Top 100 Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes
#1. Boys," said Hermione Granger, "should not be allowed to love girls without asking them first! This is true in a number of ways and especially when it comes to gluing people to the ceiling!
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#2. When something is universal enough in our everyday lives, we take it for granted to the point of forgetting it exists.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#3. 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
#4. In what weird alternative universe would that girl NOT be Sorted into Ravenclaw? If Hermione Granger didn't go to Ravenclaw then there was no good reason for Ravenclaw House to exist.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#5. There are no hard problems, only problems that are hard to a certain level of intelligence. Move the smallest bit upwards [in intelligence] and some problems move from "impossible" to "obvious." Move a substantial degree upwards, and all of them will become obvious.
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#6. 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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#7. In the same sense that every thermal differential wants to equalize itself, and every computer program wants to become a collection of ad-hoc patches, every Cause wants to be a cult. It's
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#8. I wouldn't be surprised if tomorrow was the Final Dawn, the last sunrise before the Earth and Sun are reshaped into computing elements.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#9. Stupidity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
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#10. Clever kids in Ravenclaw, evil kids in Slytherin, wannabe heroes in Gryffindor, and everyone who does the actual work in Hufflepuff.
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#11. Rationality is the master lifehack which distinguishes which other lifehacks to use.
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#12. It wasn't cheating, but it was Science, which was almost as good.
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#13. When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing.
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#15. The next time, Mr. Potter, that you choose to escalate a contest rather than lose, you may lose all the stakes you place on the table.
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#16. You're eleven years old, Mr. Potter!" she said in a harsh whisper.
"And therefore subhuman. Sorry ... for a moment there, I forgot.
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#18. Also Harry was in love. It would be a three-way wedding: him, the Time-Turner, and Professor Quirrell.
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#19. Professor McGonagall, the Headmaster set fire to a chicken!"
"He wha-
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#20. 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.
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#21. 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.
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#22. You need one whole hell of a lot of rationality before it does anything but lead you into new and interesting mistakes.
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#23. 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.
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#24. It was a rare brain that could feel strongly about anything, if it wasn't close in space, close in time, near at hand, within easy reach ...
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#25. 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 .
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#26. Do not think that heroes cannot be broken! We are only more difficult to break, Hermione." The old wizard's eyes had grown sterner than she had ever seen. "When you have been exhausted for many hours, when pain and death is not a passing fear but a certainty, then it is harder to be a hero.
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#27. 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.
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#28. If there is no black and white, there is yet lighter and darker, and not all grays are the same.
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#29. Be careful ... any time you find yourself defining the "winner" as someone other than the agent who is currently smiling from on top of a giant heap of utility.
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#30. World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#31. When you think of intelligence, don't think of a college professor; think of human beings as opposed to chimpanzees. If you don't have human intelligence, you're not even in the game.
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#32. 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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#33. Sometimes we forget the most basic things, since it has been too long since we learned them. I realized I had done the same with my own lesson plan. You do not teach students to throw until you have taught them to fall. And I must not teach you to fight if you do not understand how to lose.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#34. If the box contains a diamond,
I desire to believe that the box contains a diamond;
If the box does not contain a diamond,
I desire to believe that the box does not contain a diamond;
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#35. The world's greatest fool may say the sun is shining, but that doesn't make it dark out.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#36. Nothing you'll read as breaking news will ever hold a candle to the sheer beauty of settled science. Textbook science has carefully phrased explanations for new students, math derived step by step, plenty of experiments as illustration, and test problems.
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#37. He really really really shouldn't have done that. Amazing how much more obvious that became one second after it was too late.
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#38. Homo sapiens didn't become the dominant species on this planet by having the sharpest claws or hardest armor - though I suppose some of that point may be lost on wizards. Still, it's beneath my dignity as a human being to be scared of anything that isn't smarter than I am.
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#39. No rescuer hath the rescuer, Godric Gryffindor had written. No Lord hath the champion, no mother and no father, only nothingness above.
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#40. John Kenneth Galbraith said: Faced with the choice of changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
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#41. (...) Where are you trying to go?"
Harry hesitated. "I'm not really sure," he said.
"Then perhaps you are already there.
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#42. 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.
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#43. If you don't sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent.
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#44. 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!
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#45. If what you believe doesn't depend om what you see, you've been blinded as effectively as by poking out your eyeballs.
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#46. If the students see that rules are for everyone ... for professors too, not just for poor helpless students who get nothing but suffering out of the system ... why, the positive effects on school discipline should be tremendous.
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#47. Hermione's eyes lit up with a terrible light of helpfulness and something in the back of Harry's brain screamed in desperate humiliation.
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#48. Reality is always lawful," said Harry, "even if we don't know the law.
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#49. Moore's Law of Mad Science: Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point.
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#51. You're so completely going to be in Slytherin."
"I'm so completely going to be in Ravenclaw, thank you very much. I only want power so I can get books.
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#52. Um. I'm going to have to eat a kitten, aren't I? Oh god, I'm going to have to eat a kitten. The
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#53. 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.
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#54. A Gryffindor would say that people don't become who they should be, because they're afraid.
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#55. I don't care where I live, so long as there's a roof to keep the rain off my books, and high-speed Internet access.
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#56. 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.
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#57. Once you tell a lie, the truth is your enemy; and every truth connected to that truth, and every ally of truth in general; all of these you must oppose, to protect the lie. Whether you're lying to others, or to yourself.
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#58. If you didn't predict that something would happen, if it took you completely by surprise, then what you believed about the world when you didn't see it coming, isn't enough to explain [what has happened].
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#60. But it is cute. It's such a boy thing to do.
Drop dead.
Aw, you say the most romantic things.
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#61. I've lived the lives of all the characters in all my books, and all their mighty wisdom thunders in my head.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#62. There's a popular concept of 'intelligence' as book smarts, like calculus or chess, as opposed to, say, social skills. So people say that 'it takes more than intelligence to succeed in human society.' But social skills reside in the brain, not the kidneys.
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#64. Hey, Draco, you know what I bet is even better for becoming friends than exchanging secrets? Committing murder.
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#65. Boy, you resolve not to go down the path of a Dark Lord and the universe starts messing with you the instant the Hat comes off your head. Some days it just doesn't pay to fight destiny. Maybe I'll wait until tomorrow to start on my resolution to not be a Dark Lord.
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#66. 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.
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#69. Oops is the sound we make when we improve our beliefs and strategies; so to look back at a time and not see anything you did wrong means that you haven't learned anything or changed your mind since then.
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#70. The screams failed to spread, as the strong hugged the weak and comforted them. That was something to be proud of, in the last moments of the old humanity.
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#71. It's too hard, speaking to aliens. They don't think like you do, and you don't know what you're doing wrong."
"I wonder," the Master of Fandom said with artificial lightness, "if they'll call it 'xenofatigue' and forbid anyone to talk to an alien for longer than five minutes.
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#72. 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!
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#73. I have no great fondness for the universe, but I do live there
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#74. Someday," said the Boy-Who-Lived, "when the distant descendants of Homo sapiens are looking back over the history of the galaxy and wondering how it all went so wrong, they will conclude that the original mistake was when someone taught Hermione Granger how to read.
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#75. If it was a friend, perhaps, you would have felt far more injured by what he said."
"If he were a friend, all the more reason to forgive him.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#76. 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.
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#77. A friend isn't someone you use once and then throw away, a friend is someone you use over and over again.
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#78. My successes already accomplished have mostly been taking existing science and getting people to apply it in their everyday lives.
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#80. 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.
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#81. For an instant Harry imagined his own Mum and Dad in Azkaban with the Dementors sucking out their life, draining away the happy memories of their love for him. Just for an instant, before his imagination blew a fuse and called an emergency shutdown and told him never to imagine that again.
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#82. Evil done in the name of good. Evil done in the name of evil. Which is worse?
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#83. 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.
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#84. Only a man exceedingly proud and vain," Dumbledore said quietly, as he turned back to the Floo roaring up again with green flames, "would believe that his heir should be like himself, rather than like who he wished that he could be.
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#85. Reality has been around since long before you showed up. Don't go calling it nasty names like 'bizarre' or 'incredible'. The universe was propagating complex amplitudes through configuration space for ten billion years before life ever emerged on Earth. Quantum physics is not 'weird'. You are weird.
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#86. 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.
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#87. But what happens after you break - that, too, is part of being a hero.
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#88. If science is a religion, it is the religion that heals the sick and reveals the secrets of the stars.
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#89. Do not think that fairness to all sides means balancing yourself evenly between positions; truth is not handed out in equal portions before the start of a debate.
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#90. Emergence is popular because it is the junk food of curiosity. You
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#91. Lonely dissent doesn't feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.
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#92. Intelligence is the source of technology. If we can use technology to improve intelligence, that closes the loop and potentially creates a positive feedback cycle.
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#93. 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.
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#94. Complex adaptations like "being a little selfish" and "not being willing to
work without reward" are human universals. The strength might vary a bit
from person to person, but everyone's got the same machinery under the
hood, we're just painted different colors.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#95. I don't think we'll run short of volunteers to watch disgusting alien pornography. Just post it to the ship's 4chan, and check after a few hours to see if anything was modded up to +5 Insightful.
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#96. Transhumanists are not fond of death. We would stop it if we could. To this end, we support research that holds out hope of a future in which humanity has defeated death.
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#97. You couldn't leave your home planet while it still contained a place like Azkaban.
You had to stay and fight.
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#98. There were mysterious questions, but a mysterious answer was a contradiction in terms.
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#99. You see, Harry, after you've been through a few adventures you tend to catch the hang of these things. You start to see the pattern, hear the rhythm of the world. You begin to harbour suspicions before the moment of revelation.
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#100. I am going to tear apart your pathetic little magical remnant of the Dark Ages into pieces smaller than its constituent atoms.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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