tort.

    It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are
    wrong.

-- Voltaire (usually presented as,
    "It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.")
%
30 points Maniakes 03 April 2012 12:51:28AM

    There are big differences between "a study" and "a good study" and "a
    published study" and "a study that's been independently confirmed" and
    "a study that's been independently confirmed a dozen times over."
    These differences are important; when a scientist says something, it's
    not the same as the Pope saying it. It's only when dozens and hundreds
    of scientists start saying the same thing that we should start telling
    people to guzzle red wine out of a fire hose.

-- Chris Bucholz
%
30 points John_Maxwell_IV 07 May 2012 06:09:23PM

How a game theorist buys a car:

    "Hello, my name is Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. I plan to buy the
    following car [list the exact model and features] today at five P.M. I
    am calling all of the dealerships within a fifty-mile radius of my
    home and I am telling each of them what I am telling you. I will come
    in and buy the car today at five P.M. from the dealer who gives me the
    lowest price. I need to have the all-in price, including taxes, dealer
    prep [I ask them not to prep the car and not charge me for it, since
    dealer prep is little more than giving you a washed car with plastic
    covers and paper floormats removed, usually for hundreds of dollars],
    everything, because I will make out the check to your dealership
    before I come and will not have another check with me."

-- The Predictioneer's Game, page 7.

Other car-buying tips from Bueno de Mesquita, in case you're about to buy
a car:

    * Figure out exactly what car you want to buy by searching online
    * before making any contact with dealerships.

    * Don't be afraid to purchase a car from a distant dealership--the
    * manufacturer provides the warranty, not the dealer.

    * Be sure to tell each dealer you will be sharing the price they quote
    * you with subsequent dealers.

    * Don't take shit from dealers who tell you "you can't buy a car over
    * the phone" or do anything other than give you their number. If a
    * dealer is stonewalling, make it quite clear that you're willing to
    * get what you want elsewhere.

    * Arrive at the lowest-price dealer just before 5:00 PM to close the
    * deal.  In the unlikely event that the dealer changes their terms, go
    * for the next best price.
%
30 points Jayson_Virissimo 01 May 2012 08:08:55AM

    If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is
    favorable.

-- Seneca
%
30 points peter_hurford 01 September 2012 06:19:37PM

    He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without
    lessening mine; as he who lights his candle at mine, receives light
    without darkening me. No one possesses the less of an idea, because
    every other possesses the whole of it.

-- Jefferson
%
29 points JamesAndrix 09 December 2010 07:28:48AM

    A young boy walks into a barber shop and the barber whispers to his
    customer, "This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove
    it to you." The barber puts a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters
    in the other, then calls the boy over and asks, "Which do you want,
    son?" The boy takes the quarters and leaves. "What did I tell you?"
    said the barber.  "That kid never learns!" Later, when the customer
    leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream store.
    "Hey, son! May I ask you a question? Why did you take the quarters
    instead of the dollar bill?" The boy licked his cone and replied,
    "Because the day I take the dollar, the game is over!"

-- found on /r/funny
%
29 points MichaelGR 03 February 2011 02:51:58PM

    The Company that needs a new machine tool is already paying for it.

-- old Warner Swasey ad
%
29 points TobyBartels 07 March 2011 02:22:17AM

Peanuts, 1961 April 2627:

    Lucy: You can't drift along forever. You have to direct your thinking.
    For instance, you have to decide whether you're going to be a liberal
    or a conservative. You have to take some sort of stand. You have to
    associate yourself with some sort of cause.

    Linus: How can a person just decide what he's going to think? Doesn't
    he have to think first, and then try to discover what it is that he's
    thought?
%
29 points RichardKennaway 03 March 2011 10:24:00PM

    What scientists have in common is not that they agree on the same
    theories, or even that they always agree on the same facts, but that
    they agree on the procedures to be followed in testing theories and
    establishing facts.

-- Bruce Gregory Inventing Reality: Physics as Language pp.186-187.
%
29 points MichaelGR 02 June 2011 06:37:39PM

    "At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country
    in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being
    built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and
    earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few
    machines. The government bureaucrat explained: "You don’t understand.
    This is a jobs program." To which Milton replied: "Oh, I thought you
    were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should
    give these workers spoons, not shovels."

-- Milton Friedman story
%
29 points abcd_z 03 July 2011 05:15:40AM

    When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

-- John Maynard Keynes
%
29 points Tesseract 03 July 2011 04:25:27AM

    We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that
    is in it.

-- Mark Twain
%
29 points Stabilizer 02 January 2012 05:58:19PM

    The road to wisdom? — Well, it's plain

    and simple to express:

    Err

    and err

    and err again

    but less

    and less

    and less.

-- Piet Hein
%
29 points Oscar_Cunningham 01 January 2012 03:53:09PM

    ...when you do have a deep understanding, you have solved the problem
    and it is time to do something else. This makes the total time you
    spend in life reveling in your mastery of something quite brief. One
    of the main skills of research scientists of any type is knowing how
    to work comfortably and productively in a state of confusion.

-- Anon
http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-have-an-understanding-of-very-advanced-mathematics#ans873950
%
29 points Grognor 01 May 2012 07:15:47AM

    The Disobedi-Ant

    The story of the Disobedi-Ant is very short. It refused to believe
    that its powerful impulses to play instead of work were anything but
    unique expressions of its very unique self, and it went its merry way,
    singing, "What I choose to do has nothing to do with what any-ant else
    chooses to do! What could be more self-evident?"

    Coincidentally enough, so went the reasoning of all its colony-mates.
    In fact, the same refrain was independently invented by every last ant
    in the colony, and each ant thought it original. It echoed throughout
    the colony, even with the same melody.

    The colony perished.

-- Douglas Hofstadter (posted with gwern's permission)
%
29 points Jayson_Virissimo 03 June 2012 10:01:09AM

    The greatest weariness comes from work not done.

-- Eric Hoffer
%
29 points Mark_Eichenlaub 02 June 2012 11:52:31PM

    And clearly my children will never get any taller, because there is no
    statistically-significant difference in their height from one day to
    the next.

-- Andrew Vickers, What Is A P-Value, Anyway?
%
29 points tastefullyOffensive 06 July 2012 04:47:33PM

    Just explained the Higgs Boson to my friend even though I don't
    understand it myself. He was very convinced. I bet this is how
    religions get started.

-- Rob DenBleyker
%
29 points peter_hurford 03 August 2012 12:17:53AM

    All of the books in the world contain no more information than is
    broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year.
    Not all bits have equal value.

-- Carl Sagan
%
29 points Stabilizer 03 December 2012 02:13:14AM

    Among a great many other things that chess teaches you is to control
    the initial excitement you feel when you see something that looks
    good. It trains you to think before grabbing, and to think just as
    objectively when you're in trouble. When you're making a film you have
    to make most of your decisions on the run, and there is a tendency to
    always shoot from the hip. It takes more discipline than you might
    imagine, to think, even for thirty seconds, in the noisy, confusing,
    high-pressure atmosphere of a film set. But a few seconds' thought can
    often prevent a serious mistake being made about something that looks
    good at first glance. With respect to films, chess is more useful in
    preventing you from making mistakes than giving you ideas. Ideas come
    spontaneously and the discipline required to evaluate and put them to
    use tends to be the real work.

-- Stanley Kubrick
%
28 points SilasBarta 01 September 2009 03:42:39PM

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.
%
28 points RobinZ 22 October 2009 04:46:10PM

    The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my
    measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old
    measurements and expect me to fit them.

-- George Bernard Shaw, writer, Nobel laureate (1856-1950)

Edit: The full citation is to his 1903 play Man and superman: a comedy and
a philosophy, where the character John Tanner ("M.I.R.C., Member of the
Idle Rich Class") says:

    Yes, because to be treated as a boy was to be taken on the old
    footing. I had become a new person ; and those who knew the old person
    laughed at me. The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor : he
    took my measure anew every time he saw me, whilst all the rest went on
    with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.
%
28 points sketerpot 02 March 2010 12:43:39AM, short version

    He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.

-- John McCarthy, on mainstream environmentalism.
%
28 points sketerpot 02 March 2010 12:43:39AM

    He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.

-- John McCarthy, on mainstream environmentalism.

As someone who regularly gets into arguments about this, I can say that
he's definitely right; you wouldn't believe the amount of nonsense that
can be disposed of simply by looking up the relevant numbers and doing a
minute's worth of easy arithmetic.

For example, I've heard some people recently claiming that a combination
of solar photovoltaics, electrolysis to produce hydrogen, and these new
Bloom box fuel cells are cheaper than nuclear fission. Look up the costs
of solar farms; about $3 per peak watt. Their average power output is
less; we can very optimistically assume that they run at 20% of capacity
on average. Efficiency losses from electrolysis and fuel cells are about
50%. Putting it all together, this would cost about $30 per watt of
average power delivered. Not including the cost of the fuel cells.

A little googling will show that the total cost of building two new AP1000
reactors in Georgia is about $14 billion, and they average at least 93% of
their peak power, and transmission line losses bring their average power
delivered to about 1000 MW each. So their cost is about $7 per watt of
average power delivered, or about 23% the cost of solar.

There's a lot of extremely harmful bullshit out there, and defeating most
of it doesn't take any advanced techniques; it just takes a willingness to
look up some relevant numbers and do a bit of arithmetic.
%
28 points RobinZ 01 April 2010 11:44:53PM

    My dad used to have an expression: "Don't tell me what you value. Show
    me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value."

-- Joe Biden, remarks delivered in Saint Clair Shores, MI,
    Monday, September 15, 2008
%
28 points Morendil 01 September 2010 06:55:22AM

    Writing program code is a good way of debugging your thinking.

-- Bill Venables
%
28 points CronoDAS 03 May 2011 09:43:26PM

    "War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for?" he said.

    "Dunno, sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?"

    "Absol--Well, okay."

    "Defending yourself from a totalitarian aggressor?"

    "All right, I'll grant you that, but--"

    "Saving civilization against a horde of--"

    "It doesn't do any good in the long run is what I'm saying, Nobby, if
    you'd listen for five seconds together," said Fred Colon sharply.

    "Yeah, but in the long run what does, sarge?"

-- Terry Pratchett, Thud!
%
28 points Patrick 01 June 2011 01:47:26PM

    I didn't do the engineering, and I didn't do the math, because I
    thought I understood what was going on and I thought I made a good
    rig. But I was wrong. I should have done it.

-- Jamie Hyneman
%
28 points Tesseract 03 July 2011 04:42:28AM

    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.

-- Steven Pinker, Quoted in The Blank Slate
%
28 points summerstay 04 August 2011 02:01:49PM

    A Thinking Machine! Yes, we can now have our thinking done for us by
    machinery! The Editor of the Common School Advocate says—" On our way
    to Cincinnati, a few days since, we stopped over night where a
    gentleman from the city was introducing a machine which he said was
    designed to supercede the necessity and labor of thinking. It was
    highly and respectably recommended, by men too in high places, and is
    designed for a calculator, to save the trouble of all mathematical
    labor. By turning the machinery it produces correct results in
    addition, substraction, multiplication, and division, and the operator
    assured us that it was equally useful in fractions and the higher
    mathematics." The Editor thinks that such machines, by which the
    scholar may, by turning a crank, grind out the solution of a problem
    without the fatigue of mental application, would by its introduction
    into schools, do incalculable injury, But who knows that such machines
    when brought to greater perfection, may not think of a plan to remedy
    all their own defects and then grind out ideas beyond the ken of
    mortal mind!"

-- The Primitive Expounder in 1847
%
28 points Eugine_Nier 03 September 2011 05:36:08AM

    One day, I was playing with an "express wagon," a little wagon with a
    railing around it, I noticed something about the way the ball moved. I
    went to my father and said, "Say, Pop, I noticed something. When I
    pull the wagon, the ball rolls to the back of the wagon. And when I'm
    pulling it along and I suddenly stop, the ball rolls to the front of
    the wagon. Why is that?"

    "That, nobody knows," he said. "The general principle is that things
    which are moving tend to keep on moving, and things which are standing
    still tend to stand still, unless you push them hard. This tendency is
    called 'inertia,' but nobody knows why it's true." Now, that's a deep
    understanding. He didn't just give me the name.

-- Richard Feynman
%
28 points Stabilizer 03 February 2012 10:42:15PM

    "The truth is whatever you can get away with."

    "No, that’s journalism. The truth is whatever you can’t escape."

-- Greg Egan, Distress
%
28 points wallowinmaya 01 February 2012 06:54:38PM

    It is easy to be certain....One has only to be sufficiently vague.

-- Charles S. Peirce
%
28 points DSimon 02 March 2012 05:50:57AM

    T-Rex: Our bodies are amazing things! Check it, everyone!

    We use our mouths to talk. We invent, remember and teach entire
    languages with which to do the talking! And if that fails, we can talk
    with our hands. We build planes and boats and cars and spaceships, all
    by either using our bodies directly, or by using instruments invented
    by our bodies. We compose beautiful music and tell amazing stories,
    all with our bodies, these fleshy bags with spooky skeletons inside.

    And yet, if we have a severe enough peanut allergy, we can be killed
    in seconds by a friggin' legume. And hey, 70% of our planet is water,
    but what happens if we spend too much time in it? We drown. Game over,
    man!

    I used to make fun of Green Lantern for being vulnerable to the color
    yellow. Then I choked on my orange juice one morning and nearly
    suffocated.

-- Dinosaur Comics
%
28 points peter_hurford 01 March 2012 05:19:45PM

    The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you
    look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies
    they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful
    people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love,
    they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own
    motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more
    today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering
    of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.

-- Neil DeGrasse Tyson
%
28 points Grognor 01 May 2012 07:13:26AM

    Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am
    persecuted whenever I am contradicted.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, probably not apocryphal
%
28 points Oligopsony 06 June 2012 07:06:56PM

    So, let's say some bros of mine and I have some hand-signals for, you
    know, bro stuff. And one of the signals means, "Oh, shit. Here comes
    that girl! You know. That girl. She's coming." That signal has a
    particular context. Eventually, one of my bros gets tired of sloppy
    use of the signal, and sets about laying out specifically what
    situations make a girl that girl. If I used the signal in a
    close-but-not-quite context, he'd handle it and then pull me aside and
    say, "I know she and I had that thing that one time, but we never...
    well, it wasn't quite THAT. You know? So that signal, it freaked me
    out, because I thought it had to be someone else. Make sure you're
    using it properly, okay?" And I'd be like, "Bro. Got it."

    Another friend of mine, he recognizes the sorts of situations we use
    the signal in have a common thread, so he begins using the hand signal
    for other situations, any situation that has the potential for both
    danger and excitement. So if someone invites us to this real sketchy
    bar, he'll give me the signal - "This could be bad. But what if it's
    not?" And I'd respond, "I see what you did there."

    Maybe you see where this is going. We're hanging out one day, and some
    guy suggests we crash some party. Bro #2 signals, and bro #1 freaks
    out, looking around. And then he's like, "OH FUCK I HAVE TO CALL HER."
    And #2 says, "No, dude, there's no one coming. I just meant, this is
    like one of those situations, you know?" And they're pissed at each
    other because they're using the same signal to mean different things.
    I'm not mad, because I generally know what they each mean, but I have
    more context than they do.

    The same thing probably happens with analytics and Continentals.

-- Philosophy Bro
%
28 points Ezekiel 02 September 2012 01:16:02AM

    My brain technically-not-a-lies to me far more than it actually lies
    to me.

-- Aristosophy
%
28 points Stabilizer 02 October 2012 06:46:48AM

    Curiosity was framed. Avoid it at your peril. The cat's not even sick.
    If you don't know how it works, find out. If you're not sure if it
    will work, try it. If it doesn't make sense, play with it until it
    does. If it's not broken, break it. If it might not be true, find out.
    And most of all, if someone says it is none of your business, prove
    them wrong.

-- Seth Godin
%
28 points James_Miller 01 December 2012 08:19:55PM

    You might expect that, having learned of the existence of immortal
    life, man would dedicate colossal resources to learning how the
    immortal jellyfish performs its trick. You might expect that biotech
    multinationals would vie to copyright its genome; that a vast
    coalition of research scientists would seek to determine the
    mechanisms by which its cells aged in reverse; that pharmaceutical
    firms would try to appropriate its lessons for the purposes of human
    medicine; that governments would broker international accords to
    govern the future use of rejuvenating technology.

NYT article titled Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?

The next line of the article after the above quote is "But none of this
happened."
%
27 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 18 April 2009 01:28:35AM

    Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows
    suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.

-- Randall Munroe
%
27 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 July 2009 10:07:14PM

    There is no real me! Don't try to find the real me! Don't try to find
    someone inside of me who isn't me!

-- Princess Waltz

Commentary: What's odd is not how many people think they contain other
people. What's odd is how many of those people think the other person is
the real one.
%
27 points Rain 02 July 2010 12:05:26AM

    Nature draws no line between living and nonliving.

-- K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation
%
27 points Rain 03 September 2010 12:15:26PM

    Robot: "With all your modern science, are you any closer to
    understanding the mystery of how a robot walks or talks?"

    Farnsworth: "Yes you idiot! The circuit diagram is right in the inside
    of your case."

    Robot: "I choose to believe what I was programmed to believe!"

-- Futurama, The Honking
%
27 points Alexandros 11 December 2010 11:03:27AM

    if you're the smartest person in the room, go look for a room with
    smarter people in it.

-- kevinpet, at Hacker News
%
27 points James_Miller 02 March 2011 08:55:46PM

    There is some theoretical amount of honesty that is indistinguishable
    from mental illness...Imagine if you stopped filtering everything you
    said...just try to imagine yourself living without self-censorship.
    Wouldn't you sound crazy?

-- Dilbert creator Scott Adams discussing Charlie Sheen.
%
27 points RichardKennaway 02 March 2011 12:42:24PM

    If a man proves too clearly and convincingly to himself . . . that a
    tiger is an optical illusion--well, he will find out he is wrong. The
    tiger will himself intervene in the discussion, in a manner which will
    be in every sense conclusive.

-- G. K. Chesterton (unsourced)
%
27 points jasonmcdowell 01 June 2011 09:23:48PM

    I wish there was no illness, I don't care if an old doctor starves.

-- Loā Hô, a Taiwanese physician and poet.
%
27 points Unnamed 01 June 2011 07:11:09PM

    Violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more
    quickly. Its existence changes your destination. If you use it, you
    had better be prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes
    you to.

-- hilzoy
%
27 points Oligopsony 31 October 2011 07:38:26PM

On precision in aesthetics, metaethics:

    RS: Butt-Head, I have a question for you. I noticed that you often
    say, "I like stuff that's cool." But isn't that circular logic? I
    mean, what is the definition of "cool," other than an adjective
    denoting something the speaker likes?

    BH: Huh-huh. Uh, did you, like, go to college?

    RS: You don't have to go to college to know the definition of
    "redundant." What I'm saying is that essentially what you're saying is
    "I like stuff that I like."

    B: Yeah. Huh-huh. Me, too.

    BH: Also, I don't like stuff that sucks, either.

    RS: But nobody likes stuff that sucks!

    BH: Then why does so much stuff suck?

    B: Yeah. College boy! Huh-huh, huh-huh.

-- Rolling Stone, Interview with Beavis and Butt-Head
%
27 points gwern 02 December 2011 08:16:46PM

    Economists essentially have a sophisticated lack of understanding of
    economics, especially macroeconomics. I know it sounds ridiculous. But
    the reason why I tell people they should study economics is not so
    they’ll know something at the end—because I don’t think we know
    much—but because we’re good at thinking. Economics teaches you to
    think things through. What you see a lot of times in economics is
    disdain for other's lack of thinking. You have to think about the
    ramifications of policies in the short run, the medium run, and the
    long run. Economists think they’re good at doing that, but they’re
    good at doing that in the sense that they can write down a model that
    will help them think about it—not in terms of empirically knowing what
    the answers are. And we have gotten so enamored of thinking things
    through that the fact that we don’t know anything needs to bother us
    more. So, yes, it’s true that the average guy on the street doesn’t
    understand economics, and it’s also true that we don’t understand
    economics. We just have a more sophisticated lack of understanding
    than the guy on the street.

-- Culture in Economics and the Culture of Economics: Raquel Fernández in
    Conversation with The Straddler
%
27 points J_Taylor 01 January 2012 08:35:29AM

    A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not
    prove anything."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche
%
27 points NancyLebovitz 02 February 2012 10:15:50AM

    "I was just doing my job" or "I don’t make the rules" is not a defense
    if you have a history of deciding what your job actually is, and
    selectively breaking or bending rules.

-- Venkat Rao, Heads I Win, Tails You Lose
%
27 points arundelo 01 February 2012 09:46:04PM

    Robert Morris has a very unusual quality: he's never wrong. It might
    seem this would require you to be omniscient, but actually it's
    surprisingly easy. Don't say anything unless you're fairly sure of it.
    If you're not omniscient, you just don't end up saying much.

    [....] He's not just generally correct, but also correct about how
    correct he is.

-- Paul Graham
%
27 points GabrielDuquette 01 February 2012 02:18:49PM

    It is the most common way of trying to cope with novelty: by means of
    metaphors and analogies we try to link the new to the old, the novel
    to the familiar. Under sufficiently slow and gradual change, it works
    reasonably well; in the case of a sharp discontinuity, however, the
    method breaks down: though we may glorify it with the name 'common
    sense', our past experience is no longer relevant, the analogies
    become too shallow, and the metaphors become more misleading than
    illuminating.

-- E. W. Dijkstra
%
27 points Alicorn 11 June 2012 07:09:59PM

    Do you ever get the feeling that God has a plan?

    And you're the only one who can stop it?

    A Softer World
%
27 points Will_Newsome 03 July 2012 05:06:21AM

    I often tried plays that looked recklessly daring, maybe even silly.
    But I never tried anything foolish when a game was at stake, only when
    we were far ahead or far behind. I did it to study how the other team
    reacted, filing away in my mind any observations for future use.

-- Ty Cobb
%
27 points RolfAndreassen 03 July 2012 06:17:44PM

    We find it difficult and disturbing to hold in our minds arguments of
    the form ‘On the one hand, on the other.’ If we are for capital
    punishment we want it to be good in all respects, with no serious
    drawbacks; if we are against it, we want it to be bad in all respects,
    with no serious advantages. We want the world of facts to dictate to
    us, virtually, how to act; but this it will never do. We always have
    to make a choice.

-- Theodore Dalrymple, article in Library of Law and Liberty.
%
27 points NancyLebovitz 08 August 2012 04:43:07PM

    But I came to realize that I was not a wizard, that "will-power" was
    not mana, and I was not so much a ghost in the machine, as a machine
    in the machine.

-- Ta-nehisi Coates
%
27 points palladias 02 October 2012 07:52:35PM

    "You’re saying I’ll get used to being a warlock, or whatever it is
    that I am."

    "You’ve always been what you are. That’s not new. What you’ll get used
    to is knowing it."

-- Jem and Tessa, Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare
%
27 points Alejandro1 07 November 2012 06:20:08AM

    Breaking: To surprise of pundits, numbers continue to be best system
    for determining which of two things is larger.

-- xkcd.
%
27 points Nominull 02 December 2012 05:03:11AM

    Molten variables hiss and roar. On my mind-forge, I hammer them into
    the greatsword Epistemology. Many are my foes this night.

-- Nate Silver Parody Twitter Account @fivethirtynate,
    on the night of the presidential election
%
26 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 July 2009 10:14:44PM

    When I was young, I thought the act of getting older meant, year by
    year, getting more sophisticated, more hard, cool, and unpitying. Less
    innocent.

    Maybe that was a childish idea of what getting older was about. Maybe
    adults, mature adults, get more innocent with time, not less. Because
    the word "innocent" does not mean "naive," it means "not guilty."

    Children do small evils to each other, schoolyard fights and insults,
    not because their hearts are pure, but because their powers are small.
    Grown-ups have more power. Some of them do great evils with that
    power. But what about the ones who don't? Aren't they more innocent
    than children, not less?

-- John C. Wright, Fugitives of Chaos
%
26 points Unnamed 08 January 2010 12:48:32AM

    Most haystacks do not even have a needle.

-- Lorenzo
%
26 points Rain 07 January 2010 11:39:22PM

    In the wake of such suffering, there is no way to adequately explain
    the tragedy. Yet the seemingly random nature of the mass deaths has
    made them even harder for the survivors to understand.

    "In a situation like this, it's only natural to want to assign blame,"
    said Dr. Frederick MacDougal of the National Center for Infectious
    Diseases, who recently lost a third cousin to a degenerative nerve
    disorder. "But the disturbing thing about this case is that no one
    factor is at fault. People are dying for such a wide range of
    reasons--gunshot wounds, black-lung disease, falls down elevator
    shafts--that we have been unable to isolate any single element as the
    cause."

    "No one simple explanation can encompass the enormous scope of this
    problem," MacDougal added. "And that's very difficult for most people
    to process psychologically."

    [...]

    Meanwhile, as the world continues to grapple with this seemingly
    unstoppable threat, the deaths--and the sorrow, fear and pain they
    have wrought--continue.

    As Margaret Heller, a volunteer at a clinic in Baltimore put it, "We
    do everything we can. But for most of the people we try to help, the
    sad truth is it's only a matter of time."

-- The Onion, Millions and Millions Dead

Related: World Death Rate Holding Steady At 100 Percent
%
26 points Kutta 01 February 2010 02:40:35PM

    Many people equate tolerance with the attitude that every belief is
    equally true, and that we should all simply accept this fact and go
    our separate ways. But I view tolerance as the willingness to come
    together, to face one another in the same room and hack at each other
    with claw hammers until the truth finally trickles out from the blood
    and the tears.

-- Raving Atheist, found via the Black Belt Bayesian blog
    (props to Steven)
%
26 points RichardKennaway 01 February 2010 11:53:30AM

    Intuition only works in situations where neurology and evolution has
    pre-equipped us with a good set of basic-level categories. That works
    for dealing with other humans, and for throwing things, and for a
    bunch of other things that do not, unfortunately, include constructing
    viable philosophies."

-- Eric S. Raymond
%
26 points anonym 01 February 2010 06:53:17AM

    Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human
    mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn
    how to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of
    their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading,
    adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school
    to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those
    bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any
    species-wide knack for them to have evolved.

-- Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
%
26 points DSimon 03 August 2010 03:27:01AM

    My hotel doesn't have a 13th floor because of superstition, but people
    on the 14th floor, you should know what floor you're really on. If you
    jump out the window, you will die sooner than you expect.

-- Mitch Hedberg (Quoted from memory)
%
26 points sketerpot 03 December 2010 10:25:21PM

Mitch Hedberg on the distinction between labels and the things to which
they are applied:

    I just bought a 2-bedroom house, but it's up to me, isn't it, how many
    bedrooms there are? Fuck you, real estate lady! This bedroom has a
    oven in it! This bedroom’s got a lot of people sitting around watching
    TV. This bedroom is A.K.A. a hallway.
%
26 points DSimon 02 February 2011 06:20:47PM

    Kräht der Hahn am Mist, ändert sich's Wetter oder es bleibt wie's ist.

-- Common German folk saying

Translates as "If the rooster crows on the manure pile, the weather will
change or stay as it is." In other words, P(W|R) = P(W) when W is
uncorrelated with R.
%
26 points AlexMennen 08 March 2011 01:49:27AM

    The discovery that the universe has no purpose need not prevent a
    human being from having one.

-- Irwin Edman
%
26 points Dr_Manhattan 02 March 2011 02:54:54PM

    In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must
    confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.

-- Winston Churchill
%
26 points Dreaded_Anomaly 06 April 2011 03:27:01AM

    Complex problems have simple, easy to understand wrong answers.

-- Grossman's Law
%
26 points Tom_Talbot 03 August 2011 12:08:43AM

    A writer on structuralism in the Times Literary Supplement has
    suggested that thoughts which are confused and tortuous by reason of
    their profundity are most appropriately expressed in prose that is
    deliberately unclear. What a preposterously silly idea! I am reminded
    of an air-raid warden in wartime Oxford who, when bright moonlight
    seemed to be defeating the spirit of the blackout, exhorted us to wear
    dark glasses. He, however, was being funny on purpose.

-- Peter Medawar
%
26 points Manfred 02 August 2011 11:08:49PM

    It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the
    "plan of creation" or "unity of design," etc., and to think that we
    give an explanation when we only restate a fact.

-- Charles Darwin
%
26 points brazzy 03 September 2011 10:47:19PM

    She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom
    followed it)

-- Lewis Carrol, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
%
26 points Jayson_Virissimo 01 September 2011 04:40:38PM

    The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance
    as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a
    way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of
    his real interests. He becomes primitive again.

-- Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy

In other words, politics is the mind killer.
%
26 points ciphergoth 13 October 2011 09:32:09PM

    News flash, dearies: there’s lots of areas of life that aren’t
    ‘science’ where people do tend to get a mite hung up on particulars of
    what is and is not, in fact, true. Like in bookkeeping. Like in
    criminal investigations. Like when they’re trying to establish where
    their spouse was last night.

    Like, in fact, in most facets of life, hundreds of times a day, even
    if accounting isn’t your field and you’re not the accused at a
    criminal trial, and you’re not even married. Getting the facts right
    isn’t a concern of ‘science’, specifically. It’s a general concern of
    human beings. Getting reality right is, frequently, indeed, rather
    important if you wish to stay alive. It’s not a particularly academic
    question whether the car is or is not coming, when you cross the road.
    It’s the sort of thing one likes to get right. And we don’t generally
    call this ‘science’, either. We call it ‘looking’.

-- AJ Milne
%
26 points J_Taylor 04 December 2011 08:23:34AM

    Nobody panics when things go "according to plan"… even if the plan is
    horrifying.

-- The Joker
%
26 points A4FB53AC 01 April 2012 03:48:12PM

    A faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth
    many regrets.

-- Arthur C. Clarke
%
26 points Alicorn 01 April 2012 06:09:23PM

    Westerners are fond of the saying ‘Life isn’t fair.’ Then, they end in
    snide triumphant: ‘So get used to it!’

    What a cruel, sadistic notion to revel in! What a terrible,
    patriarchal response to a child’s budding sense of ethics. Announce to
    an Iroquois, ‘Life isn’t fair,’ and her response will be: ‘Then make
    it fair!’

-- Barbara Alice Mann
%
26 points Mark_Eichenlaub 02 May 2012 05:34:28AM

    Asked today if the Titanic II could sink, Mr Palmer told reporters:
    "Of course it will sink if you put a hole in it."

http://www.smh.com.au/business/clive-palmer-plans-to-build-titanic-ii-20120430-1xtrc.html
%
26 points rocurley 03 May 2012 11:42:32PM

    When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Make life take the
    lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons, what the hell am
    I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life
    rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know
    who I am?  I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the
    lemons! I’m gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that
    burns your house down!"

-- Cave Johnson, Portal 2
%
26 points Will_Newsome 03 July 2012 05:24:54AM

    Here is a hand. How do I know? Look closely, asshole, it's clearly a
    hand.

    Look, if you really insist on doubting that here is a hand, or
    anything else, there's nothing really I can say to convince you
    otherwise. What the tits would the world even look like if this
    weren't a hand? What sort of system is your doubt endorsing? After
    all, you can't just say "It's not true that here is a hand." You have
    to be endorsing some other picture of the world. [...]

    So it turns out when I say things like "Here is a hand" I'm not really
    making a claim about the world, I'm laying down some rules for
    discussion. If you doubt there's a hand here, then fuck you and that's
    all there is to it. We can't really talk about anything now, because
    we can't even agree on something as simple as a goddamn hand. When we
    all agree here is a hand, then we can go about discussing our world in
    meaningful ways. Skepticism just undermines a foundation and replaces
    it with nothing; it[']s paralyzing. The grounds for such radical
    skepticism don't exist; it presupposes and relies on the very
    certainty it tries to undermine.

    This is more practical than you realize. There are people who actually
    believe that the world is only 6,000 years old. What the fuck, right?
    But if you've ever talked with one of them, you know that they're
    fucking impossible to have what you consider a 'reasonable' discussion
    with. It's not like they don't have answers for everything, it[']s
    just that those answers don't make any fucking sense to you. It[']s
    the sort of gibberish that makes you want to scream. The problem is
    that you don't even play the game by the same goddamn rules. You're
    both certain of your positions, because those positions are logically
    derived from the worldview each of you endorses as your starting
    point, and you both look at each other's foundations and say,
    "Seriously, what the fuck are you talking about?" You don't even know
    how you would go about convincing them that you're right and they're
    wrong; you don't even agree on a method by which to do that.

    If you flew to some part of the world where they'd never heard of an
    airplane or even a bird, how the fuck could you convince them you
    flew? They don't even know what that means. They would have all sorts
    of questions, and would consider your answers nonsensical or magical.
    When a non-believer is told that God exists, he reacts in the same
    way; also, a believer when he is told there is no God.

    So everything we believe about the world is built on some sort of
    foundation. Sure, that foundation can change, but there is always
    something there at the base, and it is that base that enables us to
    talk about the world. Not everyone has the same base you do, and that
    has to be okay. Just know that some of your beliefs are just as
    unsupported as everyone else's. It's just the way it is, bro.

-- Philosophy Bro, summarizing Wittgensteins On Certainty.
    (I'm not sure the summary is very true to the original
    but it's interesting nonetheless.)
%
26 points roland 03 August 2012 08:56:07AM

    Yes -- and to me, that's a perfect illustration of why experiments are
    relevant in the first place! More often than not, the only reason we
    need experiments is that we're not smart enough. After the experiment
    has been done, if we've learned anything worth knowing at all, then
    hopefully we've learned why the experiment wasn't necessary to begin
    with -- why it wouldn't have made sense for the world to be any other
    way. But we're too dumb to figure it out ourselves!

-- Scott Aaronson
%
26 points frostgiant 08 August 2012 02:13:24AM

    The problem with Internet quotes and statistics is that often times,
    they’re wrongfully believed to be real.

-- Abraham Lincoln
%
26 points katydee 07 September 2012 02:15:02AM

    If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil
    deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us
    and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the
    heart of every human being, and who is willing to destroy a piece of
    his own heart?

-- Solzhenitsyn
%
26 points Jay_Schweikert 02 September 2012 05:48:43PM

    Qhorin Halfhand: The Watch has given you a great gift. And you only
    have one thing to give in return: your life.

    Jon Snow: I'd gladly give my life.

    Qhorin Halfhand: I don’t want you to be glad about it! I want you to
    curse and fight until your heart’s done pumping.

-- Game of Thrones, Season 2.
%
26 points Eugine_Nier 02 December 2012 02:52:14AM

    Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question:
    whether "democratic behaviour" means the behaviour that democracies
    like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did,
    it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.

    (..)

    Even if they don’t read Aristotle (that would be undemocratic) you
    would have thought the French Revolution would have taught them that
    the behaviour aristocrats naturally like is not the behaviour that
    preserves aristocracy. They might then have applied the same principle
    to all forms of government.

-- Screwtape, from Screwtape Proposes a Toast by C. S. Lewis.
%
25 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 November 2009 11:39:02PM

    Just a few centuries ago, the smartest humans alive were dead wrong
    about damn near everything. They were wrong about gods. Wrong about
    astronomy. Wrong about disease. Wrong about heredity. Wrong about
    physics. Wrong about racism, sexism, nationalism, governance, and many
    other moral issues. Wrong about geology. Wrong about cosmology. Wrong
    about chemistry. Wrong about evolution. Wrong about nearly every
    subject imaginable.

-- Luke Muehlhauser
%
25 points Nic_Smith 01 February 2010 07:43:17AM

    If you can't feel secure - and teach your children to feel secure -
    about 1-in-610,000 nightmare scenarios - the problem isn't the world.
    It's you.

-- Bryan Caplan
%
25 points Randaly 03 August 2010 04:45:58AM

    Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from SCIENCE!

-- Girl Genius
%
25 points Hariant 09 October 2010 01:42:32AM

    Philosopher: Can we ever be certain an observation is true?

    Engineer: Yep.

    Philosopher: How?

    Engineer: Lookin'.

-- Scrollover of SMBC #1879
%
25 points MichaelGR 03 December 2010 05:40:15PM

    A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it, is
    committing another mistake.

-- Confucius
%
25 points wiresnips 03 January 2011 08:40:04PM

    Whatever elaborate, and grotesquely counter-intuitive, underpinnings
    there might be to familiar reality, it stubbornly continues to be
    familiar. When Rutherford showed that atoms were mostly empty space,
    did the ground become any less solid? The truth itself changes
    nothing.

-- Greg Egan, Quarantine
%
25 points Psy-Kosh 03 February 2011 11:38:09PM

Just saw on reddit a perfect accidental metaphor: jakeredfield posted this
in r/gaming:

    For the people that have no played Portal yet, be warned, there may be
    spoilers up ahead for you.

    So anyway, I am a huge fan of Portal, I love everything about the
    game. I bought it upon release and have played through it multiple
    times. My friends aren't as big of gamers as me so it took them some
    time to get their hands on Portal. My one friend didn't have a
    computer capable of running Portal so I let him play on mine.

    I pulled up a chair besides him and eagerly watched him play then
    entire time. He loved the game. I expected him to. It's an awesome
    game. But here comes the WTF part...(SPOILERS AHEAD)

    He go to the part at the last puzzle, right before GlaDOS tries to
    kill you in the fire. So then, my friend is like, "Oh, so it's one of
    those games where you die at the end. Haha, it was a good game." And
    then he immediately shuts it down. I just sat there. Shocked. In awe.
    I couldn't believe what I just saw. He turns to me and goes, "Good
    game, I'd play that again."

    This is the part where I just hit him and yell, "IT WASN'T OVER YET!"
    He was so confused. He loaded it back up to that part and couldn't
    figure it out. I then pointed it out to him what he needed to do from
    there. He eventually fully finished the game.

    Imagine what would have happened if I wasn't there? How many other
    people do you think only experienced the game up to this part, because
    they didn't have someone tell them?

What makes it even more perfect is this reply by Aleitheo:

    So rather than try to see if he could live or even just die in the
    fire he turned off the game before he even saw the "ending"?
%
25 points RichardKennaway 02 May 2011 09:11:54PM

    I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing
    the thing they want to be successful at.

-- XKCD (the mouseover text)

For "success" and "successful" one might substitute "rationality" and
"rational".
%
25 points wedrifid 01 June 2011 09:58:59AM

    If you want to beat the market, you have to do something different
    from what everyone else is doing, and you have to be right.

-- David Bennett
%
25 points Thomas 04 July 2011 07:57:13PM

    A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.

-- Daniel Dennett
%
25 points DSimon 02 October 2011 05:51:50AM

    T-Rex: If I lived in the past I'd have different beliefs, because I'd
    have nobody modern around to teach me anything else!

    FACT.

    And I find it really unlikely that I would come up with all our modern
    good stuff on my own, running around saying "You guys! Democracy is
    pretty okay. Also, women are equal to men, and racism? Kind of a dick
    move." If I was raised by racist and sexist parents in the middle of a
    racist and sexist society, I'm pretty certain I'd be racist and
    sexist! I'm only as enlightened as I am today because I've stood on
    the shoulders of giants.

    Right. So that raises the question: Is everyone from that period in
    Hell, or is Heaven overwhelmingly populated by racists?

-- T-Rex, Dinosaur Comics
%
25 points torekp 02 January 2012 12:50:30AM

    Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake."

-- Napoleon Bonaparte
%
25 points Tesseract 01 February 2012 07:53:34PM

    What is the aim of philosophy? To be clear-headed rather than
    confused; lucid rather than obscure; rational rather than otherwise;
    and to be neither more, nor less, sure of things than is justifiable
    by argument or evidence. That is worth trying for.

-- Geoffrey Warnock
%
25 points gwern 01 March 2012 05:58:00PM

    It's easy to think of yourself as being quite a nice person so long
    as you live on your own and are the only witness to yourself.

-- Alain de Botton
%
25 points Ghatanathoah 02 May 2012 04:42:39PM

    It is indeed true that he [Hume] claims that 'reason is, and ought
    only to be the slave of the passions.' But a slave, it should not be
    forgotten, does virtually all the work.

-- Alan Carter, Pluralism and Projectivism
%
25 points Incorrect 02 August 2012 11:13:29PM

    It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either
    charming or tedious.

-- Oscar Wilde
%
25 points VincentYu 11 November 2012 01:45:03PM

    Often a person uses some folk proverb to explain a behavioral event
    even though, on an earlier occasion, this same person used a directly
    contradictory folk proverb to explain the same type of event. For
    example, most of us have heard or said, "look before you leap." Now
    there’s a useful, straightforward bit of behavioral advice—except that
    I vaguely remember admonishing on occasion, "he who hesitates is
    lost." And "absence makes the heart grow fonder" is a pretty clear
    prediction of an emotional reaction to environmental events. But then
    what about "out of sight, out of mind"? And if "haste makes waste,"
    why do we sometimes hear that "time waits for no man"? How could the
    saying "two heads are better than one" not be true? Except that "too
    many cooks spoil the broth." If I think "it’s better to be safe than
    sorry," why do I also believe "nothing ventured, nothing gained"? And
    if "opposites attract," why do "birds of a feather flock together"? I
    have counseled many students to "never to put off until tomorrow what
    you can do today." But I hope my last advisee has never heard me say
    this, because I just told him, "cross that bridge when you come to
    it."

    The enormous appeal of clichés like these is that, taken together as
    implicit "explanations" of behavior, they cannot be refuted. No matter
    what happens, one of these explanations will be cited to cover it. No
    wonder we all think we are such excellent judges of human behavior and
    personality. We have an explanation for anything and everything that
    happens. Folk wisdom is cowardly in the sense that it takes no risk
    that it might be refuted.

Keith E. Stanovich, How to Think Straight About Psychology, 10th ed.
(2013), 14.

ETA: Should have included the subsequent paragraph:

    That folk wisdom is "after the fact" wisdom, and that it actually is
    useless in a truly predictive sense, is why sociologist Duncan Watts
    titled one of his books: Everything Is Obvious—Once You Know the
    Answer (2011). Watts discusses a classic paper by Lazarsfeld (1949) in
    which, over 60 years ago, he was dealing with the common criticism
    that "social science doesn’t tell us anything that we don’t already
    know." Lazarsfeld listed a series of findings from a massive survey of
    600,000 soldiers who had served during World War II; for example, that
    men from rural backgrounds were in better spirits during their time of
    service than soldiers from city backgrounds. People tend to find all
    of the survey results to be pretty obvious. In this example, for
    instance, people tend to think it obvious that rural men would have
    been used to harsher physical conditions and thus would have adapted
    better to the conditions of military life. It is likewise with all of
    the other findings—people find them pretty obvious. Lazarsfeld then
    reveals his punchline: All of the findings were the opposite of what
    was originally stated. For example, it was actually the case that men
    from city backgrounds were in better spirits during their time of
    service than soldiers from rural backgrounds. The last part of the
    learning exercise is for people to realize how easily they would have
    explained just the opposite finding. In the case of the actual
    outcome, people tend to explain it (when told of it first) by saying
    that they expected it because city men are used to working in crowded
    conditions and under hierarchical authority. They never realize how
    easily they would have concocted an explanation for exactly the
    opposite finding.
%
25 points TeMPOraL 02 December 2012 07:02:50PM

    It has been said that the past is a foreign country. Well, it is
    certainly inhabited by foreigners, people whose mindset was shaped by
    circumstances we shy from remembering. The mother of three children
    who gave birth eight times. The father of four children, the last of
    whom cost him his wife. Our minds are largely free of such horrors,
    and not inured to that kind of suffering. That is the progress of
    technology. That is what is improving the human race.

    It is a long, long ladder, and sometimes we slip, but we've never
    actually fallen. That is our progress.

-- Derleth, on Hacker News.
%
24 points RichardKennaway 15 June 2009 05:32:08AM

    What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out,
    which is the exact opposite.

-- Bertrand Russell, Free Thought and Official Propaganda,
    in "Sceptical Essays".
%
24 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 15 June 2009 01:12:22AM

    I have now reigned about 50 years in victory or peace, beloved by my
    subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches
    and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any
    earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In this
    situation, I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine
    happiness which have fallen to my lot. They amount to fourteen.

-- Abd Er-Rahman III of Spain, 960 AD.
%
24 points RobinZ 22 October 2009 04:44:32PM

    [I]n my opinion nothing occurs contrary to nature except the
    impossible, and that never occurs.

-- Sagredo, Two New Sciences (1914 translation), Galileo Galilei
%
24 points Theist 04 June 2010 11:27:54PM

    I accidentally changed my mind.

-- my four-year-old
%
24 points Tesseract 03 January 2011 09:26:36PM

    The mere fact that it is possible to frame a question does not make it
    legitimate or sensible to do so. There are many things about which you
    can ask, "What is its temperature?" or "What color is it?" but you may
    not ask the temperature question or the color question of, say,
    jealousy or prayer. Similarly, you are right to ask the "Why" question
    of a bicycle's mudguards or the Kariba Dam, but at the very least you
    have no right to assume that the "Why" question deserves an answer
    when posed about a boulder, a misfortune, Mt. Everest, or the
    universe. Questions can be simply inappropriate, however heartfelt
    their framing.

-- Richard Dawkins, Gods Utility Function
%
24 points billswift 02 March 2011 07:50:29PM

    The most practical thing in the world is a good theory.

-- Helmholtz
%
24 points CronoDAS 05 April 2011 06:25:31PM

A fable:

    In Persia many centuries ago, the Sufi mullah or holy man Nasruddin
    was arrested after preaching in the great square in front of the
    Shah's palace. The local clerics had objected to Mullah Nasruddin's
    unorthodox teachings, and had demanded his arrest and execution as a
    heretic. Dragged by palace guards to the Shah's throne room, he was
    sentenced immediately to death.

    As he was being taken away, however, Nasruddin cried out to the Shah:
    "O great Shah, if you spare me, I promise that within a year I will
    teach your favourite horse to sing!"

    The Shah knew that Sufis often told the most outrageous fables, which
    sounded blasphemous to many Muslims but which were nevertheless
    intended as lessons to those who would learn. Thus he had been tempted
    to be merciful, anyway, despite the demands of his own religious
    advisors. Now, admiring the audacity of the old man, and being a
    gambler at heart, he accepted his proposal.

    The next morning, Nasruddin was in the royal stable, singing hymns to
    the Shah's horse, a magnificent white stallion. The animal, however,
    was more interested in his oats and hay, and ignored him. The grooms
    and stablehands all shook their heads and laughed at him. "You old
    fool", said one. "What have you accomplished by promising to teach the
    Shah's horse to sing? You are bound to fail, and when you do, the Shah
    will not only have you killed - you'll be tortured as well, for
    mocking him!"

    Nasruddin turned to the groom and replied: "On the contrary, I have
    indeed accomplished much. Remember, I have been granted another year
    of life, which is precious in itself. Furthermore, in that time, many
    things can happen. I might escape. Or I might die anyway. Or the Shah
    might die, and his successor will likely release all prisoners to
    celebrate his accession to the throne".

    "Or...". Suddenly, Nasruddin smiled. "Or, perhaps, the horse will
    learn to sing".

The original source of this fable seems to be lost to time.
This version was written by Idries Shah.
%
24 points AndrewM 04 April 2011 07:20:13PM

    We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones.

-- Robert Wright, The Moral Animal
%
24 points HonoreDB 04 April 2011 05:26:20PM

    Part of the potential of things is how they break.

-- Vi Hart, How To Snakes
%
24 points Dreaded_Anomaly 02 June 2011 09:27:21PM

    If you want to know the way nature works, we looked at it,
    carefully... that's the way it looks! You don't like it... go
    somewhere else! To another universe! Where the rules are simpler,
    philosophically more pleasing, more psychologically easy. I can't help
    it! OK! If I'm going to tell you honestly what the world looks like to
    the human beings who have struggled as hard as they can to understand
    it, I can only tell you what it looks like. And I cannot make it any
    simpler, I'm not going to do this, I'm not going to simplify it, and
    I'm not going to fake it. I'm not going to tell you it's something
    like a ball bearing inside a spring, it isn't. So I'm going to tell
    you what it really is like, and if you don't like it, that's too bad.

-- Richard Feynman, the QED Lectures at the University of Auckland
%
24 points GabrielDuquette 01 June 2011 01:25:20PM

    I cannot see that such inward convictions and feelings are of any
    weight as evidence of what really exists.

-- Charles Darwin
%
24 points jimmy 04 July 2011 05:13:21AM

    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
%
24 points Maniakes 02 September 2011 08:52:25PM

    The church is near, but the road is icy. The bar is far away, but I
    will walk carefully.

-- Russian proverb
%
24 points MinibearRex 01 September 2011 10:01:10PM

    The proposition here is that the human brain is, in large part, a
    machine for winning arguments, a machine for convincing others that
    its owner is in the right - and thus a machine for convincing its
    owner of the same thing. The brain is like a good lawyer: given any
    set of interests to defend, it sets about convincing the world of
    their moral and logical worth, regardless of whether they in fact have
    any of either. Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not
    truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill
    than for virtue.

-- Robert Wright, The Moral Animal
%
24 points anonym 02 October 2011 01:54:31AM

    The most valuable acquisitions in a scientific or technical education
    are the general-purpose mental tools which remain serviceable for a
    lifetime. I rate natural language and mathematics as the most
    important of these tools, and computer science as a third.

-- George E. Forsythe
%
24 points Maniakes 03 December 2011 12:26:40AM

    We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do,
    and not what they ought to do.

-- Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning
%
24 points djcb 02 December 2011 06:48:20AM

    If you hit this sign, you will hit that bridge.

-- Road sign in Griffin, Georgia, showing that sometimes it's good
    to have some distance between map and area.
%
24 points Tesseract 01 December 2011 05:40:37PM

    One of the toughest things in any science... is to weed out the ideas
    that are really pleasing but unencumbered by truth.

-- Thomas Carew
%
24 points Mark_Eichenlaub 02 April 2012 12:03:19AM

    Gene Hofstadt: You people. You think money is the answer to every
    problem.

    Don Draper: No, just this particular problem.

-- Mad Men, My Old Kentucky Home
%
24 points Daniel_Burfoot 01 September 2012 03:57:48PM

    It is now clear to us what, in the year 1812, was the cause of the
    destruction of the French army. No one will dispute that the cause of
    the destruction of Napoleon's French forces was, on the one hand,
    their advance late in the year, without preparations for a winter
    march, into the depths of Russia, and, on the other hand, the
    character that the war took on with the burning of Russian towns and
    the hatred of the foe aroused in the Russian people. But then not only
    did no one foresee (what now seems obvious) that this was the only way
    that could lead to the destruction of an army of eight hundred
    thousand men, the best in the world and led by the best generals, in
    conflict with a twice weaker Russian army, inexperienced and led by
    inexperienced generals; not only did no one foresee this, but all
    efforts on the part of the Russians were constantly aimed at hindering
    the one thing that could save Russia, and, on the part of the French,
    despite Napoleon's experience and so-called military genius, all
    efforts were aimed at extending as far as Moscow by the end of summer,
    that is, at doing the very thing that was to destroy them.

-- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky
%
24 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 September 2012 08:41:56AM

The following quotes were heavily upvoted, but then turned out to be made
by a Will Newsome sockpuppet who edited the quote afterward. The original
comments have been banned. The quotes are as follows:

    If dying after a billion years doesn't sound sad to you, it's because
    you lack a thousand-year-old brain that can make trillion-year plans.

-- Aristosophy

    One wish can achieve as much as you want. What the genie is really
    offering is three rounds of feedback.

-- Aristosophy

If anyone objects to this policy response, please PM me so as to not feed
the troll.
%
24 points Alejandro1 02 October 2012 03:24:10PM

    And who shows greater reverence for mystery, the scientist who devotes
    himself to discovering it step by step, always ready to submit to
    facts, and always aware that even his boldest achievement will never
    be more than a stepping-stone for those who come after him, or the
    mystic who is free to maintain anything because he need not fear any
    test?

-- Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies
%
24 points Nominull 02 November 2012 04:08:43PM

    A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it,
    but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along
    with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.

-- John Maynard Keynes
%
23 points Yvain 15 June 2009 09:57:40AM

    Voting in a democracy makes you feel powerful, much as playing the
    lottery makes you feel rich.

-- Mencius Moldbug
%
23 points Vlad 15 June 2009 08:09:13AM

    What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without
    evidence.

-- Christopher Hitchens
%
23 points wuwei 15 June 2009 04:39:02AM

    Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to
    learn.  And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could
    learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can
    learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib
    knew that every experience carries its lesson.

-- Frank Herbert, Dune
%
23 points arundelo 03 July 2009 01:32:56AM

    Numerical arithmetic should look to children like a simpler and faster
    way of doing things that they know how to do already, not a set of
    mysterious recipes for getting right answers to meaningless questions.

-- John Holt, How Children Fail, p. 101
    See also Paul Lockhart.
%
23 points DaveInNYC 24 October 2009 06:53:52PM

    I have met people who exaggerate the differences [between the morality
    of different cultures], because they have not distinguished between
    differences of morality and differences of belief about facts. For
    example, one man said to me, "Three hundred years ago people in
    England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule
    of Human Nature or Right Conduct?" But surely the reason we do not
    execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we
    did-if we really thought that there were people going about who had
    sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him
    in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or
    drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if
    anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did.
    There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is
    simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge
    not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing
    them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man
    humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed
    there were no mice in the house.

-- C.S. Lewis
%
23 points CSmith 02 July 2010 04:53:11AM

    Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche
%
23 points Apprentice 03 August 2010 01:15:30PM

    Upon his death man must leave everything behind ... and depart forever
    from the world he has known. He must of necessity go to that foul land
    of death, a fact which makes death the most sorrowful of all events.
    ... Some foreign doctrines, however, teach that death should not be
    regarded as profoundly sorrowful. ... These are all gross deceptions
    contrary to human sentiment and fundamental truths. Not to be happy
    over happy events, not to be saddened by sorrowful events, not to show
    surprise at astonishing events, in a word, to consider it proper not
    to be moved by whatever happens, are all foreign types of deception
    and falsehood. They are contrary to human nature and extremely
    repugnant to me.

-- Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801)
    - quoted from Blocker, Japanese Philosophy, p. 109
%
23 points Apprentice 06 October 2010 10:13:16AM

    We live in a world where it has become "politically correct" to avoid
    absolutes. Many want all religions to be given the same honor, and all
    gods regarded as equally true and equally fictitious. But take these
    same people, who want fuzzy, all-inclusive thinking in spiritual
    matters, and put them on an airplane. You will find they insist on a
    very dogmatic, intolerant pilot who will stay on the "straight and
    narrow" glidepath so their life will not come to a violent end short
    of the runway. They want no fuzzy thinking here!

-- Jack T. Chick
%
23 points Tesseract 05 November 2010 08:34:18PM

Kołakowski's Law, or The Law of the Infinite Cornucopia:

    For any given doctrine that one wants to believe, there is never a
    shortage of arguments by which to support it.

-- Leszek Kołakowski
%
23 points anonym 03 November 2010 06:52:53AM

    Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.

-- Dean Schlicter
%
23 points Tetronian 03 December 2010 05:39:17AM

    The question I ask myself like almost everyday is 'Am I doing the most
    important thing I could be doing?'

-- Mark Zuckerberg
%
23 points billswift 01 February 2011 07:45:56PM

    Speed is not attained by hurrying; it is an unsought by-product of
    intelligent and continuous work.

-- Frederick Giesecke, et al, Technical Drawing, 8th ed
%
23 points MinibearRex 08 March 2011 12:17:29AM

On noticing confusion:

    "Holmes," I cried, "this is impossible."

    "Admirable!" he said. "A most illuminating remark. It is impossible as
    I state it, and therefore I must in some respect have stated it wrong.

-- Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Priory School
%
23 points aausch 07 March 2011 07:28:04PM

    You'll worry less about what people think about you when you realize
    how seldom they do.

-- David Foster Wallace
%
23 points Nominull 06 April 2011 03:40:18AM

    using the word "science" in the same way you’d use the word "alakazam"
    doesn’t count as being smarter

-- Kris Straub, Chainsawsuit artist commentary
%
23 points nhamann 05 April 2011 09:22:48PM

    True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet,
    precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to
    see or cheer.

-- David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
%
23 points RichardKennaway 04 April 2011 10:45:00AM

    "Magic is just a way of saying 'I don't know.'"

-- Terry Pratchett, Nation

    The essence of magic is to do away with underlying mechanisms. ...
    What makes the elephant disappear is the movement of the wand and the
    intent of the magician, directly. If there were any intervening
    processes, it would not be magic but just engineering. As soon as you
    know how the magician made the elephant disappear, the magic
    disappears and -- if you started by believing in magic -- the
    disappointment sets in.

-- William T. Powers (CSGNET mailing list, April 2005)
%
23 points Tesseract 01 September 2011 08:48:19PM

    If you want to live in a nicer world, you need good, unbiased science
    to tell you about the actual wellsprings of human behavior. You do not
    need a viewpoint that sounds comforting but is wrong, because that
    could lead you to create ineffective interventions. The question is
    not what sounds good to us but what actually causes humans to do the
    things they do.

-- Douglas Kenrick
%
23 points Vaniver 05 November 2011 10:30:09PM

    The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.

-- Gloria Steinem
%
23 points Nominull 31 October 2011 03:31:51PM

    Opening your eyes doesn't make a bad picture worse.

http://onefte.com/2011/07/17/bully-for-you/
%
23 points gwern 04 December 2011 01:47:19PM

    In the autumn of 1939, Ludwig Wittgenstein and his young Cambridge
    student and friend Norman Malcolm were walking along the river when
    they saw a newspaper vendor's sign announcing that the Germans had
    accused the British government of instigating a recent attempt to
    assassinate Hitler. When Wittgenstein remarked that it wouldn't
    surprise him at all if it were true, Malcolm retorted that it was
    impossible because "the British were too civilized and decent to
    attempt anything so underhand, and . . . such an act was incompatible
    with the British 'national character'." Wittgenstein was furious. Some
    five years later, he wrote to Malcolm:

        "Whenever I thought of you I couldn't help thinking of a
        particular incident which seemed to me very important. . . . you
        made a remark about 'national character' that shocked me by its
        primitiveness. I then thought: what is the use of studying
        philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk
        with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic,
        etc., if it does not improve your thinking about the important
        questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more
        conscientious than any . . . journalist in the use of the
        DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends."

-- Marjorie Perloff, Wittgensteins Ladder; apparently of the many
    attempts, the one referred to did not actually have British backing,
    although some did eg. the Oster Conspiracy or Operation Foxley.
%
23 points [deleted] 03 December 2011 03:05:16PM

    Fujiwara no Yoshitake (954-974), a handsome nobleman, tragically died
    of smallpox at age 21. He left a love poem full of pathos:

    Kige ga tame

    oshikarazarishi

    Inochi sae

    Nagaku mo gana to

    Omoikeru kana

    For your precious sake, once I thought

    I could die.

    Now, I wish to live with you

    a long, long time.

-- Hokusai and Hiroshige
%
23 points Jayson_Virissimo 02 February 2012 07:53:20AM

    Already I had learned from thee that because a thing is eloquently
    expressed it should not be taken to be as necessarily true; nor
    because it is uttered with stammering lips should it be supposed
    false. Nor, again, is it necessarily true because rudely uttered, nor
    untrue because the language is brilliant. Wisdom and folly both are
    like meats that are wholesome and unwholesome, and courtly or simple
    words are like town-made or rustic vessels — both kinds of food may be
    served in either kind of dish.

-- Saint Augustine of Hippo, Confessions
%
23 points William_Kasper 06 May 2012 08:10:15PM

    [Political "gaffe" stories] are completely information-free news
    events, and they absolutely dominate political news coverage and
    analysis. It's like asking your doctor if the X-rays show a tumor, and
    all he'll talk about is how stupid the radiologist's haircut looks. .
    . . ["Blast"] stories are. . . just as content-free as the "gaffe"
    stories. But they are popular for the same reason: There's a petty,
    tribal satisfaction in seeing a member of our team really put the
    other team in their place. And there's a rush of outrage adrenaline
    when the other team says something mean about us. So, instead of
    covering pending legislation or the impact it could have on your life,
    the news media covers the dick-measuring contest.

-- David Wong, 5 Ways to Spot a B.S. Political Story in Under 10 Seconds
%
23 points Alejandro1 05 June 2012 03:26:47PM

    When I was 11, I was fascinated with a flame and I didn't know what it
    was. I went to a teacher and said, "What's a flame? What's going on in
    there?" And she said "It's oxidation." And that's all she said. And I
    never heard that word before, so that was like, calling it by another
    name.

-- Alan Alda, in an interview at The Colbert Report,
    telling the story that gave rise to The Flame Challenge.
%
23 points [deleted] 09 July 2012 11:30:38PM

    Suppose we find a society which lacks our understanding of human
    physiology, and that speaks a language just like English, except for
    one curious family of idioms. When they are tired they talk of being
    beset by fatigues, of having mental fatigues, muscular fatigues,
    fatigues in the eyes and fatigues of the the spirit. Their sports lore
    contains such maxims as 'too many fatigues spoils your aim' and 'five
    fatigues in the legs are worth ten in the arms'. When we encounter
    them and tell them of our science, they want to know what fatigues
    are. They have been puzzling over such questions as whether
    numerically the same fatigue can come and go and return, whether
    fatigues have a definite location in matter and space and time,
    whether fatigues are identical with some physical states or processes
    or events in their bodies, or are made of some sort of stuff. We can
    see that they are off to a bad start with these questions, but what
    should we tell them? One thing we can tell them is that there simply
    are no such things as fatigues - they have a confused ontology. We can
    expect them to retort: 'You don't think there are fatigues? Run around
    the block a few times and you'll know better! There are many things
    your science might teach us, but the non-existence of fatigues isn't
    one of them!

-- Dan Dennett, Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology
%
23 points Konkvistador 04 July 2012 05:43:39AM

    We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled. But
    how can we be sure our senses are not being deceived at any particular
    time, or even all the time? Might I just be a brain in a tank
    somewhere, tricked all my life into believing in the events of this
    world by some insane computer? And does my life gain or lose meaning
    based on my reaction to such solipsism?

-- Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7. Activity recorded M.Y.
    2302.22467. (TERMINATION OF SPECIMEN ADVISED)

From Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
%
23 points Scottbert 08 August 2012 02:34:31AM

    reinventing the wheel is exactly what allows us to travel 80mph
    without even feeling it. the original wheel fell apart at about 5mph
    after 100 yards. now they're rubber, self-healing, last 4000 times
    longer. whoever intended the phrase "you're reinventing the wheel" to
    be an insult was an idiot.

-- rickest on IRC
%
23 points lukeprog 09 September 2012 11:56:38PM

    The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is
    OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can’t
    easily be measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This
    is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what
    can’t be measured easily isn’t important. This is blindness. The
    fourth step is to say that what can’t easily be measured really
    doesn’t exist. This is suicide.

Charles Handy describing the Vietnam-era measurement policies of Secretary
of Defense Robert McNamara
%
23 points ChrisHallquist 03 September 2012 06:22:54AM

    "Why do you read so much?"

    Tyrion looked up at the sound of the voice. Jon Snow was standing a
    few feet away, regarding him curiously. He closed the book on a finger
    and said, "Look at me and tell me what you see."

    The boy looked at him suspiciously. "Is this some kind of trick? I see
    you. Tyrion Lannister."

    Tyrion sighed. "You are remarkably polite for a bastard, Snow. What
    you see is a dwarf. You are what, twelve?"

    "Fourteen," the boy said.

    "Fourteen, and you’re taller than I will ever be. My legs are short
    and twisted, and I walk with difficulty. I require a special saddle to
    keep from falling off my horse. A saddle of my own design, you may be
    interested to know. It was either that or ride a pony. My arms are
    strong enough, but again, too short. I will never make a swordsman.
    Had I been born a peasant, they might have left me out to die, or sold
    me to some slaver’s grotesquerie. Alas, I was born a Lannister of
    Casterly Rock, and the grotesqueries are all the poorer. Things are
    expected of me. My father was the Hand of the King for twenty years.
    My brother later killed that very same king, as it turns out, but life
    is full of these little ironies. My sister married the new king and my
    repulsive nephew will be king after him. I must do my part for the
    honor of my House, wouldn’t you agree? Yet how? Well, my legs may be
    too small for my body, but my head is too large, although I prefer to
    think it is just large enough for my mind. I have a realistic grasp of
    my own strengths and weaknesses. My mind is my weapon. My brother has
    his sword, King Robert has his warhammer, and I have my mind… and a
    mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its
    edge." Tyrion tapped the leather cover of the book. "That’s why I read
    so much, Jon Snow."

-- George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
%
23 points gwern 18 October 2012 05:33:06PM

    The late F.W.H. Myers used to tell how he asked a man at a dinner
    table what he thought would happen to him when he died. The man tried
    to ignore the question, but on being pressed, replied: "Oh well, I
    suppose I shall inherit eternal bliss, but I wish you wouldn't talk
    about such unpleasant subjects."

-- Bertrand Russell (Google Books attributes this to
        In praise of idleness and other essays, pg 133)
%
23 points AspiringRationalist 04 October 2012 06:59:56PM

    To succeed in a domain that violates your intuitions, you need to be
    able to turn them off the way a pilot does when flying through clouds.
    You need to do what you know intellectually to be right, even though
    it feels wrong.

-- Paul Graham
%
23 points Jayson_Virissimo 05 November 2012 11:56:48AM

    After all, the essential point in running a risk is that the returns
    justify it.

-- Sennett Forell, Foundation and Empire
%
23 points MTGandP 02 November 2012 02:11:36AM

    You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational and
    believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from
    other people you have to do things that are arbitrary and believe
    things that are false.

-- Paul Graham
%
23 points Alejandro1 05 December 2012 02:03:14PM

    I was once, years and years ago, falsely accused by someone of
    egregious dishonesty, and after I put forward evidence that the
    accusation was false, was told, "Let's just agree to disagree." At
    which, of course, I exploded; I would not be agreeing to disagree
    about whether I had been completely dishonest, thank you very much.
    And every time someone uses the phrase I am tempted to say, "We don't
    need to agree to disagree because we already are disagreeing." I think
    what gets me is that it's such an unbelievably low standard that
    almost anything would be more intellectually robust; why not agree to
    something more ambitiously intellectual, like swapping book
    recommendations, or having a temporary cooling-off period, or going to
    a third party for arbitration or advice, or anything else, really?

-- Brandon Watson.
%
23 points Konkvistador 09 December 2012 07:33:05PM

    In December of each year, the New York Times film critics, like film
    critics everywhere, write Deep Think pieces about what patterns in the
    movies released in the current year tell us about Trends in the Big
    Issues. The annual answer ought to be: Virtually nothing, because what
    gets released in a single year is a close to a random sample of
    projects that had been in the works for years and happened to come to
    fruition now. But that never stops the critics from pontificating on
    2012: The Meaning of It All.

-- Steve Sailer, here
%
22 points Rune 18 April 2009 09:00:18PM

    Sheldon: "More wrong?" Wrong is an absolute state and not subject to
    gradation.

    Stuart: Of course it is. It's a little wrong to call a tomato a
    vegetable; it's very wrong to say it's a suspension bridge.

-- The Big Bang Theory
%
22 points ata 07 August 2009 04:50:43AM

    A witty saying proves nothing.

-- Voltaire
%
22 points RobinZ 30 November 2009 12:05:58AM

    It helps to stop worrying about what you are and concentrate on what
    you do. If you think of a poet as a person with some special
    qualifications that come by nature (or divine favor), you are likely
    to make one of two mistakes about yourself. If you think you've got
    what it takes, you may fail to learn what you need to know in order to
    use whatever qualities you may have. On the other hand, if you think
    you do not have what it takes, you may give up too easily, thinking it
    is useless to try. A poet is someone - you, me, anyone - who writes
    poems. That question out of the way, now we can learn to write poems
    better.

-- Judson Jerome, The Poet's Handbook, Chap. 1
    ("From Sighs and Groans to Art")
%
22 points Rain 01 March 2010 09:53:48PM

    If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we
    can solve them.

-- Isaac Asimov
%
22 points Yvain 02 April 2010 12:46:16AM

    "Everyone thinks they've won the Magical Belief Lottery. Everyone
    thinks they more or less have a handle on things, that they, as
    opposed to the billions who disagree with them, have somehow lucked
    into the one true belief system."

-- R Scott Bakker, Neuropath
%
22 points anonym 02 May 2010 03:06:51AM

    If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will
    scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he
    will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered
    something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his
    instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.

-- Bertrand Russell
%
22 points Kutta 01 May 2010 06:36:57AM

    Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.

-- Lawrence Krauss
%
22 points BenAlbahari 01 June 2010 10:28:12PM

    I know that most men — not only those considered clever, but even
    those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult
    scientific, mathematical, or philosophic, problems — can seldom
    discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as
    obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed,
    perhaps with much difficulty — conclusions of which they are proud,
    which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their
    lives.

-- Leo Tolstoy, 1896 (excerpt from "What Is Art?")
%
22 points gwern 01 February 2011 06:00:54PM

    "After solving a problem, humanity imagines that it finds in analogous
    solutions the key to all problems.

    Every authentic solution brings in its wake a train of grotesque
    solutions."

-- Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 430
%
22 points endoself 04 April 2011 06:44:35PM

    Most people would rather die than think; many do.

-- Bertrand Russell
%
22 points Jayson_Virissimo 02 June 2011 12:34:21AM

    In the study of reliable processes for arriving at belief,
    philosophers will become technologically obsolescent. They will be
    replaced by cognitive and computer scientists, workers in artificial
    intelligence, and others.

-- Robert Nozick, The Nature of Rationality
%
22 points gwern 05 August 2011 05:55:09PM

    "Lottery tickets should not be free. In such purely random and
    independent events as the lottery, the probability of having a winning
    number depends directly on the number of tickets you have purchased.
    When one evaluates the outcome of a scientific work, attention must be
    given not only to the potential interest of the ‘significant’ outcomes
    but also to the number of ‘lottery tickets’ the authors have ‘bought’.
    Those having many have a much higher chance of ‘winning a lottery
    prize’ than of getting a meaningful scientific result. It would be
    unfair not to distinguish between significant results of well-planned,
    powerful, sharply focused studies, and those from ‘fishing
    expeditions’ with a much higher probability of catching an old truck
    tyre than of a really big fish."

-- Stan Young, 28-Jul-07 www.NISS.org; quoted in
    Everything is Dangerous: A Controversy,
    a paper discussing epidemiology's failure to use things like
    the Bonferroni correction which has led to things like 80% of observed
    correlations failing to replicate (or only 1 out of 20 NIH
    randomized-trials replicating the original claim).
%
22 points AlexSchell 08 September 2011 08:13:09PM

    It's one thing to make lemonade out of lemons, another to proclaim
    that lemons are what you'd hope for in the first place.

-- Gary Marcus, Kluge
%
22 points anonym 02 October 2011 02:27:50AM

    It would be an error to suppose that the great discoverer seizes at
    once upon the truth, or has any unerring method of divining it. In all
    probability the errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the
    less vigorous one. Fertility of imagination and abundance of guesses
    at truth are among the first requisites of discovery; but the
    erroneous guesses must be many times as numerous as those that prove
    well founded. The weakest analogies, the most whimsical notions, the
    most apparently absurd theories, may pass through the teeming brain,
    and no record remain of more than the hundredth part….

-- W. Stanley Jevons
%
22 points lukeprog 03 November 2011 07:45:04AM

    It is better to destroy one's own errors than those of others.

-- Democritus
%
22 points gwern 08 December 2011 03:59:31AM

    'Tell me one last thing,' said Harry. 'Is this real? Or has this been
    happening inside my head?'

    Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in
    Harry's ears even though the bright mist was descending again,
    obscuring his figure.

    'Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth
    should that mean that it is not real?'

-- J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
%
22 points NancyLebovitz 01 February 2012 04:50:16PM

    I may say that this is the greatest factor—the way in which the
    expedition is equipped—the way in which every difficulty is foreseen,
    and precautions taken for meeting or avoiding it. Victory awaits him
    who has everything in order — luck, people call it. Defeat is certain
    for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time;
    this is called bad luck.

-- from *The South Pole* by Roald Amundsen

%
22 points Kyre 02 February 2012 05:11:44AM

    "I choose not to believe in any gods as an act of charity," Marcus
    said.

    "Charity toward whom?"

    "Toward the gods. Seems rude to think they couldn’t make a world
    better than this,"

-- Daniel Abraham, The Dragon's Path
%
22 points GabrielDuquette 01 March 2012 04:56:33PM

    "Anne!" Anne was seated on the springboard; she turned her head. Jubal
    called out, "That new house on the far hilltop — can you see what
    color they’ve painted it?"

    Anne looked in the direction in which Jubal was pointing and answered,
    "It’s white on this side."

-- Robert Heinlein, Stranger In A Strange Land
%
22 points Yobi 03 March 2012 03:25:48PM

Of a milk bottle:

    It is of interest that when the [milk] bottle is half filled with milk
    it is more often described as half empty, but when it is half filled
    with water it tends to be described as half full. This probably
    happens because in the case of the milk one is working downward from a
    full bottle but in the case of the water one is working upward from an
    empty milk bottle. The history of a situation has much effect on the
    way it is looked at.

-- Edward de Bono, Lateral Thinking
%
22 points Elithrion 03 April 2012 01:38:31AM

    "What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?"
    This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from
    up and down the table. Richard continued, "What I mean is that if you
    really want to understand something, the best way is to try and
    explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your
    mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have
    to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's
    really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a
    complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal
    with, you've learned something about it yourself."

-- Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
%
22 points Spurlock 02 April 2012 04:45:14AM

    Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to
    learn.  And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could
    learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can
    learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad‘Dib
    knew that every experience carries its lesson.

-- Frank Herbert, Dune
%
22 points RichardKennaway 09 May 2012 07:48:11AM

    Saying "what kind of an idiot doesn't know about the Yellowstone
    supervolcano" is so much more boring than telling someone about the
    Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time.

-- xkcd
%
22 points Jayson_Virissimo 03 June 2012 10:11:44AM

    Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at
    all.

-- Charles Babbage
%
22 points ChristianKl 02 June 2012 05:25:23PM

    [About the challenge of skeptics to spread their ideas in society] In
    times of war we need warriors, but this isn't war. You might try to
    say it is, but it's not a war. We aren't trying to kill an enemy. We
    are trying to persuade other humans. And in times like that we don't
    need warriors. What we need are diplomats.

-- Phil Plait, Dont Be A Dick (around 23:30)
%
22 points VKS 04 September 2012 11:51:02PM

    After I spoke at the 2005 "Mathematics and Narrative" conference in
    Mykonos, a suggestion was made that proofs by contradiction are the
    mathematician's version of irony. I'm not sure I agree with that: when
    we give a proof by contradiction, we make it very clear that we are
    discussing a counterfactual, so our words are intended to be taken at
    face value. But perhaps this is not necessary. Consider the following
    passage.

        There are those who would believe that every polynomial equation
        with integer coefficients has a rational solution, a view that
        leads to some intriguing new ideas. For example, take the equation
        x² - 2 = 0. Let p/q be a rational solution. Then (p/q)² - 2 = 0,
        from which it follows that p² = 2q². The highest power of 2 that
        divides p² is obviously an even power, since if 2^k is the highest
        power of 2 that divides p, then 2^2k is the highest power of 2
        that divides p². Similarly, the highest power of 2 that divides
        2q² is an odd power, since it is greater by 1 than the highest
        power that divides q². Since p² and 2q² are equal, there must
        exist a positive integer that is both even and odd. Integers with
        this remarkable property are quite unlike the integers we are
        familiar with: as such, they are surely worthy of further study.

    I find that it conveys the irrationality of √2 rather forcefully. But
    could mathematicians afford to use this literary device? How would a
    reader be able to tell the difference in intent between what I have
    just written and the following superficially similar passage?

        There are those who would believe that every polynomial equation
        has a solution, a view that leads to some intriguing new ideas.
        For example, take the equation x² + 1 = 0. Let i be a solution of
        this equation. Then i² + 1 = 0, from which it follows that i² =
        -1. We know that i cannot be positive, since then i² would be
        positive. Similarly, i cannot be negative, since i² would again be
        positive (because the product of two negative numbers is always
        positive). And i cannot be 0, since 0² = 0. It follows that we
        have found a number that is not positive, not negative, and not
        zero. Numbers with this remarkable property are quite unlike the
        numbers we are familiar with: as such, they are surely worthy of
        further study.

    Timothy Gowers, Vividness in Mathematics and Narrative, in Circles
    Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative
%
22 points imaxwell 03 September 2012 10:01:52PM

    The only road to doing good shows, is doing bad shows.

-- Louis C.K., on Reddit
%
22 points AlexMennen 04 September 2012 02:11:40AM

    Discovery is the privilege of the child, the child who has no fear of
    being once again wrong, of looking like an idiot, of not being
    serious, of not doing things like everyone else.

-- Alexander Grothendieck
%
22 points CronoDAS 06 September 2012 11:05:03AM

    "The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s
    why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system." This may
    sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it
    was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and
    pinball games to write "Childhood’s End" and think up communications
    satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column
    proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a
    guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion
    that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like
    abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans
    turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it
    as a punishment.

-- Tim Kreider

The interesting part is the phrase "which sounds like the kind of lunatic
notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like
abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays." If we can
anticipate what the morality of the future would be, should we try to live
by it now?
%
22 points RichardKennaway 12 October 2012 08:51:49AM

    "But can’t you just wave your hand and make all the dirt fly away,
    then?"

    "The trouble is getting the magic to understand what dirt is," said
    Tiffany, scrubbing hard at a stain. "I heard of a witch over in Escrow
    who got it wrong and ended up losing the entire floor and her sandals
    and nearly a toe."

    Mrs. Aching backed away. "I thought you just had to wave your hands
    about," she mumbled nervously.

    "That works," said Tiffany, "but only if you wave them about on the
    floor with a scrubbing brush."

-- Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith
%
22 points [deleted] 02 October 2012 03:37:26AM

    Understanding an idea meant entangling it so thoroughly with all the
    other symbols in your mind that it changed the way you thought about
    everything.

-- Greg Egan, Diaspora
%
22 points Alejandro1 03 November 2012 02:54:30AM

    In a man whose reasoning powers are good, fallacious arguments are
    evidence of bias.

-- Bertrand Russell, Philosophy's Ulterior Motives.
    (The context is Descartes' philosophy and the obviously fallacious
    proofs he offers of the existence of God and the external world.)
%
22 points Konkvistador 09 December 2012 07:24:52PM

    Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason. We all need to
    take a cold hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for what it
    is. ... [M]ost of the bizarre and depressing research findings [about
    cognitive biases] make perfect sense once you see reasoning as having
    evolved not to help us find the truth but to help us engage in
    arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions
    with other people.

    I'm not saying we should all stop reasoning and go with our gut
    feelings. Gut feelings are sometimes better guides than reasoning for
    making consumer choices and interpersonal judgments, but they are
    often disastrous as a basis for public policy, science, and law.
    Rather, what I'm saying is that we must be wary of any /individual/'s
    ability to reason. We should see each individual as being limited,
    like a neuron. A neuron is really good at one thing: summing up the
    stimulation coming into its dendrites to 'decide' whether to fire a
    pulse along its axon. A neuron by itself isn't very smart. But if you
    put neurons together in the right way you get a brain; you get an
    emergent system that is much smarter and more flexible than a single
    neuron.

    In the same way, each individual reasoner is really good at one thing:
    finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds,
    usually for intuitive reasons. We should not expect individuals to
    produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when
    self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put
    individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can
    use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all
    individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to
    interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good
    reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why
    it's so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity
    within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth.

-- Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind
%
22 points Macaulay 01 December 2012 04:52:32PM

    A person is said to exhibit rational irrationality when it is
    instrumentally rational for him to be epistemically irrational. An
    instrumentally rational person chooses the best strategies to achieve
    his goals. An epistemically irrational person ignores and evades
    evidence against his beliefs, holds his beliefs without evidence or
    with only weak evidence, has contradictions in his thinking, employs
    logical fallacies in belief formation, and exhibits characteristic
    epistemic vices such as closed-mindedness. Epistemically irrational
    political beliefs can reinforce one’s self-image; boost one’s
    self-esteem; make one feel noble, smart, superior, safe, or
    comfortable; and can help achieve conformity with the group and thus
    facilitate social acceptance. Thus, epistemic irrationality can be
    instrumentally rational.

    If I falsely believe the road I am crossing is free of cars, I might
    die. So I have a strong incentive to form beliefs about the road in a
    rational way. However, if I falsely believe that import quotas are
    good for the economy, this has no directly harmful effects. (On the
    contrary, the belief can have significant instrumental value. It might
    make me feel patriotic; serve my xenophobia; serve as an outlet to
    rationalize, sublimate, or redirect racist attitudes; or help me
    pretend to have solidarity with union workers.) … Epistemic
    rationality is hard and takes self-discipline.

    When it comes to politics, individuals have every incentive to indulge
    their irrational impulses. Demand for irrational beliefs is like
    demand for most other goods. The lower the cost, the more will be
    demanded. The cost to the typical voter of voting in epistemically
    irrational ways is nearly zero. The cost of overcoming bias and
    epistemic irrationality is high. The psychological benefit of this
    irrationality is significant. Thus, voters demand a high amount of
    epistemic irrationality.

-- Jason Brennan, The Ethics of Voting, p.173-74
%
21 points gjm 19 April 2009 12:59:34AM

    It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought
    without accepting it.

-- Aristotle
%
21 points arundelo 03 July 2009 01:36:57AM

    On some pitch black mornings, hearing what I knew was a cold wind
    howling outside, I might think, "Well, it is certainly comfortable in
    this bed, and maybe it wouldn't hurt if I just skipped practicing
    to-day." But my response to this was not to draw on something called
    will power, to insult or threaten myself, but to take a longer look at
    my life, to extend my vision, to think about the whole of my
    experience, to reconnect present and future, and quite specifically,
    to ask myself, "Do you like playing the cello or not? Would you like
    to play it better or not?" When I put the matter this way I could see
    that I enjoyed playing the cello more than I enjoyed staying in bed.
    So I got up. If, as sometimes happened or happens, I do stay in bed,
    not sleeping, not really thinking, but just not getting up, it is not
    because will power is weak but because I have temporarily become
    disconnected, so to speak, from the wholeness of my life. I am living
    in that Now that some people pursue so frantically, that gets harder
    to find the harder we look for it.

-- John Holt, Freedom and Beyond, p. 119
%
21 points Rune 06 August 2009 03:43:35AM

    As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual
    certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I
    became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can
    meet girls.

-- M. Cartmill
%
21 points Vladimir_Nesov 23 October 2009 08:55:32AM

    When things are hard to understand, people who suspect they're
    nonsense generally keep quiet.

-- Paul Graham
%
21 points anonym 04 April 2010 01:43:41AM

    Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried
    to make it precise.

-- Bertrand Russell
%
21 points Rain 01 April 2010 08:48:19PM

    The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be
    done by perfect men.

-- George Eliot
%
21 points komponisto 02 July 2010 12:07:04AM

    Hunches are not bad, they just need to be allowed to die a natural
    death when evidence proves them wrong.

-- Steve Moore, former FBI agent
%
21 points Yvain 01 September 2010 06:53:36PM

    We have not solved all your problems. Each answer only led to new
    questions. We are still confused - but perhaps we are confused on a
    higher level, and about more important things.

-- seen on a hotel bulletin board
%
21 points Yvain 07 October 2010 07:04:21PM

    "Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will
    not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the
    virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you
    should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will
    be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the
    memories of your loved ones."

-- Marcus Aurelius
%
21 points [deleted] 06 October 2010 01:48:49PM

    To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe
    anything upon insufficient evidence.

    If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or
    persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which
    arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and
    the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards
    as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without
    disturbing it--the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.

    ... "But," says one, "I am a busy man; I have no time for the long
    course of study which would be necessary to make me in any degree a
    competent judge of certain questions, or even able to understand the
    nature of the arguments."

    Then he should have no time to believe.

-- W. K. Clifford, The Ethics of Belief.
%
21 points billswift 03 January 2011 07:48:43PM

    To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn
    old falsehoods.

-- Robert A Heinlein, Notebooks of Lazarus Long
%
21 points atucker 02 February 2011 01:51:35AM

    Things are only impossible until they're not.

-- Jean-Luc Picard
%
21 points KenChen 05 April 2011 01:58:17PM

    Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when
    you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

-- Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
%
21 points Tesseract 02 May 2011 04:49:11AM

    A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather
    it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's
    convictions.

-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
%
21 points Nick_Roy 01 June 2011 06:25:51PM

    The whole universe sat there, open to the man who could make the right
    decisions.

-- Frank Herbert, Dune
%
21 points MichaelGR 03 July 2011 04:39:12AM

    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
%
21 points Yvain 22 October 2011 05:18:58PM

    Don't you feel in your heart that these contradictions do not really
    contradict: that there is a cosmos that contains them all? The soul
    goes round upon a wheel of stars and all things return; perhaps Strake
    and I have striven in many shapes, beast against beast and bird
    against bird, and perhaps we shall strive for ever. But since we seek
    and need each other, even that eternal hatred is an eternal love. Good
    and evil go round in a wheel that is one thing and not many. Do you
    not realize in your heart, do you not believe behind all your beliefs,
    that there is but one reality and we are its shadows; and that all
    things are but aspects of one thing: a centre where men melt into Man
    and Man into God?'

    'No,' said Father Brown.

-- G.K. Chesterton
%
21 points JenniferRM 02 November 2011 12:19:56AM

    People can learn to look you in the eyes even when they're lying to
    you. But it's kind of like a fake smile; there are involuntary muscles
    up there. If you know what you're looking for, you can still tell. But
    what does it mean if they're looking you in the eyes and they mean it?
    It means that, at least in that moment, they're doing what they really
    believe is right. That's the definition of integrity.

    That part is easy. That's not the surprising thing.

    The surprising thing, to me, was that someone can have integrity and
    still be completely evil. It's kind of obvious in retrospect; the
    super-villain in an action movie can always look the hero in the eye,
    and he always does, just to prove it. He has integrity. Evil with
    integrity is more respectable, somehow, than plain evil. All it takes
    to have integrity is to do what you think is right, no matter how
    stupid that may be.

    Beware of people with integrity.

-- Avery Pennarun
%
21 points PhilGoetz 06 December 2011 04:19:12AM

    I did not think; I investigated.

Wilhelm Roentgen, when asked by an interviewer what he thought on noticing
some kind of light (X-ray-induced fluorescence) apparently passing through
a solid opaque object. Quoted in de Solla Price, Science Since Babylon,
expanded edition, p. 146.
%
21 points J_Taylor 04 December 2011 08:10:29AM

    "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster
    horses."

-- Probably not Henry Ford

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/08/henry_ford_never_said_the_fast.html
%
21 points HonoreDB 10 January 2012 07:48:23PM

    ...some people requested that I be prohibited from studying. One time
    they achieved it through a very holy and simple mother superior who
    believed that studying would get me in trouble with the Inquisition
    and ordered me not to do it. I obeyed her for the three months that
    she was in office in as far as I did not touch a book, but as far as
    absolutely not studying, this was not in my power. [...] Even the
    people I spoke to, and what they said to me, gave rise to thousands of
    reflections. What was the source of all the variety of personality and
    talent I found among them, since they were all one species? [...]
    Sometimes I would pace in front of the fireplace in one of our large
    dormitories and notice that, though the lines of two sides were
    parallel and its ceiling level, to our vision it appears as though the
    lines are inclined toward each other and the ceiling is lower in the
    distance than it is nearby. From this it can be inferred that the
    lines of our vision run straight, but not parallel, to form the figure
    of a pyramid. And I wondered if that was the reason that the ancients
    questioned whether the earth was a sphere or not. Because although it
    seemed so, their vision might have deceived them, showing concave
    shapes where there were none. [...] Once I saw two girls playing with
    a top, and hardly had I seen the movement and the shape when I began,
    in my insane way, to consider the easy movement of the spherical shape
    and how long the momentum, once established, remained independent of
    its original cause, the distant hand of the girl. Not content with
    this I had flour brought and sprinkled on the floor in order to
    discover whether the spinning top would describe perfect circles or
    not. It turned out that they were not perfect circles but spirals that
    lost their circular shape to the degree that the top lost momentum.

-- Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz, 1691 (tr. Pamela Kirk Rappaport)
%
21 points taelor 01 February 2012 06:05:49PM

    I am a physical object sitting in a physical world. Some of the forces
    of this physical world impinge on my surfaces. Light rays strike my
    retinas; molecules bombard my eardrums and fingertips. I strike back,
    emanating concentic air waves. These waves take the form of torrents
    of discourses about tables, people, molecules, light rays, retinas,
    air waves, prime numbers, infinite classes, joy and sorrow, good and
    evil.

-- W. V. O. Quine
%
21 points gwern 01 March 2012 05:57:07PM

    "All logic texts are divided into two parts. In the first part, on
    deductive logic, the fallacies are explained; in the second part, on
    inductive logic, they are committed."

-- Morris Raphael Cohen, quoted by Cohen in The Earth Is Round (p 0.05)
%
21 points HonoreDB 01 March 2012 04:58:22PM

    "Are you trying to tell me that there are sixteen million practicing
    wizards on Earth?" "Sixteen million four hundred and--" Dairine paused
    to consider the condition the world was in. "Well it's not anywhere
    near enough! Make them all wizards."

-- Diane Duane, High Wizardry
%
21 points Alejandro1 02 April 2012 07:08:33PM

On politics as the mind-killer:

    We’re at the point where people are morally certain about the
    empirical facts of what happened between Trayvon Martin and George
    Zimmerman on the basis of their general political worldviews. This
    isn’t exactly surprising—we are tribal creatures who like master
    narratives—but it feels as though it’s gotten more pronounced
    recently, and it’s almost certainly making us all stupider.

-- Julian Sanchez
%
21 points NancyLebovitz 02 May 2012 03:49:35PM

    The larger the island of knowledge,
    the longer the shoreline of wonder.

Wikiquotes: Huston Smith Wikipedia: Ralph Washinton Sockman
%
21 points MichaelGR 03 May 2012 05:33:52PM

    If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood,
    divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the
    vast and endless sea...

    Antoine de Saint Exupery
%
21 points RobertLumley 02 July 2012 03:15:03PM

    Human behavior is economic behavior. The particulars may vary, but
    competition for limited resources remains a constant.

-- CEO Nwabudike Morgan in Alpha Centauri
%
21 points bungula 03 August 2012 07:28:59AM

    "I drive an Infiniti. That’s really evil. There are people who just
    starve to death - that’s all they ever did. There’s people who are
    like, born and they go ‘Uh, I’m hungry’ then they just die, and that’s
    all they ever got to do. Meanwhile I’m driving in my car having a
    great time, and I sleep like a baby.

    It’s totally my fault, ’cause I could trade my Infiniti for a [less
    luxurious] car… and I’d get back like $20,000. And I could save
    hundreds of people from dying of starvation with that money. And
    everyday I don’t do it. Everyday I make them die with my car."

-- Louis C.K.
%
21 points J_Taylor 03 October 2012 03:43:31AM

    Will Smith don't gotta cuss in his raps to sell his records;

    well I do, so fuck him and fuck you too!

-- Eminem, The Real Slim Shady

Eminem seeks his comparative advantage and avoids self-handicapping.
%
20 points Yvain 18 April 2009 01:26:56PM

    If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were
    merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the
    morning torn between a desire to improve the world, and a desire to
    enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

-- E. B. White
%
20 points billswift 20 May 2009 12:32:56AM

    And when someone makes a statement you don't understand, don't tell
    him he's crazy. Ask him what he means.

-- H Beam Piper, Space Viking
%
20 points Marcello 02 July 2009 10:16:22PM

    Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit
    atrocities.

-- Voltaire
%
20 points RichardKennaway 02 July 2009 10:05:51PM

    Experiment and theory often show remarkable agreement when performed
    in the same laboratory.

-- Daniel Bershader
%
20 points Yvain 22 October 2009 08:53:47PM

    A great many years ago, a couple of Jehovah Witnesses bit off more
    than they could chew with my grandmother. During the unsolicited
    conversation one of them remarked, "Only God can make a rainbow". To
    which my grandmother-who was watering her plants at the time-said,
    "Nonsense!", and created her own rainbow with a spray of water from
    the hose. Family lore has it that was the end of the conversation.

-- seen on Livejournal
%
20 points gwern 30 November 2009 02:05:28AM

    CAESAR [recovering his self-possession]: "Pardon him. Theodotus, he is
    a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are
    the laws of nature."

-- George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra (1898)
%
20 points Tyrrell_McAllister 01 May 2010 08:01:08PM

    The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its
    resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in
    empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses, as
    setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out
    beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of the pure
    understanding. He did not observe that with all his efforts he made no
    advance—meeting no resistance that might, as it were, serve as a
    support upon which he could take a stand, to which he could apply his
    powers, and so set his understanding in motion.

-- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
    (trans. Norman Kemp Smith), p.  A5/B8.
%
20 points MichaelGR 06 July 2010 02:49:03PM

From the Wikipedia article about perverse incentives:

    In Hanoi, under French colonial rule, a program paying people a bounty
    for each rat pelt handed in was intended to exterminate rats. Instead,
    it led to the farming of rats.

and

    19th century palaeontologists traveling to China used to pay peasants
    for each fragment of dinosaur bone (dinosaur fossils) that they
    produced. They later discovered that peasants dug up the bones and
    then smashed them into multiple pieces to maximise their payments.
%
20 points Jayson_Virissimo 03 August 2010 02:38:38AM

    The fact that you are giving money to charity does not mean that you
    need not try to find out whether that charity is a fraud or not.

-- C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
%
20 points thomascolthurst 03 September 2010 11:28:42PM

    Someone once quoted Shakespeare to the philosopher W. V. O. Quine:
    "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your
    philosophy." To which Quine is said to have responded: "Possibly, but
    my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are
    in heaven and earth."

Reported by Chet Raymo
%
20 points Rain 05 October 2010 05:37:38PM

    The singularity is my retirement plan.

-- tocomment, in a Hacker News post
%
20 points DSimon 04 November 2010 08:06:19PM

    Man, I'm amazing! I'm a machine that turns FOOD into IDEAS!

-- T-Rex, Dinosaur Comics #539
%
20 points PeterS 03 November 2010 05:22:17AM

Rule I

    We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both
    true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

    To this purpose the philosophers say that Nature does nothing in vain,
    and more is in vain when less will serve; for Nature is pleased with
    simplicity, and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.

Rule II

    Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible,
    assign the same causes.

    As to respiration in a man and in a beast; the descent of stones in
    Europe and in America; the light of our culinary fire and of the sun;
    the reflection of light in the earth, and in the planets.

Rule III

    The qualities of bodies, which admit neither intensification nor
    remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to all bodies
    within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal
    qualities of all bodies whatsoever.

    For since the qualities of bodies are only known to us by experiments,
    we are to hold for universal all such as universally agree with
    experiments; and such as are not liable to diminution can never be
    quite taken away. We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence for
    the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we
    to recede from the analogy of Nature, which is wont to be simple, and
    always consonant to itself. . .

Rule IV

    In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions inferred
    by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true,
    notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses that may be imagined, till
    such time as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made
    more accurate, or liable to exceptions.

    This rule we must follow, that the argument of induction may not be
    evaded by hypotheses.

-- Isaac Newton, Philosophiae naturalis: Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy
%
20 points RichardKennaway 02 November 2010 09:43:19PM

    The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no
    reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong
    probability that yours is a fake.

-- H.L. Mencken, Minority Report.
%
20 points jaimeastorga2000 02 November 2010 08:49:16PM

    From desert cliff and mountaintop we trace the wide design,

    Strike-slip fault and overthrust and syn and anticline...

    We gaze upon creation where erosion makes it known,

    And count the countless aeons in the banding of the stone.

    Odd, long-vanished creatures and their tracks shells are found;

    Where truth has left its sketches on the slate below the ground.

    The patient stone can speak, if we but listen when it talks.

    Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the rocks.

    There are those who name the stars, who watch the sky by night,

    Seeking out the darkest place, to better see the light.

    Long ago, when torture broke the remnant of his will,

    Galileo recanted, but the Earth is moving still.

    High above the mountaintops, where only distance bars,

    The truth has left its footprints in the dust between the stars.

    We may watch and study or may shudder and deny,

    Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the sky.

    By stem and root and branch we trace, by feather, fang and fur,

    How the living things that are descend from things that were.

    The moss, the kelp, the zebrafish, the very mice and flies,

    These tiny, humble, wordless things--how shall they tell us lies?

    We are kin to beasts; no other answer can we bring.

    The truth has left its fingerprints on every living thing.

    Remember, should you have to choose between them in the strife,

    Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote life.

    And we who listen to the stars, or walk the dusty grade,

    Or break the very atoms down to see how they are made,

    Or study cells, or living things, seek truth with open hand.

    The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand.

    Deep in flower and in flesh, in star and soil and seed,

    The truth has left its living word for anyone to read.

    So turn and look where best you think the story is unfurled.

    Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.

-- Catherine Faber, The Word of God
%
20 points billswift 03 December 2010 05:16:54AM

    In the Information Age, the first step to sanity is FILTERING. Filter
    the information; extract the knowledge.

    Filter first for substance. Filter second for significance. These
    filters protect against advertising.

    Filter third for reliability.
    This filter protects against politicians.

    Filter fourth for completeness. This filter protects from the media.

-- Marc Stielger, David's Sling
%
20 points DSimon 04 January 2011 05:24:29PM

    The Three Virtues of a Programmer:

        Laziness - The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce
        overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving
        programs that other people will find useful, and document what you
        wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it.

        Impatience - The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy.
        This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs,
        but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to.

        Hubris - Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for.
        Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that
        other people won't want to say bad things about.

-- Larry Wall (Programming Perl, 2nd edition), quote somewhat abridged
%
20 points mjcurzi 02 March 2011 11:37:49PM

    An accumulation of facts, however large, is no more science than a
    pile of bricks is a house.

-- Clyde Kluckhohn
%
20 points orthonormal 07 July 2011 04:04:14PM

    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.)
%
20 points innailana 04 July 2011 03:10:57AM

    When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action.
    When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the
    action that would create it.

-- Lois McMaster Bujold
%
20 points gwern 11 September 2011 02:53:32PM

    Again and again, I’ve undergone the humbling experience of first
    lamenting how badly something sucks, then only much later having the
    crucial insight that its not sucking wouldn’t have been a Nash
    equilibrium.

-- Scott Aaronson
%
20 points scav 03 October 2011 11:55:04AM

    I honestly don't know. Let's see what happens.

-- Hans. The Troll Hunter
%
20 points Alejandro1 02 October 2011 02:01:37AM

    Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their
    performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or
    planned.

-- Jorge Luis Borges, The Secret Miracle.
%
20 points GabrielDuquette 01 January 2012 02:51:00AM

    AUGUSTUS: I've had premonitions. Premonitions of death.

    FABIUS MAXIMUS: We all have them.

    AUGUSTUS: No, no, no. This is serious. Listen, old friend, let me tell
    you. Two weeks after we came back from you know where, I was in Mars
    Field giving a libation. A little ceremony. You remember?

    FABIUS MAXIMUS: I remember, but I wasn't there.

    AUGUSTUS: No? Well. nearby, there's a temple built in memory of Marcus
    Agrippa.

    FABIUS MAXIMUS: Yes, I know it.

    AUGUSTUS: An eagle circled me five times, then flew off and settled on
    the "A" of Agrippa's name.

    FABIUS MAXIMUS: Well. Caesar...

    AUGUSTUS: No, don't lie to me. It's clear what it means. It was
    telling me that my time had come and that I must give way to someone
    by the name of Agrippa.

    FABIUS MAXIMUS: Postumus?

    AUGUSTUS: Who else?

    FABIUS MAXIMUS: Did you consult an augur?

    AUGUSTUS: No. I don't need an augur.

    FABIUS MAXIMUS: Well. you're not an expert on the interpretation of
    signs.

    AUGUSTUS: Then listen to this. The following day, lightning melted the
    "C" on my name on a statue nearby. It struck the "C" off "Caesar". Do
    you follow? What does "C" mean?

    FABIUS MAXIMUS: A hundred.

    AUGUSTUS: A hundred. Exactly! Livia saw it. She went to an augur to
    find out what it meant. She wouldn't tell me, but I forced it out of
    her. It means that I have only a hundred days to live. I shall die in
    a hundred days.

    (long pause)

    FABIUS MAXIMUS: Or weeks.

    AUGUSTUS: Eh?

    FABIUS MAXIMUS: Why shouldn't it be weeks? Or months? Why shouldn't it
    mean that you'll live to be a hundred?

-- I, Claudius, Poison Is Queen
%
20 points Alejandro1 02 February 2012 05:40:03PM

    ... People usually don't know why they vote for the candidates they
    choose to vote for, and are not particularly good at assessing how
    something influenced that vote -- let alone how some hypothetical
    future event would influence them.

    ...if you ask voters, it turns out that some will tell you that they
    would be more likely, and a somewhat larger number will tell you that
    they'll be less likely, to vote for someone with a Trump endorsement.
    Hey, reporters: don't believe those polls! You can take it as a
    measure of what respondents think about Trump, if you care about such
    things, but there's no reason to believe that this kind of
    self-reporting about vote choice is meaningful at all, and it
    shouldn't be included in stories about a Trump endorsement as if it
    was meaningful.

    ...The bottom line here is that polling is a really good tool for
    reporters to use in many cases, but remember: what polling tells you
    for sure is only what people will say if they're asked a question by a
    pollster.

-- Jonathan Bernstein
%
20 points Maniakes 02 February 2012 12:41:11AM

    "Today we will be dragoons, until we are told otherwise"

    "Where are our horses, then?"

    "We must imagine them."

    "Imaginary horses are much slower than the other kind."

-- Neal Stephenson, The Confusion
%
20 points Cthulhoo 01 March 2012 10:18:27AM

    When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final
    arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of
    us will win, but both will profit.

-- Ayn Rand
%
20 points lsparrish 04 April 2012 03:19:15AM

    What really matters is:-

        Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you
        mean and make sure your sentence couldn't mean anything else.

        Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don't
        implement promises, but keep them.

        Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean
        "More people died" don't say "Mortality rose."

        In writing. Don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want
        us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of
        telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be
        terrified. Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful"
        when we've read the description. You see, all those words
        (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying
        to your readers, "Please will you do my job for me."

        Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely"
        when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you
        want to talk about something really infinite.

-- C. S. Lewis
%
20 points Emile 04 June 2012 09:50:15PM

    In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a
    really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would
    actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them
    again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should,
    because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it
    happens every day. I cannot recall the last time someting like that
    happened in politics or religion.

-- Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP Keynote Address
%
20 points GLaDOS 06 August 2012 10:04:20AM

    The findings reveal that 20.7% of the studied articles in behavioral
    economics propose paternalist policy action and that 95.5% of these do
    not contain any analysis of the cognitive ability of policymakers.

-- Niclas Berggren, source and HT to Tyler Cowen
%
20 points JQuinton 11 September 2012 02:01:34PM

    If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for 10 years
    plant trees. If your plan is for 100 years educate children

-- Confucius
%
20 points simplicio 01 September 2012 04:06:40PM

    ...a good way of thinking about minimalism [about truth] and its
    attractions is to see it as substituting the particular for the
    general. It mistrusts anything abstract or windy. Both the relativist
    and the absolutist are impressed by Pilate's notorious question 'What
    is Truth?', and each tries to say something useful at the same high
    and vertiginous level of generality. The minimalist can be thought of
    turning his back on this abstraction, and then in any particular case
    he prefaces his answer with the prior injunction: you tell me. This
    does not mean, 'You tell me what truth is.' It means, 'You tell me
    what the issue is, and I will tell you (although you will already
    know, by then) what the truth about the issue consists in.' If the
    issue is whether high tide is at midday, then truth consists in high
    tide being at midday... We can tell you what truth amounts to, if you
    first tell us what the issue is.

    There is a very powerful argument for minimalism about truth, due to
    the great logician Gottlob Frege. First, we should notice the
    transparency property of truth. This is the fact that it makes no
    difference whether you say that it is raining, or it is true that it
    is raining, or true that it is true that it is raining, and so on
    forever. But if 'it is true that' introduced some substantial, robust
    property of a judgment, how could this be so? Consider, for example, a
    pragmatism that attempts some equation between truth and utility. Then
    next to the judgment 'it is raining' we might have 'it is useful to
    believe that it is raining.' But these are entirely different things!
    To assess the first we direct our attention to the weather. To assess
    the second we direct our attention to the results of believing
    something about the weather - a very different investigation.

    Let us return to Pilate. Where does minimalism about truth leave him?
    It suggests that when he asked this question, he was distracting
    himself and his audience from his real job, which was to find out
    whether to uphold certain specific historical charges against a
    defendant. Thus, if I am innocent, and I come before a judge, I don't
    want airy generalities about the nature of truth. I want him to find
    that I did not steal the watch if I did not steal the watch. I want
    him to rub his nose in the issue. I want a local judgment about a
    local or specific event, supposed to have happened in a particular
    region of time and space.

-- Simon Blackburn, Truth
%
20 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 September 2012 07:56:47PM

    Nontrivial measure or it didn't happen.

-- Aristosophy

(Who's Kate Evans? Do we know her? Aristosophy seems to have rather a lot
of good quotes.)
%
20 points peter_hurford 01 September 2012 06:18:48PM

    In a society in which the narrow pursuit of material self-interest is
    the norm, the shift to an ethical stance is more radical than many
    people realize. In comparison with the needs of people starving in
    Somalia, the desire to sample the wines of the leading French
    vineyards pales into insignificance. Judged against the suffering of
    immobilized rabbits having shampoos dripped into their eyes, a better
    shampoo becomes an unworthy goal. An ethical approach to life does not
    forbid having fun or enjoying food and wine, but it changes our sense
    of priorities. The effort and expense put into buying fashionable
    clothes, the endless search for more and more refined gastronomic
    pleasures, the astonishing additional expense that marks out the
    prestige car market in cars from the market in cars for people who
    just want a reliable means to getting from A to B, all these become
    disproportionate to people who can shift perspective long enough to
    take themselves, at least for a time, out of the spotlight. If a
    higher ethical consciousness spreads, it will utterly change the
    society in which we live.

-- Peter Singer
%
20 points Athrelon 02 October 2012 05:58:56PM

    It is easier to love humanity than to love one's neighbor.

-- Eric Hoffer, on Near/Far
%
20 points gwern 04 November 2012 03:26:33AM

    "The boundary between these 2 classes [the Eloi Morlocks] is more
    porous than I've made it sound. I'm always running into regular dudes
    - construction workers, auto mechanics, taxi drivers, galoots in
    general - who were largely aliterate until something made it necessary
    for them to become readers and start actually thinking about things.
    Perhaps they had to come to grips with alcoholism, perhaps they got
    sent to jail, or came down with a disease, or suffered a crisis in
    religious faith, or simply got bored. Such people can get up to speed
    on particular subjects quite rapidly. Sometimes their lack of a broad
    education makes them over-apt to go off on intellectual wild goose
    chases, but, hey, at least a wild goose chase gives you some
    exercise."

-- Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning Was... the Commandline

    The last project that I worked on with [Richard Feynman] was in
    simulated evolution. I had written a program that simulated the
    evolution of populations of sexually reproducing creatures over
    hundreds of thousands of generations. The results were surprising in
    that the fitness of the population made progress in sudden leaps
    rather than by the expected steady improvement. The fossil record
    shows some evidence that real biological evolution might also exhibit
    such "punctuated equilibrium," so Richard and I decided to look more
    closely at why it happened. He was feeling ill by that time, so I went
    out and spent the week with him in Pasadena, and we worked out a model
    of evolution of finite populations based on the Fokker Planck
    equations. When I got back to Boston I went to the library and
    discovered a book by Kimura on the subject, and much to my
    disappointment, all of our "discoveries" were covered in the first few
    pages. When I called back and told Richard what I had found, he was
    elated. "Hey, we got it right!" he said. "Not bad for amateurs."

-- Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine
%
20 points Alejandro1 05 December 2012 03:57:39AM

    One in four Americans has an opinion about an imaginary debt plan

    A new poll from Public Policy Polling found that an impressive 39
    percent of Americans have an opinion about the Simpson-Bowles deficit
    reduction plan.

    Before you start celebrating the new, sweeping reach of the 2010
    commission’s work, consider this: Twenty-five percent of Americans
    also took a stance on the Panetta-Burns plan.

    What’s that? You’re not familiar with Panetta-Burns? That’s probably
    because its "a mythical Clinton Chief of Staff/former western
    Republican Senator combo" that PPP dreamed up to test how many
    Americans would profess to have an opinion about a policy that did not
    exist. They found one in four voters to do just that.

    Panetta-Burns’ nonexistent policy proposals were supported by 8
    percent and opposed by 17 percent of the voters surveyed.
    Simpson-Bowles’ real policy proposals had stronger favorables, with 23
    percent support and 16 percent opposition.

-- Washington Post's Wonkblog
%
20 points GabrielDuquette 01 December 2012 03:46:47PM

    how are opinions like assholes? I've trained mine to be uncommonly
    elastic and accepting of new things

-- ponchopeligroso
%
19 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 18 April 2009 01:27:08AM

    You cannot improve the world just by being right.

-- Confusion, Why functional programming doesnt catch on
%
19 points Rune 21 May 2009 02:24:57AM

    We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and
    to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful
    and his children smart.

-- H. L. Mencken
%
19 points wuwei 15 June 2009 04:15:12AM

    Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer.
    Art is everything else we do. ... Science advances whenever an Art
    becomes a Science. And the state of the Art advances too because
    people always leap into new territory once they have understood more
    about the old.

-- Donald Knuth
%
19 points RobinZ 06 August 2009 01:05:22PM

    No one has ever announced that because determinism is true thermostats
    do not control temperature.

-- Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations,
    qtd. in Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room
%
19 points RobinZ 06 August 2009 01:04:15PM

    It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by
    eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate
    the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is
    the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important
    operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

-- Whitehead, Alfred North (1861 - 1947), An Introduction to Mathematics.
%
19 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 August 2009 04:05:53AM

    Better our hypotheses die for our errors than ourselves.

-- Karl Popper
%
19 points djcb 30 November 2009 07:07:05PM

    Today, safe flight inside clouds is possible using gyroscopic
    instruments that report the airplane’s orientation without being
    misled by centrifugal effects. But the pilot’s spatial intuition is
    still active, and often contradicts the instruments. Pilots are
    explicitly, emphatically trained to trust the instruments and ignore
    intuition—precisely the opposite of the Star Wars advice—and those who
    fail to do so often perish.

-- Gary Drescher Good and Real

(I really like this quote as a counterweight to the ubiquitous
cliche-advise to follow you intuition. Often, your intuition may be
fooled. And, it cannot be repeated often enough, Good and Real is a
must-read for LW-minded folks)
%
19 points anonym 30 November 2009 01:40:26AM

    In general, we are least aware of what our minds do best.

-- Marvin Minsky
%
19 points saliency 30 November 2009 01:26:44AM

    I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve
    it through not dying.

-- Woody Allen
%
19 points Rain 01 February 2010 12:44:08PM

    One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws
    in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before
    implementation.

    I will maintain a realistic assessment of my strengths and weaknesses.
    Even though this takes some of the fun out of the job, at least I will
    never utter the line "No, this cannot be! I AM INVINCIBLE!!!" (After
    that, death is usually instantaneous.)

    I will be neither chivalrous nor sporting. If I have an unstoppable
    superweapon, I will use it as early and as often as possible instead
    of keeping it in reserve.

    If my advisors ask "Why are you risking everything on such a mad
    scheme?", I will not proceed until I have a response that satisfies
    them.

    I will see a competent psychiatrist and get cured of all extremely
    unusual phobias and bizarre compulsive habits which could prove to be
    a disadvantage.

    I will never build a sentient computer smarter than I am.

-- Peters Evil Overlord List on how to be a less wrong fictional villain
%
19 points Rain 01 February 2010 12:41:11PM

    As we know,

    There are known knowns.

    There are things

    We know we know.

    We also know

    There are known unknowns.

    That is to say

    We know there are some things

    We do not know.

    But there are also unknown unknowns,

    The ones we don't know

    We don't know.

-- Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
%
19 points MichaelGR 01 March 2010 10:27:23PM

    Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or
    magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old
    he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic
    dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the
    technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature
    doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering
    the world irreversibly.

-- Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline (2009), p 216
%
19 points RobinZ 05 April 2010 03:16:59PM

    You don't have to believe everything you think.

Seen on bumper sticker, via ^zhurnaly.
%
19 points Kaj_Sotala 01 May 2010 08:51:41PM

(In a thread where people were asked whether or not they had a religious
experience of "feeling God"):

    I had something similar to feeling God, I suppose, except it was in
    essence the exact opposite. I was in a forest one summer, and I looked
    up at the sunlight shining through the leaves, and suddenly it felt
    like I could see each and every individual leaf in the forest and
    trace the path of each photon that poured through them, and I remember
    thinking over and over, in stunned amazement, "the world is
    sufficient. The world is sufficient."

    I'd never thought much about religion before that, but that experience
    made me realize that the material world was entire orders of magnitude
    more beautiful than any of the tawdry religious fantasies people came
    up with, and it felt unspeakably tragic that anyone would ever reject
    this, our most incredible universe, for spiritual pipe-dreams. In a
    way, you might say I felt the lack of god, and it felt like glory.

-- Axiomatic
%
19 points Kaj_Sotala 02 July 2010 12:36:22AM

    The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new
    discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny..."

-- Isaac Asimov
%
19 points Rain 03 August 2010 12:56:20AM

    A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely
    rearranging their prejudices.

-- William James
%
19 points RichardKennaway 05 October 2010 12:37:58PM

    Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed;
    for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that
    those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else,
    do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they
    already possess.

-- Rene Descartes.
%
19 points Nisan 10 November 2010 08:02:18PM

    Know the hair you have to get the hair you want.

-- Pantene Pro-V hair care bottle
%
19 points billswift 02 March 2011 07:57:01PM

    Thinking allows us to anticipate ill consequences without suffering
    them.

-- Roger Peters, Practical Intelligence
%
19 points GabrielDuquette 02 May 2011 03:19:18AM

    The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge
    the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to
    judgment in one particular direction or another.

-- Richard Feynman
%
19 points CSalmon 04 June 2011 01:26:27AM

    Rin: What are clouds? I always thought they were thoughts of the sky
    or something like that. Because you can't touch them.

    [ . . . ]

    Hisao: Clouds are water. Evaporated water. You know they say that
    almost all of the water in the world will at some point of its
    existence be a part of a cloud. Every drop of tears and blood and
    sweat that comes out of you, it'll be a cloud. All the water inside
    your body too, it goes up there some time after you die. It might take
    a while though.

    Rin: Your explanation is better than any of mine.

    Hisao: Because it's true.

    Rin: That must be it.

-- Katawa Shoujo
%
19 points MinibearRex 03 July 2011 07:37:40PM

    "When someone pulls a gun on you, what are your options?"

    "Do what they say or get shot."

    Wrong. You take their gun, or pull out a bigger gun, or call their
    bluff, or do any one of 146 other things."

-- Suits (TV show)
%
19 points Nic_Smith 03 July 2011 03:01:50PM

    "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
%
19 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 August 2011 10:23:50PM

    A student study at the University of Cambridge concluded that it takes
    3,481 licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.[7] Another study by
    Purdue University concluded that it takes an average of 364 licks to
    get to the center of a Tootsie Pop using a "licking machine", while it
    takes an average of 252 licks when tried by 20 volunteers. Yet another
    study by the University of Michigan concluded that it takes 411 licks
    to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. A 1996 study by undergraduate
    students at Swarthmore College concluded that it takes a median of 144
    licks (range 70-222) to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.[8] Harvard
    Grad students created a rotating mechanical tongue and concluded 317
    licks.

-- Wikipedia, on the reproducibility of scientific results
%
19 points Tesseract 02 August 2011 10:35:26PM

    If we want to know where the truth lies in particular cases, we have
    to look.

-- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
%
19 points Guswut 05 October 2011 05:17:00PM

    Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.

-- Robert A. Heinlein
%
19 points Swimmy 04 October 2011 06:33:58AM

    The god we seek must rule the world according to our own will.

-- Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2
%
19 points gaffa 31 October 2011 06:41:50PM

    You can't make a movie and say 'It was all a big accident' - no, it
    has to be a conspiracy, people plotting together. Because in a story,
    a story is about intention. A story is not about spontaneous order or
    complex human institutions which are the product of human action but
    not of human design - no, a story is about evil people plotting
    together.

    Tyler Cowen, on the danger of narrative for human reasoning, TED talks
    (TEDxMidAtlantic) 11/5/09, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoEEDKwzNBw
%
19 points Bugmaster 06 December 2011 07:17:46PM

    -- You can look at the stars and say they sure are pretty without
    having to calculate how many light-years away each one is.

    -- Not if you want to get to them someday.

-- Questionable Content #2072
%
19 points DSimon 05 December 2011 02:04:14AM

    Unlike programs, computers must obey the laws of physics.

-- Alan J. Perlis, in the foreword to
    Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
%
19 points Maniakes 03 December 2011 12:30:14AM

    If you're tempted to respond, "But I love school, and so do all my
    friends. Ah, the life of the mind, what could be better?" let me
    gently remind you that readers of economics blogs are not a random
    sample of the population. Most people would hate reading this blog;
    you read it just for fun!

-- Bryan Caplan
%
19 points gwern 01 December 2011 08:48:36PM

    "The older we become, the more important it is to use what we know
    rather than learn more."

-- I.J. Good (as quoted in The Problem of Thinking Too Much
                by Persi Diaconis)
%
19 points Ezekiel 30 November 2011 11:03:32PM

    I had a dream that I met a girl in a dying world. [...] I knew we
    didn't have long together. She grabbed me and spoke a stream of
    numbers into my ear. Then it all went away.

    I woke up. The memory of the apocalypse faded to mere fancy, but the
    numbers burned bright in my mind. I wrote them down immediately. They
    were coordinates. A place and a time, neither one too far away.

    What else could I do? When the day came, I went to the spot and
    waited.

    And?

    It turns out wanting something doesn't make it real.

-- Randall Munroe, xkcd #240: Dream Girl
%
19 points Konkvistador 05 February 2012 04:29:03PM

    The tendency toward generalization doesn’t bother me in an of itself,
    rather, I’m focused on whether the proposition is true. But the
    hypocrisy gets tiresome sometimes, as people will fluidly switch from
    a cognitive style which accepts generalization to one which rejects
    it. A stereotype is often a generalization whose robustness you don’t
    want to accept. Negative generalities need context when they’re
    unpalatable, but no qualification is necessary when their truth is
    congenial.

-- Razib Khan, here
%
19 points Woodbun 04 March 2012 12:02:38PM

    "One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from
    authority'. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance
    hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.)"

-- Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World
%
19 points Stabilizer 04 March 2012 05:50:49AM

    Society changes when we change what we're embarrassed about.

    In just fifty years, we've made it shameful to be publicly racist.

    In just ten years, someone who professes to not know how to use the
    internet is seen as a fool.

    The question, then, is how long before we will be ashamed at being
    uninformed, at spouting pseudoscience, at believing thin propaganda?
    How long before it's unacceptable to take something at face value? How
    long before you can do your job without understanding the state of the
    art?

    Does access to information change the expectation that if you can
    know, you will know?

    We can argue that this will never happen, that it's human nature to be
    easily led in the wrong direction and to be willfully ignorant. The
    thing is, there are lots of things that used to be human nature, but
    due to culture and technology, no longer are.

-- Seth Godin
%
19 points Random832 13 April 2012 08:41:37PM

The other day I was thinking about Discworld, and then I remembered this
and figured it would make a good rationality quote...

    [Vimes] distrusted the kind of person who'd take one look at another
    man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, "Ah, my dear sir, I
    can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who
    has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fell on
    hard times," and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about
    calluses and stance and the state of a man's boots, when exactly the
    same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes
    because he'd been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue
    pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen and in
    fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to
    the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!

-- Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
%
19 points Pavitra 13 June 2012 02:20:58AM

    Every creative act is open war against The Way It Is. What you are
    saying when you make something is that the universe is not sufficient,
    and what it really needs is more you. And it does, actually; it does.
    Go look outside. You can’t tell me that we are done making the world.

-- Tycho
%
19 points VKS 08 June 2012 11:13:33AM

    I am reminded of a commentary on logic puzzles of a certain kind; it
    was perhaps in a letter to Martin Gardner, reprinted in one of his
    books. The puzzles are those about getting about on an island where
    each native either always tells the truth or always lies. You reach a
    fork in the road, for example, and a native is standing there, and you
    want to learn from him, with one question, which way leads to the
    village. The "correct" question is "If I asked you if the left way led
    to the village, would you say yes?" But why should the native’s
    concept of lying conform to our own logical ideas? If the native is a
    liar, it means he wants to fool you, and your logical trickery will
    not work. The best you can do is say something like "Did you hear they
    are giving away free beer in the village today?" and see which way the
    native runs. You follow him, even if he says something like "Ugh, I
    hate beer!" since then he probably really is lying.

    Alexandre Borovik, quoting an unidentified colleague, paraphrasing
    another unidentified source, possibly Martin Gardner quoting a letter
    he got.
%
19 points Jayson_Virissimo 03 October 2012 01:22:57AM

    The truth is out there, but so are the lies.

-- Dana Scully, The X-Files, Season 1, Episode 17
%
19 points Eugine_Nier 02 October 2012 12:44:21AM

    Lastly, there is an attitude not unknown in the crisis against which I
    should particularly like to protest. I should address my protest
    especially to those lovers and pursuers of Peace who, very
    short-sightedly, have occasionally adopted it. I mean the attitude
    which is impatient of these preliminary details about who did this or
    that, and whether it was right or wrong. They are satisfied with
    saying that an enormous calamity, called War, has been begun by some
    or all of us; and should be ended by some or all of us. To these
    people this preliminary chapter about the precise happenings must
    appear not only dry (and it must of necessity be the driest part of
    the task) but essentially needless and barren. I wish to tell these
    people that they are wrong; that they are wrong upon all principles of
    human justice and historic continuity: but that they are specially and
    supremely wrong upon their own principles of arbitration and
    international peace.

    These sincere and high-minded peace-lovers are always telling us that
    citizens no longer settle their quarrels by private violence; and that
    nations should no longer settle theirs by public violence. They are
    always telling us that we no longer fight duels; and need no longer
    wage wars. In short, they perpetually base their peace proposals on
    the fact that an ordinary citizen no longer avenges himself with an
    axe. But how is he prevented from revenging himself with an axe? If he
    hits his neighbour on the head with the kitchen chopper, what do we
    do? Do we all join hands, like children playing Mulberry Bush, and say
    "We are all responsible for this; but let us hope it will not spread.
    Let us hope for the happy day when he shall leave off chopping at the
    man's head; and when nobody shall ever chop anything for ever and
    ever." Do we say "Let byegones be byegones; why go back to all the
    dull details with which the business began; who can tell with what
    sinister motives the man was standing there within reach of the
    hatchet?" We do not. We keep the peace in private life by asking for
    the facts of provocation, and the proper object of punishment. We do
    go into the dull details; we do enquire into the origins; we do
    emphatically enquire who it was that hit first. In short we do what I
    have done very briefly in this place.

-- G. K. Chesterton, The Appetite of Tyranny,
    arguing against pretending to be wise
%
19 points arborealhominid 19 November 2012 01:49:02AM

    If I have a Grand Unified Theory Of Everything, it's this: I believe
    that people always do things that make sense to them. Hard as it is to
    believe with all the hurting out there, almost nobody hurts others
    just to be a jerk. So if you want to change human behavior on a grand
    scale, you can't tell people "stop being a jerk." You have to dissect
    and then recreate their models of the world until being a jerk doesn't
    make sense.

-- Cliff Pervocracy
%
19 points Raemon 04 November 2012 07:21:06PM

    "Oh, sorry, I have this condition where I don't see or hear anything I
    disagree with."

    "I had no idea that being human was a disease."

    "A bad one! Everyone who contracts it eventually dies!"

-- Something Positive
%
19 points Wrongnesslessness 05 November 2012 09:53:16AM

    The inhabitants of Florence in 1494 or Athens in 404 BCE could be
    forgiven for concluding that optimism just isn't factually true. For
    they knew nothing of such things as the reach of explanations or the
    power of science or even laws of nature as we understand them, let
    alone the moral and technological progress that was to follow when the
    Enlightenment got under way. At the moment of defeat, it must have
    seemed at least plausible to the formerly optimistic Athenians that
    the Spartans might be right, and to the formerly optimistic
    Florentines that Savonarola might be. Like every other destruction of
    optimism, whether in a whole civilization or in a single individual,
    these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared
    to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those
    people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier
    experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring
    the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.

-- David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
%
19 points Posterity 13 December 2012 05:25:11AM

    If you were taught that elves caused rain, every time it rained, you'd
    see the proof of elves.

-- Ariex
%
18 points Furcas 18 April 2009 10:11:19PM

    When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity,
    the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is
    possible for one side to be simply wrong.

-- Richard Dawkins
%
18 points RichardKennaway 22 October 2009 11:48:39PM

"There is a superstition in avoiding superstition, when men think to do
best if they go furthest from the superstition formerly received."

-- Francis Bacon
%
18 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 November 2009 11:44:45PM

    Your calendar never lies. All we have is our time. The way we spend
    our time is our priorities, is our "strategy." Your calendar knows
    what you really care about. Do you?

-- Tom Peters, HT Ben Casnocha
%
18 points anonym 01 February 2010 06:51:49AM

    Thinking is skilled work. It is not true that we are naturally endowed
    with the ability to think clearly and logically--without learning how,
    or without practicing.... People with untrained minds should no more
    expect to think clearly and logically than people who have never
    learned and never practiced can expect to find themselves good
    carpenters, golfers, bridge-players, or pianists.

-- Alfred Mander, Logic for the Millions
%
18 points Rain 01 March 2010 09:54:29PM

    In an universe full of inanimate material, sentient beings are gods.

-- spire3661, in a Slashdot post
%
18 points Thomas 02 April 2010 04:52:20PM

    Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to
    guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: 'My friend, you should
    blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.' The
    stranger is a theologian.

-- Denis Diderot
%
18 points RichardKennaway 01 April 2010 10:04:50PM

    When I look around and think that everything's completely and utterly
    fucked up and hopeless, my first thought is "Am I wearing completely
    and utterly fucked up and hopeless-colored glasses?"

-- Crap Mariner (Lawrence Simon)
%
18 points Rain 01 April 2010 08:48:00PM

    Any technique, however worthy and desirable, becomes a disease when
    the mind is obsessed with it.

-- Bruce Lee
%
18 points Rain 01 May 2010 02:22:03PM

    We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made
    and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of
    rock. The significance of our lives and our fragile realm derives from
    our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning.

-- Carl Sagan
%
18 points MarcTheEngineer 02 July 2010 03:41:55PM

    I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable,
    I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free
    because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I
    do.

-- Robert A. Heinlein
%
18 points Kazuo_Thow 03 August 2010 03:56:18AM

    ... the history of mathematics is a history of horrendously difficult
    problems being solved by young people too ignorant to know that they
    were impossible.

-- Freeman Dyson, Birds and Frogs
%
18 points teageegeepea 02 September 2010 02:13:29AM

    First, you'll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by
    having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But
    second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied,
    written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed
    decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the
    existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and
    you didn't, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you
    couldn't even guess [...] you will forget there ever was a time when
    you didn't have it, and you'll be aware only of the fact that you have
    it now and most others don't....and that all those other people are
    fools [...] you'll eventually become aware of the limitations of this
    information [...] But that takes a while to learn. In the meantime it
    will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn't
    have these clearances.  Because you'll be thinking as you listen to
    them: 'What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would
    he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his
    predictions and recommendations?' And that mental exercise is so
    torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening.
    [...] You will deal with a person who doesn't have those clearances
    only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what
    impression you want him to go away with, since you'll have to lie
    carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to
    manipulate him. You'll give up trying to assess what he has to say.
    The danger is, you'll become something like a moron. You'll become
    incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how
    much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be
    much greater than yours.
%
18 points cata 06 October 2010 07:25:11PM

    One of my mentors once gave me a list of obvious things to check when
    stuff doesn't work. Funny, years later I still need this list:

        It worked. No one touched it but you. It doesn't work. It's
        probably something you did.

        It worked. You made one change. It doesn't work. It's probably the
        change you made.

        It worked. You promoted it. It doesn't work. Your testing
        environment probably isn't the same as your production
        environment.

        It worked for these 10 cases. It didn't work for the 11th case. It
        was probably never right in the first place.

        It worked perfectly for 10 years. Today it didn't work. Something
        probably changed.

-- edw519, Hacker News, on debugging.
%
18 points MBlume 11 November 2010 02:12:02AM

    When I was halfway through my Ph.D. I formulated a hypothesis: The
    proximate challenge that keeps you from graduating is that you have to
    write a thesis. But the ultimate challenge to getting your Ph.D. is
    this: You somehow have to learn to understand, deep down, that all
    your romantic notions about the Ph.D. are bunk, that you will be
    exactly the same person on the day after you get it that you were the
    day before, and that you need to stop waiting for the day when you
    feel like a god and just write something down and get on with life.

    It may take you years to accept this, and it may drive you to drink,
    but after you get to that point you can graduate.

    Only then will you be able to live with the fact that your thesis
    looks like crap to you. Your thesis will always look like crap to you.
    Either you will have figured out absolutely everything and your thesis
    will look incredibly boring to you, because you've moved on, or --
    vastly more likely -- your thesis will look woefully incomplete
    because, geez, there is so much that you couldn't figure out, and
    you're just so stupid!

    Or, most likely of all, you will think both of these things at the
    same time.

    Similarly: Being the world's foremost expert on a particular
    scientific problem is a lot less exciting in real life than it seems
    in the movies. In fact, being on the frontier of science feels like
    being totally, hopelessly lost and confused. Why this came as a
    surprise to me I'll never know.

-- mechanical_fish on Hacker News
%
18 points anonym 03 November 2010 06:46:09AM

    If you haven’t found something strange during the day, it hasn’t been
    much of a day.

-- John Archibald Wheeler
%
18 points MichaelGR 03 January 2011 09:31:43PM

    The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.

-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
%
18 points DSimon 10 February 2011 08:20:54PM

    You know in those stories where there's this immortal guy and they
    talk about how bored they are and how boring life is after 5000 years
    or whatever? I am going to call something.

    I am going to call SHENANIGANS.

    You know who writes those stories? MORTALS. Folks using some of their
    PRECIOUS, FINITE LIFE to write a made-up story in which an imaginary
    person keeps going on about how being immortal is actually sucky and
    how they're totes jealous that others get to die someday!

    Ridiculous!

    And kinda sad!

-- Todays Dinosaur Comic
%
18 points Kutta 04 April 2011 05:29:14PM

    The correct question to ask about functions is not "What is a rule?"
    or "What is an association?" but "What does one have to know about a
    function in order to know all about it?" The answer to the last
    question is easy - for each number x one needs to know the number f(x)
    (…)

-- M. Spivak: Calculus
%
18 points Thomas 18 June 2011 08:46:31AM

    Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent
    and well informed just to be undecided about them.

    Laurence J. Peter
%
18 points advancedatheist 01 June 2011 08:13:16PM

From Space Viking, by H. Beam Piper:

    "Young man," Harkaman reproved, "the conversation was between Lord
    Trask and myself. And when somebody makes a statement you don't
    understand, don't tell him he's crazy. Ask him what he means. What do
    you mean, Lord Trask?"

Source:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20728/20728-h/20728-h.htm
%
18 points Dreaded_Anomaly 06 July 2011 02:33:34AM

    "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
%
18 points Daniel_Burfoot 03 August 2011 03:30:15AM

    It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the
    inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly,
    to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by
    intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.

-- Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (first sentence)
%
18 points lukeprog 01 September 2011 12:04:59PM

    The rule that human beings seem to follow is to engage the brain only
    when all else fails - and usually not even then.

-- David Hull, Science and Selection: Essays on Biological Evolution and
            the Philosophy of Science
%
18 points James_Miller 02 October 2011 03:09:21AM

Three proposed derogatory labels from Dilbert creator Scott Adams:

    Labelass: A special kind of idiot who uses labels
              as a substitute for comprehension.

Binarian: A special kind of idiot who believes that all people who hold
          a different view from oneself have the same views as each other.

Masturdebator: One who takes pleasure in furiously debating viewpoints
               that only exist in the imagination.
%
18 points Xom 01 November 2011 08:14:06PM

    In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them.
    When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then,
    if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you
    probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit
    it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use
    words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to
    prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job
    for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning.
    Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and
    get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.

-- Orwell
%
18 points Alejandro1 01 November 2011 01:25:25AM

    Consider an instance close to hand: arguments on the Internet. Whether
    the discussion is about abortion or the definition of atheism or the
    advisability of tax cuts, one might think that the longer the debate
    continues, the more ideas would emerge. In fact, the reverse is the
    case. A couple of scientists discussing the proper taxonomy of flesh
    flies will entertain many options, but thousands of people talking
    about God will endlessly repeat the same rhetorical moves.

-- Jim Harrison
%
18 points peter_hurford 31 October 2011 04:20:46PM

    Expert estimates of probability are often off by factors of hundreds
    or thousands. [...] I used to be annoyed when the margin of error was
    high in a forecasting model that I might put together. Now I view it
    as perhaps the single most important piece of information that a
    forecaster provides. When we publish a forecast on FiveThirtyEight, I
    go to great lengths to document the uncertainty attached to it, even
    if the uncertainty is sufficiently large that the forecast won’t make
    for punchy headlines.

-- Nate Silver
%
18 points Daniel_Burfoot 04 December 2011 12:23:32AM

    In the early 1970's it cost $7 to buy a share in [Warren Buffett's]
    company, and that same share is worth $4,900 today... That makes
    Buffett a wonderful investor. What makes him the greatest investor of
    all time is that during a certain period when he thought stocks were
    grossly overpriced, he sold everything and returned all the money to
    his partners at a sizable profit to them. The voluntary returning of
    money that others would gladly pay you to continue to manage is, in my
    experience, unique in the history of finance.

-- Peter Lynch, "One Up on Wall Street"
%
18 points baiter 01 December 2011 10:34:19PM

    God created the Earth, but the Dutch created the Netherlands.

-- Dutch proverb
%
18 points NancyLebovitz 04 January 2012 10:04:36PM

    Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is
    not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must
    be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in
    operation as the rule.

-- Francis Bacon
%
18 points cousin_it 09 January 2012 04:32:27PM

    Chu-p’ing Man studied the art of killing dragons under Crippled Yi. It
    cost him all the thousand pieces of gold he had in his house, and
    after three years he'd mastered the art, but there was no one who
    could use his services. - Chuang Tzu

    So he decided to teach others the art of kiling dragons. - René Thom
%
18 points quinox 01 January 2012 01:46:52AM

    "Is it hard?"

    "Not if you have the right attitudes. It’s having the right attitudes
    that’s hard."

-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
%
18 points GLaDOS 06 January 2012 09:42:21AM

    In questions of this appalling magnitude, I find the best way to
    "overcome bias" is often to find perspectives which seem to make each
    answer obvious. Once we recognize that both A and B are obviously
    true, and A is inconsistent with B, we are in the right mindset for
    actual thought.

-- Mencius Moldbug
%
18 points gwern 01 January 2012 01:28:47AM

    "When picking fruit, an excellent first choice is the low-hanging
    ladderfruit. It is especially delicious."

-- Frank Adamek
%
18 points tingram 01 January 2012 12:39:11AM

    Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.

-- Bruce Lee
%
18 points Alejandro1 05 February 2012 05:41:50AM

    Any time we find that "math" disagrees with reality, the problem is
    never with "math"—it’s with us, for using the wrong math!

-- Scott Aaronson
%
18 points Stephanie_Cunnane 10 March 2012 10:32:20PM

    Some environments are worse than irregular. Robin Hogarth described
    "wicked" environments, in which professionals are likely to learn the
    wrong lessons from experience. He borrows from Lewis Thomas the
    example of a physician in the early twentieth century who often had
    intuitions about patients who were about to develop typhoid.
    Unfortunately, he tested his hunch by palpating the patient's tongue,
    without washing his hands between patients. When patient after patient
    became ill, the physician developed a sense of clinical infallibility.
    His predictions were accurate--but not because he was exercising
    professional intuition!

-- Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow
%
18 points ShardPhoenix 06 March 2012 09:55:47AM

    Past me is always so terrible, even when I literally just finished
    being him.

    Karkat from Homestuck by Andrew Hussie
%
18 points Alejandro1 02 March 2012 01:36:55AM

    The reason you can't rigidly separate positive from normative
    economics is that you can't rigidly separate claims of fact from
    claims of value in general. Human language is too laden with thick
    concepts that mix the two. The claim that someone is a "slut" or a
    "bitch", for example, melds together factual claims about a woman's
    behavior with a lot of deeply embedded normative concepts about what
    constitutes appropriate behavior for a woman. The claim that financial
    markets are "efficient" is both an effort to describe their operation
    and a way of valorizing them. The idea of a "recession" or "full
    employment" or "potential output" all embed certain ideas about what
    would constitute a normal arrangement of human economic activity (...)
    You could try to rigorously purge your descriptions of the economy of
    anything that vaguely smells of a thick moral concept, but you'd find
    yourself operating with an impoverished vocubulary unable to describe
    human affairs in any kind of reasonable way.

-- Matt Yglesias
%
18 points gwern 01 March 2012 05:58:13PM

    "Hope always feels like it's made up of a set of reasons: when it's
    just sufficient sleep and a few auspicious hormones."

-- Alain de Botton
%
18 points VKS 03 April 2012 07:51:55AM

    Pedantry and mastery are opposite attitudes toward rules. To apply a
    rule to the letter, rigidly, unquestioningly, in cases where it fits
    and in cases where it does not fit, is pedantry. ... To apply a rule
    with natural ease, with judgment, noticing the cases where it fits,
    and without ever letting the words of the rule obscure the purpose of
    the action or the opportunities of the situation, is mastery.

-- George Pólya, How to Solve It
%
18 points Multiheaded 06 April 2012 08:20:31PM

    [Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life.
    Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all
    "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire
    nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view
    of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the
    military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with
    soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a
    substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do.
    Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional
    strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety,
    short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common
    sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and
    self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades.

    However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are
    psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.
    The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarized version of
    Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power
    by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism,
    and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people "I offer
    you a good time," Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle,
    danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his
    feet.

(George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf)

(well, we have videogames now, yet... we gotta make them better! more
vicseral!)
%
18 points cousin_it 16 May 2012 11:51:40PM

    The Patrician steepled his hands and looked at Vimes over the top of
    them.

    "Let me give you some advice, Captain," he said.

    "Yes, sir?"

    "It may help you make some sense of the world."

    "Sir."

    "I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are
    the good people and the bad people," said the man. "You're wrong, of
    course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them
    are on opposite sides. "

    He waved his thin hand towards the city and walked over to the window.

    "A great rolling sea of evil," he said, almost proprietorially.
    "Shallower in some places, of course, but deeper, oh, so much deeper
    in others. But people like you put together little rafts of rules and
    vaguely good intentions and say, this is the opposite, this will
    triumph in the end. Amazing!" He slapped Vimes good-naturedly on the
    back.

    "Down there," he said, "are people who will follow any dragon, worship
    any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday
    badness. Not the really high, creative loathesomeness of the great
    sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you
    might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not
    because they say yes, but because they don't say no. I'm sorry if this
    offends you,'' he added, patting the captain's shoulder, "but you
    fellows really need us."

    "Yes, sir?" said Vimes quietly.

    "Oh, yes. We're the only ones who know how to make things work. You
    see, the only thing the good people are good at is overthrowing the
    bad people. And you're good at that, I'll grant you. But the trouble
    is that it's the only thing you're good at. One day it's the ringing
    of the bells and the casting down of the evil tyrant, and the next
    it's everyone sitting around complaining that ever since the tyrant
    was overthrown no-one's been taking out the trash. Because the bad
    people know how to plan. It's part of the specification, you might
    say. Every evil tyrant has a plan to rule the world. The good people
    don't seem to have the knack."

    "Maybe. But you're wrong about the rest!" said Vimes. "It's just
    because people are afraid, and alone-" He paused. It sounded pretty
    hollow, even to him.

    He shrugged. "They're just people," he said. "They're just doing what
    people do. Sir."

    Lord Vetinari gave him a friendly smile. "Of course, of course," he
    said. "You have to believe that, I appreciate. Otherwise you'd go
    quite mad. Otherwise you'd think you're standing on a feather-thin
    bridge over the vaults of Hell. Otherwise existence would be a dark
    agony and the only hope would be that there is no life after death. I
    quite understand."

    (...)

    After a while he made a few pencil annotations to the paper in front
    of him and looked up.

    "I said," he said, "that you may go."

    Vimes paused at the door.

    "Do you believe all that, sir?" he said. "About the endless evil and
    the sheer blackness?"

    "Indeed, indeed," said the Patrician, turning over the page. "It is
    the only logical conclusion."

    "But you get out of bed every morning, sir?"

    "Hmm? Yes? What is your point?"

    "I'd just like to know why, sir."

    "Oh, do go away, Vimes. There's a good fellow."

-- Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
%
18 points maia 03 May 2012 09:12:09PM

    If God gives you lemons, you find a new God.

-- Powerthirst 2: Re-Domination
%
18 points Stabilizer 05 July 2012 08:53:15AM

    A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a
    phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible.
    That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our
    computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for
    particular purposes, but they aren't flexible. Neither is a violin, or
    a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.

-- Marvin Minsky

Thinking of your brain (and yourself) like an instrument to played might
be useful for instrumental rationality.
%
18 points katydee 03 August 2012 08:35:20AM

    I have always thought that one man of tolerable abilities may work
    great changes, and accomplish great affairs among mankind, if he first
    forms a good plan, and, cutting off all amusements or other
    employments that would divert his attention, makes the execution of
    that same plan his sole study and business.

-- Benjamin Franklin
%
18 points army1987 11 September 2012 10:07:40AM

    To use an analogy, if you attend a rock concert and take a box to
    stand on then you will get a better view. If others do the same, you
    will be in exactly the same position as before. Worse, even, as it may
    be easier to loose your balance and come crashing down in a heap (and,
    perhaps, bringing others with you).

-- Iain McKay et al., An Anarchist FAQ, section C.7.3
%
18 points taelor 14 September 2012 07:16:44AM

    Oh, right, Senjōgahara. I've got a great story to tell you. It's about
    that man who tried to rape you way back when. He was hit by a car and
    died in a place with no connection to you, in an event with no
    connection to you. Without any drama at all. [...] That's the lesson
    for you here: You shouldn't expect your life to be like the theater.

-- Kaiki Deishū, Episode 7 of Nisemonogatari.
%
18 points mrglwrf 11 September 2012 07:00:03PM

    You know those people who say "you can use numbers to show anything"
    and "numbers lie" and "I don't trust numbers, don't give me numbers,
    God, anything but numbers"? These are the very same people who use
    numbers in the wrong way.

-- "Junior", FIRE JOE MORGAN
%
18 points RichardKennaway 01 September 2012 04:03:28PM

    Nothing can be soundly understood

    If daylight itself needs proof.

-- Imām al-Ḥaddād (trans. Moṣṭafā al-Badawī),
    "The Sublime Treasures: Answers to Sufi Questions"
%
18 points GabrielDuquette 03 October 2012 04:07:44PM

    Early to bed and early to rise makes a man misunderstand correlation
    versus causation.

-- cogentanalysis
%
18 points Eugine_Nier 15 November 2012 02:14:07AM

    As the philosopher David Schmidtz says, if your main goal is to show
    that your heart is in the right place, then your heart is not in the
    right place.

-- Jason Brennan, Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know
%
18 points Fyrius 07 December 2012 02:10:09PM

Long quote to make a simple point, but relevant. (Context: this is from a
Star Wars novel, so it's fiction.)

    A death hollow is a low point where the heavier-than-air toxic gases
    that roll downslope from the volcanoes can pool.

    The corpse of a hundred-kilo tusker lay just within its rim, its snout
    only a meter below the clear air that could have saved it. Other
    corpses littered the ground around it: rot crows and jacunas and other
    small scavengers I didn't recognize, lured to their deaths by the
    jungle's false promise of an easy meal.

    I said something along these lines to Nick. He laughed and called me a
    Balawai fool.

    "There's no false promise," he'd said. "There's no promise at all. The
    jungle doesn't promise. It exists. That's all. What killed those
    little ruskakks wasn't a trap. It was just the way things are."

    Nick says that to talk of the jungle as a person-to give it the
    metaphoric aspect of a creature, any creature-that's a Balawai thing.
    That's part of what gets them killed out here.

    It's a metaphor that shades the way you think: talk of the jungle as a
    creature, and you start treating it like a creature. You start
    thinking you can outsmart the jungle, or trust it, overpower it or
    befriend it, deceive it or bargain with it.

    And then you die.

    "Not because the jungle kills you. You get it? Just because it is what
    it is." These are Nick's words. "The jungle doesn't do anything. It's
    just a place. It's a place where many, many things live... and all of
    them die. Fantasizing about it - pretending it's something it's not -
    is fatal. That's your free life lesson for the day," he told me. "Keep
    it in mind."

    I will.

    Mace Windu, in Shatterpoint by Matthew Stover

%
18 points almkglor 07 December 2012 09:29:17AM

    It's frightening to think that you might not know something, but more
    frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people
    who have faith that they know exactly what is going on."

-- Amos Tversky
%
18 points SaidAchmiz 02 December 2012 08:34:25PM

    It is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if
    the cat is not there.

-- Confucius, allegedly (quoted in The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed)

Edit: The rationality relevance might need some explanation. The way I've
seen this aphorism used is this: it's sometimes hard to distinguish
between a task that's achievable but very difficult (and that it therefore
might make sense to spend time/effort on), and a task that is impossible
(and thus is a complete waste of time/effort).

If you spend some time searching for the cat in the dark room, you might
not find it. Is that because finding it is difficult (after all, this is
what you might quite plausibly expect, if you assume that the cat is
there), or because the cat is not there and you're wasting your time?
%
17 points CronoDAS 20 May 2009 04:22:05AM

    There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not
    be done at all.

-- Peter Drucker
%
17 points wuwei 15 June 2009 05:59:42AM

    One can measure the importance of a scientific work by the number of
    earlier publications rendered superfluous by it.

-- David Hilbert
%
17 points Patrick 23 October 2009 12:33:43AM

    Thus Aristotle laid it down that a heavy object falls faster than a
    light one does. The important thing about this idea is not that he was
    wrong, but that it never occurred to Aristotle to check it.

-- Albert Szent-Györgyi de Nagyrápolt,
    winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
%
17 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 October 2009 04:16:51PM

    Moral language persuades best when opinions are not yet formed, which
    is why writers of children’s literature can get away with saying
    things like, "Mr. Billings was an awful, horrible man with a heart of
    stone." This sounds like a line from a children’s book because it
    employs persuasive methods that, though appropriate for children,
    would insult the intelligence of most adult readers.

    Most moral discourse is the conversational equivalent of children’s
    literature. Disputants speak to one another—or, rather, at one
    another—as if their interlocutors failed to pay adequate attention on
    the day elementary morality was explained. Unaware of the projective
    nature of value, they marvel at their opponents’ blindness, their
    utter failure to see what is so perfectly obvious. Not knowing what
    else to do, they scold their opponents as if they were children, and
    scold them as if they were belligerent children when they fail to
    respond the first time.

    What to do about this? Take a cue from good writers. Stick to the
    facts. Keep evaluative language to a minimum, and get rid of the most
    overtly judgmental, moralistic language.

-- Joshua Greene, The Terrible, Horrible, No Good,
    Very Bad Truth About Morality And What To Do About It
%
17 points MichaelGR 07 January 2010 09:52:09PM

    If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first four
    sharpening the axe. - Abraham Lincoln
%
17 points Kaj_Sotala 01 March 2010 06:28:11PM

    People constantly ignore my good advice by contributing to the
    American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, CARE, and
    public radio all in the same year--as if they were thinking, "OK, I
    think I've pretty much wrapped up the problem of heart disease; now
    let's see what I can do about cancer."

-- Steven Landsburg (original link by dclayh)
%
17 points MichaelGR 05 April 2010 06:35:25AM

    "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the
    solution."

-- Clay Shirky
%
17 points Nic_Smith 03 April 2010 02:55:18AM

    I recall, for example, suggesting to a regular loser at a weekly poker
    game that he keep a record of his winnings and losses. His response
    was that he used to do so but had given up because it proved to be
    unlucky. - Ken Binmore, Rational Decisions

A side note: All three of the quotes I've posted are from Binmore's
Rational Decisions, which I'm about a third of the way through and have
found very interesting. It makes a great companion to Less Wrong -- and
it's also quite quotable in spots.
%
17 points Rain 01 April 2010 08:47:41PM

    The word agnostic is actually used with the two distinct meanings of
    personal ignorance and intrinsic unknowability in the same context.
    They are distinguished when necessary with a qualifier.

    WEAK agnosticism: I have no fucking idea who fucked this shit up.

    STRONG agnosticism: Nobody has any fucking idea who fucked this shit
    up.

    There is a certain confusion with weak atheism which could (and
    frequently does) arise, but that is properly reserved for the category
    of theological noncognitivists,

    WEAK atheism: What the fuck do you mean with this God shit?

    STRONG atheism: Didn't take any God to fuck this shit up.

    which is different again from weak theism.

    WEAK theism: Somebody fucked this shit up.

    STRONG theism: God fucked this shit up.

    An interesting cross-categorical theological belief not easily
    represented above is

    DEISM: God set this shit up and it fucked itself.

-- Snocone, in a Slashdot post
%
17 points Rain 01 April 2010 08:47:27PM

    If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them
    down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.

-- Jack Handey's Deep Thoughts
%
17 points Rain 01 May 2010 02:21:41PM

    I've always believed that the mind is the best weapon.

-- John Rambo, Rambo: First Blood Part II
%
17 points Rain 02 July 2010 12:05:14AM

    The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.

-- Plutarch
%
17 points Kyre 02 September 2010 05:40:12AM

    Comic Quote Minus 13

-- Ryan Armand

Sometimes I see something that just seems to hit the bullseye deeply in
the centre, and sticks there, quivering.
%
17 points RichardKennaway 01 September 2010 07:30:30AM

    Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's
    opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

-- Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
%
17 points gwern 06 October 2010 12:23:32AM

    'One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and
    he interrupted the lesson suddenly in order to retrieve a packet of
    biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that
    he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats
    in the front row, if they would also like a biscuit. A few students
    took a biscuit.

    "Nice biscuit, don't you think," said Korzybski, while he took a 2nd
    one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white
    paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On
    it was a big picture of a dog's head and the words "Dog Cookies."

    The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them
    wanted to vomit, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out
    of the lecture hall to the toilet.

    "You see," Korzybski remarked, "I have just demonstrated that people
    don't just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former
    is often outdone by the taste of the latter."'

I think of this as a rationalist parable and not so much a quote. It has a
lot of personal resonance since I often had dog biscuits with my tea when
I was younger.
%
17 points RichardKennaway 05 October 2010 12:41:05PM

On the same theme as the previous one:

    I've begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all,
    unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It's there
    for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all
    the time: heat, light, food, a lovely day. There is no mystery, no one
    asks for money, I don't have to dress up, and there is no boring
    pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I
    offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to "God" are all
    answered at about the same 50-percent rate.

-- George Carlin
%
17 points Alicorn 12 December 2010 03:31:23AM

    "Look! Can your fortunetelling explain that?!"

    "Ha! Can your science explain why it rains?"

    "YES! Yes, it can!"

    Avatar: the Last Airbender
%
17 points DSimon 03 January 2011 06:18:39PM

    All Wars are Follies, very expensive, and very mischievous ones. When
    will Mankind be convinced of this, and agree to settle their
    Differences by Arbitration? Were they to do it, even by the Cast of a
    Dye, it would be better than by Fighting and destroying each other.

-- Benjamin Franklin
%
17 points Kutta 03 January 2011 09:18:45AM

    It’s neither our economy or our multimedia that I’m most concerned
    about, but whether the kids are lively and in good shape. I mean, as
    long as the people are doing fine it doesn’t matter if the nation is
    in poverty.

-- Hayao Miyazaki
%
17 points aausch 07 February 2011 04:25:37PM

    As they say in Discworld, we are trying to unravel the Mighty Infinite
    using a language which was designed to tell one another where the
    fresh fruit was.

-- Terry Pratchett
%
17 points purpleposeidon 04 February 2011 08:50:11AM

The following reminded me of Arguments as Soldiers:

    Statistics for the enemy. Anecdotes for the friend. -- Zach Weiner

I'm sorry to have not found his blog sooner.
%
17 points Kazuo_Thow 02 February 2011 06:05:08AM

    Apathy on the individual level translates into insanity at the mass
    level.

-- Douglas Hofstadter
%
17 points Jayson_Virissimo 02 February 2011 12:10:49AM

    Statistics is applied philosophy of science.

-- A. P. Dawid
%
17 points Thomas 01 February 2011 10:45:33PM

    Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Give a man a fishing rod
    and he'll sell it for a fish.

-- ???
%
17 points gwern 01 February 2011 05:52:07PM

    "I submit that claims about God are of this latter sort. There’s
    simply no reason to take them more seriously than one does claims
    about witches or ghosts. The idea that one needs powerful
    philosophical theories to settle such issues I like to call the
    "philosophy fallacy."

    We will see that people are particularly prey to it in religious
    discussions, both theist and atheist alike; indeed, atheists often get
    trapped into doing far more, far riskier philosophy than they need."

-- Georges Rey, Meta-atheism: Religious Avowal as Self-deception (2009)

(First version seen on
http://www.strangedoctrines.com/2008/09/risky-philosophy.html but quote
from an expanded paper.)
%
17 points Nominull 04 March 2011 05:08:06AM

    It's terrible not being able to be happy even though you're not wrong.

-- Kaname Madoka, Puella Magi Madoka Magica
%
17 points scav 03 March 2011 10:28:44AM

    EDMUND

    This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,

    when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit

    of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our

    disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as

    if we were villains by necessity; fools by

    heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and

    treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,

    liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of

    planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,

    by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion

    of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish

    disposition to the charge of a star!

-- Wm. Shakspere King Lear
%
17 points Nominull 03 March 2011 04:00:43AM

    The classical theorists resemble Euclidean geometers in a
    non-Euclidean world who, discovering that in experience straight lines
    apparently parallel often meet, rebuke the lines for not keeping
    straight as the only remedy for the unfortunate collisions which are
    occurring. Yet, in truth, there is no remedy except to throw over the
    axiom of parallels and to work out a non-Euclidean geometry.

-- John Maynard Keynes, on models of unemployment that seemed nice on
    paper but did not measure up to the real world.
%
17 points phaedrus 02 June 2011 12:26:26AM

    We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data
    itself.

-- Chris Mooney
%
17 points sketerpot 14 August 2011 09:22:20PM

    Our headlines are splashed with crime, yet for every criminal there
    are 10,000 honest decent kindly men. If it were not so, no child would
    live to grow up, business could not go on from day to day. Decency is
    not news; it is buried in the obituaries -- but it is a force stronger
    than crime.

-- Robert Heinlein, on selection bias. From this big list of quotes.
%
17 points Konkvistador 03 September 2011 09:07:47PM

    "The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and
    social. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care
    about us; we want the esteem of our peers. For most people, wanting to
    know the truth about the world is way, way down the list. Scientific
    objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought,
    restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard
    with dislike and mistrust."

-- John Derbyshire
%
17 points Konkvistador 23 October 2011 10:59:30AM

    A decision was wise, even though it led to disastrous consequences, if
    the evidence at hand indicated it was the best one to make; and a
    decision was foolish, even though it led to the happiest possible
    consequences, if it was unreasonable to expect those consequences.

-- Herodotus
%
17 points gwern 10 October 2011 05:00:42PM

    We know this much Death is an evil; we have the gods' word for it;
    they too would die if death were a good thing

-- Sappho #7; trans. Barnard (seen on
http://www.nada.kth.se/%7Easa/Quotes/immortality )
%
17 points grendelkhan 07 October 2011 03:29:50PM

    The least evil is still evil. The least monstrous is still monstrous

    When, as will happen, you are yourself forced to choose between two
    bad things, then choose the lesser of the evils and choose it boldly.
    That will be the right choice and, if circumstances are truly as
    circumscribed as you believe them to be, that will be the right thing
    to do in that situation.

    But it still won't be a good thing. It isn't a good thing and cannot
    be made good.

-- Fred Clarke, August 9
%
17 points RobertLumley 03 October 2011 03:47:41PM

    What good fortune for those in power that people do not think.

-- Adolph Hitler
%
17 points ShardPhoenix 03 October 2011 08:33:20AM

    He wanted to find fault with the idea but couldn't quite do it on the
    spur of the moment. He filed it away for later discrediting

-- The Magician King by Lev Grossman
%
17 points ArisKatsaris 01 November 2011 11:01:13PM

    If I let go of a hammer on a planet that has a positive gravity, I
    need not see it fall to know that it has in fact fallen. [...]
    Gentlemen, human beings have characteristics just as inanimate objects
    do.

-- Spock, Court Martial, Star Trek: The Original Series
%
17 points Dr_Manhattan 02 December 2011 03:09:16PM

    Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions

-- Daniel Kahneman
%
17 points gwern 01 January 2012 01:28:20AM

    "Don't ask whether predictions are made, ask whether predictions are
    implied."

-- Steven Kaas
%
17 points gwern 01 January 2012 07:58:04PM

    The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death

-- 1 Corinthians 15:26
%
17 points RobinZ 04 February 2012 12:17:40AM

    I’ve very often made mistakes in my physics by thinking the theory
    isn’t as good as it really is, thinking that there are lots of
    complications that are going to spoil it — an attitude that anything
    can happen, in spite of what you’re pretty sure should happen.

-- Richard Feynman, in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman,
    chapter entitled "Mixing Paints".
%
17 points scmbradley 02 February 2012 01:41:43PM

    Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread
    which isn't there

-- E.H. Gombrich
%
17 points Oscar_Cunningham 01 February 2012 09:51:09PM

    Paradoxes, like optical illusions, are often used by psychologists to
    reveal the inner workings of the mind, for paradoxes stem from (and
    amplify) dormant clashes among implicit sets of assumptions.

-- Judea Pearl (Causality)
%
17 points daenerys 05 February 2012 02:52:23AM

    This is why science and mathematics are so much fun; You discover
    things that seem impossible to be true, and then get to figure out why
    it's impossible for them NOT to be.

-- Vi Hart, Doodling in Math: Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant- Part
3 of 3
%
17 points NexH 06 March 2012 02:19:52PM

    When it comes to rare probabilities, our mind is not designed to get
    things quite right. For the residents of a planet that may be exposed
    to events no one has yet experienced, that is not good news.

--Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, fast and slow
%
17 points Stabilizer 01 March 2012 09:29:18AM

    To be a good diagnostician, a physician needs to acquire a large set
    of labels for diseases, each of which binds an idea of the illness and
    its symptoms, possible antecedents and causes, possible developments
    and consequences, and possible interventions to cure or mitigate the
    illness. Learning medicine consists in part of learning the language
    of medicine. A deeper understanding of judgments and choices also
    requires a richer vocabulary than is available in everyday language.
    The availability of a diagnostic label for [the] bias... makes it
    easier to anticipate, recognize and understand.

-- Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
%
17 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 March 2012 02:15:31AM

    I don't know if we've sufficiently analyzed the situation if we're
    thinking storming Azkaban is a solution.

-- thatguythere47, enunciating an important general principle.
%
17 points Will_Newsome 02 March 2012 09:55:32AM

    If you want to know how decent people can support evil, find a mirror.

-- Mencius Moldbug, A gentle introduction to Unqualified Reservations
    (part 2) (yay reflection!)
%
17 points Stephanie_Cunnane 05 April 2012 04:09:46AM

    I believe I am accurate in saying that educators too are interested in
    learnings which make a difference. Simple knowledge of facts has its
    value. To know who won the battle of Poltava, or when the umpteenth
    opus of Mozart was first performed, may win $64,000 or some other sum
    for the possessor of this information, but I believe educators in
    general are a little embarrassed by the assumption that the
    acquisition of such knowledge constitutes education. Speaking of this
    reminds me of a forceful statement made by a professor of agronomy in
    my freshman year in college. Whatever knowledge I gained in his course
    has departed completely, but I remember how, with World War I as his
    background, he was comparing factual knowledge with ammunition. He
    wound up his little discourse with the exhortation, "Don't be a damned
    ammunition wagon; be a rifle!"

-- Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy
(1961)
%
17 points EditedToAdd 02 April 2012 04:51:17PM

    But, the hard part comes after you conquer the world. What kind of
    world are you thinking of creating?

-- Johan Liebert, Monster
%
17 points Rhwawn 06 April 2012 07:54:30PM

    By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets
    it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and, in effect,
    increases the mental power of the race.

-- Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics
    (thanks to Terence Tao)
%
17 points dvasya 01 April 2012 04:01:25PM

    Our minds contain processes that enable us to solve problems we
    consider difficult. "Intelligence" is our name for whichever of those
    processes we don't yet understand.

    Some people dislike this "definition" because its meaning is doomed to
    keep changing as we learn more about psychology. But in my view that's
    exactly how it ought to be, because the very concept of intelligence
    is like a stage magician's trick. Like the concept of "the unexplored
    regions of Africa," it disappears as soon as we discover it.

-- Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind
%
17 points Eugine_Nier 01 April 2012 07:40:33PM

    Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the
    creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

-- G. K. Chesterton
%
17 points john_ku 05 May 2012 12:48:46PM

    If the difficulty of a physiological problem is mathematical in
    essence, ten physiologists ignorant of mathematics will get precisely
    as far as one physiologist ignorant of mathematics and no further.

-- Norbert Wiener
%
17 points MichaelGR 03 May 2012 05:32:32PM

    "Smart people learn from their mistakes. But the real sharp ones learn
    from the mistakes of others."

-- Brandon Mull, Fablehaven
%
17 points Mark_Eichenlaub 02 May 2012 05:29:43AM

    I don't think we can get much more specific without starting to be
    mistaken.

-- Paul Graham, Is It Worth Being Wise?
    http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html
%
17 points James_Miller 01 June 2012 04:34:51PM

    "My other piece of advice, Copperfield," said Mr. Micawber, "you know.
    Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six,
    result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure
    twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

-- Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (HT Cafe Hayek.)
%
17 points Nominull 08 July 2012 08:01:12PM

    I never felt I was studying the stupidity of mankind in the third
    person. I always felt I was studying my own mistakes.

-- Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics
%
17 points Alicorn 06 August 2012 04:40:11AM

    Since Mischa died, I've comforted myself by inventing reasons why it
    happened. I've been explaining it away ... But that's all bull. There
    was no reason. It happened and it didn't need to.

-- Erika Moen
%
17 points Stabilizer 05 August 2012 11:19:45PM

    I don't think winners beat the competition because they work harder.
    And it's not even clear that they win because they have more
    creativity. The secret, I think, is in understanding what matters.

    It's not obvious, and it changes. It changes by culture, by buyer, by
    product and even by the day of the week. But those that manage to
    capture the imagination, make sales and grow are doing it by
    perfecting the things that matter and ignoring the rest.

    Both parts are difficult, particularly when you are surrounded by
    people who insist on fretting about and working on the stuff that
    makes no difference at all.

-- Seth Godin
%
17 points Alicorn 05 August 2012 07:18:30PM

    My knee had a slight itch. I reached out my hand and scratched the
    knee in question. The itch was relieved and I was able to continue
    with my activities.

-- The dullest blog in the world
%
17 points Zvi 01 September 2012 09:10:38PM

    Subway ad: "146 people were hit by trains in 2011. 47 were killed."

    Guy on Subway: "That tells me getting hit by a train ain't that
    dangerous."

-- Nate Silver, on his Twitter feed @fivethirtyeight
%
17 points Konkvistador 04 September 2012 08:39:45AM

    Neither side of the road is inherently superior to the other, so we
    should all choose for ourselves on which side to drive. #enlightenment

-- Kate Evans on Twitter
%
17 points Jay_Schweikert 01 October 2012 08:27:21PM

    Frodo: Those that claim to oppose the Enemy would do well not to
    hinder us.

    Faramir: The Enemy? (turns over body of an enemy soldier) His sense of
    duty was no less than yours, I deem. You wonder what his name is,
    where he came from, and if he was really evil at heart. What lies or
    threats led him on this long march from home, and if he'd not rather
    have stayed there... in peace. War will make corpses of us all.

-- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (extended edition)
%
17 points Nick_Tarleton 07 November 2012 07:56:04AM

    "Because they were hypocrites," Finkle-McGraw said, after igniting his
    calabash and shooting a few tremendous fountains of smoke into the
    air, "the Victorians were despised in the late twentieth century. Many
    of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the
    most nefandous conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding
    such views because they were not hypocrites themselves-they took no
    moral stances and lived by none."

    "So they were morally superior to the Victorians-" Major Napier said,
    still a bit snowed under. "-even though-in fact, because-they had no
    morals at all." There was a moment of silent, bewildered head-shaking
    around the copper table.

    "We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy," Finkle-McGraw
    continued. "In the late-twentieth-century Weltanschauung, a hypocrite
    was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned
    campaign of deception-he never held these beliefs sincerely and
    routinely violated them in privacy. Of course, most hypocrites are not
    like that. Most of the time it's a spirit-is-willing, flesh-is-weak
    sort of thing."

    "That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code," Major Napier
    said, working it through, "does not imply that we are insincere in
    espousing that code."

    "Of course not," Finkle-McGraw said. "It's perfectly obvious, really.
    No one ever said that it was easy to hew to a strict code of conduct.
    Really, the difficulties involved-the missteps we make along the way
    are what make it interesting. The internal, and eternal, struggle,
    between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral
    system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in
    that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher
    power."

-- Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
%
17 points VKS 03 December 2012 06:50:16AM

    Truth comes out of error more easily than out of confusion.

-- Francis Bacon
%
16 points benthamite 18 April 2009 10:00:18PM

    I wish to propose for the reader’s favourable consideration a doctrine
    which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The
    doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a
    proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

-- Bertrand Russell, ‘Introduction’, in Sceptical Essays, London, 1928
%
16 points Henrik_Jonsson 15 June 2009 05:14:57AM

    Once again, we are saddled with a Stone Age moral psychology that is
    appropriate to life in small, homogeneous communities in which all
    members share roughly the same moral outlook. Our minds trick us into
    thinking that we are absolutely right and that they are absolutely
    wrong because, once upon a time, this was a useful way to think. It is
    no more, though it remains natural as ever. We love our respective
    moral senses. They are as much a part of us as anything. But if we are
    to live together in the world we have created for ourselves, so unlike
    the one in which our ancestors evolved, we must know when to trust our
    moral senses and when to ignore them.

-- Joshua Greene
%
16 points Kaj_Sotala 10 August 2009 07:22:53PM

    I've noticed that the press tends to be quite accurate, except when
    they're writing on a subject I know something about.

-- Keith F.  Lynch
%
16 points hegemonicon 06 August 2009 05:30:25AM

    Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to
    paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard
    every time it pisses on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to
    the newspaper. So I keep trying to gently bring my mind back to what
    is really there to be seen, maybe to be seen and noted with a kind of
    reverence. Because if I don't learn to do this, I think I'll keep
    getting things wrong.

-- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
%
16 points RichardKennaway 22 October 2009 11:51:02PM

    Everything is open to questioning. That does not mean all answers are
    equally valid.

-- Kelvin Throop
%
16 points roland 22 October 2009 07:12:43PM

    People often lack the discipline to adhere to a superior strategy that
    doesn't "feel" right. Reasoning in a way that sometimes "feels" wrong
    takes discipline.

-- Michael Bishop, Epistemology and the psychology of human judgement
%
16 points Kaj_Sotala 01 December 2009 01:50:04PM

    As a rule, people judged themselves according to their intentions and
    others according to results. In study after study, individuals ranked
    themselves as more charitable, more compassionate, more conscientious
    than others, not because they in fact were - but because they wanted
    to be these things and were almost entirely blind to the fact that
    others wanted the same. Intentions were all important when it came to
    self-judgement, and pretty much irrelevant when it came to judging
    others. The only exceptions, it turned out, were loved ones.

    That was what it meant to be a 'significant' other: to be included in
    the circle of delusions that everyone used to exempt themselves.

-- Scott Bakker, Neuropath
%
16 points MichaelGR 30 November 2009 12:21:53AM

    Politicians compete to bribe voters with their own money.

-- Adapted from something in The Economist
%
16 points Cyan 07 January 2010 09:17:15PM

    This conception of debate as combat is, in fact, probably the main
    reason why the Social Text editors fell for my parody. Acting not as
    intellectuals seeking the truth, but as self-appointed generals in the
    "Science Wars'', they apparently leapt at the chance to get a "real''
    scientist on their "side''. Now, ruing their blunder, they must surely
    feel a kinship with the Trojans.

    But the military metaphor is a mistake; the Social Text editors are
    not my enemies.

-- Alan Sokal (hat tip)
%
16 points Sniffnoy 14 February 2010 07:15:51AM

On parsimony:

    If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only
    because they do not realize how complicated life is.

-- John von Neumann, at the first national meeting of the
    Association for Computing Machinery
%
16 points Warrigal 13 February 2010 01:32:32AM

    You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to
    become right.

-- Randall Munroe, in the alt-text of xkcd 701
%
16 points Shalmanese 02 February 2010 09:47:05AM

    In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them,
    there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will
    probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain
    institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or
    gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes
    gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it
    away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to
    answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you
    clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and
    tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

-- G.K. Chesterton
%
16 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 February 2010 12:40:01AM

    The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to close
    it again on something solid.

-- G.K. Chesterton
%
16 points gaffa 01 March 2010 05:20:03PM

    …it is fatally easy to read a pattern into stochastically generated
    data.

-- John Maynard Smith (The Causes of Extinction, 1989)
%
16 points CaptainOblivious2 03 April 2010 02:23:54AM

"All things end badly - or else they wouldn't end"

    Brian Flanagan (Tom Cruise), Cocktail, 1988. He was referring to
    relationships, but it's actually a surprisingly general rule.
%
16 points torekp 03 July 2010 11:36:36AM

    Idealists of all schools, aristocrats and bourgeois, theologians and
    physicians, politicians and moralists, religionists, philosophers, or
    poets, not forgetting the liberal economists - unbounded worshippers
    of the ideal, as we know - are much offended when told that man, with
    his magnificent intelligence, his sublime ideas, and his boundless
    aspirations, is, like all else existing in the world, nothing but
    matter, only a product of vile matter.

    We may answer that the matter of which materialists speak, matter
    spontaneously and eternally mobile, active, productive, matter
    chemically or organically determined and manifested by the properties
    or forces, mechanical, physical, animal, and intelligent, which
    necessarily belong to it - that this matter has nothing in common with
    the vile matter of the idealists. The latter, a product of their false
    abstraction, is indeed a stupid, inanimate, immobile thing, incapable
    of giving birth to the smallest product, a caput mortuum, an ugly
    fancy in contrast to the beautiful fancy which they call God; as the
    opposite of this supreme being, matter, their matter, stripped by that
    constitutes its real nature, necessarily represents supreme
    nothingness.

-- Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State
%
16 points sketerpot 04 August 2010 07:10:17PM

    If you do experiments and you're always right, then you aren't getting
    enough information out of those experiments. You want your experiment
    to be like the flip of a coin: You have no idea if it is going to come
    up heads or tails. You want to not know what the results are going to
    be.

-- Peter Norvig, in an interview about being wrong.
When I saw this, I thought it sounded a lot like entropy pruning in
decision trees, where you don't even bother asking questions that won't
make you update your probability estimates significantly. Then I
remembered that Norvig was the co-author of the AI textbook that I had
learned about decision trees from. Interesting interview.
%
16 points James_Miller 01 September 2010 02:52:25PM

    Like all dreamers, I confused disenchantment with truth.

-- Jean-Paul Sartre
%
16 points scav 05 January 2011 09:25:10AM

    If you show me

    That, say, homeopathy works,

    Then I will change my mind

    I’ll spin on a fucking dime

    I’ll be embarrassed as hell,

    But I will run through the streets yelling

    It’s a miracle! Take physics and bin it!

    Water has memory!

    And while its memory of a long lost drop of onion juice is Infinite

    It somehow forgets all the poo it’s had in it!

    You show me that it works and how it works

    And when I’ve recovered from the shock

    I will take a compass and carve Fancy That on the side of my cock.

-- Tim Minchin, Storm
%
16 points steven0461 06 February 2011 09:16:23PM

    Some in their discourse desire rather commendation of wit, in being
    able to hold all arguments, than of judgment, in discerning what is
    true; as if it were a praise to know what might be said, and not what
    should be thought.

-- Francis Bacon
%
16 points ata 04 March 2011 10:25:22PM

    Not to know is bad; not to wish to know is worse.

-- Wolof proverb
%
16 points taserian 04 April 2011 07:47:05PM

On perseverance:

    It's a little like wrestling a gorilla. You don't quit when you're
    tired, you quit when the gorilla is tired.

-- Robert Strauss
%
16 points Thomas 02 May 2011 07:36:46PM

    Nature is fucked up, and anyone who argues otherwise has not actually
    seen nature in action.

-- Michael Anissimov
%
16 points MarkusRamikin 08 June 2011 03:26:07PM

    "Attack and absorb the data that attack produces!"

-- Tylwyth Waff in Heretics of Dune

(Hi. I'm new.)
%
16 points servumtuum 06 June 2011 09:37:47PM

    The essence of wisdom is to remain suspicious
    of what you want to be true.

-- Jon K. Hart
%
16 points Jonathan_Graehl 05 June 2011 02:40:05AM

    No man has wit enough to reason with a fool.

-- Proyas (fictional character - author: R. Scott Bakker)
%
16 points RichardKennaway 01 June 2011 11:08:54AM

    If you have ten minutes unscheduled and the phone isn't ringing, what
    do you do? What do you start?

-- Seth Godin
%
16 points sketerpot 14 August 2011 08:38:14PM

From Wintersmith, on the ability to notice confusion rather than
rationalizing:

    "And now I shall tell you something vitally important. It is the
    secret of my long life."

    Ah, thought Tiffany, and she leaned forward.

    "The important thing," said Miss Treason, "is to stay the passage of
    the wind. You should avoid rumbustious fruits and vegetables. Beans
    are the worst, take it from me."

    "I don’t think I understand—" Tiffany began.

    "Try not to fart, in a nutshell."

    "In a nutshell I imagine it would be pretty unpleasant!" said Tiffany
    nervously. She couldn’t believe she was being told this.

    "This is no joking matter," said Miss Treason. "The human body only
    has so much air in it. You have to make it last. One plate of beans
    can take a year off your life. I have avoided rumbustiousness all my
    days. I am an old person and that means what I say is wisdom!" She
    gave the bewildered Tiffany a stern look. "Do you understand, child?"

    Tiffany’s mind raced. Everything is a test! "No," she said. "I’m not a
    child and that’s nonsense, not wisdom!"

    The stern look cracked into a smile. "Yes," said Miss Treason. "Total
    gibberish. But you’ve got to admit it’s a corker, all the same, right?
    You definitely believed it, just for a moment? The villagers did last
    year. You should have seen the way they walked about for a few weeks!
    The strained looks on their faces quite cheered me up!"

%
16 points SilasBarta 03 August 2011 02:27:52AM

About the intersection of math and politics through the mind of a child,
Bob Murphy relates this story about his six-year-old son Clark:

    Clark: Daddy why can’t there be a biggest number?

    Bob: Because no matter how big a number is, there is always a bigger
    number.

    Clark (puzzled): Why?

    Bob: OK, let’s say a guy comes up to me and says, "Hey, I know the
    biggest number!" Then I would say, "Oh yeah, what is it?" And the guy
    would tell me, "It’s a billion billion." But then I would just add 1
    to it, and say, "A ha, a billion billion and 1 is a bigger number. So
    you made a mistake when you said you thought of the biggest number."

    Clark (after a pause): What guy are you talking about?

    Bob: Just any guy. I’m saying, if anybody tries to think of the
    biggest number, I’ll always be able to do that trick-where I add 1 to
    it-so they can’t do it. They’ll always lose.

    Clark: What if a girl asks you?

    [I ran through the same thing with a girl asking me...]

    Clark: OK I want to tell the story!

    Bob: Sure go ahead.

    Clark: So what if a guy came up to me and said, "Hey Clark, I know the
    biggest number! It’s 100 billion!" Then I would say, "No, 100 billion
    and 1 is bigger! You’re wrong!"

    Bob: Right, good job. So he didn’t really think of the biggest number
    after all, did he?

    Clark: No.

    Bob: And you can always do that.

    Clark: OK let me tell it again with Sam [name possibly changed--a kid
    from his class].

    Bob: OK.

    Clark: So what if Sam came up to me and said, "Hey Clark, I know the
    biggest number. It’s 50 googol." But I would say, "No Sam you’re
    wrong! 50 googol and 1 is bigger!" But Sam gets mad so he would start
    shouting and say, "I DID TOO THINK OF THE BIGGEST NUMBER CLARK!!"

And I know we're not supposed to quote ourselves, but you rarely get an
opportunity to use a line like this:

    I guess you already tried explaining to Clark that the cardinality of
    the natural numbers is invariant under transformations of largest
    number proponent?

%
16 points crazy88 04 September 2011 07:29:46AM

    Ralph Hull made a reasonable living as a magician milking a card trick
    he called "The Tuned Deck"...Hull enjoyed subjecting himself to the
    scrutiny of colleagues who attempted to eliminate, one by one, various
    explanations by depriving him of the ability to perform a particular
    sleight of hand. But the real trick was over before it had even begun,
    for the magic was not in clever fingers but in a clever name. The
    blatantly singular referent cried out for a blatantly singular
    explanation, when in reality The Tuned Deck was not one trick but
    many. The search for a single explanation is what kept this multiply
    determined illusion so long a mystery.

-- Nicholas Epley, Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making
%
16 points gwern 03 September 2011 06:28:06PM

    "Asking a question is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is
    embarrassing for a lifetime. "

-- Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, 2006, p. 255
%
16 points Vladimir_Nesov 06 October 2011 12:05:04AM

    Truths were carved from the identical wood as were lies — words — and
    so sank or floated with equal ease. But since truths were carved by
    the World, they rarely appeased Men and their innumerable vanities.

-- Drusas Achamian, in The White-Luck Warrior by R. Scott Bakker
%
16 points kalla724 02 November 2011 08:34:16PM

    The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it.

-- Alan Saporta
%
16 points Nominull 31 October 2011 05:29:21PM

    Writers of all stripes enjoy engaging in the most cynical readings of
    human behavior because they think it makes them appear hyper-rational.
    But in fact here is a perfect example of how trying to achieve that
    makes you irrational. Human emotion is real. It is an observable
    phenomenon. It observably influences behavior. Therefore to fail to
    account for it when discussing coupling and relationships is the
    opposite of cold rationality; it is in fact a failure of empiricism.

-- L'Hote on Kate Bolick's All the Single Ladies
%
16 points CharlieSheen 25 January 2012 11:55:12PM

    It’s not a good idea for members of the faith-based community like
    Hitchens to proclaim things like: Science proves we’re all genetically
    equal, so therefore you shouldn’t be beastly toward people of other
    races. The obvious flaw in this strategy is that eventually people
    will figure out that you are lying about what the science of genetics
    says, and therefore, by your own logic, that discredits the perfectly
    valid second half of your assertion.

-- Steve Sailer
%
16 points Konkvistador 08 January 2012 05:03:52PM

    ... if anyone thinks they can get an accurate picture of anyplace on
    the planet by reading news reports, they're sadly mistaken.

-- Bruce Schneier
%
16 points HonoreDB 18 February 2012 09:45:08PM

    Luck is opportunity plus preparation plus luck.

-- Jane Espenson
%
16 points arundelo 11 February 2012 06:22:39PM

    Any time you say something is "more likely" than something else, that
    an explanation is "improbable," or "almost certainly true," or
    "implausible," and so on, you are making mathematical statements. Any
    time something is "more" than something else, that's math.

-- Richard Carrier
%
16 points kalla724 01 February 2012 09:38:43PM

Probably a duplicate, but I can't find a previous version:

    For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple,
    and wrong.

-- H. L. Mencken
%
16 points ArisKatsaris 07 March 2012 11:08:18PM

    -So what do you think happens after we die?

    -The acids and lifeforms living inside your body eat their way out,
    while local detritivores eat their way in. Why?

    -No, no, no, what happens to you?

    -Oh, you guys mean the soul.

    -Exactly.

    -Is that in the body?

    -Yes!

    -The acids and lifeforms eat their way out, while local detritivores
    eat their way in.

-- SMBC Theater - Death
%
16 points Vaniver 01 April 2012 11:20:25PM

    For those who feel deeply about contemporary politics, certain topics
    have become so infected by considerations of prestige that a genuinely
    rational approach to them is almost impossible.

-- George Orwell
%
16 points Alejandro1 03 April 2012 05:01:58PM

    ‘I’m exactly in the position of the man who said, ‘I can believe the
    impossible, but not the improbable.’’

    ‘That’s what you call a paradox, isn’t it?’ asked the other.

    ‘It’s what I call common sense, properly understood,’ replied Father
    Brown. ’It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story,
    that deals with things we don’t understand, than a natural story that
    contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr
    Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and
    I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first
    presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and
    slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic
    at all. That is not impossible; it’s only incredible.

-- G. K. Chesterton, The Curse of the Golden Cross
%
16 points Alejandro1 02 May 2012 07:33:52PM

    The word problem may be an insidious form of question-begging. To
    speak of the Jewish problem is to postulate that the Jews are a
    problem; it is to predict (and recommend) persecution, plunder,
    shooting, beheading, rape, and the reading of Dr. Rosenberg's prose.
    Another disadvantage of fallacious problems is that they bring about
    solutions that are equally fallacious. Pliny (Book VIII of Natural
    History) is not satisfied with the observation that dragons attack
    elephants in the summer; he ventures the hypothesis that they do it in
    order to drink the elephants' blood, which, as everyone knows, is very
    cold.

-- Jorge Luis Borges, Dr. Américo Castro is Alarmed
%
16 points baiter 01 May 2012 01:07:24PM

    My function is to raise the possibility, 'Hey, you know, some of this
    stuff might be bullshit.'

-- Robert Anton Wilson
%
16 points CaveJohnson 13 June 2012 03:00:40PM

    In general, nothing is more difficult than not pretending to
    understand.

-- Nicolás Gómez Dávila, source
%
16 points pkkm 02 June 2012 07:04:03AM

    People who do great things look at the same world everyone else does,
    but notice some odd detail that's compellingly mysterious.

-- Paul Graham, What Youll Wish Youd Known
%
16 points lukeprog 22 September 2012 01:28:25PM

    The problem with any ideology is that it gives the answer before you
    look at the evidence.

-- Bill Clinton
%
16 points Matt_Caulfield 03 September 2012 03:55:04PM

    It may be of course that savages put food on a dead man because they
    think that a dead man can eat, or weapons with a dead man because they
    think a dead man can fight. But personally I do not believe that they
    think anything of the kind. I believe they put food or weapons on the
    dead for the same reason that we put flowers, because it is an
    exceedingly natural and obvious thing to do. We do not understand, it
    is true, the emotion that makes us think it is obvious and natural;
    but that is because, like all the important emotions of human
    existence it is essentially irrational.

    G. K. Chesterton

%
16 points DanielVarga 10 October 2012 10:49:46PM

    I love uncertainty. In many situations I'd rather try something just
    to see what happens. I'm the character that gets killed first in every
    horror movie, but that's fine with me, since life is not generally
    like a horror movie.

-- Noah Smith
%
16 points Alejandro1 06 October 2012 03:35:52PM

    I prefer this sort of distant, reductionist, structural approach to
    analysing the race because there's little reason to believe in the
    validity of the implicit theories or "models" lurking behind pundits'
    gut judgments. When I heard Mr Romney's 47% comments, I thought "Oooh,
    he's toast!" and then I stopped myself and acknowledged that I
    actually have no rational basis for believing that his remarks would
    in the final analysis hurt Mr Romney at all. What percentage of
    undecided or weakly-decided swing-state voters ever caught wind of Mr
    Romney's embarrassing chat? I didn't know! Of those who became aware
    of it, how many cared? I didn't know! So why did I think "Oooh, he's
    toast!" Because I am human, and I make most judgments and decisions on
    the basis of crackpot hunches, the underlying logic of which is almost
    completely inscrutable to me.

-- Will Wilkinson
%
16 points gwern 06 October 2012 12:49:25AM

    Despite the difficulty of exact Bayesian inference in complex
    mathematical models, the essence of Bayesian reasoning is frequently
    used in everyday life. One example has been immortalized in the words
    of Sherlock Holmes to his friend Dr. Watson: "How often have I said to
    you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
    however improbable, must be the truth?" (Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign
    of Four, 1890, Ch. 6). This reasoning is actually a consequence of
    Bayesian belief updating, as expressed in Equation 4.4. Let me
    re-state it this way: "How often have I said to you that when p(D|θ_i
    ) = 0 for all i!=j, then, no matter how small the prior p(θ_j ) 0 is,
    the posterior p(θ_j |D) must equal one." Somehow it sounds better the
    way Holmes said it.

-- Kruschke 2010, Doing Bayesian Data Analysis, pg56-57
%
16 points arundelo 02 October 2012 01:58:29AM

    My wife and I, since we'd been in lock-down with each other, oh, these
    past nine years, have developed a bit of shorthand. If one of us says
    something the other has heard so many times before that tears of
    boredom flow, the victim has a right to protest. The victim says,
    "That's on the tape." As in, that's on your tape -- the list of
    stories and obsessions you've rewound so often I could sing along with
    them in my sleep.

-- Mark Schone
%
16 points roland 16 November 2012 06:08:58PM

    In the way that skepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public
    concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the
    fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and
    pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the
    skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our
    role in it might be. Their motives are in many ways consonant with
    science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need
    to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness.
    None of us comes fully equipped.

-- Carl Sagan
%
16 points Stabilizer 04 November 2012 07:09:05AM

    "Look," [Deutsch] went on, "I can’t stop you from writing an article
    about a weird English guy who thinks there are parallel universes. But
    I think that style of thinking is kind of a put-down to the reader.
    It’s almost like saying, If you’re not weird in these ways, you’ve got
    no hope as a creative thinker. That’s not true. The weirdness is only
    superficial."

New Yorker article on David Deutsch

(I saw this on Scott Aaronsons blog)
%
16 points Nisan 03 November 2012 06:34:57AM

    And then she said, "Ha ha ha, I figured out how to remove the closing
    quotation mark! From now on, the whole future is my story!

-- Aristosophy. I like to think this is about the Robots Rebellion.
%
16 points GabrielDuquette 01 December 2012 05:29:20PM

    Nobody likes to face the more painful question, What Made the Dogs
    Want to Leave?

-- TheThomason
%
15 points Steve_Rayhawk 15 June 2009 12:21:54AM

    Practically anything can go faster than Disc light, which is lazy and
    tame, unlike ordinary light. The only thing known to go faster than
    ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin
    Wheedle.  He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king,
    and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a
    king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir
    instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary
    particles—kingons, or possibly queons—that do this job, but of course
    succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an
    anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery
    to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in
    order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at
    that point, the bar closed.

-- Terry Pratchett, Mort, on mind-projection fallacy intuitions (and/or on
Jack Sarfatti's theories of superluminal signaling)
%
15 points MBlume 04 July 2009 10:30:45PM

    "I'm writing a book on magic," I explain, and I'm asked, "Real magic?"
    By real magic people mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts, and
    supernatural powers. "No," I answer. "Conjuring tricks, not real
    magic."

    Real magic, in other words, refers to the magic that is not real,
    while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real
    magic.

-- from Net of Magic, by Lee Siegel
%
15 points wuwei 04 July 2009 02:33:44AM

    There is a mathematical style in which proofs are presented as strings
    of unmotivated tricks that miraculously do the job, but we found
    greater intellectual satisfaction in showing how each next step in the
    argument, if not actually forced, is at least something sweetly
    reasonable to try. Another reason for avoiding [pulling] rabbits [out
    of the magicians's hat] as much as possible was that we did not want
    to teach proofs, we wanted to teach proof design. Eventually,
    expelling rabbits became another joy of my professional life.

-- Edsger Dijkstra
%
15 points KatjaGrace 03 July 2009 07:03:33AM

    Philosophy triumphs easily over past and future evils; but present
    evils triumph over it.

-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
%
15 points JohannesDahlstrom 02 July 2009 10:02:28PM

    The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.

-- Terry Pratchett, 'Hogfather'
%
15 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 August 2009 04:07:44AM

    Freedom is understood in contrast to its various opposites. I can be
    free as opposed to being presently coerced. I can be free as opposed
    to being under some other person's general control. I can be free as
    opposed to being subject to delusions or insanity. I can be free as
    opposed to being ruled by the state in denial of ordinary personal
    liberties. I can be free as opposed to being in jail or prison. I can
    be free as opposed to living under unusually heavy personal
    obligations. I can be free as opposed to being burdened by bias or
    prejudice. I can even be free (or free spirited) as opposed to being
    governed by ordinary social conventions. The question that needs to be
    asked, and which hardly ever is asked, is whether I can be free as
    opposed to being causally determined. Given that some kind of causal
    determinism is presupposed in the very concept of human action, it
    would be odd if this were so. Why does anyone think that it is?

-- David Hill
%
15 points loqi 22 October 2009 05:31:07PM

    Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning.

-- Edsger Dijkstra
%
15 points ABranco 01 December 2009 03:52:12AM

    I will repeat this point again until I get hoarse: a mistake is not
    something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the
    information until that point.

-- Nicholas Nassim Taleb
%
15 points RobinZ 29 November 2009 11:57:11PM

    "My style" sure makes a great crutch for putting off learning how to
    draw better, doesn't it?

Egypt "peganthyrus" Urnash, comment thread, a quick drawing lesson, July
17, 2008
%
15 points dclayh 01 February 2010 10:50:42PM

    That is not dead which can eternal lie,/ And with strange aeons even
    Death may die.

-- H.P. Lovecraft, clearly talking about cryonic preservation
%
15 points Kevin 01 February 2010 08:38:40PM

    Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.

-- Isaac Asimov via Salvor Hardin, Foundation
%
15 points Tom_Talbot 01 February 2010 07:11:06PM

"If the tool you have is a hammer, make the problem look like a nail."

-- Steven W. Smith,
    The Scientist and Engineers Guide to Digital Signal Processing
%
15 points gregconen 01 February 2010 05:50:19PM

    More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows
    you how good people are at evaluating risk.

-- Bruce Schneier
%
15 points roland 03 March 2010 05:43:15AM

    ...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a
    dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that
    information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it
    consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of
    information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that
    attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources
    that might consume it.

-- Herbert Simon 1971
%
15 points Matt_Duing 02 March 2010 03:47:45AM

    It is said that those who appreciate legislation and sausages should
    not see them being made. The same is true for human emotions.

-- Steven Pinker
%
15 points Seth_Goldin 03 June 2010 03:40:44AM

    There is no such thing as absolute certainty, but there is assurance
    sufficient for the purposes of human life.

-- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
%
15 points Matt_Duing 02 June 2010 04:03:17AM

    It's wonderful how much we suck compared to us ten years from now!

-- Michael Blume
%
15 points josht 08 July 2010 09:30:39AM

A recent one from Linux Weekly News that gives insight into rationality:

    Side note: when a respected information source covers something where
    you have on-the-ground experience, the result is often to make you
    wonder how much fecal matter you've swallowed in areas outside your
    own expertise.

-- Rusty Russell
%
15 points Randaly 04 September 2010 03:01:09AM

    Test Your God.... Test[s] cannot harm a God of Truth, but will destroy
    fakes. Fake gods refuse test[s].

-- Dr. Gene Ray
%
15 points Hariant 03 November 2010 05:21:09AM

    Getting caught up in style and throwing away victory is something for
    the lower ranks to do. Captains can't even think about doing such a
    carefree thing. Don't try to be a good guy. It doesn't matter who owes
    who. From the instant they enter into a war, both sides are evil.

    Shunsui Kyōraku Bleach

Related to: Politics, Protection
%
15 points Perplexed 03 November 2010 02:54:38AM

    David Hume was right to predict that superstition would survive for
    hundreds of years after his death, but how could he have anticipated
    that his own work would inspire Kant to invent a whole new package of
    superstitions? Or that the incoherent system of Marx would move vast
    populations to engineer their own ruin? Or that the infantile rantings
    of the author of Mein Kampf would be capable of bringing the whole
    world to war?

    Perhaps we will one day succeed in immunizing our societies against
    such bouts of collective idiocy by establishing a social contract in
    which each child is systematically instructed in Humean skepticism.
    Such a new Emile would learn about the psychological weaknesses to
    which Homo sapiens is prey, and so would understand the wisdom of
    treating all authorities - political leaders and social role-models,
    academics and teachers, philosophers and prophets, poets and pop stars
    - as so many potential rogues and knoves, each out to exploit the
    universal human hunger for social status. He would therefore
    appreciate the necessity of doing all of his own thinking for himself.
    He would understand why and when to trust his neighbors. Above all, he
    would waste no time yearning for utopias that are incompatible with
    human nature.

-- Ken Binmore, in Natural Justice, p56
%
15 points gwern 24 December 2010 06:08:58PM

    "Claude Shannon once told me that as a kid, he remembered being stuck
    on a jigsaw puzzle. His brother, who was passing by, said to him: "You
    know: I could tell you something."

    That's all his brother said.

    Yet that was enough hint to help Claude solve the puzzle. The great
    thing about this hint... is that you can always give it to yourself."

-- Manuel Blum, Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student
%
15 points Automaton 03 December 2010 07:42:32AM

    On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will
    reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so
    that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.

-- Nietzsche
%
15 points RichardKennaway 06 January 2011 08:27:38PM

    Let us be certain of a fact before being concerned with its cause. It
    is true that this method is too lengthy for most people who naturally
    run to the cause and overlook the certitude about facts; but at last
    we will avoid the ridicule of finding the cause of what does not
    exist.

-- Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
%
15 points RichardKennaway 02 February 2011 01:41:35AM

    People who have been living with serious problems for a long time find
    it hard to imagine that there's been a solution within their reach all
    along. For the short term, it's easier to go on putting up with the
    problem than it is to change one's expectations.

-- paulwl (quoted here)

ETA: I thought this had the smell of Usenet about it, and on Google Groups
I found the original, written by one Alex Clark here. paulwl is actually
the person he was replying to.

BTW, there's quite a bit of rationality (and irrationality) on that
newsgroup on the subject of people looking for relationships (mostly men
looking for women), from way back when. I don't know if 1996 predates the
sort of PUA that has been talked about on LW.
%
15 points NancyLebovitz 15 March 2011 06:25:02PM

    It's better to be lucky than smart,
    but it's easier to be smart twice than lucky twice
%
15 points CronoDAS 05 March 2011 01:50:12AM

    In the middle of every silver lining there is a big black cloud.

-- Alonzo Fyfe
%
15 points djcb 03 March 2011 06:23:18AM

    while enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere,
    on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disaster.

    Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)

[ In The Intelligent Investor, Benjamin Graham, who was Warren Buffett's
mentor, shares his views on investing for a wider audience. I like the
rationalist, no-nonsense approach he takes (as seen in this quote) esp. in
a field like this ]
%
15 points Matt_Duing 05 April 2011 02:13:41AM

    The most important relic of early humans is the modern mind.

-- Steven Pinker
%
15 points Risto_Saarelma 12 June 2011 05:30:47PM

    The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke remarked that "any
    sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".
    Clarke was referring to the fantastic inventions we might discover in
    the future or in our travels to advanced civilizations. However, the
    insight also applies to self-perception. When we turn our attention to
    our own minds, we are faced with trying to understand an unimaginably
    advanced technology. We can't possibly know (let alone keep track of)
    the tremendous number of mechanical influences on our behavior because
    we inhabit an extraordinarily complicated machine. So we develop a
    shorthand, a belief in the causal efficacy of our conscious thoughts.
    We believe in the magic of our own causal agency.

    Daniel M. Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will

%
15 points NancyLebovitz 08 June 2011 10:00:01PM

    Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people
    trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were
    tricked into entering.

-- Gary Snyder (bOING bOING #9, 1992)

I don't have a strong feeling about the accuracy of the percentage, but
the general point sounds plausible.
%
15 points NancyLebovitz 06 June 2011 01:21:30PM

    If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is
    ready, we shall never begin.

-- Ivan Turgenev
%
15 points MichaelGR 02 June 2011 06:36:26PM

    The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in war.

-- WSJ article about Navy SEALs
%
15 points loqi 01 June 2011 06:54:15PM

        If you can't think intuitively, you may be able to verify specific
        factual claims, but you certainly can't think about history.

    Well, maybe we can't think about history. Intuition is unreliable.
    Just because you want to think intelligently about something doesn't
    mean it's possible to do so.

Jewish Atheist, in reply to Mencius Moldbug
%
15 points Nominull 04 August 2011 04:14:24PM

    Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And
    we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about,
    but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes.

-- Bruce Sterling, cyberpunk author
%
15 points CronoDAS 24 September 2011 10:55:38PM

    No matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, turn back.

-- Turkish proverb
%
15 points Thomas 05 September 2011 01:25:02PM

    The investor who finds a way to make soap from peanuts has more
    genuine imagination than the revolutionary with a bayonet, because he
    has cultivated the faculty of imagining the hidden potentiality of the
    real. This is much harder than imagining the unreal, which may be why
    there are so many more utopians than inventors

    Joe Sobran

%
15 points GabrielDuquette 01 September 2011 02:38:27PM

    On practical questions of urgent importance we must make up our minds
    one way or the other even when we know that the evidence is
    incomplete. To refuse to make up our minds is equivalent to deciding
    to leave things as they are (which is just as likely as any other to
    be the wrong solution).

-- Robert H. Thouless
%
15 points Thomas 02 October 2011 09:38:21AM

    If the Coyote orders all those gizmos then why doesn't he just order
    food?

    Unknown

%
15 points Nisan 22 November 2011 03:02:18AM

    Some years ago I was trying to decide whether or not to move to
    Harvard from Stanford. I had bored my friends silly with endless
    discussion. Finally, one of them said, "You’re one of our leading
    decision theorists. Maybe you should make a list of the costs and
    benefits and try to roughly calculate your expected utility." Without
    thinking, I blurted out, "Come on, Sandy, this is serious."

-- Persi Diaconis
%
15 points CaveJohnson 18 January 2012 07:36:34PM

    Most people are theists not because they were "reasoned into"
    believing in God, but because they applied Occam's razor at too early
    an age. Their simplest explanation for the reason that their parents,
    not to mention everyone else in the world, believed in God, was that
    God actually existed. The same could be said for, say, Australia.

-- Mencius Moldbug
%
15 points gwern 01 January 2012 01:24:02AM

    "The general method that Wittgenstein does suggest is that of ’shewing
    that a man has supplied no meaning for certain signs in his
    sentences’.

    I can illustrate the method from Wittgenstein’s later way of
    discussing problems. He once greeted me with the question: ‘Why do
    people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the
    earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis? I replied: ‘I
    suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.’
    ‘Well,’ he asked, ‘what would it have looked like if it had looked as
    if the earth turned on its axis?’

    This question brought it out that I had hitherto given no relevant
    meaning to ‘it looks as if’ in ‘it looks as if the sun goes round the
    earth’.

    My reply was to hold out my hands with the palms upward, and raise
    them from my knees in a circular sweep, at the same time leaning
    backwards and assuming a dizzy expression. ‘Exactly!’ he said."

-- Elizabeth Anscombe, An Introduction To Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1959);
    apropos of a recent Scot Sumner blog post
%
15 points wilder 01 February 2012 10:34:36PM

    Wishing for something that is logically impossible is a sign that
    there is something better to wish for.

-- David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
%
15 points gyokuro 02 March 2012 04:39:18AM

    "I've never ever felt wise," Derk said frankly. "But I suppose it is a
    tempation, to stare into distance and make people think you are."

    "It's humbug," said the dragon. "It's also stupid. It stops you
    learning more."

-- Diana Wynne Jones, Dark Lord of Derkholm
%
15 points Alejandro1 01 March 2012 06:23:41PM

    The demons told me that there is a hell for the sentimental and the
    pedantic. They are abandoned in an endless palace, more empty than
    full, and windowless. The condemned walk about as if searching for
    something, and, as we might expect, they soon begin to say that the
    greatest torment consists in not participating in the vision of God,
    that moral suffering is worse than physical suffering, and so on. Then
    the demons hurl them into the sea of fire, from where no one will ever
    take them out.

-- Adolfo Bioy Casares (my translation)
%
15 points FiftyTwo 03 April 2012 09:31:53PM

    I know a lot of scientists as well as laymen are scornful of
    philosophy - perhaps understandably so. Reading academic philosophy
    journals often makes my heart sink too. But without exception, we all
    share philosophical background assumptions and presuppositions. The
    penalty of _not _ doing philosophy isn't to transcend it, but simply
    to give bad philosophical arguments a free pass.

-- David Pearce
%
15 points Oscar_Cunningham 01 April 2012 02:07:43PM

    You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.

-- Marvin Minsky
%
15 points Spurlock 02 April 2012 04:44:28AM

    The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and
    meets resistance.

-- St Augustine of Hippo
%
15 points komponisto 01 May 2012 03:05:58PM

    [S]top whining and start hacking.

-- Paul Graham
%
15 points Mark_Eichenlaub 02 May 2012 05:33:38AM

    If you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an
    excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.

-- Paul Graham What You’ll Wish You’d Known
http://paulgraham.com/hs.html
%
15 points GabrielDuquette 02 June 2012 05:26:51AM

    Problem solving is hunting; it is savage pleasure and we are born to
    it.

-- Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs
%
15 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 July 2012 08:45:06PM

    "Buddhism IS different. It's the followers who aren’t."

-- A Dust Over India.

Commentary: Reading this made me realize that many religions genuinely are
different from each other. Christianity is genuinely different from
Judaism, Islam is genuinely different from Christianity, Hinduism is
genuinely different from all three. It's religious people who are the same
everywhere; not the same as each other, obviously, but drawn from the same
distribution. Is this true of atheistic humanists? Of transhumanists?
Could you devise an experiment to test whether it was so, would you bet on
the results of that experiment? Will they say the same of LessWrongers,
someday? And if so, what's the point?

Now that I think on it, though, there might be a case for scientists being
drawn from a different distribution, or computer programmers, or for that
matter science fiction fans (are those all the same distributions as each
other, I wonder?). It's not really hopeless.
%
15 points cousin_it 16 August 2012 05:35:13PM

    If cats looked like frogs we’d realize what nasty, cruel little
    bastards they are.

-- Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
%
15 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 August 2012 05:04:58PM

    "Silver linings are like finding change in your couch. It's there, but
    it never amounts to much."

-- http://www.misfile.com/?date=2012-08-10
%
15 points aausch 05 August 2012 07:52:35PM

    Did you teach him wisdom as well as valor, Ned? she wondered. Did you
    teach him how to kneel? The graveyards of the Seven Kingdoms were full
    of brave men who had never learned that lesson

-- Catelyn Stark, A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin
%
15 points cata 03 September 2012 11:10:45PM

    Does the order of the two terminal conditions matter? / Think about
    it.

    Does the order of the two terminal conditions matter? / Try it out!

    Does the order of the two previous answers matter? / Yes. Think first,
    then try.

    Friedman and Felleisen, The Little Schemer

%
15 points katydee 02 September 2012 06:51:54PM

    When we were first drawn together as a society, it had pleased God to
    enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which we
    once esteemed truths, were errors; and that others, which we had
    esteemed errors, were real truths. From time to time He has been
    pleased to afford us farther light, and our principles have been
    improving, and our errors diminishing.

    Now we are not sure that we are arrived at the end of this
    progression, and at the perfection of spiritual or theological
    knowledge; and we fear that, if we should once print our confession of
    faith, we should feel ourselves as if bound and confin'd by it, and
    perhaps be unwilling to receive farther improvement, and our
    successors still more so, as conceiving what we their elders and
    founders had done, to be something sacred, never to be departed from.

-- Michael Welfare, quoted in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
%
15 points katydee 13 September 2012 05:07:40AM

    There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true
    nobility is being superior to your former self.

-- Ernest Hemingway
%
15 points peter_hurford 01 September 2012 06:16:01PM

    Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In
    our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help
    will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.

-- Sagan
%
15 points MBlume 01 October 2012 07:56:20PM

    I can pick up a mole (animal) and throw it. Anything I can throw
    weighs one pound. One pound is one kilogram.

-- Randal Munroe, A Mole of Moles
%
15 points beoShaffer 12 November 2012 05:17:09AM

    I've never heard more different explanations for anything parents tell
    kids than why they shouldn't swear. Every parent I know forbids their
    children to swear, and yet no two of them have the same justification.
    It's clear most start with not wanting kids to swear, then make up the
    reason afterward.

-- Paul Graham in The Lies We Tell Kids
%
15 points lukeprog 12 November 2012 03:39:32AM

    Slogans like "practice random acts of kindness" feel good and are easy
    to put into practice. But if we don’t take our activism more seriously
    than that, our motive is probably a desire to feel good about
    ourselves, to help ourselves or those close to us, or to act out our
    self-identity. The endpoint of authentic compassion is a desire to do
    the most good that one can, to be as effective as possible in creating
    a world with less suffering and destruction and more joy. Figuring out
    how we can do the most good takes careful thought over a long period
    of time, and it means moving into new and possibly uncomfortable areas
    of advocacy. But the importance of taking our activism seriously and
    approaching it from this utilitarian perspective cannot be overstated.
    It will mean a difference between life and death, between happiness
    and suffering, for thousands of people, for thousands of acres of the
    ecosystem, and for tens of thousands of animals.

-- Nick Cooney, Change of Heart
%
15 points BerryPick6 06 November 2012 03:08:10PM

    Recognizing the startling resurgence in realism, Don Philahue (of The
    Don Philahue Show) invited a member of Realists Anonymous to bare his
    soul on television. After a brief introduction documenting the spread
    of realism, Philahue turned to his guest:

    DP: What kinds of realism were you into, Hilary?

    H: The whole bag, Don. I was a realist about logical terms, abstract
    entities, theoretical postulates - you name it.

    DP: And causality, what about causality?

    H: That too, Don. (Audience gasps.)

    DP: I'm going to press you here, Hilary. Did you at any time accept
    moral realism?

    H: (staring at feet): Yes.

    DP: What effect did all this realism have on your life?

    H: I would spend hours aimlessly wandering the streets, kicking large
    stones and shouting, "I refute you thus!" It's embarrassing to recall.

    DP: There was worse, wasn't there Hilary?

    H: I can't deny it, don. (Audience gasps.) Instead of going to work I
    would sit at home fondling ashtrays and reading voraciously about
    converging scientific theories. I kept a copy of "Hitler: A Study in
    Tyranny" hidden in the icebox, and when no one was around I would take
    it our and chant "The Nazis were bad. The Nazis were really bad."

-- A dialogue by Philip Gasper
%
15 points katydee 02 December 2012 08:15:19AM

    Do not read written works and think, "This is the Way." Written works
    are like the gate to approach the Way. Thus, there are people who
    remain ignorant of the Way regardless of how much they have learned
    and how many Chinese characters they know. Though they face the pages
    and read as skillfully as though they were annotating the ancients,
    they are ignorant of the truth and so do not make the Way their own.

-- Yagyū Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword
%
15 points GabrielDuquette 01 December 2012 03:44:40PM

    Keep your solutions close, and your problems closer.

-- afoolswisdom
%
15 points Will_Newsome 01 December 2012 05:13:57PM

    When you have run the length of various practices and none of those
    practices remain in your mind, that very lack of mind itself is the
    heart of "all things." When you have exhaustively learned the various
    practices and techniques and made great effort in disciplined
    training, there will be action in your arms, legs, and body but none
    in your mind; you will have distanced yourself from training, but will
    not be in opposition to it, and you will have freedom in whatever
    techniques you perform. You yourself will be unaware of where your
    mind is, and neither demons nor heresies will be able to find it.

-- Yagyū Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword
%
14 points gjm 19 April 2009 01:07:40AM

    Most things are, in fact, slippery slopes. And if you start backing
    off from one thing because it's a slippery slope, who knows where
    you'll stop?

-- Sean M Burke
%
14 points dreeves 18 April 2009 08:12:26PM

    Faced with the choice of changing one's mind and proving that there is
    no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

-- John Kenneth Galbraith
%
14 points sparrowsfall 20 May 2009 03:11:31PM

    From the inside, ideology usually looks like common sense.

-- John Quiggin

http://crookedtimber.org/2009/04/22/the-ideology-that-dare-not-speak-its-name/
%
14 points RichardKennaway 15 June 2009 12:06:21PM

    Your superior intellects are no match for our puny weapons!

(Variously attributed. TV Tropes says the Simpsons.)

Also variously interpreted. I take it as a caution against forgetting to
actually win with one's towering genius.
%
14 points RichardKennaway 15 June 2009 05:48:24AM

    The seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the
    ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in
    them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions
    what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and
    demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is
    fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty
    of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning
    the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he
    reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content,
    attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he
    performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling
    into either prejudice or leniency.

-- Alhazen (Abū Alī al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haitham)
%
14 points Lightwave 14 June 2009 11:18:30PM

"The lottery is a tax on those incapable of basic math."

-- Ambrose Bierce
%
14 points ajayjetti 11 August 2009 11:17:10PM

    Alice came to a fork in the road. "Which road do I take?" she asked.
    "Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat. "I don't know,"
    Alice answered. "Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter."

-- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
%
14 points Rain 01 September 2009 11:52:15PM

    I am only one, but I am still one. I cannot do everything, but still I
    can do something; and just because I cannot do everything, I will not
    refuse to do the something that I can do.

-- Helen Keller
%
14 points bogus 01 February 2010 03:58:08PM

    If [Ayn] Rand really wanted to build an individualist sub-culture, she
    would have done so in an evolutionarily informed way. If people
    naturally care about the opinions of others, jumping on people is a
    good way to get dishonest conformity, but a bad way to get an honest
    exchange of ideas. Instead, an individualist sub-culture must be built
    upon tolerance and honesty. I'd suggest three key norms:

        Don't think less of people who sincerely disagree.  Do think less
        of people who insincerely agree.  Do think less of people who
        think less of people who sincerely disagree.

-- Bryan Caplan
    Reference: Guardians of Ayn Rand
%
14 points Rain 01 February 2010 12:42:53PM

    O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth
    to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go
    forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe.
    O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with
    our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms
    of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with
    the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste
    their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the
    hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to
    turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the
    wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports
    of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in
    spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave
    and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their
    hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make
    heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white
    snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of
    love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful
    refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with
    humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

-- Mark Twain, excerpt from The War Prayer
%
14 points Yvain 01 February 2010 12:24:51PM

    In our public medical personas, we often act as though morality
    consisted only in following society's conventions: we do this not so
    much out of laziness but because we recognize that it is better that
    the public think of doctors as old-fashioned or stupid, than that they
    should think us evil.

-- The Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine
%
14 points anonym 01 February 2010 06:50:31AM

    Million-to-one odds happen eight times a day in New York.

-- Penn Jillette
%
14 points steven0461 02 March 2010 11:51:17PM

    The man who lies to others has merely hidden away the truth, but the
    man who lies to himself has forgotten where he put it.

old Arab proverb, according to this page, which is itself interesting
%
14 points RichardKennaway 01 March 2010 08:56:57PM

    There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in
    the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel,
    responsibility lies with you.

-- J.K. Rowling, Harvard commencement address.
%
14 points RobinZ 01 April 2010 11:33:04PM

    Blind alley, though. If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's
    ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved
    anything.

-- Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
%
14 points komponisto 01 April 2010 09:39:48PM

    What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without
    evidence.

-- Christopher Hitchens
%
14 points RichardKennaway 01 June 2010 08:45:00PM

    A certain mother habitually rewards her small son with ice cream after
    he eats his spinach. What additional information would you need to be
    able to predict whether the child will: a. Come to love or hate
    spinach, b. Love or hate ice cream, or c. Love or hate Mother?

-- Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind
%
14 points Houshalter 01 June 2010 08:29:38PM

    It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to
    make sense.

Another Twain quote.
%
14 points JoshuaZ 01 June 2010 07:42:42PM

    Were it possible to trace the succession of ideas in the mind of Sir
    Isaac Newton, during the time that he made his greatest discoveries, I
    make no doubt but our amazement at the extent of his genius would a
    little subside. But if, when a man publishes his discoveries, he
    either through a design, or through habit, omit the intermediary steps
    by which he himself arrived at them, it is no wonder that his
    speculations confound them, and that the generality of mankind stand
    amazed at his reach of thought. If a man ascend to the top of a
    building by the help of a common ladder, but cut away most of the
    steps after he has done with them, leaving only every ninth of tenth
    step, the view of the ladder, in the condition which he has pleased to
    exhibit it, gives us a prodigious, but unjust view of the man who
    could have made use of it. But if he had intended that any body should
    follow him, he should have left the ladder as he constructed it, or
    perhaps as he found it, for it might have been a mere accident that
    threw it in his way... I think that the interests of science have
    suffered by the excessive admiration and wonder with which several
    first rate philosophers are considered, and that an opinion of the
    greater equality of mankind, in point of genius, and power of
    understanding, would be of real service in the present age." - Joseph
    Priestly, The History and present State of Electricity

The section where I've added an ellipsis is a section where he discusses
Newton in more detail. That entire part of the text is worth reading.
Priestly wrote the book before he did his work on the composition of air.
The book is, as far as I am aware, the first attempt at actual history of
science. (I'm meaning to read the whole thing at some point, but the
occasionally archaic grammar makes for slow reading.)
%
14 points roland 01 June 2010 06:30:07PM

    Conscious thought leads people to put disproportionate weight on
    attributes that are accessible, plausible and easy to verbalize, and
    therefore too little weight on other attributes. -- Ap Dijksterhuis

%
14 points Alan 05 July 2010 04:22:00AM

    What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.

-- Anatole France
%
14 points Rain 02 July 2010 12:06:30AM

    A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time.

-- George Iles
%
14 points ata 05 September 2010 03:29:48AM

    The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile
    but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with the
    indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine
    meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

-- Stanley Kubrick
%
14 points MichaelGR 06 November 2010 05:09:59PM

    A horse that can count to ten is a remarkable horse,
    not a remarkable mathematician.

-- Samuel Johnson
%
14 points aausch 04 November 2010 03:17:11AM

    "The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and
    blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails.
    You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at
    night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only
    love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or
    know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only
    one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what
    wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust,
    never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and
    never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look
    what a lot of things there are to learn."

-- T.H. White (The Once and Future King)
%
14 points jaimeastorga2000 02 November 2010 08:42:37PM

For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite
is rightly to apply it. The greatest minds, as they are capable of the
highest excellences, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations; and
those who travel very slowly may yet make far greater progress, provided
they keep always to the straight road, than those who, while they run,
forsake it.

-- René Descartes, Discourse on the Method
%
14 points Lightwave 03 December 2010 09:09:36AM

    Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp
    of his lowly origin.

-- Charles Darwin
%
14 points Kutta 03 January 2011 09:20:55AM

    I definitely think there is great art out there that was solely
    designed to give people what they want; in film, someone like Chaplin
    comes to mind. I mean, giving people what they want is an art unto
    itself, but I think the real challenge in that method is finding a way
    to give them what they want while giving them more.

-- Jonathan Henderson
%
14 points MichaelGR 03 February 2011 02:52:24PM

    Life is tough, but it's tougher if you're stupid.

-- John Wayne, Sands of Iwo Jima (1949)
%
14 points MichaelGR 03 February 2011 02:50:58PM

    History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

-- Mark Twain
%
14 points billswift 01 February 2011 07:55:18PM

    Too broad a viewpoint, too philosophical an outlook paralyzes the
    will.

-- Robert A Heinlein, Lost Legacy
%
14 points Dreaded_Anomaly 11 March 2011 04:43:52AM

    If the wonder's gone when the truth is known,
    there never was any wonder.

-- Gregory House, M.D. (House Season 4, Episode 8
    "You Don't Want to Know," written by Sara Hess)
%
14 points Louie 09 March 2011 11:42:52AM

"Anything you can do, I can do meta" -Rudolf Carnap
%
14 points Cyan 07 March 2011 04:17:55PM

    What exactly qualifies some physical systems to play the role of
    'measurer'? Was the wavefunction of the world waiting to jump for
    thousands of millions of years until a single-celled living creature
    appeared? Or did it have to wait a little longer, for some better
    qualified system... with a PhD?

-- John Stewart Bell, Against Measurement in Physics World, 1990.
%
14 points Costanza 04 March 2011 02:41:33PM

An irrationality quote from Samuel Johnson via Boswell:

    After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time
    together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the
    nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely
    ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not
    true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity
    with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force
    against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it
    thus."

%
14 points mispy 05 April 2011 03:08:38AM

    Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to
    imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend
    those things which are there.

-- Richard Feynman
%
14 points Apprentice 04 April 2011 03:17:38PM

    Virtually everything in science is ultimately circular, so the main
    thing is just to make the circles as big as possible.

-- Richard D. Janda and Brian D. Joseph, 2003,
    The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, p. 111.
%
14 points scav 03 August 2011 10:08:20AM

    I confess, for my part, that I have been taken in, over and over
    again. I have been taken in by acquaintances, and I have been taken in
    (of course) by friends; far oftener by friends than by any other class
    of persons. How came I to be so deceived? Had I quite misread their
    faces? No. Believe me, my first impression of those people, founded on
    face and manner alone, was invariably true. My mistake was in
    suffering them to come nearer to me and explain themselves away.

-- Hunted Down: the detective stories of Charles Dickens (Charles Dickens)
%
14 points AngryParsley 03 August 2011 05:00:10AM

    "You could trifle with your mind, using activators and redactors from
    your own thought-shop, and put yourself back into the state of mind
    you were in before the Curia forced you to experience your victims'
    lives."

    "Is this some sort of test or quiz? You know I shall not do that."

    "Why not?"

    Ironjoy started to turn away, but then stopped, turned, and answered
    the question. "If I were now as I was then, I would gladly change my
    self to remain as I was then; but I am now as I am now. The me that I
    am now has no desire to be any other me. Isn’t that the fundamental
    nature of the self?"

-- The Phoenix Exultant by John C. Wright
%
14 points Nic_Smith 02 August 2011 08:05:28PM

    I think that people use a rule of thumb when deciding what things in
    life are worth learning. Most people seek knowledge in one of the
    following three categories:

        What many other people learn (calculus, C++, and so on) What is
        easy to learn (hula-hooping, Ruby, and so on) What has value that
        is easy to appreciate (thermonuclear physics, for example, or that
        ridiculously loud whistle where you stick your fingers in your
        mouth) -- Land of Lisp. Conrad Barski.

%
14 points MichaelGR 11 September 2011 04:37:05AM

    "When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a
    conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you
    get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in
    business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more
    depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the
    bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in
    business to give people what they want. It’s the truth."

-- Steve Jobs, [Wired, February 1996]
%
14 points Normal_Anomaly 03 September 2011 01:08:18AM

    From the day we arrive on the planet

    and blinking, step into the sun

    there's more to see than can ever be seen

    more to do than can ever be done

-- The Lion King opening song
%
14 points p4wnc6 04 October 2011 04:06:03AM

    Most people who quote Einstein’s declaration that "God does not play
    dice" seem not to realize that a dice-playing God would be an
    improvement over the actual situation

-- Scott Aaronson, from here
%
14 points JenniferRM 02 November 2011 12:17:36AM

    All scientists despise the ideology of 'breakthroughs' --- I mean the
    belief that science proceeds from one revelation to another, each one
    opening up a new world of understanding and advancing still farther a
    sharp line of demarcation between what is true and what is false.
    Everyone actually engaged in scientific research knows that this way
    of looking at things is altogether misleading, and that the frontier
    between understanding and bewilderment is rather like the plasma
    membrane of a cell as it creeps over its substratum, a pushing forward
    here, a retraction there --- an exploratory probing that will
    eventually move forward the whole body of the cell... in real life,
    science does not prance from one mountain top to the next.

-- Peter Medawar in Does Ethology Throw Any Light on Human Behavior?
%
14 points RobinZ 02 December 2011 03:18:52AM

    Il est dans la nature humaine de penser sagement et d'agir d'une façon
    absurde.

    English translation: It is human nature to think wisely and to act in
    an absurd fashion.

-- Anatole France, Le livre de mon ami (1885)
%
14 points paper-machine 05 January 2012 03:51:50AM

    A critical analysis of the present global constellation -- one which
    offers no clear solution, no "practical" advice on what to do, and
    provides no light at the end of the tunnel, since one is well aware
    that this light might belong to a train crashing towards us -- usually
    meets with reproach: "Do you mean we should do nothing? Just sit and
    wait?" One should gather the courage to answer: "YES, precisely that!"
    There are situations when the only truly "practical" thing to do is to
    resist the temptation to engage immediately and to "wait and see" by
    means of a patient, critical analysis.

-- Slavoj Žižek, Violence
Admittedly not the most clear elucidation of the subject of how urgency
(fabricated or otherwise) should affect ethical deliberation, but see also
his essay "Jack Bauer and the Ethics of Urgency" -- if you're into that
sort of thing.
%
14 points CaveJohnson 08 February 2012 05:51:26PM

    When people talk about the importance of democracy, it is never
    democracy as it has ever actually functioned, with the politicians
    that have actually been elected, and the policies that have actually
    been implemented. It is always democracy as people imagine it will
    operate once they succeed in electing "the right people" — by which
    they mean, people who agree almost completely with their own views,
    and who are consistent and incorruptible in their implementation of
    the resulting policies.

-- Ben O'Neill, here

Considering the above quote can be used to criticize nearly any popular
political position I don't think it is inherently mind-killing. Also since
we all agree democracy is a good thing this isn't even very political. The
original article and context obviously does make it somewhat political.
%
14 points Alejandro1 01 February 2012 04:55:17PM

    "Stay, 'tis just a figure!" Root laughed rather winningly, reaching
    out to touch Locke's shoulder.

    "A faulty one," Daniel said, "for you are an alchemist."

    "I am called an Alchemist. Within living memory, Daniel, everyone who
    studied what I—and you—study was called by that name. And most persons
    even today observe no distinction between Alchemy and the younger and
    more vigorous order of knowledge that is associated with your club."

    "I am too exhausted to harry you through all of your evasions. Out of
    respect for your friends Mr. Locke, and for Leibniz, I shall give you
    the benefit of the doubt, and wish you well," Daniel said.

    "God save you, Mr. Waterhouse."

    "And you, Mr. Root. But I say this to you—and you as well, Mr. Locke.
    As I came in here I saw a map, lately taken from this house, burning
    in the fire. The map was empty, for it depicted the ocean—most likely,
    a part of it where no man has ever been. A few lines of latitude were
    ruled across that vellum void, and some legendary isles drawn in, with
    great authority, and where the map-maker could not restrain himself he
    drew phantastickal monsters. That map, to me, is Alchemy. It is good
    that it burnt, and fitting that it burnt tonight, the eve of a
    Revolution that I will be so bold as to call my life's work. In a few
    years Mr. Hooke will learn to make a proper chronometer, finishing
    what Mr. Huygens began thirty years ago, and then the Royal Society
    will draw maps with lines of longitude as well as latitude, giving us
    a grid— what we call a Cartesian grid, though 'twas not his idea—and
    where there be islands, we will rightly draw them. Where there are
    none, we will draw none, nor dragons, nor sea-monsters—and that will
    be the end of Alchemy."

-- Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver.
%
14 points NancyLebovitz 06 March 2012 12:15:36PM

    Carefully observe those good qualities wherein our enemies excel us

-- Plutarch, found here
%
14 points James_Miller 01 March 2012 03:22:58PM

    Had no idea so much strategy was possible in Rock, Paper, Scissors?
    The rules of the game itself may be simple, but the human mind is not.

-- Natalie Wolchover
%
14 points Konkvistador 12 April 2012 07:39:12AM

    The most fundamental form of human stupidity is forgetting what we
    were trying to do in the first place

-- Nietzsche
%
14 points Ezekiel 04 May 2012 10:52:03PM

    When scientists discuss papers:

    "I don't think this inference is entirely reasonable. If you're using
    several non-independent variables you're liable to accumulate more
    error than your model accounts for."

    When scientists discuss grants:

    "A guy who worked at the NSF once told me if we light a candle inside
    this jackal skull, the funders will smile upon our hopes."

    "I'll get the altar!"

-- Zach Weiner, SMBC #2559
%
14 points Old_Rationality 02 May 2012 11:44:04AM

    The atmosphere of political parties, whether in France or England, is
    not congenial to the formation of an impartial judgment. A Minister,
    who is in the thick of a tough parliamentary struggle, must use
    whatever arguments he can to defend his cause without inquiring too
    closely whether they are good, bad, or indifferent. However good they
    may be, they will probably not convince his political opponents, and
    they can scarcely be so bad as not to carry some sort of conviction to
    the minds of those who are predisposed to support him.

-- Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt
%
14 points Nominull 02 May 2012 01:39:17AM

    Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if
    the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?

-- Kurt Vonnegut
%
14 points MichaelGR 03 May 2012 05:31:34PM

    "No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for
    reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance."

    Confucius

%
14 points AlexMennen 06 June 2012 04:31:12PM

    The present impossibility of giving a scientific explanation is no
    proof that there is no scientific explanation. The unexplained is not
    to be identified with the unexplainable, and the strange and
    extraordinary nature of a fact is not a justification for attributing
    it to powers above nature.

-- The Catholic Encyclopedia
%
14 points shminux 05 June 2012 06:05:55PM

    If you pay nothing for expert advise you will value it at epsilon more
    than nothing, if you pay five figures for it you will clear your
    schedule and implement recommendations within the day. In addition to
    this being one of consulting’s worst-kept secrets, it suggests
    persuasive reasons why you should probably extract a commitment out of
    software customers prior to giving them access for the software. Doing
    this will automatically make people value your software more

-- Patrick McKenzie,
    the guy who gets instrumental rationality on the gut level.

More from the same source:

    I always thought I really hated getting email. It turns out that I was
    not a good reporter of my own actual behavior, which is something
    you’ll hear quite a bit if you follow psychological research. (For
    example, something like 75% of Americans will report they voted for
    President Obama, which disagrees quite a bit with the ballot box. They
    do this partially because they misremember their own behavior and
    partially because they like to been seen as the type of person who
    voted for the winner. 99% of geeks will report never having bought
    anything as a result of an email. They do this because they
    misremember their own behavior and partially because they believe that
    buying stuff from "spam" is something that people with AOL email
    addresses do, and hence admitting that they, too, can be marketed to
    will cause them to lose status. The AppSumo sumo would be a good deal
    skinnier if that were actually the case, but geeks were all people
    before they were geeks, and people are statistically speaking terrible
    at introspection.)

%
14 points Alejandro1 04 July 2012 08:11:35AM

    Religion begins by being taken for granted; after a time, it is
    elaborately proved; at last comes a time (the present) when the whole
    effort is to induce people to let it alone.

-- John Stuart Mill (1854).
%
14 points peter_hurford 02 July 2012 07:35:13PM

    I begin with the assumption that suffering and death from lack of
    food, shelter, and medical care are bad. I think most people will
    agree about this, although one may reach the same view by different
    routes. I shall not argue for this view. People can hold all sorts of
    eccentric positions, and perhaps from some of them it would not follow
    that death by starvation is in itself bad. It is difficult, perhaps
    impossible, to refute such positions, and so for brevity I will
    henceforth take this assumption as accepted. Those who disagree need
    read no further.

-- Peter Singer
%
14 points baiter 02 July 2012 11:27:14PM

    "New rule: If you handle snakes to prove they won't bite you because
    God is real, and then they bite you -- do the math."

-- Bill Maher, Real Time with Bill Maher, 6/8/2012
%
14 points lukeprog 22 August 2012 07:03:40PM

M. Mitchell Waldrop on a meeting between physicists and economists at the
Santa Fe Institute:

    ...as the axioms and theorems and proofs marched across the overhead
    projection screen, the physicists could only be awestruck at [the
    economists'] mathematical prowess — awestruck and appalled. They had
    the same objection that [Brian] Arthur and many other economists had
    been voicing from within the field for years. "They were almost too
    good," says one young physicist, who remembers shaking his head in
    disbelief. "lt seemed as though they were dazzling themselves with
    fancy mathematics, until they really couldn't see the forest for the
    trees. So much time was being spent on trying to absorb the
    mathematics that I thought they often weren't looking at what the
    models were for, and what they did, and whether the underlying
    assumptions were any good. In a lot of cases, what was required was
    just some common sense. Maybe if they all had lower IQs, they'd have
    been making some better models."

%
14 points D_Malik 04 August 2012 04:15:04AM

    Only the ideas that we actually live are of any value.

-- Hermann Hesse, Demian
%
14 points lukeprog 09 September 2012 11:47:06PM

    ...the 2008 financial crisis showed that some [mathematical finance]
    models were flawed. But those flaws were based on flawed assumptions
    about the distribution of price changes... Nassim Taleb, a popular
    author and critic of the financial industry, points out many such
    flaws but does not include the use of Monte Carlo simulations among
    them. He himself is a strong proponent of these simulations. Monte
    Carlo simulations are simply the way we do the math with uncertain
    quantities. Abandoning Monte Carlos because of the failures of the
    financial markets makes as much sense as giving up on addition and
    subtraction because of the failure of accounting at Enron or AIG’s
    overexposure in credit default swaps.

-- Douglas Hubbard, How to Measure Anything
%
14 points Alicorn 17 September 2012 05:43:03PM

    I've always thought of the SkiFree monster as a metaphor for the
    inevitability of death.

    "SkiFree, huh? You know, you can press 'F' to go faster than the
    monster and escape."

-- xkcd 667
%
14 points [deleted] 04 September 2012 06:55:38AM

    If at first you don't succeed, switch to power tools.

-- The Red Green Show
%
14 points BlazeOrangeDeer 02 October 2012 08:04:52AM

    From the stories I expected the world to be sad

    And it was.

    And I expected it to be wonderful.

    It was.

    I just didn't expect it to be so big.

-- xkcd: Click and Drag
%
14 points lukeprog 05 November 2012 08:08:07PM

    I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything... but
    I don't see my way to your conclusion.

-- Thomas Huxley
%
14 points DSimon 02 November 2012 05:55:00AM

    Remember, kids, the only difference between screwing around and
    science is writing it down.

-- Adam Savage
%
14 points NancyLebovitz 13 December 2012 07:11:36AM

    It’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do
    important things that are not urgent, like thinking; and it’s also
    easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big
    things that we’re not so sure about.

-- John Cleese
%
13 points Rune 18 April 2009 06:42:02PM

"Science is interesting and if you don't agree, you can fuck off."

-- Richard Dawkins quoting a former editor of New Scientist magazine.
%
13 points badger 18 April 2009 04:43:33AM

    The greatest enemy of truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate,
    contrived, and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, pervasive, and
    unrealistic.

-- John F. Kennedy

(For those interested, I'm pulling most of these quotes from Rational
Choice in an Uncertain World by Robyn Dawes, which I just began)
%
13 points Yvain 15 June 2009 09:24:40AM

    Imagine a world where everything changes to match the state of your
    mind, where evidence never pushes back against your theories, where
    your every thought is correct simply because you think it so. Can
    there be any better definition of hell for a man of learning?

-- Bradeline, Fall From Heaven
%
13 points RichardKennaway 02 July 2009 10:45:38PM

    The Mathemagician nodded knowingly and stroked his chin several times.
    "You'll find," he remarked gently, "that the only thing you can do
    easily is be wrong, and that's hardly worth the effort."

-- Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
%
13 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 July 2009 10:08:21PM

    I don't know how many people I've met who hold beliefs like "in three
    card stud a four is more likely to come up after an eight than a six."
    What the fuck? Is the concept of random that hard to grasp?

-- Alphadominance
%
13 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 August 2009 03:50:52AM

    Consequentialism: The belief that doing the right thing makes the
    world a better place.

-- DanielLC
%
13 points Kaj_Sotala 02 September 2009 05:59:39PM

    "You can safely say that you have made God in your own image when it
    turns out that God hates all the same people you do." -- Reverend
    Robert Cromey

%
13 points thomblake 01 September 2009 07:55:37PM

    The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the
    intelligent are full of doubt.

-- Bertrand Russell
%
13 points RichardKennaway 09 January 2010 09:39:30AM

    You cannot understand what a person is saying unless you understand
    who they are arguing with.

-- Don Symons, quoted by Tooby and Cosmides.
%
13 points Zack_M_Davis 07 January 2010 09:50:16AM

    2 + 3 = 5, 3 + 2 = 5, 5 - 2 =3, and 5 - 3 = 2 are not four facts, but
    four different ways of looking at one fact. Furthermore, that fact is
    not a fact of arithmetic, to be taken on faith and memorized like
    nonsense syllables. It is a fact of nature, which children can
    discover for themselves, and rediscover or verify for themselves as
    many times as they need or want to.

