Eliezer Yudkowsky: Trending quotes (page 2)

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“I know that I can never truly understand it, and I haven't the words to say.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Feeling Rational http://lesswrong.com/lw/hp/feeling_rational/ (April 2007)
Context: Ever since I adopted the rule of "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be," I've also come to realize "That which the truth nourishes should thrive." When something good happens, I am happy, and there is no confusion in my mind about whether it is rational for me to be happy. When something terrible happens, I do not flee my sadness by searching for fake consolations and false silver linings. I visualize the past and future of humankind, the tens of billions of deaths over our history, the misery and fear, the search for answers, the trembling hands reaching upward out of so much blood, what we could become someday when we make the stars our cities, all that darkness and all that light — I know that I can never truly understand it, and I haven't the words to say.

Understanding

“When, today, you get into an argument about whether "we" ought to raise the minimum wage, you're executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed…”

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Politics Is The Mind-Killer http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/ (February 2007)
Context: People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation... When, today, you get into an argument about whether "we" ought to raise the minimum wage, you're executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed... Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back — providing aid and comfort to the enemy.

“Ever since I adopted the rule of "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be," I've also come to realize "That which the truth nourishes should thrive."”

Eliezer Yudkowsky

When something good happens, I am happy, and there is no confusion in my mind about whether it is rational for me to be happy. When something terrible happens, I do not flee my sadness by searching for fake consolations and false silver linings. I visualize the past and future of humankind, the tens of billions of deaths over our history, the misery and fear, the search for answers, the trembling hands reaching upward out of so much blood, what we could become someday when we make the stars our cities, all that darkness and all that light — I know that I can never truly understand it, and I haven't the words to say.
Feeling Rational http://lesswrong.com/lw/hp/feeling_rational/ (April 2007)

Truth

“But the nonexistent apples will still fall toward the nonexistent ground at a meaningless rate of 9.8 m/s2.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Quantum Non-Realism http://lesswrong.com/lw/q5/quantum_nonrealism/ (May 2008)
Context: The nature of "reality" is something about which I'm still confused, which leaves open the possibility that there isn't any such thing. But Egan's Law still applies: "It all adds up to normality." Apples didn't stop falling when Einstein disproved Newton's theory of gravity. Sure, when the dust settles, it could turn out that apples don't exist, Earth doesn't exist, reality doesn't exist. But the nonexistent apples will still fall toward the nonexistent ground at a meaningless rate of 9.8 m/s2.

“If you declare Crocker's Rules, other people don't need to worry about being tactful to you.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Promoting "Crocker's Rules" in "An Introduction to SL4" (2002) http://www.sl4.org/intro.html
Context: If you declare Crocker's Rules, other people don't need to worry about being tactful to you. (You still need to worry about being tactful to them — Crocker's Rules only work one way.)

People

“This is crunch time for the whole human species, and not just for us but for the intergalactic civilization whose existence depends on us. This is the hour before the final exam and we're trying to get as much studying done as possible.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Question 5 in Less Wrong Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky (January 2010) http://lesswrong.com/lw/1lq/less_wrong_qa_with_eliezer_yudkowsky_video_answers/
Context: This is crunch time for the whole human species, and not just for us but for the intergalactic civilization whose existence depends on us. This is the hour before the final exam and we're trying to get as much studying done as possible. It may be that you can't make yourself feel that for a decade or thirty years or however long this crunch time lasts, but the reality is one thing and the emotions are another... If you confront it full on, then you can't really justify trading off any part of intergalactic civilization for any intrinsic thing you could get nowadays, and at the same time, it's also true that there are very few people who can live like that (and I'm not one of them myself).

Study , Time , Dependency

“Have I ever remarked on how completely ridiculous it is to ask high school students to decide what they want to do with the rest of their lives and give them nearly no support in doing so? Support like, say, spending a day apiece watching twenty different jobs and then another week at their top three choices, with salary charts and projections and probabilities of graduating that subject given their test scores? The more so considering this is a central allocation question for the entire economy?”

Eliezer Yudkowsky

A comment on Memetic Hazards in Videogames (September 2010) http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pe/memetic_hazards_in_videogames/2l8y

School , Question , Support

“But ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. A phenomenon can seem mysterious to some particular person. There are no phenomena which are mysterious of themselves. To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Mysterious Answers To Mysterious Questions http://lesswrong.com/lw/iu/mysterious_answers_to_mysterious_questions/ (August 2007); Yudkowsky credits the map/territory analogy to physicist/statistician Edwin Thompson Jaynes.

Personality

“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

We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think http://lesswrong.com/lw/jx/we_change_our_minds_less_often_than_we_think/ (October 2007)

Idea

“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 Dissent http://lesswrong.com/lw/mb/lonely_dissent/ (December 2007)

School , Feeling

“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

Epistle to the New York Less Wrongians (April 2011) http://lesswrong.com/lw/5c0/epistle_to_the_new_york_less_wrongians/

People , Optimism

“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

Question 12 in Less Wrong Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky (January 2010) http://lesswrong.com/lw/1lq/less_wrong_qa_with_eliezer_yudkowsky_video_answers/

“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 Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Ch. 45 http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/45/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (2010 - 2015)

Death , Children , History , Star

“To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Twelve Virtues Of Rationality http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues

“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.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Your Strength As A Rationalist http://lesswrong.com/lw/if/your_strength_as_a_rationalist/ (August 2007)

Knowledge , Reality

“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

" Timeless Identity http://lesswrong.com/lw/qx/timeless_identity/" (June 2008)

Life , World , Thinking

“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

Helpless Individuals (March 2009) http://lesswrong.com/lw/64/helpless_individuals/

Question

“You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That's not just an arbitrary rule, it's implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signalling! And cats are COMPLICATED! A human mind can't just visualise a whole cat's anatomy and, and all the cat biochemistry, and what about the neurology? How can you go on thinking using a cat-sized brain?”

Eliezer Yudkowsky Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Harry Potter in Ch. 2 http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/2
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (2010 - 2015)

Cats , Thinking

“The strength of a theory is not what it allows, but what it prohibits; if you can invent an equally persuasive explanation for any outcome, you have zero knowledge.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky

An Alien God http://lesswrong.com/lw/kr/an_alien_god/ (November 2007)

Knowledge

“If I'm teaching deep things, then I view it as important to make people feel like they're learning deep things, because otherwise, they will still have a hole in their mind for "deep truths" that needs filling, and they will go off and fill their heads with complete nonsense that has been written in a more satisfying style.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky

A comment on "Mind Control and Me" at LessWrong.com (March 2009) http://lesswrong.com/lw/46/mind_control_and_me/319?context=1

People , Truth , Feeling , Learning