Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

67 quotes in 1174 categories

• There is light in the world, and it is us!
• That which the truth nourishes should thrive.
• If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool.
• 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…
• The strength of a theory is not what it allows, but what it prohibits; if you can invent an equally persuasive explanation for any outcome,…
• 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…
• 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…
• There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts; and if a model is surprised by the facts, it is no credit…
• Science has heroes, but no gods. The great Names are not our superiors, or even our rivals, they are passed milestones on our road; and…
• You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• If you don’t sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent.
• 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.
• If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.
• [...] intelligent people only have a certain amount of time (measured in subjective time spent thinking about religion) to become atheists. After a certain point,…
• 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…
• 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…

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