Top 150 Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

2. “World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

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

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

4. “Not every change is an improvement but every improvement is a change; you can’t do anything BETTER unless you can manage to do it DIFFERENTLY, you’ve got to let yourself do better than other people!”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

5. “Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is necessarily a change.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

6. “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

7. “Rationality is the master lifehack which distinguishes which other lifehacks to use.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

8. “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, or the sky. But they don’t have to! WE care! There IS light in the world, and it is US!”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

9. “I’m lazy! I hate work! Hate hard work in all its forms! Clever shortcuts, that’s all I’m about!”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

10. “Moore’s Law of Mad Science: Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

11. “If you don’t sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

12. “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

13. “Through rationality we shall become awesome, and invent and test systematic methods for making people awesome, and plot to optimize everything in sight, and the more fun we have the more people will want to join us.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

14. “The police officer who puts their life on the line with no superpowers, no X-Ray vision, no super-strength, no ability to fly, and above all no invulnerability to bullets, reveals far greater virtue than Superman – who is only a mere superhero.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

15. “I see little hope for democracy as an effective form of government, but I admire the poetry of how it makes its victims complicit in their own destruction.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

16. “When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

17. “I ask the fundamental question of rationality: Why do you believe what you believe? What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

18. “Remember, if you succeed in everything you try in life, you’re living below your full potential and you should take up more difficult or daring things.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

19. “After all, if you had the complete decision process, you could run it as an AI, and I’d be coding it up right now.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

20. “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

21. “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

22. “Intelligence is the source of technology. If we can use technology to improve intelligence, that closes the loop and potentially creates a positive feedback cycle.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

23. “Existential depression has always annoyed me; it is one of the world’s most pointless forms of suffering.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

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

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

25. “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 learn they’ll weep to hear that such a thing as Death had ever once existed.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

26. “We tend to see individual differences instead of human universals. Thus, when someone says the word ‘intelligence,’ we think of Einstein instead of humans.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

27. “If you want to maximize your expected utility, you try to save the world and the future of intergalactic civilization instead of donating your money to the society for curing rare diseases and cute puppies.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

28. “Lonely dissent doesn’t feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

29. “That which the truth nourishes should thrive.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

30. “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

31. “Many have stood their ground and faced the darkness when it comes for them. Fewer come for the darkness and force it to face them.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

32. “There were mysterious questions, but a mysterious answer was a contradiction in terms.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

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

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

34. “Why does any kind of cynicism appeal to people? Because it seems like a mark of maturity, of sophistication, like you’ve seen everything and know better. Or because putting something down feels like pushing yourself up.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

35. “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

36. “A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curiosity requires both that you be ignorant, and that you desire to relinquish your ignorance.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

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

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

38. “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

39. “If cryonics were a scam it would have far better marketing and be far more popular.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

40. “There is light in the world, and it is us!”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

41. “Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

42. “Maybe you just can’t protect people from certain specialized types of folly with any sane amount of regulation, and the correct response is to give up on the high social costs of inadequately protecting people from themselves under certain circumstances.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

43. “But I really am Ravenclaw, you know, not Slytherin. I don’t want to rule the universe. I just think it could be more sensibly organised.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

44. “I don’t want to rule the universe. I just think it could be more sensibly organised.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

45. “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

46. “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

47. “The purpose of a moral philosophy is not to look delightfully strange and counterintuitive or to provide employment to bioethicists. The purpose is to guide our choices toward life, health, beauty, happiness, fun, laughter, challenge, and learning.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

48. “Studying biases can in fact make you more vulnerable to overconfidence and confirmation bias, as you come to see the influence of cognitive biases all around you – in everyone but yourself.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

49. “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

50. “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