If people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing.
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.
The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.
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.
To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.
I see little hope for democracy as an effective form of government, but I admire the poetry of how it makes its victims complicit in their own destruction.
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!
I’m lazy! I hate work! Hate hard work in all its forms! Clever shortcuts, that’s all I’m about!
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.
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.