Eliezer Yudkowsky

“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,...”

“If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy.”

“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 l...”

“What people really believe doesn't feel like a BELIEF, it feels like the way the world IS.”

“[...] intelligent people only have a certain amount of time (measured in subjective time spent thinking about religion) to become atheists. After a certain point, if you're smart, have spent...”

“To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.”

“Every mystery ever solved had been a puzzle from the dawn of the human species right up until someone solved it.”

“It's a most peculiar psychology—this business of 'Science is based on faith too, so there!' Typically this is said by people who claim that faith is a good thing. Then why do they say 'Scien...”

“...there's something in science like the shine of the Patronus Charm, driving back all sorts of darkness and madness...”

“Then you get the wrong answer and you can't go to the Moon that way! Nature isn't a person, you can't trick them into believing something else, if you try to tell the Moon it's made of chees...”

“By far the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.”

“Most Muggles lived in a world defined by the limits of what you could do with cars and telephones. Even though Muggle physics explicitly permitted possibilities like molecular nanotechnology...”

“I only want power so I can get books.”

“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, l...”

“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 - w...”

“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...”

“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...”

“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.”

“Textbook science is beautiful! Textbook science is comprehensible, unlike mere fascinating words that can never be truly beautiful. Elementary science textbooks describe simple theories, and...”

“The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science, the very latest controversies, are worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like 'General Relativity still governing planeta...”