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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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Eliezer Yudkowsky
Age: 45
Born: 1979
Born: September 11
Artificial Intelligence Researcher
Blogger
Computer Scientist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky
Future
Cute
Intergalactic
Money
Rare
Donating
Trying
Expected
Puppies
World
Save
Curing
Disease
Maximize
Civilization
Puppy
Instead
Utility
Society
Diseases

More quotes by 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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Rationality is the master lifehack which distinguishes which other lifehacks to use.
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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To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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I'm lazy! I hate work! Hate hard work in all its forms! Clever shortcuts, that's all I'm about!
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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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
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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
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There is light in the world, and it is us!
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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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 to ordeals and test yourself in fire. Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken belief, and seek to feel fully that emotion which fits the facts.
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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Intelligence is the source of technology. If we can use technology to improve intelligence, that closes the loop and potentially creates a positive feedback cycle.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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I'm wondering if there's a spell to make lightning flash in the background whenever I make an ominous resolution.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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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
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World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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If you want to build a recursively self-improving AI, have it go through a billion sequential self-modifications, become vastly smarter than you, and not die, you've got to work to a pretty precise standard.
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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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
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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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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