Rationality Quotes 27

"Believing this statement will make you happier."
        -- Ryan Lortie

"Make changes based on your strongest opportunities, not your most convenient ones."
        -- MegaTokyo

"The mind is a cruel, lying, unreliable bastard that can't be trusted with even an ounce of responsibility.  If you were dating the mind, all your friends would take you aside, and tell you that you can really do better, and being alone isn't all that bad, anyway.  If you hired the mind as a babysitter, you would come home to find all but one of your children in critical condition, and the remaining one crowned 'King of the Pit'."
        -- Lore Sjoberg

"Getting bored is a non-trivial cerebral transformation that doubtlessly took many millions of years for nature to perfect."
        -- Lee Corbin

"The views expressed here do not necessarily represent the unanimous view of all parts of my mind."
        -- Malcolm McMahon

"The boundary between these two classes is more porous than I've made it sound.  I'm always running into regular dudes--construction workers, auto mechanics, taxi drivers, galoots in general--who were largely aliterate until something made it necessary for them to become readers and start actually thinking about things.  Perhaps they had to come to grips with alcoholism, perhaps they got sent to jail, or came down with a disease, or suffered a crisis in religious faith, or simply got bored.  Such people can get up to speed on particular subjects quite rapidly.  Sometimes their lack of a broad education makes them over-apt to go off on intellectual wild goose chases, but, hey, at least a wild goose chase gives you some exercise."
        -- Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning was the Command Line

Comments

[Peter]

Lore Sjöberg prefers to write his last name with an ö (o with umlaut), as a Google search will verify.

[pdf23ds]

I went and read that Neal Stephenson book. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone--it's awfully dated and doesn't seem to have a strong point at the end that makes all the meandering worthwhile.

[anonymous coward]

I feel doubly let down. Not only did I too go and read the peice by Stephenson, which was disappointing, but when I came back here to express my disappointment I found I'd been beaten to it.

The quote itself is still a very good one, though.

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Sorry about that. It's been a long time since I read the Stephenson piece in question, and all I had was the quote in my file. If I'd realized, I wouldn't have quoted it, or would have dropped a warning in the comments.

[Jeroen]

Do you have a reference for the Malcolm McMahon quote? Thanks.

[Dmitriy Kropivnitskiy]

I cannot seem to google the Ryan Lortie quote. Where did that come from?

[Fredrik Bränström]

anonymous coward & pdf23ds: Interesting that you went off on such an intellectual wild goose chase... ;)

[Paul Gowder]

Lore Sjoberg is my new hero.