Eliezer Yudkowsky - Reality Quotes

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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.

Eliezer Yudkowsky
Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.

Eliezer Yudkowsky
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).

Eliezer Yudkowsky
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.

Eliezer Yudkowsky