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Nasim

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“Up until this point Harry had lived by the admonition of E. T. Jaynes that if you were ignorant about a phenomenon, that was a fact about your own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself; that your uncertainty was a fact about you, not a fact about whatever you were uncertain about; that ignorance existed in the mind, not in reality; that a blank map did not correspond to a blank territory. There were mysterious questions, but a mysterious answer was a contradiction in terms. A phenomenon could be mysterious to some particular person, but there could be no phenomena mysterious of themselves. To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

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“- With respect, Professor McGonagall, I'm not quite sure you understand what I'm trying to do here.
- With respect, Mr. Potter, I'm quite sure I don't. Unless - this is a guess, mind - you're trying to take over the world?
- No! I mean yes - well, NO!
- I think i should perhaps be alarmed that you have trouble answering the question.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

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“I have no great fondness for the universe, but I do live there”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

tags: humor, rationality

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“Someday," said the Boy-Who-Lived, "when the distant descendants of Homo sapiens are looking back over the history of the galaxy and wondering how it all went so wrong, they will conclude that the original mistake was when someone taught Hermione Granger how to read.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

tags: harry-potter, hermione-granger, hpmor, methods-of-rationality

24 likes

“Science taps the power of human understanding to look at the world and figure out how it works. It can't fail without humanity itself failing. Your magic could turn off, and you would hate that, but you would still be you. You would still be alive to regret it. But because science rests upon my human intelligence, it is the power that cannot be removed from me without removing me. Even if the laws of the universe change on me, so that all my knowledge is void, I'll just figure out the new laws, as has been done before. It's not a Muggle thing, it's a human thing, it just refines and trains the power you use every time you look at something you don't understand and ask 'Why?”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

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