01c. 1979 ADTo worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.Eliezer Yudkowsky / quote ↗
02c. 1979 ADEvery mystery ever solved had been a puzzle from the dawn of the human species right up until someone solved it.Eliezer Yudkowsky / quote ↗
03c. 1979 ADI don't want to rule the universe. I just think it could be more sensibly organised.Eliezer Yudkowsky / quote ↗
04c. 1979 ADAll right," Harry said coldly. "I'll answer your original question, then. You asked why Dark Wizards are afraid of death. Pretend, Headmaster, that you really believed in souls. Pretend that anyone could verify the existence of souls at any time, pretend that nobody cried at funerals because they knew their loved ones were still alive. Now can you imagine destroying a soul? Ripping it to shreds so that nothing remains to go on its next great adventure? Can you imagine what a terrible thing that would be, the worst crime that had ever been committed in the history of the universe, which you would do anything to prevent from happening even once? Because that's what Death really is - the annihilation of a soul!Eliezer Yudkowsky / quote ↗
05c. 1979 ADEnding up with that gigantic outsized brain must have taken some sort of runaway evolutionary process, something that would push and push without limits.And today's scientists had a pretty good guess at what that runaway evolutionary process had been.Harry had once read a famous book called Chimpanzee Politics. The book had described how an adult chimpanzee named Luit had confronted the aging alpha, Yeroen, with the help of a young, recently matured chimpanzee named Nikkie. Nikkie had not intervened directly in the fights between Luit and Yeroen, but had prevented Yeroen's other supporters in the tribe from coming to his aid, distracting them whenever a confrontation developed between Luit and Yeroen. And in time Luit had won, and become the new alpha, with Nikkie as the second most powerful......though it hadn't taken very long after that for Nikkie to form an alliance with the defeated Yeroen, overthrow Luit, and become the new new alpha.It really made you appreciate what millions of years of hominids trying to outwit each other - an evolutionary arms race without limit - had led to in the way of increased mental capacity.'Cause, y'know, a human would have totally seen that one coming.Eliezer Yudkowsky / quote ↗
06c. 1979 ADIllusion of transparency: We always know what we mean by our words, and so we expect others to know it too. Reading our own writing, the intended interpretation falls easily into place, guided by our knowledge of what we really meant. It’s hard to empathize with someone who must interpret blindly, guided only by the words.Be not too quick to blame those who misunderstand your perfectly clear sentences, spoken or written. Chances are, your words are more ambiguous than you think.Eliezer Yudkowsky / quote ↗
07c. 1979 ADWhat does it mean to call for a “democratic” solution if you don’t have a conflict-resolution mechanism in mind?I think it means that you have said the word “democracy,” so the audience is supposed to cheer. It’s not so much a propositional statement, as the equivalent of the “Applause” light that tells a studio audience when to clap.Eliezer Yudkowsky / quote ↗
08c. 1979 ADMany 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 / quote ↗
09c. 1979 ADBe careful... any time you find yourself defining the "winner" as someone other than the agent who is currently smiling from on top of a giant heap of utility.Eliezer Yudkowsky / quote ↗
10c. 1979 ADYou couldn't changed history. But you could get it right to start with. Do something differently the FIRST time around.This whole business with seeking Slytherin's secrets... seemed an awful lot like the sort of thing where, years later, you would look back and say, 'And THAT was where it all started to go wrong.'And he would wish desperately for the ability to fall back through time and make a different choice. Wish granted. Now what?Eliezer Yudkowsky / quote ↗
11c. 1979 ADOkay, so either (a) I just teleported somewhere else entirely (b) they can fold space like no one's business or (c) they are simply ignoring all the rules.Eliezer Yudkowsky / quote ↗
12c. 1979 ADWorld domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.Eliezer Yudkowsky / quote ↗
13c. 1979 ADLogic stays true, wherever you may go,So logic never tells you where you live.Eliezer Yudkowsky / quote ↗
14c. 1979 ADI'm lazy! I hate work! Hate hard work in all its forms! Clever shortcuts, that's all I'm about!Eliezer Yudkowsky / quote ↗
16c. 1979 ADWhen you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing.Eliezer Yudkowsky / quote ↗
17c. 1979 ADBoys," said Hermione Granger, "should not be allowed to love girls without asking them first! This is true in a number of ways and especially when it comes to gluing people to the ceiling!Eliezer Yudkowsky / quote ↗
18c. 1979 ADWhy 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 / quote ↗
19c. 1979 ADLike that's the only reason anyone would ever buy a first-aid kit? Don't take this the wrong way, Professor McGonagall, but what sort of crazy children are you used to dealing with?""Gryffindors," spat Professor McGonagall, the word carrying a freight of bitterness and despair that fell like an eternal curse on all youthful heroism and high spirits.Eliezer Yudkowsky / quote ↗
20c. 1979 ADSomeday," said the Boy-Who-Lived, "when the distant descendants of Homo sapiens are looking back over the history of the galaxy and wondering how it all went so wrong, they will conclude that the original mistake was when someone taught Hermione Granger how to read.Eliezer Yudkowsky / quote ↗
21c. 1979 ADThe Headmaster told Professor Flitwick that this was, indeed, a secret and delicate matter of which he had already been informed, and that he did not think pressing it at this time would help me or anyone. Professor Flitwick started to say something about the Headmaster's usual plotting going much too far, and I had to interrupt at that point and explain that it had been my own idea and not anything the Headmaster forced me into, so Professor Flitwick spun around and started lecturing me, and the Headmaster interrupted him and said that as the Boy-Who-Lived I was doomed to have weird and dangerous adventures so I was safer if I got into them on purpose instead of waiting for them to happen by accident, and that was when Professor Flitwick threw up his little hands and started shrieking in a high-pitched voice at both of us about how he didn't care what we were cooking up together, but this wasn't ever to happen again for as long as I was in Ravenclaw House or he would have me thrown out and I could go to Gryffindor which was where all this Dumbledoring belonged -Eliezer Yudkowsky / quote ↗
22c. 1979 ADLies 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.Eliezer Yudkowsky / quote ↗
23c. 1979 ADSometimes Harry thought the deepest split in his personality wasn't anything to do with his dark side; rather it was the divide between the altruistic and forgiving Abstract Reasoning Harry, versus the frustrated and angry Harry In The Moment.Eliezer Yudkowsky / quote ↗
24c. 1979 ADIn a moral dilemma where you lost something either way, making the choice would feel bad either way, so you could temporarily save yourself a little mental pain by refusing to decide. At the cost of not being able to plan anything in advance, and at the cost of incurring a huge bias toward inaction or waiting until too late...Eliezer Yudkowsky / quote ↗
