Sergei

“Harry had run into trouble falling asleep Friday night, which he had anticipated might happen, and so he had decided to take the obvious advance precaution of buying a sleeping potion; and to prevent it from constituting a visible sign that he was nervous, he had decided to buy it off Fred and George a couple of months earlier.”
― 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

“Your first minutes on the streets of an unfamiliar city are always special: what happens in later months or years can never supplant them. These minutes are filled with the visual equivalent of nuclear energy, a kind of nuclear power of attention. With penetrating insight and an all-pervading excitement, you absorb a huge universe – houses, trees, faces of passersby, signs, squares, smells, dust, cats and dogs, the color of the sky. During these minutes, like an omnipresent God, you bring a new world into being: you create, you build inside yourself a whole city with all its streets and squares, with its courtyards and patios, with its sparrows, with its thousands of years of history, with its food shops and its shops for manufactured goods, with its opera house and its canteens. This city that suddenly arises from nonbeing is a special city; it differs from the city that exists in reality – it is the city of a particular person.”
― Vasily Grossman, An Armenian Sketchbook

“So Harry was going to leave this problem to Fred and George, and they would discuss all the aspects of it and brainstorm anything they thought might be remotely relevant. And they shouldn't try to come up with an actual solution until they'd finished doing that, unless of course they did happen to randomly think of something awesome, in which case they could write it down for afterward and then go back to thinking. And he didn't want to hear back from them about any so-called failures to think of anything for at least a week. Some people spent decades trying to think of things.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality