At various points and in various ways in this book (actually six books, actually a compendium of 333 blog posts; took me more than year to read it), Yudkowski quotes the medieval swordmaster Miyamoto Musashi:
“The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him.”
It’s apparent how resonant this idea is with Yudkowski, as while reading through his writings the single biggest impression I got is how INCISIVE they are. In every subject he writes about, you can really feel his aim to “cut through to the truth in a single motion.”
Yudkowski is an AI researcher (writing in about 2008–2009), and although I’m very skeptical about the possibility of achieving Artificial General Intelligence anytime in the foreseeable future (yeah, how’s that going by the way? I for one am not waiting up for the Singularity), the various subjects feeding into it, as well as the completely general arena of Rationality that he is concerned with, make for some very stimulating subject matter. Yudkowski is off-the-charts brilliant, and I found it exhilarating to learn from him. Below are some of the more important excellent points made along the way that he either made me aware of or put in such an incisive way that I had my hair blown back:
If something seems difficult, weird, perplexing, intractable, or mysterious, that’s a property of your own state of mind, not of the thing itself. Actually learning about aspects of reality requires giving up expecting/demanding the universe to be the way you think it should be. Let it teach you. (Case in point: quantum mechanics.)
You are not a rational homunculus trying not to be led astray by distracting biases. You just ARE a bundle of biases. “These make up the ‘elephant’ of your mind and atop them rides a tiny ‘deliberative thinking’ module that only rarely exerts itself.”
The map is not the territory. Reality is not regimented into different “levels” of existence: that’s the result of our minds making categorizations and multilevel models that are convenient for us given our interests. Reductionism is therefore true, which allows some things to be explained *away* (e.g. spirits, phlogiston), and other things to be just explained, without eliminating them (how airplanes fly).
“Probabilities express uncertainty, and it is only agents who can be uncertain. A blank map does not correspond to a blank territory. Ignorance is in the mind.”
Information is governed by the laws of thermodynamics. To know something without ever coming into direct contact with it through the process of evidence-gathering—i.e., in a way that is evidence-insensitive—would violate the second law of thermodynamics.
It’s a good bet that most of human cognition consists of “cache lookups” of pre-stored nuggets connected only by networks of association.
Arguing about the “correct” definition of a word is just spinning your wheels. If you can’t agree with someone on how to use a word, use two different words, or just “taboo” the word (like in the game Taboo) from the discussion and use other words instead. “The fundamental problem with arguing that things are true ‘by definition’ is that you can’t make reality go a different way by choosing a different definition.” “Just because [a word exists] doesn’t mean that it has a meaning, floating out there in the void, which you can discover by finding the right definition. It feels that way, but it is not so.”
“Had the idea of god not come along until the scientific age, only an exceptionally weird person would invent such an idea and pretend that it explained anything.”
Oh SNAP!
There are intrinsic features of religious belief that are straightforwardly entailed by God’s nonexistence. “If God did speak plainly, and answer prayers reliably, God would just become one more boringly real thing, no more worth believing in than the postman. If God were real, it would destroy the inner uncertainty that brings forth outward fervor in compensation. And if everyone else believed God were real, it would destroy the specialness of being one of the elect.”
If you’re horrified by the prospect of some evil act suddenly being “permitted” if a morality-decreeing God didn’t exist, that shows that you ALREADY accept morality independently of anything to do with God. Let that sink in.
On free will:
“If the laws of physics did not control us, how could we possibly control ourselves? How could thoughts judge other thoughts, how could emotions conflict with each other, how could one course of action appear best, how could we pass from uncertainty to certainty about our own plans, in the midst of utter chaos? If we were not in reality, where could we be? The future is determined by physics. What kind of physics? The kind of physics that includes the actions of human beings. People’s choices are determined by physics. What kind of physics? The kind of physics that includes weighing decisions, considering possible outcomes, judging them, being tempted, following morals, rationalizing transgressions, trying to do better . . . There is no point where a quark swoops in from Pluto and overrides all this. The thoughts of your decision process are all real, they are all something. But a thought is too big and complicated to be an atom. So thoughts are made of smaller things, and our name for the stuff that stuff is made of is 'physics.' Physics underlies our decisions and includes our decisions. It does not explain them away."
Finally, as a sort of gratuitous bonus, I learned more about quantum mechanics from EY than I ever have (and I took it as a class in college). Suffice it to say that all the hackneyed terms in which you always hear about it—"weirdness,” "uncertainty," "paradox," "collapse," "duality," are all worse than useless. Also that the “many-worlds” (Everett) interpretation of quantum mechanics is overwhelmingly supported and almost certainly true. Yet misconceptions abound, just as they do about QM itself (even among writers of textbooks about QM).
Yudkowski is also a huge (not to say GINORMOUS) fan of Bayesian probability theory, and keeps coming back to it again and again. Although he isn’t always the best ground-up explainer of it, he makes a lot of penetrating insights with it. Just be forewarned that it is mathy (although not impenetrably so), and you’ll never stop hearing about it throughout the length of the book. 😊
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As Clear and as Beautiful as Two plus Two equals Four
Techniques to approach nearly every problem you will encounter in life and in science, and to useful in resolving questions that are solution resistant to rule of thumb thinking.There is a great deal to say about this. You will find much of it in Eliezer Yudkowsky's book.A pleasure to read for clarity, for truth and for the courage and commitment to being less wrong evident in the meaning of the whole as well as the parts.Beautiful as two plus two equals four, and consistent by necessity with that simple statement.Of particular interest: Yudkowsky's forward or introduction in which he recognizes the mistakes in his intial approach and correctly describes the true value of his collected work from his current, accumulated store of true explanatory knowledge.Nothing other than "bravo" needs to be said about the utility of his methodology and the correct use of it here in practise. All scientist must now do, as a matter of course, what Yudkowsky has done.The inclusion of public periodic UPDATING in scientific and artistic methodology is shown to be mandatory AND any scientist or artist who fails to update conclusions, intend and purpose, constantly, routinely on receipt of new true information has thus parted company with the UR statement of numbers, two plus two equals four.Further, better, now. https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoplusTwoequalsFour/
Top reviews from other countries
Oliver
Incredibly important book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 11, 2020Andrew Miller
As good as you'd expect a published blog to be
Reviewed in Canada on April 24, 2015Daniele Esposito
A great and easy ride through rationality
Reviewed in Italy on May 13, 2015
Tim Josling
Awesome book which changed my life.
Reviewed in Australia on September 8, 2015