{"author":"Eliezer Yudkowsky","author_id":"Eliezer+Yudkowsky","total_quotes":61,"quotes":[{"text":"What people really believe doesn't feel like a BELIEF, it feels like the way the world IS.","author":"Eliezer Yudkowsky","tags":["belief","religion"],"id":289,"author_id":"Eliezer+Yudkowsky"},{"text":"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. Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn't work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn't work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they've got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs. Or a good and virtuous person should believe as strongly as they can, no matter what the evidence says. Or truth doesn't exist and there's no such thing as objective reality. 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.","author":"Eliezer Yudkowsky","tags":["harry-potter"],"id":10380,"author_id":"Eliezer+Yudkowsky"},{"text":"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.","author":"Eliezer Yudkowsky","tags":["society","book","brain "],"id":11533,"author_id":"Eliezer+Yudkowsky"},{"text":"And then Harry Potter had launched in to a speech that was inspiring, yet vague. A speech to the effect that Fred and George and Lee had tremendous potential if they could just learn to be weirder. To make people's live surreal, instead of just surprising them with the equivalents of buckets of water propped above doors. (Fred and George had exchanged interested looks, they'd never thought of that one.) Harry Potter had invoked a picture of the prank they'd pulled on Neville - which, Harry had mentioned with some remorse, the Sorting Hat had chewed him out on - but which must have made Neville doubt his own sanity. For Neville it would have felt like being suddendly transported into an alternate universe. The same way everyone else had felt when they'd seen Snape apologize. That was the true power of pranking.","author":"Eliezer Yudkowsky","tags":["fanfiction","fantasy"],"id":32049,"author_id":"Eliezer+Yudkowsky"},{"text":"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.","author":"Eliezer Yudkowsky","tags":["change","change the world "],"id":35502,"author_id":"Eliezer+Yudkowsky"},{"text":"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!","author":"Eliezer Yudkowsky","tags":["fanfiction","harry-potter"],"id":36757,"author_id":"Eliezer+Yudkowsky"},{"text":"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.","author":"Eliezer Yudkowsky","tags":["anticipation","rationality","reality","thinking"],"id":38964,"author_id":"Eliezer+Yudkowsky"},{"text":"Only God can tell a truly plausible lie.","author":"Eliezer Yudkowsky","tags":["entanglement","god","lie","truth"],"id":41612,"author_id":"Eliezer+Yudkowsky"},{"text":"When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing.","author":"Eliezer Yudkowsky","tags":["fanfiction","harry-potter"],"id":51253,"author_id":"Eliezer+Yudkowsky"},{"text":"The purest case of an intelligence explosion would be an Artificial Intelligence rewriting its own source code. The key idea is that if you can improve intelligence even a little, the process accelerates. It's a tipping point. Like trying to balance a pen on one end - as soon as it tilts even a little, it quickly falls the rest of the way.","author":"Eliezer Yudkowsky","tags":["balance","end","pen "],"id":54448,"author_id":"Eliezer+Yudkowsky"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":61,"pages":7,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}