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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, you have zero knowledge.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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Eliezer Yudkowsky
Age: 45
Born: 1979
Born: September 11
Artificial Intelligence Researcher
Blogger
Computer Scientist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky
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More quotes by 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
I only want power so I can get books.
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
The important graphs are the ones where some things are not connected to some other things. When the unenlightened ones try to be profound, they draw endless verbal comparisons between this topic, and that topic, which is like this, which is like that until their graph is fully connected and also totally useless.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
There's a popular concept of 'intelligence' as book smarts, like calculus or chess, as opposed to, say, social skills. So people say that 'it takes more than intelligence to succeed in human society.' But social skills reside in the brain, not the kidneys.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
- Every time someone cries out in prayer and I can't answer, I feel guilty about not being God. - That doesn't sound good. - I understand that I have a problem, and I know what I need to do to solve it, all right? I'm working on it. Of course, Harry hadn't said what the solution was. The solution, obviously, was to hurry up and become God.
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
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
Our coherent extrapolated volition is our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges, where our wishes cohere rather than interfere extrapolated as we wish that extrapolated, interpreted as we wish that interpreted.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
If cryonics were a scam it would have far better marketing and be far more popular.
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
If you want to maximize your expected utility, you try to save the world and the future of intergalactic civilization instead of donating your money to the society for curing rare diseases and cute puppies.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
The people I know who seem to make unusual efforts at rationality, are unusually honest, or, failing that, at least have unusually bad social skills.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
If you don’t sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Lonely dissent doesn't feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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 no invulnerability to bullets, reveals far greater virtue than Superman - who is only a mere superhero.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
- With respect, Professor McGonagall, I'm not quite sure you understand what I'm trying to do here. - With respect, Mr. Potter, I'm quite sure I don't. Unless - this is a guess, mind - you're trying to take over the world? - No! I mean yes - well, NO! - I think i should perhaps be alarmed that you have trouble answering the question.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The Universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don't have to! WE care! There IS light in the world, and it is US!
Eliezer Yudkowsky