Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Famous Quotes By Eliezer Yudkowsky
Reality has been around since long before you showed up. Don't go calling it nasty names like 'bizarre' or 'incredible'. The universe was propagating complex amplitudes through configuration space for ten billion years before life ever emerged on Earth. Quantum physics is not 'weird'. You are weird. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
If dragons were common, and you could look at one in the zoo - but zebras were a rare legendary creature that had finally been decided to be mythical - then there's a certain sort of person who would ignore dragons, who would never bother to look at dragons, and chase after rumors of zebras. The grass is always greener on the other side of reality. Which is rather setting ourselves up for eternal disappointment, eh? If we cannot take joy in the merely real, our lives shall be empty indeed. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
If what you believe doesn't depend om what you see, you've been blinded as effectively as by poking out your eyeballs. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
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. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
I wouldn't be surprised if tomorrow was the Final Dawn, the last sunrise before the Earth and Sun are reshaped into computing elements. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Have I ever remarked on how completely ridiculous it is to ask high school students to decide what they want to do with the rest of their lives and give them nearly no support in doing so? Support like, say, spending a day apiece watching twenty different jobs and then another week at their top three choices, with salary charts and projections and probabilities of graduating that subject given their test scores? The more so considering this is a central allocation question for the entire economy? — Eliezer Yudkowsky
One last time, Akon thought of all his fear, of the sick feeling in his stomach and the burning that was becoming a pain in his throat. He pinched himself on the arm, hard, very hard, and felt the warning signal telling him to stop.
Goodbye, Akon thought; and the tears began falling down his cheek, as though that one silent word had, for the very last time, broken his heart.
And he lived happily ever after. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Harry had always been frightened of ending up as one of those child prodigies that never amounted to anything and spent the rest of their lives boasting about how far ahead they'd been at age ten. But then most adult geniuses never amounted to anything either. There were probably a thousand people as intelligent as Einstein for every actual Einstein in history. Because those other geniuses hadn't gotten their hands on the one thing you absolutely needed to achieve greatness. They'd never found an important problem. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
I don't think we'll run short of volunteers to watch disgusting alien pornography. Just post it to the ship's 4chan, and check after a few hours to see if anything was modded up to +5 Insightful. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Do not think that fairness to all sides means balancing yourself evenly between positions; truth is not handed out in equal portions before the start of a debate. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
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. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
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. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
If the box contains a diamond,
I desire to believe that the box contains a diamond;
If the box does not contain a diamond,
I desire to believe that the box does not contain a diamond;
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
For an instant Harry imagined his own Mum and Dad in Azkaban with the Dementors sucking out their life, draining away the happy memories of their love for him. Just for an instant, before his imagination blew a fuse and called an emergency shutdown and told him never to imagine that again. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
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. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
When you find yourself in philosophical difficulties, the first line of defense is not to define your problematic terms, but to see whether you can think without using those terms at all. Or any of their short synonyms. And be careful not to let yourself invent a new word to use instead. Describe outward observables and interior mechanisms; don't use a single handle, whatever that handle may be. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Human beings," said the Ship's Confessor, "cannot designate a 'current best candidate' without psychological consequences. Human rationalists learn to discuss an issue as thoroughly as possible before suggesting any solutions. For humans, solutions are sticky in a way that would require detailed cognitive science to explain. We would not be able to search freely through the solution space, but would be helplessly attracted toward the 'current best' point, once we named it. Also, any endorsement whatever of a solution that has negative moral features, will cause a human to feel shame - and 'best candidate' would feel like an endorsement. To avoid feeling that shame, humans must avoid saying which of two bad alternatives is better than the other. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
A single Lie That Must Be Protected can block someone's progress into advanced rationality. No, it's not harmless fun. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Complex adaptations like "being a little selfish" and "not being willing to
work without reward" are human universals. The strength might vary a bit
from person to person, but everyone's got the same machinery under the
hood, we're just painted different colors. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
You can be mistaken about what you believe, most people never realize there's a difference between believing something and thinking it's good to believe it. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Physiologically adult humans are not meant to spend an additional 10 years in a school system; their brains map that onto "I have been assigned low tribal status". And so, of course, they plot rebellion accuse the existing tribal overlords of corruption plot perhaps to split off their own little tribe in the savanna, not realizing that this is impossible in the Modern World. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
If science is a religion, it is the religion that heals the sick and reveals the secrets of the stars. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
(...) Where are you trying to go?"
