I wonder if Mr. Yudkowsky could sum up everything he is trying to say on this blog in ten short, snappy proverbs. Kind of like the Ten Commandments, or the lists at the end of the " . . . for Dummies" books.
On second thoughts, seven plus or minus two might be a better number.
The Gelfin quote is great. I suppose making excuses and rationalising things is a sign of cognitive dissonance and ought to act as a warning that you need to pull onto the side of the road and check your map, before you arrive at the wrong destination.
Oh wow, I have a five-year old todo entry that says "dig 'groundless confidence' quote out of Vandread". Scratch that one off.
"Gnostic: Knowledge that is so pure that it cannot be explained or proven wrong."
-- Glossary of Zen
"I haven't been wrong since 1961, when I thought I made a mistake."
-- Bob Hudson
"Sometimes I envy that groundless confidence."
-- Vandread
"I remember when I first learned the word 'omniscient'. I thought that was a reasonable goal to aim for."
-- Samantha Atkins
"Our language for describing emotions is very crude... that's what music is for, I guess."
-- Ben Goertzel
"How much money would it take to get YOU to change your sexual orientation? Now add a dollar to that. That's how much Disney could offer you."
-- Leader Kibo
"I don't need The Media to tell me that I should be outraged about a brutal murder. All I need is to be informed that it has happened, and I'll form my own opinion about it."
-- The_Morlock
"Now Charlie, don't forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he wished for."
"What?"
"He lived happily ever after."
-- Roald Dahl, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
"He was never at ease with politics, where good and bad were just, apparently, two ways of looking at the same thing or, at least, were described like that by the people who were on the side Vimes thought of as 'bad'."
-- Terry Pratchett, "The Fifth Elephant"
"Philosophy is the art of asking the wrong questions."
-- J.R. Molloy
"The future is coming, Bill Joy. Like a juggernaut. There'll be no slowing it down. A billion people in India (substantial numbers of programmers riding the wave of the silicon revolution) and more than a billion people in China want a decent standard of living and they're counting on future technologies to deliver it for them. To slow down the future, you would have to nuke them. Are you going to nuke them, Bill? I didn't think so."
-- Jeff Davis
"Yikes, we may need to revise the Wechsler-Bellevue to accomodate some hitherto unrecognized nadir of the intelligence quotient scale."
-- Tom Morse
"Adultery always begins with the adulterer(s) claiming to themselves and to others that the relationship is "harmless" because it hasn't crossed a certain line. The line where it becomes wrong is the line where you start having to rationalize like that."
-- Gelfin