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.
Rationality is the master lifehack which distinguishes which other lifehacks to use.
A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curiosity requires both that you be ignorant, and that you desire to relinquish your ignorance.
I don’t want to rule the universe. I just think it could be more sensibly organised.
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.
This is one of theprimary mechanisms whereby, if a fool says the sun is shining, we do notcorrectly discard this as irrelevant nonevidence, but rather find ourselvesimpelled to say that it must be dark outside.
I’m wondering if there’s a spell to make lightning flash in the background whenever I make an ominous resolution.
After all, if you had the complete decision process, you could run it as an AI, and I’d be coding it up right now.
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.
If you don’t sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent.
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.
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.
Existential depression has always annoyed me; it is one of the world’s most pointless forms of suffering.