- 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
If I could create a world where people lived forever, or at the very least a few billion years, I would do… — 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
Moore's Law of Mad Science: Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point. — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
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… — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
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".… — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
Existential depression has always annoyed me; it is one of the world's most pointless forms of suffering. — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
If our extinction proceeds slowly enough to allow a moment of horrified realization, the doers of the deed will likely be quite… — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
An anthropologist will not excitedly report of a newly discovered tribe: 'They eat food! They breathe air! They use tools! They tell… — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The Universe is neither… — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
Physiologically adult humans are not meant to spend an additional 10 years in a school system; their brains map that onto "I… — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation. — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
Most Muggles lived in a world defined by the limits of what you could do with cars and telephones. Even though Muggle… — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
Singularitarians are the munchkins of the real world. We just ignore all the usual dungeons and head straight for the cycle of… — Eliezer Yudkowsky Copy Share Image
What people really believe doesn't feel like a BELIEF, it feels like the way the world IS. — 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
