Top 150 Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Singularitarians are the munchkins of the real world. We just ignore all the usual dungeons and head straight for the cycle of infinite wish spells.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

52. “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 passionate argument – you can make more people believe the proposition, but you cannot make it more true.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

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

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

54. “I’m not a psychopath, I’m just very creative.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

55. “It is triple ultra forbidden to respond to criticism with violence. There are a very few injunctions in the human art of rationality that have no ifs, ands, buts, or escape clauses. This is one of them. Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

56. “I’m wondering if there’s a spell to make lightning flash in the background whenever I make an ominous resolution.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

57. “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

58. “Since the rise of Homo sapiens, human beings have been the smartest minds around. But very shortly – on a historical scale, that is – we can expect technology to break the upper bound on intelligence that has held for the last few tens of thousands of years.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

59. “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

60. “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.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

61. “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.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

62. “This is one of theprimary mechanisms whereby, if a fool says the sun is shining, we do notcorrectly discard this as irrelevant nonevidence, but rather find ourselvesimpelled to say that it must be dark outside.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

63. “If science is a religion, it is the religion that heals the sick and reveals the secrets of the stars.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

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

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

65. “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

66. “That is not how it works in Ravenclaw, Draco! If you have to push someone into a wall it means your brain is too weak to beat them the right way and everyone in Ravenclaw knows that -.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

67. “Every improvement is a change, but not every change is an improvement. Every rationalist doubts, but not all doubts are rational. Wearing doubts doesn’t make you a rationalist any more than wearing a white medical lab coat makes you a doctor.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

68. “Evil done in the name of good. Evil done in the name of evil. Which is worse?”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

69. “Oops is the sound we make when we improve our beliefs and strategies; so to look back at a time and not see anything you did wrong means that you haven’t learned anything or changed your mind since then.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

70. “Above all, don’t ask what to believe – ask what to anticipate. Every question of belief should flow from a question of anticipation, and that question of anticipation should be the center of the inquiry.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

71. “A friend isn’t someone you use once and then throw away, a friend is someone you use over and over again.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

72. “Only a man exceedingly proud and vain,” Dumbledore said quietly, as he turned back to the Floo roaring up again with green flames, “would believe that his heir should be like himself, rather than like who he wished that he could be.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

73. “Once you tell a lie, the truth is your enemy; and every truth connected to that truth, and every ally of truth in general; all of these you must oppose, to protect the lie. Whether you’re lying to others, or to yourself.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

74. “Paolo Freire said, “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

75. “If the box contains a diamond, I desire to believe that the box contains a diamond; If the box does not contain a diamond, I desire to believe that the box does not contain a diamond; Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

76. “No rescuer hath the rescuer, Godric Gryffindor had written. No Lord hath the champion, no mother and no father, only nothingness above.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

77. “Stupidity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

78. “Nestled up against the wall, where Professor Quirrell had stumbled, glistened the crushed remains of a beautiful blue beetle.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

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

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

80. “To be humble is to take specific actions in anticipation of your own errors. To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

81. “Harry had read once, somewhere, that the opposite of happiness wasn’t sadness, but boredom; and the author had gone on to say that to find happiness in life you asked yourself not what would make you happy, but what would excite you. And by the same reasoning, hatred wasn’t the true opposite of love. Even hatred was a kind of respect that you could give to someone’s existence. If you cared about someone enough to prefer their dying to their living, it meant you were thinking about them.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

82. “Twenty years later, that was what he would desperately wish had happened twenty years ago, and twenty years before twenty years later happened to be right now. Altering the distant past was easy, you just had to think of it at the right time.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

83. “A playground is a great place to be a bully, and a terrible place to be a victim, if the teachers don’t care who started it.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

84. “To figure out a strange plot, look at what happens, then ask who benefits.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

85. “Homo sapiens didn’t become the dominant species on this planet by having the sharpest claws or hardest armor – though I suppose some of that point may be lost on wizards. Still, it’s beneath my dignity as a human being to be scared of anything that isn’t smarter than I am.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

86. “Why do you believe what you believe? What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

87. “What happened to me personally is only anecdotal evidence,” Harry explained. “It doesn’t carry the same weight as a replicated, peer-reviewed journal article about a controlled study with random assignment, many subjects, large effect sizes and strong statistical significance.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

88. “Don’t let your life be steered by your reluctance to do a little extra thinking.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

89. “And I suspect, Mr. Potter, that if I leave you alone for two months with your schoolbooks, even without a wand, I will return to this house only to find a crater billowing purple smoke, a depopulated city surrounding it and a plague of flaming zebras terrorising what remains of England.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

90. “A random key does not open a random lock just because they are “both random.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

91. “It’s okay to bribe people with books, right?”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

92. “But what happens after you break – that, too, is part of being a hero.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

93. “Well, sounding wise wasn’t difficult. It was a lot easier than being intelligent, actually, since you didn’t have to say anything surprising or come up with any new insights. You just let your brain’s pattern-matching software complete the cliche, using whatever Deep Wisdom you’d stored previously.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

94. “There are forty kinds of lunacy but only one kind of common sense.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

95. “When people think of “emotion” and “rationality” as opposed, I suspect that they are really thinking of System 1 and System 2 – fast perceptual judgments versus slow deliberative judgments. Deliberative judgments aren’t always true, and perceptual judgments aren’t always false; so it is very important to distinguish that dichotomy from “rationality.” Both systems can serve the goal of truth, or defeat it, depending on how they are used.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

96. “If there is no black and white, there is yet lighter and darker, and not all grays are the same.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

97. “Never give anyone wise advice unless you know exactly what you’re both talking about.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

98. “Most ill-doers do not think of themselves as evil; indeed, most conceive themselves the heroes of the stories they tell. I once thought that the greatest evil in this world was done in the name of the greater good. I was wrong. Terribly wrong. There is evil in this world which knows itself for evil, and hates the good with all its strength. All fair things does it desire to destroy.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

99. “She was taken to St. Mungo’s, where,” the Headmistress now sounded slightly perturbed, “a standard diagnostic Charm showed Miss Granger as a healthy unicorn in excellent physical condition except that her mane needs combing.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

100. “For an instant Harry imagined his own Mum and Dad in Azkaban with the Dementors sucking out their life, draining away the happy memories of their love for him. Just for an instant, before his imagination blew a fuse and called an emergency shutdown and told him never to imagine that again.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky