Humans are not adapted for the task of scientific research. Humans are adapted to chase deer across the savanna, throw spears into them, cook them, and then—this is probably the part that takes most of the brains—cleverly argue that they deserve to receive a larger share of the meat.

It's amazing that Albert Einstein managed to repurpose a brain like that for the task of doing physics.

• Eliezer Yudkowsky, My Childhood Role Model

Not a very advanced idea, and most people here probably already realised it -- I did too -- but this essay uniquely managed to strike me with the full weight of just how massive the gap really is.

I used to think "human brains aren't natively made for this stuff, so just take your biases into account and then you're good to go". I did not think "my god, we are so ridiculously underequipped for this."

Beware of self fulfilling thoughts are thoughts the truth conditions of which are subsets of the existence conditions

-Luke, Pale Blue Dot

Stirring quotes from this video about the Singularity Institute (MIRI

It's very hard to predict when you're going to get a piece of knowledge you don't have now - EY

paraphrase: nanotechnology is about the future of the material world, ai is about the future of the information world - a female SI advisor with nanotech experience - sounded very intelligent

(speaking about SI [now MIRI] and that they are seen as cutting edge/beyond the pale of respectability): "...in my experience it's only by pushing things beyond the pale of respectability that you get things done and push the dial" - Thiel

paraphrase: universities can only have near term goals (up to 7 years max, usually from 3 to 5 years), so non-profits can have goals of longer term, greater than 10 years - Thiel

IMO synthetic biology constitutes a third domain of advancement - the future of the living world

21st-century Western males are shocked by the idea of rape because it violates cultural assumptions about gentlemanly conduct and the rules of how men compete among themselves for women; so another possibility I was wondering about is if, indeed, men would simply be more shocked by the whole idea than women. It just wasn't clear from the comments whether this was actually the case, or if my female readers were so offended as to not even bother commenting.

EY - Interlude with the Confessor

EY is right by contemporary theories:

Structural inequality encompasses the lower status of women in our community, lower rates of pay, and underrepresentation of women in leadership positions. Societies with greater structural inequality have higher levels of violence against women. Normative inequality refers to attitudes and beliefs that support male dominance and male entitlement. Men who perpetrate violence against women are more likely to hold these attitudes. [2]

Though he's making a very different point, I'd like to point something else out inspired by this piece that I do not feel would fit in with the narrative at the generic thread.

In my opinion, violence against men or intimate partner violence as a gender neutral construct is equally important, but more neglected yet, from a more neutral piece, as tractable as violence against women.

To satisfy anyone's curiosity, I identify neither as a feminist, nor a men's rights activists, nor as a humanist, but a rationalist.

If I missed something along the line, I'm really willing to learn.

kamenin on Collapse Postulates

Jonvon, there is only one human superpower. It makes us what we are. It is our ability to think. Rationality trains this superpower, like martial arts trains a human body. It is not that some people are born with the power and others are not. Everyone has a brain. Not everyone tries to train it. Not everyone realizes that intelligence is the only superpower they will ever have, and so they seek other magics, spells and sorceries, as if any magic wand could ever be as powerful or as precious or as significant as a brain.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Now that we've beaten up on these people all over the place, maybe we should step up to the plate and say "how can we do better?".

-Robin Hanson, on a Blogginheads.tv conversation with Daniel Sarewitz. Sarewitz was spending a lot of time criticizing naive views which many smart people hold about human enhancement.

It is tempting but false to regard adopting someone else's beliefs as a favor to them, and rationality as a matter of fairness, of equal compromise. Therefore it is written "Do not believe you do others a favor if you accept their arguments; the favour is to you." -- Eliezer Yudkowsky

The Arguments From My Opponent Believes Something are a lot like accusations of arrogance. They’re last-ditch attempts to muddy up the waters. If someone says a particular theory doesn’t explain everything, or that it’s elitist, or that it’s being turned into a religion, that means they can’t find anything else.

Otherwise they would have called it wrong.

-- Scott Alexander, On first looking into Chapman’s “Pop Bayesianism”

For a self-modifying AI with causal validity semantics, the presence of a particular line of code is equivalent to the historical fact that, at some point, a human wrote that piece of code. If the historical fact is not binding, then neither is the code itself. The human-written code is simply sensory information about what code the humans think should be written.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Creating Friendly AI

I strongly recommend not using stupid.

-- NancyLebovitz

You can find the comment here, but it is even better when taken completely out of context.

Experience is the result of using the computing power of reality.

-- Roland

The first terrifying shock comes when you realize that the rest of the world is just so incredibly stupid.

The second terrifying shock comes when you realize that they're not the only ones.

-- Nominull3 here, nearly six-years old quote

"Taking up a serious religion changes one's very practice of rationality by making doubt a disvalue." ~ Orthonormal

"How do you not have arguments with idiots? Don't frame the people you argue with as idiots!"

-- Cat Lavigne at the July 2013 CFAR workshop

This doesn't look as bad as it looks like it looks.

Qiaochu_Yuan

"Goedel's Law: as the length of any philosophical discussion increases, the probability of someone incorrectly quoting Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem approaches 1"

--nshepperd on #lesswrong

Perhaps the rule should be "Rationality Quotes from people associated with LessWrong that they made elsewhere", which would be useful, but not simply duplicate other parts of LW.