Twenty years later, that was what he would desperately wish had happened twenty years ago, and twenty years before twenty years later happened to be right now. Altering the distant past was easy, you just had to think of it at the right time.
John Kenneth Galbraith said: “Faced with the choice of changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
A friend isn’t someone you use once and then throw away, a friend is someone you use over and over again.
Once you tell a lie, the truth is your enemy; and every truth connected to that truth, and every ally of truth in general; all of these you must oppose, to protect the lie. Whether you’re lying to others, or to yourself.
Don’t let your life be steered by your reluctance to do a little extra thinking.
Do not think that heroes cannot be broken! We are only more difficult to break, Hermione.” The old wizard’s eyes had grown sterner than she had ever seen. “When you have been exhausted for many hours, when pain and death is not a passing fear but a certainty, then it is harder to be a hero.
There is never an idea so true that it’s wrong to criticize any argument that supports it.
Only God can tell a truly plausible lie.
People form close friendships by knowing private things about each other, and the reason most people don’t make close friends is because they’re too embarrassed to share anything really important about themselves.
Asimov’s “The Relativity of Wrong”:3 When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
Why would you pay attention to your own thoughts, if you knew you were trying to manipulate yourself.
The point of thinking is to shape our plans; if you’re going to keep the same plans anyway, why bother going to all that work to justify it? When.
Studying biases can in fact make you more vulnerable to overconfidence and confirmation bias, as you come to see the influence of cognitive biases all around you – in everyone but yourself.
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
People cling to their intuitions, I think, not so much because they believe their cognitive algorithms are perfectly reliable, but because they can’t see their intuitions as the way their cognitive algorithms happen to look from the inside. And so everything you try to say about how the native cognitive algorithm goes astray, ends up being contrasted to their direct perception of the Way Things Really Are – and discarded as obviously wrong.
When people think of “emotion” and “rationality” as opposed, I suspect that they are really thinking of System 1 and System 2 – fast perceptual judgments versus slow deliberative judgments. Deliberative judgments aren’t always true, and perceptual judgments aren’t always false; so it is very important to distinguish that dichotomy from “rationality.” Both systems can serve the goal of truth, or defeat it, depending on how they are used.
I’ve seen people severely messed up by their own knowledge of biases. They have more ammunition with which to argue against anything they don’t like. And that problem – too much ready ammunition – is one of the primary ways that people with high mental agility end up stupid, in Stanovich’s “dysrationalia” sense of stupidity.
If the joy of scientific discovery is one-shot per discovery, then, from a fun-theoretic perspective, Newton probably used up a substantial increment of the total Physics Fun available over the entire history of Earth-originating intelligent life. That selfish bastard explained the orbits of planets and the tides.
Awww, it sounds like someone fell prey to the planning fallacy.
Life is mundane, and does not need a weird explanation.