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Rationality: From AI to Zombies

Eliezer Yudkowsky (Goodreads Author)

4.36 · Rating details · 1,247 ratings · 132 reviews

What does it actually mean to be rational? Not Hollywood-style "rational," where you forsake all human feeling to embrace Cold Hard Logic. Real rationality, of the sort studied by psychologists, social scientists, and mathematicians. The kind of rationality where you make good decisions, even when it's hard; where you reason well, even in the face of massive uncertainty; w ...more

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Published March 11th 2015 by Machine Intelligence Research Institute

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Mar 12, 2019 Bradley rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2019-shelf, fanboy-goes-squee, metaphysics, non-fiction, psychology, science, top-one-hundred

Apart from just a few niggling quips I might have had with a few parts of this absolutely fantastic collection of essays, I think I've found one of my most absolute favorite books of all time.

I've read a ton of philosophy over the years and more psychology, thanks to my degree in psychology, but nothing QUITE prepared me for this. What we have here is not just a man in the process of designing, from the ground-up, a nice AI that won't turn around and rationally destroy us all because we're ver Apart from just a few niggling quips I might have had with a few parts of this absolutely fantastic collection of essays, I think I've found one of my most absolute favorite books of all time.

I've read a ton of philosophy over the years and more psychology, thanks to my degree in psychology, but nothing QUITE prepared me for this. What we have here is not just a man in the process of designing, from the ground-up, a nice AI that won't turn around and rationally destroy us all because we're vermin, but a man who has gone ahead and taken the idea of real rationality and turned it not only on his work, his life, and himself, but has gone out of his way to give us the benefit of his experience.

Sound like a self-help book? It isn't. Or, at least, any of us could use it that way, but to me, it's probably the single-most-useful, courageous, funny, and excruciatingly smart book I've read in a very long time.

Does Eliezer have charm? Hell yeah. Does Eliezer champion Bayesian probability? HELL YEAH. Does Eliezer throw a perfectly understandable spotlight on our desperate need to reduce bias and seek truth no matter how painful? Yes. Very much so. And he sends a lot of great light on the whole field of AI research, Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Quantum Physicists, and everyone who might be laboring under faulty models of thought and lazy thinking.

Above all, he's passionate as hell about Thinking Clearly. It also helps that he's fantastically devoted to rigorous standards, correct predictive models, and thorough ethical considerations. This isn't all about AIs although we know he is passionate about it. It's about EVERYTHING.

And he's right. We need rationality, and I mean, REAL RATIONALITY. I mean meticulously and carefully considered thought. Courageous exposing of our own faults. Our stubbornness, our ability to get up when we fail and learn from our mistakes and DON'T MAKE THE SAME MISTAKES AGAIN.

This isn't just a primer on logic. It's pretty much a beacon of shining light in the darkness. :) And Eliezer brings it all to us in such a charming and self-deprecating way that I wouldn't be surprised if he gains a cult following of aspiring Rationalists flocking to his cause.

Of course, he would question the HELL out of that. Jeeze... I feel like we have a modern Socrates in our midst. Only, this modern Socrates is building on ALL the myriad scientific foundations of those who have come before and is unwilling to take even a dram of Hemlock. :)

(He already tried that as Eliezer of '96.) :)

So. What am I trying to say here?

Oh, nothing much. I don't care who you are or what you're into. EVERYONE should read this monster of a book and see for themselves. This world is not hopeless. Not when we have such minds in it. Of course, that means we all need to step up to the plate and don't let bias, willful ignorance, or intellectual dishonesty win.

Everyone needs to step up. Even if you don't use Bayesian. :) ...more

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Mar 14, 2015 Mikko rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, the-art-of-thinking

Confession: The ideas in this book helped shape my identity and gave my life a direction.

Do you,
a) want to improve yourself as a human being, or
b) think that 'Nah, I'm pretty much fine the way I currently am'?

If you said yes to either question, this book is for you. It is a revelation that will make you a better human being. And the fact remains that it is usually those who think themselves wise that need a wake up call the most.

You will learn that you are wrong about most of the things most of ...more

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Apr 13, 2015 Mikhail rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2015

If I could have read just one book in my whole life, this would be it.

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Jul 06, 2016 Gleb Posobin rated it it was amazing

Shelves: to-reread

Whew, I have finally finished “Rationality: from AI to Zombies” by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which is a collection of his posts from overcomingbias.com and lesswrong.com, organized in “sequences” — sequences of posts on the same topic.

