Censused!
aausch
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
“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)
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
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
“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
“Things are not as they seem. They are what they are.” ― Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
I (unfortunately) keep misreading “Shut up and multiply” to instead say “Shut up and procreate”, to significant humorous (at least to me) effect.
- 2 Dec 2010 6:47 UTC; 3 points) 's comment on Circular Altruism by (
Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
-- Gautama Buddha
- 12 Apr 2010 5:11 UTC; 1 point) 's comment on Rationality Quotes: February 2010 by (
Our brains are closest to being sane and functioning rationally at a conscious level near our birth (or maybe earlier). Early childhood behaviour is clear evidence for such.
“Neurons” and “brains” are damaged/mutated results of a mutated “space-virus”, or equivalent. All of our individual actions and collective behaviours are biased in externally obvious but not visible to us ways, optimizing for:
terraforming the planet in expectation of invasion (ie, global warming, high CO2 pollution)
spreading the virus into space, with a built in bias for spreading away from our origin (voyager’s direction)
Margaret Mead made a world-wide reputation for herself with her book Coming of Age in Samoa. After visiting the island of Samoa and talking to some teenage girls, she came away convinced that the Puritanism of the American sexual code was cultural artifact. In Samoa, by contrast, sex was freely practiced, with little attention to any niceties. Unfortunately, she was wrong about this, as we learned almost a half a century later, when Derek Freeman, who actually spoke Samoan, went to Samoa and interviewed the now grown women who had been interviewed by Margaret Mead many years earlier. He discovered that they had been putting her on. Decency and sexual restraint were as important to Samoans as to Americans.
James Q. Wilson, Moral Intuitions
‘Nash equilibrium strategy’ is not necessarily synonymous to ‘optimal play’. A Nash equilibrium can define an optimum, but only as a defensive strategy against stiff competition. More specifically: Nash equilibria are hardly ever maximally exploitive. A Nash equilibrium strategy guards against any possible competition including the fiercest, and thereby tends to fail taking advantage of sub-optimum strategies followed by competitors. Achieving maximally exploitive play generally requires deviating from the Nash strategy, and allowing for defensive leaks in ones own strategy. -- Johannes Koelman
I believe the video you were looking for is here:
[censored the link on account of comment below]
http://www. yachigusaryu. com/blog/2007/02/no-touch-knockout-fraud-exposed.html
High status people tend to be significantly busier, and their attention is faced with consistently higher demands. As such, they have developed much more complicated filters to remove distractions, which you will have to navigate before you can have an intelligent conversation with them.
...well, in advance of the lottery actually running, we can perhaps all agree that it is a good idea to give the selectees drugs that will induce extra courage, and shoot them if they run away.
I’ve set my line of retreat at a much higher extreme. I expect humans trained in rationality, when faced with a situation where they must abandon their rationality in order to win, to abandon their rationality. If the most effective way to produce a winning army is to irreversibly alter the brains of soldiers to become barbarians, the pre-lottery agreement, for me, would include that process (say brain washing, drugging and computer implants), as well as appropriate ways to pacify the army once the war has been completed.
I expect a rational society, when faced with the inevitability of war, would pick the most efficient way to pound the enemy into dust, and go as far as this, if required.
Caveats: I don’t actually expect anything this extreme would be required for winning most wars. I have a nagging doubt, that it may not be possible to form a society of humans which is at the same time both rational, and willing to go to such an extreme.
“Update: many people have read this post and suggested that, in the first file example, you should use the much simpler protocol of copying the file to modified to a temp file, modifying the temp file, and then renaming the temp file to overwrite the original file. In fact, that’s probably the most common comment I’ve gotten on this post. If you think this solves the problem, I’m going to ask you to pause for five seconds and consider the problems this might have. (...) The fact that so many people thought that this was a simple solution to the problem demonstrates that this problem is one that people are prone to underestimating, even they’re explicitly warned that people tend to underestimate this problem!” -- @danluu, “Files are hard”
[in the context of creatively solving a programming problem]
“You will be wrong. You’re going to think of better ideas. … The facts change. … When the facts change, do not dig in. Do it over again. See if your answer is still valid in light of the new requirements, the new facts. And if it isn’t, change your mind, and don’t apologize.”
-- Rich Hickey
(note that, in context, he tries to differentiate between reasoning with incomplete information, which you don’t need to apologize for—just change your mind and move on—and genuine mistakes or errors)
Exercise: Dancing
Single/Partnered dancing lessons. Increase body awareness and consciousness of body language signs, both emitted and received. Practice basic skills that can lead to other benefits—confidences speaking with strangers, and hugging at meet-ups.
I am not looking for intelligent disagreement any longer.… What I am looking for is intelligent agreement. ~ Ayn Rand
- 10 Apr 2012 3:03 UTC; 0 points) 's comment on In Defense of Ayn Rand by (
-- David Foster Wallace