    The fact is this:

    ***** -- *** **

    If you have before you a group of objects--coins or stones, for
    example---that looks like the group on the left, then you can make it
    into two groups that look like the ones on the right. Or--and this is
    what the two-way arrow means---if you have two groups that look like
    the ones on the right, you can make them into a group that looks like
    the one on the left.

    This is not a fact of arithmetic, but a fact of nature. It did not
    become true only when human beings invented arithmetic. It has nothing
    to do with human beings. It is true all over the universe. One doesn't
    have to know any arithmetic to discover or verify it. An infant
    playing with blocks or a dog pawing at sticks might do that operation,
    though probably neither of them would notice that he had done it; for
    them, the difference between ***** and *** ** would be a difference
    that didn't make any difference. Arithmetic began (and begins) when
    human beings began to notice and think about this and other numerical
    facts of nature.

-- --John Holt, Learning All the Time
%
13 points RichardKennaway 01 February 2010 10:13:36AM

    We can get very confused, because we think that words must have some
    secret meaning that we have to figure out. They don't. They are just
    noises or marks, and they mean whatever experience you have learned to
    mean by them. People tend to use similar words in similar situations,
    but unless you have specifically agreed on what the words will mean,
    in terms of underlying experiences, there's no way to know what
    another person understands when you use them. The experience you
    attach to a word when you say it isn't automatically the same as the
    experience another person attaches to the same word when hearing it.

-- William T. Powers
%
13 points Seth_Goldin 20 March 2010 05:45:56PM

    As one shocked 42-year-old manager exclaimed in the middle of a
    self-reflective career planning exercise, 'Oh, no! I just realized I
    let a 20-year-old choose my wife and my career!'

-- Douglas T. Hall, Protean Careers of the 21st Century
%
13 points CronoDAS 04 March 2010 02:30:03PM

    Its now well known that if you torture the data long enough, it will
    confess to anything.

%
13 points RichardKennaway 01 April 2010 10:03:17PM

    It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.

-- Charles Darwin, The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals,
    ch.3.
%
13 points utilitymonster 08 May 2010 04:18:43PM

    Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy
    him that expresses zeal for those virtues which he neglects to
    practice; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of
    conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory, as a
    man may be confident of the advantages of a voyage, or a journey...,
    without having courage or industry to undertake it, and may honestly
    recommend to others, those attempts which he neglects himself.

-- Samuel Johnson
%
13 points sketerpot 03 May 2010 07:52:24PM

    "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your
    right to misattribute it to Voltaire."

-- Voltaire

(The phrase was written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall as a summary of Voltaire's
attitude toward free speech. Since then, people started attributing it to
Voltaire himself, and the myth has spread far and wide, as nobody really
checks to see if he actually said that. Hearing something somewhere is
plenty of evidence for most people, most of the time, and the conviction
gets more solid over time. Which brings me to my second rationality quote,
from Winston Churchill: "A lie gets halfway around the world before the
truth has a chance to get its pants on.")
%
13 points NancyLebovitz 02 May 2010 11:02:28AM

Discussion of how not to get lost in the woods

    Arg, this post is bringing back memories of all kinds of backcountry
    stupidity (including a fair amount of my own stupidity), so I can't
    resist adding a comment about GPS devices. Any navigation tool -- GPS
    device, map, compass, sextant, whatever -- only works if you are using
    the navigation tool to relate yourself to the surrounding landscape.
    And you should never trust maps, GPS devices, compasses, or any tool
    if it contradicts what you're seeing in the surrounding landscape. I
    own a top-notch brand of GPS device, I got a top-quality map to go
    inside it, and when I checked the map against a landscape I knew well,
    I found error after error (which is true with all maps, by the way;
    one of the reasons I like paper maps is that I can make notations on
    it when I find errors).

%
13 points RobinZ 01 May 2010 01:21:51PM

    "Then the one called Raltariki is really a demon?" asked Tak.

    "Yes—and no," said Yama. "If by 'demon' you mean a malefic,
    supernatural creature, possessed of great powers, life span, and the
    ability to temporarily assume virtually any shape—then the answer is
    no. This is the generally accepted definition, but it is untrue in one
    respect."

    "Oh? And what may that be?"

    "It is not a supernatural creature."

    "But it is all those other things?"

    "Yes."

    "Then I fail to see what difference it makes whether it be
    supernatural or not—so long as it is malefic, possesses great powers
    and life span and has the ability to change its shape at will."

    "Ah, but it makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the
    difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and
    fantasy—it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be
    logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some bow in that final
    direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose
    sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the
    unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint
    or a fool. I have no use for either."

-- Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light. (h/t zhurnaly)
%
13 points DanielVarga 06 June 2010 05:55:56AM

    I imagine that if my friend finally came to the conclusion that he
    were a machine, he would be infinitely crestfallen. I think he would
    think: "My God! How Horrible! I am only a machine!" But if I should
    find out I were a machine, my attitude would be totally different. I
    would say: "How amazing! I never before realized that machines could
    be so marvelous!"

-- Raymond Smullyan
%
13 points mattnewport 03 June 2010 06:43:52PM

    If at first you don't succeed, try, try, again. Then quit. There's no
    use in being a damn fool about it.

-- W. C. Fields
%
13 points DSimon 02 July 2010 10:25:36PM

    When I was 14, my father was stationed in Japan. I went rock climbing
    with this kid from school. He fell and got injured, and I had to bring
    him to the hospital. We came in through the wrong entrance, and passed
    this guy in the hall. He was a janitor. My friend came down with an
    infection, and the doctors didn't know what to do. So they brought in
    the janitor. He was a doctor. And a Buraku - one of Japan's
    untouchables. His ancestors had been slaughterers, gravediggers. And
    this guy knew that he wasn't accepted by the staff, didn't even try.
    He didn't dress well. He didn't pretend to be one of them. People
    around that place didn't think he had anything they wanted, except
    when they needed him - because he was right, which meant that nothing
    else mattered. And they had to listen to him.

-- Dr. Greg House
%
13 points brazzy 02 July 2010 09:37:53AM

    The necessity for marking our classes has brought with it a bias for
    false and excessive contrast, and we never invent a term but we are at
    once cramming it with implications beyond its legitimate content.
    There is no feat of irrelevance that people will not perform quite
    easily in this way; there is no class, however accidental, to which
    they will not at once ascribe deeply distinctive qualities. The
    seventh sons of seventh sons have remarkable powers of insight; people
    with a certain sort of ear commit crimes of violence; people with red
    hair have souls of fire; all democratic socialists are trustworthy
    persons; all people born in Ireland have vivid imaginations and all
    Englishmen are clods; all Hindoos are cowardly liars; all curly-haired
    people are good-natured; all hunch-backs are energetic and wicked, and
    all Frenchmen eat frogs. Such stupid generalisations have been
    believed with the utmost readiness, and acted upon by great numbers of
    sane, respectable people. And when the class is one's own class, when
    it expresses one of the aggregations to which one refers one's own
    activities, then the disposition to divide all qualities between this
    class and its converse, and to cram one's own class with every
    desirable distinction, becomes overwhelming.

-- H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia
%
13 points RichardKennaway 02 July 2010 06:50:00AM

Silas will like this one:

    Menahem sighed. 'How can one explain colours to a blind man?'

    'One says', snapped Rek, 'that red is like silk, blue is like cool
    water, and yellow is like sunshine on the face.'

-- David Gemmell Legend
%
13 points RichardKennaway 02 July 2010 06:48:51AM

    I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I
    didn’t know.

-- Mark Twain, Old Times on the Mississippi
%
13 points simplicio 04 August 2010 05:32:50AM

On rationalization, aka the giant sucking cognitive black hole.

    Though [Ben Franklin] had been a vegetarian on principle, on one long
    sea crossing the men were grilling fish, and his mouth started
    watering:

        I balanc'd some time between principle and inclination, till I
        recollectd that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish
        taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, "if you eat one
        another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you." So I din'd upon cod
        very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning
        only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet.

    Franklin concluded: "So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable
    creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every
    thing one has a mind to do."

-- Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis
%
13 points Rain 03 August 2010 12:48:23PM

    Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day,
    something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one
    else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always
    part of unanimity.

-- Christopher Morley
%
13 points RichardKennaway 03 August 2010 07:54:49AM

    When I was a young man about to go out into the world, my father says
    to me a very valuable thing. He says to me like this... "Son," the old
    guy says, "I am sorry that I am not able to bank roll you to a very
    large start, but not having any potatoes which to give you, I am now
    going to stake you to some very valuable advice. One of these days in
    your travels, a guy is going to come to you and show you a nice, brand
    new deck of cards on which the seal has not yet been broken. This man
    is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump
    out of the deck and squirt cider in your ear. Now son, do not bet this
    man, for as sure as you stand there, you are going to wind up with an
    earful of cider."

-- Sky Masterson, a character in Guys and Dolls
%
13 points sark 07 September 2010 03:52:55AM

House: There's never any proof. Five different doctors come up with five
different diagnoses based on the same evidence.

Cuddy: You don't have any evidence. And nobody knows anything, huh? How is
it you always think you're right?

House: I don't. I just find it hard to operate on the opposite assumption.
%
13 points Craig_Heldreth 02 September 2010 05:59:17PM

    It is often said that experiments should be made without preconceived
    ideas. This is impossible.

-- Henri Poincare, Science and Hypothesis.
%
13 points Jayson_Virissimo 01 September 2010 07:50:13AM

    There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that
    ought to be stopped.

-- G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
%
13 points Kobayashi 06 October 2010 11:28:21PM

    You can always reach me through my blog!" he panted. "Overpowering
    Falsehood dot com, the number one site for rational thinking about the
    future--

-- Zendegi, by Greg Egan (2010) 
%
13 points Apprentice 06 October 2010 10:47:42AM

    If I close my mind in fear, please pry it open.

-- Metallica
%
13 points Unnamed 05 October 2010 08:48:57PM

    God, grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change;
    Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference.

-- adapted from Reinhold Niebuhr
%
13 points MichaelGR 04 November 2010 09:10:40PM

    It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science
    are not found because they are useful, they are found because it was
    possible to find them.

-- J. Robert Oppenheimer.
%
13 points xamdam 03 November 2010 01:41:32PM

    We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings.

-- Dr. Manhattan (Watchmen)
%
13 points MichaelGR 03 January 2011 09:33:59PM

    In a strong enough wind, even turkeys can fly.

-- Saying of investors
%
13 points gerg 03 January 2011 09:08:12PM

    It is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long
    for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not
    desire.

-- Thucydides
%
13 points billswift 03 January 2011 07:44:47PM

    When somebody makes a statement you don't understand, don't tell him
    he's crazy. Ask him what he means.

-- H Beam Piper, Space Viking
%
13 points lukeprog 12 February 2011 03:30:48PM

    If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of
    their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to
    let as few things into your identity as possible.

-- Paul Graham
%
13 points benelliott 01 February 2011 08:28:48PM

    Admitting error clears the score and proves you wiser than before.

-- Arthur Guiterman
%
13 points billswift 01 February 2011 07:29:20PM

    How emotionally entangled are you with your point of view? Test
    yourself - defend an opposing view, believing your life depends upon
    it.

-- Marc Stiegler, David's Sling
%
13 points wedrifid 04 March 2011 07:46:53AM

    Running into a pole is a drag, but never being allowed to run into a
    pole is a disaster. Pain is part of the price of freedom.

-- Daniel Kish (Human Echolocation researcher, advocate and instructor).
%
13 points TobyBartels 03 March 2011 02:54:27AM

    Stupid is as stupid does.

This is an old saying, which I learnt from the 1994 movie Forrest Gump
(not otherwise a bastion of rationalism).

While we may judge people as irrational ("stupid") based on what they know
(epistemic rationality, roughly), it's instrumental rationality that
matters in the end.
%
13 points atucker 02 March 2011 05:38:28PM

    I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing
    people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I
    believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex.

-- Bertrand Russell
%
13 points Confringus 04 April 2011 08:39:08PM

    "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to
    believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

-- Douglas Adams

    a phenomenon can be wondrous on its own merit, it need not be magical
    or extraordinary to have value.
%
13 points Pugovitz 07 June 2011 07:18:02PM

    Try to learn something about everything
    and everything about something.

-- Thomas H. Huxley
%
13 points wedrifid 01 June 2011 09:57:43AM

    A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much
    knowledge that is idle.

-- Kahlil Gibran
%
13 points djcb 03 July 2011 10:28:23AM

    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.
%
13 points lukeprog 16 September 2011 12:53:43AM

    It is remarkable that [probability theory], which originated in the
    consideration of games of chance, should have become the most
    important object of human knowledge... The most important questions of
    life are, for the most part, really only problems of probability.

-- Laplace
%
13 points DanielLC 04 October 2011 04:31:12AM

    "-but I think it would probably kill you."

    "Comforting to know. Well, more comforting than not knowing it could
    kill you," I remark pointedly.

-- Sam Hughes
%
13 points MichaelHoward 02 October 2011 03:36:38PM

    It does not do to dwell on dreams... and forget to live.

-- Professor Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore
%
13 points Konkvistador 09 November 2011 12:05:44AM

    Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very
    intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them
    to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with
    idealism.

-- Thomas Sowell
%
13 points wedrifid 05 November 2011 07:49:49AM

    Sweetie, if you work reaaaaly hard, and focus reaaaaly well, and there
    aren't that many people who are still better at what you do than you
    are despite your best efforts, you can be whatever you want. If you
    don't die.

-- Zach Weiner, SMBC]
%
13 points Oligopsony 04 November 2011 10:04:34PM

    "Tell me, Eben: how is’t, d’you think, that the planets are moved in
    their courses?"

    "Why, said Ebenezer, "’tis that the cosmos is filled with little
    particles moving in vortices, each of which centers on a star; and
    ‘tis the subtle push and pull of these particles in our solar vortex
    that slides the planets along their orbs - is’t not?"

    "So saith Descartes," Burlingame smiled. "And d’you haply recall what
    is the nature of light?"

    "If I have’t right," replied Ebenezer, "’tis an aspect of the vortices
    - of the press of inward and outward forces in ‘em. The celestial fire
    is sent through space from the vortices by this pressure, which
    imparts a transitional motion to little light globules - "

    "Which Renatus kindly hatched for that occasion," Burlingame
    interrupted. "And what’s more he allows his globules both a
    rectilinear and a rotatary motion. If only the first occurs when the
    globules smite our retinae, we see white light; if both, we see color.
    And if this were not magical enough - mirabile dictu! - when the
    rotatory motion surpasseth the rectilinear, we see blue; when the
    reverse, we see red; and when the twain are equal, we see yellow. What
    fantastical drivel!"

    "You mean ‘tis not the truth? I must say, Henry, it sounds reasonable
    to me. In sooth, there is a seed of poetry in it; it hath an
    elegance."

    "Aye, it hath every virtue and but one small defect, which is, that
    the universe doth not operate in that wise."

-- John Barth, the Sot-Weed Factor
%
13 points djcb 01 November 2011 09:48:31PM

    The nurse recorded the time of death, 9:21 P.M. He discovered, oddly,
    that the clock had halted at that moment —just the sort of mystical
    phenomenon that appealed to unscientific people. Then an explanation
    occurred to him. He knew the clock was fragile, because he had
    repaired it several times, and he decided that the nurse must have
    stopped it by picking it up to check the time in the dim light.

-- James Gleick - Genius - The work and Life of Richard Feynman
[ this is a really chilling passage, which describes the moments just
after Feynman's wife has passed away, which devastated him. Somehow, this
struck me.]
%
13 points jsbennett86 01 November 2011 12:53:29AM

    Who first called Reason sweet, I don't know. I suspect that he was a
    man with very few responsibilities, no children to rear, and no
    payroll to meet. An anchorite with heretical tendencies, maybe, or the
    idle youngest son of a wealthy Athenian. The dictates of Reason are
    often difficult to figure out, rarely to my liking, and profitable
    only by what seems a happy but remarkably unusual accident. Mostly,
    Reason brings bad news, and bad news of the worst sort, for, if it is
    truly the word of Reason, there is no denying it or weaseling out of
    its demands without simply deciding to be irrational. Thus it is that
    I have discovered, and many others, I notice, have also discovered,
    all sorts of clever ways to convince myself that Reason is "mere"
    Reason, powerful and right, of course, but infinitely outnumbered by
    reasons, my reasons.

-- Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire
%
13 points GabrielDuquette 31 October 2011 06:11:05PM

    Would anybody tell me if I was getting stupider?

-- Mike Patton
%
13 points paper-machine 06 December 2011 06:34:25AM

    Rejecting all organs of information therefore but my senses, I rid
    myself of the Pyrrhonisms with which an indulgence in speculations
    hyperphysical and antiphysical so uselessly occupy and disquiet the
    mind. A single sense may indeed be sometimes decieved, but rarely: and
    never all our senses together, with their faculty of reasoning. They
    evidence realities; and there are enough of these for all the purposes
    of life, without plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and
    phantasms. I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things
    which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which
    may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.

    I am sure that I really know many, many, things, and none more surely
    than that I love you with all my heart, and pray for the continuance
    of your life until you shall be tired of it yourself.

-- Thomas Jefferson, to John Adams, August 15, 1820.
%
13 points J_Taylor 04 December 2011 12:04:58PM

    When you choose

    How much postage to use,

    When you know

    What's the chance it will snow,

    When you bet

    And you end up in debt,

    Oh try as you may,

    You just can't get away

    From mathematics!

-- Tom Lehrer, Thats Mathematics
%
13 points gwern 01 December 2011 04:35:04AM

    "Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering
    inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another."

-- Arthur Schopenhauer
%
13 points Anubhav 08 January 2012 05:16:29AM

    Imagine willpower doesn't exist. That's step 1 to a better future.

Second slide of this powerpoint by Stanford's Persuasive Tech Lab.
%
13 points NancyLebovitz 10 January 2012 09:33:38PM

    In short, they made unrealistic demands on reality and reality did not
    oblige them.

Cory Doctorow talking about DRM, but I think there are some wider
applications.
%
13 points fortyeridania 02 January 2012 12:03:22PM

    The truth is common property. You can't distinguish your group by
    doing things that are rational, and believing things that are true.

-- Paul Graham, Lies We Tell Kids
%
13 points MixedNuts 02 January 2012 02:20:33PM

    The ultimate theological question is: ‘Where does the Sun go at
    night?’.

    The answer that so many civilisations agreed for so long was: ‘The Sun
    is driven by one of the gods, and at night it goes under the Earth to
    fight a battle. There is at least some risk that the god will lose
    this battle, and so the Sun may not rise tomorrow’. It’s something the
    human race understood was a cast iron fact before they knew how to
    cast iron. It survived as the working model twenty-five times longer
    than the four hundred years we’ve understood the Earth goes around the
    Sun.

-- Lance Parkin, Above us only sky

    For millenia that was a huge and frightening question, and then we
    went and answered it, and now it's too trivial to point out. We found
    out where the sun goes at night. I want to carve a primer on cosmology
    in gold letters on a mountain, entitled something in all caps along
    the lines of "HERE IS THE GLORY OF HUMANKIND".
%
13 points [deleted] 01 January 2012 12:17:44AM

    Science isn't just a job, it's a means of determining truth. Methods
    of determining truth that aren't trustworthy in the laboratory don't
    become trustworthy when you leave it. There is no doctrine of applying
    scientific methodology to every aspect of one's life, you either
    follow trustworthy methods of investigation or you don't, and "follow
    trustworthy methods of investigation" is the core of science.

-- Desertopa, TVTropes Forum
%
13 points army1987 08 February 2012 05:21:12PM

    Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number
    of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur,
    Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and
    Albert Einstein.

-- H. Jackson Brown
%
13 points gwern 01 February 2012 03:27:12PM

On the Outside View:

    "Of course, if you want to, you can always come up with reasons why
    the lessons from the Neo-Sumerian Empire don't apply to you."

-- Steven Kaas
%
13 points taelor 07 March 2012 09:00:12AM

    But even as light is opposed by darkness, science and reason have
    their enemies. Superstition and belief in magic are as old as man
    himself; for the intransigence of facts and our limitations in
    controlling them can be powerfully hard to take. Add to this the
    reflection that we are in an age when it is popular to distrust
    whatever is seen as the established view or the Establishment, and it
    is no wonder that anti-rational attitudes and doctrines are mustering
    so much support. Still, we can understand what encourages the
    anti-rationalist turn without losing our zeal for opposing it. A
    current Continuing Education catalogue offers a course description,
    under the heading "Philosophy", that typifies the dark view at its
    darkest: "Children of science that we are, we have based our cultural
    patterns on logic, on the cognitive, on the verifiable. But more and
    more there has crept into current research and study the haunting
    suggestion that there are other kinds of knowledge unfathomable by our
    cognition, other ways of knowing beyond the limits of our logic, which
    are deserving of our serious attention." Now "knowledge unfathomable
    by our cognition" is simply incoherent, as attention to the words
    makes clear. Moreover, all that creeps is not gold. One wonders how
    many students enrolled.

-- W. V. O. Quine
%
13 points EllisD 02 March 2012 02:24:29PM

    Whether a mathematical proposition is true or not is indeed
    independent of physics. But the proof of such a proposition is a
    matter of physics only. There is no such thing as abstractly proving
    something, just as there is no such thing as abstractly knowing
    something. Mathematical truth is absolutely necessary and
    transcendent, but all knowledge is generated by physical processes,
    and its scope and limitations are conditioned by the laws of nature.

-- David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity.
%
13 points bungula 01 March 2012 01:30:50PM

    It's the Face of Boe. I'm absolutely certain about this, absolutely
    positive. Of course I'll probably turn out to be incorrect

-- Sam Hughes, talking about the first season finale of Doctor Who,
differentiating between the subjective feeling of certainty and the actual
probability estimate.
%
13 points Bugmaster 05 April 2012 05:48:37AM

    -- So... if they've got armor on, it's a battle !

    -- And who told you that ?

    -- A knight...

    -- How'd you know he was a knight ?

    -- Well... that's 'cause... he'd got armor on ?

    -- You don't have to be a knight to buy armor. Any idiot can buy
    armor.

    -- How do you know ?

    -- 'Cause I sold armor.

-- Game of Thrones (TV show)
%
13 points Konkvistador 23 May 2012 05:45:15PM

    Is it fair to say you're enjoying the controversy you've started?

    Thiel: I don't enjoy being contrarian.
    
    Yes you do. *laughs*

    Thiel: No, I think it is much more important to be right
           than to be contrarian.

-- Peter Thiel, on 60 Minutes
%
13 points GabrielDuquette 08 May 2012 02:24:04PM

    The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding.

-- Cheryl Strayed, Wild
%
13 points Vaniver 10 May 2012 04:07:28PM

    If rational thought is useful at all, then it must be maintained as a
    practice. Parents must teach it to their children, teachers must teach
    it to their students, and people must respect each other for their
    rationality. If the practice of rational thought is not to be lost,
    some group of people, at least, will have to maintain it.

-- Jonathan Baron
%
13 points AlexSchell 02 May 2012 02:32:49AM

    [Instrumentalism about science] has a long and rather sorry
    philosophical history: most contemporary philosophers of science
    regard it as fairly conclusively refuted. But I think it’s easier to
    see what’s wrong with it just by noticing that real science just isn’t
    like this. According to instrumentalism, palaeontologists talk about
    dinosaurs so they can understand fossils, astrophysicists talk about
    stars so they can understand photoplates, virologists talk about
    viruses so they can understand NMR instruments, and particle
    physicists talk about the Higgs Boson so they can understand the LHC.
    In each case, it’s quite clear that instrumentalism is the wrong way
    around. Science is not "about" experiments; science is about the
    world, and experiments are part of its toolkit.

-- David Wallace
%
13 points CasioTheSane 05 May 2012 07:01:54PM

    We're even wrong about which mistakes we're making.

-- Carl Winfeld
%
13 points arundelo 05 July 2012 02:13:49PM

    However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf,
    I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your
    basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

-- Clay Shirky
%
13 points Alicorn 22 August 2012 05:09:26AM

    Some critics of education have said that examinations are unrealistic;
    that nobody on the job would ever be evaluated without knowing when
    the evaluation would be conducted and what would be on the evaluation.

    Sure. When Rudy Giuliani took office as mayor of New York, someone
    told him "On September 11, 2001, terrorists will fly airplanes into
    the World Trade Center, and you will be judged on how effectively you
    cope."

    ...

    When you skid on an icy road, nobody will listen when you complain
    it's unfair because you weren't warned in advance, had no experience
    with winter driving and had never been taught how to cope with a skid.

-- Steven Dutch
%
13 points lukeprog 09 September 2012 12:46:27AM

    If a thing can be observed in any way at all, it lends itself to some
    type of measurement method. No matter how "fuzzy" the measurement is,
    it’s still a measurement if it tells you more than you knew before.

-- Douglas Hubbard, How to Measure Anything
%
13 points Konkvistador 04 September 2012 08:40:20AM

    Erode irreplaceable institutions related to morality and virtue
    because of their contingent associations with flawed human groups
    #lifehacks

-- Kate Evans on Twitter
%
13 points NihilCredo 04 November 2012 07:37:34PM

    The great thing about reality is that eventually you hit it.

-- Andrew Sullivan, in an otherwise fairly bland political post
%
13 points lukeprog 21 November 2012 11:22:50AM

    Philosophy is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat.
    Metaphysics is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat
    that isn't there. Theology is like being in a dark room and looking
    for a black cat that isn't there and shouting "I found it!" Science is
    like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat using a
    flashlight.

-- Anonymous
%
13 points gotdistractedbythe 06 December 2012 12:37:13AM

    "Right and wrong do exist. Just because you don't know what the right
    answer is — maybe there's even no way you could know what the right
    answer is — doesn't make your answer right or even okay. It's much
    simpler than that. It's just plain wrong."

-- Dr. House
%
13 points michaelkeenan 01 December 2012 05:27:13PM

    The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits
    to grow sharper.

-- Eden Phillpotts
%
12 points Vladimir_Nesov 18 April 2009 10:26:10PM

    One disadvantage of having a little intelligence is that one can
    invent myths out of his own imagination, and come to believe them.
    Wild animals, lacking imagination, almost never do disastrously stupid
    things out of false perceptions of the world about them. But humans
    create artificial disasters for themselves when their ideology makes
    them unable to perceive where their own self-interest lies.

-- E.T. Jaynes, Probability Theory as Logic [pdf].
%
12 points badger 18 April 2009 04:48:59AM

    Reason means truth, and those who are not governed by it take the
    chance that someday a sunken fact will rip the bottom out of their
    boat.

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr
%
12 points anonym 15 June 2009 02:18:22AM

    Knowing that one may be subject to bias is one thing; being able to
    correct it is another.

-- Jon Elster
%
12 points hrishimittal 03 July 2009 03:10:10PM

    ...you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what
    you want from being contaminated by what seems possible.This is
    isomorphic to the principle that you should prevent your beliefs about
    how things are from being contaminated by how you wish they were. Most
    people let them mix pretty promiscuously. The continuing popularity of
    religion is the most visible index of that.

-- pg
%
12 points JustinShovelain 02 July 2009 10:55:13PM

    Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of
    average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of a car is
    separate from the way the car is driven.

-- Edward de Bono
%
12 points SilasBarta 02 July 2009 08:39:51PM

    "An economic transaction is a solved political problem."

-- Abba Lerner
%
12 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 August 2009 03:52:00AM

    I almost believe we are ghosts, all of us. It's not just what we
    inherit from our fathers and mothers that walks again in us - it's all
    sorts of dead old ideas and dead beliefs and things like that. They
    don't exactly live in us, but there they sit all the same and we can't
    get rid of them. All I have to do is pick up a newspaper, and I see
    ghosts lurking between the lines. I think there are ghosts everywhere
    you turn in this country - as many as there are grains of sand - and
    then there we all are, so abysmally afraid of the light.

-- Ibsen, 1881
%
12 points anonym 01 September 2009 03:32:45PM

    Reality is not optional.

-- Thomas Sowell
%
12 points ABranco 24 October 2009 03:13:44AM

    It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too
    costly to bear.

-- Nicholas Nassim Taleb

(i.e.: don't forget to put, in your utility functions, the damn
appropriate weight of those highly-improbable-but-high-negative-impact
tragedies!)
%
12 points RobinZ 22 October 2009 04:45:27PM

    There is an unfortunate optical illusion - a variant on the Doppler
    effect - that besets all frauds. It's unfortunate, because it has the
    effect of exacerbating the pecuniary losses that fraud victims endure,
    by unfairly leaving them, like many rape victims, irrationally ashamed
    of themselves.

    The Doppler principle we posit holds that as a victim approaches a
    swindler, he sees nothing but green lights. But as soon as he realizes
    that his money is gone, he spins around and beholds, as if by magic,
    bright red flags as far as the eye can see.

-- Roger Parloff, senior editor, More brazen than Madoff?, Fortune,
2009-03-31
%
12 points MichaelGR 30 November 2009 12:22:38AM

    "Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking
    to increase activity can result in just the opposite."

-- Andrew S. Grove
%
12 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 November 2009 11:42:44PM

    "Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe
    which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was
    a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most
    arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless,
    it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star
    cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might
    invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately
    illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and
    arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were
    eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with
    the human intellect, nothing will have happened."

-- Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
%
12 points MichaelGR 08 January 2010 08:59:15PM

    This problem affects a question close to Frances Kamm’s work: what she
    calls the Problem of Distance in Morality (PDM). Kamm says that her
    intuition consistently finds that moral obligations attach to things
    that are close to us, but not to thinks that are far away. According
    to her, if we see a child drowning in a pond and there’s a machine
    nearby which, for a dollar, will scoop him out, we’re morally
    obligated to give the machine a dollar. But if the machine is here but
    the scoop and child are on the other side of the globe, we don’t have
    to put a dollar in the machine. --Aaron Swartz

%
12 points Rain 07 January 2010 11:37:36PM

    A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which
    is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was
    yesterday.

-- Alexander Pope
%
12 points Unnamed 07 January 2010 05:33:41PM

    Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an
    idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?

-- attributed to George Carlin
%
12 points Zack_M_Davis 01 February 2010 06:38:17PM

    'Cause it's gonna be the future soon

    And I won't always be this way

    When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away

-- Jonothan Coulton
%
12 points XiXiDu 01 February 2010 10:50:03AM

    The introduction of suitable abstractions is our only mental aid to
    organize and master complexity.

-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
%
12 points ABranco 01 March 2010 11:50:20PM

    A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual"
    - find out how he feels about astrology.

-- Robert Heinlein
%
12 points Rain 01 March 2010 09:53:26PM

    Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
%
12 points RichardKennaway 01 March 2010 08:57:20PM

    Successful zealots don't argue to win. They argue to move the
    goalposts and to make it appear sane to do so.

-- Seth Godin
%
12 points RichardKennaway 01 March 2010 08:56:04PM

    Death is the most terrible of all things; for it is the end, and
    nothing is thought to be any longer either good or bad for the dead.

-- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

    The halt can manage a horse,

    the handless a flock,

    The deaf be a doughty fighter,

    To be blind is better than to burn on a pyre:

    There is nothing the dead can do.

-- Havamal
%
12 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 March 2010 04:02:57PM

    I haven't taken this position just to be difficult. To look around,
    the world does appear to be flat, so I think it is incumbent on others
    to prove decisively that it isn't. And I don't think that burden of
    proof has been met yet.

-- Daniel Shenton, President of the Flat Earth Society as of 2010
%
12 points AlexMennen 05 April 2010 06:06:58AM

    An atheist walked into a bar, but seeing no bartender he revised his
    initial assumption and decided he only walked into a room.

http://friendlyatheist.com/2008/02/29/complete-the-atheist-joke-1/
%
12 points gregconen 04 April 2010 04:52:19PM

    Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to
    common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.

-- WIlliam Thomson, Lord Kelvin
%
12 points djcb 02 April 2010 12:20:39PM

    The white line down the center of the road is a mediator, and very
    likely it can err substantially towards one side the other before the
    disadvantaged side finds advantage in denying its authority.

-- Schelling, Strategy of conflict, p144

[The book was mentioned a couple of times here on LW, and is a nice
introduction to the use of game theory in geopolitics]
%
12 points anonym 02 May 2010 03:09:37AM

    Unfortunately for the good sense of mankind, the fact of their
    fallibility is far from carrying the weight in their practical
    judgment, which is always allowed to it in theory; for while every one
    well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take any
    precautions against their own fallibility, or admit the supposition
    that any opinion, of which they feel very certain, may be one of the
    examples of the error to which they acknowledge themselves to be
    liable.

-- John Stuart Mill
%
12 points anonym 02 May 2010 03:08:13AM

    There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the
    variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such
    assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are
    assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to
    them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of
    philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems
    constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.

-- Alfred North Whitehead
%
12 points MichaelGR 01 May 2010 05:48:07PM

    By definition, all but the last doomsday prediction is false. Yet it
    does not follow, as many seem to think, that all doomsday predictions
    must be false; what follow is only that all such predictions but one
    are false.

-- Richard A. Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response, p. 13
%
12 points Daniel_Burfoot 02 June 2010 04:26:51AM

    To a very great extent, the term science is reserved for fields that
    do progress in obvious ways. But does a field make progress because it
    is a science, or is it a science because it makes progress?

-- Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
%
12 points roland 01 June 2010 06:28:21PM

    Prevent all problems and get nothing done, or accept an allowable
    level of small problems and focus on the big things. --Timothy Ferriss

%
12 points Kaj_Sotala 08 July 2010 07:36:26PM

    Anyone who believes that the theory of evolution implies moral
    darwinism, and who also believes in the theory of gravity, has a moral
    duty to go jump off a cliff.

-- Ari Rahikkala
%
12 points Kazuo_Thow 01 July 2010 10:02:12PM

    This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity
    of imagining what is, in fact, real.

-- Philip Gourevitch
%
12 points RichardKennaway 03 August 2010 07:44:31AM

    Man cannot understand the perfection and imperfections of his chosen
    art if he cannot see the value in other arts. Following rules only
    permits development up to a point in technique and then the student
    and artist has to learn more and seek further. It makes sense to study
    other arts as well as those of strategy. Who has not learned something
    more about themselves by watching the activities of others? To learn
    the sword study the guitar. To learn the fist study commerce. To just
    study the sword will make you narrow-minded and will not permit you to
    grow outward.

-- Musashi, A Book of Five Rings
%
12 points arch1 01 September 2010 08:32:17PM

    A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them
    only that degree of certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if
    it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world is
    suffering.

-- Bertrand Russell
%
12 points brazzy 01 September 2010 08:05:25AM

    The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every well-bred
    girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can even ignore her own
    thoughts and her own knowledge.

-- H.G. Wells, Ann Veronica
%
12 points Vladimir_M 06 October 2010 10:49:54PM

Prompted by the discussion of Sam Harriss idea that science should provide
for a universal moral code, I thought of this suitable reply given long
ago:

    [The] doctrine of right and wrong is perpetually disputed, both by the
    pen and the sword: whereas the doctrine of lines and figures is not
    so, because men care not in that subject what be truth, as a thing
    that crosses no man's ambition, profit, or lust. For I doubt not, but
    if it had been a thing contrary to any man's right of dominion, or to
    the interest of men that have dominion, that the three angles of a
    triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine
    [would] have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of
    geometry suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.

-- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

(It also provides for some interesting perspective on the current
epistemological state of various academic fields that are taken seriously
as a source of guidance for government policy.)
%
12 points komponisto 05 October 2010 07:02:24PM

    In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question
    mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

-- Bertrand Russell

(Quoted, in Italian translation, on p. 174 of Amanda Knox's appeal brief.)
%
12 points RolfAndreassen 05 October 2010 06:09:40PM

    "Ideas are tested by experiment." That is the core of science. All
    else is bookkeeping.

    Zombie Feynman, in xkcd 397. 

%
12 points nazgulnarsil 09 December 2010 04:49:02PM

    Imagine being told you were made for a purpose, and that longevity and
    happiness are not in the list of design objectives.

-- David Eubanks, Life Artificial
%
12 points Rain 06 December 2010 03:06:16AM

    Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are
    convinced beyond doubt that they are right.

-- Laurens Van der Post
%
12 points MichaelGR 05 December 2010 09:49:21PM

    Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

-- George Bernard Shaw
%
12 points RichardKennaway 03 December 2010 09:15:01PM

    When I start to wonder if black swans exist, I put down my copy of
    Mind and pick up my copy of Nature.

-- Ariadne (former columnist in New Scientist).
%
12 points [deleted] 07 January 2011 07:53:08PM

Dirge without Music

Edna St. Vincent Millay

    I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard
    ground.

    So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

    Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned

    With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

    Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.

    Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

    A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,

    A formula, a phrase remains, -- but the best is lost.

    The answers quick keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,

    They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled

    Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.

    More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

    Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

    Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

    Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

    I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
%
12 points Nevin 05 January 2011 05:33:20AM

The new XKCD is highly relevant.

    Okay, middle school students, it's the first Tuesday in February.

    This means that by law and custom, we must spend the morning reading
    though the Wikipedia article List of Common Misconceptions, so you can
    spend the rest of your lives being a little less wrong.

    The guests at every party you'll ever attend thank us in advance.

    Subtext: I wish I lived in this universe.

%
12 points MichaelHoward 04 January 2011 08:49:53PM

    You can make a small program (say, 1,000 lines) work through brute
    force even when breaking every rule of good style. For a larger
    program, this is simply not so. If the structure of a 100,000-line
    program is bad, you will find that new errors are introduced as fast
    as old ones are removed.

-- Bjarne Stroustrup
%
12 points MichaelGR 03 January 2011 09:32:11PM

    Take the bettors in the racetrack experiment. Thirty seconds before
    putting down their money, they had been tentative and uncertain;
    thirty seconds after the deed, they were significantly more optimistic
    ans self-assured. The act of making a final decision--in this case, of
    buying a ticket--had been the critical factor. Once a stand had been
    taken, the need for consistency pressured these people to bring what
    they felt and believed into line with what they had already done. They
    simply convinced themselves that they had made the right choice and,
    no doubt, felt better and it all.

-- Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The psychology of Persuasion, p.59
%
12 points PhilGoetz 06 February 2011 06:34:56AM

    But can people in desperate poverty be considered to be making free
    choices? Many say no. So, is the choice between starving and selling
    one’s kidney really a choice? Yes; an easy one. One of the options is
    awful. To forbid organ selling is to take away the better choice. If
    we choose to provide an even better option to the person that would be
    great - but it is no solution to the problem of poverty to take away
    what choices the poor do have absent outside help.

-- Katja Grace, on Metaeuphoric, Dying for a Donation
%
12 points aausch 04 February 2011 10:05:08PM

    Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or
    derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But
    the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer
    to achieve immortality by not dying

-- The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
%
12 points Konkvistador 03 February 2011 08:35:54PM

    To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is
    dangerous.

-- Confucius
%
12 points MichaelGR 03 February 2011 02:53:17PM

    It has never mattered to me that thirty million people might think I'm
    wrong. The number of people who thought Hitler was right did not make
    him right... Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a
    few million people think you are?

-- Frank Zappa, quoted from The Real Frank Zappa Book
%
12 points MichaelGR 03 February 2011 02:51:43PM

    Teachers open the door. You enter by yourself.

-- Chinese proverb
%
12 points Eneasz 03 February 2011 04:58:02AM

    At my mother's knee I learned to view religious worship as a practice
    which lures people away from their duties and pleasures on earth, and
    breeds in them a thirst for impossible things, the chasing of which
    can bring no honour or delight but only bewilderment, disappointment,
    and insanity.

    K. J. Bishop, "The Etched City"

(a sentiment I think applies to all super-stimuli)
%
12 points lukeprog 06 March 2011 08:23:32PM

I got your Friendly AI problem right here...

    To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to
    society.

-- Theodore Roosevelt
%
12 points Nornagest 03 March 2011 03:37:38AM

    The majority of people in this world are ataxic: they cannot
    coordinate their mental muscles to make a purposed movement. They have
    no real Will, only a set of wishes, many of which contradict others.
    The victim wobbles from one to the other (and it is no less wobbling
    because the movements may occasionally be very violent), and at the
    end of life the movements cancel each other out. Nothing has been
    achieved, except the one thing of which the victim is not conscious:
    the destruction of his own character, the confirming of indecision.

-- Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA
%
12 points Oscar_Cunningham 14 April 2011 11:44:56AM

    Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest
    to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent
    it.

-- Paul Graham What Ive learned from Hacker News
%
12 points atucker 06 April 2011 07:17:13AM

    There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet
    an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says
    "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a
    bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes
    "What the hell is water?"

~ Story, used most famously in David Foster Wallace's
    Commencement Address at Kenyon College
%
12 points RichardKennaway 02 May 2011 09:10:18PM

    If a guy tells me the probability of failure is 1 in 10E5, I know he's
    full of crap.

-- Richard P. Feynmann, What Do You Care What Other People Think?
%
12 points beoShaffer 12 June 2011 08:53:58PM

    Tom smiled. "Yes, Don't you like that idea?" "Liking it and having it
    be true aren't the same thing, Tom."

-- Clive Barker, Abarat
%
12 points NancyLebovitz 07 June 2011 08:43:08AM

    Its the first follower who turns the lone nut into a leader.
%
12 points Patrick 07 June 2011 03:45:19AM

    If things are nice there is probably a good reason why they are nice:
    and if you do not know at least one reason for this good fortune, then
    you still have work to do.

-- Richard Askey
%
12 points RobertLumley 02 June 2011 12:19:35AM

    There always comes a time in history when the man who dares to say
    that two plus two equals four is punished with death … And the issue
    is not a matter of what reward or what punishment will be the outcome
    of that reasoning. The issue is simply whether or not two plus two
    equals four.

-- Albert Camus, The Plague
%
12 points arundelo 07 July 2011 02:04:33AM

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.

%
12 points paper-machine 10 August 2011 03:09:58PM

    Advancing a career in science is not the same as advancing science.

-- John D. Cook, in a tweet.
%
12 points Tom_Talbot 02 August 2011 11:43:36PM

    Suppose we know someone's objective and also know that half the time
    that person correctly figures out how to achieve it and half the time
    he acts at random. Since there is generally only one right way of
    doing things (or perhaps a few) but very many wrong ways, the
    "rational" behavior can be predicted but the "irrational" behavior
    cannot. If we predict the person's behavior on the assumption that he
    is rational, we will be right half the time. If we assume he is
    irrational, we will almost never be right, since we still have to
    guess which irrational thing he will do. We are better off assuming he
    is rational and recognizing that we will sometimes be wrong. To put
    the argument more generally, the tendency to be rational is the
    consistent (and hence predictable) element in human behavior. The only
    alternative to assuming rationality (other than giving up and assuming
    that human behavior cannot be understood and predicted) would be a
    theory of irrational behavior - a theory that told us not only that
    someone would not always do the rational thing but also which
    particular irrational thing he would do. So far as I know, no
    satisfactory theory of that sort exists.

-- David Friedman, Price Theory, An Intermediate Text
%
12 points GabrielDuquette 02 August 2011 08:43:01PM

    "[I]f function is hard enough, form is forced to follow it, because
    there is no effort to spare for error. Wild animals are beautiful
    because they have hard lives."

-- Paul Graham
%
12 points CronoDAS 24 September 2011 10:56:02PM

    If we don't change our direction, we're likely to end up where we're
    headed.

-- Chinese proverb
%
12 points lukeprog 16 September 2011 12:54:43AM

    The enlightened individual has learned to ask not "Is it so?" but
    rather "What is the probability that it is so?"

-- Sheldon Ross
%
12 points lionhearted 01 September 2011 11:34:16PM

    I moved out of the hood for good, you blame me?

    Niggas aim mainly at niggas they can't be.

    But niggas can't hit niggas they can't see.

    I'm out of sight, now I'm out of they dang reach.

-- Dr. Dre, The Watcher
%
12 points lukeprog 01 September 2011 12:12:13PM

    Imagine that everyone in North America took [a cognitive enhancement
    pill] before retiring and then woke up the next morning with more
    memory capacity and processing speed... I believe that there is little
    likelihood that much would change the next day in terms of human
    happiness. It is very unlikely that people would be better able to
    fulfill their wishes and desires the day after taking the pill. In
    fact, it is quite likely that people would simply go about their usual
    business - only more efficiently. If given more memory capacity and
    processing speed, people would, I believe: carry on using the same
    ineffective medical treatments because of failure to think of
    alternative causes; keep making the same poor financial decisions
    because of overconfidence; keep misjudging environmental risks because
    of vividness; play host to the [tempting bad ideas] of Ponzi and
    pyramid schemes; [and] be wrongly influenced in their jury decisions
    by incorrect testimony about probabilities... The only difference
    would be that they would be able to do all of these things much more
    quickly!

-- Keith Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss
%
12 points grendelkhan 07 October 2011 03:35:44PM

    Whether their motives were righteous or venal, highminded or base,
    noble or ig-, in retrospect the obvious verdict is that they were all
    morons--yes, even the distinguished fellows and visiting scholars at
    think tanks and deans of international studies schools. They were
    morons because the whole moral, political and practical purpose of
    their scheme depended on its going exactly according to plan. Which
    nothing ever does. The Latin phrase for this logical fallacy would be
    Duh. Some of them were halfway intelligent; some of them may even have
    been well-intentioned; but they lacked imagination, and this is a
    fatal flaw. What we learn from history is that it never turns out like
    it's supposed to. And the one thing we know for sure about the future
    is that it won't be like we think.

-- Tim Kreider, Artist's Note for The Pain
%
12 points Wix 07 October 2011 02:33:24PM

    Real magic is the kind of magic that is not real, while magic that is
    real (magic that can actually be done), is not real magic.

-- Lee Siegle
%
12 points MinibearRex 04 November 2011 02:36:39PM

    Through the discovery of Buchner, Biology was relieved of yet another
    fragment of mysticism. The splitting up of sugar into CO2 and alcohol
    is no more the effect of a "vital principle" than the splitting up of
    cane sugar by invertase. The history of this problem is instructive,
    as it warns us against considering problems beyond our reach because
    they have not yet found their solution.

-- Jacques Loeb, 1906, on the discovery of the mechanism of glycolysis
%
12 points baiter 04 November 2011 02:31:09AM

    Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our
    inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the
    state of facts and evidence.

-- John Adams, Argument in Defense of the Soldiers
    in the Boston Massacre Trials
%
12 points kateblu 09 December 2011 03:42:02AM

    If a theory has a lot of parameters, you adjust their values to fit a
    lot of data, and your theory is not really predicting those things,
    just accommodating them. Scientists use words like "curve fitting" and
    "fudge factors" to describe that sort of activity. On the other hand,
    if a theory has just a few parameters but applies to a lot of data, it
    has real power.  You can use a small subset of the measurements to fix
    the parameters; then all other measurements are uniquely predicted.

-- Frank Wilczek
%
12 points Alerik 06 December 2011 05:28:36PM

"To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees." ― Paul Valéry
%
12 points harshhpareek 04 December 2011 07:32:21AM

    The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might expect,
    it winds all over the place. But it doesn't do this out of frivolity.
    The path it has discovered is the most economical route to the sea

-- Paul Graham, The Age of the Essay
(http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html)
%
12 points hairyfigment 03 December 2011 12:17:34AM

    Every properly trained wizard has heard of Abraham, the idiot
    apprentice who recklessly enchanted a massive diamond instead of
    selling it to pay someone more skilled to fix his cursed noble friend.
    Haven't you destroyed the bloody thing by now?

    Raven, from Dan Shive's webcomic El Goonish Shive.

%
12 points Karmakaiser 01 December 2011 01:40:48AM

    Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for
    the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the
    ignorant.

-- Epictetus
%
12 points Karmakaiser 09 January 2012 04:33:02PM

    "A "lie-to-children" is a statement which is false, but which
    nevertheless leads the child’s mind towards a more accurate
    explanation, one that the child will only be able to appreciate if it
    has been primed with the lie." "Yes, you needed to understand that"
    they are told, "so that now we can tell you why it isn’t exactly
    true." It is for the best possible reasons, but it is still a lie"."

-- (The Science of Discworld, Ebury Press edition, quotes from pp 41-42)
%
12 points Alejandro1 03 January 2012 11:56:30PM

    It cannot have escaped philosophers' attention that our fellow
    academics in other fields--especially in the sciences--often have
    difficulty suppressing their incredulous amusement when such topics as
    Twin Earth, Swampman, and Blockheads are posed for apparently serious
    consideration. Are the scientists just being philistines, betraying
    their tin ears for the subtleties of philosophical investigation, or
    have the philosophers who indulge in these exercises lost their grip
    on reality?

    These bizarre examples all attempt to prove one "conceptual" point or
    another by deliberately reducing something underappreciated to zero,
    so that What Really Counts can shine through. Blockheads hold
    peripheral behavior constant and reduce internal structural details
    (and--what comes to the same thing--intervening internal processes)
    close to zero, and provoke the intuition that then there would be no
    mind there; internal structure Really Counts. Manthra is more or less
    the mirror-image; it keeps internal processes constant and reduces
    control of peripheral behavior to zero, showing, presumably, that
    external behavior Really Doesn't Count. Swampman keeps both future
    peripheral dispositions and internal states constant and reduces
    "history" to zero. Twin Earth sets internal similarity to maximum, so
    that external context can be demonstrated to be responsible for
    whatever our intuitions tell us. Thus these thought experiments mimic
    empirical experiments in their design, attempting to isolate a crucial
    interaction between variables by holding other variables constant. In
    the past I have often noted that a problem with such experiments is
    that the dependent variable is "intuition"--they are intuition
    pumps--and the contribution of imagination in the generation of
    intuitions is harder to control than philosophers have usually
    acknowledged.

    But there is also a deeper problem with them. It is child's play to
    dream up further such examples to "prove" further conceptual points.
    Suppose a cow gave birth to something that was atom-for-atom
    indiscernible from a shark. Would it be a shark? What is the
    truth-maker for sharkhood? If you posed that question to a biologist,
    the charitable reaction would be that you were making a labored
    attempt at a joke. Suppose an evil demon could make water turn solid
    at room temperature by smiling at it; would demon-water be ice? Too
    silly a hypothesis to deserve a response. All such intuition pumps
    depend on the distinction spelled out by McLaughlin and
    O'Leary-Hawthorne between "conceptual" and "reductive" answers to the
    big questions. What I hadn't sufficiently appreciated in my earlier
    forthright response to Jackson is that when one says that the
    truth-maker question requires a conceptual answer, one means an answer
    that holds not just in our world, or all nomologically possible
    worlds, but in all logically possible worlds. Smiling demons,
    cow-sharks, Blockheads, and Swampmen are all, some philosophers think,
    logically possible, even if they are not nomologically possible, and
    these philosophers think this is important. I do not. Why should the
    truth-maker question cast its net this wide? Because, I gather,
    otherwise its answer doesn't tell us about the essence of the topic in
    question. But who believes in real essences of this sort nowadays? Not
    I.

-- Daniel Dennett, Get Real
%
12 points imbatman 10 January 2012 11:21:33PM

"A Confucian has stolen my hairbrush! Down with Confucianism!"

-- GK Chesterton (on ad hominems)
%
12 points Alicorn 06 January 2012 09:19:01PM

    "This has been a good day... I haven't done a single thing that was
    stupid..."

    "Have you done anything that was smart?"

-- Peanuts (Nov. 23, 1981) by Charles Schulz
%
12 points Alicorn 09 January 2012 06:04:02PM

    If some persons died, and others did not die, death would indeed be a
    terrible affliction.

-- Jean de la Bruyère
%
12 points Maniakes 03 January 2012 08:24:54PM

    I replied as follows: "What would you think of someone who said, "I
    would like to have a cat, provided it barked"? [...] As a natural
    scientist, you recognize that you cannot assign characteristics at
    will to chemical and biological entities, cannot demand that cats bark
    or water burn. Why do you suppose that the situation is different in
    the "social sciences?"

-- Milton Friedman
%
12 points David_Gerard 03 February 2012 07:33:07AM

    The human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from
    the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called
    "sciences as one would." For what a man had rather were true he more
    readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from
    impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the
    deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience,
    from arrogance and pride, lest his mind should seem to be occupied
    with things mean and transitory; things not commonly believed, out of
    deference to the opinion of the vulgar. Numberless, in short, are the
    ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections color and
    infect the understanding.

-- Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (Aphorism XLIX), 1620.
    (1863 translation by Spedding, Ellis and Heath.)
%
12 points Konkvistador 07 February 2012 03:20:34PM

    It may be expecting too much to expect most intellectuals to have
    common sense, when their whole life is based on their being uncommon
    -- that is, saying things that are different from what everyone else
    is saying. There is only so much genuine originality in anyone. After
    that, being uncommon means indulging in pointless eccentricities or
    clever attempts to mock or shock.

-- Thomas Sowell
%
12 points Alicorn 01 February 2012 08:16:27PM

    Death is the gods' crime.

    Unsounded

%
12 points Will_Newsome 04 March 2012 12:10:37PM

    The world is paved with good intentions; the road to Hell has bad
    epistemology mixed in.

-- Steven Kaas
%
12 points GLaDOS 01 March 2012 07:07:58PM

    I have sometimes seen people try to list what a real intellectual
    should know. I think it might be more illuminating to list what he
    shouldn’t.

-- Gregory Cochran, in a comment here
%
12 points Stephanie_Cunnane 09 April 2012 02:15:40AM

    From this moment forward, remember this: What you do is infinitely
    more important than how you do it. Efficiency is still important, but
    it is useless unless applied to the right things.

-- Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek
%
12 points Klevador 14 April 2012 04:48:48AM

    Any collocation of persons, no matter how numerous, how scant, how
    even their homogeneity, how firmly they profess common doctrine, will
    presently reveal themselves to consist of smaller groups espousing
    variant versions of the common creed; and these sub-groups will
    manifest sub-sub-groups, and so to the final limit of the single
    individual, and even in this single person conflicting tendencies will
    express themselves.

-- Jack Vance, The Languages of Pao
%
12 points Pavitra 05 April 2012 12:59:38PM

    In the real world things are very different. You just need to look
    around you. Nobody wants to die that way. People die of disease and
    accident. Death comes suddenly and there is no notion of good or bad.
    It leaves, not a dramatic feeling but great emptiness. When you lose
    someone you loved very much you feel this big empty space and think,
    'If I had known this was coming I would have done things differently.'

-- Yoshinori Kitase
%
12 points VKS 03 April 2012 08:52:49PM

    Don't just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your
    own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary?
    Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What
    about the degenerate case? Where does the proof use the hypothesis?

    Paul Halmos

%
12 points Stephanie_Cunnane 03 April 2012 07:51:19AM

    In short, and I can't emphasize this strongly enough, a fundamental
    issue that any theory of psychology ultimately has to face is that
    brains are useful. They guide behavior. Any brain that didn't cause
    its owner to do useful--in the evolutionary sense--things, didn't
    cause reproduction.

-- Robert Kurzban,
    Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind
%
12 points jsbennett86 03 April 2012 02:17:07AM

    But when we have these irrational beliefs, these culturally coded
    assumptions, running so deep within our community and movement, how do
    we actually change that? How do we get people to further question
    themselves when they’ve already become convinced that they’re a
    rational person, a skeptic, and have moved on from irrationality,
    cognitive distortion and bias?

    Well I think what we need to do is to change the fundamental structure
    and values of skepticism. We need to build our community and movement
    around slightly different premises.

    As it has stood in the past, skepticism has been predicated on a
    belief in the power of the empirical and rational. It has been based
    on the premise that there is an empirical truth, and that it is
    knowable, and that certain tools and strategies like science and logic
    will allow us to reach that truth. In short, the "old guard"
    skepticism was based on a veneration of the rational. But the
    veneration of certain techniques or certain philosophies creates the
    problematic possibility of choosing to consider certain conclusions or
    beliefs to BE empirical and rational and above criticism, particularly
    beliefs derived from the "right" tools, and even more dangerously, to
    consider oneself "rational".

    ...

    I believe that in order to be able to question our own beliefs as well
    as we question those of others, we need to restructure skepticism
    around awareness of human limitation, irrationality and flaws. Rather
    than venerating the rational, and aspiring to become some kind of
    superhuman fully rational vulcan minds, we need to instead create a
    more human skepticism, built around understanding how belief operates,
    how we draw conclusions, and how we can cope with the human
    limitations. I believe we need to remove the focus from aspiring
    towards ridding ourselves of the irrational, and instead move the
    focus towards understanding how this irrationality operates and why we
    believe all the crazy things we believe. We need to position as our
    primary aspiration not the achievement of a perfect comprehending
    mind, but instead an ability to maintain constant hesitation and
    doubt, to always always ALWAYS second-guess our positions and
    understand that they’re being created through a flawed mind, from
    flawed perceptions.

    Science and reason are excellent tools to allow us to cope with being
    crazy, irrational human beings, but it CANNOT allow us to transcend
    that. The instant we begin to believe that we have become A Skeptic, A
    Rational Person, that is when we’ve fucked up, that is when we stop
    practicing skepticism, stop keeping an eye out for our mistakes, and
    begin to imagine our irrational perceptions as perfect rational
    conclusions. It’s only by building a skepticism based on the practice
    of doubt, rather than the state of Skeptic, that we’ll truly be able
    to be move on from our assumptions.

    Natalie Reed, Getting Skeptics to Think Rationally About Their
    Skepticism

%
12 points Annie0305 20 May 2012 10:13:35AM

Oh, and Paul Graham again from the same piece:

    When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get the wrong
    answers on tests. But when people are bad at open-mindedness they
    don't know it.

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12 points Old_Rationality 02 May 2012 11:59:39AM

    His mind refused to accept a simple inference from simple facts, which
    were patent to all the world. The very simplicity of the conclusion
    was of itself enough to make him reject it, for he had an elective
    affinity for everything that was intricate. He was a prey to
    intellectual over-subtlety.

-- Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt
%
12 points mindspillage 14 May 2012 02:19:05PM

    In war you will generally find that the enemy has at any time three
    courses of action open to him. Of those three, he will invariably
    choose the fourth.

-- Helmuth Von Moltke
%
12 points Jayson_Virissimo 01 May 2012 07:48:47AM

    Proper treatment will cure a cold in seven days, but left to itself a
    cold will hang on for a week.

-- Henry G. Felsen
%
12 points Vaniver 03 July 2012 12:56:18AM

    Reality is the ultimate arbiter of truth. If your thoughts, beliefs,
    and actions aren't aligned with truth, your results will suffer.

-- Steve Pavlina
%
12 points Oscar_Cunningham 02 August 2012 09:27:58PM

    By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering
    and analyzing the observations that I have made, I ended up in the
    domain of mathematics.

-- M. C. Escher
%
12 points Alicorn 09 August 2012 12:26:50AM

    It's not the end of the world. Well. I mean, yes, literally it is the
    end of the world, but moping doesn't help!

-- A Softer World
%
12 points RichardKennaway 16 September 2012 06:10:49PM

    When a precise, narrowly focused technical idea becomes metaphor and
    sprawls globally, its credibility must be earned afresh locally by
    means of specific evidence demonstrating the relevance and explanatory
    power of the idea in its new application.

-- Edward Tufte, Beautiful Evidence
%
12 points ChristianKl 09 September 2012 10:49:29PM

    "The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature
    hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t
    know."

― Robert M. Pirsig,
    Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
%
12 points chaosmosis 09 September 2012 12:34:36AM

    "You're very smart. Smarter than I am, I hope. Though of course I have
    such incredible vanity that I can't really believe that anyone is
    actually smarter than I am. Which means that I'm all the more in need
    of good advice, since I can't actually conceive of needing any."

    New Peter / Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind

%
12 points Jayson_Virissimo 01 September 2012 08:18:04AM

    Conspiracy Theory, n. A theory about a conspiracy that you are not
    supposed to believe.

-- L. A. Rollins, Lucifer's Lexicon: An Updated Abridgment
%
12 points grendelkhan 15 October 2012 05:40:26PM

    It's all fine and good to declare that you would have freed your
    slaves. But it's much more interesting to assume that you wouldn't
    have and then ask, "Why?"

-- Ta-Nehisi Coates, A Muscular Empathy
%
12 points taelor 02 November 2012 02:47:46AM

    If we see in each generation the conflict of the future against the
    past, the fight of what might be called progressive versus
    reactionary, we shall find ourselves organizing the historical story
    upon what is really an unfolding principle of progress, and our eyes
    will be fixed upon certain people who appear as the special agencies
    of that progress. [...] But if we see in each generation a clash of
    wills out of which there emerges something that probably no man ever
    willed, our minds become concentrated upon the process that produced
    such an unpredictable issue, and we are more open for an intensive
    study of the motions and interactions that underlie historical change.
    [...] The process of the historical transition will then be recognized
    to be unlike what the whig historian seems to assume - much less like
    the procedure of a logical argument and perhaps much more like the
    method by which a man can be imagined to work his way out of a
    "complex". It is a process which moves by mediations and those
    mediations may be provided by anything in the world - by men’s sins or
    misapprehensions or by what we can only call fortunate conjunctures.
    Very strange bridges are used to make the passage from one state of
    things to another; we may lose sight of them in our surveys of general
    history, but their discovery is the glory of historical research.
    History is not the study of origins; rather it is the analysis of all
    the mediations by which the past was turned into our present.

-- Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History
%
12 points fortyeridania 02 November 2012 07:11:52AM

On confirmation bias

    If a man objects to truths that are all too evident, it is no easy
    task finding arguments that will change his mind. This is proof
    neither of his own strength nor of his teacher's weakness. When
    someone caught in an argument hardens to stone, there is just no more
    reasoning with them.

-- Epictetus, Discourses I.5.1-2 (page 15 of this edition)
    (original Greek, with alternate translations at the link)
%
12 points SaidAchmiz 02 December 2012 07:26:34AM

    "Well, how about this — that man, unlike animals, is a creature who
    experiences an insurmountable need for knowledge? I've read that
    somewhere."

    "So have I," said Valentine. "But the trouble is that man, or in any
    case the common man, easily overcomes this need for knowledge of his.
    It seems to me that he doesn't have such a need at all. There's a need
    to understand, but knowledge is not required for that. The God
    hypothesis, for instance, gives one an unparalleled ability to
    understand absolutely everything, while discovering absolutely
    nothing... Give a person a highly simplified model of the world and
    interpret any event on the basis of this simplified model. Such an
    approach required no knowledge. A few memorized formulas plus some
    so-called intuition, so-called practical acumen, and so-called common
    sense."

-- Roadside Picnic, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky
%
11 points AndySimpson 18 April 2009 07:55:05PM

    Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

-- Aldous Huxley
%
11 points jscn 16 June 2009 04:21:08AM

    It's a wonderful thing to be clever, and you should never think
    otherwise, and you should never stop being that way. But what you
    learn, as you get older, is that there are a few million other people
    in the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever
    you do with your life will certainly be lost - swallowed up in the
    ocean - unless you are doing it with like-minded people who will
    remember your contributions and carry them forward. That is why the
    world is divided into tribes.

-- Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
%
11 points NancyLebovitz 04 July 2009 02:44:55PM

By Ta Nehisi Coates

    But I distrusted the whole game. Intuitively, I wonder about the
    honesty and proficiency of writers who opine on everything from Iran
    to education to drug policy to health care to cap and trade to race.
    Perhaps these people simply have more brains than me, but the
    catch-all nature of punditry, the need to speak on every policy topic
    as though one were an expert, is exactly what I hope to avoid.

%
11 points anonym 24 October 2009 10:25:46PM

    When I became convinced that the Universe is natural — that all the
    ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul,
    into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of
    freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was
    flooded with light, and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became
    dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me
    no master in all the wide world — not even in infinite space. I was
    free — free to think, to express my thoughts — free to live to my own
    ideal — free to live for myself and those I loved — free to use all my
    faculties, all my senses — free to spread imagination’s wings — free
    to investigate, to guess and dream and hope — free to judge and
    determine for myself — free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds,
    all the "inspired" books that savages have produced, and all the
    barbarous legends of the past — free from the popes and priests — free
    from all the "called" and "set apart" — free from sanctified mistakes
    and holy lies — free from the fear of eternal pain — free from the
    winged monsters of the night — free from devils, ghosts, and gods. For
    the first time I was free. There were no prohibited places in all the
    realms of thought — no air, no space, where fancy could not spread her
    painted wings — no chains for my limbs — no lashes for my back — no
    fires for my flesh — no master’s frown or threat — no following
    another’s steps — no need to bow, or cringe, or crawl, or utter lying
    words. I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all
    worlds.

    And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and
    went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave for the
    liberty of hand and brain — for the freedom of labor and thought — to
    those who fell in the fierce fields of war, to those who died in
    dungeons bound with chains — to those who proudly mounted scaffold’s
    stairs — to those whose bones were crushed, whose flesh was scarred
    and torn — to those by fire consumed — to all the wise, the good, the
    brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to
    the sons of men. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had
    held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still.

-- Robert G. Ingersoll
%
11 points ABranco 24 October 2009 03:59:33AM

    Never underestimate the difficulty of changing false beliefs by facts.

-- Harvard economist Henry Rosovsky
%
11 points spriteless 23 October 2009 10:29:00PM

Since all things related to akrasia and self motivation are relevant here:

    As a final incentive before giving up a difficult task, try to imagine
    it successfully accomplished by someone you violently dislike.

-- K.  Zenios
%
11 points anonym 30 November 2009 02:03:46AM

    ... by natural selection our mind has adapted itself to the conditions
    of the external world. It has adopted the geometry most advantageous
    to the species or, in other words, the most convenient. Geometry is
    not true, it is advantageous.

-- Henri Poincaré
%
11 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 January 2010 11:43:13PM

    If you’ve never broken the bed, you’re not experimenting enough.

-- Miss HT Psych
%
11 points Rain 07 January 2010 11:34:47PM

    He must be very ignorant; for he answers every question he is asked.

-- Voltaire
%
11 points MatthewB 07 January 2010 02:06:09PM

    People will torture their children with battery acid from time to time
    anyway -- and who among us hasn't wanted to kill and eat an albino? I
    sincerely hope that my "new atheist" colleagues are not so naive as to
    imagine that actual belief in magic might be the issue here. After
    all, it would be absurd to criticize witchcraft as unscientific, as
    this would ignore the primordial division between mythos and logos.
    Let me see if I have this straight: Belief in demons, the evil eye,
    and the medicinal value of a cannibal feast are perversions of the
    real witchcraft - -which is drenched with meaning, intrinsically
    wholesome, integral to our humanity, and here to stay. Do I have that
    right?

-- Sam Harriss, reply to Karen Armstrong
%
11 points gregconen 01 February 2010 03:53:24PM

    I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to
    the thoughtless approval of the masses.

-- Johannes Kepler
%
11 points RichardKennaway 01 February 2010 10:19:31AM

    People are not complicated. People are really very simple. What makes
    them appear complicated is our continual insistence on interpreting
    their behavior instead of discovering their goals.

-- Bruce Gregory
%
11 points Bindbreaker 01 March 2010 08:07:19PM

    One thousand five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was the
    center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew that
    the Earth was flat... and fifteen minutes ago, you knew people were
    alone on this planet. Think about what you'll know tomorrow."

-- Agent K, Men in Black
%
11 points CronoDAS 04 April 2010 04:34:51AM

    The wizard who reads a thousand books is powerful. The wizard who
    memorizes a thousand books is insane.
%
11 points Rain 01 May 2010 02:22:14PM

    As a species we're fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a
    room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another.
    Why do you think we invented politics and religion?

-- Ollie, The Mist, 2007
%
11 points djcb 01 May 2010 01:56:11PM

    Men ought to know that from nothing else but the brain comes joy,
    delights, laughter, and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency, and
    lamentations. And by this, in an especial manner, we acquire wisdom
    and knowledge, and see and hear and know what are foul and what are
    fair, what are bad and what are good, what are sweet, and what are
    unsavory. ... And by the same organ we become mad and delirious, and
    fears and terrors assail us. ... All these things we endure from the
    brain. ...In these ways I am of the opinion that the brain exercises
    the greatest power in the man.

-- Hippocrates, On the sacred disease (ca. 4th century BCE).

[ In this and other of his writings, Hippocrates shows such an incredible
early sense for rationality and against superstition that was only rarely
seen in the next 2000 after that -- and in addition, he was not just a
armchair philosopher, he actually put these things is practice. So, hats
off for Hippocrates, even when his medicine was not without faults of
course...]
%
11 points Matt_Duing 02 June 2010 04:15:13AM

"Sanity is conforming your thoughts to reality. Conforming reality to your
thoughts is creativity."

-- Unknown
%
11 points RichardKennaway 01 June 2010 07:56:25PM

    Despite the fact that you arrived in this world with nothing but an
    unborn Buddha-mind, your partiality for yourselves now makes you want
    to have things move in your own way. You lose your temper, become
    contentious, and then you think, "I haven't lost my temper. That
    fellow won't listen to me. By being so unreasonable he has made me
    lose it." And so you fix belligerently on his words and end up
    transforming the valuable Buddha-mind into a fighting spirit. By
    stewing over this unimportant matter, making the thoughts churn over
    and over in your mind, you may finally get your way, but then you fail
    in your ignorance to realize that it was meaningless for you to
    concern yourself over such a matter.

From The Dharma Talks of Zen Master Bankei, translated by Norman Waddell.
Quoted by Torkel Franzén as a perfect description of Usenet flamewars.
%
11 points RichardKennaway 02 July 2010 06:59:22AM

    A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong,
    which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than
    yesterday.

-- Jonathan Swift (also attributed to Pope)

    I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was
    yesterday.

-- Abraham Lincoln
%
11 points Yvain 07 October 2010 07:07:18PM

    A neighbor came to Nasrudin, asking to borrow his donkey. "It is out
    on loan," the teacher replied. At that moment, the donkey brayed
    loudly inside the stable. "But I can hear it bray, over there." "Whom
    do you believe," asked Nasrudin, "me or a donkey?"

-- old Sufi parable
%
11 points wedrifid 23 December 2010 05:55:51AM

    The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think,
    feel and act in a completely moral way. [...] Some people are so
    highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally
    imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt,
    they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives
    and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality
    have a non-moral origin.

-- Ted Kaczynski
%
11 points David_Gerard 11 December 2010 09:30:54PM

    Witching was turning out to be mostly hard work and really short on
    magic of the zap!-glingle-glingle-glingle variety. There was no school
    and nothing that was exactly like a lesson. But it wasn’t wise to try
    to learn witching all by yourself, especially if you had a natural
    talent. If you got it wrong, you could go from ignorant to cackling in
    a week ...

    When you got right down to it, it was all about cackling. No one ever
    talked about this, though. Witches said things like "You can never be
    too old, too skinny, or too warty," but they never mentioned the
    cackling. Not properly. They watched out for it, though, all the time.

    It was all too easy to become a cackler. Most witches lived by
    themselves (cat optional) and might go for weeks without ever seeing
    another witch.  In those times when people hated witches, they were
    often accused of talking to their cats. Of course they talked to their
    cats. After three weeks without an intelligent conversation that
    wasn’t about cows, you’d talk to the wall. And that was an early sign
    of cackling.

    "Cackling," to a witch, didn’t just mean nasty laughter. It meant your
    mind drifting away from its anchor. It meant you losing your grip. It
    meant loneliness and hard work and responsibility and other people’s
    problems driving you crazy a little bit at a time, each bit so small
    that you’d hardly notice it, until you thought that it was normal to
    stop washing and wear a kettle on your head. It meant you thinking
    that the fact you knew more than anyone else in your village made you
    better than them. It meant thinking that right and wrong were
    negotiable. And, in the end, it meant you "going to the dark," as the
    witches said. That was a bad road. At the end of that road were
    poisoned spinning wheels and gingerbread cottages.

    What stopped this was the habit of visiting. Witches visited other
    witches all the time, sometimes traveling quite a long way for a cup
    of tea and a bun. Partly this was for gossip, of course, because
    witches love gossip, especially if it’s more exciting than truthful.
    But mostly it was to keep an eye on one another.

    Today Tiffany was visiting Granny Weatherwax, who was in the opinion
    of most witches (including Granny herself) the most powerful witch in
    the mountains. It was all very polite. No one said, "Not gone bats,
    then?" or "Certainly not! I’m as sharp as a spoon!" They didn’t need
    to. They understood what it was all about, so they talked of other
    things. But when she was in a mood, Granny Weatherwax could be hard
    work.

-- Pratchett, Wintersmith

%
11 points topynate 03 December 2010 06:20:06AM

    Empty arguments with words cannot (in any way) compare with a test
    which will show practical results.

-- Ma Jun, inventor or reinventor of the South Pointing Chariot
    and the differential gear.
%
11 points billswift 03 December 2010 05:15:07AM

"When in total ignorance, try anything and you will be less ignorant."

-- G.Harry Stine, A Matter of Metalaw
%
11 points Nominull 07 January 2011 08:15:31PM

    The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate,
    contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive and
    unrealistic.

-- John F. Kennedy
%
11 points Document 05 January 2011 12:41:30AM

    There should be a word for the things we do not because we want to but
    because we want to be the kind of person who wants to.

-- A Softer World #626
%
11 points JohannesDahlstrom 04 January 2011 09:23:32PM

    This is how Vetinari thinks, his soul exulted. Plans can break down.
    You cannot plan the future. Only presumptuous fools plan. The wise man
    steers.

-- Terry Pratchett, Making Money

Although thought by a madman in the book, there seems to be truth in this
quote. People often seem to think of the future as a coherent, specific
story not unlike the one woven by the brain from the past events.
Unpleasant surprises happen when the real events inevitably deviate from
those imagined.
%
11 points AndySimpson 04 January 2011 07:01:56PM

    ...natural selection built the brain to survive in the world and only
    incidentally to understand it at a depth greater than is needed to
    survive. The proper task of scientists is to diagnose and correct the
    misalignment.

-- E. O. Wilson
%
11 points MichaelGR 03 January 2011 09:32:45PM

    Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.

-- Walter Lippmann
%
11 points gwern 07 February 2011 12:48:39AM

    "Nor let him [the ruler] ever believe that a state can always make
    safe choices; on the contrary, let him think that he must make only
    doubtful ones; because this is in the order of things, that one never
    tries to avoid one inconvenience without incurring another; but
    prudence consists of knowing how to recognize the kinds of
    inconveniences, and to take the least sad for good."

-- Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
%
11 points Konkvistador 02 February 2011 10:40:20PM

    On two occasions I have been asked, - "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put
    into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In
    one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower
    House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind
    of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

-- Charles Babbage
%
11 points Threedee 05 March 2011 08:28:20AM

    If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a
    past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a
    different reality system.

-- William James
%
11 points billswift 02 March 2011 07:22:47PM

    It is discipline, the rigorous attention to detail, that distinguishes
    the work of a scholar from that of a dilettante.
%
11 points dares 04 April 2011 07:52:14PM

    In life as in poker, the occasional coup does not necessarily
    demonstrate skill and superlative performance is not the ability to
    eliminate chance, but the capacity to deliver good outcomes over and
    over again. That is how we know Warren Buffett is a skilled investor
    and Johnny Chan a skilled poker player.

-- John Kay, Financial Times
%
11 points RobinZ 04 May 2011 02:48:38PM

    Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere
    concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on,
    which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and
    interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and
    unhelpful symbols.

-- John Maynard Keynes,
    The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money (1935),
    Book 5, Chapter 21, Section 3, pg. 298
%
11 points vallinder 02 May 2011 08:11:01PM

    It is quite easy to show, decision-theoretically, that the greatest
    chance of survival generally belongs to those who have most of their
    beliefs about things which affect our survival ability true.
    Philosophy, however, is totally irrelevant to survival from an
    evolutionary point of view. Natural selection has no way of weeding
    out veridical intuitions about the basic constitution of matter, for
    instance, from false ones, because humans have not generally been
    killed before they can procreate due to having erroneous metaphysical
    intuitions. Or bluntly put: having a true metaphysical theory does not
    help you getting laid.

-- Staffan Angere, Theory and Reality: Metaphysics as Second Science, p. 17
%
11 points Alicorn 24 June 2011 01:22:42AM

    "People argue against the existence of spirits and immaterial souls
    because they can't be explained by science. But if by definition these
    things are outside the scope of science, then you can't use science to
    prove or disprove them."

    "Do these spirits and souls actually affect anything in the real
    world?"

    "Sure."

    "Then they're within the scope of science."

    "Okay, let's say they don't interact at all with the world."

    "Then why do we care?!?!"

-- Calamities of Nature
%
11 points MixedNuts 06 June 2011 03:17:18PM

    When shall we cross ourselves?

    Whenever we are about to perform a good deed, or when we see or feel
    that we might commit a sin.

    Carlos Gimenez, Barrio (Context: children in a religious institution
    are answering catechism questions)

This sounds like a great way to prime yourself. Crossing yourself has all
the wrong connotations, but a gesture meaning "I choose good." should help
in general. (I like the fist-over-heart Battlestar Galactica salute.)

Having a whole set of gestures, along with pithy quotes, should prove even
more effective.
%
11 points CharlesR 06 June 2011 01:09:01AM

    Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at
    defending beliefs they arrived at for nonsmart reasons.

-- Michael Shermer
%
11 points RichardKennaway 03 June 2011 02:16:06PM

    He who would be Pope must think of nothing else.

Usually cited as a Spanish proverb.
%
11 points jscn 02 June 2011 12:26:59AM

    The intellect, as a means for the preservation of the individual,
    unfolds its chief powers in simulation; for this is the means by which
    the weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves, since they
    are denied the chance of waging the struggle for existence with horns
    or the fangs of beasts of prey. In man this art of simulation reaches
    its peak: here deception, flattering, lying and cheating, talking
    behind the back, posing, living in borrowed splendor, being masked,
    the disguise of convention, acting a role before others and before
    oneself—in short, the constant fluttering around the single flame of
    vanity is so much the rule and the law that almost nothing is more
    incomprehensible than how an honest and pure urge for truth could make
    its appearance among men. They are deeply immersed in illusions and
    dream images; their eye glides only over the surface of things and
    sees "forms"; their feeling nowhere lead into truth, but contents
    itself with the reception of stimuli, playing, as it were, a game of
    blindman's buff on the backs of things.

-- Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense
%
11 points RobertLumley 02 June 2011 12:21:14AM

    If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and
    truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of
    knowledge in mathematics.

-- Roger Bacon
%
11 points Yvain 03 July 2011 11:07:00PM

    "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)
%
11 points CaveJohnson 23 September 2011 09:50:22AM

    One of my favorite genres in the prestige press is the Self-Refuting
    Article. These are articles that contain all the facts necessary to
    undermine the premise of the piece, but reporters, editors, and
    readers all conspire together in an act of collective stupidity to Not
    Get the Joke

-- Steve Sailer
%
11 points lukeprog 08 September 2011 01:58:27AM

    If you cannot calculate you cannot speculate on future pleasure and
    your life will not be that of a human, but that of an oyster or a
    jellyfish.

-- Plato, Philebus
%
11 points Konkvistador 31 October 2011 04:50:03PM

    A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason
    and the real reason.

-- Thomas Carlyle
%
11 points RobinZ 12 October 2011 01:14:49AM

    This is one of those occasions when it would be wise to translate back
    into respectable gene language, just to reassure ourselves that we
    have not become too carried away with subjective metaphors.

-- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, ch. 8
%
11 points Wix 02 November 2011 08:22:53AM

    At sea once more we had to pass the Sirens, whose sweet singing lures
    sailors to their doom. I had stopped up the ears of my crew with wax,
    and I alone listened while lashed to the mast, powerless to steer
    toward shipwreck.

-- Odysseus in Odyssey
%
11 points Alejandro1 31 October 2011 10:44:25PM

    I want to give thanks to the divine

    Labyrinth of causes and effects

    For the diversity of beings

    That form this singular universe,

    For Reason, that will never give up its dream

    Of a map of the labyrinth,

-- Jorge Luis Borges, Another poem of gifts (opening lines).
%
11 points Thomas 11 December 2011 03:35:40PM

    Remember — there is a correlation between correlation and causation.

    ChaosRobie on Reddit

%
11 points brilee 02 December 2011 02:32:02PM

    Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment;
    chop wood, carry water.

Zen saying

A warning that not all hyperrationality is beneficial.
%
11 points CaveJohnson 19 January 2012 10:59:42PM

    We should venture on the study of every kind of animal without
    distaste; for each and all will reveal to us something natural and
    something beautiful.

-- Aristotle
%
11 points Grognor 16 February 2012 07:59:35AM

    If we want to know if there has been a change from the start to the
    end dates, all we have to do is look! I’m tempted to add a dozen more
    exclamation points to that sentence, it is that important. We do not
    have to model what we can see. No statistical test is needed to say
    whether the data has changed. We can just look.

    I have to stop, lest I become exasperated. We statisticians have
    pointed out this fact until we have all, one by one, turned blue in
    the face and passed out, the next statistician in line taking the
    place of his fallen comrade.

-- William M. Briggs
%
11 points Stabilizer 06 March 2012 04:51:18AM

    We have not succeeded in answering all our problems.

    The answers we have found only serve

    to raise a whole set of new questions.

    In some ways we feel we are as confused as ever,

    but we believe we are confused on a higher level

    and about more important things.

-- Posted outside the mathematics reading room, Tromsø University

From the homepage of Kim C. Border
%
11 points XFrequentist 02 March 2012 09:01:52PM

    May the best of your todays, be the worst of your tomorrows

    Jay-Z, Forever Young

[Taking the lyrics literally, the whole thing is a pretty sweet
transhumanist anthem.]
%
11 points arundelo 01 March 2012 08:03:29PM

    When reading, you win if you learn, not if you convince yourself that
    you know something the author does not know.

-- Reg Braithwaite (raganwald)
%
11 points army1987 02 April 2012 05:13:52PM

    Analogies are like ropes; they tie things together pretty well, but
    you won't get very far if you try to push them.

-- Thaddeus Stout Tom Davidson
%
11 points tgb 01 April 2012 01:30:37PM

    Who has seen the wind?

    Neither I nor you:

    But when the leaves hang trembling,

    The wind is passing through.

    Who has seen the wind?

    Neither you nor I:

    But when the trees bow down their heads,

    The wind is passing by.

-- Christina Rossetti, Who has seen the Wind?
%
11 points Kutta 01 April 2012 01:00:30PM

    He who knows how to do something is the servant of he who knows why
    that thing must be done.

-- Isuna Hasekura, Spice and Wolf vol. 5
    ("servant" is justified by the medieval setting).
%
11 points MixedNuts 09 April 2012 03:24:07PM

On specificity and sneaking on connotations; useful for the liberal-minded
among us:

    I think, with racism and sexism and 'isms' generally, there's a sort
    of confusion of terminology.

    A "Racist1" is someone, who, like a majority of people in this
    society, has subconsciously internalized some negative attitudes about
    minority racial groups. If a Racist1 takes the Implicit Association
    Test, her score shows she's biased against black people, like the
    majority of people (of all races) who took the test. Chances are,
    whether you know it or not, you're a Racist1.

    A "Racist2" is someone who's kind of an insensitive jerk about race.
    The kind of guy who calls Obama the "Food Stamp President." Someone
    you wouldn't want your sister dating.

    A "Racist3" is a neo-Nazi. You can never be quite sure that one day he
    won't snap and kill someone. He's clearly a social deviant.

    People use the word "Racist" for all three things, and I think that's
    the source of a lot of arguments. When people get accused of being
    racists, they evade responsibility by saying, "Hey, I'm not a
    Racist3!" when in fact you were only saying they were Racist1 or
    Racist2. But some of the responsibility is on the accusers too -- if
    you say "That Republican's a racist" with the implication of "a jerk"
    and then backtrack and change the meaning to "vulnerable to
    unconscious bias", then you're arguing in bad faith. Never mind that
    some laws and rules which were meant to protect people from Racist3's
    are in fact deployed against Racist2's.

-- celandine13
%
11 points shminux 24 May 2012 06:14:17PM

    if you can’t explain how to simulate your theory on a computer,
    chances are excellent that the reason is that your theory makes no
    sense!

-- Scott Aaronson
%
11 points Annie0305 20 May 2012 09:43:39AM

    "Almost certainly, there is something wrong with you if you don't
    think things you don't dare say out loud."

-- Paul Graham
%
11 points Stephanie_Cunnane 02 May 2012 05:11:15AM

    Are you better off than you were one year ago, one month ago, or one
    week ago?

-- Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek
%
11 points J_Taylor 03 May 2012 06:16:35PM

    It is not seeing things as they are to think first of a Briareus with
    a hundred hands, and then call every man a cripple for only having
    two. It is not seeing things as they are to start with a vision of
    Argus with his hundred eyes, and then jeer at every man with two eyes
    as if he had only one. And it is not seeing things as they are to
    imagine a demigod of infinite mental clarity, who may or may not
    appear in the latter days of the earth, and then to see all men as
    idiots.

-- G.K. Chesterton
%
11 points Alejandro1 02 June 2012 12:35:00AM

    "The veil before my eyes dropped. I saw he was insincere ... a liar. I
    saw marriage with him would have been marriage to a worthless
    adventurer. I saw all this within five minutes of that meeting." As if
    she heard a self-recriminatory bitterness creep into her voice again,
    she stopped; then continued in a lower tone. "You may wonder how I had
    not seen it before. I believe I had. But to see something is not the
    same as to acknowledge it."

-- John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman
%
11 points RobertLumley 02 July 2012 03:16:55PM

    Why do you insist that the human genetic code is "sacred" or "taboo"?
    It is a chemical process and nothing more. For that matter—we—are
    chemical processes and nothing more. If you deny yourself a useful
    tool simply because it reminds you uncomfortably of your mortality,
    you have uselessly and pointlessly crippled yourself.

-- Chairman Sheng-ji Yang in Alpha Centauri
%
11 points Konkvistador 25 August 2012 10:55:45AM

    To understand our civilisation, one must appreciate that the extended
    order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously:
    it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and
    largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose
    significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they
    cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by
    means of an evolutionary selection — the comparative increase of
    population and wealth — of those groups that happened to follow them.
    The unwitting, reluctant, even painful adoption of these practices
    kept these groups together, increased their access to valuable
    information of all sorts, and enabled them to be 'fruitful, and
    multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it' (Genesis 1:28). This
    process is perhaps the least appreciated facet of human evolution.

-- Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit : The Errors of Socialism (1988), p.
6
%
11 points paper-machine 16 August 2012 10:47:22PM

    The problem with therapy-- include self help and mind hacks-- is its
    amazing failure rate. People do it for years and come out of it and
    feel like they understand themselves better but they do not change. If
    it failed to produce both insights and change it would make sense, but
    it is almost always one without the other.

-- The Last Psychiatrist
%
11 points Stabilizer 03 August 2012 04:07:02AM

    But a curiosity of my type remains after all the most agreeable of all
    vices --- sorry, I meant to say: the love of truth has its reward in
    heaven and even on earth.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche
%
11 points MichaelGR 09 August 2012 08:06:20PM

    The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever
    observes…

-- Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
%
11 points Eneasz 20 August 2012 06:56:35PM

An excerpt from Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss. Boxing is not safe.

    The innkeeper looked up. "I have to admit I don't see the trouble," he
    said apologetically. "I've seen monsters, Bast. The Cthaeh falls short
    of that."

    "That was the wrong word for me to use, Reshi," Bast admitted. "But I
    can't think of a better one. If there was a word that meant poisonous
    and hateful and contagious, I'd use that."

    Bast drew a deep breath and leaned forward in his chair. "Reshi, the
    Cthaeh can see the future. Not in some vague, oracular way. It sees
    all the future. Clearly. Perfectly. Everything that can possibly come
    to pass, branching out endlessly from the current moment."

    Kvothe raised an eyebrow. "It can, can it?"

    "It can," Bast said gravely. "And it is purely, perfectly malicious.
    This isn't a problem for the most part, as it can't leave the tree.
    But when someone comes to visit..."

    Kvothe's eyes went distant as he nodded to himself. "If it knows the
    future perfectly," he said slowly, "then it must know exactly how a
    person will react to anything it says."

    Bast nodded. "And it is vicious, Reshi."

    Kvothe continued in a musing tone. "That means anyone influenced by
    the Cthaeh would be like an arrow shot into the future."

    "An arrow only hits on person, Reshi." Bast's dark eyes were hollow
    and hopeless. "Anyone influenced by the Cthaeh is like a plague ship
    sailing for a harbor." Bast pointed at the half-filled sheet
    Chronicler held in his lap. "If the Sithe knew that existed, they
    would spare no effort to destroy it. They would kill us for having
    heard what the Cthaeh said."

    "Because anything carrying the Cthaeh's influence away from the
    tree..." Kvothe said, looking down at his hands. He sat silently for a
    long moment, nodding thoughtfully. "So a young man seeking his fortune
    goes to the Cthaeh and takes away a flower. The daughter of the king
    is deathly ill, and he takes the flower to heal her. They fall in love
    despite the fact that she's betrothed to the neighboring prince..."

    Bast stared at Kvothe, watching blankly as he spoke.

    "They attempt a daring moonlight escape," Kvothe continued. "But he
    falls from the rooftops and they're caught. The princess is married
    against her will and stabs the neighboring prince on their wedding
    night. The prince dies. Civil war. Fields burned and salted. Famine.
    Plague..."

    "That's the story of the Fastingsway War," Bast said faintly.

%
11 points OnTheOtherHandle 19 September 2012 05:24:59AM

    Let us together seek, if you wish, the laws of society, the manner in
    which these laws are reached, the process by which we shall succeed in
    discovering them; but, for God's sake, after having demolished all the
    a priori dogmatisms, do not let us in our turn dream of indoctrinating
    the people...let us not - simply because we are at the head of a
    movement - make ourselves into the new leaders of intolerance, let us
    not pose as the apostles of a new religion, even if it be the religion
    of logic, the religion of reason.

-- Pierre Proudhon, to Karl Marx
%
11 points Will_Newsome 01 September 2012 10:17:14AM

    Proceed only with the simplest terms, for all others are enemies and
    will confuse you.

-- Michael Kirkbride / Vivec, The Thirty Six Lessons of Vivec, Morrowind.
%
11 points Konkvistador 15 September 2012 05:58:02PM

    The Perfect Way is only difficult for those who pick and choose; Do
    not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear.  Make a hairbreadth
    difference, and Heaven and Earth are set apart; if you want the truth
    to stand clear before you, never be for or against.  The struggle
    between "for" and "against" is the mind's worst disease.

-- Jianzhi Sengcan
%
11 points lukeprog 19 October 2012 10:54:24PM

    To say our predictions are no worse than the experts’ is to damn
    ourselves with some awfully faint praise.

-- Nate Silver
%
11 points AlexMennen 02 October 2012 02:27:13AM

    A common mistake is to suppose that scientists are such admirable
    people that they can be safely entrusted with the ultimate
    responsibility for guiding scientific research. In fact they are no
    more admirable than any other type of worker. Neither selection nor
    self-selection tor a scientific career is based on admirableness.
    Though the conventions and protocols of science enforce on scientists,
    in comparison to astrologers and English professors - and lawyers - a
    high degree of objectivity when they are doing science, it does not
    follow that such individuals can be depended on to be objective policy
    analysts. That is a role for which they are not trained (but is
    anyone?) and that does not impose the constraints that science
    imposes.

-- Richard Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response
%
11 points Eugine_Nier 15 November 2012 05:12:14AM

    It is neither desirable nor any longer effective to try bullying
    people into accepting the authority of science. Instead, all members
    of the educated public can be invited to participate in science, in
    order to experience the true nature and value of scientific inquiry.
    This does not mean listening to professional scientists tell
    condescending stories about how they have discovered wonderful things,
    which you should believe for reasons that are too difficult for you to
    understand in real depth and detail. Doing science ought to mean
    asking your own questions, making your own investigations, and drawing
    your own conclusions for your own reasons. Of course it will not be
    feasible to advance the "cutting edge" or "frontier" of modern science
    without first acquiring years of specialist training. However, the
    cutting edge is not all there is to science, nor is it necessarily the
    most valuable part of science. Questions that have been answered are
    still worth asking again, so you can understand for yourself how to
    arrive at the standard answers, and possibly discover new answers or
    recover forgotten answers that are valuable.

-- Hasok Chang, Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress
%
11 points chaosmosis 12 November 2012 03:17:08AM

    'At my funeral, I don't want people to wear bright colors and smile
    and laugh fondly at the wonderful memories of the precious time we
    spent together on Earth. Tell them to wear black and cover their faces
    with ash. Tell them to weep bitter tears and rail angrily against the
    cruel God who took me at so young an age. Do this for me, my beloved.'

http://www.theonion.com/articles/loved-ones-recall-local-mans-cowardly-battle-with,772/
%
11 points gwern 10 November 2012 06:53:11PM

    If any man pretend to me that God hath spoken to him … immediately,
    and I make doubt of it, I cannot easily perceive what argument he can
    produce to oblige me to believe it .. For to say that God … hath
    spoken to him in a dream is no more than to say he dreamed that God
    spoke to him.

-- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 13
%
11 points GabrielDuquette 02 November 2012 12:57:41AM

    One swallow does not make a summer, but one swallow does prove the
    existence of swallows.

-- Anzai Simon
%
11 points ChristianKl 05 December 2012 03:42:32PM

    But are we asking too much when we declare that our drugs need to work
    through single defined targets? Beyond that, are we even asking too
    much when we declare that we need to understand the details of how
    they work at all? Many of you will have had such thoughts (and they've
    been expressed around here as well), but they can tend to sound
    heretical, especially that second one. But that gets to the real
    issue, the uncomfortable, foot-shuffling,
    rather-think-about-something-else question: are we trying to
    understand things, or are we trying to find drugs?

-- Derek Lowe, In the Pipeline
%
11 points Alicorn 04 December 2012 02:54:54AM

    "...they have all these experts' predictions about the year 2000 and I
    kid you not they are fucking psychotic. Just not even close, like oh
    we'll be growing cars in vats and having nuclear wars with China and
    then black rainbows will drain the earth of its oxygen and kill
    everyone except our moon colonists. Experts. I mean people cannot
    predict shit. We think we can and we fucking can't."

    Subnormality

%
11 points Mestroyer 04 December 2012 04:26:52PM

    We're Nature's conscience. One day, we'll finally make it listen and
    realise what a monster it's been all along.

-- Catharine G. Evans
%
10 points caiuscamargarus 19 April 2009 12:01:05AM

    Ludwig Wittgenstein: Why do people say that it was natural to think
    that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on
    its axis?

    Elizabeth Anscombe: I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went
    round the earth.

    Ludwig Wittgenstein: Well what would it have looked like if it had
    looked as if the earth turned on its axis?

%
10 points badger 18 April 2009 11:10:46PM

    We're descended from the indignant, passionate tellers of half truths
    who in order to convince others, simultaneously convinved themselves.
    Over generations success had winnowed us out, and with success came
    our defect, carved deep in the genes like ruts in a cart track—when it
    didn't suit us we couldn't agree on what was in front of us. Believing
    is seeing. That's why there are divorces, border disputes and wars,
    and why this statue of the Virgin Mary weeps blood and that one of
    Ganesh drinks milk. And that was why metaphysics and scince were such
    courageous enterprises, such startling inventions, bigger than the
    wheel, bigger than agriculture, human artifacts set right against the
    grain of human nature.

-- Ian McEwan, Enduring Love (1998, p. 181)
%
10 points AndySimpson 18 April 2009 07:50:55PM

    ...natural selection built the brain to survive in the world and only
    incidentally to understand it at a depth greater than is needed to
    survive. The proper task of scientists is to diagnose and correct the
    misalignment.

-- E. O. Wilson
%
10 points Yvain 18 April 2009 12:57:56PM

    Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational
    things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the
    principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.

-- Scott Adams
%
10 points scav 20 May 2009 12:12:24PM

    The trouble with trying to be more stupid than you really are is that
    you very often succeed

-- C.S.Lewis The Magician's Nephew
%
10 points HughRistik 15 June 2009 06:38:28PM

    It's easy to put down the shallow concerns of life, but in a way they
    are what life is about. Deeper concerns that don't connect in any way
    to economic wealth, social status, physical pleasure, etc., are not
    really deep but pointless. The shallow concerns all pertain to the
    lowest common denominator of human life because they really are the
    basic fabric of everyone's life. They're concerns that everyone shares
    and that everyone can easily understand.

-- Ben Kovitz, Shallowness
%
10 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 July 2009 10:09:35PM

    All truth is not, indeed, of equal importance; but if little
    violations are allowed, every violation will in time be thought
    little.

-- Samuel Johnson
%
10 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 July 2009 10:05:57PM

    Defects of empirical knowledge have less to do with the ways we go
    wrong in philosophy than defects of character do: such things as the
    simple inability to shut up; determination to be thought deep; hunger
    for power; fear, especially the fear of an indifferent universe.

-- David Stove, What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts
%
10 points brian_jaress 02 July 2009 07:29:36PM

    Censure yourself, never another. Do not discuss right and wrong.

-- Zengetsu

When I first saw this, I had a negative gut reaction. The second sentence
especially bothered me. Over time, I've come to like it more. I'm now at
the point of wanting to follow it but usually failing to do so.

Discussions here on [akrasia][] seem to focus on procrastination, but this
is my own very close number two.
%
10 points djcb 06 August 2009 05:15:45PM

    There is no opinion so absurd that some philosopher will not express
    it.

-- Marcus Tullius Cicero

[ while in general I value philosophy, there is also much nonsense and,
especially, little progress ]
%
10 points Yvain 06 August 2009 05:57:38AM

    [Mathematical methods of inference] literally have no content; long
    division can calculate miles per gallon, or it can calculate income
    per capita. The statistical tools of experimental psychology were
    borrowed from agronomy, where they were invented to gauge the effects
    of different fertilizers on crop yields. The tools work just fine in
    psychology, even though, as one psychological statistician wrote, "we
    do not deal in manure, at least not knowingly."

-- Steven Pinker, How The Mind Works
%
10 points XFrequentist 06 August 2009 03:25:20AM

    Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to
    imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend
    those things which are there.

-- Richard Feynman The Character of Physical Law
%
10 points Rain 01 September 2009 10:49:34PM

    Wisdom is not only to be acquired, but also to be utilized.

-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
%
10 points childofbaud 25 October 2009 06:35:23PM

    A formula is worth a thousand pictures.

-- Edsger Dijkstra
%
10 points PhilGoetz 22 October 2009 09:15:03PM

    The master mathematician sat in his private room and pushed the papers
    from him. His calculations were already finished. In a small white
    phial there still remained a little of the drug that had kept him
    awake and active for four long nights. Each day, serene, explicit,
    patient as ever, he had given his lecture to his students, and then
    had come back at once to this momentous calculation. His face was
    grave, a little drawn and hectic from his drugged activity. For some
    time he seemed lost in thought.  Then he went to the window, and the
    blind went up with a click. Half way up the sky, over the clustering
    roofs, chimneys and steeples of the city, hung the star.

    He looked at it as one might look into the eyes of a brave enemy. "You
    may kill me," he said after a silence. "But I can hold you--and all
    the universe for that matter--in the grip of this little brain. I
    would not change. Even now."

-- H.G. Wells, The Star, 1897
%
10 points Kutta 30 November 2009 02:08:30PM

    "The hard part is actually being rational, which requires that you
    postpone the fun but currently irrelevant arguments until the pressing
    problem is solved, even perhaps with the full knowledge that you are
    actually probably giving them up entirely. Delaying gratification in
    this manner is not a unique difficulty faced by transhumanists. Anyone
    pursuing a long-term goal, such as a medical student or PhD candidate,
    does the same. The special difficulty that you will have to overcome
    is the difficulty of staying on track in the absence of social support
    or of appreciation of the problem, and the difficulty of overcoming
    your mind’s anti-religion defenses, which will be screaming at you to
    cut out the fantasy and go live a normal life, with the normal empty
    set of beliefs about the future and its potential."

-- Michael Vassar
%
10 points righteousreason 30 November 2009 01:58:26AM

    "But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required
    for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always
    accomplishes evil.

-- Robert Heinlein (SISL)
%
10 points RobinZ 30 November 2009 12:01:15AM

    Quotation - yes, but how differently persons quote! I am as much
    informed of your genius by what you select, as by what you originate.
    I read the quotation with your eyes, find a new fervent sense... For
    good quoting, then, there must be originality in the quoter - bent,
    bias, delight in the truth, only valuing the author in the measure of
    his agreement with the truth which we see, which he had the luck to
    see first. And originality, what is that? It is being; being somebody,
    being yourself, reporting accurately what you see are. If another's
    words describe your fact, use them as freely as you use the language
    the alphabet, whose use does not impair your originality. Neither will
    another's sentiment or distinction impugn your sufficiency. Yet in
    proportion to your reality of life perception, will be your difficulty
    of finding yourself expressed in others' words or deeds.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, Oct.-Nov. 1867
%
10 points RichardKennaway 12 January 2010 12:17:17PM

    If I were wrong, then one would have been enough.

Einstein's reported response to the pamphlet One Hundred Authors Against
Einstein.
%
10 points Zack_M_Davis 11 January 2010 11:48:19AM

    Mathematical folklore contains a story about how Acta Quandalia
    published a paper proving that all partially uniform k-quandles had
    the Cosell property, and then a few months later published another
    paper proving that no partially uniform k-quandles had the Cosell
    property. And in fact, goes the story, both theorems were quite true,
    which put a sudden end to the investigation of partially uniform
    k-quandles.

-- Mark Jason Dominus
%
10 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 January 2010 12:00:43AM

    Nobody wants to die. They just want the pain to stop.

-- Tetragrammaton
%
10 points Rain 07 January 2010 11:35:45PM

    Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

-- Carl Sagan
%
10 points MichaelGR 05 April 2010 06:35:53AM

    "Torture the data long enough and they will confess to anything."

-- via The Economist, a saying of statisticians.
%
10 points thomblake 03 May 2010 12:38:58AM

    it can't be ineffable if you're effing it.

-- Vorpal
%
10 points djcb 03 July 2010 10:41:26AM

    Their judgment was based more upon blind wishing than upon any sound
    prevision; for it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope
    what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what
    they do not fancy.

-- Thucydides, Greek Historian, ca. 5th century BCE (Book IV, 108)

I like Thucydides for the way he tries to explain history in terms of
real-politik, people, their drives and especially without including the
gods in an explanation, somewhat similar to Hippocrates.

Interestingly, a modern version of this appeared in Neal Stephenson's
Anathem:

    Never believe a thing simply because you want it to be true

where it's called Diax's Rake.

Anathem is a great book, I'd like to add, and quite well aligned with many
of the LW themes.
%
10 points Kyre 02 July 2010 04:45:24AM

    He who knows not and knows not that he knows not is a fool - shun him

    He who knows not, and knows that he knows not is a child - teach him

    He who knows, and knows not that he knows is asleep - wake him

    He who knows, and knows that he knows is wise - follow him

Persian proverb

%
10 points WrongBot 02 July 2010 12:49:10AM

    Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.

-- George Box
%
10 points Randaly 14 August 2010 03:15:15AM

    A joke told by Warren Buffett comes to mind: a patient, after hearing
    from a doctor that he has cancer, tells the doctor, "Doc, I don’t have
    enough money for the surgery, but maybe could I pay you to touch up
    the x-ray?" Hope and self-deception are not a strategy.

-- Vitaliy Katsenelson
%
10 points orthonormal 06 August 2010 07:00:12PM

    In short, whatever emotional impulse we may have toward altruism and
    empathy, and to whatever extent it may be genetically hardwired, it
    does not obviate the need for explicit judgments about right and
    wrong. If it did not seem correct to act with kindness and fairness,
    even at a net personal cost—if there were no sensible reason for so
    acting, beyond a raw impulse to do so—then we would have reason to
    regard the raw impulse as pointlessly self-destructive—like a
    disposition to alcoholism or a purely visceral (so to speak) aversion
    to surgery—and we would have a reason to attempt to overcome it.

    Gary Drescher, Good and Real

%
10 points apophenia 09 October 2010 11:54:34PM

    Because this is the Internet, every argument was spun in a centrifuge
    instantly and reduced down into two wholly enraged, radically
    incompatible contingents, as opposed to the natural gradient which
    human beings actually occupy.

-- Tycho, Penny Arcade
%
10 points tim 06 October 2010 04:57:36AM

    The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you
    stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had
    written on my picture "This is a pipe," I'd have been lying!

-- René Magritte, on his painting The Treachery of Images
    depicting a pipe with "Ceci n'est pas une pipe"
    ("This is not a pipe") written under it
%
10 points Vaniver 06 December 2010 03:04:33AM

    Any fool can have an opinion; to know what one needs to know to have
    an opinion is wisdom; which is another way of saying that wisdom means
    knowing what questions to ask about knowledge.

-- Neil Postman, Building a Bridge to the 18th Century
%
10 points Kazuo_Thow 04 December 2010 06:03:10AM

    The splitting of the atom has changed everything save the way men
    think, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

-- Albert Einstein
%
10 points gwern 07 January 2011 04:11:49PM

    "The usual touchstone of whether what someone asserts is mere
    persuasion or at least a subjective conviction, i.e., firm belief, is
    betting. Often someone pronounces his propositions with such confident
    and inflexible defiance that he seems to have entirely laid aside all
    concern for error. A bet disconcerts him. Sometimes he reveals that he
    is persuaded enough for one ducat but not for ten. For he would
    happily bet one, but at ten he suddenly becomes aware of what he had
    not previously noticed, namely that it is quite possible that he has
    erred."

-- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (A824/B852); seen on
http://kenfeinstein.blogspot.com/2011/01/kant-on-betting-and-prediction-markets.html
%
10 points fiddlemath 03 January 2011 08:47:39AM

    Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the
    trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.

-- Lewis Hyde, Alcohol and Poetry.
%
10 points Tesseract 03 January 2011 06:54:16AM

    Do not bear this single habit of mind, to think that what you say and
    nothing else is true. ...For a man, though he be wise, it is no shame
    to learn - learn many things, and not maintain his views too rigidly.

-- Sophocles, Antigone
%
10 points endoself 08 February 2011 10:53:58AM

    After finishing dinner, Sidney Morgenbesser decides to order dessert.
    The waitress tells him he has two choices: apple pie and blueberry
    pie. Sidney orders the apple pie. After a few minutes the waitress
    returns and says that they also have cherry pie at which point
    Morgenbesser says "In that case I'll have the blueberry pie."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_of_irrelevant_alternatives
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Morgenbesser
%
10 points CronoDAS 03 February 2011 07:19:37PM

    Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of
    thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible
    forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into
    useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say
    that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for
    roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars,
    computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up
    tenured faculty positions.

-- Seth Lloyd
%
10 points kboon 03 February 2011 10:46:55AM

    We've all bought and enjoyed books called 'Optical Illusions'. We all
    love optical illusions. But that's not what they should call the book.
    They should call them 'Brain Failures'. Because that what it is: a
    complete failure of human perception. All it takes is a few clever
    sketches and our brains can't figure it out.

-- Neil deGrasse Tyson

Transcribed from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAD25s53wmE
%
10 points Quirinus_Quirrell 02 February 2011 02:10:03AM

    The world around us redounds with opportunities, explodes with
    opportunities, which nearly all folk ignore because it would require
    them to violate a habit of thought ... I cannot quite comprehend what
    goes through people's minds when they repeat the same failed strategy
    over and over, but apparently it is an astonishingly rare realization
    that you can try something else.

-- Eliezer Yudkowsky, putting words in my other copy's mouth
%
10 points MichaelGR 08 March 2011 06:41:38PM

    Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

    Mark Twain

%
10 points radical_negative_one 07 March 2011 08:56:08PM

I am taking a first-aid class at my local community college. Our
instructor, a paramedic, after telling us about the importance of blood
flow to the brain, and the poor prognosis for someone who is left comatose
from oxygen deprivation, says:

"There are some people who say, 'But miracles can happen!' Yeah, miracles
are one in a million. What number are you?"
%
10 points wedrifid 07 March 2011 11:23:30AM

Dr. Cuddy: "And you're always right. And I don't mean you always think
you're right. But y--you are actually always right, because that's all
that matters."

House: "That doesn't even make sense. What, you want me to be wrong?"
%
10 points TylerJay 05 April 2011 09:40:03PM

    The north went on forever. Tyrion Lannister knew the maps as well as
    anyone, but a fortnight on the wild track that passed for the
    kingsroad up here had brought home the lesson that the map was one
    thing and the land quite another.

-- George R. R. Martin A Game of Thrones
%
10 points beoShaffer 03 June 2011 12:40:04AM

    quoted text The art of concluding from experience and observation
    consists in evaluating probabilities, in estimating if they are high
    or numerous enough to constitute proof. This type of calculation is
    more complicated and more difficult than one might think. It demands a
    great sagacity generally above the power of common people. The success
    of charlatans, sorcerors, and alchemists — and all those who abuse
    public credulity — is founded on errors in this type of calculation.

-- Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier, Rapport des commissaires
chargés par le roi de l'examen du magnétisme animal (1784), as translated
in "The Chain of Reason versus the Chain of Thumbs", Bully for
Brontosaurus (1991) by Stephen Jay Gould, p. 195,
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin
%
10 points Tom_Talbot 03 August 2011 12:30:12AM

    The only way to get rich from a get-rich book is to write one.

Brother Ty's seventh law
%
10 points Yvain 19 September 2011 06:22:15PM

    I think there's a few posts by Yudkowsky that I think deserve the
    highest praise one can give to a philosopher's writing: That, on
    rereading them, I have no idea what I found so mindblowing about them
    the first time. Everything they say seems patently obvious now!

-- Ari Rahikkala
%
10 points cwillu 05 September 2011 01:43:36AM

    [...] Often I find that the best way to come up with new results is to
    find someone who's saying something that seems clearly, manifestly
    wrong to me, and then try to think of counterarguments. Wrong people
    provide a fertile source of research ideas.

-- Scott Aaronson, Quantum Computing Since Democritus
(http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec14.html)
%
10 points listic 02 September 2011 01:42:17PM

    True courage is loving life while knowing all the truth about it.

-- Sergey Dovlatov

(translation is mine; can you propose a better translation from Russian?)
%
10 points AdeleneDawner 01 September 2011 09:54:09PM

    I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its
    people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core
    beliefs.

-- Sam Harris
%
10 points gwern 28 October 2011 11:19:52PM

    "I find the Law of Fives to be more and more manifest the harder I
    look."

-- Principia Discordia (surprisingly, not quoted yet)
%
10 points novalis 19 October 2011 06:00:16PM

    Don’t ask yourself if something is fair. Ask someone else--a stranger
    in the street, for example.

-- Lemony Snicket
%
10 points gwern 14 October 2011 01:46:37AM

    "Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is
    too good."

-- #122 Assorted Opinions and Maxims, Friedrich Nietzsche
%
10 points [deleted] 03 October 2011 08:35:56PM

    Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material
    provided by man’s senses. It is a faculty that man has to exercise by
    choice. Thinking is not an automatic function. In any hour and issue
    of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking
    requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one’s
    consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full, active,
    purposefully directed awareness of reality—or he can unfocus it and
    let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any
    chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his
    undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random,
    associational connections it might happen to make.

-- Ayn Rand
%
10 points gwern 20 November 2011 05:42:20PM

    "The method of 'postulating' what we want has many advantages; they
    are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil. Let us leave
    them to others and proceed with our honest toil."

-- Bertrand Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy 1919
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-construction/#Hon
%
10 points GLaDOS 06 November 2011 04:32:00PM

    We do what we must because we can.
    For the good of all of us.
    Except the ones who are dead.
%
10 points peter_hurford 01 November 2011 02:23:57AM

    I think, therefore I am perhaps mistaken.

-- Sharon Fenick
%
10 points Tesseract 01 December 2011 05:39:22PM

    A system for generating ungrounded but mostly true beliefs would be an
    oracle, as impossible as a perpetual motion machine.

(McKay Dennett 2009)
%
10 points MinibearRex 01 December 2011 05:19:09AM

    The story of computers and artificial intelligence (known as AI)
    resembles that of flight in air and space. Until recently people
    dismissed both ideas as impossible - commonly meaning that they
    couldn't see how to do them, or would be upset if they could.

-- Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation
%
10 points lukeprog 25 January 2012 10:26:25PM

    I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you
    can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as
    you can, as you go along.

-- Bertrand Russell
%
10 points Patrick 23 January 2012 05:11:30PM

    Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra
    fact.

-- Terry Pratchett
%
10 points CharlieSheen 14 January 2012 09:18:22AM

    We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.

-- Winston Churchill
%
10 points Konkvistador 15 January 2012 08:44:11AM

    Each age would do better if it studied its own faults and endeavoured
    to mend them instead of comparing itself with others to its own
    advantage.

-- James Anthony Froude
%
10 points Eugine_Nier 01 January 2012 08:05:18PM

    As in the Roman empire age, the theoretical concepts, taken out of the
    theories assigning their meaning and considered instead real objects,
    whose existence can be apparent only to the initiated people, are used
    to amaze the public. In physics courses the student (now unaware of
    the experimental basis of heliocentrism or of atomic theory, accepted
    on the sole basis of the authority principle) gets addicted to a
    complex and mysterious mythology, with orbitals undergoing
    hybridization, elusive quarks, voracious and disquieting black holes
    and a creating Big Bang: objects introduced, all of them, in theories
    totally unknown to him and having no understandable relation with any
    phenomenon he may have access to.

-- Lucio Russo, The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC
                                          and Why it Had to Be Reborn
%
10 points fortyeridania 02 January 2012 12:04:37PM

    Songs can be Trojan horses, taking charged ideas and sneaking past the
    ego's defenses and into the open mind.

-- John Mayer, Esquire (the magazine, not the social/occupational title)
%
10 points scmbradley 03 February 2012 09:25:26PM

    Any logically coherent body of doctrine is sure to be in part painful
    and contrary to current prejudices

-- Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy p. 98
%
10 points CasioTheSane 09 March 2012 07:51:03AM

    "Sir Isaac Newton, renowned inventor of the milled-edge coin and the
    catflap!"

    "The what?" said Richard.

    "The catflap! A device of the utmost cunning, perspicuity and
    invention. It is a door within a door, you see, a ..."

    "Yes," said Richard, "there was also the small matter of gravity."

    "Gravity," said Dirk with a slightly dismissed shrug, "yes, there was
    that as well, I suppose. Though that, of course, was merely a
    discovery. It was there to be discovered." ...

    "You see?" he said dropping his cigarette butt, "They even keep it on
    at weekends. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later. But the
    catflap ... ah, there is a very different matter. Invention, pure
    creative invention. It is a door within a door, you see."

-- Douglas Adams
%
10 points Stephanie_Cunnane 08 March 2012 10:44:15PM

    Now let's talk about efficient market theory, a wonderful economic
    doctrine that had a long vogue in spite of the experience of Berkshire
    Hathaway. In fact, one of the economists who won--he shared a Nobel
    Prize--and as he looked at Berkshire Hathaway year after year, which
    people would throw in his face as saying maybe the market isn't quite
    as efficient as you think, he said, "Well, it's a two-sigma event."
    And then he said we were a three-sigma event. And then he said we were
    a four-sigma event. And he finally got up to six sigmas--better to add
    a sigma than change a theory, just because the evidence comes in
    differently. [Laughter] And, of course, when this share of a Nobel
    Prize went into money management himself, he sank like a stone.

-- Charlie Munger
%
10 points Konkvistador 06 March 2012 12:19:59PM

    The reality is actually scarier than that if there was a big
    conspiracy run by an Inner Party of evil but brilliant know-it-alls,
    like O’Brien in "1984″ or Mustapha Mond in "Brave New World." The
    reality is that nobody in charge knows much about what is going on.

-- Steve Sailer, here
%
10 points Ezekiel 05 March 2012 10:13:09PM

    Because throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out
    to be... Not Magic

-- Tim Minchin, Storm
%
10 points philh 01 March 2012 10:32:08PM

The Princess Bride:

Man in Black: Inhale this, but do not touch.

Vizzini: [sniffs] I smell nothing.

Man in Black: What you do not smell is called iocane powder. It is
odorless, tasteless, dissolves instantly in liquid, and is among the more
deadlier poisons known to man.

[He puts the goblets behind his back and puts the poison into one of the
goblets, then sets them down in front of him]

Man in Black: All right. Where is the poison? The battle of wits has
begun. It ends when you decide and we both drink, and find out who is
right... and who is dead.

[Vizzini stalls, then eventually chooses the glass in front of the man in
black. They both drink, and Vizzini dies.]

Buttercup: And to think, all that time it was your cup that was poisoned.

Man in Black: They were both poisoned. I spent the last few years building
up an immunity to iocane powder.
%
10 points maia 12 April 2012 05:22:24PM

    Suppose you know a golfer's score on day 1 and are asked to predict
    his score on day 2. You expect the golfer to retain the same level of
    talent on the second day, so your best guesses will be "above average"
    for the [better-scoring] player and "below average" for the
    [worse-scoring] player. Luck, of course, is a different matter. Since
    you have no way of predicting the golfers' luck on the second (or any)
    day, your best guess must be that it will be average, neither good nor
    bad. This means that in the absence of any other information, your
    best guess about the players' score on day 2 should not be a repeat of
    their performance on day 1. ...

    The best predicted performance on day 2 is more moderate, closer to
    the average than the evidence on which it is based (the score on day
    1). This is why the pattern is called regression to the mean. The more
    extreme the original score, the more regression we expect, because an
    extremely good score suggests a very lucky day. The regressive
    prediction is reasonable, but its accuracy is not guaranteed. A few of
    the golfers who scored 66 on day 1 will do even better on the second
    day, if their luck improves. Most will do worse, because their luck
    will no longer be above average.

    Now let us go against the time arrow. Arrange the players by their
    performance on day 2 and look at their performance on day 1. You will
    find precisely the same pattern of regression to the mean. ... The
    fact that you observe regression when you predict an early event from
    a later event should help convince you that regression does not have a
    causal explanation.

-- Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

%
10 points John_Maxwell_IV 02 April 2012 05:39:48AM

    Don't kid yourself, just because you got the correct numerical answer
    to a problem is not justification that you understand the physics of
    the problem. You must understand all the logical steps in arriving at
    that solution or you have gained nothing, right answer or not.

My old physics professor David Newton (yes, apparently that's the name he
was born with) on how to study physics.
%
10 points Konkvistador 16 April 2012 05:49:36AM

    The fundamental rule of political analysis from the point of
    psychology is, follow the sacredness, and around it is a ring of
    motivated ignorance.

-- Jonathan Haidt, source
%
10 points tut 08 May 2012 05:55:31PM

    Those who wish to appear wise among fools, among the wise seem
    foolish.

-- Quintilian
%
10 points Jayson_Virissimo 01 May 2012 07:58:52AM

    Scientific Realism is the only philosophy that doesn't make the
    success of science a miracle.

-- Hilary Putnam
%
10 points hairyfigment 03 May 2012 07:36:27AM

    When somebody picks my pocket, I'm not gonna be chasing them down so I
    can figure out whether he feels like he's a thief deep down in his
    heart. I'm going to be chasing him down so I can get my wallet back.

-- illdoc1 on YouTube
%
10 points David_Gerard 23 June 2012 01:21:11PM

    The biggest threat to an artist is neither piracy nor obscurity. It's
    dicking around on the internet.

-- James L. Sutter
%
10 points Vaniver 07 June 2012 10:55:44PM

    One reason why research is so important is precisely that it can
    surprise you and tell you that your subjective convictions are wrong.
    If research always found what we expected, there wouldn't be much
    point in doing research.

-- Eugene Gendlin
%
10 points [deleted] 03 June 2012 12:40:51AM

    Humility bids us to take ourselves as we are; we do not have to be
    cosmically significant to be genuinely significant.

    Patricia Churchland

%
10 points gwern 09 June 2012 04:31:48PM

    I favor any skepsis to which I may reply: 'Let us try it!' But I no
    longer wish to hear anything of all those things and questions that do
    not permit any experiment.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science #51
%
10 points Konkvistador 04 July 2012 05:41:30AM

    And here we tinker with metal, to try to give it a kind of life, and
    suffer those who would scoff at our efforts. But who's to say that, if
    intelligence had evolved in some other form in past millennia, the
    ancestors of these beings would not now scoff at the idea of
    intelligence residing within meat?

-- Prime Function Aki Zeta-5, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
%
10 points Vaniver 03 July 2012 12:58:26AM

    Many difficulties which nature throws our way, may be smoothed away by
    the exercise of intelligence.

-- Titus Livius
%
10 points James_Miller 02 July 2012 03:29:42PM

    All mushrooms are edible. But some of them you can eat only once.

From Paleohacks.
%
10 points army1987 08 August 2012 07:58:35PM

    When a philosophy thus relinquishes its anchor in reality, it risks
    drifting arbitrarily far from sanity.

-- Gary Drescher, Good and Real
%
10 points lukeprog 04 August 2012 10:28:30AM

    Reductionism is the most natural thing in the world to grasp. It's
    simply the belief that "a whole can be understood completely if you
    understand its parts, and the nature of their sum." No one in her left
    brain could reject reductionism.

-- Douglas Hofstadter
%
10 points army1987 29 September 2012 09:57:18AM

    For a hundred years or so, mathematical statisticians have been in
    love with the fact that the probability distribution of the sum of a
    very large number of very small random deviations almost always
    converges to a normal distribution. ... This infatuation tended to
    focus interest away from the fact that, for real data, the normal
    distribution is often rather poorly realized, if it is realized at
    all. We are often taught, rather casually, that, on average,
    measurements will fall within ±σ of the true value 68% of the time,
    within ±2σ 95% of the time, and within ±3σ 99.7% of the time.
    Extending this, one would expect a measurement to be off by ±20σ only
    one time out of 2 × 10^88. We all know that "glitches" are much more
    likely than that!

-- W.H. Press et al., Numerical Recipes, Sec. 15.1
%
10 points khafra 10 September 2012 07:06:52PM

    I particularly like the reminder that I'm physics. Makes me feel like
    a superhero. "Imbued with the properties of matter and energy, able to
    initiate activity in a purely deterministic universe, it's Physics
    Man!"

-- GoodDamon
%
10 points Eugine_Nier 27 September 2012 12:26:39AM

    As far as I know, Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were
    indeed unusually incorruptible, and I do hate them for this trait.

    Why? Because when your goal is mass murder, corruption saves lives.
    Corruption leads you to take the easy way out, to compromise, to go
    along to get along. Corruption isn't a poison that makes everything
    worse. It's a diluting agent like water. Corruption makes good
    policies less good, and evil policies less evil.

    I've read thousands of pages about Hitler. I can't recall the
    slightest hint of "corruption" on his record. Like Robespierre, Lenin,
    Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, Hitler was a sincerely murderous fanatic.
    The same goes for many of history's leading villains - see Eric
    Hoffer's classic The True Believer. Sincerity is so overrated. If only
    these self-righteous monsters had been corrupt hypocrites, millions of
    their victims could have bargained and bribed their way out of hell.

-- Bryan Caplan
%
10 points [deleted] 05 September 2012 08:36:08PM

    He had bought a large map representing the sea, / Without the least
    vestige of land: / And the crew were much pleased when they found it
    to be / A map they could all understand.

    "What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators, / Tropics,
    Zones, and Meridian Lines?" / So the Bellman would cry: and the crew
    would reply / "They are merely conventional signs!

    "Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes! / But we’ve
    got our brave Captain to thank: / (So the crew would protest) "that
    he’s bought us the best— / A perfect and absolute blank!"

-- Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the snark
%
10 points J_Taylor 02 September 2012 03:33:00AM

    Major Greene this evening fell into some conversation with me about
    the Divinity and satisfaction of Jesus Christ. All the argument he
    advanced was, "that a mere creature or finite being could not make
    satisfaction to infinite justice for any crimes," and that "these
    things are very mysterious."

    Thus mystery is made a convenient cover for absurdity.

    John Adams

%
10 points MBlume 01 October 2012 07:57:22PM

    Paths are made by walking

-- Franz Kafka (quoted in Joy of Clojure)
%
10 points vallinder 06 November 2012 09:08:56AM

    The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a
    proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and
    oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

-- Paul Valéry
%
10 points Unnamed 03 November 2012 09:03:43AM

    Chris Cillizza says that [...] the surge in the quantity of public
    polling available creates a confusing fog of numbers in which
    "partisans, who already live in a choose-your-own-political-reality
    world, can select the numbers that comply with their view of the race
    and pooh-pooh the data that suggest anything different."

    That's true. But if you actually want to know what's happening in the
    race the increased poll volume makes it clearer not less clear. The
    sense that the polls are "all over the map" is the mistake. You need
    to think of each datapoint as having an associated probability
    distribution and then look at where they overlap. [...] The fact that
    we now have tons of polling that averages out to [a] conclusion means
    the scope for "sampling error" to throw us off is, at this point,
    tiny. One poll showing a lead of the current magnitude would leave us
    with a ton of uncertainty, but a bunch of polls makes the picture
    pretty clear.

-- Matthew Yglesias

%
10 points Jay_Schweikert 14 December 2012 05:16:31PM

    I don't have any previous experience with this sort of thing, but
    judging from what I hear and read, I'm supposed to be asking why all
    this is happening, and why it's happening to me. Honestly, those
    questions are about the farthest thing from my mind.

    Partly, that’s because they aren't hard questions. Why does our world
    have gravity? Why does the sun rise in the East? There are technical
    answers, but the metaphysical answer is simple: that’s how reality
    works. So too here. Only in the richest parts of the rich world of the
    twenty-first century could anyone entertain the thought that we should
    expect long, pain-free lives. Suffering and premature death (an odd
    phrase: what does it mean to call death "premature"?) are constant
    presences in the lives of most of the peoples of the Earth, and were
    routine parts of life for generations of our predecessors in this
    country—as they still are today, for those with their eyes open. Stage
    4 cancers happen to middle-aged men and women, seemingly out of the
    blue, because that's how reality works.

    As for why this is happening to me in particular, the implicit point
    of the question is an argument: I deserve better than this. There are
    two responses. First, I don't—I have no greater moral claim to be free
    from unwanted pain and loss than anyone else. Plenty of people more
    virtuous than I am suffer worse than I have, and some who don't seem
    virtuous at all skate through life with surprising ease. Welcome to
    the world. Once again, it seems to me that this claim arises from the
    incredibly unusual experience of a small class of wealthy
    professionals in the wealthiest parts of the world today. We think we
    live in a world governed by merit and moral desert. It isn't so. Luck,
    fortune, fate, providence—call it what you will, but whatever your
    preferred label, it has far more to do with the successes of the
    successful than what any of us deserves. Aristocracies of the past
    awarded wealth and position based on the accident of birth. Today's
    meritocracies award wealth and position based on the accident of being
    in the right place at the right time. The difference is smaller than
    we tend to think. Once you understand that, it’s hard to maintain a
    sense of grievance in the face of even the ugliest medical news. I’ve
    won more than my share of life's lotteries. It would seem churlish to
    rail at the unfairness of losing this one—if indeed I do lose it:
    which I may not.

    The second response is simpler; it comes from the movie "Unforgiven."
    Gene Hackman is dying, and says to Clint Eastwood: "I don't deserve
    this. To die like this. I was building a house." Eastwood responds:
    "Deserve’s got nothing to do with it."

    That gets it right, I think. It's a messed-up world, upside-down as
    often as it's rightside up. Bad things happen; future plans (that
    house Hackman was building) come to naught. Deserve's got nothing to
    do with it.

-- William J. Stuntz, discussing his cancer diagnosis
%
105 points gotdistractedbythe 02 May 2013 03:48:24AM

    "The spatial anomaly has interacted with the tachyonic radiation in
    the nebula, it's interfering with our sensors. It's impossible to get
    a reading."

    "There's no time - we'll have to take the ship straight through it!"

    "Captain, I advise against this course of action. I have calculated
    the odds against our surviving such an action at three thousand, seven
    hundred and forty-five to one."

    "Damn the odds, we've got to try... wait a second. Where, exactly, did
    you get that number from?"

    "I hardly think this is the time for-"

    "No. No, fuck you, this is exactly the time. The fate of the galaxy is
    at stake. Trillions of lives are hanging in the balance. You just
    pulled four significant digits out of your ass, I want to see you show
    your goddamn work."

    "Well, I used the actuarial data from the past fifty years, relating
    to known cases of ships passing through nebulae that are interacting
    with spatial anomalies. There have been approximately two million such
    incidents reported, with only five hundred and forty-two incidents in
    which the ship in question survived intact."

    "And did you at all take into account that ship building technology
    has improved over the past fifty years, and that ours is not
    necessarily an average ship?"

    "Indeed I did, Captain. I weighted the cases differently based on how
    recent they were, and how close the ship in question was in build to
    our own. For example, one of the incidents with a happy ending was
    forty-seven years ago, but their ship was a model roughly five times
    our size. As such, I counted the incident as having twenty-four
    percent of the relevance of a standard case."

    "But what of our ship's moxie? Can you take determination and drive
    and the human spirit into account?"

    "As a matter of fact I can, Captain. In our three-year history
    together, I have observed that both you and this ship manage to beat
    the odds with a measurable regularity. To be exact, we tend to succeed
    twenty-four point five percent more often than the statistics would
    otherwise indicate - and, in fact, that number jumps to twenty-nine
    point two percent specifically in cases where I state the odds against
    our success to three significant digits or greater. I have already
    taken that supposedly 'unknowable' factor into account with my
    calculations."

    "And you expect me to believe that you've memorized all these case
    studies and performed this ridiculously complicated calculation in
    your head within the course of a normal conversation?"

    "Yes. With all due respect to your species, I am not human. While I
    freely admit that you do have greater insight into fields such as
    emotion, interpersonal relations, and spirituality than I do, in the
    fields of memory and calculation, I am capable of feats that would be
    quite simply impossible for you. Furthermore, if I may be perfectly
    frank, the entire purpose of my presence on the bridge is to provide
    insights such as these to help facilitate your command decisions. If
    you're not going to heed my advice, why am I even here?"

    "Mm. And we're still sitting at three thousand seven hundred to one
    against?"

    "Three thousand, seven hundred and forty five to one."

    "Well, shit. Well, let's go around, then."

The Vulcan your Vulcan could sound like if he wasn't made of straw, I guess?
%
71 points Mestroyer 06 February 2013 05:52:02AM

    "If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?"

    "Oh jeez. Probably."

    "What!? Why!?"

    "Because all my friends did. Think about it – which scenario is more
    likely: every single person I know, many of them levelheaded and
    afraid of heights, abruptly went crazy at exactly the same time...
    ...or the bridge is on fire?"

-- Randall Munroe, on updating on other peoples beliefs.
%
59 points Eugine_Nier 02 February 2013 06:06:48AM

    It’s nice to elect the right people, but that’s not the way you solve
    things. The way you solve things is by making it politically
    profitable for the wrong people to do the right things.

-- Milton Friedman
%
59 points sediment 02 June 2013 07:58:49PM

Hofstadter on the necessary strangeness of scientific explanations:

    It is no accident, I would maintain, that quantum mechanics is so
    wildly counterintuitive. Part of the nature of explanation is that it
    must eventually hit some point where further probing only increases
    opacity rather than decreasing it. Consider the problem of
    understanding the nature of solids. You might wonder where solidity
    comes form. What if someone said to you, "The ultimate basis of this
    brick's solidity is that it is composed of a stupendous number of
    eensy weensy bricklike objects that themselves are rock-solid"? You
    might be interested to learn that bricks are composed of micro-bricks,
    but the initial question - "What accounts for solidity?" - has been
    thoroughly begged. What we ultimately want is for solidity to vanish,
    to dissolve, to disintegrate into some totally different kind of
    phenomenon with which we have no experience. Only then, when we have
    reached some completely novel, alien level will we feel that we have
    really made progress in explaining the top-level phenomenon.

    [...]

    I first saw this thought expressed in the stimulating book Patterns of
    Discovery by Norwood Russell Hanson. Hanson attributes it to a number
    of thinkers, such as Isaac Newton, who wrote, in his famous work
    Opticks: "The parts of all homogeneal hard Bodies which fully touch
    one another, stick together very strongly. And for explaining how this
    may be, some have invented hooked Atoms, which is begging the
    Question." Hanson also quotes James Clerk Maxwell (from an article
    entitled "Atom"): "We may indeed suppose the atom elastic, but this is
    to endow it with the very property for the explanation of which... the
    atomic constitution was originally assumed." Finally, here is a quote
    Hanson provides from Werner Heisenberg himself: "If atoms are really
    to explain the origin of color and smell of visible material bodies,
    then they cannot possess properties like color and smell." So,
    although it is not an original thought, it is useful to bear in mind
    that greeness disintegrates.

-- from the postscript to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle,
   in Metamagical Themas:
   Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
   (his lovely book of essays from his column in Scientific American)
%
55 points Zando 03 August 2013 06:50:10AM

    when trying to characterize human beings as computational systems, the
    difference between "person" and "person with pencil and paper" is vast.

-- Procrastination and The Extended Will, 2009
%
55 points westward 18 December 2013 09:05:29PM

    "Finally, a study that backs up everything I've always said about
    confirmation bias."

-- Kslane, Twitter
%
54 points Qiaochu_Yuan 11 April 2013 09:13:10AM

    In a class I taught at Berkeley, I did an experiment where I wrote a
    simple little program that would let people type either "f" or "d" and
    would predict which key they were going to push next. It's actually
    very easy to write a program that will make the right prediction about
    70% of the time. Most people don't really know how to type randomly.
    They'll have too many alternations and so on. There will be all sorts
    of patterns, so you just have to build some sort of probabilistic
    model. Even a very crude one will do well. I couldn't even beat my own
    program, knowing exactly how it worked. I challenged people to try
    this and the program was getting between 70% and 80% prediction rates.
    Then, we found one student that the program predicted exactly 50% of
    the time. We asked him what his secret was and he responded that he
    "just used his free will."

-- Scott Aaronson
%
53 points Kaj_Sotala 01 March 2013 03:42:09PM

    Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where
    you had to look at a piece of writing and step back and ask whether
    the author was telling the whole truth? If you really want to be a
    critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step further,
    and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth, but why he's
    writing about this subject at all.

-- Paul Graham
%
53 points BT_Uytya 03 August 2013 01:39:05PM

    The fear people have about the idea of adherence to protocol is
    rigidity. They imagine mindless automatons, heads down in a checklist,
    incapable of looking out their windshield and coping with the real
    world in front of them. But what you find, when a checklist is well
    made, is exactly the opposite. The checklist gets the dumb stuff out
    of the way, the routines your brain shouldn’t have to occupy itself
    with (Are the elevator controls set? Did the patient get her
    antibiotics on time? Did the managers sell all their shares? Is
    everyone on the same page here?), and lets it rise above to focus on
    the hard stuff (Where should we land?).

    Here are the details of one of the sharpest checklists I’ve seen, a
    checklist for engine failure during flight in a single-engine Cessna
    airplane—the US Airways situation, only with a solo pilot. It is
    slimmed down to six key steps not to miss for restarting the engine,
    steps like making sure the fuel shutoff valve is in the OPEN position
    and putting the backup fuel pump switch ON. But step one on the list
    is the most fascinating. It is simply: FLY THE AIRPLANE. Because
    pilots sometimes become so desperate trying to restart their engine,
    so crushed by the cognitive overload of thinking through what could
    have gone wrong, they forget this most basic task. FLY THE AIRPLANE.
    This isn’t rigidity. This is making sure everyone has their best shot
    at survival.

-- Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto
%
52 points VincentYu 01 February 2013 09:36:33PM

    In Munich in the days of the great theoretical physicist Arnold
    Sommerfeld (1868–1954), trolley cars were cooled in summer by two
    small fans set into their ceilings. When the trolley was in motion,
    air flowing over its top would spin the fans, pulling warm air out of
    the cars. One student noticed that although the motion of any given
    fan was fairly random—fans could turn either clockwise or
    counterclockwise—the two fans in a single car nearly always rotated in
    opposite directions. Why was this? Finally he brought the problem to
    Sommerfeld.

    "That is easy to explain," said Sommerfeld. "Air hits the fan at the
    front of the car first, giving it a random motion in one direction.
    But once the trolley begins to move, a vortex created by the first fan
    travels down the top of the car and sets the second fan moving in
    precisely the same direction."

    "But, Professor Sommerfeld," the student protested, "what happens is
    in fact the opposite! The two fans nearly always rotate in different
    directions."

    "Ahhhh!" said Sommerfeld. "But of course that is even easier to
    explain."

-- Devine and Cohen, Absolute Zero Gravity, p. 96.
%
51 points Cthulhoo 03 September 2013 10:49:52AM

    In some species of Anglerfish, the male is much smaller than the
    female and incapable of feeding independently. To survive he must
    smell out a female as soon as he hatches. He bites into her releasing
    an enzime which fuses him to her permanently. He lives off her blood
    for the rest of his life, providing her with sperm whenever she needs
    it. Females can have multiple males attached. The morale is simple:
    males are parasites, women are sluts. Ha! Just kidding! The moral is
    don't treat actual animal behavior like a fable. Generally speaking,
    animals have no interest in teaching you anything.

-- Oglaf (Original comic NSFW)
%
48 points philh 03 September 2013 07:46:55PM

    "However, there is something they value more than a man's life: a
    trowel."

    "Why a trowel?"

    "If a bricklayer drops his trowel, he can do no more work until a new
    one is brought up. For months he cannot earn the food that he eats, so
    he must go into debt. The loss of a trowel is cause for much wailing.
    But if a man falls, and his trowel remains, men are secretly relieved.
    The next one to drop his trowel can pick up the extra one and continue
    working, without incurring debt."

    Hillalum was appalled, and for a frantic moment he tried to count how
    many picks the miners had brought. Then he realized. "That cannot be
    true. Why not have spare trowels brought up? Their weight would be
    nothing against all the bricks that go up there. And surely the loss
    of a man means a serious delay, unless they have an extra man at the
    top who is skilled at bricklaying. Without such a man, they must wait
    for another one to climb from the bottom."

    All the pullers roared with laughter. "We cannot fool this one",
    Lugatum said with much amusement.

-- Ted Chiang, Tower of Babylon
%
47 points philh 02 February 2013 11:22:32AM

Men in Black on guessing the teacher's password:

Zed: You're all here because you are the best of the best. Marines, air
force, navy SEALs, army rangers, NYPD. And we're looking for one of you.
Just one.

[...]

Edwards: Maybe you already answered this, but, why exactly are we here?

Zed: [noticing a recruit raising his hand] Son?

Jenson: Second Lieutenant, Jake Jenson. West Point. Graduate with honors.
We're here because you are looking for the best of the best of the best,
sir! [throws Edwards a contemptible glance]

[Edwards laughs]

Zed: What's so funny, Edwards?

Edwards: Boy, Captain America over here! "The best of the best of the
best, sir!" "With honors." Yeah, he's just really excited and he has no
clue why we're here. That's just, that's very funny to me.
%
44 points JQuinton 06 November 2013 06:35:10PM

    A newspaper is better than a magazine. A seashore is a better place
    than the street. At first it is better to run than to walk. You may
    have to try several times. It takes some skill, but it is easy to
    learn. Even young children can enjoy it. Once successful,
    complications are minimal. Birds seldom get too close. Rain, however,
    soaks in very fast. Too many people doing the same thing can also
    cause problems. One needs lots of room. If there are no complications,
    it can be very peaceful. A rock will serve as an anchor. If things
    break loose from it, however, you will not get a second chance.

    Is this paragraph comprehensible or meaningless? Feel your mind sort
    through potential explanations. Now watch what happens with the
    presentation of a single word: kite. As you reread the paragraph, feel
    the prior discomfort of something amiss shifting to a pleasing sense
    of rightness. Everything fits; every sentence works and has meaning.
    Reread the paragraph again; it is impossible to regain the sense of
    not understanding. In an instant, without due conscious deliberation,
    the paragraph has been irreversibly infuesed with a feeling of
    knowing.

    Try to imagine other interpretations for the paragraph. Suppose I tell
    you that this is a collaborative poem written by a third-grade class,
    or a collage of strung-together fortune cookie quotes. Your mind
    balks. The presense of this feeling of knowing makes contemplating
    alternatives physically difficult.

-- Robert Burton, "On Being Certain: Believing You’re Right Even When
                   You’re Not reminding me of Epiphany Addictions"
%
43 points Eugine_Nier 02 September 2013 04:46:08AM

    Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls
    and looks like work.

-- Thomas Edison
%
42 points Particleman 03 June 2013 04:04:26AM

    Why is there that knee-jerk rejection of any effort to "overthink" pop
    culture? Why would you ever be afraid that looking too hard at
    something will ruin it? If the government built a huge, mysterious
    device in the middle of your town and immediately surrounded it with a
    fence that said, "NOTHING TO SEE HERE!" I'm pretty damned sure you
    wouldn't rest until you knew what the hell that was – the fact that
    they don't want you to know means it can't be good.

    Well, when any idea in your brain defends itself with "Just relax!
    Don't look too close!" you should immediately be just as suspicious.
    It usually means something ugly is hiding there.

-- David Wong, The 5 Ugly Lessons Hiding in Every Superhero Movie

%
42 points MinibearRex 04 August 2013 06:07:56AM

    I've got to start listening to those quiet, nagging doubts.

-- Calvin
%
41 points Stabilizer 02 March 2013 12:54:40AM

    You know something is important when you're willing to let someone
    else take the credit if that's what it takes to get it done.

-- Seth Godin
%
40 points Stabilizer 05 February 2013 01:20:51AM

    Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must
    have it.

-- Joel Spolsky
%
40 points Mestroyer 05 October 2013 06:20:28AM

    The market doesn't give a shit how hard you worked. Users just want
    your software to do what they need, and you get a zero otherwise. That
    is one of the most distinctive differences between school and the real
    world: there is no reward for putting in a good effort. In fact, the
    whole concept of a "good effort" is a fake idea adults invented to
    encourage kids. It is not found in nature.

-- Paul Graham
%
39 points RolfAndreassen 01 January 2013 09:25:47PM

    "Ten thousand years' worth of sophistry doesn't vanish overnight,"
    Margit observed dryly. "Every human culture had expended vast amounts
    of intellectual effort on the problem of coming to terms with death.
    Most religions had constructed elaborate lies about it, making it out
    to be something other than it was—though a few were dishonest about
    life, instead. But even most secular philosophies were warped by the
    need to pretend that death was for the best."

    "It was the naturalistic fallacy at its most extreme—and its most
    transparent, but that didn't stop anyone. Since any child could tell
    you that death was meaningless, contingent, unjust, and abhorrent
    beyond words, it was a hallmark of sophistication to believe
    otherwise. Writers had consoled themselves for centuries with smug
    puritanical fables about immortals who'd long for death—who'd beg for
    death. It would have been too much to expect all those who were
    suddenly faced with the reality of its banishment to confess that
    they'd been whistling in the dark. And would-be moral
    philosophers—mostly those who'd experienced no greater inconvenience
    in their lives than a late train or a surly waiter—began wailing about
    the destruction of the human spirit by this hideous blight. We needed
    death and suffering, to put steel into our souls! Not horrible,
    horrible freedom and safety!"

-- Greg Egan, Border Guards.
%
39 points Mestroyer 07 February 2013 09:13:19AM

    I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for
    its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which
    they defend

-- Faramir, from Lord of the Rings,
    on lost purposes and the thing that he protects
%
39 points James_Miller 01 May 2013 04:49:10PM

    Unless challenged to think otherwise, people quickly move from "Phew!
    Dodged a bullet on that one!" to "I'm a great bullet-dodger."

    Discussing the "Near-miss bias" which they define as a tendency to
    "take more risk after an event in which luck played a critical role in
    deciding the event's [favorable] outcome."

-- Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman,
   "Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing", page 150.
%
39 points Kaj_Sotala 04 November 2013 01:15:49PM

    But there’s a big difference between "impossible" and "hard to
    imagine." The first is about it; the second is about you!

-- Marvin Minsky
%
38 points James_Miller 01 February 2013 07:41:37PM

    You want accurate beliefs and useful emotions.

From a participant at the January CFAR workshop. I don't remember who.
This struck me as an excellent description of what rationalists seek.
%
38 points Particleman 02 August 2013 06:07:05AM

    In 2002, Wizards of the Coast put out Star Wars: The Trading Card Game
    designed by Richard Garfield.

    As Richard modeled the game after a miniatures game, it made use of
    many six-sided dice. In combat, cards' damage was designated by how
    many six-sided dice they rolled. Wizards chose to stop producing the
    game due to poor sales. One of the contributing factors given through
    market research was that gamers seem to dislike six-sided dice in
    their trading card game.

    Here's the kicker. When you dug deeper into the comments they equated
    dice with "lack of skill." But the game rolled huge amounts of dice.
    That greatly increased the consistency. (What I mean by this is that
    if you rolled a million dice, your chance of averaging 3.5 is much
    higher than if you rolled ten.) Players, though, equated lots of dice
    rolling with the game being "more random" even though that contradicts
    the actual math.

-- Mark Rosewater, Kind Acts of Randomness

%
37 points nabeelqu 01 January 2013 03:33:09PM

    Not long ago a couple across the aisle from me in a Quiet Car talked
    all the way from New York City to Boston, after two people had asked
    them to stop. After each reproach they would lower their voices for a
    while, but like a grade-school cafeteria after the lunch monitor has
    yelled for silence, the volume crept inexorably up again. It was soft
    but incessant, and against the background silence, as maddening as a
    dripping faucet at 3 a.m. All the way to Boston I debated whether it
    was bothering me enough to say something. As we approached our
    destination a professorial-looking man who’d spoken to them twice got
    up, walked back and stood over them. He turned out to be quite tall.
    He told them that they’d been extremely inconsiderate, and he’d had a
    much harder time getting his work done because of them.

    "Sir," the girl said, "I really don’t think we were bothering anyone
    else."

    "No," I said, "you were really annoying."

    "Yes," said the woman behind them.

    "See," the man explained gently, "this is how it works. I’m the one
    person who says something. But for everyone like me, there’s a whole
    car full of people who feel the same way."

-- Tim Kreider, The Quiet Ones
%
37 points Grognor 03 February 2013 09:59:37PM

    It is because a mirror has no commitment to any image that it can
    clearly and accurately reflect any image before it. The mind of a
    warrior is like a mirror in that it has no commitment to any outcome
    and is free to let form and purpose result on the spot, according to
    the situation.

-- Yagyū Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword
%
37 points D_Malik 04 April 2013 07:23:23AM

    There once was a hare who mocked a passing tortoise for being slow.
    The erudite tortoise responded by challenging the hare to a race.

    Built for speed, and with his pride on the line, the hare easily won -
    I mean, it wasn't even close - and resumed his mocking anew.

-- Winston Rowntree, Non-Bullshit Fables
%
37 points Tenoke 08 May 2013 06:19:30PM

    "Hasn't it ever occurred to you that in your promiscuous pursuit of
    women you are merely trying to assuage your subconscious fears of
    sexual impotence?"

    "Yes, sir, it has."

    "Then why do you do it?"

    "To assuage my fears of sexual impotence."

-- Joseph Heller, Catch-22

explaining ≠ explaining away
%
37 points James_Miller 01 November 2013 03:19:40PM

    "For my own part," Ms. Yellen said, "I did not see and did not
    appreciate what the risks were with securitization, the credit ratings
    agencies, the shadow banking system, the S.I.V.’s — I didn’t see any
    of that coming until it happened." Her startled interviewers noted
    that almost none of the officials who testified had offered a similar
    acknowledgment of an almost universal failure.

    Economist and likely future chairperson of the Federal Reserve Board
    Janet Yellen shows the key rationality trait of being able to admit
    you were wrong.
%
36 points NoisyEmpire 02 January 2013 08:01:12PM

    What does puzzle people – at least it used to puzzle me – is the fact
    that Christians regard faith… as a virtue. I used to ask how on Earth
    it can be a virtue – what is there moral or immoral about believing or
    not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane
    man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants or does not
    want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were
    mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence, that would not
    mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he
    thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in
    spite of it, that would be merely stupid…

    What I did not see then – and a good many people do not see still –
    was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing
    as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some
    real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming
    that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so.
    For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that
    anesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do
    not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter
    the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their
    horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I
    start thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start
    cutting me up before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my
    faith in anesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith;
    on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and
    emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and
    emotion and imagination on the other…

    Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of
    holding onto things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your
    changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason
    takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian, I do have
    moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable; but when I was
    an atheist, I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly
    probable... Unless you teach your moods "where they get off" you can
    never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a
    creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on
    the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must
    train the habit of faith.

-- C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Caveat: this is not at all how the majority of the religious people that I
know would use the word "faith". In fact, this passage turned out to be
one of the earliest helps in bringing me to think critically about and
ultimately discard my religious worldview.
%
36 points andreas 02 February 2013 05:42:44AM

    "I design a cell to not fail and then assume it will and then ask the
    next 'what-if' questions," Sinnett said. "And then I design the
    batteries that if there is a failure of one cell it won't propagate to
    another. And then I assume that I am wrong and that it will propagate
    to another and then I design the enclosure and the redundancy of the
    equipment to assume that all the cells are involved and the airplane
    needs to be able to play through that."

-- Mike Sinnett, Boeing's 787 chief project engineer
%
36 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 July 2013 07:11:50PM

    "If you don't know how to turn off the safety, being unable to fire
    the gun is the intended result."

-- NotEnoughBears
%
35 points dspeyer 01 January 2013 04:37:36PM

    You're better at talking than I am. When you talk, sometimes I get
    confused. My ideas of what's right and wrong get mixed up. That's why
    I'm bringing this. As soon as I start thinking it's all right to steal
    from our employees, I'm going to start hitting you with the stick.

    later

    If it makes you feel any better, I agree with your logic completely.

    No, what would make me feel better is for you to stop hitting me!

-- Freefall
%
35 points Jay_Schweikert 04 April 2013 02:18:00PM

    Jack Sparrow: [after Will draws his sword] Put it away, son. It's not
    worth you getting beat again.

    Will Turner: You didn't beat me. You ignored the rules of engagement.
    In a fair fight, I'd kill you.

    Jack Sparrow: Then that's not much incentive for me to fight fair,
    then, is it? [Jack turns the ship, hitting Will with the boom]

    Jack Sparrow: Now as long as you're just hanging there, pay attention.
    The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and
    what a man can't do. For instance, you can accept that your father was
    a pirate and a good man or you can't. But pirate is in your blood,
    boy, so you'll have to square with that some day. And me, for example,
    I can let you drown, but I can't bring this ship into Tortuga all by
    me onesies, savvy? So, can you sail under the command of a pirate, or
    can you not?

-- Pirates of the Caribbean

The pirate-specific stuff is a bit extraneous, but I've always thought
this scene neatly captured the virtue of cold, calculating practicality.
Not that "fairness" is never important to worry about, but when you're
faced with a problem, do you care more about solving it, or arguing that
your situation isn't fair? What can you do, and what can't you do? Reminds
me of What do I want? What do I have? How can I best use the latter to get
the former?
%
35 points Zubon 03 May 2013 03:50:45AM

    A lot of people gave very selflessly to build this warship so we can
    go out and battle the vikings, but the time has come to admit that
    hard work and hope are no substitute for actual knowledge and that
    we've made a really shitty ship. If we sail this ship against the
    vikings, we'll be massacred immediately.

-- Oglaf webcomic, Bilge
%
35 points Stabilizer 02 November 2013 01:41:02AM

    A good stack of examples, as large as possible, is indispensable for a
    thorough understanding of any concept, and when I want to learn
    something new, I make it my first job to build one.

-- Paul Halmos
%
34 points Qiaochu_Yuan 03 January 2013 08:49:14AM

    In Japan, it is widely believed that you don't have direct knowledge
    of what other people are really thinking (and it's very presumptuous
    to assume otherwise), and so it is uncommon to describe other people's
    thoughts directly, such as "He likes ice cream" or "She's angry".
    Instead, it's far more common to see things like "I heard that he
    likes ice cream" or "It seems like/It appears to be the case that she
    is angry" or "She is showing signs of wanting to go to the park."

-- TVTropes

Edit (1/7): I have no particular reason to believe that this is literally
true, but either way I think it holds an interesting rationality lesson.
Feel free to substitute 'Zorblaxia' for 'Japan' above.
%
34 points GabrielDuquette 03 February 2013 01:13:32AM

    Market exchange is a pathetically inadequate substitute for love, but
    it scales better.

-- S. T. Rev
%
34 points Jayson_Virissimo 01 March 2013 09:19:48AM

    It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making
    decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who
    pay no price for being wrong.

-- Thomas Sowell
%
34 points Pablo_Stafforini 01 July 2013 10:38:53PM

    Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are
    probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological
    species capable of starting a technological civilization. We filled
    that niche because we got there first, not because we are in any sense
    optimally adapted to it.

-- Nick Bostrom,
   "Superintelligence: the Coming Machine Intelligence Revolution, chap. 2"
%
34 points philh 08 September 2013 01:53:01AM

    Fran: A million billion pounds says you’ll have nothing to show me.

    Bernard: Oh, the old million billion. Why don’t we make it
    interesting, why don’t we say 50?

-- Black Books, Elephants and Hens. H/t /u/mrjack2 on /r/hpmor.
%
34 points Nomad 05 October 2013 04:20:03PM

    We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over
    totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was also
    one of the winners.

-- Paul Graham
%
33 points jsbennett86 02 February 2013 03:45:22AM

On scientists trying to photograph an atom's shadow:

   ...the idea sounds stupid. But scientists don't care about sounding
   stupid, which is what makes them not stupid, and they did it anyway.

-- Luke McKinney, 6 Microscopic Images That Will Blow Your Mind
%
33 points Qiaochu_Yuan 01 February 2013 06:08:33PM

    Things that are your fault are good because they can be fixed. If
    they're someone else's fault, you have to fix them, and that's much
    harder.

-- Geoff Anders (paraphrased)
%
33 points James_Miller 01 April 2013 04:17:37PM

    A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely
    stumped. True, you occasionally face a question such as 17 × 24 = ? to
    which no answer comes immediately to mind, but these dumbfounded
    moments are rare. The normal state of your mind is that you have
    intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes
    your way. You like or dislike people long before you know much about
    them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel
    that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing it. Whether
    you state them or not, you often have answers to questions that you do
    not completely understand, relying on evidence that you can neither
    explain nor defend.

-- Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
%
33 points [deleted] 01 May 2013 02:43:45PM

    When I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology
    department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment
    that went something like this – it had been found by others that under
    certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to
    whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A.
    So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see
    if they still did A.

    I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her
    laboratory the experiment of the other person – to do it under
    condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to
    Y and see if A changed. Then she would know that the real difference
    was the thing she thought she had under control.

    She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor.
    And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has
    already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about
    1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not
    try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the
    conditions and see what happens. Nowadays there's a certain danger of
    the same thing happening, even in the famous field of physics. ...

-- Richard Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!
%
33 points Stabilizer 02 September 2013 08:57:21PM

    Don't ask what they think. Ask what they do.

    My rule has to do with paradigm shifts—yes, I do believe in them. I've
    been through a few myself. It is useful if you want to be the first on
    your block to know that the shift has taken place. I formulated the
    rule in 1974. I was visiting the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
    (SLAC) for a weeks to give a couple of seminars on particle physics.
    The subject was QCD. It doesn't matter what this stands for. The point
    is that it was a new theory of sub-nuclear particles and it was
    absolutely clear that it was the right theory. There was no critical
    experiment but the place was littered with smoking guns. Anyway, at
    the end of my first lecture I took a poll of the audience. "What
    probability would you assign to the proposition 'QCD is the right
    theory of hadrons.'?" My socks were knocked off by the answers. They
    ranged from .01 percent to 5 percent. As I said, by this time it was a
    clear no-brainer. The answer should have been close to 100 percent.
    The next day I gave my second seminar and took another poll. "What are
    you working on?" was the question. Answers: QCD, QCD, QCD, QCD,
    QCD,........ Everyone was working on QCD. That's when I learned to ask
    "What are you doing?" instead of "what do you think?"

