Eliezer Yudkowsky

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Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (born September 11, 1979) is an American artificial intelligence researcher concerned with the Singularity, and an advocate of Friendly Artificial Intelligence.

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• Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud. Submit yourself to ordeals and test yourself in fire. Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken belief, and seek to feel fully that emotion which fits the facts. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm. 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.”
  • in Twelve Virtues Of Rationality
• People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation... 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... Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back - providing aid and comfort to the enemy.
  • in Politics Is The Mind-Killer, February 2007.
• 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.
  • in Your Strength As A Rationalist, August 2007.
• Ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance.
  • in Mysterious Answers To Mysterious Questions, August 2007. (Yudkowsky credits the map/territory analogy to physicist/statistician Edwin Thompson Jaynes.)
• 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.
  • in We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think, October 2007.
• 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.
  • in An Alien God, November 2007.
• Lonely dissent doesn't feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.
  • in Lonely Dissent, December 2007.
• 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.
  • in Quantum explanations, April 2008, part of his Quantum Physics Sequence.
• 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.
  • in Honesty: Beyond Internal Truth, June 2009.

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