Eliezer Yudkowsky
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowskyis an American artificial intelligence researcher known for popularizing the idea of friendly artificial intelligence. He is a co-founder and research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a private research nonprofit based in Berkeley, California...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth11 September 1979
CountryUnited States of America
shining darkness driving
...there's something in science like the shine of the Patronus Charm, driving back all sorts of darkness and madness...
dark shining fool
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.
atheist smart dark
[...] intelligent people only have a certain amount of time (measured in subjective time spent thinking about religion) to become atheists. After a certain point, if you're smart, have spent time thinking about and defending your religion, and still haven't escaped the grip of Dark Side Epistemology, the inside of your mind ends up as an Escher painting.
bravery darkness faces
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.
carry key olympics word
I want to carry in my heart forever the key word of the Olympics - 'passion.'
death defeated fond future holds hope humanity research stop support
Transhumanists are not fond of death. We would stop it if we could. To this end, we support research that holds out hope of a future in which humanity has defeated death.
apply existing mostly people science successes
My successes already accomplished have mostly been taking existing science and getting people to apply it in their everyday lives.
answer best guilty keeping obvious seems soon stop
The obvious choice isn't always the best choice, but sometimes, by golly, it is. I don't stop looking as soon I find an obvious answer, but if I go on looking, and the obvious-seeming answer still seems obvious, I don't feel guilty about keeping it.
operate though
Though I have friends aplenty in academia, I don't operate within the academic system myself.
alike breathe discovered eat food humans newly reminds report
An anthropologist will not excitedly report of a newly discovered tribe: 'They eat food! They breathe air! They use tools! They tell each other stories!' We humans forget how alike we are, living in a world that only reminds us of our differences.
bees born electronic exists funds honey human imagined market mice money offer sell species wasps
The human species was not born into a market economy. Bees won't sell you honey if you offer them an electronic funds transfer. The human species imagined money into existence, and it exists - for us, not mice or wasps - because we go on believing in it.
biases cognitive errors global highly human known mental program relevant reveal systematic underlying
The systematic experimental study of reproducible errors of human reasoning, and what these errors reveal about underlying mental processes, is known as the heuristics and biases program in cognitive psychology. This program has made discoveries highly relevant to assessors of global catastrophic risks.
carry known pounds stuff
In our skulls, we carry around 3 pounds of slimy, wet, greyish tissue, corrugated like crumpled toilet paper. You wouldn't think, to look at the unappetizing lump, that it was some of the most powerful stuff in the known universe.
allow deed destroyed doers extinction horrified likely proceeds quite realizing slowly suggest taken therefore
If our extinction proceeds slowly enough to allow a moment of horrified realization, the doers of the deed will likely be quite taken aback on realizing that they have actually destroyed the world. Therefore I suggest that if the Earth is destroyed, it will probably be by mistake.