Highlights from Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Highlights from this book
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The active effort required to resist the slide into entropy wasn’t there, and decay inevitably followed.
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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.
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manipulating which meanings go with which words.
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Since the days of Socrates at least, and probably long before, the way to appear cultured and sophisticated has been to never let anyone see you care strongly about anything. It’s embarrassing
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Curiosity, as a human emotion, has been around since long before the ancient Greeks. But what set humanity firmly on the path of Science was noticing that certain modes of thinking uncovered beliefs that let us manipulate the world.
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If you are a scientist just beginning to investigate fire, it might be a lot wiser to point to a campfire and say “Fire is that orangey-bright hot stuff over there,” rather than saying “I define fire as an alchemical transmutation of substances which releases phlogiston.” You should not ignore something just because you can’t define it.
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“What is true of one apple may not be true of another apple; thus more can be said about a single apple than about all the apples in the world.”