Sublime

Perhaps the most impressive part of this expertise is our ability to infer others’ beliefs, but the foundation is inferring their intentions.

The strength of a model is not what it can explain, but what it can’t, for only prohibitions constrain anticipation

The history of Earth up until now has been a history of optimizers spinning their wheels at a constant rate, generating a constant optimization pressure. And creating optimized products, not at a constant rate, but at an accelerating rate, because of how object-level innovations open up the pathway to other object-level innovations. But that accele

What distinguishes predictive ability is not who the experts are or what they believe, but rather how they think.

The formalism of Solomonoff induction measures the “complexity of a description” by the length of the shortest computer program which produces that description as an output.

For second-order rationality to be genuinely rational, you would first need a good model of reality, to extrapolate the consequences of rationality and irrationality. If you then chose to be first-order irrational, you would need to forget this accurate view. And then forget the act of forgetting. I don’t mean to commit the logical fallacy of gener

The stages in this sequence correspond to whole brain emulations of successively more neurologically sophisticated model organisms—for example, C. elegans → honeybee → mouse → rhesus monkey → human. Because the gaps between these rungs—at least after the first step—are mostly quantitative in nature and due mainly (though not entirely) to the differ

Rushworth Kidder, the founder of the Institute for Global Ethics and author of Moral Courage and How Good People Make Tough Choices,