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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
Disease
Maximize
Civilization
Puppy
Instead
Utility
Society
Diseases
Future
Cute
Intergalactic
Money
Rare
Donating
Trying
Expected
Puppies
World
Save
Curing

More quotes by Eliezer Yudkowsky

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I am a full-time Research Fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a small 501(c)(3) public charity supported primarily by individual donations.
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Rationality is the master lifehack which distinguishes which other lifehacks to use.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Lonely dissent doesn't feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.
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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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- 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
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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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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
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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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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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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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What people really believe doesn't feel like a BELIEF, it feels like the way the world IS.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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There is light in the world, and it is us!
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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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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I only want power so I can get books.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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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