- With respect, Professor McGonagall, I'm not quite sure you understand what I'm trying to do here. - With respect, Mr. Potter,… — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
I keep trying to explain to people that the archetype of intelligence is not Dustin Hoffman in 'The Rain Man;' it is… — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
If you want to maximize your expected utility, you try to save the world and the future of intergalactic civilization instead of… — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
The important graphs are the ones where some things are not connected to some other things. When the unenlightened ones try to… — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
The purest case of an intelligence explosion would be an Artificial Intelligence rewriting its own source code. The key idea is that… — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
Remember, if you succeed in everything you try in life, you're living below your full potential and you should take up more… — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
Trying and getting hurt can't possibly be worse for you than being... stuck. — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
“But I really am Ravenclaw, you know, not Slytherin. I don't want to rule the universe. I just think it could be more sensibly… — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
“If you regard evidence as a constraint and seek to free yourself, you sell yourself into the chains of your whims. For you cannot… — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
“I am not sure how to explain it, except that - truth matters to us.” — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
I see little hope for democracy as an effective form of government, but I admire the poetry of how it makes its victims complicit… — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
“He really really really shouldn't have done that. Amazing how much more obvious that became one second after it was too late.” — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
I'm wondering if there's a spell to make lightning flash in the background whenever I make an ominous resolution. — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
“There’s a technique we use in our local rationalist cluster called “Is That Your True Rejection?”, and it works like this: Before you stake… — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
Lonely dissent doesn't feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit. — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
“Knowing that Draco's hopeful face had probably been drilled into him by months of practice did not make it any less effective, Harry observed.… — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
The strength of a theory is not what it allows, but what it prohibits; if you can invent an equally persuasive explanation for any… — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
It is triple ultra forbidden to respond to criticism with violence. There are a very few injunctions in the human art of rationality that… — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
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… — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
