Quote

If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Eliezer Yudkowsky
Age: 45
Born: 1979
Born: September 11
Artificial Intelligence Researcher
Blogger
Computer Scientist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky
Explaining
Outcome
Outcomes
Zero
Equally
Knowledge
Good

More quotes by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We underestimate the distance between ourselves and others. Not just inferential distance, but distances of temperament and ability, distances of situation and resource, distances of unspoken knowledge and unnoticed skills and luck, distances of interior landscape.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Image
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
Image
- 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
Image
When you think of intelligence, don't think of a college professor think of human beings as opposed to chimpanzees. If you don't have human intelligence, you're not even in the game.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I'm lazy! I hate work! Hate hard work in all its forms! Clever shortcuts, that's all I'm about!
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Image
What people really believe doesn't feel like a BELIEF, it feels like the way the world IS.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Image
If you handed [character] a glass that was 90% full, he'd tell you that the 10% empty part proved that no one really cared about water.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Image
There were mysterious questions, but a mysterious answer was a contradiction in terms.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Image
I'm wondering if there's a spell to make lightning flash in the background whenever I make an ominous resolution.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Image
To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Image
By and large, the answer to the question How do large institutions survive? is They don't! The vast majority of large modern-day institutions - some of them extremely vital to the functioning of our complex civilization - simply fail to exist in the first place.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Image
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
Image
Since the rise of Homo sapiens, human beings have been the smartest minds around. But very shortly - on a historical scale, that is - we can expect technology to break the upper bound on intelligence that has held for the last few tens of thousands of years.
Eliezer Yudkowsky