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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

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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
Full
Water
Tell
Cared
Part
Handed
Character
Proved
Really
Glass
Glasses
Empty

More quotes by 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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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
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Rationality is the master lifehack which distinguishes which other lifehacks to use.
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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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.
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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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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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
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World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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Every mystery ever solved had been a puzzle from the dawn of the human species right up until someone solved it.
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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If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.
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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If cryonics were a scam it would have far better marketing and be far more popular.
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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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
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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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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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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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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