Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• Not every change is an improvement but every improvement is a change; you can't do anything BETTER unless you can manage to do it DIFFERENTLY, you've got to let yourself do better than other people!

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  People, Improvement, Manage

  8 Copy quote

• If you don’t sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent.

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Kids, Parent, Ifs

  "Normal Cryonics" by Eliezer Yudkowsky, www.lesswrong.com. January 19, 2010.

  4 Copy quote

• If cryonics were a scam it would have far better marketing and be far more popular.

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Marketing, Scams, Ifs

  Comment on reddit, www.reddit.com. November 29, 2008.

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Fun, Laughter, Philosophy

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Skills, People, Effort

  "Honesty: Beyond Internal Truth". lesswrong.com. June 06, 2009.

  13 Copy quote

• You couldn't changed history. But you could get it right to start with. Do something differently the FIRST time around. This whole business with seeking Slytherin's secrets... seemed an awful lot like the sort of thing where, years later, you would look back and say, 'And THAT was where it all started to go wrong.' And he would wish desperately for the ability to fall back through time and make a different choice. Wish granted. Now what?

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Fall, Years, Choices

  7 Copy quote

• You cannot rationalize what is not rational to begin with - as if lying were called truthization. There is no way to obtain more truth for a proposition by bribery, flattery, or the most passionate argument - you can make more people believe the proposition, but you cannot make it more true.

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Lying, Believe, People

  10 Copy quote

• [...] intelligent people only have a certain amount of time (measured in subjective time spent thinking about religion) to become atheists. After a certain point, if you're smart, have spent time thinking about and defending your religion, and still haven't escaped the grip of Dark Side Epistemology, the inside of your mind ends up as an Escher painting.

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Atheist, Smart, Dark

  6 Copy quote

• Lonely dissent doesn't feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Lonely, School, Black

  "Lonely Dissent". lesswrong.com. December 28, 2007.

  7 Copy quote

• The human brain cannot release enough neurotransmitters to feel emotion a thousand times as strong as the grief of one funeral. A prospective risk going from 10,000,000 deaths to 100,000,000 deaths does not multiply by ten the strength of our determination to stop it. It adds one more zero on paper for our eyes to glaze over.

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Determination, Strong, Zero

  "Global Catastrophic Risks". Chapter: "Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks". Book edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic, 2008.

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  Disappointment, Real, Ethos

  "Mundane Magic". lesswrong.com. October 31, 2008.

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Smart, Book, Skills

  6 Copy quote

• Like that's the only reason anyone would ever buy a first-aid kit? Don't take this the wrong way, Professor McGonagall, but what sort of crazy children are you used to dealing with?" "Gryffindors," spat Professor McGonagall, the word carrying a freight of bitterness and despair that fell like an eternal curse on all youthful heroism and high spirits.

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Children, Crazy, Despair

  32 Copy quote

• 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

  Civilization, Majority, Answers

  "Helpless Individuals". lesswrong.com. March 30, 2009.

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Self, Want, Standards

  "Less Wrong Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky: Video Answers". Question 12, lesswrong.com. January 07, 2010.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Distance, Skills, Luck

  "Beware of Other-Optimizing". lesswrong.com. April 10, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

• We tend to see individual differences instead of human universals. Thus, when someone says the word 'intelligence,' we think of Einstein instead of humans.

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Thinking, Differences, Individual

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  People, Wish, Together

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Profound, Important, Trying

  4 Copy quote

• And someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star, they won’t tell the children about the history of Ancient Earth until they’re old enough to bear it; and when they learn they’ll weep to hear that such a thing as Death had ever once existed!

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Stars, Children, Humanity

  "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (HPMOR)". Serial fan fiction by Eliezer Yudkowsky, www.fanfiction.net. February 28, 2010 – March 14, 2015.

  6 Copy quote

• Okay, so either (a) I just teleported somewhere else entirely (b) they can fold space like no one's business or (c) they are simply ignoring all the rules.

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Space, Somewhere Else, Okay

  "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality". Book by Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2010.

  4 Copy quote

• - 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

  Mean, Thinking, Mind

  "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality". Book by Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2010.

  4 Copy quote

• World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Phrases, World, Ugly

  4 Copy quote

• If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool.

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Believe, Iron, Desire

  "Twelve Virtues Of Rationality" by Eliezer Yudkowsky, yudkowsky.net. 2006.

  5 Copy quote

• If you've been cryocrastinating, putting off signing up for cryonics "until later", don't think that you've "gotten away with it so far". Many worlds, remember? There are branched versions of you that are dying of cancer, and not signed up for cryonics, and it's too late for them to get life insurance.

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Cancer, Thinking, Dying

  "Timeless Identity". lesswrong.com. June 3, 2008.

  4 Copy quote

Page 3 of 4

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin