Quotes
This is how our species is going to die. Not necessarily from nuclear war specifically, but from ignoring existential risks that don’t appear imminent at this moment. If we keep doing that, eventually, something is going to kill us – something that looked improbable in advance, but that, by the time it looks imminent, is too late to stop.
Michael Huemer, The case for tyranny, Fake Nous, July 11, 2020
Like a king who rules all within the four seas, yet sill seeks beyond for something more, so is desire, so is lust; like the unbounded ocean, it knows not when and where to stop. Indulge in lust a little, and like the child it grows apace. The wise man seeing the bitterness of sorrow, stamps out and destroys the risings of desire.
Jack Kerouac, Wake up: A life of the Buddha, London, 2008
At one time I had undertaken to write a book on von Neumann’s scientific life. In trying to plan it, I thought of how I, along with many others, had been influenced by him; and how this man, and some others I knew, working in the purely abstract realm of mathematics and theoretical physics had changed aspects of the world as we know it. […] It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a sheet of paper could change the course of human affairs.
Stanisław M. Ulam, Adventures of a mathematician, Berkeley, 1991, pp. 4-5
In The Mismeasure of Man Gould fails to live up to the trust engendered by his credentials. His historical account is highly selective; he asserts the non-objectivity of science so that he can test for scientific truth, flagrantly, by the standards of his own social and political convictions; and by linking his critique to the quest for fairness and justice, he exploits the generous instincts of his readers. Moreover, while he is admired as a clear writer, in the sense of effective communication, he is not clear in the deeper sense of analyzing ideas sharply and with logical rigor, as we have a right to expect of a disciplined scientist.It has been uncomfortable to dissect a colleague’s book and his background so critically. But I have felt obliged to do so because Gould’s public influence, well-earned for his popular writing on less political questions, is being put to mischievous political use in this book. Moreover, its success undermines the ideal of objectivity in scientific expositions, and also reflects a chronic problem of literary publications. My task has been all the more unpleasant because I do not doubt Gould’s sincerity in seeking a more just and generous world, and I thoroughly share his conviction that racism remains one of the greatest obstacles.Unfortunately, the approach that Gould has used to combat racism has serious defects. Instead of recognizing the value of eliminating bias, his answer is to press for equal and opposite bias, in a virtuous direction—not recognizing the irony and the danger of thus subordinating science to fashions of the day. Moreover, as a student of evolution he might have been expected to build on a profound insight of modern genetics and evolutionary biology: that the human species, and each race within it, possesses a wide range of genetic diversity. But instead of emphasizing the importance of recognizing that diversity, Gould remains locked in combat with a prescientific, typological view of heredity, and this position leads him to oppose studies of behavioral genetics altogether. As the reviewer for Nature stated, The Mismeasure of Man is “a book which exemplifies its own thesis. It is a masterpiece of propaganda, researched in the service of a point of view rather than written from a fund of knowledge.“In effect, we see here Lysenkoism risen again: an effort to outlaw a field of science because it conflicts with a political dogma. To be sure, the new version is more limited in scope, and it does not use the punitive powers of a totalitarian state, as Trofim Lysenko did in the Soviet Union to suppress all of genetics between 1935 and 1964. But that is not necessary in our system: A chilling atmosphere is quite sufficient to prevent funding agencies, investigators, and graduate students from exploring a taboo area. And such Neo-Lysenkoist politicization of science, from both the left and the right, is likely to grow, as biology increasingly affects our lives—probing the secrets of our genes and our brain, reshaping our image of our origins and our nature, and adding new dimensions to our understanding of social behavior. When ideologically committed scientists try to suppress this knowledge they jeopardize a great deal, for without the ideal of objectivity science loses its strength.
Bernard D. Davis, Neo-Lysenkoism, IQ, and the press, The public interest, no. 73, 1983, pp. 41–59, pp. 57-59
[W]e all know that arguments from authority carry little weight: what should sway you is not the mere fact of some other person stating their opinion, but the actual arguments and evidence that they’re able to bring. Except that as we’ve seen, for Bayesians with common priors this isn’t true at all! Instead, merely hearing your friend’s opinion serves as a powerful summary of what your friend knows. And if you learn that your rational friend disagrees with you, then even without knowing why, you should take that as seriously as if you discovered a contradiction in your own thought processes. This is related to an even broader point: there’s a normative rule of rationality that you should judge ideas only on their merits—yet if you’re a Bayesian, of course you’re going to take into account where the ideas come from, and how many other people hold them! Likewise, if you’re a Bayesian police officer or a Bayesian airport screener or a Bayesian job interviewer, of course you’re going to profile people by their superficial characteristics, however unfair that might be to individuals—so all those studies proving that people evaluate the same resume differently if you change the name at the top are no great surprise. It seems to me that the tension between these two different views of rationality, the normative and the Bayesian, generates a lot of the most intractable debates of the modern world.
