This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
I don't know; the more Less Wrong I read, the more I start to think Lovecraft was on to something.
Delving too far in our search for knowledge is likely to awaken vast godlike forces which are neither benevolent nor malevolent but horrifyingly indifferent to humanity. Some of these forces may be slightly better or worse than others, but all of them could and would swat our civilization away like a mosquito. Such forces may already control other star systems.
The only defense against such abominations is to study the arcane knowledge involved in summoning or banishing these entities; however, such knowledge is likely to cause its students permanent psychological damage or doom them to eternities of torture.
I've always enjoyed Vernor Vinge's name for AI: "Applied Theology".
(In, I think, A Fire upon the Deep.)