People From Chicago

"It would actually be quite surprisingly helpful for increasing the percentage of people who will participate meaningfully in saving the planet, if there were some reliably-working standard explanation for why physics and logic together have enough room to contain morality."

"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."

"In the universe where everything works the way it common-sensically ought to, everything about the study of Artificial General Intelligence is driven by the one overwhelming fact of the indescribably huge effects: initial conditions and unfolding patterns whose consequences will resound for as long as causal chains continue out of Earth, until all the stars and galaxies in the night sky have burned down to cold iron, and maybe long afterward, or forever into infinity if the true laws of physics should happen to permit that. To deliberately thrust your mortal brain onto that stage, as it plays out on ancient Earth the first root of life, is an act so far beyond "audacity" as to set the word on fire, an act which can only be excused by the terrifying knowledge that the empty skies offer no higher authority."

"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.”"

"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."

"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."

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

"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!"

"Lies propagate, that’s what I’m saying. You’ve got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that’s connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you’d even have to start lying about the general laws of thought. Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn’t work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn’t work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they’ve got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs. Or a good and virtuous person should believe as strongly as they can, no matter what the evidence says. Or truth doesn’t exist and there’s no such thing as objective reality. A lot of common wisdom like that isn’t just mistaken, it’s anti-epistemology, it’s systematically wrong. Every rule of rationality that tells you how to find the truth, there’s someone out there who needs you to believe the opposite. If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy; and there’s a lot of people out there telling lies."

"You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That's not just an arbitrary rule, it's implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signalling! And cats are COMPLICATED! A human mind can't just visualise a whole cat's anatomy and, and all the cat biochemistry, and what about the neurology? How can you go on thinking using a cat-sized brain?"

"Many boys and girls are heroes in their dreams," Dumbledore said quietly. He did not look at any of the other girls, only at her. "Fewer in the waking world. 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. It is a hard life, sometimes lonely, often short. I have told none to refuse that calling, but neither would I wish to increase their number."

"There's a standard Internet phenomenon (I generalize) of a Sneer Club of people who enjoy getting together and picking on designated targets. Sneer Clubs (I expect) attract people with high Dark Triad characteristics, which is (I suspect) where Asshole Internet Atheists come from - if you get a club together for the purpose of sneering at religious people, it doesn't matter that God doesn't actually exist, the club attracts psychologically f'd-up people. Bullies, in a word, people who are powerfully reinforced by getting in what feels like good hits on Designated Targets, in the company of others doing the same and congratulating each other on it."

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

"There was a conference one time on: "What are we going to do about the looming risk of AI disaster?" … And what came out of that conference was OpenAI, which was basically the worst possible way of doing anything. Like, "This is not a problem of, 'Oh no, what if secret elites get AI', it's that nobody knows how to build the thing." … So, like, "Let's open up everything! Let's accelerate everything!" It was like ChatGPT's blind version of throwing the ideals at a place where they were exactly the wrong ideals to solve the problem. … And that was it. That was me in 2015 going, "Oh. So this is what humanity will elect to do. We will not rise above. We will not have more grace, not even here, at the very end." So that is when I did my crying late at night, and then picked myself up and fought and fought and fought until I had run out all the avenues that I seem to have the capability to do."

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

"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."

"Have I ever remarked on how completely ridiculous it is to ask high school students to decide what they want to do with the rest of their lives and give them nearly no support in doing so? Support like, say, spending a day apiece watching twenty different jobs and then another week at their top three choices, with salary charts and projections and probabilities of graduating that subject given their test scores? The more so considering this is a central allocation question for the entire economy?"

"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."

"If dragons were common, and you could look at one in the zoo — but zebras were a rare legendary creature that had finally been decided to be mythical — then there's a certain sort of person who would ignore dragons, who would never bother to look at dragons, and chase after rumors of zebras. The grass is always greener on the other side of reality. Which is rather setting ourselves up for eternal disappointment, eh? If we cannot take joy in the merely real, our lives shall be empty indeed."

"This is crunch time for the whole human species, and not just for us but for the intergalactic civilization whose existence depends on us. This is the hour before the final exam and we're trying to get as much studying done as possible. It may be that you can't make yourself feel that for a decade or thirty years or however long this crunch time lasts, but the reality is one thing and the emotions are another... If you confront it full on, then you can't really justify trading off any part of intergalactic civilization for any intrinsic thing you could get nowadays, and at the same time, it's also true that there are very few people who can live like that (and I'm not one of them myself)."

