A community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality.

Easily forgotten in a world where success in school is most easily achieved by NOT seeing for yourself. One of the fundamental attributes of a good scientist.

Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is necessarily a change. If we only admit small local errors, we will only make small local changes. We could move so much faster.

Goertzel: "FYI, I am scheduled to give a talk to Google's tech staff on AGI and Novamente, later in the month... I believe Eliezer may be speaking there sometime soon, also..." (Eliezer: No.)

Endow computer with general intelligence. Apply intelligence to improve upon itself. Lather, rinse, repeat. FOOM! Intelligence explosion.

If prophets of 1900 AD - never mind 1000 AD - had tried to bound the powers of human civilization a billion years later, some of those impossibilities would have been accomplished before the century was out.

"What a strange thing a human must be - an intelligence inscribed entirely by evolution, a mind that wasn't constructed by another mind. We are one of the oddest and most awkward sights in the universe."

Keynote address given by Eliezer Yudkowsky at the New York Transhumanist Association: World Futures Symposium.

Founding, early years and recent progress of SIAI.

"Genius fools are dangerous because they can’t shape minds at all. It doesn’t matter whether their intentions are good or bad, because the outcome bears no relation to their intentions for it."

"The problem with Löb's Theorem seems to generalize to other foundations for self-rewriting AI."

Participants: Eliezer Yudkowsky, Jeff Medina, Dr. Karl H. Pribram, Ari Heljakka, Dr. Hugo de Garis.

How dare the world do this to us? How dare people let it pass unchallenged?

If I found myself waking up in a world where magic worked - a world where a few people could, by virtue of their knowledge, heal the sick or build castles in the air - I would study sorcery. Finding themselves in this world, why do so few study science?

How much fun is there in the universe? Will we ever run out of fun? Are we having fun yet? And could we be having more fun?

If "The Matrix" is a transhumanist action movie, then "Open Your Eyes" is a transhumanist psychological thriller.

This isn't the world you see in books and TV shows; those worlds obey the law of dramatic unity, where it takes an important cause to have an important effect and the main character is never killed by a completely unrelated truck halfway through the novel

Curiosity, relinquishment, lightness, evenness, argument, empiricism, simplicity, humility, perfectionism, precision, scholarship, and the void.

Recursive Self-Improvement and the World's Most Important Math