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If you are equally good at explaining 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
Zero
Equally
Knowledge
Good
Explaining
Outcome
Outcomes

More quotes by Eliezer Yudkowsky

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Boys, said Hermione Granger, should not be allowed to love girls without asking them first! This is true in a number of ways and especially when it comes to gluing people to the ceiling!
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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The purpose of a moral philosophy is not to look delightfully strange and counterintuitive or to provide employment to bioethicists. The purpose is to guide our choices toward life, health, beauty, happiness, fun, laughter, challenge, and learning.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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If cryonics were a scam it would have far better marketing and be far more popular.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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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 to that model.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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What people really believe doesn't feel like a BELIEF, it feels like the way the world IS.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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- 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
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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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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 them – just because you acquired a doctorate in AI doesn’t mean you should be permanently disqualified.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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Remember, if you succeed in everything you try in life, you're living below your full potential and you should take up more difficult or daring things.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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Through rationality we shall become awesome, and invent and test systematic methods for making people awesome, and plot to optimize everything in sight, and the more fun we have the more people will want to join us.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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Part of the rationalist ethos is binding yourself emotionally to an absolutely lawful reductionistic universe - a universe containing no ontologically basic mental things such as souls or magic and pouring all your hope and all your care into that merely real universe and its possibilities, without disappointment.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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Maybe you just can't protect people from certain specialized types of folly with any sane amount of regulation, and the correct response is to give up on the high social costs of inadequately protecting people from themselves under certain circumstances.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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There were mysterious questions, but a mysterious answer was a contradiction in terms.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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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 with a baseball bat was a good thing.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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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 head, it's probably going to stay there.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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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
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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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky