Eliezer Yudkowsky quotes - page 3

The human brain cannot release enough neurotransmitters to feel emotion a thousand times as strong as the grief of one funeral. A prospective risk going from 10,000,000 deaths to 100,000,000 deaths does not multiply by ten the strength of our determination to stop it. It adds one more zero on paper for our eyes to glaze over. (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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
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
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
I know that I can never truly understand it, and I haven't the words to say.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
When, today, you get into an argument about whether "we" ought to raise the minimum wage, you're executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed...
Eliezer Yudkowsky
But the nonexistent apples will still fall toward the nonexistent ground at a meaningless rate of 9.8 m/s2.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
This is crunch time for the whole human species, and not just for us but for the intergalactic civilization whose existence depends on us. This is the hour before the final exam and we're trying to get as much studying done as possible.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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
The grass is always greener on the other side of reality. Which is rather setting ourselves up for eternal disappointment, eh? If we cannot take joy in the merely real, our lives shall be empty indeed. (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
People go funny in the head when talking about politics.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
The human brain cannot release enough neurotransmitters to feel emotion a thousand times as strong as the grief of one funeral.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
My experience is that journalists report on the nearest-cliche algorithm, which is extremely uninformative because there aren't many cliches, the truth is often quite distant from any cliche, and the only thing you can infer about the actual event was that this was the closest cliche.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
It is so much worse than you think.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
A lot of common wisdom like that isn't just mistaken, it's anti-epistemology, it's systematically wrong. Every rule of rationality that tells you how to find the truth, there's someone out there who needs you to believe the opposite. If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy; and there's a lot of people out there telling lies.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Evaluate your beliefs first and then arrive at your emotions. Let yourself say: "If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool.”.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Lies propagate, that's what I'm saying. You've got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that's connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you'd even have to start lying about the general laws of thought. (Eliezer Yudkowsky)
Confusion exists in the map, not in the territory. Unanswerable questions do not mark places where magic enters the universe. They mark places where your mind runs skew to reality.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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
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.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
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