Tesseract

Meta: Clean­ing the front page

• Tesseract 3 Dec 2010 9:21 UTC

  58 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes: De­cem­ber 2010

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

  G.K. Chesterton

  What links here?

  • DanielVarga's comment on Best of Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes, 2011 Edition by DanielVarga (30 Dec 2011 12:25 UTC; 7 points)

Judg­ment Un­der Uncer­tainty sum­maries, Part 1: Representativeness

• Tesseract 3 Jul 2011 4:19 UTC

  41 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes July 2011

  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

• Tesseract 3 Jul 2011 4:42 UTC

  38 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes July 2011

  Sometimes, apparently rational self-interested strategies turn out (as in the prisoners’ dilemma) to be self-defeating. This may look like a defeat for rationality, but it is not. Rationality is saved by its own open-endedness. If a strategy of following accepted rules of rationality is sometimes self-defeating, this is not the end. We revise the rules to take account of this, so producing a higher-order rationality strategy. This in turn may fail, but again we go up a level. At whatever level we fail, there is always the process of standing back and going up a further level.

  Quoted in The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker

The Truth about Scots­men, or: Dis­solv­ing Fallacies

• Tesseract 3 Jul 2011 4:25 UTC

  37 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes July 2011

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

  Mark Twain

• Tesseract 1 Feb 2012 19:53 UTC

  34 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Fe­bru­ary 2012

  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

• Tesseract 1 Sep 2011 20:48 UTC

  34 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Septem­ber 2011

  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

• Tesseract 2 May 2011 4:49 UTC

  32 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes: May 2011

  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

• Tesseract 27 Jul 2011 22:31 UTC

  30 points

  on: New Post ver­sion 2 (please read this ONLY if your last name be­ings with l–z)

  Downvoted.

  It’s interesting and potentially useful, and I liked some of the links; however, I felt seriously skeeved-out throughout, probably due to the combination of uncomfortably personal authorial bildungsroman (with connotations of “if you do this right, you can be just like me”), and the implied promotion of polyamory. Would work much better if you could remove the autobiographical aspects.

  What links here?

  • lukeprog's comment on Polyhacking by Alicorn (29 Aug 2011 0:45 UTC; 51 points)
  • Ra­tion­al­ity and Relationships by lukeprog (8 Aug 2011 4:02 UTC; 18 points)
  • RobertLumley's comment on New Post ver­sion 2 (please read this ONLY if your last name be­ings with l–z) by lukeprog (1 Aug 2011 18:01 UTC; 2 points)

• Tesseract 5 Jan 2011 16:28 UTC

  30 points

  in reply to: shokwave’s comment on: The Ne­glected Virtue of Scholarship

  I sincerely doubt that the discussions which began on the leading edge would return anywhere near the same amount of progress as those which start in the scholarly middle. After all, those problems are on the edge because they’re difficult to solve given the intellectual tools we have today. Though Less Wrong is often insightful, I suspect it’s the result not of discovering genuinely new tools, but of applying known tools in ways most readers haven’t seen them used. For Less Wrong to make progress with a problem that a lot of smart people have been thinking about in detail for a long time either requires that the entire field is so confused that no one has been able to think as clearly about it as we can (probably hubristic), or that we have developed genuinely new intellectual techniques that no one has tried yet.

• Tesseract 3 Jan 2011 21:26 UTC

  30 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes: Jan­uary 2011

  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, God’s Utility Function

• Tesseract 28 Dec 2010 23:54 UTC

  30 points

  in reply to: DanielLC’s comment on: Dark Arts 101: Us­ing presuppositions

  “Human” is a word with many meanings, interpretations, and implications, not all of which are satisfied by the condition of possessing human DNA. “Person” is likewise disputable.

  And I hate to sound like a style guide, but the phrase “everyone will agree that [x]” is false almost without exception and should probably be avoided.

• Tesseract 5 Nov 2010 20:34 UTC

  30 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes: Novem­ber 2010

  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

• Tesseract 1 Dec 2011 17:40 UTC

  28 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes De­cem­ber 2011

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

  Thomas Carew

• Tesseract 2 Aug 2011 22:35 UTC

  26 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Au­gust 2011

  If we want to know where the truth lies in particular cases, we have to look.

  Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

• Tesseract 31 Dec 2010 3:00 UTC

  23 points

  on: Some ra­tio­nal­ity tweets

  There’s a certain style distinct to many didactic quotes: they express claims in a wise-sounding but opaque way, so that they automatically appear deep without requiring the reader to actually think about them. This can cloak empty language and doubtful claims in a veneer of impressiveness—not to mention being uncommunicative if the ideas really are good.

  It looks to me like these match that style. The ideas here could be both true and interesting, but making them into aphorisms (to fit Twitter) removes the explanation and examples that would convince me they’re true and interesting. As it is, they sound meaningless to me—the medium totally obscures the message.

  I’d be interested in a post exploring some of these ideas, but tweets seem to me to be a format utterly unsuited to the topic.

  [Also, I really think that this should not be on the front page. If even commenters have to puzzle over many of these, it’s not a good choice for the general audience.]

• Tesseract 28 Jul 2011 1:34 UTC

  22 points

  in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: New Post ver­sion 2 (please read this ONLY if your last name be­ings with l–z)

  I found the Coming of Age series to be both self-indulgent and quite dull, and I think that it’s very difficult to use yourself as an example of vice or virtue without running into one or both of those issues. I also find that I (more-or-less automatically) downgrade an author’s ethos by a lot when he’s talking about himself as an illustrative example. But for this one, it’s the skeeviness factor that dominates — it’s just plain creepy to hear about your love life as a source of telling anecdotes. And that’s distracting.

  Polyamory may be great, but the right way to promote it is not by slipping into a post the implication that it’s the endpoint of rational thinking about romance. Which is what this reads as, whether you intended it to or not. If you want to advocate polyamory here (and honestly, I’m not sure that Less Wrong is the right place to do so), you should devote an entire post to it, and set forth clear arguments as to why it’s the better option, rather than presuming it in your advice.

  The Sequences do not consist of Eliezer promoting himself as a master rationalist, nor do they assume that you already think he is. He argues for certain positions, and the reader comes to believe that he is a good rationalist as a result of being convinced that the positions he holds are rational. The tone of this is much closer to the motivational-seminar pitch of “I turned my life around using these three simple principles”, with the additional difficulty that we’re just taking your word for your romantic success. It’s not credible.

• Tesseract 21 May 2011 15:20 UTC

  18 points

  on: What both­ers you about Less Wrong?

  I find that Less Wrong is a conflation of about six topics:

  • Singularitarianism (e.g. discussion of SIAI, world-saving)

  • Topics in AI (e.g. decision theory, machine learning)

  • Topics in philosophy (e.g. metaethics, anthropic principle)

  • Epistemic rationality (e.g. dissolving questions, training mental skills, cognitive biases)

  • Applied rationality (e.g. how to avoid akrasia, how to acquire skills efficiently)

  • Rationality community (e.g. meetups, exchanging knowledge)

  These don’t all seem to fit together entirely comfortably. Ideally, I’d split these into three more-coherent sections (singularitarianism and AI, philosophy and epistemic rationality, and applied rationality and community), each of which I think could probably be more effective as their own space.