Sergei

“Sometimes pulling numbers out of your arse and using them to make a decision is better than pulling a decision out of your arse.”
― ciphergoth

“Harry's thoughts flashed back to possibly the worst moment of his life to date, those long seconds of blood-freezing horror beneath the Hat, when he thought he'd already failed. He'd wished then to fall back just a few minutes in time and change something, anything before it was too late...

And then it had turned out to not be too late after all.

Wish granted.

You couldn't change history. But you could get it right to start with. Do something differently the first time around.

This whole business with seeking Slytherin's secrets... seemed an awful lot like the sort of thing where, years later, you would look back and say, 'And that was where it all started going wrong.'

And he would wish desperately for the ability to fall back through time and make a different choice...

Wish granted. Now what?”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“To counter all these biases, both in my readers, and in myself, I try to move my estimates in the following directions. I try to be less confident, to expect typical outcomes to be more ordinary, but also to expect more deviations from typical outcomes. I try to rely more on ordinary methods, sources, and assumptions, and also more on statistics or related systems and events.

I expect bigger deviations from traditional images of the future, but also rely less on strange, exotic, unlikely-seeming, and hypothetical possibilities. Looking backward, future folk should see their world as changing less from their past than we might see looking forward. Seen up close and honestly, I expect the future usually to look like most places: mundane, uninspiring, and morally ambiguous, with grand hopes and justifications often masking lives of quiet desperation. Of course, lives of quiet desperation can still be worth living.”
― Robin Hanson, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth

“All the sensations of that bright world were really happening in that
quiet cave of bone you called your skull, the place where
you lived and never, ever left. If you really wanted to
say hello to someone, to the actual person, you wouldn't
shake their hand, you'd knock gently on their skull and say "How
are you doing in there?" That was what people were, that was where
they really lived.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality