Former LWDC organizer. Hikikomori. Trans woman—she/her or ze/zir pronouns.
RobinZ
Karma: 6,693
Took it—I hadn’t taken an IQ test before, and I found it interesting (and, for the final few questions, quite difficult).
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.)
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 Philosopher’s Magazine
I disagree, in fact. That books strengthen the mind is baldly asserted, not supported, by this quote—the rationality point I see in it is related to comparative advantage.
Reminds me of the bit in “Cargo Cult Science” by Richard Feynman:
Other kinds of errors are more characteristic of poor science. 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.
This may amuse some of us: anyone remember the pilot of House)?
Rebecca Adler: I just want to die with a little dignity.
Dr. House: There’s no such thing! Our bodies break down, sometimes when we’re 90, sometimes before we’re even born, but it always happens and there’s never any dignity in it. I don’t care if you can walk, see, wipe your own ass. It’s always ugly—always! We can live with dignity—we can’t die with it.
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
Completed survey less annoying question that required using an annoying scanner that makes annoying noises (I am feeling annoyed). Almost skipped it, but realized that the attitudes of ex-website-regulars might be of interest.
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.
There’s a better counterargument than that in Tetlock—one of the data points he collected was from a group of university undergraduates, and they did worse than the worst experts, worse than blind chance. Thinking for yourself is the worst option Tetlock considered.
[I]n my opinion nothing occurs contrary to nature except the impossible, and that never occurs.
-- Sagredo, “Two New Sciences” (1914 translation), Galileo Galilei
I apologize for responding to this where you are highly unlikely to see … but you seem to be missing an essential point. It is not necessary to understand science to do science any more than it is necessary to understand control theory to balance on one leg. What is disappointing is that even the population of scientists—who would appear the most likely to understand science—make errors that demonstrate that they do not.
Even so, we rationalists ought not to be deterred from improving our minds by their failure to. That would be an improper use of humility.
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”.
Spain is more Middle-Eastern than France and France was on the European front of both World Wars, so France. I can see your point, though.
Rereading this article from Emile’s link:
I think my major problem with this article is that the perfectly reasonable conclusion—that you can’t do better in the future today by thinking today’s cached thoughts about how people in the past could have done better in the future of the past—is obscured by the utterly ridiculous device of the eponymous chronophone.
To elaborate: If you analyze the question, “how did people in the past figure out that ideas are tested by experiment?”, then you can immediately rule out “by asking how people at their own time evaluated ideas”. And indeed, generalizing to “how did people in the past become smarter than their contemporaries—i.e. better at solving their problems?”, you see that it is trivially true that you can’t count on the standardized thinking of the present to take you beyond the standardized thinking of the present.
But if you analyze the question, “what do you say into the chronophone to convince Archimedes?”, you come up with “this thing couldn’t possibly work—there is no way to draw a unique relation between rationalizations of current and past ideas, so it fails sci-fi”. Which has nothing to do with anything.
Not to mention the remarks of Mark Twain on a fundraiser he attended once:
Well, Hawley worked me up to a great state. I couldn’t wait for him to get through [his speech]. I had four hundred dollars in my pocket. I wanted to give that and borrow more to give. You could see greenbacks in every eye. But he didn’t pass the plate, and it grew hotter and we grew sleepier. My enthusiasm went down, down, down - $100 at a time, till finally when the plate came round I stole 10 cents out of it. [Prolonged laughter.] So you see a neglect like that may lead to crime.
Arlene died a few hours after I got there. A nurse came in to fill out the death certificate, and went out again. I spent a little more time with my wife. Then I looked at the clock I had given her seven years before, when she had first become sick with tuberculosis. It was something which in those days was very nice: a digital clock whose numbers would change by turning around mechanically. The clock was very delicate and often stopped for one reason or another—I had to repair it from time to time—but I kept it going for all those years. Now, it had stopped once more—at 9:22, the time on the death certificate!
I remembered the time I was in my fraternity house at MIT when the idea came into my head completely out of the blue that my grandmother was dead. Right after that there was a telephone call, just like that. It was for Pete Bernays—my grandmother wasn’t dead. So I remembered that, in case somebody told me a story that ended the other way. I figured that such things can sometimes happen by luck—after all, my grandmother was very old—although people might think they happened by some sort of supernatural phenomenon.
Arlene had kept this clock by her bedside all the time she was sick, and now it stopped the moment she died. I can understand how a person who half believes in the possibility of such things, and who hasn’t got a doubting mind—especially in a circumstance like that—doesn’t immediately try to figure out what happened, but instead explains that no one touched the clock, and there was no possibility of explanation by normal phenomena. The clock simply stopped. It would become a dramatic example of these fantastic phenomena.
I saw that the light in the room was low, and then I remembered that the nurse had picked up the clock and turned it toward the light to see the face better. That could easily have stopped it.
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, “Los Alamos from Below” (third chapter of Part 3)
Eliezer Omegas on Newcomb’s problem.
What reason do you have for assigning such high probability to time travel being possible?
Karma balance to baby-vs-bunny poll.