    I saw exactly the same phenomenon more recently when I was working on
    black holes. This time it was after a string theory seminar, I think
    in Santa Barbara. I asked the audience to vote whether they agreed
    with me and Gerard 't Hooft or if they thought Hawking’s ideas were
    correct. This time I got a 50-50 response. By this time I knew what
    was going on so I wasn't so surprised. Anyway I later asked if anyone
    was working on Hawking's theory of information loss. Not a single hand
    went up. Don't ask what they think. Ask what they do.

-- Leonard Susskind, Susskinds Rule of Thumb
%
33 points Alejandro1 02 December 2013 04:20:15PM

Most of the Headlines from a Mathematically Literate World. An example:

    Our World: Hollywood Breaks Box Office Records with Explosions, Rising
    Stars.

    Mathematically Literate World: Hollywood Breaks Box Office Records
    with Inflation, Rising Population.
%
32 points jooyous 06 February 2013 09:57:17PM

    I wept because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet, then
    I continued weeping because his foot problem did not actually solve my
    shoe problem.

-- Noah Brand

I'd prefer if this quote ended with " ... and then I got done weeping and
started working on my shoe budget," but oh wells.
%
32 points jsbennett86 02 March 2013 04:31:22AM

On the presentation of science in the news:

    It's not that clean energy will never happen – it totally will. It's
    just that it won't come from a wild-haired scientist running out of
    his basement screaming, "Eureka! I've discovered how to get limitless
    clean energy from common seawater!" Instead, it will come from
    thousands of scientists publishing unreadable studies with titles like
    "Assessing Effectiveness and Costs of Asymmetrical Methods of
    Beryllium Containment in Gen 4 Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors When
    Factoring for Cromulence Decay." The world will be saved by a series
    of boring, incremental advances that chip away at those technical
    challenges one tedious step at a time.

    But nobody wants to read about that in their morning Web browsing. We
    want to read that while we were sleeping, some unlikely hero saved the
    world. Or at least cured cancer.

-- David Wong, 5 Easy Ways to Spot a BS News Story on the Internet
%
32 points Stabilizer 01 April 2013 07:19:22PM

    More specifically, one thing I learned from Terry that I was not
    taught in school is the importance of bad proofs. I would say "I think
    this is true", work on it, see that there was no nice proof, and give
    up. Terry would say "Here's a criterion that eliminates most of the
    problem. Then in what's left, here's a worse one that handles most of
    the detritus. One or two more epicycles. At that point it comes down
    to fourteen cases, and I checked them." Yuck. But we would know it was
    true, and we would move on. (Usually these would get cleaned up a fair
    bit before publication.)

-- Allen Knutson, on collaborating with Terence Tao
%
32 points ShardPhoenix 03 May 2013 10:14:51AM

    Noriko: Wow, you must have a real knack for it!

    Kazumi: That's not it, Miss Takaya! It takes hard work in order to
    achieve that.

    Noriko: Hard work? You must have a knack for hard work, then!

-- Gunbuster
%
32 points TeMPOraL 01 June 2013 04:48:25PM

Akins Laws of Spacecraft Design are full of amazing quotes. My personal
favourite:

    6) (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat
    magic marker.

(See also an interesting note from HNs btilly on this law)
%
32 points Zubon 02 July 2013 10:15:14PM

    He senses in his gut that he did the right thing by showing up. As
    with all gut feelings, only time will tell whether this is pathetic
    self-delusion.

-- Neil Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
%
32 points David_Gerard 02 July 2013 04:13:17PM

    Unix was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as
    that would also stop them from doing clever things.

-- Doug Gwyn

%
32 points Benito 01 August 2013 09:15:24PM

    This analogy, this passage from the finite to infinite, is beset with
    pitfalls. How did Euler avoid them? He was a genius, some people will
    answer, and of course that is no explanation at all. Euler has shrewd
    reasons for trusting his discovery. We can understand his reasons with
    a little common sense, without any miraculous insight specific to
    genius.

-- G. Polya, Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning Vol. 1

%
32 points Pablo_Stafforini 02 September 2013 12:56:06PM

    You should work to reduce your biases, but to say you have none is a
    sign that you have many.

-- Nate Silver, "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail —
                But Some Don’t", New York, 2012, p. 451
%
32 points Dentin 04 September 2013 04:09:34PM

    There is no glory, no beauty in death. Only loss. It does not have
    meaning. I will never see my loved ones again. They are permanently
    lost to the void. If this is the natural order of things, then I
    reject that order. I burn here my hopelessness, I burn here my
    constraints. By my hand, death shall fall. And if I fail, another
    shall take my place ... and another, and another, until this wound in
    the world is healed at last.

-- Anonymous, found written in the Temple at 2013 Burning Man
%
31 points James_Miller 01 January 2013 05:58:51PM

    The women of this country learned long ago, those without swords can
    still die upon them.

-- Éowyn explaining to Aragorn why she was skilled with a blade.
   The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, the 2002 movie.
%
31 points jsbennett86 02 February 2013 03:36:42AM

    It seems that 32 Bostonians have simultaneously dropped dead in a
    ten-block radius for no apparent reason, and General Purcell wants to
    know if it was caused by a covert weapon. Of course, the military has
    been put in charge of the investigation and everything is hush-hush.

    Without examining anything, Keyes takes about five seconds to surmise
    that the victims all died from malfunctioning pacemakers and the
    malfunction was definitely not due to a secret weapon. We're supposed
    to be impressed, but our experience with real scientists and engineers
    indicates that when they're on-the-record, top-notch scientists and
    engineers won't even speculate about the color of their socks without
    looking at their ankles. They have top-notch reputations because
    they're almost always right. They're almost always right because they
    keep their mouths shut until they've fully analyzed the data.

-- Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics review of The Core
%
31 points Vaniver 03 April 2013 02:05:53PM

    Don’t settle. Don’t finish crappy books. If you don’t like the menu,
    leave the restaurant. If you’re not on the right path, get off it.

-- Chris Brogan on the Sunk Cost Fallacy
%
31 points Alejandro1 01 August 2013 08:45:40PM

    It's a horrible feeling when you don't understand why you did something.

-- Dennis Monokroussos
%
31 points snafoo 04 August 2013 05:51:26PM

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

-- Turkish proverb
%
31 points Alejandro1 01 November 2013 01:46:41PM

    "What else [have you learned]?"

    "Never make a decision blindfolded."

    The teacher laughed. "An impossible wish. We’re all wearing
    blindfolds, every moment of our lives, and they come off far less
    easily than this cheap piece of cloth."

    "Then what should we do, when we can’t take the blindfold off?"

    "Do the best you can," the teacher said, "and never forget that you’re
    wearing it."

-- Math with Bad Drawings
%
31 points HungryHippo 02 December 2013 12:42:14PM

    By the middle of the seventeenth century it had come to be understood
    that the world was enclosed in a sea of air, much as the greater part
    of it was covered by water. A scientist of the period, Francesco Lana,
    contended that a lighter-than-air ship could float upon this sea, and
    he suggested how such a ship might be built. He was unable to put his
    invention to a practical test, but he saw only one reason why it might
    not work:

    "... that God will never suffer this Invention to take effect, because
    of the many consequencies which may disturb the Civil Government of
    men. For who sees not, that no City can be secure against attack,
    since our Ship may at any time be placed directly over it, and
    descending down may discharge Souldiers; the same would happen to
    private Houses, and Ships on the Sea: for our Ship descending out of
    the Air to the sails of Sea-Ships, it may cut their Ropes, yea without
    descending by casting Grapples it may over-set them, kill their men,
    burn their Ships by artificial Fire works and Fire-balls.  And this
    they may do not only to Ships but to great Buildings, Castles, Cities,
    with such security that they which cast these things down from a
    height out of Gun-shot, cannot on the other side be offended by those
    below."

    Lana's reservation was groundless. He had predicted modern air warfare
    in surprisingly accurate detail—with its paratroopers and its strafing
    and bombing. Contrary to his expectation, God has suffered his
    invention to take effect. And so has Man.

-- B. F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior

%
30 points Will_Newsome 01 January 2013 08:00:39PM

    For the Greek philosophers, Greek was the language of reason.
    Aristotle's list of categories is squarely based on the categories of
    Greek grammar. This did not explicitly entail a claim that the Greek
    language was primary: it was simply a case of the identification of
    thought with its natural vehicle. Logos was thought, and Logos was
    speech. About the speech of barbarians little was known; hence, little
    was known about what it would be like to think in the language of
    barbarians. Although the Greeks were willing to admit that the
    Egyptians, for example, possessed a rich and venerable store of
    wisdom, they only knew this because someone had explained it to them
    in Greek.

-- Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language
%
30 points ciphergoth 02 July 2013 12:59:11PM

    Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
%
30 points Alejandro1 02 August 2013 10:55:14AM

    Now, now, perfectly symmetrical violence never solved anything.

-- Professor Farnsworth, Futurama.
%
30 points Alejandro1 01 November 2013 01:48:51PM

    Is time real? In one sense, it’s a silly question. The "reality" of
    something is only an interesting issue if its a well-defined concept
    whose actual existence is in question, like Bigfoot or supersymmetry.
    For concepts like "time," which are unambiguously part of a useful
    vocabulary we have for describing the world, talking about "reality"
    is just a bit of harmless gassing. They may be emergent or
    fundamental, but they’re definitely there.

-- Sean Carroll
%
29 points roystgnr 02 January 2013 09:24:29PM

    I think, actually, scientists should kinda look into that whole
    'death' thing. Because, they seem to have focused on diseases... and I
    don't give a #*= about them. The guys go, "Hey, we fixed your
    arthritis!" "Am I still gonna die?" "Yeah."

    So that, I think, is the biggest problem. That's why I can't get
    behind politicians! They're always like, "Our biggest problem today is
    unemployment!" and I'm like "What about getting old and sick and
    dying?"

    Norm MacDonald, Me Doing Stand Up

(a few verbal tics were removed by me; the censorship was already present
in the version I heard)
%
29 points philh 01 March 2013 07:14:03PM

    "Luck" is useless as a strategy and "Hard work" is mostly useless.
    Prefer "Discover rules then systematically exploit them."

-- patio11
%
29 points James_Miller 01 May 2013 04:56:15PM

    Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the
    right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the
    right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's
    power and is not easy.

-- Aristotle
%
29 points RolfAndreassen 02 August 2013 02:48:21AM

    Once there was a miser, who to save money would eat nothing but
    oatmeal. And what's more, he would make a great big batch of it at the
    start of every week, and put it in a drawer, and when he wanted a meal
    he would slice off a piece and eat it cold; thus he saved on firewood.
    Now, by the end of the week, the oatmeal would be somewhat moldy and
    not very appetising; and so to make himself eat it, the miser would
    take out a bottle of good whiskey, and pour himself a glass, and say
    "All right, Olai, eat your oatmeal and when you're done, you can have
    a dram." Then he would eat his moldy oatmeal, and when he was done
    he'd laugh and pour the whiskey back in the bottle, and say "Hah! And
    you believed that? There's one born every minute, to be sure!" And
    thus he had a great savings in whiskey as well.

-- Norwegian folktale.
%
29 points Turgurth 02 September 2013 12:11:39AM

    Not being able to get the future exactly right doesn’t mean you don’t
    have to think about it.

-- Peter Thiel
%
28 points Alejandro1 03 July 2013 01:28:06PM

    My experience as a marriage counselor taught me that for a discussion
    of a disagreement to be productive, the parties have to have a shared
    understanding of what is being debated. If a husband thinks a marital
    debate is about leaving the toliet seat up or not, and the wife thinks
    it is about why her husband never listens to, appreciates or loves her
    the way he should, expect fireworks and frustration. If you are in an
    argument that you think is about government debt and it’s going
    nowhere, it may be because the person you are debating isn’t really
    arguing about the current level of government debt. Rather, they are
    arguing about the size of government.

    If you get into a debate that is ostensibly about the level of
    government debt, try the following tactic (or try it on yourself in
    your own mind): If your opponent says that government debt is too high
    and we therefore need to cut public spending, ask whether s/he has
    EVER favored under ANY economic conditions a nice, fat increase in
    public spending. If you are debating someone who says that government
    debt is no big deal and that we should be increasing public spending,
    ask if s/he has EVER favored under ANY economics conditions a big, fat
    cut in public spending. You are going to get a no answer most of the
    time; maybe almost all the time.

    Is that wrong? No, it’s just frustrating when you are arguing about
    one thing and the other person is arguing about something else (or,
    when BOTH of you are actually arguing about something other than what
    on the face of it you think you are arguing about). The solution?:
    Drop the charade and get down to business. How big government should
    be is an essential political argument for the members of a society to
    have, so why not just have it up front?

-- Keith Humphreys

(I hope that the general point is appreciated instead of starting a
politics discussion! I think these kind of proxy arguments are a very
common failure mode in all areas of life.)
%
28 points James_Miller 01 July 2013 05:31:59PM

    "Here are the ten major principles of rapid skill acquisition:

        Choose a lovable project.
        Focus your energy on one skill at a time.
        Define your target performance level.
        Deconstruct the skill into subskills.
        Obtain critical tools.
        Eliminate barriers to practice.
        Make dedicated time for practice.
        Create fast feedback loops.
        Practice by the clock in short bursts.
        Emphasize quantity and speed."

-- Josh Kaufman, The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything ... Fast!
%
27 points GabrielDuquette 01 January 2013 06:19:58PM

    The first rule of human club is you don't explicitly discuss the rules
    of human club.

-- Silas Dogood
%
27 points Stuart_Armstrong 02 March 2013 01:53:25AM

    "I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs. Christine
    Ladd-Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that
    there were no others. Coming from a logician and a solipsist, her
    surprise surprised me."

-- Bertrand Russell
%
27 points Jayson_Virissimo 03 April 2013 07:32:21AM

    If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance we can
    solve them.

-- Isaac Asimov
%
27 points GabrielDuquette 05 May 2013 03:49:28PM

    "Your third arrest, you go to jail for life."
    "Why the third?"
    "Because in a game a guy gets three times to swing a stick at a ball."

-- Hunter Felt
%
27 points James_Miller 01 June 2013 03:15:46PM

    Imagine you are sitting on this plane now. The top of the craft is
    gone and you can see the sky above you. Columns of flame are growing.
    Holes in the sides of the airliner lead to freedom. How would you
    react?

    You probably think you would leap to your feet and yell, "Let's get
    the hell out of here!" If not this, then you might assume you would
    coil into a fetal position and freak out. Statistically, neither of
    these is likely. What you would probably do is far weirder......

    In any perilous event, like a sinking ship or towering inferno, a
    shooting rampage or a tornado, there is a chance you will become so
    overwhelmed by the perilous overflow of ambiguous information that you
    will do nothing at all...

    about 75 percent of people find it impossible to reason during a
    catastrophic event or impending doom.

-- David McRaney, You Are Not So Smart p. 55,56, and 58.
%
27 points snafoo 04 August 2013 05:46:45PM

    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)
%
27 points JonMcGuire 04 September 2013 04:03:52PM

    But, of course, the usual response to any new perspective is "That
    can't be right, because I don't already believe it."

-- Eugene McCarthy, Human Origins: Are We Hybrids?
%
27 points XerxesPraelor 20 September 2013 05:07:43PM

    There is one very valid test by which we may separate genuine, if
    perverse and unbalanced, originality and revolt from mere impudent
    innovation and bluff. The man who really thinks he has an idea will
    always try to explain that idea. The charlatan who has no idea will
    always confine himself to explaining that it is much too subtle to be
    explained. The first idea may be really outree or specialist; it may
    be really difficult to express to ordinary people. But because the man
    is trying to express it, it is most probable that there is something
    in it, after all. The honest man is he who is always trying to utter
    the unutterable, to describe the indescribable; but the quack lives
    not by plunging into mystery, but by refusing to come out of it.

-- G K Chesterton
%
27 points James_Miller 02 December 2013 12:59:52AM

    There are tens of thousands of professional money managers.
    Statistically, a handful of them have been successful by pure chance.
    Which ones? I don't know, but I bet a few are famous.

    The market doesn't care how much you paid for a stock. Or your house.
    Or what you think is a "fair" price.

    Professional investors have better information and faster computers
    than you do. You will never beat them short-term trading. Don't even
    try.

    The book Where Are the Customers' Yachts? was written in 1940, and
    most still haven't figured out that financial advisors don't have
    their best interest at heart.

    The low-cost index fund is one of the most useful financial inventions
    in history. Boring but beautiful.

-- Morgan Housel, Highlights from 50 Unfortunate Truths About Investing
%
26 points katydee 01 January 2013 01:37:48PM

    The dream is damned and dreamer too if dreaming's all that dreamers do.

-- Rory Miller
%
26 points curiousepic 06 February 2013 02:25:23AM

    Q: I was wondering what the dumbest or funniest argument you've heard
    against the defeat of aging?

    Aubrey de Grey: Um, It's been a very very long time since I've heard a
    question or concern I haven't heard before, so nothing's dumb or funny
    anymore, it's just... tedium.
%
26 points GabrielDuquette 01 March 2013 06:18:01PM

    Shouldn't "it works like a charm" be said about things that don't work?

-- Jason Roy
%
26 points Stabilizer 02 March 2013 12:58:40AM

    "Anything left on your bucket list?"

    "Not dying..."

-- Bill Gates, in his AMA on reddit.
%
26 points etotheipi 08 April 2013 02:29:36AM

    The peril of arguing with you is forgetting to argue with myself.
    Don’t make me convince you: I don’t want to believe that much.

-- James Richardson,
   "Even More Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays from Vectors 3.0"

The others are quite nice too: http://www.theliteraryreview.org/WordPress/tlr-poetry/
%
26 points Creutzer 20 July 2013 09:28:36AM

    As I looked out into the night sky, across all those infinite stars,
    it made me realize how insignificant they are.

-- Peter Cook

Not, perhaps, a rationality quote per se, but a delightful subversion of a
harmful commonplace.
%
26 points cody-bryce 02 July 2013 06:17:44PM

    Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as
    used to it.

-- H.L. Mencken
%
26 points CronoDAS 04 July 2013 07:33:31PM

    There are those among us - among you, too, I observe - who glorify the
    wonders of the natural world with a kind of glassy-eyed fanaticism and
    urge a return to that purer, more innocent state. This testifies to
    nothing other than the fact that those who recommend the satisfactions
    of living in harmony with nature have never had to do it. Nature is
    evil. Nature is conflict, violence, betrayal; worms that crawl through
    the skin and breed in the gut; thorns that poison; snakes that fight
    in writhing, heaving masses until all lie dead from one another's
    poison. From nature we learned to tear the flesh off the bone and suck
    out the blood - and to enjoy it. Do you want to return to that state?
    I do not.

    ...

    I have known Nature. I have known Civilization. Civilization is better.

-- Donna Ball (writing as Donna Boyd), The Passion
%
26 points Vaniver 01 July 2013 04:57:29PM

    We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done
    was very foolish.

-- F. A. Hayek
%
26 points RolfAndreassen 06 August 2013 03:49:17PM

    He took literally five seconds for something I'd spent two weeks on,
    which I guess is what being an expert means

-- Graduate student of our group,
   recognising a level above his own in a weekly progress report
%
26 points shminux 02 August 2013 03:23:24AM

    A man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor
    judge of distance.

-- Unknown
%
26 points cody-bryce 02 August 2013 10:30:27PM

    If Tetris has taught me anything it's that errors pile up and
    accomplishments disappear.

-- Unknown
%
25 points Carwajalca 29 January 2013 11:21:28AM

    I've never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of
    humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an
    adhesive.

-- Randall Munroe, in http://what-if.xkcd.com/30/
   (What-if xkcd, Interplanetary Cessna)
%
25 points James_Miller 01 January 2013 05:34:35PM

    We cannot dismiss conscious analytic thinking by saying that
    heuristics will get a "close enough" answer 98 percent of the time,
    because the 2 percent of the instances where heuristics lead us
    seriously astray may be critical to our lives.

-- Keith E. Stanovich,
   "What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought"
%
25 points Eugine_Nier 02 February 2013 06:51:31AM

    [S]econd thoughts tend to be tentative, and people tend not to believe
    that they are being lied to. Their own fairmindedness makes them
    gullible. Upon hearing two versions of any story, the natural reaction
    of any casual listener is to assume both versions are slanted to favor
    their side, and that the truth is perhaps somewhere in the middle. So
    if I falsely accuse an innocent group of ten people of wrongdoing, the
    average bystander, if he later hears my false accusation disputed,
    will assume that five or six of the people are guilty, rather than
    assume I lied and admit that he was deceived.

-- John C Wright
%
25 points arundelo 01 February 2013 05:00:17PM

    Eventually you just have to admit that if it looks like the absence of
    a duck, walks like the absence of a duck, and quacks like the absence
    of a duck, the duck is probably absent.

-- Tom Chivers
%
25 points Rubix 02 February 2013 01:17:50AM

    In any man who dies, there dies with him his first snow and kiss and
    fight. Not people die, but worlds die in them.

-- Yevgeny Yevtushenko
%
25 points BlueSun 03 April 2013 04:20:39PM

Something a Chess Master told me as a child has stuck with me:

    How did you get so good?

    I've lost more games than you've ever played.

-- Robert Tanner
%
25 points NancyLebovitz 25 June 2013 02:01:01PM

    The movie "Apollo 13″ does a fair job of showing how rapidly the
    engineers in Houston devised the kludge and documented it, but because
    of time contraints of course they can’t show you everything. NASA is a
    stickler for details. (Believe me, I’ve worked with them!) They don’t
    just rapid prototype something that people’s lives will depend upon.
    Overnight, they not only devised the scrubber adapter built from stuff
    in the launch manifest, they also tested it, documented it, and sent
    up stepwise instructions for constructing it. In a high-maturity
    organization, once you get into the habit of doing that, it doesn’t
    really take that long. Something that always puzzles me when I meet
    cowboy engineers who insist that process will just slow them down
    unacceptably. I tell them that hey, if NASA engineers could design,
    build, test, and document a CO2 scrubber adapter made from common
    household items overnight, you can damn well put in a comment when you
    check in your code changes.

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2013/06/04/stanislaw-burzynski-versus-the-bbc/#comment-262541
%
25 points MinibearRex 05 August 2013 05:23:38AM

    He wasn't certain what he expected to find, which, in his experience,
    was generally a good enough reason to investigate something.

-- Harry Potter and the Confirmed Critical, Chapter 6
%
25 points SatvikBeri 03 September 2013 09:45:33PM

    I discovered as a child that the user interface for reprogramming my
    own brain is my imagination. For example, if I want to reprogram
    myself to be in a happy mood, I imagine succeeding at a difficult
    challenge, or flying under my own power, or perhaps being able to
    levitate objects with my mind. If I want to perform better at a
    specific task, such as tennis, I imagine the perfect strokes before
    going on court. If I want to fall asleep, I imagine myself in pleasant
    situations that are unrelated to whatever is going on with my real
    life.

    My most useful mental trick involves imagining myself to be far more
    capable than I am. I do this to reduce the risk that I turn down an
    opportunity just because I am clearly unqualified[...] As my career
    with Dilbert took off, reporters asked me if I ever imagined I would
    reach this level of success. The question embarrasses me because the
    truth is that I imagined a far greater level of success. That's my
    process. I imagine big.

-- Scott Adams
%
25 points arundelo 02 September 2013 02:44:29AM

    You argue that it would be wrong to stab my neighbor and take all
    their stuff. I reply that you have an ugly face. I commit the "ad
    hominem" fallacy because I'm attacking you, not your argument. So one
    thing you could do is yell "OI, AD HOMINEM, NOT COOL."

    [...] What you need to do is go one step more and say "the ugliness of
    my face has no bearing on moral judgments about whether it is okay to
    stab your neighbor."

    But notice you could've just said that without yelling "ad hominem"
    first! In fact, that's how all fallacies work. If someone has actually
    committed a fallacy, you can just point out their mistake directly
    without being a pedant and finding a pat little name for all of their
    logical reasoning problems.

-- TychoCelchuuu, on Reddit
%
25 points Stabilizer 03 October 2013 09:15:52PM

    A majority of life's errors are caused by forgetting what one is
    really trying to do.

-- Charlie Munger
%
25 points jsbennett86 03 October 2013 05:07:22AM

    Him: We can't go back. We don't understand everything yet.

    Her: "Everything" is a little ambitious. We barely understand
    anything.

    Him: Yeah. But that's what the first part of understanding everything
    looks like.

-- Randall Munroe, Time
%
25 points pewpewlasergun 03 October 2013 06:06:56AM

    Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the
    real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the
    window.

-- Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver
%
25 points satt 01 December 2013 11:27:45PM

    Visit with your predecessors from previous Administrations. They know
    the ropes and can help you see around some corners. Try to make
    original mistakes, rather than needlessly repeating theirs.

-- Donald Rumsfeld
%
25 points Benito 12 December 2013 06:03:44PM

    When I was a young untenured professor of philosophy, I once received
    a visit from a colleague from the Comparative Literature Department,
    an eminent and fashionable literary theorist, who wanted some help
    from me. I was flattered to be asked, and did my best to oblige, but
    the drift of his questions about various philosophical topics was
    strangely perplexing to me. For quite a while we were getting nowhere,
    until finally he managed to make clear to me what he had come for. He
    wanted "an epistemology," he said. An epistemology. Every
    self-respecting literary theorist had to sport an epistemology that
    season, it seems, and without one he felt naked, so he had come to me
    for an epistemology to wear – it was the very next fashion, he was
    sure, and he wanted the dernier cri in epistemologies. It didn't
    matter to him that it be sound, or defensible, or (as one might as
    well say) true; it just had to be new and different and stylish.
    Accessorize, my good fellow, or be overlooked at the party.

-- Daniel Dennett

Example of professing a belief - here, belief is a fashion statement, or
something fun to whip out at parties, not a thing that actually constrains
anticipation.
%
24 points Grif 02 February 2013 01:12:40AM

    If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to
    provide that proves they should value evidence? If someone doesn’t
    value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they
    should value logic?

-- Sam Harris
%
24 points harshhpareek 03 March 2013 08:05:37PM

    The world of the manager is one of problems and opportunities.
    Problems are to be managed; one must understand the nature of the
    problem, amass resources adequate to deal with it, and "work the
    problem" on an ongoing basis.[...] But what if the problem can be
    fixed? This is not the domain of the manager.

    An engineer believes most problems have solutions. The engineer isn't
    interested in building an organisation to cope with the problem. [...]
    And yet the engineer's faith in fixes often blinds him to the fact
    that many problems, especially those involving people, don't have the
    kind of complete permanent solutions he seeks.

-- John Walker, The Hackers Diet (~loc 250 on an e-reader)
%
24 points maia 01 May 2013 08:08:17PM

    When a problem comes along / You must whip it / Before the cream sets
    out too long / You must whip it / When something's goin' wrong / You
    must whip it

    Now whip it / Into shape / Shape it up / Get straight / Go forward /
    Move ahead / Try to detect it / It's not too late / To whip it / Whip
    it good

-- Devo, on the value of confronting problems rather than letting them fester
%
24 points cody-bryce 02 August 2013 10:29:11PM

    Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of
    trying to be the right person.

-- Gloria Steinem
%
24 points Nomad 03 September 2013 05:28:00PM

    The "I blundered and lost, but the refutation was lovely!" scenario is
    something lovers of truth and beauty can appreciate.

-- Jeremy Silman
%
24 points NoSuchPlace 07 December 2013 03:05:36AM

    It's hard enough to overcome one's own misconceptions without having
    to think about how to get the resulting ideas past other people's. I
    worry that if I wrote to persuade, I'd start to shy away unconsciously
    from ideas I knew would be hard to sell. When I notice something
    surprising, it's usually very faint at first. There's nothing more
    than a slight stirring of discomfort. I don't want anything to get in
    the way of noticing it consciously.

-- Paul Graham

%
23 points Konkvistador 02 January 2013 07:57:26PM

    Just because someone isn't into finding out The Secrets Of The
    Universe like me doesn't necessarily mean I can't be friends with
    them.

-- Buttercup Dew (@NationalistPony)
%
23 points Oscar_Cunningham 02 January 2013 02:21:31PM

    I don't blame them; nor am I saying I wouldn't similarly manipulate
    the truth if I thought it would save lives, but I don't lie to myself.
    You keep two books, not no books.

-- The Last Psychiatrist
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/10/how_not_to_prevent_military_su.html
%
23 points Stabilizer 01 January 2013 06:29:14PM

    To succeed in a domain that violates your intuitions, you need to be
    able to turn them off the way a pilot does when flying through clouds.
    Without visual cues (e.g. the horizon) you can't distinguish between
    gravity and acceleration. Which means if you're flying through clouds
    you can't tell what the attitude of the aircraft is. You could feel
    like you're flying straight and level while in fact you're descending
    in a spiral. The solution is to ignore what your body is telling you
    and listen only to your instruments. But it turns out to be very hard
    to ignore what your body is telling you. Every pilot knows about this
    problem and yet it is still a leading cause of accidents. You need to
    do what you know intellectually to be right, even though it feels
    wrong.

-- Paul Graham
%
23 points James_Miller 01 January 2013 05:46:59PM

    What You Are Inside Only Matters Because of What It Makes You Do

-- David Wong, 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person.
    Published in Cracked.com
%
23 points Qiaochu_Yuan 12 March 2013 05:07:31AM

    The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it
    has taken place.

-- George Bernard Shaw
%
23 points Stabilizer 01 April 2013 07:36:20PM

    One test adults use is whether you still have the kid flake reflex.
    When you're a little kid and you're asked to do something hard, you
    can cry and say "I can't do it" and the adults will probably let you
    off. As a kid there's a magic button you can press by saying "I'm just
    a kid" that will get you out of most difficult situations. Whereas
    adults, by definition, are not allowed to flake. They still do, of
    course, but when they do they're ruthlessly pruned.

-- Paul Graham
%
23 points Zubon 02 June 2013 08:33:40PM

    Sorry? Of course he was sorry. People were always sorry. Sorry they
    had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were
    doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but
    they still did whatever it was. The sorrow never stopped them; it just
    made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped. ...

    Sorrow be damned, and all your plans. Fuck the faithful, fuck the
    committed, the dedicated, the true believers; fuck all the sure and
    certain people prepared to maim and kill whoever got in their way;
    fuck every cause that ended in murder and a child screaming.

-- Iain M. Banks, Against a Dark Background
%
23 points AspiringRationalist 01 June 2013 11:19:51PM

    Bad things don't happen to you because you're unlucky. Bad things
    happen to you because you're a dumbass.

-- That 70s Show

%
23 points dspeyer 01 July 2013 08:25:02PM

    The Milky-Way galaxy is mind-bogglingly big.

    Eh," you say, "100,000 light years in diameter, give or take a few."

    Listen, pal: just because you can measure something in light years
    doesn't mean you truly understand how big it really is.

    By the time you carve our galaxy up into units you have actual,
    personal experience with, you'll have to start using numbers that you
    won't live long enough to count to.

    That's okay. The galaxy doesn't care. In fact, not caring is one of
    the things it does best.

    That, and being really, really, really big.

-- Howard Taylor
%
23 points dspeyer 01 July 2013 08:20:30PM

    Sometimes the most remarkable things seem commonplace. I mean, when
    you think about it, jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get
    in a plane, it defies the gravity of an entire planet by exploiting a
    loophole with air pressure, and it flies across distances that would
    take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been
    significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the
    earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into
    something, and you can only breathe because someone built you a really
    good tin can that has seams tight enough to hold in a decent amount of
    air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and
    research, blood, sweat, tears, and lives have gone into the history of
    air travel, and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet
    and societies.

    But get on any flight in the country, and I absolutely promise you
    that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible
    achievement, will be willing to complain about the drinks.

    The drinks, people.

-- Harry Dresden, Summer Knight, Jim Butcher
%
23 points Eugine_Nier 02 August 2013 06:22:12AM

    Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits
    that result in that status; it undermines them.

-- Reynolds law
%
23 points pjeby 06 November 2013 12:46:38AM

    Realistically, most people have poor filters for sorting truth from
    fiction, and there’s no objective way to know if you’re particularly
    good at it or not. Consider the people who routinely disagree with
    you. See how confident they look while being dead wrong? That’s
    exactly how you look to them.

-- Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big
%
22 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 February 2013 11:33:28PM

I've just come across a fascinatingly compact observation by I. J. Good:

    Public and private utilities do not always coincide. This leads to
    ethical problems. Example - an invention is submitted to a scientific
    adviser of a firm...

    The probability that the invention will work is p. The value to the
    firm if the invention is adopted and works is V, and the loss if the
    invention is adopted and fails is L. The value to the adviser
    personally if he advises the adoption of the invention and it works is
    v, and the loss if it fails to work is l. The losses to the firm and
    the adviser if he recommends the rejection of the invention are both
    negligible...

    Then the firm's expected gain if the invention is adopted is pV -
    (1-p)L and the adviser's expected gain in the same circumstances is pv
    - (1-p)l. The firm has positive expected gain if p/(1-p) L/V, and the
    adviser has positive expected gain if p/(1-p) l/v.

    If l/v p/(1-p) L/V, the adviser will be faced with an ethical problem,
    i.e. he will be tempted to act against the interests of the firm.

This is a beautifully simple recipe for a conflict of interest:

Considering absolute losses assuming failure and absolute gains
conditioned on success, an adviser is incentivized to give the wrong
advice, precisely when:

    The ratio of agent loss to agent gain,
    exceeds the odds of success versus failure
    which in turn exceeds the ratio of principal loss to principal gain.

You can see this reflected in a lot of cases because the gains to an
advisor often don't scale anywhere near as fast as the gains to society or
a firm. It's the Fearful Committee Formula.
%
22 points satt 02 April 2013 06:18:07AM

    Within the philosophy of science, the view that new discoveries
    constitute a break with tradition was challenged by Polanyi, who
    argued that discoveries may be made by the sheer power of believing
    more strongly than anyone else in current theories, rather than going
    beyond the paradigm. For example, the theory of Brownian motion which
    Einstein produced in 1905, may be seen as a literal articulation of
    the kinetic theory of gases at the time. As Polanyi said:

        Discoveries made by the surprising configuration of existing
        theories might in fact be likened to the feat of a Columbus whose
        genius lay in taking literally and as a guide to action that the
        earth was round, which his contemporaries held vaguely and as a
        mere matter for speculation.

-- David Lamb Susan M. Easton,
   "Multiple Discovery: The pattern of scientific progress" pp. 100-101
%
22 points satt 02 May 2013 02:05:24AM

    For one mistake made for not knowing, ten mistakes are made for not
    looking.

-- James Alexander Lindsay
%
22 points RolfAndreassen 03 May 2013 12:16:01AM

    One interesting thing about Ms. Dowd’s description of "hardball"
    political tactics is just how dainty and genteel her brass knuckle
    suggestions actually are. A speech, an appeal to reason: there is
    nothing here about lucrative contracts for political supporters,
    promises of sinecure jobs for politicians who lose their seats, a
    "blank check" for administrative backing on some obscure tax loophole
    that a particular politician could award to a favored client; there’s
    not even a delicate hint about grand jury investigations that can be
    stopped in their tracks or compromising photographs or wiretaps that
    need never see the light of day. Far be it from Ms Dowd to speak of or
    even hint at the kind of strategy that actual politicians think about
    when words like ‘hardball’ come to mind. Ms Dowd speaks of brass
    knuckles and then shows us a doily; at some level it speaks well of
    Ms. Dowd as a human being that even when she tries she seems unable to
    come up with an offer someone can’t refuse.

-- Walter Russell Mead, describing someone else's failure to understand
                        what a desperate effort actually looks like.
%
22 points shminux 09 June 2013 07:21:58PM

    you can't wait around for someone else to act. I had been looking for
    leaders, but I realised that leadership is about being the first to
    act.

-- Edward Snowden, the NSA surveillance whistle-blower.
%
22 points arborealhominid 06 June 2013 03:31:47PM

    The word gentleman originally meant something recognisable: one who
    had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone
    'a gentleman' you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating
    a fact. If you said he was not 'a gentleman' you were not insulting
    him, but giving information. There was no contradiction in saying that
    John was a liar and a gentleman; any more than there now is in saying
    that James is a fool and an M.A. But then there came people who said-
    so rightly, charitably, spiritually, sensitively, so anything but
    usefully- 'Ah, but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not
    the coat of arms and the land, but the behaviour? Surely he is the
    true gentleman who behaves as a gentleman should? Surely in that sense
    Edward is far more truly a gentleman than John?' They meant well. To
    be honourable and courteous and brave is of course a far better thing
    than to have a coat of arms. But it is not the same thing. Worse
    still, it is not a thing everyone will agree about. To call a man 'a
    gentleman' in this new, refined sense, becomes, in fact, not a way of
    giving information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that
    he is 'a gentleman' becomes simply a way of insulting him. When a word
    ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of
    praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object; it only tells
    you about the speaker's attitude to that object. (A 'nice' meal only
    means a meal the speaker likes.) A gentleman, once it has been
    spiritualised and refined out of its old coarse, objective sense,
    means hardly more than a man whom the speaker likes. As a result,
    gentleman is now a useless word. We had lots of terms of approval
    already, so it was not needed for that use; on the other hand if
    anyone (say, in a historical work) wants to use it in its old sense,
    he cannot do so without explanations. It has been spoiled for that
    purpose.

-- C.S. Lewis

%
22 points ShardPhoenix 02 August 2013 08:26:41AM

    Rin: "Even I make mistakes once in a while."

    Shirou (thinking): ...This is hard. Would it be good for her if I
    correct her and point out that she makes mistakes often, not just once
    in a while?

-- Fate/stay night
%
22 points lukeprog 02 September 2013 09:57:55AM

    You cannot have... only benevolent knowledge; the scientific method
    doesn't filter for benevolence.

-- Richard Rhodes
%
22 points satt 02 September 2013 01:36:41AM

    I realize that if you ask people to account for 'facts,' they usually
    spend more time finding reasons for them than finding out whether they
    are true. [...] They skip over the facts but carefully deduce
    inferences. They normally begin thus: 'How does this come about?' But
    does it do so? That is what they ought to be asking.

-- Montaigne, Essays, M. Screech's 1969 translation
%
22 points Eugine_Nier 02 September 2013 04:15:32AM

    If you don’t study philosophy you’ll absorb it anyway, but you won’t
    know why or be able to be selective.

-- idontknowbut@gmail.com
%
22 points Eugine_Nier 04 October 2013 02:53:15AM

    the mass of an object never seems to change: a spinning top has the
    same weight as a still one. So a "law" was invented: mass is constant,
    independent of speed. That "law" is now found to be incorrect. Mass is
    found to increase with velocity, but appreciable increases require
    velocities near that of light. A true law is: if an object moves with
    a speed of less than one hundred miles a second the mass is constant
    to within one part in a million. In some such approximate form this is
    a correct law. So in practice one might think that the new law makes
    no significant difference. Well, yes and no. For ordinary speeds we
    can certainly forget it and use the simple constant-mass law as a good
    approximation. But for high speeds we are wrong, and the higher the
    speed, the more wrong we are.

    Finally, and most interesting, philosophically we are completely wrong
    with the approximate law. Our entire picture of the world has to be
    altered even though the mass changes only by a little bit. This is a
    very peculiar thing about the philosophy, or the ideas, behind the
    laws. Even a very small effect sometimes requires profound changes in
    our ideas.

-- Richard Feynman, Lectures on Physics
%
21 points Vaniver 11 January 2013 01:32:09AM

    Some may think these trifling matters not worth minding or relating;
    but when they consider that tho' dust blown into the eyes of a single
    person, or into a single shop on a windy day, is but of small
    importance, yet the great number of the instances in a populous city,
    and its frequent repetitions give it weight and consequence, perhaps
    they will not censure very severely those who bestow some attention to
    affairs of this seemingly low nature. Human felicity is produc'd not
    so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by
    little advantages that occur every day.

-- Benjamin Franklin
%
21 points Antadil 02 March 2013 11:18:53PM

    I remember asking a wise man, once,

    'Why do men fear the dark?'

    'Because darkness' he told me, 'is ignorance made visible.'

    'And do men despise ignorance?', I asked.

    'No!', he said, 'they prize it above all things - all things! - but
    only so long as it remains invisible.'

-- R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye
%
21 points RichardKennaway 10 April 2013 07:00:22PM

    BOSWELL. 'Sir Alexander Dick tells me, that he remembers having a
    thousand people in a year to dine at his house: that is, reckoning
    each person as one, each time that he dined there.' JOHNSON. 'That,
    Sir, is about three a day.' BOSWELL. 'How your statement lessens the
    idea.' JOHNSON. 'That, Sir, is the good of counting. It brings every
    thing to a certainty, which before floated in the mind indefinitely.'

-- From Boswell's Life of Johnson.
   HT to a commenter on the West Hunter blog.
%
21 points BT_Uytya 03 June 2013 09:34:39AM

Baroque Cycle by Neal Stphenson proves to be a very good, intelligent book
series.

    "Why does the tide rush out to sea?"

    "The influence of the sun and the moon."

    "Yet you and I cannot see the sun or the moon. The water does not have
    senses to see, or a will to follow them. How then do the sun and moon,
    so far away, affect the water?"

    "Gravity," responded Colonel Barnes, lowering his voice like a priest
    intoning the name of God, and glancing about to see whether Sir Isaac
    Newton were in earshot.

    "That’s what everyone says now. ’Twas not so when I was a lad. We used
    to parrot Aristotle and say it was in the nature of water to be drawn
    up by the moon. Now, thanks to our fellow-passenger, we say ‘gravity.’
    It seems a great improvement. But is it really? Do you understand the
    tides, Colonel Barnes, simply because you know to say ‘gravity’?"

Daniel Waterhouse and Colonel Barnes in Solomon’s Gold
%
21 points jsbennett86 11 September 2013 06:03:45AM

    If you cannot examine your thoughts, you have no choice but to think
    them, however silly they may be.

-- Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say
%
21 points dspeyer 02 December 2013 06:10:24AM

    Mike nodded. He wasn't really surprised, though. One of the things
    he'd come to learn since the Ring of Fire, all the way down to the
    marrow of his bones, was that if the ancestors of twentieth-century
    human beings didn't do something that seemed logical, it was probably
    because it wasn't actually logical at all, once you understood
    everything involved. So it turned out that such notorious military
    numbskulls as Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Phil Sheridan,
    Stonewall Jackson, William Tecumseh Sherman and all the rest of them
    hadn't actually been idiots after all. It was easy for
    twentieth-century professors to proclaim loftily that Civil War
    generals had insisted on continuing with line formations despite the
    advent of the Minié ball-armed rifled musket because the dimwits
    simply hadn't noticed that the guns were accurate for several hundred
    yards. When—cluck; cluck—they should obviously have adopted the
    skirmishing tactics of twentieth-century infantry.

    But it turned out, when put to a ruthless seventeenth-century Swedish
    general's test in his very rigorous notion of field exercises, that
    those professors of a later era had apparently never tried to stand
    their ground when cavalry came at them. After they fired their shot,
    and needed one-third of a minute—if they were adept at the business,
    and didn't get rattled—to have a second shot ready. In that bloody
    world where real soldiers lived and died, skirmishing tactics without
    breechloading rifles or automatic weapons were just a way to commit
    suicide. If the opponent had large enough forces and was willing to
    lose some men, at least.

-- Eric Flint and David Weber, 1634: The Baltic War
%
20 points RichardKennaway 13 January 2013 08:11:24PM

    Just because you no longer believe a lie, does not mean you now know
    the truth.

-- Mark Atwood
%
20 points Alicorn 11 January 2013 03:08:53AM

    He tells her that the earth is flat -

    He knows the facts, and that is that.

    In altercations fierce and long

    She tries her best to prove him wrong.

    But he has learned to argue well.

    He calls her arguments unsound

    And often asks her not to yell.

    She cannot win. He stands his ground. The planet goes on being round.

-- Wendy Cope, "He Tells Her", from the series Differences of Opinion
%
20 points Alicorn 02 March 2013 01:07:37AM

    ...these things are possible. And because they're possible we have to
    think of them so they don't surprise us later. We have to think of
    them so that if the worst does come, we'll already know how to live in
    that universe.

-- Miro, in Xenocide by Orson Scott Card
%
20 points Pablo_Stafforini 02 May 2013 06:19:16PM

    Ownership is not limited to material things. It can also apply to
    points of view. Once we take ownership of an idea—whether it’s about
    politics or sports—what do we do? We love it perhaps more than we
    should. We prize it more than it is worth. And most frequently, we
    have trouble letting go of it because we can’t stand the idea of its
    loss. What are we left with then? An ideology—rigid and unyielding.

-- Dan Ariely,
   "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions",
   New York, 2008, pp. 138-139
%
20 points Vaniver 01 July 2013 04:56:28PM

    I wish that I may never think the smiles of the great and powerful a
    sufficient inducement to turn aside from the straight path of honesty
    and the convictions of my own mind.

-- David Ricardo
%
20 points PhilGoetz 16 July 2013 02:48:18PM

    I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box
    when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

-- Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett, quoted here

%
20 points Vaniver 13 November 2013 03:51:46AM

    When the tech geeks raised concerns about their ability to deliver the
    website on time, they are reported to have been told "Failure is not
    an option." Unfortunately, this is what happens when you say "failure
    is not an option": You don’t develop backup plans, which means that
    your failure may turn into a disaster.

-- from an article about Obamacare.
%
20 points lukeprog 14 November 2013 12:55:08AM

    God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot predict, the
    courage to predict the things I can, and the wisdom to buy index
    funds.

-- Nate Silver

(h/t Rob Wiblin)
%
20 points malcolmmcc 01 November 2013 11:01:56AM

    Next time you’re in a debate, ask yourself if someone is on offense or
    defense. If they’re neither, then you know you have someone you can
    learn from

-- Julien Smith
%
20 points Stabilizer 07 December 2013 10:34:41PM

    In every way that people, firms, or governments act and plan, they are
    making implicit forecasts about the future.

-- The Economist
%
19 points ygert 01 January 2013 05:29:18PM

I was rereading HP Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu lately, and the quote
from the Necronomicon jumped out at me as a very good explanation of
exactly why cryonics is such a good idea.

(Full disclosure: I myself have not signed up for cryonics. But I intend
to sign up as soon as I can arrange to move to a place where it is
available.)

The quote is simply this:

    That is not dead which can eternal lie,

    And with strange aeons even death may die.

%
19 points GabrielDuquette 02 February 2013 01:19:39AM

    Saw kid tryin' to catch a butterfly, got me wonderin why I didn't see
    a butterfly trying desperately to fly away from a kid

-- thefolksong
%
19 points Pablo_Stafforini 02 June 2013 02:40:27AM

    Th[e] strategy [of preferring less knowledge and intelligence due to
    their high cognitive costs] is exemplified by the sea squirt larva,
    which swims about until it finds a suitable rock, to which it then
    permanently affixes itself. Cemented in place, the larva has less need
    for complex information processing, whence it proceeds to digest part
    of its own brain (its cerebral ganglion). Academics can sometimes
    observe a similar phenomenon in colleagues who are granted tenure.

-- Nick Bostrom
%
19 points B_For_Bandana 01 June 2013 08:45:22PM

    Stepan Arkadyevitch subscribed to a liberal paper, and read it. It was
    not extreme in those views, but advocated those principles the
    majority held. And though he was not really interested in science or
    art or politics, he strongly adhered to such views on all those
    subjects as the majority, including his paper, advocated, and he
    changed them only when the majority changed them; or more correctly,
    he did not change them, but they themselves imperceptibly changed in
    him.

    Stepan Arkadyevitch never chose principles or opinions, but these
    principles and opinions came to him, just as he never chose the shape
    of a hat or coat, but took those that others wore. And, living as he
    did in fashionable society, through the necessity of some mental
    activity, developing generally in a man's best years, it was as
    indispensable for him to have views as to have a hat. If there was any
    reason why he preferred liberal views rather than the conservative
    direction which many of his circle followed, it was not because he
    found a liberal tendency more rational, but because he found it better
    suited to his mode of life.

    The liberal party declared that everything in Russia was wretched; and
    the fact was that Stepan Arkadyevitch had a good many debts and was
    decidedly short of money. The liberal party said that marriage was a
    defunct institution and that it needed to be remodeled, and in fact
    domestic life afforded Stepan Arakadyevitch very little pleasure, and
    compelled him to lie, and to pretend, which was contrary to his
    nature. The liberal party said, or rather allowed it to be understood,
    that religion is only a curb on the barbarous portion of the
    community, and in fact Stepan Arkadyevitch could not bear the shortest
    prayer without pain in his knees, and he could not comprehend the
    necessity of all these high-sounding words about the other world when
    it was so very pleasant to live in this one.

-- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

The personal is political!
%
19 points Zubon 03 July 2013 11:03:03PM

    Xander: Yep, vampires are real. A lot of 'em live in Sunnydale. Willow
    'll fill you in.

    Willow: I know it's hard to accept at first.

    Oz: Actually, it explains a lot.

One of the stronger examples of Bayesian updating in fiction, from Buffy
the Vampire Slayer season 2, episode 13
%
19 points mushroom 01 July 2013 09:53:59PM

    "The wonder and horror of epidemiology, is that it’s not enough to
    just measure one thing very accurately. To get the right answer, you
    may have to measure a great many things very accurately."

-- Jerry Avorn, quoted here.
%
19 points ShardPhoenix 02 August 2013 08:28:32AM

    But, Senjougahara, can I set a condition too? A condition, or, well,
    something like a promise. Don't ever pretend you can see something
    that you can't, or that you can't see something that you can. If our
    viewpoints are inconsistent, let's talk it over. Promise me.

-- Bakemonogatari
%
19 points johnlawrenceaspden 08 September 2013 04:53:03PM

    When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not
    know a thing, to allow that you do not know it. This is knowledge.

-- Confucius, Analects
%
19 points RolfAndreassen 03 October 2013 05:29:05AM

    "I didn't go spiralling down. Because there is no abyss. There is no
    yawning chasm waiting to swallow us up, when we learn that there is no
    god, that we're animals like any other animal, that the universe has
    no purpose, that our souls are made of the same stuff as water and
    sand."

    I said, "There are two thousand cultists on this island who believe
    otherwise."

    Michael shrugged. "What do you expect from moral flat-Earthers, if not
    fear of falling?"

-- Greg Egan, Distress.
%
19 points ShardPhoenix 03 December 2013 08:29:07AM

    You know what they say - "Asking once will bring you temporary shame,
    whereas not doing so will bring you permanent shame".

    They also say "Answering a question will make you feel superior for a
    while, whereas not doing so will give you a lifelong sense of
    superiority".

-- Monogatari Series Second Season

%
19 points Eugine_Nier 03 December 2013 01:00:37AM

    All appearances to the contrary, the managers involved in this debacle
    aren't dumb. But they come from a background – law and politics –
    where arguments often take the place of reality, and plausibility can
    be as good as, or better than, truth.

    What engineers know that lawyers and politicians often don't is that
    in the world of things, as opposed to people, there's no escaping the
    sharp teeth of reality. But in law, and especially politics,
    inconvenient facts are merely inconvenient, something to be
    rationalized away.

-- Glenn Reynolds
%
18 points Jayson_Virissimo 02 January 2013 10:06:26AM

    It is not an epistemological principle that one might as well hang for
    a sheep as for a lamb.

-- Bas van Fraassen, The Scientific Image
%
18 points jsbennett86 13 February 2013 11:34:58PM

    Every time you read something that mentions brain chemicals or brain
    scans, rewrite the sentence without the sciencey portions. "Hate makes
    people happy." "Women feel closer to people after sex." "Music makes
    people happy." If the argument suddenly seems way less persuasive, or
    the news story way less ground-breaking… well. Someone’s doing
    something shady.

-- Ozy Frantz, Brain Chemicals are not Fucking Magic
%
18 points Kawoomba 06 February 2013 10:26:25AM

    A sharp knife is nothing without a sharp eye.

-- Klingon proverb
%
18 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 February 2013 05:25:27AM

    Good things come to those who steal them.

-- Magnificent Sasquatch
%
18 points Cyan 08 April 2013 05:27:30AM

    By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is
    noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by
    experience, which is the bitterest.

-- Kung Fu-tzu
%
18 points Vaniver 01 April 2013 03:16:14PM

    The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its
    solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental
    skills.

-- Albert Einstein
%
18 points twanvl 09 April 2013 11:45:37AM

    If the climate skeptics want to win me over, then the way for them to
    do so is straightforward: they should ignore me, and try instead to
    win over the academic climatology community, majorities of chemists
    and physicists, Nobel laureates, the IPCC, National Academies of
    Science, etc. with superior research and arguments.

-- Scott Aaronson, on areas of expertise
%
18 points RolfAndreassen 06 May 2013 05:08:42PM

    But if the question is "Has this caused you to revise downward your
    estimate of the value of health insurance?" the answer has to
    obviously be yes. Anyone who answers differently is looking deep into
    their intestinal loops, not the Oregon study. You don't have to revise
    the estimate to zero, or even a low number. But if you'd asked folks
    before the results dropped what we'd expect to see if insurance made
    people a lot healthier, they'd have said "statistically significant
    improvement on basic markers for the most common chronic diseases. The
    fact that we didn't see that means that we should now say that health
    insurance, or at least Medicaid, probably doesn't make as big a
    difference in health as we thought.

-- Megan McArdle, trying to explain Bayesian updates and the importance of
       making predictions in advance, without referring to any mathematics.
%
18 points Woodbun 05 June 2013 05:27:29AM

    ...the machines will do what we ask them to do and not what we ought
    to ask them to do. In the discussion of the relation between man and
    powerful agencies controlled by man, the gnomic wisdom of the folk
    tales has a value far beyond the books of our sociologists.

-- Norbert Wiener

%
18 points Estarlio 12 June 2013 10:30:01PM

    Oh, you could do it all by magic, you certainly could. You could wave
    a wand and get twinkly stars and a fresh-baked loaf. You could make
    fish jump out of the sea already cooked. And then, somewhere, somehow,
    magic would present its bill, which was always more than you could
    afford.

    That’s why it was left to wizards, who knew how to handle it safely.
    Not doing any magic at all was the chief task of wizards - not "not
    doing magic" because they couldn’t do magic, but not doing magic when
    they could do and didn’t. Any ignorant fool can fail to turn someone
    else into a frog. You have to be clever to refrain from doing it when
    you knew how easy it was.

    There were places in the world commemorating those times when wizards
    hadn’t been quite as clever as that, and on many of them the grass
    would never grow again.

-- Terry Prachett, Going Postal
%
18 points Arkanj3l 05 August 2013 03:04:37AM

    'Then he posed a question that, obvious as it seems, had not really
    occurred to me: "What makes you think that UFOs are a scientific
    problem?"

    I replied with something to the effect that a problem was only
    scientific in the way it was approached, but he would have none of
    that, and he began lecturing me. First, he said, science had certain
    rules. For example, it has to assume that the phenomena it is
    observing is natural in origin rather than artificial and possibly
    biased. Now the UFO phenomenon could be controlled by alien beings.
    "If it is," added the Major, "then the study of it doesn’t belong to
    science. It belongs to Intelligence." Meaning counterespionage. And
    that, he pointed out, was his domain. *

    "Now, in the field of counterespionage, the rules are completely
    different." He drew a simple diagram in my notebook. "You are a
    scientist. In science there is no concept of the ‘price’ of
    information. Suppose I gave you 95 per cent of the data concerning a
    phenomenon. You’re happy because you know 95 per cent of the
    phenomenon. Not so in intelligence. If I get 95 per cent of the data,
    I know that this is the ‘cheap’ part of the information. I still need
    the other 5 percent, but I will have to pay a much higher price to get
    it. You see, Hitler had 95 per cent of the information about the
    landing in Normandy. But he had the wrong 95 percent!"

    "Are you saying that the UFO data we us to compile statistics and to
    find patterns with computers are useless?" I asked. "Might we be
    spinning our magnetic tapes endlessly discovering spurious laws?"

    "It all depends on how the team on the other side thinks. If they know
    what they’re doing, there will be so many cutouts between you and them
    that you won’t have the slightest chance of tracing your way to the
    truth. Not by following up sightings and throwing them into a
    computer. They will keep feeding you the information they want you to
    process. What is the only source of data about the UFO phenomenon? It
    is the UFOs themselves!"

    Some things were beginning to make a lot of sense. "If you’re right,
    what can I do? It seems that research on the phenomenon is hopeless,
    then. I might as well dump my computer into a river."

    "Not necessarily, but you should try a different approach. First you
    should work entirely outside of the organized UFO groups; they are
    infiltrated by the same official agencies they are trying to
    influence, and they propagate any rumour anyone wants to have
    circulated. In Intelligence circles, people like that are historical
    necessities. We call them ‘useful idiots’. When you’ve worked long
    enough for Uncle Sam, you know he is involved in a lot of strange
    things. The data these groups get is biased at the source, but they
    play a useful role.

    "Second, you should look for the irrational, the bizarre, the elements
    that do not fit...Have you ever felt that you were getting close to
    something that didn’t seem to fit any rational pattern yet gave you a
    strong impression that it was significant?"'

-- Jacques Vallee, Messengers of Deception

%
18 points Eugine_Nier 02 September 2013 04:44:42AM

    One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that
    you end up being governed by your inferiors.

-- Plato
%
18 points Eugine_Nier 04 October 2013 02:37:33AM

    IF you can keep your head when all about you

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

    If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;

    If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,

    Or being hated, don't give way to hating,

    And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

    If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;

    If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;

    If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;

    If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

    Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

    If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

    And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

    If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,

    And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

    If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

    Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,

    If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

    If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,

    Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

    And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

-- Rudyard Kipling, If – 
%
18 points Bundle_Gerbe 01 November 2013 11:26:39AM

    The theme of this book, then, must be the coming to consciousness of
    uncertain inference. The topic may be compared to, say, the history of
    visual perspective. Everyone can see in perspective, but it has been a
    difficult and long-drawn-out effort of humankind to become aware of
    the principles of perspective in order to take advantage of them and
    imitate nature. So it is with probability. Everyone can act so as to
    take a rough account of risk, but understanding the principles of
    probability and using them to improve performance is an immense task.

-- James Franklin,
   "The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal"
%
18 points NancyLebovitz 04 November 2013 01:36:55PM

    Any man can learn to learn from the wise once he can find them: but
    learn to learn from a fool and all the world’s your faculty.

-- John Ciardi
%
18 points JQuinton 26 December 2013 02:41:46PM

    Saying "everyone is equally to blame" is great if you want to sound
    reasonable and paint yourself as a moderate voice in a debate, but it
    doesn't really work if you actually want to be correct.

-- from a commenter called ThisIsMyRealName over at Slate
%
18 points adamzerner 21 December 2013 05:52:32PM

    A problem well put, is half solved.

-- John Dewey
%
18 points shminux 03 December 2013 10:56:59PM

Scott Aaronson after looking into the JFK assassination conspiracy evidence:

    Before I started reading, if someone forced me to guess, maybe I
    would’ve assigned a ~10% probability to some sort of conspiracy. Now,
    though, I’d place the JFK conspiracy hypothesis firmly in
    Moon-landings-were-faked, Twin-Towers-collapsed-from-the-inside
    territory. Or to put it differently, "Oswald as lone, crazed assassin"
    has been added to my large class of "sanity-complete" propositions:
    propositions defined by the property that if I doubt any one of them,
    then there’s scarcely any part of the historical record that I
    shouldn’t doubt.
%
17 points HalMorris 02 January 2013 09:58:44AM

    In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower
    Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That
    is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year.
    Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that
    in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next
    November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three
    hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico
    like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that
    seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will
    be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will
    have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along
    under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is
    something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns
    of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

-- Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

(If you wonder where "two hundred and forty-two miles" shortening of the
river came from, it was the straightening of its original meandering path
to improve navigation)
%
17 points Kindly 07 January 2013 03:42:13AM

    Then for the first time it dawned on him that classing all drowthers
    together made no more sense than having a word for all animals that
    can't stand upright on two legs for more than a minute, or all animals
    with dry noses. What possible use could there be for such
    classifications? The word "drowther" didn't say anything about people
    except that they were not born in a Westil Family. "Drowther" meant
    "not us," and anything you said about drowthers beyond that was likely
    to be completely meaningless. They were not a "class" at all. They
    were just... people.

-- Orson Scott Card, The Lost Gate
%
17 points AspiringRationalist 01 January 2013 09:16:14PM

    The ideas of the Hasids are scientifically and morally wrong; the
    fashion, food and lifestyle are way stupid; but the community and
    family make me envious.

-- Penn Jilette
%
17 points gotdistractedbythe 04 February 2013 01:55:07AM

    Been making a game of looking for rationality quotes in the super bowl

-- Bud Light Commercial, It's only weird if it doesn't work

Only a rationality quote out of context, though, since the ad is about
superstitious rituals among sports fans. My automatic mental reply is
"well that doesn't work"
%
17 points Vaniver 01 February 2013 09:27:35PM

    If you're not making quantitative predictions, you're probably doing
    it wrong.

-- Gabe Newell, during a talk. The whole talk is worthwhile if you're
                interested in institutional design or Valve.
%
17 points pjeby 05 May 2013 05:24:06AM

    Nowadays many educated people treat reinforcement theory as if it were
    something not terribly important that they have known and understood
    all along. In fact most people don't understand it, or they would not
    behave so badly to the people around them.

-- Karen Pryor,
   "Dont Shoot the Dog!: The New Art of Teaching and Training"
%
17 points lukeprog 14 May 2013 08:45:43PM

    Philosophy... is what you have to do until you figure out what
    questions you should have been asking in the first place.

-- Daniel Dennett
%
17 points pjeby 01 May 2013 08:11:29PM

    When I argue with reality, I lose – but only 100 percent of the time.

-- Byron Katie, Loving What Is
%
17 points tingram 03 June 2013 05:23:24AM

    It is said, for example, that a man ten times regrets having spoken,
    for the once he regrets his silence. And why? Because the fact of
    having spoken is an external fact, which may involve one in
    annoyances, since it is an actuality. But the fact of having kept
    silent! Yet this is the most dangerous thing of all. For by keeping
    silent one is relegated solely to oneself, no actuality comes to a
    man's aid by punishing him, by bringing down upon him the consequences
    of his speech. No, in this respect, to be silent is the easy way. But
    he who knows what the dreadful is, must for this very reason be most
    fearful of every fault, of every sin, which takes an inward direction
    and leaves no outward trace. So it is too that in the eyes of the
    world it is dangerous to venture. And why? Because one may lose. But
    not to venture is shrewd. And yet, by not venturing, it is so
    dreadfully easy to lose that which it would be difficult to lose in
    even the most venturesome venture, and in any case never so easily, so
    completely as if it were nothing...one's self. For if I have ventured
    amiss – very well, then life helps me by its punishment. But if I have
    not ventured at all – who then helps me?

-- Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
%
17 points elharo 03 July 2013 10:00:50AM

    When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar,
    you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.

-- Tyrion Lannister, in George R.R. Martin's A Clash of Kings
%
17 points AShepard 01 July 2013 11:56:09PM

    If (as those of us who make a study of ourselves have been led to do)
    each man, on hearing a wise maxim immediately looked to see how it
    properly applied to him, he would find that it was not so much a pithy
    saying as a whiplash applied to the habitual stupidity of his faculty
    of judgment. But the counsels of Truth and her precepts are taken to
    apply to the generality of men, never to oneself; we store them up in
    our memory not in our manners, which is most stupid and unprofitable.

-- Michel de Montaigne, Essays, On habit
%
17 points Eugine_Nier 02 September 2013 08:16:25PM

    Another bad indication is when we feel sorry for people applying for
    the program. We used to fund people because they seemed so well
    meaning. We figured they would be so happy if we accepted them, and
    that they would get their asses kicked by the world if we didn't. We
    eventually realized that we're not doing those people a favor. They
    get their asses kicked by the world anyway.

-- Paul Graham
%
17 points Eugine_Nier 04 October 2013 02:56:50AM

    You can't trust your intuitions [in this domain]. I'm going to give
    you a set of rules here that will get you through this process if
    anything will. At certain moments you'll be tempted to ignore them. So
    rule number zero is: these rules exist for a reason. You wouldn't need
    a rule to keep you going in one direction if there weren't powerful
    forces pushing you in another.

-- Paul Graham
%
17 points roland 05 November 2013 08:22:03PM

    Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right
    things.

-- Peter Drucker
%
16 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 January 2013 09:29:29AM

    "A stupid person can make only certain, limited types of errors. The
    mistakes open to a clever fellow are far broader. But to the one who
    knows how smart he is compared to everyone else, the possibilities for
    true idiocy are boundless."

-- Steven Brust, Iorich, spoken by Vlad
%
16 points Mass_Driver 25 January 2013 10:00:41PM

    I once heard a story about the original writer of the Superman Radio
    Series. He wanted a pay rise, his employers didn't want to give him
    one. He decided to end the series with Superman trapped at the bottom
    of a well, tied down with kryptonite and surrounded by a hundred
    thousand tanks (or something along these lines). It was a cliffhanger.
    He then made his salary demands. His employers refused and went round
    every writer in America, but nobody could work out how the original
    writer was planning to have Superman escape. Eventually the radio guys
    had to go back to him and meet his wage demands. The first show of the
    next series began "Having escaped from the well, Superman hurried
    to..." There's a lesson in there somewhere, but I've no idea what it
    is.

http://writebadlywell.blogspot.com/2010/05/write-yourself-into-corner.html

I would argue that the lesson is that when something valuable is at stake,
we should focus on the simplest available solutions to the puzzles we
face, rather than on ways to demonstrate our intelligence to ourselves or
others.
%
16 points NancyLebovitz 17 January 2013 03:43:04AM

    I keep coming back to the essential problem that in our increasingly
    complex society, we are actually required to hold very firm opinions
    about highly complex matters that require analysis from multiple
    fields of expertise (economics, law, political science, engineering,
    others) in hugely complex systems where we must use our imperfect data
    to choose among possible outcomes that involve significant trade offs.
    This would be OK if we did not regard everyone who disagreed with us
    as an ignorant pinhead or vile evildoer whose sole motivation for
    disagreeing is their intrinsic idiocy, greed, or hatred for our
    essential freedoms/people not like themselves. Except that there
    actually are LOTS of ignorant pinheads and vile evildoers whose sole
    motivation etc., or whose self-interest is obvious to everyone but
    themselves.

-- osewalrus
%
16 points GabrielDuquette 01 January 2013 06:21:03PM

    Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by,
    And that has made all the difference.* *Not a controlled experiment

-- lanyard
%
16 points shokwave 05 March 2013 09:17:16AM

On consciousness:

    "Forget about minds," he told her. "Say you've got a device designed
    to monitor—oh, cosmic rays, say. What happens when you turn its sensor
    around so it's not pointing at the sky anymore, but at its own guts?"

    He answered himself before she could: "It does what it's built to. It
    measures cosmic rays, even though it's not looking at them any more.
    It parses its own circuitry in terms of cosmic-ray metaphors, because
    those feel right, because they feel natural, because it can't look at
    things any other way. But it's the wrong metaphor. So the system
    misunderstands everything about itself. Maybe that's not a grand and
    glorious evolutionary leap after all. Maybe it's just a design flaw."

-- Peter Watts, Blindsight
%
16 points player_03 08 April 2013 06:25:20AM

    When I was a Christian, and when I began this intense period of study
    which eventually led to my atheism, my goal, my one and only goal, was
    to find the best evidence and argument I could find that would lead
    people to the truth of Jesus Christ. That was a huge mistake. As a
    skeptic now, my goal is very similar - it just stops short. My goal is
    to find the best evidence and argument, period. Not the best evidence
    and argument that leads to a preconceived conclusion. The best
    evidence and argument, period, and go wherever the evidence leads.

-- Matt Dillahunty
%
16 points Jayson_Virissimo 02 May 2013 01:06:05AM

    With numbers you can do anything you like. Suppose I have the sacred
    number 9 and I want to get a number 1314, date of the execution of
    Jaques de Molay - a date dear to anyone who, like me, professes
    devotion ot the Templar tradition of knighthood. What do I do? I
    multiply 9 by one hundred and forty-six, the fateful day of the
    destruction of Carthage. How did I arrive at this? I divided thirteen
    hundred and fourteen by two, three, et cetera, until I found a
    satisfying date. I could also have divided thirteen hundred and
    fourteen by 6.28, the double of 3.14 and I would have got two hundred
    and nine. That is the year Attulus I, king of Pergamon, ascended the
    throne. You see?

-- Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum (1989)
%
16 points arborealhominid 03 May 2013 01:13:52PM

    One of the biggest tasks, according to Gardner, was tracking
    information and beliefs back to their roots. This is always important,
    but especially in a field as rich in hearsay as herbal medicine. One
    little piece of information, or an unsubstantiated report, can grow
    and become magnified, quickly becoming an unquestioned truism. She
    used as an example the truism that the extracts of the herb Ginkgo
    Biloba might cause dangerous bleeding. Everyone says it can. The
    journalists say it. The doctors say it. The herbalists say it. Even I
    say it! It's nearly impossible to read a scientific paper on Ginkgo
    that doesn't mention this alleged danger. But why do we say it - where
    did the information come from? Turns out, there was one case report -
    of a single person - who couldn't clot efficiently after taking
    Ginkgo. Another 178 papers were published that mentioned this danger,
    citing only this one report. Those 178 papers were cited by over 4,100
    other papers. So now we have almost 4-and-a-half thousand references
    in the scientific literature - not to mention the tens of thousands of
    references in the popular press - to the dangers of Ginkgo, all
    traceable back to a single person whose bleeding may or may not have
    been attributable to the herb.

-- Adam Stark
%
16 points army1987 03 May 2013 12:03:52PM

    It is often better to pull numbers out of your arse and use them to
    make a decision, than to pull a decision out of your arse.

-- Paul Crowley
%
16 points novalis 07 June 2013 06:33:30PM

    It’s actually hard to see when you’ve fucked up, because you chose all
    your actions in a good-faith effort and if you were to run through it
    again you’ll just get the same results. I mean, errors-of-fact you can
    see when you learn more facts, but errors-of-judgement are judged
    using the same brain that made the judgement in the first place.

-- Collin Street
%
16 points James_Miller 01 June 2013 03:24:39PM

    you would be foolish to accept what people believed for "thousands of
    years" in many domains of natural science. When it comes to the
    ancients or the moderns in science always listen to the moderns. They
    are not always right, but overall they are surely more right, and less
    prone to miss the mark. In fact, you may have to be careful about
    paying too much attention to science which is a generation old, so
    fast does the "state of the art" in terms of knowledge shift.

-- Razib Khan
%
16 points Alejandro1 02 June 2013 05:37:52PM

    "I call that 'the falling problem'. You encounter it when you first
    study physics. You realize that, if you were ever dropped from a plane
    without a parachute, you could calculate with a high degree of
    accuracy how long it's take to hit the ground, your speed, how much
    energy you'll deposit into the earth. And yet, you would still be just
    as dead as a particularly stupid gorilla dropped the same distance.
    Mastery of the nature of reality grants you no mastery over the
    behavior of reality. I could tell you your grandpa is very sick. I
    could tell you what each cell is doing wrong, why it's doing wrong,
    and roughly when it started doing wrong. But I can't tell them to
    stop."

    "Why can't you make a machine to fix it?"

    "Same reason you can't make a parachute when you fall from the plane."

    "Because it's too hard?"

    "Nothing is too hard. Many things are too fast."

    (beat)

    "I think I could solve the falling problem with a jetpack. Can you try
    to get me the parts?"

    "That's all I do, kiddo."

-- SMBC
%
16 points bouilhet 02 July 2013 11:22:27PM

    The conscientious. - It is more comfortable to follow one's conscience
    than one's reason: for it offers an excuse and alleviation if what we
    undertake miscarries – which is why there are always so many
    conscientious people and so few reasonable ones.

-- Nietzsche
%
16 points PhilGoetz 16 July 2013 02:50:30PM

    There's more pressure on a vet to get it right. People say "it was
    god's will" when granny dies, but they get angry when they lose a cow.

-- Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett again

%
16 points grendelkhan 05 July 2013 09:55:57PM

    "You're like an infant!" Tosco sneered. "Still humming at night about
    your poor lost momma and the terrible thing men do to their cos? Grow
    up and face the real world."

    "I have," Carlo replied. "I faced it, and now I'm going to change it."

-- Greg Egan, The Eternal Flame ch. 38
%
16 points Kaj_Sotala 05 August 2013 08:24:08PM

    Old man: Gotcha! So you do collect answers after all!

    Eye: But of course! Everybody does! You need answers to base decisions
    on. Decisions that lead to actions. We wouldn't do much of anything,
    if we were always indecisive!

    All I am saying is that I see no point in treasuring them! That's all!

    Once you see that an answer is not serving its question properly
    anymore, it should be tossed away. It's just their natural life cycle.
    They usually kick and scream, raising one hell of a ruckus when we ask
    them to leave. Especially when they have been with us for a long time.

    You see, too many actions have been based on those answers. Too much
    work and energy invested in them. They feel so important, so full of
    themselves. They will answer to no one. Not even to their initial
    question!

    What's the point if a wrong answer will stop you from returning to the
    right question. Although sometimes people have no questions to return
    to... which is usually why they defend them, with such strong
    conviction.

    That's exactly why I am extra cautious with all these big ol' answers
    that have been lying around, long before we came along. They bully
    their way into our collection without being invited by any questions
    of our own. We accept them just because they have satisfied the
    questions of so many before us... seeking the questions which fits
    them instead...

    My favorite kind of answers are those that my questions give birth to.
    Questions that I managed to keep safe long enough to do so. These baby
    answers might seem insignificant in comparison at first, but they are
    of a much better quality.

-- Kostas Kiriakakis, A Day at the Park

%
16 points Eugine_Nier 04 August 2013 05:43:25AM

    And anyone that’s been involved in philanthropy eventually comes to
    that point. When you try to help, you try to give things, you start to
    have the consequences. There’s an author Bob Lupton, who really nails
    it when he says that when he gave something the first time, there was
    gratitude; and when he gave something a second time to that same
    community, there was anticipation; the third time, there was
    expectation; the fourth time, there was entitlement; and the fifth
    time, there was dependency. That is what we’ve all experienced when
    we’ve wanted to do good. Something changes the more we just give
    hand-out after hand-out. Something that is designed to be a help
    actually causes harm.

-- Peter Greer
%
16 points jimmy 03 September 2013 01:47:02AM

    To know thoroughly what has caused a man to say something is to
    understand the significance of what he has said in its very deepest
    sense.

-- Willard F. Day
%
16 points Alejandro1 03 October 2013 01:53:00PM

    header: funtime activity: casually accusing people of
    machiavellianism.

    man: i’m hungry. we should buy lunch.

    woman: OH, so you’re saying THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS?

-- Zack Weinersmith, SMBC rejected ideas
%
16 points Eugine_Nier 03 December 2013 12:56:13AM

    The most important professions in the modern world may be the most
    reviled: advertiser, salesperson, lawyer, and financial trader. What
    these professions have in common is extending useful social
    interactions far beyond the tribe-sized groups we were evolved to
    inhabit (most often characterized by the Dunbar number). This commonly
    involves activities that fly in the face of our tribal moral
    instincts.

-- Nick Szabo
%
15 points GabrielDuquette 02 February 2013 01:18:28AM

    Judge a book by its cover. The author and publisher selected that
    design to represent the book's content and tone. #MoreSensibleSayings

-- ShittingtonUK
%
15 points Jayson_Virissimo 01 April 2013 11:33:50PM

    Focusing is about saying no.

-- Steve Jobs
%
15 points SilasBarta 01 May 2013 05:17:41PM

I was pleasantly surprised to see this elegant phrasing of a (Machian?)
rationalist principle in popular culture:

    There's an axiom in my business [i.e. law]: 'A difference that makes
    no difference is no difference.'

-- Joe Adama, in the TV series Caprica
%
15 points ArisKatsaris 05 May 2013 05:16:31PM

    It's often a good habit to keep track of seemingly identical concepts
    separately, just in case you're wrong and they're not identical.

-- aristosophy
%
15 points AlanCrowe 01 May 2013 02:17:44PM

    And I told her that no matter what the org chart said, my real bosses
    were a bunch of mice in cages and cells in a dish, and they didn’t
    know what the corporate goals were and they couldn’t be "Coached For
    Success", the way that poster on the wall said.

-- Derek Lowe

%
15 points MagnetoHydroDynamics 03 July 2013 12:51:40PM

    All magic is science! You just don't know what you're doing, so you
    call it magic! And well, it's... Ridiculous.

-- Princess Bubblegum in Adventure Time.
%
15 points Panic_Lobster 14 August 2013 06:28:36AM

    Karl Popper used to begin his lecture course on the philosophy of
    science by asking the students simply to 'observe'. Then he would wait
    in silence for one of them to ask what they were supposed to observe.
    [...] So he would explain to them that scientific observation is
    impossible without pre-existing knowledge about what to look at, what
    to look for, how to look, and how to interpret what one sees. And he
    would explain that, therefore, theory has to come first. It has to be
    conjectured, not derived.

-- David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
%
15 points philh 10 August 2013 11:48:06PM

    "But think how small he is," said the Black Panther, who would have
    spoiled Mowgli if he had had his own way. "How can his little head
    carry all thy long talk?"

    "Is there anything in the jungle too little to be killed? No. That is
    why I teach him these things, and that is why I hit him, very softly,
    when he forgets."

-- Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book
%
15 points Polina 05 August 2013 11:47:45AM

    Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

-- George Bernard Shaw
%
15 points arundelo 26 September 2013 05:17:23PM

    We have this shared concept that there's some baseline level of
    effort, at which point you've absolved yourself of finger-pointing for
    things going badly. [.... But t]here are exceptional situations where
    the outcome is more important than what you feel is reasonable to do.

-- Tim Evans-Ariyeh
%
15 points NancyLebovitz 13 September 2013 12:49:38PM

    Personally, a huge breakthrough for me was realizing I could view
    social situations as information-gathering opportunities (as opposed
    to pass-fail tests). If something didn't work - that wasn't a fail, it
    was DATA. If something did work... also data. I could experiment!
    People's reactions weren't eternal judgments about my worth, but
    interesting feedback on the approach I had chosen that day.

