Category Archives: Rationality - Page 2

Contrary actions to the Twelve Virtues – Curiosity

Posted by on June 23, 2009 No comments

Yudkowsky writes of the first virtue:

The first virtue is curiosity. A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curiosity requires both that you be ignorant, and that you desire to relinquish your ignorance. If in your heart you believe you already know, or if in your heart you do not wish to know, then your questioning will be purposeless and your skills without direction. Curiosity seeks to annihilate itself; there is no curiosity that does not want an answer. The glory of glorious mystery is to be solved, after which it ceases to be mystery. Be wary of those who speak of being open-minded and modestly confess their ignorance. There is a time to confess your ignorance and a time to relinquish your ignorance.

It’s easy to pay homage to the virtue of the curious, without actually being curious yourself.  What don’t you know that you want to know?  Or…more importantly…what don’t you know that you should want to know?

Do you dump your retirement savings into instruments you don’t understand?  Do you accept at face value what the salesman tells you about the TV you’re looking at?  Do you seek The Answer, and then stop at the first reasonable explanation you come upon?

Reasonable is not the same as Right

Posted by on June 22, 2009 1 comment

I came across a forum post sharing this interesting story:

How Mil Specs Live Forever

The US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That’s an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that’s the way they built them in England, and the US railroads were built by English expatriates.

Why did the English people build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.

Why did “they” use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance roads, because that’s the spacing of the old wheel ruts.

So who built these old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts? The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made for or by Imperial Rome they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

Thus, we have the answer to the original questions. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification (Military Spec) for an Imperial Roman army war chariot.

MilSpecs and Bureaucracies live forever.

So, the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse’s ass came up with it, you may be exactly right. Because the Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back-ends of two war horses.

Wild, yet reasonable!  More after the fold…

Read more »

Crazy nutbags. (AKA, this picture reminds me of homeopaths and their ilk.)

Posted by on May 26, 2009 No comments
Sourced from BoingBoing

Sourced from BoingBoing

Thanks BoingBoing!

Herein find out how to survive a nuclear war.

Posted by on May 14, 2009 1 comment
Picture taken of the atomic bombing of Nagasak...
Image via Wikipedia

Michael Anissimov talks about the book, Nuclear War Survival Skills by Cresson Kearny.  Some interesting stuff in there…

Kearny points out that many casualties in a nuclear attack might be due to people running to windows in major cities, looking at the sky lit up by SLBMs, only to be killed by blades of glass when otherwise-survivable ICBMs explode.

You’re not in control.

Posted by on February 8, 2009 No comments

And by “you’re”, I mean your conscious mind.  Robin Hanson points to the latest Nature:

Our conscious minds control less than we think.  From the latest Nature:

A person’s responses can often be explained by non-linguistic behaviours of other people and simple instincts for social display and response, without any recourse to conscious cognition. This `second channel’ of human communication acts in parallel with that based on rational thinking and verbal communication, and it is much more important in human affairs than most people like to think. …

Every day I see more evidence that points towards a simple conclusion: It requires rigorous self-examination to determine our own motives and the correct, rational response to any given problem. This rigorous self-examination is beyond what the vast majority of people are either capable of or are willing to do.

I’ll take 300 cents, please. Or, people’s brains are broken.

Posted by on February 7, 2009 No comments

The New York Times points to research demonstrating the effect of big numbers on people’s ability to reason.

You would probably never sell out your friend for $5. But 500 cents? Now you’re talking!

UFO rants are fun.

Posted by on February 6, 2009 No comments
Three people enjoy the summer sky over the Del...
Image via Wikipedia

Since I enjoy rants against those holding beliefs with no basis in reality, I enjoyed this little post on Skeptic Blog.

I had to laugh when I read fellow Skeptologist Brian Dunning’s article about the UFO True Believerâ„¢ Stan Friedman hating him. What an elite club! Friedman is no fan of me, either. A few years ago I wrote an article for Sky and Telescope magazine about UFOs, basically making the same claim I made here last week: if all these UFO sightings we hear about were real, the majority of them would be seen by amateur astronomers.

Friedman took exception to that (shocker, I know). In his internet newsletter (subscription required), he said: “Plait among other gems says about Amateur [sic] astronomers [sic] ‘Logically, they should be reporting most of the UFOs’. This is logic?”

Um, yeah, Mr. Friedman, it is. Maybe you should acquaint yourself with it. Note that this is all he said, just dismissing my point without actually saying anything about it. I know, it’s hard to believe that someone with such stature in the UFO community would make a claim with no evidence, and dismiss a claim that does have evidence!

Be sure to click on over and read it all.

“I told you so” is stupid.

Posted by on January 24, 2009 No comments

Everything is a probability.

When I say Event X is going to happen, I of course don’t know this with 100% probability.

When you say “No, Event Y is going to happen.”, you do not know this with 100% probability, even if you think you do.

If Event Y happens, the fact that it happened says little about your “rightness” at the time of your prediction.  If I think Event X has a 75% chance of happening and Event Y has a 25% chance of happening, but Event Y is what actually ends up happening, that doesn’t mean my estimates at the time were wrong.

This is why “I told you so” is stupid.  It doesn’t increase your stature as an accurate predictor.  The only things that should increase your stature as an accurate predictor is a history of predictions that match with events that happen.  For bonus points your predictions calibrated probabilities should match the real events.

As an aside, the problems related to this include our societies reliance on ‘pundits’.  There is no central clearinghouse for recording well-defined predictions which matches those with their results.  Such a mechanism would help us better pick our leaders and those who advise our leaders.

Quoted

Posted by on December 22, 2008 1 comment

The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.

St. Augustine

Spock is a lie

Posted by on December 5, 2008 1 comment

Spock
Image via Wikipedia

Spock has done a horrible disservice to the rationalist.  Let me explain…

I’ve had discussions with people who, after being shown their side of the argument didn’t hold, would respond with:  “You’re just being too rational.”  As if there can be such a thing.  I suspect what they really mean is that they feel like I’m not addressing their emotional need.

Spock has convinced the world (or at least some of it’s inhabitants) that rationality is the flipside of emotion.  This is far from the case.  Being rational doesn’t mean being emotionless or disregarding other people’s emotion.

When deciding what to believe, or what course of action you should take, the rational thing to do is consider how other people would react, how you would react, how you would feel.  Emotional responses are just another part of the environment in which we live, to not account for them in our reasoning is folly.