Best of Rationality Quotes
One disadvantage of having a little intelligence is that one can invent myths out of his own imagination, and come to believe them. Wild animals, lacking imagination, almost never do disastrously stupid things out of false perceptions of the world about them. But humans create artificial disasters for themselves when their ideology makes them unable to perceive where their own self-interest lies.
-- E.T. Jaynes, Probability Theory as Logic [pdf].
I sure wished I knew what the hell I was talking about, but I'd picked up enough terms and felt the importance attached to them, so that I could use them properly without knowing what they meant. But they felt right, so very right...
-- Roger Zelazny, as Corwin ("Nine Princes in Amber").
"A few intellectually rigorous killjoys argued that any explanation to which humans could relate was probably anthropomorphic nonsense, but nobody invited them onto talk shows."
--Greg Egan, "Quarantine".
Loyalty mods don't whisper propaganda in your skull. They don't bombard you with images of the object of devotion while stimulating the pleasure centres of your brain, or cripple you with pain and nausea if you stray from correct thought. They don't cloud your mind with blissful euphoria, or feverish zealotry; nor do they trick you into accepting some flawed but elegant piece of casuistry. No brainwashing, no conditioning, no persuasion. A loyalty mod isn't an agent of change; it's the end product, a fait accompli. Not a cause for belief, but belief itself, belief made flesh - or rather, flesh made into belief.
--Greg Egan, "Quarantine".
I don’t want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to — I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine, and I can know much more, I could experience so much more, but I’m trapped in this absurd body.
-- John Cavil (Battlestar Galactica character)
Infinite is an undirect way to speak of the finite; more precisely infinity is about finite dynamical processes.
Just how animated objects perceived their surroundings was a mystery even to the wizards who created them; when customers asked, the universal reply was simply, "It's magic."
-- Lawrence Watt-Evans, Ithanalin's Restoration
Beyond the age of information is the age of choices.
-- Charles Eames
You need someone who can convert philosophical verbiages into rigorous models. Physicists are best trained to model things. Mathematicians/Logicians best trained to deeply analyze such models. Computer scientists are best trained to finding efficient algorithms for (relatively) well-defined problems. It is likely that all make valuable and essential contributions to the grand goal of AI.
-- Paul Graham