Eliezer Yudkowsky

“a rationalist isn't ever certain of anything”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“I CAN DO MAGIC! FEAR ME, LAWS OF PHYSICS, I'M COMING TO VIOLATE YOU!”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“I'm not a psychopath, I'm just very creative.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“Reversed stupidity is not intelligence”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

To be clever in argument is not rationality but rationalization.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

If you don’t sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“It's okay to bribe people with books, right?”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“Reality is always lawful," said Harry, "even if we don't know the law.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

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

— 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

“Also Harry was in love. It would be a three-way wedding: him, the Time-Turner, and Professor Quirrell.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“But I really am Ravenclaw, you know, not Slytherin. I don't want to rule the universe. I just think it could be…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“Why would you pay attention to your own thoughts, if you knew you were trying to manipulate yourself”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

I don't want to rule the universe. I just think it could be more sensibly organised.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

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

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“The next time, Mr. Potter, that you choose to escalate a contest rather than lose, you may lose all the stakes you…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

And someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star they won’t tell the children about the history of…

— 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…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“For an instant Harry imagined his own Mum and Dad in Azkaban with the Dementors sucking out their life, draining away the…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“If the students see that rules are for everyone... for professors too, not just for poor helpless students who get nothing but…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

Not every change is an improvement but every improvement is a change; you can't do anything BETTER unless you can manage to…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“This is one of the primary mechanisms whereby, if a fool says the sun is shining, we do not correctly discard this…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“There are no hard problems, only problems that are hard to a certain level of intelligence. Move the smallest bit upwards [in…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

I see little hope for democracy as an effective form of government, but I admire the poetry of how it makes its…

— 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…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“The point being that when there are lots of possible answers, most of the evidence you need goes into just locating the…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

Most Muggles lived in a world defined by the limits of what you could do with cars and telephones. Even though Muggle…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

- With respect, Professor McGonagall, I'm not quite sure you understand what I'm trying to do here. - With respect, Mr. Potter,…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“Probably the single most reliable sign of a cult guru is that the guru claims expertise, not in one area, not even…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

If dragons were common, and you could look at one in the zoo - but zebras were a rare legendary creature that…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

- Every time someone cries out in prayer and I can't answer, I feel guilty about not being God. - That doesn't…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

You cannot 'rationalize' what is not rational to begin with - as if lying were called 'truthization.' There is no way to…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“When you walked through a park, the immersive world that surrounded you was something that existed inside your own brain as a…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“People had no sense of history, they learned about chemistry and biology and astronomy and thought that these matters had always been…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“And then Harry Potter had launched in to a speech that was inspiring, yet vague. A speech to the effect that Fred…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“Charming, happy, generous with his favors to his friends, Draco wasn't a psychopath. That was the sad and awful part, knowing human…

— 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…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“The Soviets were not 50% right, they were entirely wrong. They weren’t quantitatively wrong about the amount of variance due to the…

— 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…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“Once upon a time," said the Kiritsugu, "there were people who dropped a U-235 fission bomb, on a place called Hiroshima. They…

— Eliezer Yudkowsky