-- parodie
%
15 points Salemicus 03 September 2013 07:20:38PM

    [This claim] is like the thirteenth stroke of a crazy clock, which not
    only is itself discredited but casts a shade of doubt over all
    previous assertions.

-- A. P. Herbert, Uncommon Law
%
15 points Salemicus 03 September 2013 07:11:37PM

    A man who has made up his mind on a given subject twenty-five years
    ago and continues to hold his political opinions after he has been
    proved to be wrong is a man of principle; while he who from time to
    time adapts his opinions to the changing circumstances of life is an
    opportunist.

-- A. P. Herbert, Uncommon Law
%
15 points lavalamp 23 September 2013 09:42:20PM

    You asked us to make them safe, not happy!

--"Adventure Time" episode "The Businessmen":
    the zombie businessmen are explaining why they are imprisoning soft
    furry creatures in a glass bowl.
%
15 points Estarlio 04 September 2013 11:10:25PM

    Foundations matter. Always and forever. Regardless of domain. Even if
    you meticulously plug all abstraction leaks, the lowest-level concepts
    on which a system is built will mercilessly limit the heights to which
    its high-level "payload" can rise. For it is the bedrock abstractions
    of a system which create its overall flavor. They are the ultimate
    constraints on the range of thinkable thoughts for designer and user
    alike. Ideas which flow naturally out of the bedrock abstractions will
    be thought of as trivial, and will be deemed useful and necessary.
    Those which do not will be dismissed as impractical frills — or will
    vanish from the intellectual landscape entirely. Line by line, the
    electronic shanty town grows. Mere difficulties harden into hard
    limits. The merely arduous turns into the impossible, and then finally
    into the unthinkable.

    [...]

    The ancient Romans could not know that their number system got in the
    way of developing reasonably efficient methods of arithmetic
    calculation, and they knew nothing of the kind of technological paths
    (i.e. deep-water navigation) which were thus closed to them.

-- Stanislav, http://www.loper-os.org/?p=448

%
15 points JQuinton 04 September 2013 03:47:11PM

    Somebody could give me this glass of water and tell me that it’s
    water. But there’s a lot of clear liquids out there and I might
    actually have a real case that this might not be water. Now most cases
    when something like a liquid is in a cup it’s water.

    A good way to find out if it’s water is to test if it has two
    hydrogens per oxygen in each molecule in the glass and you can test
    that. If it evaporates like water, if it tastes like water, freezes
    like water… the more tests we apply, the more sure we can be that it’s
    water.

    However, if it were some kind of acid and we started to test and we
    found that the hydrogen count is off, the oxygen count is off, it
    doesn’t taste like water, it doesn’t behave like water, it doesn’t
    freeze like water, it just looks like water. If we start to do these
    tests, the more we will know the true nature of the liquid in this
    glass. That is how we find truth. We can test it any number of ways;
    the more we test it, the more we know the truth of what it is that
    we’re dealing with.

-- An ex-Mormon implicitly describing Bayesian updates
%
15 points undermind 07 November 2013 12:50:59AM

    Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!

    We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.

    No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.

    We laughed, -knowing that better men would come,

    And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags

    He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.

-- Wilfred Owen
%
15 points Gvaerg 01 November 2013 09:57:14PM

    I spread the map out on the dining room table, and I held down the
    corners with cans of V8. The dots from where I'd found things looked
    like the stars in the universe. I connected them, like an astrologer,
    and if you squinted your eyes like a Chinese person, it kind of looked
    like the word 'fragile'. [...] I erased and connected the dots to make
    'porte'. I had the revelation that I could connect the dots to make
    'cyborg', and 'platypus', and 'boobs', and even 'Oskar', if you were
    extremely Chinese. I could connect them to make almost anything I
    wanted, which meant I wasn't getting closer to anything. And now I'll
    never know what I was supposed to find. And that's another reason I
    can't sleep.

-- Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
%
15 points hairyfigment 04 November 2013 06:34:46AM

    That's why it's so important to understand how unworried I was. I
    wasn't $400 worth of worried, or $100 worth of worried, or even $20
    worth. I wouldn't have gone to the dermatologist if I didn't have
    health insurance. I probably wouldn't have gone if I had insurance but
    it had a big deductible, or even any real co-pay. The only reason I
    went to have my life saved is because it cost me zero dollars.

-- Jon Schwarz, A Tiny Revolution

%
15 points BT_Uytya 07 December 2013 07:01:55PM

    This was what made the fall of Iothiah so disastrous. ...
    Strategically, the loss of Iothiah was little more than a nuisance.

    Symbolically, however…

    The crisis she faced was a crisis in confidence, nothing more, nothing
    less. The less her subjects believed in the Empire, the less some
    would sacrifice, the more others would resist. It was almost
    arithmetic. The balance was wobbling, and all the world watched to see
    which way the sand would spill. She had made a resolution to act as if
    she believed to spite all those who doubted her as much as anything
    else, and paradoxically, they had all started believing with her. It
    was a lesson Kellhus had drummed into her countless times and one she
    resolved never to forget again.

    To know is to have power over the world; to believe is to have power
    over men.

-- Scott R. Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior
%
15 points Alejandro1 02 December 2013 12:18:04AM

    Note: When treating mental patients who think they’re Samson, cut
    their hair before putting them in the locked ward.

-- Fred Clark
%
14 points Will_Newsome 03 January 2013 07:07:41AM

    [O]ne may also focus on a single problem, which can appear in
    different guises in various disciplines, and vary the methods. An
    advantage of viewing the same problem through the lens of different
    models is that we can often begin to identify which features of the
    problem are enduring and which are artifacts of our particular methods
    or background assumptions. Because abstraction is a license for us to
    ignore information, looking at several approaches to modeling a
    problem can give you insight into what is important to keep and what
    is noise to ignore. Moreover, discovering robust features of a
    problem, when it happens, can reshape your intuitions.

-- Gregory Wheeler, "Formal Epistemology"
%
14 points Qiaochu_Yuan 01 January 2013 10:45:50PM

    If you ever decide that your life is not too high a price to pay for
    saving the universe, let me know. We'll be ready.

-- Kyubey, Puella Magi Madoka Magica
%
14 points BerryPick6 01 January 2013 04:15:35PM

    Many of our most serious conflicts are conflicts within ourselves.
    Those who suppose their judgements are always consistent are
    unreflective or dogmatic.

-- John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement
%
14 points pleeppleep 02 January 2013 02:28:38AM

    I intend to live forever or die trying

-- Groucho Marx
%
14 points xv15 11 February 2013 04:34:07PM

    Closeness in the experiment was reasonably literal but may also be
    interpreted in terms of identification with the torturer. If the
    church is doing the torturing then the especially religious may be
    more likely to think the tortured are guilty. If the state is doing
    the torturing then the especially patriotic (close to their country)
    may be more likely to think that the tortured/killed/jailed/abused are
    guilty. That part is fairly obvious but note the second less obvious
    implication–the worse the victim is treated the more the
    religious/patriotic will believe the victim is guilty. ... Research in
    moral reasoning is important because understanding why good people do
    evil things is more important than understanding why evil people do
    evil things.

-- Alex Tabarrok
%
14 points Eugine_Nier 05 February 2013 01:22:59AM

    Of a proposed course of action He wants men, so far as I can see, to
    ask very simple questions; is it righteous? is it prudent? is it
    possible? Now if we can keep men asking "Is it in accordance with the
    general movement of our time? Is it progressive or reactionary? Is
    this the way that History is going?" they will neglect the relevant
    questions. And the questions they do ask are, of course, unanswerable;
    for they do not know the future, and what the future will be depends
    very largely on just those choices which they now invoke the future to
    help them to make.

-- Screwtape, The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
%
14 points Kingoftheinternet 01 February 2013 07:47:05PM

    If you are reading this book and flipping out at every third sentence
    because you feel I'm insulting your intelligence, then I have three
    points of advice for you:

        Stop reading my book. I didn't write it for you. I wrote it for
        people who don't already know everything.

        Empty before you fill. You will have a hard time learning from
        someone with more knowledge if you already know everything.

        Go learn Lisp. I hear people who know everything really like Lisp.

    For everyone else who's here to learn, just read everything as if I'm
    smiling and I have a mischievous little twinkle in my eye.

-- Introduction to Learn Python The Hard Way, by Zed A. Shaw
%
14 points khafra 19 April 2013 04:37:17PM

    Amazon isn’t a store, not really. Not in any sense that we can
    regularly think about stores. It’s a strange pulsing network of
    potential goods, global supply chains, and alien associative
    algorithms with the skin of a store stretched over it, so we don’t
    lose our minds.

-- Tim Maly, pondering the increasing and poorly understood impact of
             algorithms on the average person's life.

%
14 points elharo 08 May 2013 10:58:16PM

    One of the most impressive features of brains – especially human
    brains — is the flexibility to learn almost any kind of task that
    comes its way. Give an apprentice the desire to impress his master and
    a chicken-sexing task, and his brain devotes its massive resources to
    distinguishing males from females. Give an unemployed aviation
    enthusiast a chance to be a national hero, and his brain learns to
    distinguish enemy aircraft from local flyboys. This flexibility of
    learning accounts for a large part of what we consider human
    intelligence. While many animals are properly called intelligent,
    humans distinguish themselves in that they are so flexibly
    intelligent, fashioning their neural circuits to match the task at
    hand. It is for this reason that we can colonize every region on the
    planet, learn the local language we’re born into, and master skills as
    diverse as playing the violin, high-jumping and operating space
    shuttle cockpits.

-- David Eagleman, Incognito p. 71
%
14 points Qiaochu_Yuan 27 May 2013 02:31:46AM

    We would all like to believe that if we win something it is because of
    our skill, but if we lose it is because of the good luck or cheating
    of our opponent. This is nowhere more apparent than in the game of
    backgammon. A good opponent will play in such a way that the dice
    rolls having highest probability will be "good rolls" for them on
    their next turn, enabling them to take the other player's pieces,
    consolidate their position, etc. However, since there is an element of
    randomness, when these rolls actually come up it is very difficult
    even for me to believe that my opponent's fortune is due to their
    skill rather than their luck. Whenever I am being consistently beaten
    by an opponent I have to fight very hard to make myself believe that
    there is actually something wrong with my play and figure out how to
    correct it.

    This phenomenon is nowhere more apparent than in computer backgammon.
    Computer backgammon is essentially a solved problem. Unlike Chess or
    Go, the best neural network algorithms that run even on modest
    hardware will consistently beat most human players, and perhaps draw
    with the best in the world. In fact, we have learnt rather a lot from
    these algorithms. Many rules of thumb that were believed for years by
    most decent players have been overturned by computer simulations.
    Computers tend to play backgammon markedly more aggressively than is
    natural for a human, but we can show that they are nevertheless doing
    the right thing. If you are not an extremely high level player,
    playing against a good computer algorithm feels weird if you are used
    to playing against humans.

    One of the most annoying results of this is that it is impossible to
    obtain a reliable user generated rating of a backgammon program. For
    example, GNU Backgammon is one of the two or three best algorithms in
    the world and an under-appreciated gem of the GNU project as a whole.
    A full 50% of the user reviews on the Ubuntu software centre accuse
    the program of cheating by fixing the dice rolls and give it a 1 or 2
    star review. It is hilarious how many of these reviews include
    comments like they "know how to play" or have been "playing for a long
    time" as if this were evidence to support their claim. The rest of the
    reviews are by people who know better and they all give it 4 or 5
    stars (4 is reasonable due to a few user interface quirks, but the
    algorithm itself is worth a 5). As a result, the averaged rating is
    only 3 stars, even though this is widely acknowledged as one of the
    three best backgammon programs in the world. It doesn't cheat because
    it doesn't have to, and it actually gives you mechanisms for checking
    that it is not cheating, e.g. entering dice rolls manually and a tutor
    mode that will correct your bad plays.

    This phenomenon is repeated absolutely everywhere that user reviews of
    backgammon programs are available. On the Google Play store, I have
    seen this even on a program with an absolutely crappy algorithm that I
    can consistently beat on expert level as well as on decent ones that
    are backed by GNUbg. As a result, it is absolutely impossible to find
    out which are the good backgammon programs if you don't already know,
    since they all get a low average rating.

-- Matthew Leifer
%
14 points alexvermeer 16 June 2013 08:32:59PM

    The recognition of confusion is itself a form of clarity.

-- T.K.V. Desikachar
%
14 points sediment 01 June 2013 01:53:19PM

    What I have been calling nefarious rhetoric recurs in a rudimentary
    form also in impromptu discussions. Someone harbors a prejudice or an
    article of faith or a vested interest, and marshals ever more
    desperate and threadbare arguments in defense of his position rather
    than be swayed by reason or face the facts. Even more often, perhaps,
    the deterrent is just stubbon pride: reluctance to acknowledge error.
    Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right.
    The scientist is distinguished by a desire to be right.

-- W. V. Quine, "An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary"
    (a whimsical and fun read)
%
14 points jsbennett86 12 July 2013 04:43:26AM

    There's something here that doesn't make sense... Let's go and poke it
    with a stick.

-- The Doctor, in Doctor Who
%
14 points Stabilizer 01 July 2013 10:00:15PM

    On any important topic, we tend to have a dim idea of what we hope to
    be true, and when an author writes the words we want to read, we tend
    to fall for it, no matter how shoddy the arguments. Needy readers have
    an asymptote at illiteracy; if a text doesn't say the one thing they
    need to read, it might as well be in a foreign language. To be
    open-minded, you have to recognize, and counteract, your own doxastic
    hungers.

-- Daniel Dennet, Dennetts Law of Needy Readers
%
14 points Joshua_Blaine 02 August 2013 05:49:04PM

    The best solution to a problem is usually the easiest one.

-- GLaDOS from Portal 2
%
14 points shminux 16 September 2013 04:54:16PM

Rationality wakes up last:

    In those first seconds, I'm always thinking some version of this: "Oh,
    no!!! This time is different. Now my arm is dead and it's never
    getting better. I'm a one-armed guy now. I'll have to start drawing
    left-handed. I wonder if anyone will notice my dead arm. Should I keep
    it in a sling so people know it doesn't work or should I ask my doctor
    to lop it off? If only I had rolled over even once during the night.
    But nooo, I have to sleep on my arm until it dies. That is so like me.
    What happens if I sleep on the other one tomorrow night? Can I learn
    to use a fork with my feet?"

    Then at about the fifth second, some feeling returns to my arm and I
    experience hope. I also realize that if people could lose their arms
    after sleeping on them there wouldn't be many people left on earth
    with two good arms. Apparently the rational part of my mind wakes up
    last.

-- Scott Adams, on waking up with a numb arm.
%
14 points gwern 10 September 2013 04:18:02PM

    ...By the end of August, I was mentally drained, more drained, I
    think, than I had ever been. The creative potential, the capacity to
    solve problems, changes in a man in ebbs and flows, and over this he
    has little control. I had learned to apply a kind of test. I would
    read my own articles, those I considered the best. If I noticed in
    them lapses, gaps, if I saw that the thing could have been done
    better, my experiment was successful. If, however, I found myself
    reading with admiration, that meant I was in trouble.

-- Stanislaw Lem, His Master's Voice
    p. 106 from the Northwestern University Press 3rd edition, 1999
%
14 points Yahooey 04 September 2013 07:55:15PM

    There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to
    whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success
    is impossible.

-- Jack Vance, "The Languages of Pao"
%
14 points iDante 02 September 2013 03:08:53AM

    At which point, Polly decided that she knew enough of the truth to be
    going on with. The enemy wasn't men, or women, or the old, or even the
    dead. It was just bleedin' stupid people, who came in all varieties.
    And no one had the right to be stupid.

-- Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
%
14 points Eugine_Nier 02 September 2013 04:48:56AM

    When you have to talk yourself into something, it’s a bad sign

-- Paul Graham
%
14 points CronoDAS 06 October 2013 01:30:37AM

    You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.

-- Henry Ford
%
14 points NancyLebovitz 06 November 2013 05:55:38PM

    One of the miseries of life is that everybody names things a little
    bit wrong, and so it makes everything a little harder to understand in
    the world than it would be if it were named differently.

-- Richard Feynman
%
14 points Cyan 01 December 2013 11:09:42PM

    We see things not as they are but as we are, ...

-- G. T. W. Patrick
%
13 points John_Maxwell_IV 14 January 2013 05:10:40AM

    I guess my point here is that part of the reason I stayed in Mormonism
    so long was that the people arguing against Mormonism were using such
    ridiculously bad arguments. I tried to find the most rigorous
    reasoning and the strongest research that opposed LDS theology, but
    the best they could come up with was stuff like horses in the Book of
    Mormon. It's so easy for a Latter-Day Saint to simply write the horse
    references off as either a slight mistranslation or a gap in current
    scientific knowledge that that kind of "evidence" wasn't worth the
    time of day to me. And for every horse problem there was something
    like Hugh Nibley's "Two Shots in the Dark" or Eugene England's work on
    Lehi's alleged travels across Saudi Arabia, apologetic works that made
    Mormon historical and theological claims look vaguely plausible. There
    were bright, thoughtful people on both sides of the Mormon apologetics
    divide, but the average IQ was definitely a couple of dozen points
    higher in the Mormon camp.

http://www.exmormon.org/whylft18.htm
%
13 points Endovior 03 January 2013 06:07:47PM

    If your ends don’t justify the means, you’re working on the wrong
    project.

-- Jobe Wilkins (Whateley Academy)
%
13 points Mandos 12 March 2013 11:51:54PM

    If you don't know what you want," the doorman said, "you end up with
    a lot you don't.

-- Chuck Palahniuk, "Fight Club"
%
13 points TimS 04 March 2013 02:33:55PM

    Any positive social quality – looks, smarts, cash, power, whatever –
    makes people want to compete for your attention. Some of these people
    are going to be assholes operating under the mistaken impression that
    you are a vending machine, and that if they feed you enough suck-up
    coins, you will dispense whatever it is they want. If you have no idea
    that you have Quality X that they want from you, then you have no
    chance of figuring out that the reason they're getting so overbearing
    is that you're not giving them all the X they think they deserve.
    People can get remarkably angry when you don't give them the thing you
    have no idea they're asking for. And then they get angrier if you try
    to tell them you're confused.

-- Arabella Flynn
%
13 points Kawoomba 01 March 2013 08:34:41PM

    Wenn der Hahn kräht auf dem Mist, dann ändert sich das Wetter, oder es
    bleibt wie es ist.

    (When the rooster crows on the dungheap, then the weather will change,
    or stay as it is)

-- German weather lore / farmers' rule
%
13 points NancyLebovitz 05 March 2013 12:26:10AM

    Popular evopsych, summed up: "Men and women are different. Humans and
    chimps are the same."

-- Cliff Pervocracy
%
13 points Viliam_Bur 19 April 2013 07:14:30AM

    In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession
    of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the
    weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In
    ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever
    first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim.
    ... [the one] who first seizes the word imposes reality on the other;
    [the one] who defines thus dominates and lives; and [the one] who is
    defined is subjugated and may be killed.

    In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human
    kingdom, define or be defined.

-- Thomas Szasz
%
13 points xv15 08 April 2013 03:36:06AM

Joe Pyne was a confrontational talk show host and amputee, which I say for
reasons that will become clear. For reasons that will never become clear,
he actually thought it was a good idea to get into a zing-fight with Frank
Zappa, his guest of the day. As soon as Zappa had been seated, the
following exchange took place:

    Pyne: I guess your long hair makes you a girl.

    Zappa: I guess your wooden leg makes you a table.

Of course this would imply that Pyne is not a featherless biped.

-- Robert Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
%
13 points lukeprog 14 May 2013 08:43:46PM

    He who says "Better to go without belief forever than believe a lie!"
    merely shows his own... private horror of becoming a dupe... It is
    like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of
    battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories...
    over enemies or over nature gained.

-- William James
%
13 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 May 2013 11:25:14PM

    This debate brings to mind one of the more interesting differences
    between the hard sciences and other fields. This occurs when you
    firmly believe A, someone makes a compelling argument, and within a
    few seconds you firmly believe not-A, to the point of arguing for
    not-A with even more vigor that you used for A just a few seconds ago.

-- Lou Scheffer

(Most recent example from my own life that springs to mind: "It seems
incredibly improbable that any Turing machine of size 100 could encode a
complete solution to the halting problem for all Turing machines of size
up to almost 100... oh. Nevermind.")
%
13 points Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 May 2013 02:59:11AM

    I don't really understand metaphysics or why it's needed.

-- Matt Simpson

    Sketch version: There is no "no metaphysics" anwser, there is only
    "metaphysics I just unconsciously accept" and "metaphysics I've
    actually thought about". You can do it well or you can do it badly but
    you can't not do metaphysics.

-- Andrew Summitt
%
13 points lukeprog 08 June 2013 06:14:40PM

    If you're not making mistakes, you're not taking risks, and that means
    you're not going anywhere. The key is to make mistakes faster than the
    competition, so you have more chances to learn and win.

-- John W. Holt
%
13 points cody-bryce 03 June 2013 05:56:40PM

    Not having all the information you need is never a satisfactory excuse
    for not starting the analysis.

-- Akins Laws of Spacecraft Design
%
13 points uninverted 03 June 2013 09:36:11PM

    It’s hard to tell the difference between "Nobody ever complains about
    this car because it’s reliable" and "Nobody complains about this car
    because nobody buys this car."

-- Shamus Young
%
13 points Tenoke 18 July 2013 09:38:25PM

    The future is always ideal: The fridge is stocked, the weather clear,
    the train runs on schedule and meetings end on time. Today, well,
    stuff happens.

-- Hara Estroff Marano, on procrastination in Psychology Today as cited here

%
13 points Salemicus 22 August 2013 11:16:10PM

    Finding a good formulation for a problem is often most of the work of
    solving it... Problem formulation and problem solution are
    mutually-recursive processes.

-- David Chapman
%
13 points hylleddin 02 August 2013 09:24:40PM

    The mark of a great man is one who knows when to set aside the
    important things in order to accomplish the vital ones.

-- Tillaume, The Alloy of Law
%
13 points Eugine_Nier 04 August 2013 06:13:25AM

    So, in a business setting, you’ve got to provide value to your
    customers so that they pay for the goods and services that you’re
    providing. Philanthropy is unfortunate in that the people that your
    customer base is made of oftentimes are the people that are writing
    the checks to support you. The people that are writing the donation
    checks are what keep organizations in business oftentimes. The people
    that are receiving the services, then, are oftentimes not paying for
    the services, and therefore their voice is not heard. And so within
    the nonprofit space, we’ve created a system where he/she who tells the
    best story is the one that’s rewarded. There’s an incentive to push
    down the stories that are not of positive impact. There’s the
    incentive to pretend that there are no negative things that happen,
    there’s the incentive to make sure that our failures are never made
    public, and there’s the disconnected between who’s paying for the
    service and who’s receiving the services. When you disconnect those
    two aspects, you do not have accountability that acts in the best
    interest of the people who are receiving what we are all trying to do,
    which is just to help in places of great need.

-- Peter Greer
%
13 points snafoo 04 August 2013 05:50:23PM

    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
%
13 points ChristianKl 03 October 2013 10:45:21AM

    A number of isolated facts does not produce a science any more than a
    heap of bricks produces a house.

-- Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity p. 56
%
13 points JackV 02 December 2013 11:59:56AM

When he studied which psychological studies were replicatable, and had to
choose whether to disbelieve some he'd previously based a lot of work on,
Brian Nosek said:

       I choose the red pill. That's what doing science is.

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/11/26/welcome-to-the-era-of-big-replication/
(via ciphergoth on twitter)
%
12 points GLaDOS 10 January 2013 07:10:30PM

    While truths last forever, taboos against them can last for centuries.

-- Sid, a commenter from HalfSigmas blog
%
12 points army1987 01 January 2013 08:20:35PM

    If you'd have told a 14th-century peasant that there'd be a huge
    merchant class in the future who would sit in huge metal cylinders
    eating meals and drinking wine while the cylinders hurtled through the
    air faster than a speeding arrow across oceans and continents to bring
    them to far-flung business opportunities, the peasant would have
    classified you as insane. And he'd have been wrong to the tune of a
    few gazillion frequent-flyer miles.

-- someone on Usenet replying to someone deriding Kurzweil
%
12 points Kindly 01 February 2013 07:44:07PM

    Were all stars to disappear or die,

    I should learn to look at an empty sky

    And feel its total darkness sublime,

    Though this might take me a little time.

-- W. H. Auden, The More Loving One
%
12 points scav 07 February 2013 04:13:25PM

    But I've never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations
    of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an
    adhesive.

-- Randall Munroe
%
12 points Alejandro1 01 March 2013 03:36:40PM

    I once had a civil argument with [someone], in which I laid out my
    position in the usual way: "Premiss + premiss + premiss = conclusion."
    She responded: "Well, that’s your opinion; you have yours, and I have
    mine." I pointed out that no, I wasn’t asserting an opinion, I was
    making an argument based on facts and logic. Either my facts are
    wrong, or my logic is. She looked at me like I had lost my mind.

-- Rod Dreher

(Post slightly edited in response to comments below)
%
12 points GabrielDuquette 11 April 2013 04:41:54AM

    WAYS TO KILL 2 BIRDS W/ 1 STONE

    1) Ricochet

    2) Retrieve, rethrow

    3) Line up birds precisely

    4) Huge boulder

    5) Use lovebirds, 2nd dies of grief

-- Ken Jennings
%
12 points michaelkeenan 01 May 2013 04:48:52PM

    Don't you understand anything about commitment, about being a pro,
    about sticking with what you say you wanna be? You don't do it just
    when you feel good. You don't do it just when you're not tired. You
    don't do it just when it's sunny. You do it every day of your life.
    You do it when it hurts to do it, when it's the last thing in the
    world that you wanna do, when there are a million reasons not to do
    it. You do it because you're a professional.

-- Teddy Atlas
%
12 points tingram 03 June 2013 01:25:56AM

From the remarkable opening chapter of Consciousness Explained:

    One should be leery of these possibilities in principle. It is also
    possible in principle to build a stainless-steel ladder to the moon,
    and to write out, in alphabetical order, all intelligible English
    conversations consisting of less than a thousand words. But neither of
    these are remotely possible in fact and sometimes an impossibility in
    fact is theoretically more interesting than a possibility in
    principle, as we shall see.

-- Daniel Dennett
%
12 points taelor 08 June 2013 04:36:24AM

    The hidden thought embedded in most discussions of conspiracy theories
    is this: The world is being controlled by evil people; so, if we can
    get rid of them, the world can revert to control by good people, and
    things will be great again. This thought is false. The world is not
    controlled by any group of people – evil or good – and it will not be.
    The world is a large, chaotic mess. Those groups which do exert some
    control are merely larger pieces in the global mix.

-- Paul Rosenberg
%
12 points Bruno_Coelho 01 June 2013 07:13:25PM

    Students are often quite capable of applying economic analysis to
    emotionally neutral products such as apples or video games, but then
    fail to apply the same reasoning to emotionally charged goods to which
    similar analyses would seem to apply. I make a special effort to
    introduce concepts with the neutral examples, but then to challenge
    students to ask wonder why emotionally charged goods should be treated
    differently.

-- R. Hanson
%
12 points Kaj_Sotala 02 July 2013 04:28:54AM

    The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the
    thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human
    problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive,
    definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed.
    These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.

-- Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism
%
12 points Zubon 09 July 2013 11:19:17PM

    [As the] percentage of the US population carrying cameras everywhere
    they go, every waking moment of their lives [has gone from "almost
    none" to "almost all,"] in the last few years, with very little
    fanfare, we've conclusively settled the questions of flying saucers,
    lake monsters, ghosts, and Bigfoot.

-- xkcd explains that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
%
12 points Eugine_Nier 02 July 2013 03:47:59AM

    At college in 1980, my Government Studies prof also served as
    Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party of Minnesota (the real one,
    not the DFL). We clashed over Robert Mugabe, just coming to power in
    Zimbabwe, he asserting it spelled salvation and I, that it spelled
    ruin.

    I e-mailed him a year or two ago, asking if I could get a retroactive
    grade increase since my predictions had proven more accurate than his.
    His explanation was that he truly believed Mugabe was an agrarian
    reformer whose program of taking land from Whites to give to Blacks
    would benefit the country; but things just hadn't worked out as hoped.

    I didn't bother to send him the famous Heinlein quote about Bad Luck.
    And I didn't really expect the grade change. But it certainly was
    satisfying to say "I told you so" 30 years later.

-- JD
%
12 points anonym 21 August 2013 02:23:44AM

    The opposite intellectual sin to wanting to derive everything from
    fundamental physics is holism which makes too much of the fact that
    everything is ultimately connected to everything else. Sure, but
    scientific progress is made by finding where the connections are weak
    enough to allow separate theories.

-- John McCarthy
%
12 points jsbennett86 14 September 2013 09:41:19PM

    Reality is one honey badger. It don’t care. About you, about your
    thoughts, about your needs, about your beliefs. You can reject reality
    and substitute your own, but reality will roll on, eventually crushing
    you even as you refuse to dodge it. The best you can hope for is to
    play by reality’s rules and use them to your benefit.

-- Mark Crislip, Science-Based Medicine
%
12 points wadavis 03 October 2013 10:50:21PM

    ...I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall
    adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

-- Abraham Lincoln, Letter to Horace Greeley
%
12 points Eugine_Nier 02 November 2013 10:58:12PM

    Someone I know at TAC opined that everyone knows this stuff, and
    talking about it is just mean. I think he is mistaken: you have to
    state important facts every so often, or nobody knows them anymore.

-- West Hunter
%
12 points Vaniver 10 December 2013 12:18:00AM

    Why, because I cannot help feeling that you are now saying what is not
    quite consistent or accordant with what you were saying at first about
    rhetoric. And I am afraid to point this out to you, lest you should
    think that I have some animosity against you, and that I speak, not
    for the sake of discovering the truth, but from jealousy of you.

    Now if you are one of my sort, I should like to cross-examine you, but
    if not I will let you alone. And what is my sort? you will ask. I am
    one of those who are very willing to be refuted if I say anything
    which is not true, and very willing to refute any one else who says
    what is not true, and quite as ready to be refuted as to refute-I for
    I hold that this is the greater gain of the two, just as the gain is
    greater of being cured of a very great evil than of curing another.

-- Socrates, in Gorgias (Paragraph break mine,
    to make it slightly less of a wall of text.
    This has shown up before, in a somewhat different form.)
%
11 points Konkvistador 30 January 2013 12:10:07PM

    Whenever you can, count.

-- Sir Francis Galton
%
11 points PhilipL 21 January 2013 05:20:59PM

    Person 1: "I don't understand how my brain works. But my brain is what
               I rely on to understand how things work."
    Person 2: "Is that a problem?"
    Person 1: "I'm not sure how to tell."

-- Todays xkcd
%
11 points Particleman 03 January 2013 05:35:04AM

    "How is it possible! How is it possible to produce such a thing!" he
    repeated, increasing the pressure on my skull, until it grew painful,
    but I didn't dare object. "These knobs, holes...cauliflowers -" with
    an iron finger he poked my nose and ears - "and this is supposed to be
    an intelligent creature? For shame! For shame, I say!! What use is a
    Nature that after four billion years comes up with THIS?!"

    Here he gave my head a shove, so that it wobbled and I saw stars.

    "Give me one, just one billion years, and you'll see what I create!"

-- Stanislaw Lem, The Sanatorium of Dr. Vliperdius (trans. Michael Kandel)

%
11 points arborealhominid 08 January 2013 12:38:19AM

    Tobias adjusted his wings and appeared to tighten his talons on the
    branch. "Maybe you’re right. I don’t know. Look, Ax, it’s a whole new
    world. We’re having to make all this up as we go along. There aren’t
    any rules falling out of the sky telling us what and what not to do."
    "What exactly do you mean?" "Too hard to explain right now," Tobias
    said. "I just mean that we don’t really have any time-tested rules for
    dealing with these issues... So we have to see what works and what
    doesn’t. We can’t afford to get so locked into one idea that we defend
    it to the death, without really knowing if that idea works- in the
    real world."

-- Animorphs, book 52: The Sacrifice

%
11 points GabrielDuquette 02 February 2013 01:20:29AM

    People's executive functioning is largely invisible to them, and
    perceived in moral terms to the extent that it is visible.

-- S. T. Rev
%
11 points Eugine_Nier 02 March 2013 07:42:55AM

    You can't possibly get a good technology going without an enormous
    number of failures. It's a universal rule. If you look at bicycles,
    there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found
    the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle
    theoretically. Even now, after we've been building them for 100 years,
    it's very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works – it's even
    difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial
    and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential.

-- Freeman Dyson
%
11 points gwern 02 March 2013 02:22:07AM

    If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his
    children 'There are no fairies'; he can omit to teach them the word
    'fairy'.

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel § 413; via Fable of The Born-Blind-People

(Gb rkcerff guvf va zber YJl wnetba: vs lbh qvq abg nyernql xabj gur jbeq
be pbaprcg snvel, jung bofreingvbaf jbhyq cevivyrtr gur fcrpvsvp
ulcbgurfvf bs 'snvevrf' gb gur cbvag jurer vg jbhyq orpbzr n frevbhf
cbffvovyvgl? Ubj znal ovgf jbhyq gung gnxr naq jurer jbhyq lbh trg gurz,
nfvqr sebz gur zrqvn naq bgure crbcyr'f cebqhpgf?)
%
11 points Dahlen 13 April 2013 09:27:06AM

    How rare it is to encounter advice about the future which begins from
    a premise of incomplete knowledge!

-- James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State
%
11 points xv15 08 April 2013 05:38:31AM

    "Alas", said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day.
    At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and
    running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and
    left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the
    last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I
    must run into."

    "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.

-- Kafka, A Little Fable
%
11 points ModusPonies 03 April 2013 02:17:16PM

    If you will learn to work with the system, you can go as far as the
    system will support you ... By realizing you have to use the system
    and studying how to get the system to do your work, you learn how to
    adapt the system to your desires. Or you can fight it steadily, as a
    small undeclared war, for the whole of your life ... Very few of you
    have the ability to both reform the system and become a first-class
    scientist.

-- Richard Hamming

(I recommend the whole talk, which contains some great examples and many
other excellent points.)
%
11 points BT_Uytya 06 May 2013 07:40:17PM

    But consider: Newton has thought things that no man before has ever
    thought. A great accomplishment to be sure. Perhaps the greatest
    achievement any human mind has ever made. Very well - what does that
    say of Newton, and of us? Why, that his mind is framed in such a way
    that it can out-think anyone else's. So all hail Isaac Newton! Let us
    give him his due, and glorify and worship whatever generative force
    can frame such a mind.

    Now consider Hooke. Hooke has perceived things that no man before us
    has ever perceived. What does that say of Hooke, and of us? That Hooke
    was framed in some special way? No, for just look at you, Robert - by
    your leave, you are stooped, asthmatic, fitful, beset by aches and
    ills, your eyes and ears are no better than those of men who've not
    perceived a thousandth part of what you have.

    Newton makes his discoveries in geometrical realms, where our minds
    cannot go, he strolls in a walled garden filled with wonders, to which
    he has the only key. But you Hooke, are cheek-by-jowl with all of
    humanity in the streets of London. Anyone can look at the things you
    have looked at. But in those things you see what no one else has. You
    are the millionth human to look at a spark, a flea, a raindrop, the
    moon, and the first to see it. For anyone to say that this is less
    remarkable than what Newton has done, is to understand things in but a
    hollow and jejune way, 'tis like going to a Shakespeare play and
    remembering only the sword fights.

-- Daniel Waterhouse says to Hooke in Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver
%
11 points grendelkhan 25 May 2013 07:50:06PM

    PROF. PLUM: What are you afraid of, a fate worse than death?

    MRS. PEACOCK: No, just death; isn't that enough?

-- Clue (1985)
%
11 points elharo 03 June 2013 11:25:56PM

    the designers of a theoretical technology in any but the most
    predictable of areas should identify its assumptions and claims that
    have not already been tested in a laboratory. They should design not
    only the technology but also a map of the uncertainties and edge cases
    in the design and a series of such experiments and tests that would
    progressively reduce these uncertainties. A proposal that lacks this
    admission of uncertainties coupled with designs of experiments that
    will reduce such uncertainties should not be deemed credible for the
    purposes of any important decision. We might call this requirement a
    requirement for a falsifiable design.

-- Nick Szabo,
"Falsifiable design: A methodology for evaluting theoretical technologies"
%
11 points Thomas 01 June 2013 11:43:02AM

    I will destroy my enemies by converting them to friends!

-- Maimonides

%
11 points AlanCrowe 03 July 2013 03:46:24PM

    Madmen we are, but not quite on the pattern of those who are shut up
    in a madhouse. It does not concern any of them to discover what sort
    of madness afflicts his neighbor, or the previous occupants of his
    cell; but it matters very much to us. The human mind is less prone to
    go astray when it gets to know to what extent, and in how many
    directions, it is itself liable to err, and we can never devote too
    much time to the study of our aberrations.

-- Bernard de Fontenelle, 1686

Found in book review
%
11 points satt 12 July 2013 12:37:16AM

    People tend to roll their eyes a bit when business school grads like
    me start saying things about "management is measurement" and so on,
    but the fact is that a) if you don’t measure something, how are you
    going to find out whether it’s changed or not? and b) if you don’t
    want to find out whether something’s changing or not, in what sense
    can you actually claim to care about it?

-- Daniel Davies
%
11 points shminux 19 August 2013 04:36:20PM

    If your parents made you practice the flute for 10,000 hours, and it
    wasn't your thing, you aren't an expert. You're a victim.

    The most important skill involved in success is knowing how and when
    to switch to a game with better odds for you.

-- Scott Adams
%
11 points Panic_Lobster 10 October 2013 05:35:03AM

    The reason that testability is not enough is that prediction is not,
    and cannot be, the purpose of science. Consider an audience watching a
    conjuring trick. The problem facing them has much the same logic as a
    scientific problem. Although in nature there is no conjurer trying to
    deceive us intentionally, we can be mystified in both cases for
    essentially the same reason: appearances are not self-explanatory. If
    the explanation of a conjuring trick were evident in its appearance,
    there would be no trick. If the explanations of physical phenomena
    were evident in their appearance, empiricism would be true and there
    would be no need for science as we know it. The problem is not to
    predict the trick's appearance. I may, for instance predict that if a
    conjurer seems to place various balls under various cups, those cups
    will later appear to be empty; and I may predict that if the conjurer
    appears to saw someone in half, that person will later appear on stage
    unharmed. Those are testable predictions. I may experience many
    conjuring shows and see my predictions vindicated every time. But that
    does not even address, let alone solve, the problem of how the trick
    works. Solving it requires an explanation: a statement of the reality
    which accounts for the trick's appearance.

-- David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
%
10 points GLaDOS 29 January 2013 07:34:17PM

    I notice with some amusement, both in America and English literature,
    the rise of a new kind of bigotry. Bigotry does not consist in a man
    being convinced he is right; that is not bigotry, but sanity. Bigotry
    consists in a man being convinced that another man must be wrong in
    everything, because he is wrong in a particular belief; that he must
    be wrong, even in thinking that he honestly believes he is right.

-- G. K. Chesterton
%
10 points taelor 02 January 2013 03:41:07PM

    It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make
    belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sutained by
    innnumerable unbeliefs: the fanatical Japanese in Brazil refused to
    believe for years the evidence of Japan's defeat; the fanatical
    Communist refuses to believe any unfavorable reports or evidence about
    Russia, nor will he be disillusioned by seeing with his own eyes the
    cruel misery inside the Soviet promised land.

    It is the true believer's ability to "shut his eyes and stop his ears"
    to facts that do not deserve to be either seen or heard which is the
    source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy. He can not be
    frightened by danger, nor disheartened by obstacles nor baffled by
    contradictions because he denies their existence. Strength of faith,
    as Bergson pointed out, manifests itself not in moving mountains, but
    in not seeing mountains to move.

-- Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
%
10 points blashimov 13 January 2013 07:53:31AM

    I have always had an animal fear of death, a fate I rank second only
    to having to sit through a rock concert. My wife tries to be consoling
    about mortality and assures me that death is a natural part of life,
    and that we all die sooner or later. Oddly this news, whispered into
    my ear at 3 a.m., causes me to leap screaming from the bed, snap on
    every light in the house and play my recording of "The Stars and
    Stripes Forever" at top volume till the sun comes up.

-- Woody Allen
%
10 points JQuinton 18 February 2013 08:10:42PM

    I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My
    first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already
    heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by
    concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all
    the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original
    idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw
    connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t
    turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make
    mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to
    outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and
    move on to the next thing.

-- William Deseriewicz

The whole speech is worth reading as one giant rationality quote
%
10 points tingram 10 March 2013 05:57:14PM

    The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless
    a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette
    tables is unknown.

-- George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists
%
10 points tingram 10 March 2013 05:50:50PM

    To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them:
    this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

-- Ursula K. Le Guin {Lord Estraven}, The Left Hand of Darkness
%
10 points Larks 02 April 2013 02:36:37PM

    There is nothing so disturbing to one's well-being and judgment as to
    see a friend get rich

-- Charles P Kindleberger,
   "Manias, Panics and Crashes; a History of Financial Crisis"
%
10 points lukeprog 14 May 2013 11:58:56PM

    The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them —
    especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when
    you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own
    mistakes, turning them over in your mind...

-- Daniel Dennett
%
10 points JQuinton 04 June 2013 05:26:42PM

    My sense of the proper way to determine what is ethical is to make a
    distinction between a smuggler of influence and a detective of
    influence. The smuggler knows these six principles and then
    counterfeits them, brings them into situations where they don’t
    naturally reside.

    The opposite is the sleuth’s approach, the detective’s approach to
    influence. The detective also knows what the principles are, and goes
    into every situation aware of them looking for the natural presence of
    one or another of these principles.

    Robert Cialdini at the blog Bakadesuyo explaining the difference
    between ethical persuasion and the dark arts
%
10 points Osiris 06 June 2013 01:35:05PM

    Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools,
    and those who dare not, are slaves.

--Lord Byron.

All too often those who are least rational in their best moments are the
greatest supporters of using one's head, if only to avoid too early a
demise. I wonder how many years Lord Byron gained from rational thought,
and which of the risks he took did he take because he was good at
betting...
%
10 points shminux 10 June 2013 05:00:43PM

    My dad used to run a business and whenever they needed a temp, he'd
    always line up 5-10 interviewees, to check out how they looked.

    And then hire the ugliest.

    Aside from keeping my mother off his back, he reasoned that if the
    temp had kept good employment, and it wasn't for her looks, she must
    be ok.

-- from the comments on the article on the jobs for good-looking.
%
10 points CasioTheSane 05 June 2013 06:43:48AM

    The paucity of skepticism in the world of health science is
    staggering. Those who aren't insufferable skeptical douchebags are
    doing it wrong.

-- Stabby the Raccoon
%
10 points baiter 04 July 2013 01:20:38PM

    If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

-- English proverb
%
10 points Pablo_Stafforini 01 July 2013 10:35:43PM

    [O]ur moral judgments are less reliable than many would hope, and this
    has specific implications for methodology in normative ethics. Three
    sources of evidence indicate that our intuitive ethical judgments are
    less reliable than we might have hoped: a historical record of
    accepting morally absurd social practices; a scientific record showing
    that our intuitive judgments are systematically governed by a host of
    heuristics, biases, and irrelevant factors; and a philosophical record
    showing deep, probably unresolvable, inconsistencies in common moral
    convictions. I argue that this has the following implications for
    moral theorizing: we should trust intuitions less; we should be
    especially suspicious of intuitive judgments that fit a bias pattern,
    even when we are intuitively confident that these judgments are not a
    simple product of the bias; we should be especially suspicious of
    intuitions that are part of inconsistent sets of deeply held
    convictions; and we should evaluate views holistically, thinking of
    entire classes of judgments that they get right or wrong in broad
    contexts, rather than dismissing positions on the basis of a small
    number of intuitive counterexamples.

-- Nick Beckstead,
   On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future,
   University of Rutgers, New Brunswick, 2013, p. 19
%
10 points lukeprog 11 July 2013 07:42:37PM

    Extinguished philosophies lie about the cradle of every science as the
    strangled snakes beside that of Hercules.

-- John McCarthy, adapted a line by T.H. Huxley
%
10 points CronoDAS 02 July 2013 08:00:18AM

    If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

-- Denis Healey
%
10 points jbay 02 August 2013 02:10:09PM

    But, unlike other species, we also know how not to know. We employ
    this unique ability to suppress our knowledge not just of mortality,
    but of everything we find uncomfortable, until our survival strategy
    becomes a threat to our survival.

    [...] There is no virtue in sustaining a set of beliefs, regardless of
    the evidence. There is no virtue in either following other people
    unquestioningly or in cultivating a loyal and unquestioning band of
    followers.

    While you can be definitively wrong, you cannot be definitely right.
    The best anyone can do is constantly to review the evidence and to
    keep improving and updating their knowledge. Journalism which attempts
    this is worth reading. Journalism which does not is a waste of time."

-- George Monbiot, Introduction: On Trying to be Less Wrong.

%
10 points iDante 10 August 2013 10:10:52PM

    To the layman, the philosopher, or the classical physicist, a
    statement of the form "this particle doesn't have a well-defined
    position" (or momentum, or x-component of spin angular momentum, or
    whatever) sounds vague, incompetent, or (worst of all) profound. It is
    none of these. But its precise meaning is, I think, almost impossible
    to convey to anyone who has not studied quantum mechanics in some
    depth.

-- David Griffiths, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics
    The book is not so good but I liked this quote.

%
10 points cody-bryce 02 August 2013 10:28:23PM

    I just think it's good to be confident. If I'm not on my team why
    should anybody else be?

-- Robert Downey Jr.
%
10 points NancyLebovitz 04 September 2013 02:43:55PM

    The merit of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, then – or its offence,
    depending where you stood – was not that it was authentic, but that it
    was credible.

John LeCarre, explaining that he didn't have insider information about the
intelligence community, and if he had, he would not have been allowed to
publish The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but that a great many people
who thought James Bond was too implausible wanted to believe that
LeCarre's book was the real deal.
%
10 points aausch 07 September 2013 07:13:02PM

    "The first magical step you can do after a flood," he said, "is get a
    pump and try to redirect water."

-- Richard James, founding priest of a Toronto based Wicca church,
    quoted in a thegridto article
%
10 points Panic_Lobster 08 October 2013 03:14:54AM

    When philosophers use a word—"knowledge", "being", "object", "I",
    "proposition", "name"—and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one
    must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in
    the language-game which is its original home?—What we do is to bring
    words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. You say to
    me: "You understand this expression, don't you? Well then—I am using
    it in the sense you are familiar with."— As if the sense were an
    atmosphere accompanying the word, which it carried with it into every
    kind of application.

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations p. 116-117
%
10 points monsterzero 04 October 2013 10:08:56PM

    Human consciousness isn't optimized for anything, except maybe helping
    feral hominids survive in the wild.

-- Charles Stross, Rule 34
%
10 points James_Miller 03 October 2013 02:11:45PM

    Because of the way evolution operates, the mind consists of many, many
    parts, and these parts have many different functions. Because they're
    designed to do different things, they don't always work in perfect
    harmony.

-- Robert Kurzban, Why Everyone Else Is A Hypocrite p. 6
%
10 points rule_and_line 06 November 2013 02:39:09AM

    The idea that a self-imposed external constraint on action can
    actually enhance our freedom by releasing us from predictable and
    undesirable internal constraints is not an obvious one. It is hard to
    be Ulysses.

-- Reid Hastie Robyn Dawes, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World

The "Ulysses" reference is to the famous Ulysses pact in the Odyssey.
%
10 points Benito 02 November 2013 10:03:40AM

On not doing the impossible:

    Ferrucci says. "We constantly underestimate—we did in the ’50s about
    AI, and we’re still doing it—what is really going on in the human
    brain."

    The question that [Douglas] Hofstadter wants to ask Ferrucci, and
    everybody else in mainstream AI, is this: Then why don’t you come
    study it?

    ...

    Peter Norvig, one of Google’s directors of research, echoes Ferrucci
    almost exactly. "I thought he was tackling a really hard problem," he
    told me about Hofstadter’s work. "And I guess I wanted to do an easier
    problem."

-- Article at The Atlantic
%
10 points Dan_Moore 19 December 2013 04:24:06PM

    Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

-- Samuel Beckett
%
75 points dspeyer 03 September 2014 05:06:19PM Permalink

    A good rule of thumb might be, “If I added a zero to this number, would
    the sentence containing it mean something different to me?” If the
    answer is “no,” maybe the number has no business being in the sentence
    in the first place.

-- Randall Munroe, on communicating with humans
%
70 points Alejandro1 01 September 2014 07:10:29PM Permalink

    I’m always fascinated by the number of people who proudly build
    columns, tweets, blog posts or Facebook posts around the same core
    statement: “I don’t understand how anyone could (oppose legal
    abortion/support a carbon tax/sympathize with the Palestinians over the
    Israelis/want to privatize Social Security/insert your pet issue
    here)." It’s such an interesting statement, because it has three layers
    of meaning.

    The first layer is the literal meaning of the words: I lack the
    knowledge and understanding to figure this out. But the second, intended
    meaning is the opposite: I am such a superior moral being that I cannot
    even imagine the cognitive errors or moral turpitude that could lead
    someone to such obviously wrong conclusions. And yet, the third, true
    meaning is actually more like the first: I lack the empathy, moral
    imagination or analytical skills to attempt even a basic understanding
    of the people who disagree with me.

    In short, “I’m stupid.” Something that few people would ever post so
    starkly on their Facebook feeds.

--Megan McArdle
%
66 points James_Miller 05 September 2014 08:36:09PM Permalink

    A skilled professional I know had to turn down an important freelance
    assignment because of a recurring commitment to chauffeur her son to a
    resumé-building “social action” assignment required by his high school.
    This involved driving the boy for 45 minutes to a community center,
    cooling her heels while he sorted used clothing for charity, and driving
    him back-forgoing income which, judiciously donated, could have fed,
    clothed, and inoculated an African village. The dubious “lessons” of
    this forced labor as an overqualified ragpicker are that children are
    entitled to treat their mothers’ time as worth nothing, that you can
    make the world a better place by destroying economic value, and that the
    moral worth of an action should be measured by the conspicuousness of
    the sacrifice rather than the gain to the beneficiary.

-- Steven Pinker
%
61 points Alejandro1 04 January 2014 07:57:52PM Permalink

    My friend's kid explained The Hulk to me. She said he's a big green
    monster and when he needs to get things done, he turns into a scientist.

-- Shrtbuspdx
%
53 points 27chaos 01 December 2014 08:30:07PM Permalink

    If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological
    barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair.

- Saul Alinsky, in his Rules for Radicals.

This one hit home for me. Got a haircut yesterday. :P
%
50 points B_For_Bandana 02 September 2014 01:25:28AM Permalink

    Always go to other people's funerals; otherwise they won't go to yours.

-- Yogi Berra, on Timeless Decision Theory.
%
46 points Kaj_Sotala 04 January 2014 08:03:06PM Permalink

    My 5 year old came to the dinner table, and calmly announced, "There is
    no Santa." I was puzzled because just couple of days ago he had taken
    his Christmas gift from Santa (though now that I think about it, he was
    not totally thrilled). So I asked why he thought so. He said, "Well, for
    Christmas I only got the gifts I told you about; I had gone to bed and
    told Santa himself what I wanted without telling you to see if he is
    real, and none of those came through - and I was a good boy all year!"

    To be sure, I asked him, "But you saw Santa at the mall?" He laughed as
    hard as could be, then pointed out to me, "They are people in costumes!"

-- Wen Gong
%
46 points Tyrrell_McAllister 02 April 2014 05:53:47PM Permalink

The mathematician and Fields medalist Vladimir Voevodsky on using automated proof assistants in mathematics:

    [Following the discovery of some errors in his earlier work:] I think it
    was at this moment that I largely stopped doing what is called
    “curiosity driven research” and started to think seriously about the
    future.

    [...]

    A technical argument by a trusted author, which is hard to check and
    looks similar to arguments known to be correct, is hardly ever checked
    in detail.

    [...]

    It soon became clear that the only real long-term solution to the
    problems that I encountered is to start using computers in the
    verification of mathematical reasoning.

    [...]

    Among mathematicians computer proof verification was almost a forbidden
    subject. A conversation started about the need for computer proof
    assistants would invariably drift to the Goedel Incompleteness Theorem
    (which has nothing to do with the actual problem) or to one or two cases
    of verification of already existing proofs, which were used only to
    demonstrate how impractical the whole idea was.

    [...]

    I now do my mathematics with a proof assistant and do not have to worry
    all the time about mistakes in my arguments or about how to convince
    others that my arguments are correct.

From a March 26, 2014 talk.
%
45 points nabeelqu 05 March 2014 10:56:01AM Permalink

    As burglars, they used some unusual techniques...During their casing,
    they had noticed that the interior door that opened to the draft board
    office was always locked. There was no padlock to replace...The break-in
    technique they settled on at that office must be unique in the annals of
    burglary. Several hours before the burglary was to take place, one of
    them wrote a note and tacked it to the door they wanted to enter:
    "Please don't lock this door tonight." Sure enough, when the burglars
    arrived that night, someone had obediently left the door unlocked. The
    burglars entered the office with ease, stole the Selective Service
    records, and left. They were so pleased with themselves that one of them
    proposed leaving a thank-you note on the door. More cautious minds
    prevailed. Miss Manners be damned, they did not leave a note.

-- Betty Medsger
%
44 points dspeyer 04 April 2014 02:26:23AM Permalink

    It is one thing for you to say, ‘Let the world burn.'
    It is another to say, ‘Let Molly burn.'
    The difference is all in the name.

-- Uriel, Ghost Story, Jim Butcher
%
43 points Stabilizer 05 January 2014 04:08:14PM Permalink

    This morning my daughter told me that she did well on a spelling test,
    but she got the easiest words wrong. Of course that’s not exactly true.
    The words that are hardest for her to spell are the ones she in fact did
    not spell correctly. She probably meant that she missed the words she
    felt should have been easy. Maybe they were short words. Children can be
    intimidated by long words, even though long words tend to be more
    regular and thus easier to spell.

    Our perceptions of what is easy are often upside-down. We feel that some
    things should be easy even though our experience tells us otherwise.

    Sometimes the trickiest parts of a subject come first, but we think that
    because they come first they should be easy. For example, force-body
    diagrams come at the beginning of an introductory physics class, but
    they can be hard to get right. Newton didn’t always get them right. More
    advanced physics, say celestial mechanics, is in some ways easier, or at
    least less error-prone.

    “Elementary” and “easy” are not the same. Sometimes they’re opposites.
    Getting off the ground, so to speak, may be a lot harder than flying.

-- John D. Cook
%
43 points satt 10 July 2014 11:17:19PM Permalink

    Charles II is said to have himself toyed with the philosophers, asking
    them to explain why a fish weighs more after it has died. Upon receiving
    various ingenious answers, he pointed out that in fact a dead fish does
    not weigh anything more.

-- Robert Pasnau, "Why Not Just Weigh the Fish?"
%
43 points Zubon 03 September 2014 10:47:34PM Permalink

    Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to
    utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an assertion that
    he, the nerd, does not already know the information being imparted. But
    your older nerd has more self-confidence, and besides, understands that
    frequently people need to think out loud. And highly advanced nerds will
    furthermore understand that uttering declarative sentences whose
    contents are already known to all present is part of the social process
    of making conversation and therefore should not be construed as
    aggression under any circumstances.

-- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon 
%
42 points AspiringRationalist 01 March 2014 10:10:34PM Permalink

    As the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can
    live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of
    "normal" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is
    the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a
    piece of machinery: what works best.

    These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to
    live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That
    phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably
    take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're
    weird, you're living badly.

-- Paul Graham, The Acceleration of Addictiveness
%
42 points WalterL 01 December 2014 08:30:37PM Permalink

    The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but
    that's the way to bet.

-- Damon Runyon
%
39 points dspeyer 01 March 2014 06:43:02PM Permalink

    In our large, anonymous society, it's easy to forget moral and
    reputational pressures and concentrate on legal pressure and security
    systems. This is a mistake; even though our informal social pressures
    fade into the background, they're still responsible for most of the
    cooperation in society.

-- Bruce Schneier, expert in security systems
%
38 points Gunnar_Zarncke 02 April 2014 11:21:01AM Permalink

    It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.

-- Alfred Adler
%
38 points Salemicus 04 September 2014 04:45:08PM Permalink

    How to compose a successful critical commentary:

        You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly,
        vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d
        thought of putting it that way.

        You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not
        matters of general or widespread agreement).

        You should mention anything you have learned from your target.

        Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or
        criticism.

-- D.C. Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.
Dennett himself is summarising Anatol Rapoport.
%
38 points michaelkeenan 01 September 2014 10:23:50PM Permalink

    A raise is only a raise for thirty days;
    after that, it’s just your salary.

-- David Russo
%
37 points Vulture 05 January 2014 12:00:26AM Permalink

    I spent my childhood believing I was destined to be a hero

    in some far off magic kingdom.

    It was too late when I realized that I was needed here.

-- A Softer World
%
37 points Pablo_Stafforini 07 July 2014 10:28:26PM Permalink

    Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the
    world.

-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
%
37 points dspeyer 01 November 2014 09:52:29PM Permalink

    It’s easier to bear in mind that the map is not the territory when you
    have two different maps.

-- Eric Raymond, on the value of bilinguilism
%
37 points James_Miller 02 November 2014 12:46:09AM Permalink

    I want to get the most amount of candy with the least amount of walking.

My 9-year-old son on Halloween.
%
36 points aarongertler 05 February 2014 03:47:49AM Permalink

    The story of Japanese railways during the earthquake and tsunami is the
    story of an unceasing drumbeat of everything going right [...] The
    overwhelming response of Japanese engineering to the challenge posed by
    an earthquake larger than any in the last century was to function
    exactly as designed. Millions of people are alive right now because the
    system worked and the system worked and the system worked.

    That this happened was, I say with no hint of exaggeration, one of the
    triumphs of human civilization. Every engineer in this country should be
    walking a little taller this week. We can’t say that too loudly, because
    it would be inappropriate with folks still missing and many families in
    mourning, but it doesn’t make it any less true.

--Patrick McKenzie, "Some Perspective on the Japan Earthquake"
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/03/13/some-perspective-on-the-japan-earthquake
(Disaster is not inevitable.)
%
36 points [deleted] 05 April 2014 05:45:29AM Permalink

    Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks
    on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up "What's that?"-
    It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child
    several times and said "this is a man," "this is a house," etc. And then
    the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then?

-- Wittgenstein, Culture and Value 
%
35 points Ixiel 04 April 2014 11:14:37AM Permalink

    Slartibartfast: Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I think that the chances
    of finding out what's actually going on are so absurdly remote that the
    only thing to do is to say, "Hang the sense of it," and keep yourself
    busy. I'd much rather be happy than right any day.

    Arthur Dent: And are you?

    Slartibartfast: Well... no. That's where it all falls down, of course.

-- Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
34 points johnlawrenceaspden 03 May 2014 03:17:45PM Permalink

    When another asserted something that I thought an error, I deny'd myself
    the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately
    some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering I began by observing
    that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but
    in the present case there appear'd or seem'd to me some difference, etc.

    I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the
    conversations I engag'd in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in
    which I propos'd my opinions procur'd them a readier reception and less
    contradiction; I had less mortification when I was found to be in the
    wrong, and I more easily prevail'd with others to give up their mistakes
    and join with me when I happened to be in the right.

-- Benjamin Franklin
%
34 points Manfred 04 November 2014 02:54:10AM Permalink

    In fiction, villains start with some great scheme to do something
    awesome, and that immediately makes them fascinating to the reader. The
    hero - if you're doing this poorly - sits at home and just waits for the
    villain to do something awesome so they can respond. This is a problem.
    The solution is for your heroes to have a great and awesome scheme also,
    that just isn't evil.

-- Brandon Sanderson
%
33 points Jayson_Virissimo 09 July 2014 05:01:31AM Permalink

    We have to reinvent the wheel every once in a while, not because we need
    a lot of wheels; but because we need a lot of inventors.

-- Bruce Joyce, as quoted by Michael Serra in Discovering Geometry
%
32 points lmm 03 June 2014 11:44:56AM Permalink

    I just don't have enough data to make a decision.

    Yes, you do. What you don't have is enough data for you not to have to
    make one

http://old.onefte.com/2011/03/08/you-have-a-decision-to-make/
%
32 points AspiringRationalist 07 July 2014 12:50:45AM Permalink

    Precise forecasts masquerade as accurate ones.

-- Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise
%
32 points grendelkhan 04 December 2014 09:48:07PM Permalink

    If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.

Murphy's Laws of Combat
%
31 points EGarrett 05 February 2014 01:34:22AM Permalink

    To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but
    rather one must find the path from error to truth.

-- Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 119
%
31 points James_Miller 01 June 2014 09:20:25PM Permalink

    "Do what you love" / "Follow your passion" is dangerous and destructive
    career advice. We tend to hear it from (a) Highly successful people who
    (b) Have become successful doing what they love. The problem is that we
    do NOT hear from people who have failed to become successful by doing
    what they love. Particularly pernicious problem in tournament-style
    fields with a few big winners lots of losers: media, athletics,
    startups. Better career advice may be "Do what contributes" -- focus on
    the beneficial value created for other people vs just one's own ego.
    People who contribute the most are often the most satisfied with what
    they do -- and in fields with high renumeration, make the most $.
    Perhaps difficult advice since requires focus on others vs oneself --
    perhaps bad fit with endemic narcissism in modern culture? Requires
    delayed gratification -- may toil for many years to get the payoff of
    contributing value to the world, vs short-term happiness.

-- Marc Andreessen
%
31 points VAuroch 11 November 2014 07:02:18AM Permalink

    There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something
    that has clearly happened.

-- Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
%
31 points bramflakes 03 December 2014 03:56:16PM Permalink

    When you hear an economist on TV "explain" the decline in stock prices
    by citing a slump in the market (and I have heard this
    pseudo-explanation more than once) it is time to turn off the
    television.

-- Thomas J. McKay, Reasons, Explanations and Decisions
%
31 points Jay_Schweikert 03 December 2014 04:40:11AM Permalink

    All the logical work (if not all the rhetorical work) in “Those who
    would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety,
    deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” is being done by the decision about
    what aspects of liberty are essential, and how much safety is at stake.
    The slogan might work as a reminder not to make foolish tradeoffs, but
    the real difficulty is in deciding which tradeoffs are wise and which
    are foolish. Once we figure that out, we don’t need the slogan to remind
    us; before we figure it out, the slogan doesn’t really help us.

--Eugene Volokh, "Liberty, safety, and Benjamin Franklin"

A good example of the risk of reading too much into slogans that are
basically just applause lights. Also reminds me of "The Choice between Good
and Bad is not a matter of saying Good! It is about deciding which is
which."
%
30 points MattG 10 March 2014 08:57:46PM Permalink

    Consider the people who routinely disagree with you. See how confident
    they look while being dead wrong? That’s exactly how you look to them.

-- Scott Adams
%
30 points Jack_LaSota 11 October 2014 04:18:21AM Permalink

A novice asked master Banzen: “What separates the monk from the master?”

Banzen replied: “Ten thousand mistakes!”

The novice, not understanding, sought to avoid all error. An abbot observed
and brought the novice to Banzen for correction.

Banzen explained: “I have made ten thousand mistakes; Suku has made ten
thousand mistakes; the patriarchs of Open Source have each made ten thousand
mistakes.”

Asked the novice: “What of the old monk who labors in the cubicle next to
mine? Surely he has made ten thousand mistakes.”

Banzen shook his head sadly. “Ten mistakes, a thousand times each.”

-- The Codeless Code
%
30 points arundelo 03 December 2014 12:06:10AM Permalink

    Problem is, "Fucking up when presented with surprising new situations"
    is actually a chronic human behavior. It's why purse snatchers are so
    effective -- by the time someone registers "Wait, did somebody just yank
    my purse off my shoulder?", the snatcher is long gone.

-- Ferrett Steinmetz
%
29 points Kaj_Sotala 01 March 2014 05:52:25PM Permalink

    The use with children of experimental [educational] methods, that is,
    methods that have not been finally assessed and found effective, might
    seem difficult to justify. Yet the traditional methods we use in the
    classroom every day have exactly this characteristic--they are highly
    experimental in that we know very little about their educational
    efficacy in comparison with alternative methods. There is widespread
    cynicism among students and even among practiced teachers about the
    effectiveness of lecturing or repetitive drill (which we would
    distinguish from carefully designed practice), yet these methods are in
    widespread use. Equally troublesome, new "theories" of education are
    introduced into schools every day (without labeling them as experiments)
    on the basis of their philosophical or common-sense plausibility but
    without genuine empirical support. We should make a larger place for
    responsible experimentation that draws on the available knowledge--it
    deserves at least as large a place as we now provide for faddish,
    unsystematic and unassessed informal "experiments" or educational
    "reforms."

-- John R. Anderson, Lynne M. Reder Herbert A. Simon: Applications and
Misapplications of Cognitive Psychology to Mathematics Education
%
29 points Benito 08 August 2014 09:35:08PM Permalink

    Hollywood is filled with feel-good messages about how robotic logic is
    no match for fuzzy, warm, human irrationality, and how the power of love
    will overcome pesky obstacles such as a malevolent superintelligent
    computer. Unfortunately there isn’t a great deal of cause to think this
    is the case, any more than there is that noble gorillas can defeat evil
    human poachers with the power of chest-beating and the ability to use
    rudimentary tools.

From the British Newspaper 'The Telegraph', and their article on Nick
Bostrom's awesome new book 'Superintelligence'.

I just thought it was a great analogy. Nice to see AI as an X-Risk in the
mainstream media too.
%
29 points KPier 27 September 2014 02:51:51AM Permalink

    A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He know that she
    was old, and not over-well built at the first; that she had seen many
    seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested
    to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his
    mind and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her
    thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him to
    great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in
    overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had
    gone safely though so many voyages and weathered so many storms, that it
    was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also.
    He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect
    all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek
    for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all
    ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In
    such a way he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his
    vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her depature with a
    light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in
    their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money
    when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.

    What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the
    death of those men. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the
    soundness of his ship, but the sincerity of his conviction can in nowise
    help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was
    before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in
    patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts.

-- W.J. Clifford, the Ethics of Belief
%
29 points lukeprog 04 October 2014 09:28:52PM Permalink

    Prominent altruists aren't the people who have a larger care-o-meter,
    they're the people who have learned not to trust their care-o-meters...
    Nobody has [a care-o-meter] capable of faithfully representing the scope
    of the world's problems. But the fact that you can't feel the caring
    doesn't mean that you can't do the caring.

-- Nate Soares
%
28 points dspeyer 01 September 2014 05:36:19PM Permalink

    Alex Jordan, a grad student at Stanford, came up with the idea of asking
    people to make moral judgments while he secretly tripped their disgust
    alarms. He stood at a pedestrian intersection on the Stanford campus and
    asked passersby to fill out a short survey. It asked people to make
    judgments about four controversial issues, such as marriage between
    first cousins, or a film studio’s decision to release a documentary with
    a director who had tricked some people into being interviewed. Alex
    stood right next to a trash can he had emptied. Before he recruited each
    subject, he put a new plastic liner into the metal can. Before half of
    the people walked up (and before they could see him), he sprayed the
    fart spray twice into the bag, which “perfumed” the whole intersection
    for a few minutes. Before other recruitments, he left the empty bag
    unsprayed. Sure enough, people made harsher judgments when they were
    breathing in foul air

-- The Righteous Mind Ch 3, Jonathan Haidt

I wonder if anyone who needs to make important judgments a lot makes an
actual effort to maintain affective hygiene. It seems like a really good
idea, but poor signalling.
%
28 points Azathoth123 02 November 2014 01:13:34AM Permalink

    Base Commander: Anything I do at this point will only make things worse.
                    Anything!

    Chief of Police: Many people would charge in anyway.

    Base Commander: Oh, the urge to do something during an emergency is very
                    strong. It takes training and discipline to do nothing.

-- Freefall by Mark Stanley.
%
27 points jazmt 20 January 2014 02:56:07AM Permalink

    Train your tongue to say "I don't know", lest you be brought to falsehood

-- Babylonian Talmud
%
27 points brainoil 04 February 2014 12:32:52AM Permalink

    Nothing exists in contradiction to nature, only in contradiction to what
    we know of it.

-- Dana Scully, The X-Files
%
27 points Jayson_Virissimo 04 February 2014 05:26:01AM Permalink

    Shit, if I took time out to have an opinion about everything, I wouldn't
    get any work done...

-- L. Bob Rife, Snow Crash
%
27 points Thomas 01 March 2014 04:29:55PM Permalink

    He says we could learn a lot from primitive tribes. But they could learn
    a lot more from us!

-- Jeremy Clarkson
%
27 points Stabilizer 02 March 2014 12:11:14AM Permalink

    Procrastination is the thief of compound interest.

-- Venkatesh Rao
%
27 points JQuinton 01 April 2014 01:00:19PM Permalink

    Now, one basic principle in all of science is GIGO: garbage in, garbage
    out. This principle is particularly important in statistical
    meta-analysis: because if you have a bunch of methodologically poor
    studies, each with small sample size, and then subject them to
    meta-analysis, what can happen is that the systematic biases in each
    study - if they mostly point in the same direction - can reach
    statistical significance when the studies are pooled. And this
    possibility is particularly relevant here, because meta-analyses of
    homeopathy invariably find an inverse correlation between the
    methodological quality of the study and the observed effectiveness of
    homeopathy: that is, the sloppiest studies find the strongest evidence
    in favor of homeopathy. When one restricts attention only to
    methodologically sound studies - those that include adequate
    randomization and double-blinding, predefined outcome measures, and
    clear accounting for drop-outs - the meta-analyses find no statistically
    significant effect (whether positive or negative) of homeopathy compared
    to placebo.

-- Alan Sokal, What Is Science
%
27 points roystgnr 02 May 2014 03:35:24PM Permalink

    PLAYBOY: So the experiment didn’t work?

    [Craig] FERGUSON: No, the experiment always works. There’s no such thing
    as an experiment that doesn’t work. There are only results, but results
    may vary. Here’s what I learned:
%
27 points johnlawrenceaspden 09 June 2014 11:46:13PM Permalink

    The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but
    not when it misses

-- Francis Bacon
%
27 points James_Miller 18 July 2014 02:00:07AM Permalink

    A law professor who was a practicing defense attorney whom I talked with
    during my ordeal told me of an experiment he had done. He was at a
    dinner party and told people at one table that he was defending a man
    who was wrongly accused of molesting a child, and was met with shock and
    accusations of trying to free a monster. He told another table that he
    was defending a murder suspect whom he was convinced was guilty, and
    got, "Oh, that's sounds interesting. Tell me more."

-- Ray Atkinson on Quora
%
27 points Pablo_Stafforini 07 July 2014 06:16:58PM Permalink

    Another possibility is that our intuitive sense of justice is a set of
    heuristics: moral machinery that’s very useful but far from infallible.
    We have a taste for punishment. This taste, like all tastes, is subtle
    and complicated, shaped by a complex mix of genetic, cultural, and
    idiosyncratic factors. But our taste for punishment is still a taste,
    implemented by automatic settings and thus limited by its inflexibility.
    All tastes can be fooled. We fool our taste buds with artificial
    sweeteners. We fool our sexual appetites with birth control and
    pornography, both of which supply sexual gratification while doing
    nothing to spread our genes. Sometimes, however, our tastes make fools
    of us. Our tastes for fat and sugar make us obese in a world of
    abundance. Drugs of abuse hijack our reward circuits and destroy
    people’s lives. To know whether we’re fooling our tastes or whether our
    tastes are fooling us, we have to step outside the limited perspective
    of our tastes: To what extent is this thing-diet soda, porn, Nutella,
    heroin-really serving our bests interests? We should ask the same
    question about our taste for punishment.

-- Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and
Them, New York, 2013, p. 272
%
27 points Pablo_Stafforini 04 August 2014 05:59:45PM Permalink

    A good rule of thumb to ask yourself in all situations is, “If not now,
    then when?” Many people delay important habits, work and goals for some
    hypothetical future. But the future quickly becomes the present and
    nothing will have changed.

-- Scott Young
%
26 points Alejandro1 03 February 2014 03:21:43AM Permalink

    A serious prophet upon predicting a flood should be the first man to
    climb a tree.

-- Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage.
%
26 points lukeprog 12 March 2014 08:48:02PM Permalink

    If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru, you’ll find
    out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil.

-- Warren Buffett
%
26 points aarongertler 04 April 2014 05:55:35PM Permalink

    "Throughout the day, Stargirl had been dropping money. She was the
    Johnny Appleseed of loose change: a penny here, a nickel there. Tossed
    to the sidewalk, laid on a shelf or bench. Even quarters.

    "I hate change," she said. "It's so ... jangly."

    "Do you realize how much you must throw away in a year?" I said.

    "Did you ever see a little kid's face when he spots a penny on a sidewalk?”

-- Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl
%
26 points Risto_Saarelma 06 June 2014 04:27:40PM Permalink

    But in some form or another, a lot of people believe that there are only
    easy truths and impossible truths left. They tend not to believe in hard
    truths that can be solved with technology.

    Pretty much all fundamentalists think this way. Take religious
    fundamentalism, for example. There are lots of easy truths that even
    kids know. And then there are the mysteries of God, which can’t be
    explained. In between-the zone of hard truths-is heresy. Environmental
    fundamentalism works the same way. The easy truth is that we must
    protect the environment. Beyond that, Mother Nature knows best, and she
    cannot be questioned. There’s even a market version of this, too. The
    value of things is set by the market. Even a child can look up stock
    prices. Prices are easy truths. But those truths must be accepted, not
    questioned. The market knows far more than you could ever know. Even
    Einstein couldn’t outguess God, Nature, or Market.

-- Peter Thiel
%
26 points RolfAndreassen 04 August 2014 05:40:54AM Permalink

    A man is walking on the moon with his eyes turned up toward space And
    the bright blue world that watches him reflected on his face. The whole
    world sees the hero there and the module crew also. But few can see the
    guiding team that guards him from below.

    Here's a health to the man who walked the moon, and the module crew
    above, And the team that watches from the sky with worry, joy, and love.
    To all who blazed the sky-trail come raise your glasses 'round; And a
    health to the unknown heroes, too, who never left the ground.

    Here's a health to the ship's designers, and the welders of her seams,
    And all who man the radar-scan to watch our dawning dreams. For all the
    unknown heroes, sing out to every shore: "What makes one step a giant
    leap is all the steps before".

-- Leslie Fish, musically praising the Hufflepuff virtues.
%
26 points jaime2000 05 August 2014 04:24:47AM Permalink

    "I want information. I want to understand you. To understand what
    exactly I'm fighting. You can help me."

    "I obviously won't."

    "I will kill you if you don't help me. I'm not bluffing, Broadwings. I
    will kill you and you will die alone and unseen, and frankly you are far
    too intelligent to simply believe that the stories of ancestral halls
    are true. You will die and that will probably be it, and nobody will
    ever know if you talked or not-not that conversing with an enemy in a
    war you don't support is dishonorable in the first place."

    "You'll let me leave if I stonewall, because you don't want to set a
    precedent of murdering surrendered officers."

    "We'll see. Would you like another cup?"

    "No."

    Derpy smiled deviously. "You know, in that last battle? We didn't fly
    our cannon up there to the cliffs. Nope. We had Earth ponies drag them.
    Earth ponies are capable of astounding physical feats, you know. We're
    probably going to be using more mobility in our artillery deployment
    going forward, now that they've demonstrated how effective the concept
    is."

    "...why did you tell me that? What would drive you to tell me that?"

    "I'll ask again before I continue. Would you like to assist me,
    Broadwings?"

    "I am a gryphon. Telling me your plans will do nothing to change that. I
    will not barter secrets."

    She leaned back, gesturing with a hoof as she talked. "My biggest
    strengths are that I understand the way crowds think and that I am good
    at thinking up unexpected ways to solve simple problems. My army's
    biggest weakness is that my soldiers are inexperienced, and that
    unexpected developments have an inordinate effect on their morale. Also,
    my infantry will never be able to stand against a sustained lion charge,
    so I have to keep finding ways to nullify that disadvantage, and frankly
    I won't be able to forever."

    "I don't understand. What are you doing, Mare? Why are you--"

    "--my personal biggest weaknesses," she continued, her smile now
    malicious, "are my struggles with morality, identity, and my desire to
    be loved. There's also my relationship with the stallion Macintosh
    Apple, who is usually called Big Macintosh, with whom I spend upwards of
    ten hours a day, and on whom I am completely emotionally dependent. If
    he were to be killed, I'd probably fall apart emotionally. I also have a
    daughter named Dinky - not by him, mind you - who is in the Southmarch,
    and who I am very, very guilty about abandoning. If anything were to
    happen to her I might kill myself. Do you understand yet, Broadwings?"

    "Mare, this is insanity. I cannot--"

    "--All right then, we'll continue. I also have in this camp Sweetie
    Belle, Apple Bloom, and Scootaloo, three little fillies, though they're
    growing quite quickly now. Sweetie Belle is the writer of many
    propaganda songs, Apple Bloom is Big Mac's sister, who he protects like
    a daughter, and I believe Scootaloo has no special importance but the
    other two would defend her to the death. They would be quite easy to
    kill as well. Do you understand yet?"

    "Mare! Are you mad?! Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to tell me
    these things? Aren't you afraid I would tell--"

    "--Good," she nodded. "You're beginning to understand. Let's see. My
    logistics framework right now is nonexistent. I'm entirely reliant on
    local villages bringing me food and materiel, and on capturing food and
    materiel meant for your armies. My army is nowhere near as mobile as it
    appears, since it can only operate in areas where I have established
    relationships with each particular village. A bit of simple recon work
    would let you figure out where I can and cannot go. Do you understand
    yet?"

    Broadwings' eyes opened and his pupils shrank with dawning recognition.
    "...If I came back to my army, I would use this to defeat you. If I told
    any other gryphon, they would use it to defeat you. You...you have..."

    "Yes. I have sealed your fate; you will not see your home. I can't let
    you leave now. I absolutely can't. I can now either kill you or keep you
    prisoner until this war is over-and I don't keep useless prisoners. It's
    now out of my hooves. One or the other. You pick."

-- emkajii, Equestria: Total War
%
25 points B_For_Bandana 08 February 2014 12:39:25AM Permalink

    Madolyn: "Why is the last patient of the day always the hardest?"

    Costigan: "Because you're tired and you don't give a shit. It's not
    supernatural."

-- The Departed
%
25 points CronoDAS 04 March 2014 03:07:22AM Permalink

    It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not
    know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of
    the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a
    condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any
    earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and
    play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency.
    The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of
    something else, and never for its own sake. Serious-minded persons, for
    example, are continually condemning the habit of going to the cinema,
    and telling us that it leads the young into crime. But all the work that
    goes to producing a cinema is respectable, because it is work, and
    because it brings a money profit. The notion that the desirable
    activities are those that bring a profit has made everything
    topsy-turvy. The butcher who provides you with meat and the baker who
    provides you with bread are praiseworthy, because they are making money;
    but when you enjoy the food they have provided, you are merely
    frivolous, unless you eat only to get strength for your work. Broadly
    speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is
    bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd;
    one might as well maintain that keys are good, but keyholes are bad.
    Whatever merit there may be in the production of goods must be entirely
    derivative from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them. The
    individual, in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of
    his work lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce
    between the individual and the social purpose of production that makes
    it so difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which
    profit-making is the incentive to industry. We think too much of
    production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach
    too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do
    not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer.

-- Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness
%
25 points Cyan 03 April 2014 05:59:38PM Permalink

    It is, in fact, a very good rule to be especially suspicious of work
    that says what you want to hear, precisely because the will to believe
    is a natural human tendency that must be fought.

-- Paul Krugman
%
25 points Cyan 05 May 2014 04:06:21AM Permalink

    Bruno de Finetti heard of [the author's empirical Bayes method for
    grading tests] and he wrote to me suggesting that the student should be
    encouraged to state their probability for each of the possible choices.
    The appropriate score should be a simple function of the probability
    distribution and the correct answer. An appropriate function would
    encourage students to reply with their actual distribution rather than
    attempt to bluff. I responded that it would be difficult to get third
    graders to list probabilities. He answered that we should give the
    students five gold stars and let them distribute the stars among the
    possible answers.

-- Herman Chernoff, "Past, Present, and Future of Statistical Science", pg. 34
%
25 points B_For_Bandana 03 May 2014 02:28:58AM Permalink

    One afternoon a student said "Roshi, I don't really understand what's
    going on. I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and
    everything, and Felicia got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her
    water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened when you popped him one with your
    staff, and people work on koans and get enlightened, but I've been doing
    this for two years now, and the koans don't make any sense, and I don't
    feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me what's going on?"

    "Well you see," Roshi replied, "for most people, and especially for most
    educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is
    heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply
    ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to
    induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that
    involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that
    that state has certain desirable properties. It's impossible in general
    to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms
    and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying
    to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like
    koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given
    student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the
    condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even
    thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our
    undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this
    kind of analytical discourse."

    And the student was enlightened.

-- David Chess
%
25 points arundelo 05 August 2014 05:19:21AM Permalink

    That's why I'm skeptical of people who look at some catastrophic failure
    of a complex system and say, "Wow, the odds of this happening are
    astronomical. Five different safety systems had to fail simultaneously!"
    What they don't realize is that one or two of those systems are failing
    all the time, and it's up to the other three systems to prevent the
    failure from turning into a disaster.

-- Raymond Chen
%
25 points Stabilizer 04 August 2014 04:01:20AM Permalink

    Surgeons finally did upgrade their antiseptic standards at the end of
    the nineteenth century. But, as is often the case with new ideas, the
    effort required deeper changes than anyone had anticipated. In their
    blood-slick, viscera-encrusted black coats, surgeons had seen themselves
    as warriors doing hemorrhagic battle with little more than their bare
    hands. A few pioneering Germans, however, seized on the idea of the
    surgeon as scientist. They traded in their black coats for pristine
    laboratory whites, refashioned their operating rooms to achieve the
    exacting sterility of a bacteriological lab, and embraced anatomic
    precision over speed.

    The key message to teach surgeons, it turned out, was not how to stop
    germs but how to think like a laboratory scientist. Young physicians
    from America and elsewhere who went to Germany to study with its
    surgical luminaries became fervent converts to their thinking and their
    standards. They returned as apostles not only for the use of antiseptic
    practice (to kill germs) but also for the much more exacting demands of
    aseptic practice (to prevent germs), such as wearing sterile gloves,
    gowns, hats, and masks. Proselytizing through their own students and
    colleagues, they finally spread the ideas worldwide.

-- Atul Gawande
%
25 points Azathoth123 13 September 2014 07:08:04PM Permalink

    What goes unsaid eventually goes unthought.

-- Steve Sailer
%
25 points Salivanth 02 October 2014 11:49:31PM Permalink

    The Courage Wolf looked long and slow at the Weasley twins. At length he
    spoke, "I see that you possess half of courage. That is good. Few
    achieve that."

    "Half?" Fred asked, too awed to be truly offended.

    "Yes," said the Wolf, "You know how to heroically defy, but you do not
    know how to heroically submit. How to say to another, 'You are wiser
    than I; tell me what to do and I will do it. I do not need to
    understand; I will not cost you the time to explain.' And there are
    those in your lives wiser than you, to whom you could say that."

    "But what if they're wrong?" George said.

    "If they are wrong, you die," the Wolf said plainly, "Horribly. And for
    nothing. That is why it is an act of courage."

-- HPMOR omake by Daniel Speyer.
%
25 points Gunnar_Zarncke 01 November 2014 10:37:35PM Permalink

    The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to
    be credible.

-- Mark Twain

Actually I found this in "The topology of Seemingly impossible functional
programs" which is using topological methods to 'check' infinitely many
cases in finite time. Which might even be applicable to FAI research.
%
25 points NancyLebovitz 07 December 2014 03:46:52PM Permalink

    Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You
    can waste... years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you,
    as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do
    enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just... take it.
    Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that and
    walk away. But that's hard.

-- Lois McMaster Bujold
%
25 points Kinsei 06 December 2014 01:18:27PM Permalink

    It’s much better to live in a place like Switzerland where the problems
    are complex and the solutions are unclear, rather than North Korea where
    the problems are simple and the solutions are straightforward.

-- Scott Sumner, A time for nuance
%
24 points jsbennett86 09 January 2014 11:30:28PM Permalink

    A remarkable, glorious achievement is just what a long series of
    unremarkable, unglorious tasks looks like from far away.

- Tim Urban (I think) of Wait But Why on How To Beat Procrastination
%
24 points michaelkeenan 05 January 2014 08:24:59AM Permalink

    If you don't pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, it
    will take more of your attention than it deserves.

-- David Allen
%
24 points Mestroyer 04 January 2014 07:41:07PM Permalink

    But losing can be upsetting, and can cause emotions to take the place of
    logical thinking. Below are some common “losing attitudes.” If you find
    yourself saying these things, consider it a red flag.

    “At least I have my Code of Honor,” a.k.a. “You are cheap!”

    This is by far the most common call of the scrub, and I’ve already
    described it in detail. The loser usually takes the imagined moral high
    ground by sticking to his Code of Honor, a made-up set of personal rules
    that tells him which moves he can and cannot do. Of course, the rules of
    the game itself dictate which moves a player can and cannot make, so the
    Code of Honor is superfluous and counterproductive toward winning. This
    can also take the form of the loser complaining that you have broken his
    Code of Honor. He will almost always assume the entire world agrees on
    his Code and that only the most vile social outcasts would ever break
    his rules. It can be difficult to even reason with the kind of religious
    fervor some players have toward their Code. This type of player is
    trying desperately to remain a “winner” any way possible. If you catch
    him amidst a sea of losses, you’ll notice that his Code will undergo
    strange contortions so that he may still define himself, somehow, as a
    “winner.”

-- David Sirlin on self-handicapping in competitive games
%
24 points arundelo 04 April 2014 02:13:10PM Permalink

    Specifically, [these recent books that deal with parallel universes]
    argue that if some scientific theory X has enough experimental support
    for us to take it seriously, then we must take seriously also all its
    predictions Y, even if these predictions are themselves untestable
    (involving parallel universes, for example).

    As a warm-up example, let's consider Einstein's theory of General
    Relativity. It's widely considered a scientific theory worthy of taking
    seriously, because it has made countless correct predictions -- from the
    gravitational bending of light to the time dilation measured by our GPS
    phones. This means that we must also take seriously its prediction for
    what happens inside black holes, even though this is something we can
    never observe and report on in Scientific American. If someone doesn't
    like these black hole predictions, they can't simply opt out of them and
    dismiss them as unscientific: instead, they need to come up with a
    different mathematical theory that matches every single successful
    prediction that general relativity has made -- yet doesn't give the
    disagreeable black hole predictions.

-- Max Tegmark, Scientific American guest blog, 2014-02-04
%
24 points Stabilizer 01 April 2014 08:10:10PM Permalink

    How much of a disaster is this? Well, it’s never a disaster to learn
    that a statement you wanted to go one way in fact goes the other way. It
    may be disappointing, but it’s much better to know the truth than to
    waste time chasing a fantasy. Also, there can be far more to it than
    that. The effect of discovering that your hopes are dashed is often that
    you readjust your hopes. If you had a subgoal that you now realize is
    unachievable, but you still believe that the main goal might be
    achievable, then your options have been narrowed down in a potentially
    useful way.

- -Timothy Gowers, on finding out a method he’d hoped would work, in fact
would not.
%
24 points arundelo 03 May 2014 06:27:58PM Permalink

    Things like linear algebra, group theory, and probability have so many
    uses throughout science that learning them is like installing a firmware
    upgrade to your brain -- and even the math you don't use will stretch
    you in helpful ways.

-- Scott Aaronson
%
24 points NancyLebovitz 02 June 2014 06:08:16PM Permalink

    Three Bayesians walk into a bar: a) what's the probability that this is
    a joke? b) what's the probability that one of the three is a Rabbi? c)
    given that one of the three is a Rabbi, what's the probability that this
    is a joke?

--Sorry, no cite. I got this from someone who said they'd been seeing it on twitter.
%
23 points arundelo 07 January 2014 12:26:45AM Permalink

    In any system that is less than 100% perfect, some effort ends up
    being spent on checking things that, retrospectively, turned out to be
    ok.

-- Andrew Gelman
%
23 points hairyfigment 01 March 2014 08:26:28PM Permalink

    "He keeps saying, you can run, but you can't hide. Since when do we take
    advice from this guy?"

    You got a really good point there, Rick. I mean, if the truth was that
    we could hide, it's not like he would just give us that information.

-- Rick and Morty.
%
23 points Kaj_Sotala 06 March 2014 05:06:09PM Permalink

    Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen
    incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He
    doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily ‘true’ or ‘false’, but as
    ‘academic’ or ‘practical’, ‘outworn’ or ‘contemporary’, ‘conventional’
    or ‘ruthless’. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him
    from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that
    materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or
    courageous- that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of
    thing he cares about.

-- C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
%
22 points shminux 03 February 2014 06:08:08PM Permalink

    I’m better at tests than reality. Reality doesn’t tell you which of a
    million bits of information to look at.

A comment on slatestarcodex.
%
22 points James_Miller 01 March 2014 05:27:27PM Permalink

    Almost no innovative programs work, in the sense of reliably
    demonstrating benefits in excess of costs in replicated RCTs [randomized
    controlled trials]. Only about 10 percent of new social programs in
    fields like education, criminology and social welfare demonstrate
    statistically significant benefits in RCTs. When presented with an
    intelligent-sounding program endorsed by experts in the topic, our
    rational Bayesian prior ought to be “It is very likely that this program
    would fail to demonstrate improvement versus current practice if I
    tested it.”

    In other words, discovering program improvements that really work is
    extremely hard. We labor in the dark -- scratching and clawing for tiny
    scraps of causal insight.

-- Megan McArdle, quoting or paraphrasing Jim Manzi.
%
22 points whales 02 April 2014 01:49:57AM Permalink

    When you play bridge with beginners-when you try to help them out-you
    give them some general rules to go by. Then they follow the rule and
    something goes wrong. But if you'd had their hand you wouldn't have
    played the thing you told them to play, because you'd have seen all the
    reasons the rule did not apply.

- Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai
%
22 points raisin 01 April 2014 03:45:37PM Permalink

    Richard Feynmann claimed that he wasn't exceptionally intelligent, but
    that he focused all his energies on one thing. Of course he was
    exceptionally intelligent, but he makes a good point.

    I think one way to improve your intelligence is to actually try to
    understand things in a very fundamental way. Rather than just accepting
    the kind of trite explanations that most people accept - for instance,
    that electricity is electrons moving along a wire - try to really find
    out and understand what is actually happening, and you'll begin to find
    that the world is very different from what you have been taught and
    you'll be able to make more intelligent observations about it.

http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/e3yjg/is_there_any_way_to_improve_intelligence_or_are/c153p8w

reddit user jjbcn on trying to improve your intelligence

If you're not a student of physics, The Feynman Lectures on Physics is
probably really useful for this purpose. It's free for download!

http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/

It seems like the Feynman lectures were a bit like the Sequences for those
Caltech students:

    The intervening years might have glazed their memories with a euphoric
    tint, but about 80 percent recall Feynman's lectures as highlights of
    their college years. “It was like going to church.” The lectures were “a
    transformational experience,” “the experience of a lifetime, probably
    the most important thing I got from Caltech.” “I was a biology major but
    Feynman's lectures stand out as a high point in my undergraduate
    experience … though I must admit I couldn't do the homework at the time
    and I hardly turned any of it in.” “I was among the least promising of
    students in this course, and I never missed a lecture. … I remember and
    can still feel Feynman's joy of discovery. … His lectures had an …
    emotional impact that was probably lost in the printed Lectures.”
%
22 points Tenoke 07 May 2014 12:25:19PM Permalink

    Man is not going to wait passively for millions of years before
    evolution offers him a better brain.

-- Corneliu E. Giurgea, the chemist who synthesized Piracetam and coined the
term 'Nootropic'
%
22 points CronoDAS 04 August 2014 08:24:52AM Permalink

    The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of
    magnitude bigger than to produce it.

-- Alberto Brandolini (via David Brin)
%
22 points dspeyer 05 August 2014 09:34:00PM Permalink

    It was a gamble: would people really take time out of their busy lives
    to answer other people’s questions, for nothing more than fake internet
    points and bragging rights?

    It turns out that people will do anything for fake internet points.

    Just kidding. At best, the points, and the gamification, and the focused
    structure of the site did little more than encourage people to keep
    doing what they were already doing. People came because they wanted to
    help other people, because they needed to learn something new, or
    because they wanted to show off the clever way they’d solved a problem.

    [...]

    An incredible number of people jumped at the chance to help a stranger

-- Jay Hanlon, Five year retrospective on StackOverflow
%
21 points cousin_it 16 April 2014 10:22:07AM Permalink

    Being wrong about something feels exactly the same as being right about
    something.

-- many different people, most recently user chipaca on HN
%
21 points aarongertler 16 May 2014 01:13:23AM Permalink

    I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that
    I don't know the answer.

― Douglas Adams
%
21 points Mestroyer 04 May 2014 03:38:21AM Permalink

    we're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our
    hands. But we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers, but we're
    not going to kill Today.

-- Captain James Tiberius Kirk, dodging an appeal to nature and the what the
hell effect, to optimize for consequences instead of virtue.
%
21 points elharo 01 May 2014 09:53:13AM Permalink

    The brutal truth is that reality is indifferent to your difficulty in
    finding enough subjects. It’s like astronomy: To study things that are
    small and distant in the sky you need a huge telescope. If you only have
    access to a few subjects, you need to study bigger effects, and maybe
    that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

-- Joseph P. Simmons, The Reformation: Can Social Scientists Save Themselves
%
21 points rationalnoodles 02 June 2014 11:46:14AM Permalink

    DON’T RESPOND TO IDIOTS.

    [...]

    Arguing with idiots has the game-theoretic structure of a
    dollar-auction. Whoever gets in the last argument wins. Add to this the
    asymmetry that someone with low epistemic standards can make up some
    nonsense argument in five minutes, while it takes you an hour to prove
    that it is nonsense. At which point the other guy will make up some new
    nonsense.

-- Medivh
%
21 points gwern 17 July 2014 12:22:19AM Permalink

    Independence is for the very few, it is a privilege of the strong.
    Whoever attempts it enters a labyrinth, and multiplies a thousandfold
    the dangers of life. Not least of which is that no one can see how and
    where he loses his way, becomes lonely, and is torn piecemeal by some
    minotaur of conscience. If he fails, this happens so far from the
    comprehension of men that they cannot sympathise nor pity.

-- 29, Part 2: The Free Spirit, Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil -
Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future
%
21 points Torello 02 October 2014 01:39:31AM Permalink

    While there are problems with what I have proposed, they should be
    compared to the existing alternatives, not to abstract utopias.

-- Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future
%
21 points Stabilizer 03 October 2014 10:24:12PM Permalink

    The version of Windows following 8.1 will be Windows 10, not Windows 9.
    Apparently this is because Microsoft knows that a lot of software
    naively looks at the first digit of the version number, concluding that
    it must be Windows 95 or Windows 98 if it starts with 9.

    Many think this is stupid. They say that Microsoft should call the next
    version Windows 9, and if somebody’s dumb code breaks, it’s their own
    fault.

    People who think that way aren’t billionaires. Microsoft got where it
    is, in part, because they have enough business savvy to take
    responsibility for problems that are not their fault but that would be
    perceived as being their fault.

-- John D. Cook
%
20 points cousin_it 16 January 2014 10:46:11PM Permalink

    People will call it immoral until they can afford it

-- blindcavefsh on reddit.com/r/futurology

I like this quote because it can serve as a replacement for "power corrupts"
and also applies to things like embryo selection, so it seems to be pointing
to something more general.
%
20 points Pfft 10 February 2014 05:43:22PM Permalink

    Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

--Mike Tyson
%
20 points Jayson_Virissimo 18 March 2014 09:18:23PM Permalink

    The same persons who cry down Logic will generally warn you against
    Political Economy. It is unfeeling, they will tell you. It recognises
    unpleasant facts. For my part, the most unfeeling thing I know of is the
    law of gravitation: it breaks the neck of the best and most amiable
    person without scruple, if he forgets for a single moment to give heed
    to it. The winds and waves too are very unfeeling. Would you advise
    those who go to sea to deny the winds and waves - or to make use of
    them, and find the means of guarding against their dangers? My advice to
    you is to study the great writers on Political Economy, and hold firmly
    by whatever in them you find true; and depend upon it that if you are
    not selfish or hard-hearted already, Political Economy will not make you
    so.

-- John Stuart Mill
%
20 points Jayson_Virissimo 04 April 2014 01:24:36AM Permalink

    Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us
    to ignore.

-- Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson
%
20 points somnicule 09 April 2014 11:13:15AM Permalink

    Even if it's not your fault, it's your responsibility.

-- Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
%
20 points NancyLebovitz 08 June 2014 06:47:11PM Permalink

    Let your aim be to come at truth, not to conquer your opponent. So you
    never shall be at a loss in losing the argument, and gaining a new
    discovery.

-- Arthur Martine, quoted by Daniel Dennett
%
20 points John_Maxwell_IV 07 September 2014 01:56:45AM Permalink

    Often, one of these CEOs will operate in a way inconsistent with
    Thorndike's major thesis and yet he'll end up praising the CEO anyway.
    In poker, we'd call this the "won, didn't it?" fallacy-- judging a
    process by the specific, short-term result accomplished rather than
    examining the long-term result of multiple iterations of the process
    over time.

An Amazon.com review.
%
20 points RolfAndreassen 02 September 2014 12:17:19AM Permalink

    "I mean, my lord Salvara, that your own expectations have been used
    against you. You have a keen sense for men of business, surely. You've
    grown your family fortune several times over in your brief time handling
    it. Therefore, a man who wished to snare you in some scheme could do
    nothing wiser than to act the consummate man of business. To
    deliberately manifest all your expectations. To show you exactly what
    you expected and desired to see."

    "It seems to me that if I accept your argument," the don said slowly,
    "then the self-evident truth of any legitimate thing could be taken as
    grounds for its falseness. I say Lukas Fehrwight is a merchant of
    Emberlain because he shows the signs of being so; you say those same
    signs are what prove him counterfeit. I need more sensible evidence than
    this."

-- Scott Lynch, "The Lies of Locke Lamora", page 150.
%
20 points dspeyer 02 October 2014 02:53:36PM Permalink

    Lord Vetinari, as supreme ruler of Ankh-Morpork, could in theory summon
    the Archchancellor of Unseen University to his presence and, indeed,
    have him executed if he failed to obey.

    On the other hand Mustrum Ridcully, as head of the college of wizards,
    had made it clear in polite but firm ways that he could turn him into a
    small amphibian and, indeed, start jumping around the room on a pogo
    stick.

    Alcohol bridged the diplomatic gap nicely. Sometimes Lord Vetinari
    invited the Archchancellor to the palace for a convivial drink. And of
    course the Archchancellor went, because it would be bad manners not to.
    And everyone understood the position, and everyone was on their best
    behaviour, and thus civil unrest and slime on the carpet were averted.

-- Interesting Times, Terry Pratchett
%
20 points James_Miller 15 December 2014 07:01:03PM Permalink

    Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It
    works, but you don't know why.

-- Paul Graham
%
20 points Salemicus 01 December 2014 07:50:06PM Permalink

    Geographers crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which
    they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect that
    beyond this lies nothing but sandy deserts full of wild beasts, and
    unapproachable bogs.

-- Plutarch, from Life of Theseus.
%
19 points lukeprog 07 January 2014 05:46:00PM Permalink

    [This] paper will be something of an exercise in saying the obvious, but
    on this topic it is worth saying the obvious first so that less obvious
    things can be said from there.

-- David Chalmers
%
19 points Wesmaster160 06 January 2014 10:41:02PM Permalink

    There are lots of mysteries in the world. But the truth is that maybe...
    those things aren't all that mysterious at all... Maybe they're just
    things I don't know about yet. And that's why they seem mysterious.

-- Your partner in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity
%
19 points MattG 10 March 2014 08:54:26PM Permalink

    This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult
    question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without
    noticing the substitution.

-- Daniel Kahneman
%
19 points malcolmocean 01 March 2014 03:35:08PM Permalink

    Allow me to express now, once and for all, my deep respect for the work
    of the experimenter and for his fight to wring significant facts from an
    inflexible Nature, who says so distinctly "No" and so indistinctly "Yes"
    to our theories.

-- Hermann Weyl, quoted in Science And Sanity, by Alfred Korzybski, of "the map is not the territory" fame
%
19 points roryokane 18 April 2014 01:26:11AM Permalink

    If only there were irrational people somewhere, insidiously believing
    stupid things, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest
    of us and mock them. But the line dividing rationality and irrationality
    cuts through the mind of every human being. And who is willing to mock a
    piece of his own mind?

    (With apologies to Solzhenitsyn).

-- Said Achmiz, in a comment on Slate Star Codex’s post “The Cowpox of Doubt”
%
19 points redlizard 15 May 2014 02:58:04AM Permalink

    Even with measurements in hand, old habits are hard to shake. It’s easy
    to fall in love with numbers that seem to agree with you. It’s just as
    easy to grope for reasons to write off numbers that violate your
    expectations. Those are both bad, common biases. Don’t just look for
    evidence to confirm your theory. Test for things your theory predicts
    should never happen. If the theory is correct, it should easily survive
    the evidential crossfire of positive and negative tests. If it’s not
    you’ll find out that much quicker. Being wrong efficiently is what
    science is all about.

-- Carlos Bueno, Mature Optimization, pg. 14. Emphasis mine.
%
19 points Torello 01 May 2014 11:33:48PM Permalink

    Accident, n.
    An inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws.

-- Ambrose Bierce, The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary, complied and edited by
Ernest J. Hopkins 
%
19 points Jayson_Virissimo 09 July 2014 04:56:08AM Permalink

    An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a
    very narrow field.

-- Niels Bohr, A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations
%
19 points lukeprog 24 September 2014 07:06:10AM Permalink

    He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.

-- J.S. Mill
%
19 points JQuinton 07 October 2014 04:41:37PM Permalink

    When I was 16, I wanted to follow in my grandfathers footsteps. I wanted
    to be a tradesman. I wanted to build things, and fix things, and make
    things with my own two hands. This was my passion, and I followed it for
    years. I took all the shop classes at school, and did all I could to
    absorb the knowledge and skill that came so easily to my granddad.
    Unfortunately, the handy gene skipped over me, and I became frustrated.
    But I remained determined to do whatever it took to become a tradesman.

    One day, I brought home a sconce from woodshop that looked like a
    paramecium, and after a heavy sigh, my grandfather told me the truth. He
    explained that my life would be a lot more satisfying and productive if
    I got myself a different kind of toolbox. This was almost certainly the
    best advice I’ve ever received, but at the time, it was crushing. It
    felt contradictory to everything I knew about persistence, and the
    importance of “staying the course.” It felt like quitting. But here’s
    the “dirty truth,” Stephen. “Staying the course” only makes sense if
    you’re headed in a sensible direction. Because passion and persistence -
    while most often associated with success - are also essential
    ingredients of futility.

    That’s why I would never advise anyone to “follow their passion” until I
    understand who they are, what they want, and why they want it. Even
    then, I’d be cautious. Passion is too important to be without, but too
    fickle to be guided by. Which is why I’m more inclined to say, “Don’t
    Follow Your Passion, But Always Bring it With You.”

-- Mike Rowe
%
18 points hairyfigment 13 March 2014 08:51:11PM Permalink

    A: Maybe an Air Nomad Avatar will understand where I'm coming
    from...(simulates Yangchen)...

    Y: Avatar Aang, I know that you are a gentle spirit. And the monks have
    taught you well. But this isn't about you. This is about the world.

    A: But the monks taught me I had to detach myself from the world so my
    spirit could be free!

    Y: ...Here is my wisdom for you: selfless duty calls for you to
    sacrifice your own spiritual needs, and do whatever it takes to protect
    the world.

-- Avatar: The last airbender
%
18 points Benito 02 April 2014 06:15:24PM Permalink

    I propose we simply postpone the worrisome question of what really has a
    mind, about what the proper domain of the intentional stance is.
    Whatever the right answer to that question is-if it has a right
    answer-this will not jeopardize the plain fact that the intentional
    stance works remarkably well as a prediction method in these other
    areas, almost as well as it works in our daily lives as folk
    psychologists dealing with other people. This move of mine annoys and
    frustrates some philosophers, who want to blow the whistle and insist on
    properly settling the issue of what a mind, a belief, a desire is before
    taking another step. Define your terms, sir! No, I won’t. That would be
    premature. I want to explore first the power and the extent of
    application of this good trick, the intentional stance. Once we see what
    it is good for, and why, we can come back and ask ourselves if we still
    feel the need for formal, watertight definitions. My move is an instance
    of nibbling on a tough problem instead of trying to eat (and digest) the
    whole thing from the outset. “Many of the thinking tools I will be
    demonstrating are good at nibbling, at roughly locating a few “fixed”
    points that will help us see the general shape of the problem. In Elbow
    Room (1984a), o compared my method to the sculptor’s method of roughing
    out the form in a block of marble, approaching the final surfaces
    cautiously, modestly, working by successive approximation. Many
    philosophers apparently cannot work that way and have to secure (or so
    they think) the utterly fixed boundaries of their problems and possible
    solutions before they can venture any hypotheses.

-- Daniel Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Chapter 18
"The Intentional Stance"

Reminded me of the idea of 'hacking away at the edges'.
%
18 points James_Miller 01 April 2014 10:57:23PM Permalink

    Anything outside yourself, this you can see and apply your logic to it."
    She said. "But it’s a human trait that when we encounter personal
    problems, those things most deeply personal are the most difficult to
    bring out for our logic to scan. We tend to flounder around, blaming
    everything but the actual, deep-seated thing that’s really chewing on
    us.

-- Frank Herbert, "Dune", Jessica speaking to Thufir Hawat.
%
18 points Jayson_Virissimo 09 July 2014 05:05:00AM Permalink

    If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is
    really true, there would be little hope of advance.

-- Orville Wright, http://wrightbrothers.info/quotes.php
%
18 points James_Miller 06 July 2014 05:37:35PM Permalink

    Show me a republic, ancient or modern, in which there have been no
    decorations. Some people call them baubles. Well, it is by such baubles
    that one leads men.

Napoleon who would have approved of gamification.
%
17 points lukeprog 15 January 2014 01:20:18AM Permalink

    Thus the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental
    performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and
    analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within
    the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again.

-- Joseph Schumpeter
%
17 points whales 13 January 2014 08:58:20AM Permalink

    It’s tempting to judge what you read: "I agree with these statements,
    and I disagree with those." However, a great thinker who has spent
    decades on an unusual line of thought cannot induce their context into
    your head in a few pages. It’s almost certainly the case that you don’t
    fully understand their statements. Instead, you can say: "I have now
    learned that there exists a worldview in which all of these statements
    are consistent." And if it feels worthwhile, you can make a genuine
    effort to understand that entire worldview. You don't have to adopt it.
    Just make it available to yourself, so you can make connections to it
    when it's needed.

-- Bret Victor, reflecting on Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things
Together by Bruno Latour
%
17 points bbleeker 04 March 2014 12:54:48PM Permalink

    The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is
    identical with the discovery of truth - that the error and truth are
    simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to,
    when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and
    maybe one worse than the first one.

-- H. L. Mencken
%
17 points Vulture 03 May 2014 09:17:23PM Permalink

    Nature is constantly given human qualities. Wordsworth wrote that
    “nature never did betray the heart that loved her.” Mother Nature has
    comforted us in every culture on earth. In the 20th and 21st centuries,
    some environmentalists claimed that the entire earth is a single
    ecosystem, a “superorganism” in the language of Gaia.

    I would argue that we have been fooling ourselves. Nature, in fact, is
    mindless. Nature is neither friend nor foe, neither malevolent nor
    benevolent.

    Nature is purposeless. Nature simply is. We may find nature beautiful or
    terrible, but those feelings are human constructions. Such utter and
    complete mindlessness is hard for us to accept. We feel such a strong
    connection to nature. But the relationship between nature and us is
    one-sided. There is no reciprocity. There is no mind on the other side
    of the wall. That absence of mind, coupled with so much power, is what
    so frightened me...

-- Alan Lightman
%
17 points satt 01 May 2014 11:09:26PM Permalink

    Nothing is so obvious that it’s obvious.

- Errol Morris
%
17 points James_Miller 01 June 2014 09:26:32PM Permalink

    Every time a mosquito dies, the world becomes a better place.

-- Glenn Reynolds

From Wikipedia "Various species of mosquitoes are estimated to transmit
various types of disease to more than 700 million people annually in Africa,
South America, Central America, Mexico, Russia, and much of Asia, with
millions of resultant deaths. At least two million people annually die of
these diseases, and the morbidity rates are many times higher still."

Related: let's eliminate species of mosquitoes that bite humans.
%
17 points Salemicus 08 July 2014 07:28:51PM Permalink

    The point is that even the Good Samaritan had to have the money to help,
    otherwise he too would have had to pass on the other side.

-- Margaret Thatcher, CPC Lecture.
%
17 points Benito 05 August 2014 12:50:36PM Permalink

    But if that were the case, then moral philosophers - who reason about
    ethical principles all day long - should be more virtuous than other
    people. Are they? The philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel tried to find out.
    He used surveys and more surreptitious methods to measure how often
    moral philosophers give to charity, vote, call their mothers, donate
    blood, donate organs, clean up after themselves at philosophy
    conferences, and respond to emails purportedly from students. And in
    none of these ways are moral philosophers better than other philosophers
    or professors in other fields.

    Schwitzgebel even scrounged up the missing-book lists from dozens of
    libraries and found that academic books on ethics, which are presumably
    mostly borrowed by ethicists, are more likely to be stolen or just never
    returned than books in other areas of philosophy. In other words,
    expertise in moral reasoning does not seem to improve moral behavior,
    and it might even make it worse (perhaps by making the rider more
    skilled at post hoc justification). Schwitzgebel still has yet to find a
    single measure on which moral philosophers behave better than other
    philosophers.

    Jonathon Haidt, discussing the idea that ethical reasoning causes good
    behaviour, in his book 'The Righteous Mind'.

I found the book-stealing thing quite funny, although I imagine that some of
the results described could be explained by popularity; if more people get
into / like ethics, then there are more people who might steal library
books, more antisocial people who don't respond to emails, etc. This hasn't
been demonstrated to my knowledge though, and I'm otherwise inclined to
believe that people who spend their days thinking about ethics in the
abstract, are simply better at coming up with rationales for their
instinctive feelings. Joshua Greene says rights are an example of this,
where we need a dictum against whatever our emotions are telling us is
despicable, even though we can't find any utilitarian justification for it.
%
17 points jaime2000 01 September 2014 12:30:35PM Permalink

    A Verb Called Self

    I am the playing, but not the pause.

    I am the effect, but not the cause.

    I am the living, but not the cells.

    I am the ringing, but not the bells.

    I am the animal, but not the meat.

    I am the walking, but not the feet.

    I am the pattern, but not the clothes.

    I am the smelling, but not the rose.

    I am the waves, but not the sea

    Whatever my substrate, my me is still me.

    I am the sparks in the dark that exist as a dream -

    I am the process, but not the machine.

-- Jennifer Diane "Chatoyance" Reitz,
   Friendship Is Optimal: Caelum Est Conterrens
%
17 points Gunnar_Zarncke 01 November 2014 11:12:29PM Permalink

Personality problems and pattern ordered by difficulty to change according
to Seligman:

        Panic - Curable

        Specific Phobias - Almost Curable

        Sexual Dysfunctions - Marked Relief

        Social Phobia - Moderate Relief

        Agoraphobia - Moderate Relief

        Depression - Moderate Relief

        Sex Role - Moderate Change

        Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder - Moderate/Mild Relief

        Sexual Preferences - Moderate/Mild Change [*]

        Anger - Mild/Moderate Relief

        Everyday Anxiety - Mild/Moderate Relief

        Alcohol Dependency - Mild Relief

        Overweight - Temporary Change

        Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) - Marginal Relief
        [except for rape which shows Moderate Relief]

        Sexual Orientation - Probably Unchangeable [*]

        Sexual Identity - Unchangeable [*]

From 'What You Can Change and What You Can't*' by Seligman pg. 244 of the
reviewed ('vintage') edition of 2006, explicitly confirmed to be still state
of the art.

Just read the book and thought this table to be quite quote-worthy even
though it isn't prosaic.

* These terms have specific and possibly somewhat non-standard definitions
* in the book. Seligman gives a convincing theory for formation of aspects
* of sexuality of different 'depth' (a core concept of Seligman) based on
* biological facts around expression of genes and hormones. See chapter 11.
%
17 points 27chaos 01 December 2014 08:25:59PM Permalink

    I know that all revolutions must have ideologies to spur them on. That
    in the heat of conflict these ideologies tend to be smelted into rigid
    dogmas claiming exclusive possession of the truth, and the keys to
    paradise, is tragic. Dogma is the enemy of human freedom. Dogma must be
    watched for and apprehended at every turn and twist of the revolutionary
    movement. The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt
    whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty
    that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside
    with cruelty, pain, and injustice.

-- Saul Alinsky, in his Rules for Radicals.
%
16 points Jayson_Virissimo 05 February 2014 04:36:11AM Permalink

    Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of
    magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see
    things clearly.

-- José Ortega y Gasset
%
16 points WalterL 03 February 2014 05:08:58PM Permalink

    You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all
    your art of war.

-- Napoleon Bonaparte
%
16 points MattG 10 March 2014 08:53:54PM Permalink

    Luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always
    easy to identify a small change in the story that would have turned a
    remarkable achievement into a mediocre outcome.

-- Daniel Kahneman
%
16 points Eugine_Nier 02 April 2014 01:10:14AM Permalink

    I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday
    because it is Thursday.

-- G. K. Chesterton, attributed.
%
16 points Tyrrell_McAllister 01 June 2014 08:33:14PM Permalink

    To know what questions may reasonably be asked is already a great and
    necessary proof of sagacity and insight. For if a question is absurd in
    itself and calls for an answer where none is required, it not only
    brings shame on the propounder of the question, but may betray an
    incautious listener into absurd answers, thus presenting, as the
    ancients said, the ludicrous spectacle of one man milking a he-goat and
    the other holding a sieve underneath.

-- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (trans. Norman Kemp Smith), p. A58/B82.
%
16 points seez 14 September 2014 01:33:40AM Permalink

A conversation between me and my 7-year-old cousin:

    Her: "do you believe in God?"

    Me: "I don't, do you?"

    Her: "I used to but, then I never really saw any proof, like miracles or
    good people getting saved from mean people and stuff. But I do believe
    in the Tooth Fairy, because every time I put a tooth under my pillow, I
    get money out in the morning."
%
16 points William_Quixote 04 December 2014 07:32:39PM Permalink

    There is a familiar phenomenon here, in which a certain kind of would-be
    economic expert loves to cite the supposed lessons of economic
    experiences that are in the distant past, and where we actually have
    only a faint grasp of what really happened. Harding 1921 “works” only
    because people don’t know much about it; you have to navigate through
    some fairly obscure sources to figure out [what actually happened]. And
    the same goes even more strongly - let’s say, XII times as strongly -
    when, say, [Name] starts telling us about the Emperor Diocletian. The
    point is that the vagueness of the information, and even more so what
    most people [think they] know about it, lets such people project their
    prejudices onto the past and then claim that they’re discussing the
    lessons of experience.

-- Paul Krugman, on the use of examples to obscure rather than clarify
%
16 points lukeprog 01 December 2014 11:27:14PM Permalink

    Rationalizations are more important than sex... Have you ever gone a
    week without a rationalization?

-- Jeff Goldblum's character in The Big Chill
%
15 points Cyan 17 February 2014 04:07:37PM Permalink

    Heaven and Earth are heartless

    treating creatures like straw dogs.

- Tao Te Ching

    Su Ch'e commentary on this verse explains: "Heaven and Earth are not
    partial. They do not kill living things out of cruelty or give them
    birth out of kindness. We do the same when we make straw dogs to use in
    sacrifices. We dress them up and put them on the altar, but not because
    we love them. And when the ceremony is over, we throw them into the
    street, but not because we hate them."

- Straw dog in Wikipedia
%
15 points elharo 07 February 2014 12:40:46PM Permalink

    For Popper (if not for some of his later admirers), falsifiability was
    not a crude bludgeon. Rather, it was the centerpiece of a
    richly-articulated worldview holding that millennia of human
    philosophical reflection had gotten it backwards: the question isn’t how
    to arrive at the Truth, but rather how to eliminate error. Which sounds
    kind of obvious, until I meet yet another person who rails to me about
    how empirical positivism can’t provide its own ultimate justification,
    and should therefore be replaced by the person’s favorite brand of
    cringe-inducing ugh.

-- Scott Aaaronson, Retiring falsifiability? A storm in Russell’s teacup
%
15 points James_Miller 01 March 2014 05:23:02PM Permalink

    If you're expecting the world to be fair with you because you are fair,
    you are fooling yourself. That's like expecting a lion not to eat you
    because you didn't eat him.

awesomequotes4u.com
%
15 points Jayson_Virissimo 05 April 2014 06:50:49AM Permalink

    ...the utility of a thought experiment is inversely proportional to the
    size of its departure from reality.

-- Daniel Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking
%
15 points jaime2000 01 April 2014 02:24:24PM Permalink

    There is an important difference between “We don’t know all the answers
    yet” and “Do what feels right, man.” These questions have answers,
    because humans have biochemistry, and we should do our best to find them
    and live by the results.

-- J. Stanton, The Paleo Identity Crisis: What Is The Paleo Diet, Anyway?
%
15 points Eugine_Nier 02 April 2014 01:21:46AM Permalink

    A BS detection Heuristic.

    You can tell if a discipline is BS if the degree depends severely on the
    prestige of the school granting it. I remember when I applied to MBA
    programs being told that anything outside the top 10 or 20 would be a
    waste of time. On the other hand a degree in mathematics is much less
    dependent on the school (conditional on being above a certain level, so
    the heuristic would apply to the differene betwewn top 10 and top 2000
    schools).

    The same applies to research papers. In math and physics, a result
    posted on arXiv (with a minimum hurdle) is fine. In low quality fields
    like academic finance (where almost all academics are charlatans and all
    papers some form of complicated storytelling), the "prestige" of the
    journal is the sole criterion.

-- Nassim Taleb
%
15 points James_Miller 04 August 2014 03:35:52AM Permalink

    Come back with your shield - or on it.

Our kind might not be able to cooperate, but the Spartans certainly could.
The Spartans were masters of hoplite phalanx warfare where often every
individual would have been better off running away but collectively everyone
was better off if none ran away than if all did. The above quote is what
Plutarch says Spartan mothers would tell their sons before battle. (Because
shields were heavy if you were going to run away you would drop it, and
coming back on your shield meant you were dead.) Spreading memes to overcome
collective action problems is civilization level rational.
%
15 points Jack_LaSota 09 September 2014 11:50:34PM Permalink

    My transformation begins with me getting tired of my own bullshit.

-- Skeletor is Love
%
15 points Mass_Driver 08 September 2014 09:37:47PM Permalink

    It seems to me that educated people should know something about the
    13-billion-year prehistory of our species and the basic laws governing
    the physical and living world, including our bodies and brains. They
    should grasp the timeline of human history from the dawn of agriculture
    to the present. They should be exposed to the diversity of human
    cultures, and the major systems of belief and value with which they have
    made sense of their lives. They should know about the formative events
    in human history, including the blunders we can hope not to repeat. They
    should understand the principles behind democratic governance and the
    rule of law. They should know how to appreciate works of fiction and art
    as sources of aesthetic pleasure and as impetuses to reflect on the
    human condition.

    On top of this knowledge, a liberal education should make certain habits
    of rationality second nature. Educated people should be able to express
    complex ideas in clear writing and speech. They should appreciate that
    objective knowledge is a precious commodity, and know how to distinguish
    vetted fact from superstition, rumor, and unexamined conventional
    wisdom. They should know how to reason logically and statistically,
    avoiding the fallacies and biases to which the untutored human mind is
    vulnerable. They should think causally rather than magically, and know
    what it takes to distinguish causation from correlation and coincidence.
    They should be acutely aware of human fallibility, most notably their
    own, and appreciate that people who disagree with them are not stupid or
    evil. Accordingly, they should appreciate the value of trying to change
    minds by persuasion rather than intimidation or demagoguery.

-- Steven Pinker, The New Republic 9/4/14
%
15 points James_Miller 02 September 2014 02:48:00PM Permalink

    A heuristic shouldn't be the "least wrong" among all possible rules; it
    should be the least harmful if wrong.

-- Nassim N. Taleb
%
15 points James_Miller 02 October 2014 12:31:25AM Permalink

    I want to say "live and let live" about non-scientific views. But, then
    I read about measles outbreaks in countries where vaccines are free.

-- Zach Weinersmith (Twitter)

Related:

    Rather than panicking about the single patient known to have Ebola in
    the US, protect yourself against a virus that kills up to 50,000
    Americans every year. It's the flu, and simply getting the shot
    dramatically reduces your chances of becoming ill.

-- Erin Brodwin Business Insider
%
15 points pgbh 14 November 2014 07:25:51AM Permalink

    I remember reading of a competition for a paper on resolution of
    singularities of surface; Castelnuovo and Enriques were in the
    committee. Beppo Levi presented his famous paper on the resolution of
    singularities for surfaces.

    Enriques asked him for a couple of examples and was convinced;
    Castelnuovo was not. The discussion got heated. Enriques exclaimed 'I am
    ready to cut off my head if this does not work', and Castelnuovo replied
    'I don't think that would prove it either.'

-- Angelo Vistoli, mathoverflow
%
15 points Grok_Narok 02 November 2014 02:27:52PM Permalink

    The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also
    to hate his friends.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche
%
15 points Vaniver 11 December 2014 07:13:11PM Permalink

    The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but
    in having new eyes.

-- Marcel Proust
%
14 points NancyLebovitz 27 January 2014 04:50:48PM Permalink

    No one ever said reality was going to be dignified.

-- Claire Dederer
%
14 points lukeprog 15 January 2014 01:22:48AM Permalink

    The bulk of available evidence suggests that people in all societies
    tend to be relatively rational when it comes to the beliefs and
    practices that directly involve their subsistence... The more remote
    these beliefs and practices are from subsistence activities, the more
    likely they are to involve nonrational characteristics.

-- Robert Edgerton
%
14 points Sniffnoy 09 January 2014 04:42:54AM Permalink

    It's good to learn from your failures, but I prefer to learn from the
    failures of others.

-- Jace Beleren
%
14 points CronoDAS 24 February 2014 12:07:59PM Permalink

    Now life is the only art that we are required to practice without
    preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the
    failures and botches, that are essential for the training of a mere
    beginner. In life, we must begin to give a public performance before we
    have acquired even a novice's skill; and often our moments of seeming
    mastery are upset by new demands, for which we have acquired no
    preparatory facility. Life is a score that we play at sight, not merely
    before we have divined the intentions of the composer, but even before
    we have mastered our instruments; even worse, a large part of the score
    has been only roughly indicated, and we must improvise the music for our
    particular instrument, over long passages. On these terms, the whole
    operation seems one of endless difficulty and frustration; and indeed,
    were it not for the fact that some of the passages have been played so
    often by our predecessors that, when we come to them, we seem to recall
    some of the score and can anticipate the natural sequence of the notes,
    we might often give up in sheer despair. The wonder is not that so much
    cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any
    appearance of harmony and progression.

-- Lewis Mumford, The Conduct of Life
%
14 points TsviBT 09 March 2014 05:08:18AM Permalink

    The secret of life is: This is not a drill.

-- Tom Stoppard, The Wise Man in Darkside
%
14 points Eugine_Nier 05 March 2014 02:55:41AM Permalink

    If everybody thinks you're crazy, they might have a point. But if nobody
    thinks you're crazy, you have surrendered to herd consensus and are
    being far too timid in what you allow yourself to think and say in
    public.

-- Eric Raymound
%
14 points johnlawrenceaspden 15 April 2014 11:43:31PM Permalink

    Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the
    human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the
    world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning
    is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only
    because it is supported by this much older and much more powerful,
    though usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge. We are all
    prodigious olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make
    the difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is a new trick,
    perhaps less than 100 thousand years old. We have not yet mastered it.
    It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so when we do
    it.

-- Hans Moravec, Wikipedia/Moravec's Paradox
%
14 points Larks 08 June 2014 05:49:12PM Permalink

    It is perplexing, but amusing to observe people getting extremely
    excited about things you don't care about; it is sinister to watch them
    ignore things you believe are fundamental.

-- Taleb, Aphorisms.
%
14 points shminux 18 July 2014 07:50:02PM Permalink

    Always train your doubt most strongly on those ideas that you really
    want to be true.

Sean Carroll in his blog post describing why it is a bit premature to
declare that Einstein's General Relativity has been experimentally proven to
be incomplete, even if it would be very exciting if so.
%
14 points Pablo_Stafforini 07 July 2014 06:15:08PM Permalink

    It takes […] what Berkeley calls a mind debauched by learning to carry
    the process of making the natural seem strange, so far as to ask for the
    why of any instinctive human act. To the metaphysician alone can such
    questions occur as: Why do we smile, when pleased, and not scowl? Why
    are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk to a single friend? Why does
    a particular maiden turn our wits so upside-down? The common man can
    only say, “Of course we smile, of course our heart palpitates at the
    sight of the crowd, of course we love the maiden, that beautiful soul
    clad in that perfect form, so palpably and flagrantly made from all
    eternity to be loved!”

-- William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, New York, 1890, pp. 386-387
%
14 points Torello 07 July 2014 04:13:59PM Permalink

    No matter how dissatisfied people are with the results they are getting,
    they rarely question their way of trying to get results. When what we
    are doing is not working, we do not try doing something totally
    different. Instead, we try harder by doing more of what seems
    self-evidently the right way to proceed.

-- Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand, p. 186 
%
14 points Skeptityke 07 July 2014 02:16:05AM Permalink

    It wasn’t easier, the ghost explains, you just knew how to do it.
    Sometimes the easiest method you know is the hardest method there is.

    It’s like… to someone who only knows how to dig with a spoon, the notion
    of digging something as large as a trench will terrify them. All they
    know are spoons, so as far as they’re concerned, digging is simply
    difficult. The only way they can imagine it getting any easier is if
    they change - digging with a spoon until they get stronger, faster, and
    tougher. And the dangerous people, they’ll actually try this.

-- Aggy, from Prequel.

On the importance of looking for more efficient ways to do things.
%
14 points shminux 26 August 2014 09:09:12PM Permalink

    is consciousness more like the weather, or is it more like multiplication?

-- Scott Aaronson

More context:

    a perfect simulation of the weather doesn’t make it rain - at least, not
    in our world. On the other hand, a perfect simulation of multiplying two
    numbers does multiply the numbers: there’s no difference at all between
    multiplication and a “simulation of multiplication.” Likewise, a perfect
    simulation of a good argument is a good argument, a perfect simulation
    of a sidesplitting joke is a sidesplitting joke, etc.

    Maybe the hardware substrate is relevant after all. But [...] I think
    the burden is firmly on those of us who suspect so, to explain what
    about the hardware matters and why. Post-Turing, no one gets to treat
    consciousness’s dependence on particular hardware as
    “obvious” - especially if they never even explain what it is about that
    hardware that makes a difference.

%
14 points Lumifer 12 September 2014 05:13:53PM Permalink

    It’s as if you went into a bathroom in a bar and saw a guy pissing on
    his shoes, and instead of thinking he has some problem with his aim, you
    suppose he has a positive utility for getting his shoes wet.

-- Andrew Gelman
%
14 points asd 10 September 2014 04:03:05PM Permalink

    When I visited Dieter Zeh and his group in Heidelberg in 1996, I was
    struck by how few accolades he’d gotten for his hugely important
    discovery of decoherence. Indeed, his curmudgeonly colleagues in the
    Heidelberg Physics Department had largely dismissed his work as too
    philosophical, even though their department was located on “Philosopher
    Street.” His group meetings had been moved to a church building, and I
    was astonished to learn that the only funding that he’d been able to get
    to write the first-ever book on decoherence came from the German
    Lutheran Church.

    This really drove home to me that Hugh Everett was no exception:
    studying the foundations of physics isn’t a recipe for glamour and fame.
    It’s more like art: the best reason to do it is because you love it.
    Only a small minority of my physics colleagues choose to work on the
    really big questions, and when I meet them, I feel a real kinship. I
    imagine that a group of friends who’ve passed up on lucrative career
    options to become poets might feel a similar bond, knowing that they’re
    all in it not for the money but for the intellectual adventure.

-- Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe, Chapter 8. The Level III
Multiverse, "The Joys of Getting Scooped"
%
14 points jimmy 02 November 2014 07:18:44PM Permalink

    The moment I realized that if I fall, that would probably be my end, I
    became really, really calm and detached. I picked up a good spot in the
    parking, with the back to the wall,, between 2 cars, and I moved there
    to meet them, all the time I was very focused to not get taken down and
    to take as many of them with me as possible. That was all I was
    thinking. In retrospect, I still think there were a decent amount of
    adrenalin circulating through my body, but in the moment I really felt
    zen and in complete control of myself.

    Now, I don't think that's the average reaction you can expect in a
    combat situation, nor do I think that so much control is needed. But
    I've been in other critical and stressful situations (like in the middle
    of a forest fire, or going up the ring to fight other guys in front of a
    few hundred people), and I think that it's not the prospect of death or
    getting hurt that are most stressing, is not knowing what to do

-- Bogdan M
%
13 points satt 06 January 2014 07:16:21PM Permalink

    I am so very good at what I do because I never really believe anything
    is going to work and I'm always looking for the ways the things I make
    will fail.

-- localroger
%
13 points spxtr 04 January 2014 10:00:19PM Permalink

    The most traditional way to begin a study of quantum mechanics is to
    follow the historical developments--Planck's radiation law, the
    Einstein-Debye theory of specific heats, the Bohr atom, de Broglie's
    matter waves, and so forth--together with careful analyses of some key
    experiments such as the Compton effect, the Frank-Hertz experiment, and
    the Davisson-Germer-Thompson experiment. In that way we may come to
    appreciate how the physicists in the first quarter of the twentieth
    century were forced to abandon, little by little, the cherished concepts
    of classical physics and how, despite earlier false starts and wrong
    turns, the masters--Heisenberg, Schrodinger, and Dirac, among
    others--finally succeeded in formulating quantum mechanics as we know it
    today.

    However, we do not follow the historical approach in this book. Instead,
    we start with an example that illustrates, perhaps more than any other
    example, the inadequacy of classical concepts in a fundamental way. We
    hope that by exposing the reader to a "shock treatment" at the onset, he
    or she may be attuned to what we might call the "quantum-mechanical way
    of thinking" at a very early stage.

-- J. J. Sakurai, Modern Quantum Mechanics, the standard graduate level
quantum textbook. Following this quote is a discussion of the Stern-Gerlach
experiment. I post this quote because it is in line with Quantum Explanations.
%
13 points Vaniver 03 February 2014 06:45:58PM Permalink

    But, while nothing can be done about the past, much can be done in the
    present to prepare for the future.

-- Thomas Sowell
%
13 points Eugine_Nier 07 February 2014 07:56:11AM Permalink

    I'm a big fan of the cognitive utility of the old phrase: "The exception
    that proves the rule." But then I'm kind of an exception in that regard,
    since anytime I mention I like that, I get deluged with logical and
    etymological objections.

    I merely mean that an exception that is famous for being exceptional
    suggests a general tendency in the opposite direction. The canonical
    example is that Beethoven's titanic fame as a deaf composer suggests
    that most composers aren't deaf, while, say, the lack of obsessive
    publicity about painter David Hockney's late onset deafness suggests
    that deafness isn't all that big of a deal, one way or another, to
    painters. Judging from the immortal fame of Beethoven's battle with
    deafness, we can assume that there aren't many deaf composers, while the
    ho-hum response to Hockney's deafness suggests that we can't make strong
    quantitative assumptions about painters and deafness.

-- Steve Sailor
%
13 points EGarrett 06 May 2014 04:39:52PM Permalink

    The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those
    who have not got it.
   
-- George Bernard Shaw
%
13 points James_Ernest 04 May 2014 06:18:56AM Permalink

    Real probabilities about the structure and properties of the cosmos, and
    its relation to living organisms on this planet, can be reach’d only by
    correlating the findings of all who have competently investigated both
    the subject itself, and our mental equipment for approaching and
    interpreting it - astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, biologists,
    psychologists, anthropologists, and so on. The only sensible method is
    that of assembling all the objective scientifick data of 1931, and
    forming a fresh chain of partial indications bas’d exclusively on that
    data and on no conceptions derived from earlier and less ample arrays of
    data; meanwhile testing, by the psychological knowledge of 1931, the
    workings and inclinations of our minds in accepting, connecting, and
    making deductions from data, and most particularly weeding out all
    tendencies to give more than equal consideration to conceptions which
    would never have occurred to us had we not formerly harboured
    provisional and capricious ideas of the universe now conclusively known
    to be false. It goes without saying that this realistic principle fully
    allows for the examination of those irrational feelings and wishes about
    the universe, upon which idealists so amusingly base their various
    dogmatick speculations.

-- H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 1932-1934.
%
13 points grendelkhan 18 August 2014 06:45:56PM Permalink

    Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all -- no one's around
    to write horror stories.

-- Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep
%
13 points Iydak 13 August 2014 11:57:54AM Permalink

    We try things. Occasionally they even work.

-- Parson Gotti
%
13 points johnlawrenceaspden 04 October 2014 12:05:52PM Permalink

    To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn
    old falsehoods

-- Robert Heinlein (http://tmaas.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/robert-heinlein-quotes.html)
%
13 points Torello 02 October 2014 01:22:37AM Permalink

    Put simply, the truth about all those good decisions you plan to make
    sometime in the future, when things are easier, is that you probably
    won't make them once that future rolls around and things are tough
    again.

-- Sendhil Mullaainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity, p. 215
%
13 points VAuroch 11 November 2014 07:02:01AM Permalink

Lampshading mysterious answers:

    The door was the way to... to... The Door was The Way. Good. Capital
    letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have
    a good answer to.

-- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams
%
13 points Unnamed 01 November 2014 09:52:00PM Permalink

    It is a sound maxim, and one which all close thinkers have felt, but
    which no one before Bentham ever so consistently applied, that error
    lurks in generalities: that the human mind is not capable of embracing a
    complex whole, until it has surveyed and catalogued the parts of which
    that whole is made up; that abstractions are not realities per se, but
    an abridged mode of expressing facts, and that the only practical mode
    of dealing with them is to trace them back to the facts (whether of
    experience or of consciousness) of which they are the expression.

    Proceeding on this principle, Bentham makes short work with the ordinary
    modes of moral and political reasoning. These, it appeared to him, when
    hunted to their source, for the most part terminated in phrases. In
    politics, liberty, social order, constitution, law of nature, social
    compact, c., were the catch-words: ethics had its analogous ones. Such
    were the arguments on which the gravest questions of morality and policy
    were made to turn; not reasons, but allusions to reasons; sacramental
    expressions, by which a summary appeal was made to some general
    sentiment of mankind, or to some maxim in familiar use, which might be
    true or not, but the limitations of which no one had ever critically
    examined.

    [...]

    It is the introduction into the philosophy of human conduct, of this
    method of detail-of this practice of never reasoning about wholes until
    they have been resolved into their parts, nor about abstractions until
    they have been translated into realities-that constitutes the
    originality of Bentham in philosophy, and makes him the great reformer
    of the moral and political branch of it.

    [...]

    Instead of taking up their opinions by intuition, or by ratiocination
    from premises adopted on a mere rough view, and couched in language so
    vague that it is impossible to say exactly whether they are true or
    false, philosophers are now forced to understand one another, to break
    down the generality of their propositions, and join a precise issue in
    every dispute.

    John Stuart Mill, "Bentham", on reductionism and rationalist taboo 

%
13 points Jay_Schweikert 18 December 2014 05:02:23AM Permalink

    It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation, For fear they
    should succumb and go astray; So when you are requested to pay up or be
    molested, You will find it better policy to say: --

    "We never pay any-one Dane-geld, No matter how trifling the cost; For
    the end of that game is oppression and shame, And the nation that pays
    it is lost!"

-- Rudyard Kipling, "Dane-Geld"

A nice reminder about the value of one-boxing, especially in light of
current events.
%
13 points NancyLebovitz 17 December 2014 10:00:43PM Permalink

    Where you are going to spend your time and your energy is one of the
    most important decisions you get to make in life.

-- Jeff Bezos
%
12 points Stabilizer 14 January 2014 08:33:01PM Permalink

    As we saw, the E1A team [at Fermilab] found for some time that there
    were no neutral currents---they wrote letters saying so, even drafting a
    paper to that effect. By late 1973 they had a great deal riding on that
    claim. A consensus that neutral currents did not exist would have
    vindicated their earlier caution; they would have refuted CERN and
    denied the Europeans priority. For all these reasons it is stunning to
    reread Cline’s [a leading member of E1A] memorandum of 10 December 1973
    that began with the simple statement, “At present, I do not see how to
    make this effect go away.” With those words Cline gave up his
    career-long commitment to the nonexistence of neutral currents.
    “Interest” had to bow to the linked assemblage of ideas and empirical
    results that rendered the old beliefs untenable, even if they were still
    “logically possible”.

    [...]

    Microphysical phenomena [...] are not simply observed; they are mediated
    by layers of experience, theory and causal stories that link background
    effects to their tests. But the mediated quality of effects and entities
    does not necessarily make them pliable; experimental conclusions have a
    stubbornness not easily canceled by theory change. And it is this
    solidity in the face of altering conditions that impresses the
    experimenters themselves---even when theorists dissent.

-- Peter Galison, How Experiments End.

A major concept he introduces in this chapter is the stubbornness of
empirical reality.
%
12 points TheAncientGeek 06 January 2014 08:49:52PM Permalink

    Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also how to unknow.

-- Sir Richard Francis Burton.
%
12 points Jayson_Virissimo 20 March 2014 08:31:28PM Permalink

    For men imagine that their reason governs words, while, in fact, words
    react upon the understanding; and this has rendered philosophy and the
    sciences sophistical and inactive. Words are generally formed in a
    popular sense, and define things by those broad lines which are most
    obvious to the vulgar mind; but when a more acute understanding or more
    diligent observation is anxious to vary those lines, and to adapt them
    more accurately to nature, words oppose it. Hence the great and solemn
    disputes of learned men often terminate in controversies about words and
    names...

-- Francis Bacon, Novum Organum
%
12 points Dagon 17 April 2014 03:39:25PM Permalink

    But understanding human limitations does not mean we can overcome them.
    It only means we can’t pretend they don’t exist. It should point us
    toward humility, not hubris.

--Yuval Levin, in the National Review
%
12 points lukeprog 09 April 2014 02:02:46AM Permalink

    There is nothing that can be said by mathematical symbols and relations
    which cannot also be said by words. The converse, however, is false.
    Much that can be and is said by words cannot be put into equations -
    because it is nonsense.

-- Clifford Truesdell
%
12 points TobyBartels 12 May 2014 02:57:38AM Permalink

    Don't just tell me what you'd like to be true.

This is from Greg Egan's 1999 novel Teranesia; since there are no hits for
‘Teranesia’ in the Google custom search, I'm inferring that it hasn't been
posted before.

Here's a little background. This is a spoiler for some events early in the
novel, but it is early; it's not a spoiler for the really big stuff (not
even in this chapter). So Prabir lives alone with his father (‘Baba’) and
mother (and baby sister Madhusree who is not in this scene), and their
garden has been sown with mines for some very interesting reasons that
needn't concern us, and Baba has discovered this by being blown up by one.
But he's still alive, so mother and Prabir have laid a ladder atop some
boxes across the garden, and she's crawled along the ladder to rescue Baba
without setting off more mines. But this is harder than anticipated.

    She turned to Prabir. “I'm going to try sitting down, so I can get Baba
    on to the ladder. But then I might not be able to stand up with him, to
    carry him. If I leave him on the ladder and walk back to my end, do you
    think the two of us could carry the ladder to the side of the garden
    with Baba on it-like a stretcher?”

    Prabir replied instantly, “Yes, we can do it.”

    His mother looked away, angry for a moment. She said, “I want you to
    think about it. Don't just tell me what you'd like to be true.”

    Chastened, Prabir obeyed her. Half his father's weight. More than twice
    as much as Madhusree's. He believed he was strong enough. But if he was
    fooling himself, and dropped the ladder …

    He said, “I'm not sure how far I could carry him without resting. But I
    could slide the crate along the ground with me-kick it along with one
    foot. Then if I had to stop, I could rest the ladder on it.”

    His mother considered this. “All right. That's what we'll do.” She shot
    him a half-smile, shorthand for all the reassuring words that would have
    taken too long to speak.

(taken from the American hardback edition, pages 5051)

[Edit: grammar in the text written by me]
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12 points Jayson_Virissimo 16 July 2014 08:21:17PM Permalink

    What is the first business of one who practices philosophy? To get rid
    of self-conceit. For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that
    which he thinks he already knows.

-- Epictetus, Discourses
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12 points EGarrett 20 July 2014 06:16:31PM Permalink

    One of the most important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand
    described as 'that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you're right.'
    If you don't have that, if you think you've got an inside track to
    absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually
    constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by
    such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions
    of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide.

-- Saul Alinsky
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12 points Azathoth123 18 September 2014 05:10:18AM Permalink

    Yet none of these sights [of the Scottish Highlands] had power, till a
    recent period, to attract a single poet or painter from more opulent and
    more tranquil regions. Indeed, law and police, trade and industry, have
    done far more than people of romantic dispositions will readily admit,
    to develope in our minds a sense of the wilder beauties of nature. A
    traveller must be freed from all apprehension of being murdered or
    starved before he can be charmed by the bold outlines and rich tints of
    the hills. He is not likely to be thrown into ecstasies by the
    abruptness of a precipice from which he is in imminent danger of falling
    two thousand feet perpendicular; by the boiling waves of a torrent which
    suddenly whirls away his baggage and forces him to run for his life; by
    the gloomy grandeur of a pass where he finds a corpse which marauders
    have just stripped and mangled; or by the screams of those eagles whose
    next meal may probably be on his own eyes.

-- Thomas Babington Macaulay, History of England

Frankly, the whole passage Steve Sailer quotes at the link is worth reading.
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12 points Zubon 03 September 2014 10:43:35PM Permalink

    "You sound awfully sure of yourself, Waterhouse! I wonder if you can get
    me to feel that same level of confidence."

    Waterhouse frowns at the coffee mug. "Well, it's all math," he says. "If
    the math works, why then you should be sure of yourself. That's the
    whole point of math."

-- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon 
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12 points Vulture 02 September 2014 04:26:30PM Permalink

    People who are often misunderstood: 6% geniuses; 94% garden-variety
    nonsense-spouters

-- David Malki !
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12 points Lumifer 17 October 2014 04:12:43PM Permalink

    You know, esoteric, non-intuitive truths have a certain appeal - once
    initiated, you’re no longer one of the rubes. Of course, the simplest
    and most common way of producing an esoteric truth is to just make it
    up.

-- West Hunter
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12 points James_Miller 14 October 2014 02:42:01PM Permalink

    To summarize Twitter and my Facebook feed this morning: “The Ebola virus
    proves everything I already believed about politics.” You might find
    this surprising. The Ebola virus is not running for office. It does not
    have a policy platform, or any campaign white papers on burning issues.
    It doesn’t even vote. So how could it neatly validate all our
    preconceived positions on government spending, immigration policy, and
    the proper role of the state in our health care system? Stranger still:
    How could it validate them so beautifully on both left and right?

-- Megan McArdle
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12 points LyleN 20 November 2014 02:59:00PM Permalink

    With the truth, all given facts harmonize; but with what is false, the
    truth soon hits a wrong note.

-- Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics, pointing out entangled truths and
contagious lies
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12 points Salemicus 09 December 2014 01:58:44PM Permalink

    Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense.

-- Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, Reflections on Exile
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11 points katydee 04 February 2014 07:50:26AM Permalink

    The most important thing in life is to be free to do things. There are
    only two ways to insure that freedom - you can be rich or you can you
    reduce your needs to zero.

-- Colonel John Boyd
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11 points CasioTheSane 27 March 2014 10:32:55PM Permalink

    Don't you think it would be a useful item to add to your intellectual
    toolkits to be capable of saying, when a ton of wet steaming bullshit
    lands on your head, 'My goodness, this appears to be bullshit'?

-- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
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11 points MichaelHoward 15 March 2014 02:13:44AM Permalink

    How many things apparently impossible have nevertheless been performed
    by resolute men who had no alternative but death.

-- Napoleon Bonaparte.
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11 points Ixiel 14 April 2014 03:37:41PM Permalink

    If the best minds were in charge of designing a bridge, I would expect
    the bridge to hold up well even in a storm. If the best minds were in
    charge of designing an airplane, I would expect it to fly reliably. But
    if the best minds were in charge of something no one really knows how to
    do, I would be ready for a failure, albeit a failure with superb
    academic credentials.

-- Terry Coxon
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11 points Eugine_Nier 01 May 2014 11:21:22PM Permalink

    People are surely better off with the truth. Oddly enough, everyone
    agrees with this when it comes to the arts. Sophisticated people sneer
    at feel-good comedies and saccharine romances in which everyone lives
    happily ever after. But when it comes to science, these same people say,
    "Give us schmaltz!" They expect the science of human beings to be a
    source of emotional uplift and inspirational sermonizing.

-- Steven Pinker
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11 points Nornagest 21 June 2014 11:58:50PM Permalink

Relevant to bounded cognition and consequentialism:

    It is better to be just than to be kind, but only good judges can be
    just; let those who cannot be just be kind.

-- Gene Wolfe, The Citadel of the Autarch, Loyal to the Group of Seventeen
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11 points Stabilizer 04 August 2014 11:24:33PM Permalink

    Most of the time what we do is what we do most of the time.

-- Daniel Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School

The point is that, quite often the reason we're doing something is that
that's what we're used to doing in that situation.

Note: He attributes the quote to some other psychologists.
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11 points BenSix 07 October 2014 09:12:09PM Permalink

    Nobody supposes that the knowledge that belongs to a good cook is
    confined to what is or may be written down in a cookery book.

-- Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics
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11 points tjohnson314 17 December 2014 01:02:59AM Permalink

    You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than
    about 10^12 to 1 against.

-- Ernest Rutherford

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11 points Robin 07 December 2014 11:55:40PM Permalink

    As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a
    philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a
    conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously
    logical deliberation-or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of
    unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined
    contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and
    fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious
    into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight:
    self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings
    should have grown.

-- Ayn Rand
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10 points lukeprog 15 January 2014 01:19:06AM Permalink

    For it seemed to me that I could find much more truth in the reasonings
    that each person makes concerning matters that are important to him, and
    whose outcome ought to cost him dearly later on if he judged badly, than
    in those reasonings engaged in by a man of letters in his study, which
    touch on speculations that produce no effect and are of no other
    consequence to him except perhaps that, the more they are removed from
    common sense, the more pride he will take in them.

-- Rene Descartes
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10 points Lumifer 15 January 2014 08:57:25PM Permalink

I'd like to offer a link to a blog post that looks very very rational to me.
Though not in the usual-to-LW sense.

It starts like this:

    One of the most consistent messages I offer here is about interactions
    with law enforcement, and can be expressed in two words - shut up -
    although "oh you dumb son of a bitch will you for the love of God shut
    up" might capture the flavor better.
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10 points MattG 10 March 2014 08:55:04PM Permalink

    Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability
    to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.

-- Daniel Kahneman
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10 points Eugine_Nier 01 March 2014 06:54:55PM Permalink

    As the marijuana legalization movement strengthens, you can see hints of
    how hard it is to hit the libertarian sweet spot where something is
    simultaneously legalized but remains rare and distasteful. People,
    especially young people, pick up messages from society about what is
    winning and what is losing more than they pick up nuanced messages.
    Smoking tobacco is losing so it seems reasonable to ban smoking it even
    in your own car while driving through a brushfire zone. Smoking
    marijuana is winning, so it doesn't seem like the ban on smoking in
    Laurel Canyon applies to dope.

-- Steve Sailer
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10 points johnlawrenceaspden 05 April 2014 12:49:12AM Permalink

    I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory
    perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz., telepathy,
    clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. These disturbing phenomena
    seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to
    discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for
    telepathy, is overwhelming.

-- Alan Turing (from "Computing Machinery and Intelligence")
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10 points timujin 18 May 2014 08:29:07AM Permalink

    All witches are selfish, the Queen had said. But Tiffany’s Third
    Thoughts said: Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things
    yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save
    them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away
    the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare
    you try to take these things, because they are mine! I have a duty!

-- Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men (Discworld, #30)
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10 points Jayson_Virissimo 17 June 2014 06:37:24AM Permalink

    The irony of commitment is that it’s deeply liberating - in work, in
    play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal
    critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around
    like rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the
    barrier to your life.

-- Anne Morris
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10 points LizzardWizzard 27 June 2014 10:33:42AM Permalink

    Three Bayesians walk into a bar:
    a) what's the probability that this is a joke?
    b) what's the probability that one of the three is a Rabbi?
    c) given that one of the three is a Rabbi, what's the probability that
    this is a joke?

According to the base rate there is an evidence that this is a joke about
Russia national team or Suarez bite
%
10 points B_For_Bandana 07 July 2014 05:33:42PM Permalink

    In times like these I really have to wonder why it's never (or at least
    rarely, to my eye) stressed that self-awareness is probably the single
    most important component of a healthy life. We're constantly handed very
    specific definitions of good behavior, complex moral and legal codes,
    questionable social constructs, and so on. I don't remember ever really
    being told to take a step back--to step back as far as possible--and
    look constructively at myself. But increasingly I feel that the only
    dividing line between being "that guy" and being a net positive to those
    around you comes out of being able to look at yourself critically and
    build constructively.

    Maybe I'm oversimplifying or assuming that introspection is simple. But
    for every ten groups explaining religious ideology to me, or telling me
    why their political candidate is best, I wish one would have told me to
    get out of my own head as much as possible.

-- Metafilter comment by user Phyltre
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10 points dspeyer 07 July 2014 09:26:08PM Permalink

    Perhaps we should do what Aristotle meant to do, instead of what he did.
    The goal he announces in the Metaphysics seems one worth pursuing: to
    discover the most general truths. That sounds good. But instead of
    trying to discover them because they're useless, let's try to discover
    them because they're useful.

-- Paul Graham
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10 points Ixiel 19 August 2014 12:55:58AM Permalink

    Most of the time he asked questions. His questions were very good, and
    if you tried to answer them intelligently, you found yourself saying
    excellent things that you did not know you knew, and that you had not,
    in fact, known before. He had "educed" them from you by his question.
    His classes were literally "education" - they brought things out of you,
    they made your mind produce its own explicit ideas.

-- Thomas Merton, about professor Mark Van Doren
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10 points Benito 04 August 2014 09:58:03AM Permalink

    A good argument is like a piece of technology. Few of us will ever
    invent a new piece of technology, and on any given day it’s unlikely
    that we’ll adopt one. Nevertheless, the world we inhabit is defined by
    technological change. Likewise, I believe that the world we inhabit is a
    product of good moral arguments. It’s hard to catch someone in the midst
    of reasoned moral persuasion, and harder still to observe the genesis of
    a good argument. But I believe that without our capacity for moral
    reasoning, the world would be a very different place.

-- Joshua Greene, “Moral Tribes”, Endnotes
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10 points Jack_LaSota 07 September 2014 05:01:06PM Permalink

    Katara: Do you think we'll really find airbenders?

    Sokka: You want me to be like you, or totally honest?

    Katara: Are you saying I'm a liar?

    Sokka: I'm saying you're an optimist. Same thing, basically.

-- Avatar: The Last Airbender
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10 points bbleeker 04 October 2014 09:10:19AM Permalink

    What we assume to be 'normal consciousness' is comparatively rare, it's
    like the light in the refrigerator: when you look in, there you are ON
    but what's happening when you don't look in?

-- Keith Johnstone, Impro - Improvisation and the Theatre
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10 points shminux 03 October 2014 09:53:10PM Permalink

    The words out of your mouth will literally be ignored, misheard, or even
    contorted to the opposite of what they mean, if that’s what it takes to
    preserve the listener’s misconception

-- Scott Aaronson on why quantum computers don't speed up computations by
parallelism, a popular misconception.
%
10 points alex_zag_al 01 November 2014 09:19:28PM Permalink

Colin Howson, talking about how Cox's theorem bears the mark of Cox's training as a physicist (source):

    An alternative approach is to start immediately with a quantitative
    notion and think of general principles that any acceptable numerical
    measure of uncertainty should obey. R.T. Cox and I.J. Good, working
    independently in the mid nineteen-forties, showed how strikingly little
    in the way of constraints on a numerical measure yield the finitely
    additive probability functions as canonical representations. It is not
    just the generality of the assumptions that makes the Cox-Good result so
    significant: unlike some of those which have to be imposed on a
    qualitative probability ordering, the assumptions used by Cox and to a
    somewhat lesser extent Good seem to have the property of being uniformly
    self-evidently analytic principles of numerical epistemic probability
    whatever particular scale it might be measured in. Cox was a working
    physicist and his point of departure was a typical one: to look for
    invariant principles:

        To consider first ... what principles of probable inference will
        hold however probability is measured. Such principles, if there are
        any, will play in the theory of probable inference a part like that
        of Carnot’s principle in thermodynamics, which holds for all
        possible scales of temperature, or like the parts played in
        mechanics by the equations of Lagrange and Hamilton, which have the
        same form no matter what system of coordinates is used in the
        description of motion. [Cox 1961]
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10 points James_Miller 02 November 2014 12:48:54AM Permalink

    This conclusory invocation to "science" w/o reference to any study is an
    IQ test for the American intelligentsia.

-- Joel S. Gehrke, Sr. on Twitter referencing American Ebola policy and fears.
%
10 points aarongertler 17 November 2014 05:26:01PM Permalink

    Teacher: So if you could live to be any age you like, what would it be?

    Boy 2: Infinity.

    Teacher: Infinity, you would live for ever? Why would you like to live
             for ever?

    Boy 2: Because you just know a lot of people and make lots of new
           friends because you could travel to lots of countries and
           everything and meet loads of new animals and everything.

-- Until (documentary)

http://mosaicscience.com/extra/until-transcript
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10 points [deleted] 03 November 2014 09:03:34AM Permalink

    More US citizens have married Kim Kardashian than have died of Ebola.

-- a member of the scientific collaboration I'm in.
%
10 points elharo 09 December 2014 12:30:01PM Permalink

    We're similarly shocked whenever authority figures who are supposed to
    know what they're doing make it plain that they don't, President Obama's
    healthcare launch being probably the most serious recent example. We
    shouldn't really be shocked, though. Because all these stories
    illustrate one of the most fundamental yet still under-appreciated
    truths of human existence, which is this: everyone is totally just
    winging it, all the time.

    Institutions - from national newspapers to governments and politicial
    parties - invest an enormous amount of money and effort in denying this
    truth. The facades they maintain are crucial to their authority, and
    thus to their legitimacy and continued survival. We need them to appear
    ultra-competent, too, because we derive much psychological security from
    the belief that somewhere, in the highest echelons of society, there are
    some near-infallible adults in charge.

    In fact, though, everyone is totally just winging it.

-- Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, May 21, 2014