Scott Aaronson, Common Knowledge and Aumann, August 14, 2015
When the instincts to virtue signal are combined with curiosity about science, open-mindedness about values and viewpoints, rationality about priorities and policies, and strategic savvy about ways and means, then wonderful things can happen. These more enlightened forms of virtue signaling have sparked the Protestant Reformation, American Revolution, abolitionist movement, anti-vivisection movement, women’s suffrage movement, free speech movement, and Effective Altruism movement. But when the instincts to virtue signal are not combined with curiosity, open-mindedness, rationality, and strategic savvy, then you get Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, Stalin’s Holodomor, Hitler’s Holocaust, mao’s Cultural Revolution, and Twitter.
Geoffrey Miller, Virtue Signaling: Essays on Darwinian Politics & Free Speech, New Mexico, 2019
I have also no difficulties saying that my welfare level is positive, zero, or negative. When I am neither enjoying nor suffering, my welfare is zero. Thus, the value of my welfare is a fully cardinal quantity unique up to a proportionate transformation. I am also sure that I am not bestowed by God or evolution to have this special ability of perceiving the full cardinality (both intensity and the origin) of both my welfare and preference levels. In fact, from my daily experience, observation, and conversation, I know that all people (including ordinalist economists) have this ability, except that economists heavily brainwashed by ordinalism deny it despite actually possessing it. This denial is quite incredible. If your preference is really purely ordinal, you can only say that you prefer your present situation (A) to that plus an ant bite (B) and also prefer the latter to being bodily thrown into a pool of sulphuric acid (C). You cannot say that your preference of A over B is less than your preference of B over C. Can you really believe that!
Yew-Kwang Ng, A case for happiness, cardinalism, and interpersonal comparability, The economic journal, vol. 107, no. 445, 1997, pp. 1848–1858, p. 1852
Most people who play commodity markets… lose their stake and quit within a year. Such markets are dominated by the minority who have managed to play and not go broke. If you believe otherwise, and know of some market where the prices are obviously wrong, I challenge you to ‘put your money where your mouth is’ and take some of that free money you believe is there for the taking. It’s easy to bad-mouth the stupid public before you have tried to beat them.
Robin Hanson, Could gambling save science? Encouraging an honest consensus, Social Epistemology, vol. 9, no. 1, 1995, pp. 3–33, p. 22
Si verum dicitis, Scholae, quod possitis sanare quaslibet febres citra evacuationem: sed nolle, prae metu deterioris recidivae. Ad luctam descendite, Humoristae. Sumamus e Xenodociis, e castris, vel aliunde 200 aut 500 pauperes febrientes, pluriticos, &c. partiamur illos per medium: mittamus sortes, ut mihi illorum una medietas cedat, & altera vobis. Ego illos curabo citra phlebotomiam, & evacuationem sensibilem; vos vero facite ut scitis (nec enim vos adstringo ad iactantiam phlebotomi, vel solutivi abstinentiam) videbimus quot funera uterque noftrum habiturus: praemium autem certaminis sint 300 floreni, utrimque depositi. Hic vestrum agitur negotium. O Magistratus, quibus cordi est salus populi! Pro bono publico certabitur, pro veritatis cognitione, pro vita & anima vestra, filiorum, viduarum, pupillorum totiusque sanitate populi. Ac tandem pro methodo curativa, in actuali contradictorio disputata. Superaddite praemium, honorarii loco, ex officio. Compellite nolentes intrare in certamen, vel palaestra obmutescentes cedere. Ostendant tum, quod modo oblatrando stentantur. Sic namque diplomata ostendenda sunt.
Jan Baptist Van Helmont, Infantis Nutritio ad Vitam Longam, Ortus Medicinæ id est Initia Physicæ Inaudita, 1648, pp. 622–624
Consider Julian Simon, a population and natural resource optimist, who found that he could not compete for either popular or academic attention with best-selling doomsayers like Paul Ehrlich. In 1980 Simon challenged Ehrlich to bet on whether the price of five basic metals, corrected for inflation, would rise or fall over the next decade. Ehrlich accepted, and Simon won, as would almost anyone who bet in the same way in the last two centuries. This win brought Simon publicity, but mostly in the form of high-profile editorials saying ‘Yeah he won this one, but I challenge him to bet on a more meaningful indicator such as …’. In fact, however, not only won’t Ehrlich bet again, although his predictions remain unchanged, but also none of these editorial writers will actually put their money where their mouths are! In addition, the papers that published these editorials won’t publish letters from Simon accepting their challenges.
