quote · Legacy record
Then you get the wrong answer and you can't go to the Moon that way! Nature isn't a person, you can't trick them into believing something else, if you try to tell the Moon it's made of cheese you can argue for days and it won't change the Moon! What you're talking about is rationalization, like starting with a sheet of paper, moving straight down to the bottom line, using ink to write 'and therefore, the Moon is made of cheese', and then moving back up to write all sorts of clever arguments above. But either the Moon is made of cheese or it isn't. The moment you wrote the bottom line, it was already true or already false. Whether or not the whole sheet of paper ends up with the right conclusion or the wrong conclusion is fixed the instant you write down the bottom line.
Then you get the wrong answer and you can't go to the Moon that way! Nature isn't a person, you can't trick them into believing something else, if you try to tell the Moon it's made of cheese you can argue for days and it won't change the Moon! What you're talking about is rationalization, like starting with a sheet of paper, moving straight down to the bottom line, using ink to write 'and therefore, the Moon is made of cheese', and then moving back up to write all sorts of clever arguments above. But either the Moon is made of cheese or it isn't. The moment you wrote the bottom line, it was already true or already false. Whether or not the whole sheet of paper ends up with the right conclusion or the wrong conclusion is fixed the instant you write down the bottom line.
Approximate author period: c. 1979 AD · modern
Meaning not yet available
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- Author or tradition
- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Attribution: attributed - Country attributed
- Not established
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- Approximate author period: c. 1979 AD · modern
Approximate author-period anchor from documented birth year 1979; activity date not established; Wikidata Q704195, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q704195 (accessed 2026-10-08). Not a quotation composition date.
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Supplied reference C; CSV row 61601; supplied attribution, independently unverified
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