Harry hesitated. "I'm not really sure," he said.
"Then perhaps you are already there. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Well, sounding wise wasn't difficult. It was a lot easier than being intelligent, actually, since you didn't have to say anything surprising or come up with any new insights. You just let your brain's pattern-matching software complete the cliche, using whatever Deep Wisdom you'd stored previously. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
We underestimate the power of science, and overestimate the power of personal observation. A peer-reviewed, journal-published, replicated report is worth far more than what you see with your own eyes. Our own eyes can deceive us. People can fool themselves, hallucinate, and even go insane. The controls on publication in major journals are more trustworthy than the very fabric of your brain. If you see with your own eyes that the sky is blue, and Science says it is green, then sir, I advise that you trust in Science.
This is not what most scientists will tell you, of course; but I think it is pragmatically true. Because in real life, what happens is that your eyes have a little malfunction and decide that the sky is green, and science will tell you that the sky is blue. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
If there is no black and white, there is yet lighter and darker, and not all grays are the same. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
A scientist worthy of a lab coat should be able to make original discoveries while wearing a clown suit, or give a lecture in a high squeaky voice from inhaling helium. It is written nowhere in the math of probability theory that one may have no fun. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
I don't care where I live, so long as there's a roof to keep the rain off my books, and high-speed Internet access. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
I never understood the Prisoner's Dilemma until this day. Do you cooperate when you really do want the highest payoff? When it doesn't even seem fair for both of you to cooperate? When it seems right to defect even if the other player doesn't? That's the payoff matrix of the true Prisoner's Dilemma. But all the rest of the logic - everything about what happens if you both think that way, and both defect - is the same. Do we want to live in a universe of cooperation or defection? — Eliezer Yudkowsky
The point being that when there are lots of possible answers, most of the evidence you need goes into just locating the true hypothesis out of millions of possibilities - bringing it to your attention in the first place. The amount of evidence you need to judge between two or three plausible candidates is much smaller by comparison. So if you just jump ahead without evidence and promote one particular possibility to the focus of your attention, you're skipping over most of the work. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
You have to disentangle the details. You have to hold up every one independently, and ask, "How do we know *this* detail?" Someone sketches out a picture of humanity's descent into nanotechnological warfare, where China refuses to abide by an international control agreement, followed by an arms race ... Wait a minute - how do you know it will be China? Is that a crystal ball in your pocket or are you just happy to be a futurist? Where are all these details coming from?
Where did *that specific* detail come from? — Eliezer Yudkowsky
When something is universal enough in our everyday lives, we take it for granted to the point of forgetting it exists. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
You, and you alone, have reported this mysterious sense of doom. You, and you alone, are a chaos magnet the likes of which I have never seen. After our little shopping trip to Diagon Alley, and then the Sorting Hat, and then today's little episode, I can well foresee that I am fated to sit in the Headmaster's office and hear some hilarious tale about Professor Quirrell in which you and you alone play a starring role, after which there will be no choice but to fire him. I am already resigned to it, Mr. Potter. And if this sad event takes place any earlier than the Ides of May, I will string you up by the gates of Hogwarts with your own intestines and pour fire beetles into your nose. Now do you understand me completely? — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Also Harry was in love. It would be a three-way wedding: him, the Time-Turner, and Professor Quirrell. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
There's a whole [ ... ] art to finding the truth and accomplishing value from inside a human mind: we have to learn our own flaws, overcome our biases, prevent ourselves from self-deceiving, get ourselves into good emotional shape to confront the truth and do what needs doing, etcetera etcetera and so on. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
You're so completely going to be in Slytherin."
"I'm so completely going to be in Ravenclaw, thank you very much. I only want power so I can get books. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There's a quote there about how philosophers say a great deal about what science absolutely requires, and it is all wrong, because the only rule in science is that the final arbiter is observation - that you just have to look at the world and report what you see. Um ... off the top of my head I can't think of where to find something about how it's an ideal of science to settle things by experiment instead of arguments - — Eliezer Yudkowsky
I don't want to rule the universe. I just think it could be more sensibly organised. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
The golden coins might have been his, but they were still stolen - self-stolen? Auto-thieved? — Eliezer Yudkowsky
I'm wondering if there's a spell to make lightning flash in the background whenever I make an ominous resolution. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
If you handed [character] a glass that was 90% full, he'd tell you that the 10% empty part proved that no one really cared about water. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
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. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Anything that could give rise to smarter-than-human intelligence - in the form of Artificial Intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, or neuroscience-based human intelligence enhancement - wins hands down beyond contest as doing the most to change the world. Nothing else is even in the same league. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
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. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
If you see your activities and situation originally, you will be able to originally see your goals as well. If you can look with fresh eyes, as though for the first time, you will see yourself doing things that you would never dream of doing if they were not habits. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Listen to hypotheses as they plead their cases before you, but remember that you are not a hypothesis, you are the judge. Therefore do not seek to argue for one side or another, for if you knew your destination, you would already be there. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
He wanted to write someone and demand a refund on his dark side which clearly ought to have irresistible magical power but had turned out to be defective. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Then again, it'd taken more than two hundred years after the invention of the scientific method before any Muggle scientists had thought to systematically investigate which sentences a human four-year-old could or couldn't understand. The developmental psychology of linguistics could've been discovered in the eighteenth century, in principle, but no one had even thought to look until the twentieth. So you couldn't really blame the much smaller wizarding world for not investigating the Retrieval Charm. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
There were mysterious questions, but a mysterious answer was a contradiction in terms. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
I have no great fondness for the universe, but I do live there — Eliezer Yudkowsky
If our extinction proceeds slowly enough to allow a moment of horrified realization, the doers of the deed will likely be quite taken aback on realizing that they have actually destroyed the world. Therefore I suggest that if the Earth is destroyed, it will probably be by mistake. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
I keep trying to explain to people that the archetype of intelligence is not Dustin Hoffman in 'The Rain Man;' it is a human being, period. It is squishy things that explode in a vacuum, leaving footprints on their moon. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
But Father had once told her that the trouble with passing up opportunities was that it was habit-forming. If you told yourself you were waiting for a better opportunity next time, why, next time you'd probably tell yourself the same thing. Father had said that most people spent their whole lives waiting for an opportunity that was good enough, and then they died. Father had said that while seizing opportunities would mean that all sorts of things went wrong, it wasn't nearly as bad as being a hopeless lump. Father had said that after she got into the habit of seizing opportunities, then it was time to start being picky about them. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
The Way of Bayes is also an imprecise art, at least the way I'm holding forth upon it. These blog posts are still fumbling attempts to put into words lessons that would be better taught by experience. But at least there's underlying math, plus experimental evidence from cognitive psychology on how humans actually think. Maybe that will be enough to cross the stratospherically high threshold required for a discipline that lets you actually get it right, instead of just constraining you into interesting new mistakes. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
The screams failed to spread, as the strong hugged the weak and comforted them. That was something to be proud of, in the last moments of the old humanity. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Since the beginning
not one unusual thing
has ever happened. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Hermione's eyes lit up with a terrible light of helpfulness and something in the back of Harry's brain screamed in desperate humiliation. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
And her hand kept remembering the sensation of the cloak against her fingers, replaying it over and over in her mind. There was a power to the feeling that compelled her thoughts to return to it, and to the song she'd heard / hadn't heard in a part of her mind and magic which now lay silent once more. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
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. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
When you walk past a bookshop you haven't visited before, you have to go in and look around. That's the family rule. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
belief is only really worthwhile if you could, in principle, be persuaded to believe otherwise. If — Eliezer Yudkowsky
The glass display cases had shown rock-throwers crafted by the Australian aborigines - like giant wooden shoehorns, they'd looked, but smoothed and carved and ornamented with the most painstaking care. In the 40,000 years since anatomically modern humans had migrated to Australia from Asia, nobody had invented the bow-and-arrow. It really made you appreciate how non-obvious was the idea of Progress. Why would you even think of Invention as something important, if all your history's heroic tales were of great warriors and defenders instead of Thomas Edison? How could anyone possibly have suspected, while carving a rock-thrower with painstaking care, that someday human beings would invent rocket ships and nuclear energy? — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Most ill-doers do not think of themselves as evil; indeed, most conceive themselves the heroes of the stories they tell. I once thought that the greatest evil in this world was done in the name of the greater good. I was wrong. Terribly wrong. There is evil in this world which knows itself for evil, and hates the good with all its strength. All fair things does it desire to destroy. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Don't trust thoughts because you think them, but because they obey specific trustworthy rules. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
a rationalist isn't ever certain of anything — Eliezer Yudkowsky
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 . — Eliezer Yudkowsky
It was a fractal of ugliness, disgusting at every level of self-similarity. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
P.C. Hodgell said - That which can be destroyed by the truth should be. Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud. Submit yourself to ordeals and test yourself in fire. Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken belief, and seek to feel fully that emotion which fits the facts. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm. Evaluate your beliefs first and then arrive at your emotions. Let yourself say - If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Though I have friends aplenty in academia, I don't operate within the academic system myself. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Um. I'm going to have to eat a kitten, aren't I? Oh god, I'm going to have to eat a kitten. The — Eliezer Yudkowsky
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. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
If you didn't predict that something would happen, if it took you completely by surprise, then what you believed about the world when you didn't see it coming, isn't enough to explain [what has happened]. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
When we are young we believe that we know everything, and so we believe that if we see no explanation for something, then no explanation exists. When we are older we realise that the whole universe works by a rhythm and a reason, even if we ourselves do not know it. It is only our own ignorance which appears to us as insanity. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
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. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
No ... " said Professor Quirrell. "That is not why I am here. You have made no effort to hide your dislike for me, Miss Granger. I thank you for that lack of pretense, for I much prefer true hate to false love. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Oops is the sound we make when we improve our beliefs and strategies; so to look back at a time and not see anything you did wrong means that you haven't learned anything or changed your mind since then. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
The human species was not born into a market economy. Bees won't sell you honey if you offer them an electronic funds transfer. The human species imagined money into existence, and it exists - for us, not mice or wasps - because we go on believing in it. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
But then human beings only understood each other in the first place by pretending. You didn't make predictions about people by modeling the hundred trillion synapses in their brain as separate objects. Ask the best social manipulator on Earth to build you an Artificial Intelligence from scratch, and they'd just give you a dumb look. You predicted people by telling your brain to act like theirs. You put yourself in their place. If you wanted to know what an angry person would do, you activated your own brain's anger circuitry, and whatever that circuitry output, that was your prediction. What did the neural circuitry for anger actually look like inside? Who knew? The best social manipulator on Earth might not know what neurons were, and neither might the best Legilimens. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
If I'm teaching deep things, then I view it as important to make people feel like they're learning deep things, because otherwise, they will still have a hole in their mind for "deep truths" that needs filling, and they will go off and fill their heads with complete nonsense that has been written in a more satisfying style. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
[ ... ] 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. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
You couldn't leave your home planet while it still contained a place like Azkaban.
You had to stay and fight. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
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? — Eliezer Yudkowsky
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. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Professor McGonagall, the Headmaster set fire to a chicken!"
"He wha- — Eliezer Yudkowsky
My successes already accomplished have mostly been taking existing science and getting people to apply it in their everyday lives. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
It is triple ultra forbidden to respond to criticism with violence. There are a very few injunctions in the human art of rationality that have no ifs, ands, buts, or escape clauses. This is one of them. Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Right. Because he seemed like such a normal kid. And he is a normal kid, he is just what you'd expect a baseline male child to be like if Darth Vader were his doting father. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
So the next time you doubt the strangeness of the future, remember how you were born in a hunter-gatherer tribe ten thousand years ago, when no one knew of Science at all. Remember how you were shocked, to the depths of your being, when Science explained the great and terrible sacred mysteries that you once revered so highly. Remember how you once believed that you could fly by eating the right mushrooms, and then you accepted with disappointment that you would never fly, and then you flew. Remember how you had always thought that slavery was right and proper, and then you changed your mind. Don't imagine how you could have predicted the change, for that is amnesia. Remember that, in fact, you did not guess. Remember how, century after century, the world changed in ways you did not guess.
Maybe then you will be less shocked by what happens next. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
If it was a friend, perhaps, you would have felt far more injured by what he said."
"If he were a friend, all the more reason to forgive him. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
If the students see that rules are for everyone ... for professors too, not just for poor helpless students who get nothing but suffering out of the system ... why, the positive effects on school discipline should be tremendous. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
If you've been cryocrastinating, putting off signing up for cryonics "until later", don't think that you've "gotten away with it so far". Many worlds, remember? There are branched versions of you that are dying of cancer, and not signed up for cryonics, and it's too late for them to get life insurance. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
That was a lesson everyone (every human?) learned before puberty, not to let reality seem diminished by fiction. As the proverb went, It's bad enough comparing yourself to Isaac Newton without comparing yourself to Kimball Kinnison. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Logic stays true, wherever you may go,
So logic never tells you where you live. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Every mystery ever solved had been a puzzle from the dawn of the human species right up until someone solved it. — Eliezer Yudkowsky