People cling to their intuitions, I think, not so much because they believe their cognitive algorithms are perfectly reliable, but because they can’t see their intuitions as the way their cognitive algorithms happen to look from the inside. And so everything you try to say about how the native cognitive algorithm goes astray, ends up being contrasted to their direct perception of the Way Things Really Are – and discarded as obviously wrong.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

They crossed the boundary from Christmas Eve to Christmas Day within that timeless void where Earthly rotations meant nothing, the one true everlasting Silent Night.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

Above all, don’t ask what to believe – ask what to anticipate. Every question of belief should flow from a question of anticipation, and that question of anticipation should be the center of the inquiry.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

Harry had run into trouble falling asleep Friday night, which he had anticipated might happen, and so he had decided to take the obvious advance precaution of buying a sleeping potion; and to prevent it from constituting a visible sign that he was nervous, he had decided to buy it off Fred and George a couple of months earlier.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

Well, sounding wise wasn’t difficult. It was a lot easier than being intelligent, actually, since you didn’t have to say anything surprising or come up with any new insights. You just let your brain’s pattern-matching software complete the cliche, using whatever Deep Wisdom you’d stored previously.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

She was taken to St. Mungo’s, where,” the Headmistress now sounded slightly perturbed, “a standard diagnostic Charm showed Miss Granger as a healthy unicorn in excellent physical condition except that her mane needs combing.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

If what you believe doesn’t depend om what you see, you’ve been blinded as effectively as by poking out your eyeballs.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

You cannot obtain more truth for a fixed proposition by arguing it. To improve our beliefs, we must necessarily change our beliefs.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

The truly important problems are often the ones you’re not even considering, because they appear to be impossible, or, um, actually difficult, or worst of all, not clear how to solve.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

For it is a sad rule that whenever you are most in need of your art as a rationalist, that is when you are most likely to forget it.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is necessarily a change.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

Every improvement is a change, but not every change is an improvement. Every rationalist doubts, but not all doubts are rational. Wearing doubts doesn’t make you a rationalist any more than wearing a white medical lab coat makes you a doctor.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

Are you familiar with the economic concept of ‘replacement value’? Hermione’s replacement value is infinite! There’s nowhere else I can go to buy another one!

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

A playground is a great place to be a bully, and a terrible place to be a victim, if the teachers don’t care who started it.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

Never give anyone wise advice unless you know exactly what you’re both talking about.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

There are forty kinds of lunacy but only one kind of common sense.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

Evil happens, thought Harry, it doesn’t mean anything or teach us anything, except to not be evil.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

What I am trying to say is that more than your own life has to be at stake, before a person becomes desperate enough to resort to math.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

No rescuer hath the rescuer, Godric Gryffindor had written. No Lord hath the champion, no mother and no father, only nothingness above.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

Usually, when things suck, it’s because they suck in a way that’s a Nash equilibrium.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you,” Harry recited the proverb.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky
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