Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

The people I know who seem to make unusual efforts at rationality, are unusually honest, or, failing that, at least have unusually bad social skills.

Maybe you just can't protect people from certain specialized types of folly with any sane amount of regulation, and the correct response is to give up on the high social costs of inadequately protecting people from themselves under certain circumstances.

If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.

To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty.

Lonely dissent doesn't feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.

Like that's the only reason anyone would ever buy a first-aid kit? Don't take this the wrong way, Professor McGonagall, but what sort of crazy children are you used to dealing with?" "Gryffindors," spat Professor McGonagall, the word carrying a freight of bitterness and despair that fell like an eternal curse on all youthful heroism and high spirits.

If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool.

Part of the rationalist ethos is binding yourself emotionally to an absolutely lawful reductionistic universe - a universe containing no ontologically basic mental things such as souls or magic and pouring all your hope and all your care into that merely real universe and its possibilities, without disappointment.

You cannot rationalize what is not rational to begin with - as if lying were called truthization. There is no way to obtain more truth for a proposition by bribery, flattery, or the most passionate argument - you can make more people believe the proposition, but you cannot make it more true.

If you want to build a recursively self-improving AI, have it go through a billion sequential self-modifications, become vastly smarter than you, and not die, you've got to work to a pretty precise standard.

I ask the fundamental question of rationality: Why do you believe what you believe? What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?

Trying and getting hurt can't possibly be worse for you than being... stuck.

My experience is that journalists report on the nearest-cliche algorithm, which is extremely uninformative because there aren't many cliches, the truth is often quite distant from any cliche, and the only thing you can infer about the actual event was that this was the closest cliche. It is simply not possible to appreciate the sheer awfulness of mainstream media reporting until someone has actually reported on you. It is so much worse than you think.

You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.

Through rationality we shall become awesome, and invent and test systematic methods for making people awesome, and plot to optimize everything in sight, and the more fun we have the more people will want to join us.

The important graphs are the ones where some things are not connected to some other things. When the unenlightened ones try to be profound, they draw endless verbal comparisons between this topic, and that topic, which is like this, which is like that; until their graph is fully connected and also totally useless.

I only want power so I can get books.

Between hindsight bias, fake causality, positive bias, anchoring/priming, et cetera et cetera, and above all the dreaded confirmation bias, once an idea gets into your head, it's probably going to stay there.

He'd met other prodigies in mathematical competitions. In fact he'd been thoroughly trounced by competitors who probably spent literally all day practising maths problems and who'd never read a science-fiction book and who would burn out completely before puberty and never amount to anything in their future lives because they'd just practised known techniques instead of learning to think creatively.

If people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing.

The police officer who puts their life on the line with no superpowers, no X-Ray vision, no super-strength, no ability to fly, and above all no invulnerability to bullets, reveals far greater virtue than Superman - who is only a mere superhero.

Why does any kind of cynicism appeal to people? Because it seems like a mark of maturity, of sophistication, like you’ve seen everything and know better. Or because putting something down feels like pushing yourself up.

What people really believe doesn't feel like a BELIEF, it feels like the way the world IS.

Moore's Law of Mad Science: Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point.

I am tempted to say that a doctorate in AI would be negatively useful, but I am not one to hold someone’s reckless youth against them – just because you acquired a doctorate in AI doesn’t mean you should be permanently disqualified.

Okay, so either (a) I just teleported somewhere else entirely (b) they can fold space like no one's business or (c) they are simply ignoring all the rules.

- Every time someone cries out in prayer and I can't answer, I feel guilty about not being God. - That doesn't sound good. - I understand that I have a problem, and I know what I need to do to solve it, all right? I'm working on it. Of course, Harry hadn't said what the solution was. The solution, obviously, was to hurry up and become God.

Remember, if you succeed in everything you try in life, you're living below your full potential and you should take up more difficult or daring things.

When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing.

- With respect, Professor McGonagall, I'm not quite sure you understand what I'm trying to do here. - With respect, Mr. Potter, I'm quite sure I don't. Unless - this is a guess, mind - you're trying to take over the world? - No! I mean yes - well, NO! - I think i should perhaps be alarmed that you have trouble answering the question.

Every mystery ever solved had been a puzzle from the dawn of the human species right up until someone solved it.

After all, if you had the complete decision process, you could run it as an AI, and I'd be coding it up right now.

There's something in science like the shine of the Patronus Charm, driving back all sorts of darkness and madness.

This is one of theprimary mechanisms whereby, if a fool says the sun is shining, we do notcorrectly discard this as irrelevant nonevidence, but rather find ourselvesimpelled to say that it must be dark outside.

[...] intelligent people only have a certain amount of time (measured in subjective time spent thinking about religion) to become atheists. After a certain point, if you're smart, have spent time thinking about and defending your religion, and still haven't escaped the grip of Dark Side Epistemology, the inside of your mind ends up as an Escher painting.

Litmus test: If you can't describe Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage and explain why people find it counterintuitive, you don't know enough about economics to direct any criticism or praise at "capitalism" because you don't know what other people are referring to when they use that word.

There were mysterious questions, but a mysterious answer was a contradiction in terms.

To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.

The human brain cannot release enough neurotransmitters to feel emotion a thousand times as strong as the grief of one funeral. A prospective risk going from 10,000,000 deaths to 100,000,000 deaths does not multiply by ten the strength of our determination to stop it. It adds one more zero on paper for our eyes to glaze over.

Many have stood their ground and faced the darkness when it comes for them. Fewer come for the darkness and force it to face them.

We underestimate the distance between ourselves and others. Not just inferential distance, but distances of temperament and ability, distances of situation and resource, distances of unspoken knowledge and unnoticed skills and luck, distances of interior landscape.

If cryonics were a scam it would have far better marketing and be far more popular.

The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.

You will find ambiguity a great ally on your road to power. Give a sign of Slytherin on one day, and contradict it with a sign of Gryffindor the next; and the Slytherins will be enabled to believe what they wish, while the Gryffindors argue themselves into supporting you as well. So long as there is uncertainty, people can believe whatever seems to be to their own advantage. And so long as you appear strong, so long as you appear to be winning, their instincts will tell them that their advantage lies with you. Walk always in the shadow, and light and darkness both will follow.

Crocker's Rules didn't give you the right to say anything offensive, but other people could say potentially offensive things to you, and it was your responsibility not to be offended. This was surprisingly hard to explain to people; many people would read the careful explanation and hear, "Crocker's Rules mean you can say offensive things to other people."

Existential depression has always annoyed me; it is one of the world's most pointless forms of suffering.

There is light in the world, and it is us!

I'm wondering if there's a spell to make lightning flash in the background whenever I make an ominous resolution.