Top 100 Yudkowsky Quotes
#1. Given that self-improving strong AI cannot be recalled, Yudkowsky points out that we need to "get it right the first time," and that its initial design must have "zero nonrecoverable errors."45
Ray Kurzweil
#2. Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the founders of The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, believes that singularity will lead to an "intelligence explosion" as super-intelligent machines design even more intelligent machines, with each generation repeating this process.
Peter Singer
#3. With the possible exception of nanotechnology being released upon the world there is nothing in the whole catalogue of disasters that is comparable to AGI. - Eliezer Yudkowsky, Research Fellow, Machine Intelligence Research Institute
James Barrat
#4. My parents were early adopters, and I've been online since a rather young age. You should regard anything from 2001 or earlier as having been written by a different person who also happens to be named 'Eliezer Yudkowsky.' I do not share his opinions.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#5. He wanted to write someone and demand a refund on his dark side which clearly ought to have irresistible magical power but had turned out to be defective.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#6. 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
#7. To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#8. 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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#9. There is never an idea so true that it's wrong to criticize any argument that supports it.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#10. I wasn't one of the dreamers, back then. I was just wrapped up in my private blanket of hurt.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#11. Apparently people who were in books actually sounded like a book when they talked. This was quite the surprising discovery.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#12. People form close friendships by knowing private things about each other, and the reason most people don't make close friends is because they're too embarrassed to share anything really important about themselves.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#13. When something is universal enough in our everyday lives, we take it for granted to the point of forgetting it exists.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#14. Nestled up against the wall, where Professor Quirrell had stumbled, glistened the crushed remains of a beautiful blue beetle.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#15. There's something in science like the shine of the Patronus Charm, driving back all sorts of darkness and madness ...
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#16. A scientist worthy of a lab coat should be able to make original discoveries while wearing a clown suit, or give a lecture in a high squeaky voice from inhaling helium. It is written nowhere in the math of probability theory that one may have no fun.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#17. 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
#18. Though I have friends aplenty in academia, I don't operate within the academic system myself.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#19. What happened to me personally is only anecdotal evidence," Harry explained. "It doesn't carry the same weight as a replicated, peer-reviewed journal article about a controlled study with random assignment, many subjects, large effect sizes and strong statistical significance.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#20. 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
#21. 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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#22. If cryonics were a scam it would have far better marketing and be far more popular.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#23. You cannot obtain more truth for a fixed proposition by arguing it. To improve our beliefs, we must necessarily change our beliefs.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#24. A random key does not open a random lock just because they are "both random.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#25. Listen to hypotheses as they plead their cases before you, but remember that you are not a hypothesis, you are the judge. Therefore do not seek to argue for one side or another, for if you knew your destination, you would already be there.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#26. Okay, so either (a) I just teleported somewhere else entirely (b) they can fold space like no one's business or (c) they are simply ignoring all the rules.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#28. 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
#29. 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
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#30. The human species was not born into a market economy. Bees won't sell you honey if you offer them an electronic funds transfer. The human species imagined money into existence, and it exists - for us, not mice or wasps - because we go on believing in it.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#31. 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
#32. 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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#33. Stupidity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#34. An anthropologist will not excitedly report of a newly discovered tribe: 'They eat food! They breathe air! They use tools! They tell each other stories!' We humans forget how alike we are, living in a world that only reminds us of our differences.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#35. Nonviolent ideals were cheap to hold if you were a scientist, living inside the Protego bubble cast by the police officers and soldiers whose actions you had the luxury to question.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#36. This is one of theprimary mechanisms whereby, if a fool says the sun is shining, we do notcorrectly discard this as irrelevant nonevidence, but rather find ourselvesimpelled to say that it must be dark outside.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#38. Clever kids in Ravenclaw, evil kids in Slytherin, wannabe heroes in Gryffindor, and everyone who does the actual work in Hufflepuff.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#39. I am a full-time Research Fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a small 501(c)(3) public charity supported primarily by individual donations.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#40. Without thinking about it at all, Harry stepped in front of Hermione.
There was an intake of breath from behind him, and then a moment later Hermione brushed past and stepped in front of him. "Run, Harry!" she said. "Boys shouldn't have to be in danger.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#41. Unfortunately, I am also just now realizing that I've only been going along with society all my life, and that I never thought the matter through for myself, until now.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#42. Rationality is the master lifehack which distinguishes which other lifehacks to use.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#43. It wasn't cheating, but it was Science, which was almost as good.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#44. I don't want to rule the universe. I just think it could be more sensibly organised.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#45. When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#46. There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts; and if a model is surprised by the facts, it is no credit to that model.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#48. To die was not to leave the world, not to escape somewhere else; it was the simultaneous change of every piece of yourself into nothing.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#49. 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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#50. 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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#51. When you walk past a bookshop you haven't visited before, you have to go in and look around. That's the family rule.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#52. You're eleven years old, Mr. Potter!" she said in a harsh whisper.
"And therefore subhuman. Sorry ... for a moment there, I forgot.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#53. 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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#54. Don't trust thoughts because you think them, but because they obey specific trustworthy rules.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#56. Also Harry was in love. It would be a three-way wedding: him, the Time-Turner, and Professor Quirrell.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#57. Professor McGonagall, the Headmaster set fire to a chicken!"
"He wha-
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#58. 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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#59. 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
#60. Every mystery ever solved had been a puzzle from the dawn of the human species right up until someone solved it.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#61. 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
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#62. 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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#63. The golden coins might have been his, but they were still stolen - self-stolen? Auto-thieved?
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#64. 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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#65. 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
#66. I'm wondering if there's a spell to make lightning flash in the background whenever I make an ominous resolution.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#67. You are not the one who speaks your thoughts - you are the one who hears your thoughts." In Hebrew, the word for the highest soul, that which God breathed into Adam, is N'Shama - "the hearer.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#68. Anything that could give rise to smarter-than-human intelligence - in the form of Artificial Intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, or neuroscience-based human intelligence enhancement - wins hands down beyond contest as doing the most to change the world. Nothing else is even in the same league.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#69. You need one whole hell of a lot of rationality before it does anything but lead you into new and interesting mistakes.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#70. 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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#71. 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 ...
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#72. 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
#73. 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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#74. 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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#75. Since the rise of Homo sapiens, human beings have been the smartest minds around. But very shortly - on a historical scale, that is - we can expect technology to break the upper bound on intelligence that has held for the last few tens of thousands of years.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#76. Sometimes Harry thought the deepest split in his personality wasn't anything to do with his dark side; rather it was the divide between the altruistic and forgiving Abstract Reasoning Harry, versus the frustrated and angry Harry In The Moment.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#77. 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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#78. If there is no black and white, there is yet lighter and darker, and not all grays are the same.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#79. I'm lazy! I hate work! Hate hard work in all its forms! Clever shortcuts, that's all I'm about!
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#80. 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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#81. The obvious choice isn't always the best choice, but sometimes, by golly, it is. I don't stop looking as soon I find an obvious answer, but if I go on looking, and the obvious-seeming answer still seems obvious, I don't feel guilty about keeping it.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#82. World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#83. 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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#84. I want to carry in my heart forever the key word of the Olympics - 'passion.'
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#85. 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
#86. 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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#87. To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#88. 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
#89. You can't talk to thermodynamics and you can't pray to probability theory. You
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#90. 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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#91. 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
#92. The world's greatest fool may say the sun is shining, but that doesn't make it dark out.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#93. If you're unhappy whenever other people don't picture you exactly the same way you picture yourself, that's already dooming yourself to always be unhappy. No one ever thinks of us just the same way we think of ourselves.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#94. Many philosophers - particularly amateur philosophers, and ancient philosophers - share a dangerous instinct: If you give them a question, they try to answer it.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#95. You see, Miss Granger, people do not grow up because of time, people grow up when they are placed in grownup situations.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#96. 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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#97. He really really really shouldn't have done that. Amazing how much more obvious that became one second after it was too late.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#98. 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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#99. After all, if you had the complete decision process, you could run it as an AI, and I'd be coding it up right now.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#100. What people really believe doesn't feel like a BELIEF, it feels like the way the world IS.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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