Eliezer Yudkowsky

1979– · American AI researcher and writer (born 1979)

Topics: learning, life, software engineering, engineering leadership

• The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.

  — Eliezer Yudkowsky

• To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty.

  — Eliezer Yudkowsky

• Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality.

  — Eliezer Yudkowsky

• 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

• 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

• I am tempted to say that a doctorate in AI would be negatively useful, but I am not one to hold someone’s reckless youth against them – just because you acquired a doctorate in AI doesn’t mean you should be permanently disqualified.

  — Eliezer Yudkowsky

• Rationality is the master lifehack which distinguishes which other lifehacks to use.

  — Eliezer Yudkowsky

• 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.

  — Eliezer Yudkowsky

• 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.

  — Eliezer Yudkowsky

• The strength of a theory is not what it allows, but what it prohibits; if you can invent an equally persuasive explanation for any outcome, you have zero knowledge.

  — 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

• The human brain cannot release enough neurotransmitters to feel emotion a thousand times as strong as the grief of one funeral.

  — Eliezer Yudkowsky

• 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

• 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

• 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

• I have sometimes thought that all professional lectures on rationality should be delivered while wearing a clown suit, to prevent the audience from confusing seriousness with solemnity.

  — Eliezer Yudkowsky

• 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

• 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

• 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

• Lonely dissent doesn't feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.

  — Eliezer Yudkowsky