Robin Hanson, Could gambling save science? Encouraging an honest consensus, Social Epistemology, vol. 9, no. 1, 1995, pp. 3–33, p. 8
Der gewöhnliche Probierstein: ob etwas blosse Ueberredung, oder wenigstens subiective Ueberzeugung, d. i. festes Glauben sey, was iemand behauptet, ist das Wetten. Oefters spricht iemand seine Sätze mit so zuversichtlichem und unlenkbarem Trotze aus, daß er alle Besorgniß des Irrthums gänzlich abgelegt zu haben scheint. Eine Wette macht ihn stutzig. Bisweilen zeigt sich: daß er zwar Ueberredung genug, die auf einen Ducaten an Werth geschäzt werden kan, aber nicht auf zehn, besitze. Denn, den ersten wagt er noch wol, aber bey zehnen wird er allererst inne, was er vorher nicht bemerkte, daß es nemlich doch wol möglich sey, er habe sich geirrt. Wenn man sich in Gedanken vorstellt: man solle worauf das Glück des ganzen Lebens verwetten, so schwindet unser triumphirendes Urtheil gar sehr, wir werden überaus schüchtern und entdecken so allererst, daß unser Glaube so weit nicht zulange.
Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Mineola, N.Y, 1787
Often the best way to make sure you’re being logical is to express your arguments mathematically. Early in this century, the eminent economist Alfred Marshall offered this advice to his colleagues: when confronted with an economic problem, first translate into mathematics, then solve the problem, then translate back into English and burn the mathematics.
Steven E Landsburg, More sex is safer sex: the unconventional wisdom of economics, New York, p. 174
Several months after the end of the Cuban crisis, I was involved in negotiations with Premier Khrushchev for the release of two cardinals who had been under house arrest in the Ukraine and in Czechoslovakia for almost two decades. Premier Khrushchev spoke freely about the situation in the Kremlin during the week of the Cuban crisis. From his description, the Soviet situation emerged as a mirror image of the American experience. The people around Khrushchev sought to steer him away from any action that would be a confession of weakness.“When I asked the military advisers if they could assure me that holding fast would not result in the death of five hundred million human beings, they looked at me a though I was out of my mind or, what was worse, a traitor,” he told me. “The biggest tragedy, as they saw it, was not that our country might be devastated and everything lost, but that the Chinese or the Albanians would accuse us of appeasement or weakness. So I said to myself: ‘To hell with these maniacs. If I can get the United States to assure me that it will not attempt to overthrow the Cuban government, I will remove the missiles.’ That is what happened. And so now I am being reviled by the Chinese and the Albanians. They say I was afraid to stand up to a paper tiger. It is all such nonsense. What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?”
Norman Cousins, The Cuban missile crisis: An anniversary, The Saturday Review, 1977, pp. 4, p. 4
[U]sing the mathematical theory of probability, it was proven that if all roulette numbers were equally likely to come up, and they appeared in random order, it was impossible for any betting system to succeed. Despite this, hope flared briefly at the end of the nineteenth century when the great statistician Karl Pearson (1857–1936) discovered that the roulette numbers being reported daily in a French newspaper showed exploitable patterns. The mystery was resolved when it was discovered that rather than spend hours watching the wheels, the people recording the numbers simply made them up at the end of each day. The statistical patterns Pearson detected simply reflected the failure of the reporters to invent perfectly random numbers.
Edward Thorp, A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market, New York, 2017, p. 123
We need to use the downtime, when things are calm, to prepare for when things get serious in the decades to come. The time we have now is valuable, and we need to make use of it.
Demis Hassabis, quoted in "Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk Cade Metz and the Feud over Killer Robots", Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and the Feud over Killer Robots, The New York Times, 2018
In his views of life he partook of the character of the Stoic, the Epicurean, and the Cynic. In his personal character the Stoic predominated: his standard of morals was Epicurean, in so far as that it was utilitarian, taking as the sole test of right and wrong, the tendency of actions to produce pleasure or pain. But he had (and this was the Cynic element) scarcely any belief in pleasure: at least in his later years, of which alone on this subject I can speak confidently. He deemed very few pleasures worth the price which at all events in the present state of society/, must be paid for them. The greatest miscarriages in life he considered attributable to the overvaluing of pleasures. Accordingly, temperance in the large sense intended by the Greek philosophers—stopping short at the point of moderation in all indulgences—was with him as with them, /almost the cardinal point of moral precept.
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, London, 1873, p. 48
[M]e acaba de llamar un señor que quiere hacerme una entrevista. Un tal «Cacho» Fontana. Yo le dije que no. ¡Cómo voy a aceptar que me entreviste alguien que usa ese apodo! Es más o menos como si yo me hiciera llamar «Pepe» Borges.
Jorge Luis Borges, quoted in Roberto Alifano and Jorge Luis Borges, El humor de Borges, Buenos Aires?, 1996
we can reverse the common dictum that democracy is under threat, and affirm that democracy is the threat, at least in its short-termist populist form.
Jon Elster, Some notes on ‘populism’, Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol. 46, no. 5, 2020, pp. 591–600
what hangs in the balance is at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 human lives (though the true number is probably larger). If we represent all the happiness experienced during one entire such life with a single teardrop of joy, then the happiness of these souls could fill and refill the Earth’s oceans every second, and keep doing so for a hundred billion billion millennia. It is really important that we make sure these truly are tears of joy.
Nick Bostrom, Science AMA series: I'm Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, and author of "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies", AMA, Reddit, September 24, 2014, p. 103
Puritanism – The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing,, New York, 1949, ch. 30