Eliezer Yudkowsky quotes

Lonely dissent doesn't feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit. (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
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. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Physiologically adult humans are not meant to spend an additional 10 years in a school system; their brains map that onto "I have been assigned low tribal status". And so, of course, they plot rebellion - accuse the existing tribal overlords of corruption plot, perhaps to split off their own little tribe in the savanna, not realizing that this is impossible in the Modern World. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Litmus test: If you can't describe Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage and explain why people find it counterintuitive, you don't know enough about economics to direct any criticism or praise at "capitalism" because you don't know what other people are referring to when they use that word. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Between hindsight bias, fake causality, positive bias, anchoring/priming, et cetera et cetera, and above all the dreaded confirmation bias, once an idea gets into your head, it's probably going to stay there. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky
To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Rationality is the master lifehack which distinguishes which other lifehacks to use. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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. (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
Have I ever remarked on how completely ridiculous it is to ask high school students to decide what they want to do with the rest of their lives and give them nearly no support in doing so? Support like, say, spending a day apiece watching twenty different jobs and then another week at their top three choices, with salary charts and projections and probabilities of graduating that subject given their test scores? The more so considering this is a central allocation question for the entire economy? View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky
When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky
If cryonics were a scam it would have far better marketing and be far more popular. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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. (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
If you've been cryocrastinating, putting off signing up for cryonics "until later", don't think that you've "gotten away with it so far". Many worlds, remember? There are branched versions of you that are dying of cancer, and not signed up for cryonics, and it's too late for them to get life insurance. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky
If I'm teaching deep things, then I view it as important to make people feel like they're learning deep things, because otherwise, they will still have a hole in their mind for "deep truths" that needs filling, and they will go off and fill their heads with complete nonsense that has been written in a more satisfying style. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Part of the rationalist ethos is binding yourself emotionally to an absolutely lawful reductionistic universe - a universe containing no ontologically basic mental things such as souls or magic - and pouring all your hope and all your care into that merely real universe and its possibilities, without disappointment. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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. View quote
Eliezer Yudkowsky