Allen Roberts > Recent Status Updates

“In a world where AIs we don’t wholly understand, in pursuit of strategies we don’t wholly understand, unleash AI agents we don’t wholly understand, what could go wrong?” p. 83

“…[W]e human beings do like AIs created in our image, and this fact will further encourage the evolution of deceptive AIs. AIs will often be plugged into the roles of people—friend, therapist, legal representative—who are expected to shade the truth when that’s useful.” p. 81

“Whatever you think is going to happen ten years hence, unless it is something like the sun rising tomorrow that has nothing to do with human relations, you are almost sure to be wrong. I find this thought consoling when I remember some gloomy prophecies of which I myself have rashly been guilty.” p. 120

“Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false. To know the truth is more difficult than most men suppose, and to act with ruthless determination in the belief that truth is the monopoly of their party is to invite disaster.” p. 120

“The whole philosophy of economic nationalism, which is now universal throughout the world, is based upon the false belief that the economic interest of one nation is necessarily opposed to that of another.” p. 115

“The ascetic depreciation of the pleasures of sense has not promoted kindliness or tolerance, or any of the other virtues that a non-superstitious outlook on human life would lead us to desire. On the contrary, when a man tortures himself he feels that it gives him a right to torture others, and inclines him to accept any system of dogma by which this right is fortified.” p. 112

“Democracy was invented as a device for reconciling government with liberty. It is clear that government is necessary if anything worthy to be called civilisation is to exist, but all history shows that any set of men entrusted with power over another set will abuse their power if they can do so with impunity.” p. 106

“If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do.” p. 82

“Old-fashioned people still say ‘bless you’ when one sneezes, but they have forgotten the reason for the custom. The reason was that people were thought to sneeze out their souls, and before their souls could get back lurking demons were apt to enter the un-souled body; but if any one said ‘God bless you’, the demons were frightened off.” p. 62

“The Irish were regarded by the English as possessed of a special charm and mystical insight until 1921, when it was found that the expense of continuing to oppress them would be prohibitive.” p. 53

“…[M]etaphysicians, like savages, are apt to imagine a magical connection between words and things, or at any rate between syntax and word structure. Sentences have subjects and predicates, therefore the world consists of substances with attributes. Until very recently this argument was accepted as valid by almost all philosophers…” p. 50

“In the great bourgeois period, it is the writers and explainers who have become the new ruling class. Knowledge has become power. Writers and demagogues like Rousseau, Marat, Saint-Just, and Marx made it possible for people with nothing more than ‘mental capital’ and the power of language to achieve influence over millions…” p. 354

“… [E]ven Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo played Bach and Handel—representatives of the Old World—while sitting in a submarine on the bottom of the ocean. Apparently, the desire for the new can never completely forsake the old.” p. 353

“The fulfillment of the Enlightenment’s promise of a free, open, and prosperous society has produced a new kind of barbarism combining the ‘luxurious inventiveness of Versailles with the hibiscus-covered erotic ease of Samoa.’ “ p. 348

“After meditating for twelve years, [Kant] produced his great work, the Critique of Pure Reason; seven years later, at the age of sixty-four, he produced the Critique of Practical Reason, in which he resumed his dogmatic slumbers after nearly twenty years of uncomfortable wakefulness.” p. 46

“The prince’s passion for astronomy displays a yearning for eternity, for what transcends the transitory and vulgar. It is not a form of escapism—although it has something of this about it—but an expression of an elevated spirit who seeks satisfaction in the realm of pure thought.” p. 334

“Philosophy has been defined as ‘an unusually obstinate attempt to think clearly’; I should define it rather as ‘an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously’.” p. 43

“There are, of course, economic inequalities everywhere, but in a democratic regime they tend to diminish, whereas under an oligarchy they tend to increase. And wherever an oligarchy has power, economic inequalities threaten to become permanent owing to the modern impossibility of successful rebellion.” p. 40

“If philosophy cannot rationally demonstrate its superiority to revelation, if every proof against revelation turns out to be hypothetical, or to rest upon ‘unevident premises,’ then one must accept that the philosophical life is itself based on faith, that is, an act of will, or on a decision that cannot in the last instance be rationally grounded.“ p. 325

“[Trump is] as willing to defy the norms of political correctness as he is the rule of reason; those norms are a limitation on freedom as constraining as any socialist design.” p. 240

“Dogmatism is an enemy to peace, and an insuperable barrier to democracy. In the present age, at least as much as in former times, it is the greatest of the mental obstacles to human happiness.” p. 31

“While John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith are often cited by the more genteel defenders of conservatism as the movement’s leading lights, their writings cannot account for what is truly bizarre about conservatism: a ruling class resting its claim to power upon its sense of victimhood…” p. 190

“Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin, and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both.” p. 167

“Contrary to the romantic notion of art being produced by a process of ‘letting go,’ Nietzsche insisted that the artist ‘strictly and subtly… obeys thousandfold laws.’” p. 152

“Hegel's philosophy is so odd that one would not
have expected him to be able to get sane men to accept it, but he did. He set it out with so much obscurity that people thought it must be profound.” p. 19

“After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return.” p. 19

“That Plato's Republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people, is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history.” p. 17

“Moral purity is the privilege of philosophers and monks; everyday life demands compromises and an acceptance of a degree of moral incoherence.” p. 301

“What the philosophers vainly called “the principle of sufficient reason”—the belief that everything must have a reason or cause—is simply a castle built on sand. The belief that everything has a cause is just that: a belief or an act of faith, which precedes all reason.” p. 299