It’s okay to bribe people with books, right?
When you walk past a bookshop you haven’t visited before, you have to go in and look around. That’s the family rule.
And I know that I’d just make myself unhappy by comparing that reality to... something perfect that I built up in my imagination.
And I suspect, Mr. Potter, that if I leave you alone for two months with your schoolbooks, even without a wand, I will return to this house only to find a crater billowing purple smoke, a depopulated city surrounding it and a plague of flaming zebras terrorising what remains of England.
You’d think there’d be some kind of more dramatic mental event associated with updating on an observation of infinitesimal probability -” Harry stopped himself. Mum, the witch, and even his Dad were giving him that look again. “I mean, with finding out that everything I believe is false.
Reality is always lawful,” said Harry, “even if we don’t know the law.
The most dangerous truth a Confessor knows is that the rules of society are just consensual hallucinations. Choosing to wake up from the dream means choosing to end your life.
You do realize that your brain is literally hardwired to generate error signals when it sees other human-shaped objects stating a different opinion from yourself.
I am not sure how to explain it, except that – truth matters to us.
Moore’s Law of Mad Science: Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point.
Many have stood their ground and faced the darkness when it comes for them. Fewer come for the darkness and force it to face them.
You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.
The police officer who puts their life on the line with no superpowers, no X-Ray vision, no super-strength, no ability to fly, and above all no invulnerability to bullets, reveals far greater virtue than Superman – who is only a mere superhero.
There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The Universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don’t care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don’t have to! WE care! There IS light in the world, and it is US!
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.
By far the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.
There is light in the world, and it is us!
Science has heroes, but no gods. The great Names are not our superiors, or even our rivals, they are passed milestones on our road; and the most important milestone is the hero yet to come.
When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing.
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.