"Litmus test: If you can't describe Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage and explain why people find it counterintuitive, you don't know enough about economics to direct any criticism or praise at "capitalism" because you don't know what other people are referring to when they use that word."

"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."

"The human brain cannot release enough neurotransmitters to feel emotion a thousand times as strong as the grief of one funeral. A prospective risk going from 10,000,000 deaths to 100,000,000 deaths does not multiply by ten the strength of our determination to stop it. It adds one more zero on paper for our eyes to glaze over."

"People cling to their intuitions, I think, not so much because they believe their cognitive algorithms are perfectly reliable, but because they can't see their intuitions as the way their cognitive algorithms happen to look from the inside. And so everything you try to say about how the native cognitive algorithm goes astray, ends up being contrasted to their direct perception of the Way Things Really Are—and discarded as obviously wrong."

"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."

"Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. All the more so, if it seems like no possible answer can exist: 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."

"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."

"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."

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

"I love Wikipedia. I donated thousands of dollars to the Wikimedia Foundation."

"There is some good evidence man contributes to global warming. But I say, so what? We can deal with that. It's not a catastrophe. And cold is far worse for hurting people than warmth."

"I'm a little embarrassed about how long it took me to see the folly of most government intervention. It was probably 15 years before I really woke up to the fact that almost everything government attempts to do, it makes worse."

"The people who run the international tests told us, "the biggest predictor of student success is choice." Nations that "attach the money to the kids" and thereby allow parents to choose between different public and private schools have higher test scores. This should be no surprise; competition makes us better."

"I started out by viewing the marketplace as a cruel place, where you need intervention by government and lawyers to protect people. But after watching the regulators work, I have come to believe that markets are magical and the best protectors of the consumer. It is my job to explain the beauties of the free market."

"What private property does is connect effort to reward, creating an incentive for people to produce more. Then, if there's a free market, people will trade their surpluses to each other for the things they lack. Mutual exchange for mutual benefit makes the community richer."

"It is generally my thesis then to insist on the importance of imagination in sex, to insist that the practice of sex, as performed among human beings, be accorded the same deliberate and playful application of fancy, imagination and intelligence as any other significant human activity."

"It [the frenzy of Odin] coursed through the thronged warriors; it seemed a tangible thing, communicating itself from one to another; it was almost as though one could see it, but one could not see it, only its effects. I could trace its passage. It seemed first a ghastly infection, a plague; then it seemed like a fire, invisible and consuming; then it seemed like the touching of these men by the hands of gods, but no gods I knew, none to whom a woman or child might dare pray, but the gods of men, and of the men of Torvaldsland, the dread, harsh divinities of the cruel north, the gods of Torvaldsland."

"I know that the great Hilbert said, "We will not be driven out of the paradise Cantor has created for us," and I reply, "I see no reason for walking in!" Indeed, in time, as more and more people get used to computers, I am inclined to believe that we here on this Earth will decide that the computable numbers are enough."

"Formal proofs, where there is deliberately no meaning, can convince only formalists, and of the results they themselves seem to deny any meaning. Is that to be the mathematics we are to use to understand the world we live in?"

"Perhaps thinking should be measured not by what you do but by how you do it."

"The feeling of having free will is deep in us and we are reluctant to give it up for ourselves—but we are often willing to deny it to others!"

"We constantly use the word "simplify", but its meaning depends on what you are going to do next, and there is no uniform definition."

"This is the type of AI I am interested in—what can the human and machine do together, and not in the competition which can arise. ...There are doubts as to what fraction of the population can compete with computers, even with nice interactive prompting menus."

"The fundamentals of language are not understood to this day. ...Until we understand languages of communication involving humans as they are then it is unlikely many of our software problems will vanish."

"When you take a course in Euclidean geometry is not the teacher putting a... learning program into you? ...You enter the course and cannot do problems; the teacher puts into you a program and at the end of the course you can solve such problems. ...Are you sure you are not merely "programmed" in life by what by chance events happens to you?"

"Either you will be a leader, or a follower, and my goal is for you to be a leader."

"I am concerned with educating and not training you. ...Education is what, when, and why to do things. Training is how to do it. Either one without the other is not of much use. You might think education should precede training, but the kind of educating I am trying to do must be based on your past experiences and technical knowledge."

"The past is... much more uncertain—or even falsely reported—than is usually recognized."

"Apparently an "art"—which almost by definition cannot be put into words—is probably best communicated by approaching it from many sides and doing so repeatedly, hoping thereby students will finally master enough of the art, or if you wish, style, to significantly increase their future contributions to society."

"Teachers should prepare the student for the student's future, not for the teacher's past."