I’m lazy! I hate work! Hate hard work in all its forms! Clever shortcuts, that’s all I’m about!
Lonely dissent doesn’t feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.
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.
I ask the fundamental question of rationality: Why do you believe what you believe? What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?
Remember, if you succeed in everything you try in life, you’re living below your full potential and you should take up more difficult or daring things.
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.
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.
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.
There were mysterious questions, but a mysterious answer was a contradiction in terms.
I only want power so I can get books.
Why does any kind of cynicism appeal to people? Because it seems like a mark of maturity, of sophistication, like you’ve seen everything and know better. Or because putting something down feels like pushing yourself up.
That which the truth nourishes should thrive.
If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool.
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.
Every mystery ever solved had been a puzzle from the dawn of the human species right up until someone solved it.
World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.
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.
If cryonics were a scam it would have far better marketing and be far more popular.
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.
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.