What does it mean to be rational? Why is that a good idea to act rationally? What prevents us from making optimal decisions? How can we fix ourselves? Do we even need fixing if we feel happy? Why “rationalists” are not more successful than other people?

This large collecti ...more

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Feb 11, 2017 Jimmy Longley rated it it was ok

Reviewed as part of my 100 books challenge: http://jimmylongley.com/blog/books/

Run-on Sentence Summary

Rationality, a long and meandering collection of posts from the blog Less Wrong, purports to instruct people how to leverage probability and and understanding human biases to be better but squanders the premise digressing and bashing religion.

Impressions
The promise of this book is enticing. We are told that by learning to behave rationally, we will behave more optimally and see the world more cl ...more

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Oct 21, 2020 Claire rated it it was amazing

Jesus Christ it's been 8 years but I finally did it ...more

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Aug 21, 2017 ami rated it it was amazing

Shelves: rationality, non-fiction, favorites, theory

Life-changing author

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Jun 20, 2016 Jesper rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, non-fiction

Do you consider yourself rational? Do you think being rational is important? After reading this book, my answers to these questions are "not very much at all" and "it's the most important thing in the world". More than anything I've read before, this book gives me the sense of being important, in a way that if more people read this book and get it then the world would be a much, much nicer place to live.

So, what's this book about? Like the title says, it handles the subject of rationality - not ...more

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Jun 30, 2018 Hamish Seamus rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, self-help, worth-reading, favourites, effective-altruism-and-rationalism

I learned a lot of really good stuff from this book. I learned that the entropy of statistical mechanics and the entropy of information theory are fundamentally the same thing. I learned that the many world's interpretation of quantum mechanics is a more natural way of understanding the Schrodinger equation than the Copenhagen interpretation, but it isn't clear how to get Born statistics in MWI. I learned that it's easier to use Bayes' Rule using ratios than using percentages. I learned about a I learned a lot of really good stuff from this book. I learned that the entropy of statistical mechanics and the entropy of information theory are fundamentally the same thing. I learned that the many world's interpretation of quantum mechanics is a more natural way of understanding the Schrodinger equation than the Copenhagen interpretation, but it isn't clear how to get Born statistics in MWI. I learned that it's easier to use Bayes' Rule using ratios than using percentages. I learned about a ton of heuristics and biases. I learned about how to make Occam's Razor mathematically precise. I learned that if you subscribe to objectivist meta-ethics you are susceptible to "if killing babies was the right thing to do, would you do it?" arguments. I learned to be suspicious of mysterious answers to mysterious questions. I learned that you need to have a more powerful epistemology than science in order to get anywhere in life. I learned that certainty of a proposition commits you to never changing your mind about it. I learned that a couple of hundred years ago evolution gave better predictions of the age of the world than did physics. The difference between intensional and extensional definitions. The list goes on.

Yudkowsky is very intelligent, very well read, and has a strong drive to understand the world as deeply as possible. His writing can go in any of a hundred directions, and wherever it goes you're certainly going to learn something interesting and probably something useful. He's also a very engaging writer. I really enjoyed two of his sci-fi/fantasy works: HPMOR and Three Worlds Collide. The guy knows how to create narratives which are so weird and yet compelling that you can feel your imagination expanding from them. And he can wrap up non-fiction with a true narrative with the same awesome quasi-mystical weirdness which makes you want to sign right on up to his worldview.

And yet, I have a hard time saying that this is a good book. The thing is, when Yudkowsky wants to make a point he just goes on and on and on and on. The best example of this is the sequence on quantum mechanics. He starts the sequence by promising to provide an intuitive guide to a subject which is so often taught so that the students are as confused by the subject matter as the original researchers into the phenomena were. Great! However, after a couple of essays, he seems to get sidetracked into raving about how mainstream physics is being stupid in not embracing the many worlds interpretation, and then spends 90% of the sequence just making that argument from every possible angle (when one angle would have quite sufficed). Who is he writing this for? No outsider is going to be convinced that this guy with no formal qualifications is right when the rest of the physics establishment is wrong. Is the whole thing directed at physicists? Then why did he say he was going to explain QM in an intuitive way at the start.

And oh God is it long. So much longer than it needs to be. Which is a real shame. Because it would be one of the best books I've ever read if about half of it was cut out. As it stands it would maybe still make the top ten, but it's very much a love-hate relationship.

I also spent a lot of the time while I was reading this book oscillating between thinking that Yudkowsky has all the answers, and thinking that he's a crackpot. "If all this apparently super interesting and useful stuff is true," I kept thinking "then why haven't I come across it anywhere else, and why isn't it academic mainstream?" Well towards the end of the book I came to realise that a large part of this book is just Yudkowsky synthesising the views of a bunch of very smart modern, cutting-edge academics. This both made the whole thing a lot more palatable, and somewhat (but not a whole lot) less impressive.

In sum, this is the kind of book which can legitimately change your life for the better, but it really needs a good trim, and should be more explicit about where the ideas come from. ...more

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Sep 16, 2018 Nilesh rated it really liked it

Shelves: new-sciences

This long, long, long, blog collection in the name of a book has countless flaws, but its biggest achievement is it makes one think.

I should modify that: it makes its readers think based on where sciences and technologies are today. If one picks up any philosopher from previous centuries, their work might appear much more structured, pathbreaking, readable and/or comprehensive but almost always misguided based on what we know today. To learn something even from the best works of the greatest of This long, long, long, blog collection in the name of a book has countless flaws, but its biggest achievement is it makes one think.

I should modify that: it makes its readers think based on where sciences and technologies are today. If one picks up any philosopher from previous centuries, their work might appear much more structured, pathbreaking, readable and/or comprehensive but almost always misguided based on what we know today. To learn something even from the best works of the greatest of all time, one needs to bin far too much and reinterpret the rest as the work based on the knowledge available at the times of these thinkers is proven almost decidedly inadequate if not wrong with the scientific progress of recent decades. Most recent era "philosophers" still spend far more time trying to improve on the fundamentals of these greats, rather than Mr Yudkowsky who has no space even to mention any Aristotle, or Kant or Nietzche and likes (not wholly true as there are occasional mentions).

A collection of blog does not make a good book. The hundreds of chapters are disjointed and repetitive in equal measure all through. The short length articles are great in negating various theories, while one never gets a full description of the author's own construct. The author is at his best in shooting down what he deems as wrong ideas, although many of the gaps in his own thesis are never addressed.

The repetitiveness is worse than one may have come across in any book, as blog articles themselves were rarely edited by any professional, but what is more egregious is almost no selection in the collection (arguments repeat in toto as many as ten or more times in certain cases). As the book progresses, one sees the author's own idea evolution (a term he hates for little reason outside the Darwinian sphere like some other including "emergence" while preferring identical terms like "reductionism") where he seems to be contradicting some arguments he made earlier. There is nothing wrong in one's idea development, as the author vividly describes in the book, except that consistency within a single volume is generally helpful!

These are trifles, in a way. This reviewer has developed his own theory of "rationality" as a result of all the thinking he was forced to do. The description below - completely my own - is a result of the book and not representative of the author's views in any form or shape. Some may find that useful - to the extent they are understandable. The arguments are basic and need more refinement, but worth putting down here in case they make anyone think more.

To start with, I am not a professional "thinker". Neither have I spent time writing this down formally, without errors, or to encompass many situations that would not fit the model below. Yet, what I intend to show is the limitations of rationality, the reasons behind reductionism/emergence, why we will always need philosophers and a few other things the book does not mention.

"Rationality" in a way is Domain-specific. Say, it is possible for one to start with a set of givens G1. And, one has an analytical G1-independent process toolset T1. In the world we live in, G1/T1 interactions could explain many more things in a domain D1. However, the domain explained is limited and the rationales behind G1/T1 are unfathomable. Over time, G1/T1 could expand and more could be explained, but the domain explained is only a small sub-set of the vast reality we have. Those who learn from the reality to believe in such G's, T's and D's where they exist, work in their improvements and manipulations to improve our existence are rationals.

For example, the toolset could include the Bayesian methods, all math equations and similar while one is working on the quarks and basic particles along with fields (the givens G-set) to explain the domain that would explain a proton or a neutron. Yet, the quarks will not explain our politicians, or the evolution of life, or the oceans or even a hydrogen atom. To explain elements, one needs a different givens like protons and neutrons and possibly different tools. Like to explain the characteristics of a river or an ocean flow, the givens cannot be hydrogen or oxygen atoms or even water molecules. Same goes if one tries to explain human choices or Big Bang or the working of a plane.

There are thousands of domains, and there are huge gaps in our knowledge in the form of how or why these domains emerge and gaps between them. What works within these domains is always baffling, and not just with equations like the quantum theory or the workings of our DNA or mind. We have to simply take reality as given and develop those paths where we "understand" more and more of "domains" with those Gs and Ts. Gs and Ts need not be a small set. They need not be simple. Like they need not be deterministic.

Here is why rationality is bounded itself. Why quarks combine to produce a proton of a totally different characteristics, why a water molecule has no resemblance to its constituents, why the DNA works the way it works - the number of such questions remain infinite - not just what came before the Big Bang or could happen eventually. This is why those who try to fill those knowledge gaps with their own narratives, be they religious leaders, philosophers, dreamers or even rationalists, should not be grudged. Over time, most such narrative-based explanations will appear hopelessly simple, but few could simply be agnostic to everything not fully covered by some such Ds, Ts, and Gs.

In other words, rationality itself is based on reality which is anything but rational. Those of us who are quick to damn the romantics or the religious have our own numerous simplistic "ideas" whose underlying assumptions we bury in a mountain of unsubstantiated arguments. One does not need to forgive or ignore every hopeless narrative-based idea or thinker, but equally one does not need to be completely dismissive either. The framework presented here could make one more tolerant of belief in "consciousness" as a given in explaining many human affairs. It would explain why "emergence" is an important way to describe suddent appearances of domains and their limited applicabilities (from quarks, one cannot go to DNAs for example). Most importantly, this could prove a good framework to understand what machines can learn and what they cannot completely on their own, and the givens they will need.

The above framework may not have any use. But, the book made me think. This will be the case for most who go through this turgid volume. In fact, the above is just one of the tens of times the author made me think of something new or say "aha" at something he presented. ...more

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Jul 19, 2015 Paul rated it it was ok

Did not finish, read about a third. Full of thought provoking comments and logic. But written as a collection of essays with an incessant anti religion theme. Tried to keep plowing through, but gave up. His definition of rationality and belief in the divine don't seem to be compatible. Favorite quote: You cannot obtain more truth for a fixed proposition by arguing it; you can make more people believe it, but you cannot make it more true . ...more

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Nov 15, 2015 David Shackelford rated it really liked it

Shelves: rationality

For somebody engaged in the rationalist community and Yudkowsky's other work, AI to Zombies is an epic tome filled with insight, terror, humor, and context around rationality, AI risk, and philosophy. It's very rough around the edges in pacing and tone, though, so hard to recommend to somebody not already invested in the author and his ideas. ...more

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May 05, 2017 Wesley Fenza rated it liked it

Starts very strong, but veers off into topics that have nothing to do with rationality. There is far too much lip service to evolutionary psychology, which is really disappointing. The rationalist obsession with artificial intelligence comes through in unnecessary ways.

I'd recommend reading the "How to Actually Change Your Mind" section and skipping the rest. ...more

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May 12, 2019 Francis Bezooyen rated it it was amazing

Wow! This inspiring and monumental body of essays should be considered essential reading for anyone who aspires to be rational.

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Mar 25, 2019 Shivam Vats rated it it was amazing

Shelves: meta, cognitive-science

The biggest impact of this book on me has been to clearly mark the art of rationality as a distinct art worth working on.

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Dec 28, 2016 Ben Gutierrez rated it it was amazing

Disclaimer: I haven't finished this book, but there are a couple things I want to say about it anyway.

I've given up trying to get friends and family to read Yudkowsky's writings. There is a certain sort of person that is excited by applied rationality and I've only met one of those people outside of something like Hacker News or the Less Wrong mailing lists. You should read this book, it could change your life and the way you look at the world, just like it changed me.

Maybe you'd prefer Harry Po ...more

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Jul 21, 2015 Blake Borgeson rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science, life, favorites

Eliezer Yudkowsky is a force of nature. Want to be smarter, as in better at defining and achieving your goals? Start here. If you're not the type to get turned off by Eliezer's style, you'll get an inspiring and sweeping view of ways our brains excel and ways they're full of evolutionary bugs.

Want an intro to these ideas that's more of the fanfiction sort? Start with Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and see if at the end of it you don't want to get started on being more of your own ...more

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Nov 15, 2020 Moritz Grauel rated it really liked it

Very long... Some of the essays are really worth reading... But it becomes quite evident that it is just a collection of essays from a web site. They have done a great job organising them and putting a common thread through them though. But it remains, some of the essays are a lot better than others

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Mar 14, 2015 Teo 2050 rated it it was amazing

Shelves: _audio, lib_existential-hope, rationality, _contents, philosophy, values-motivation, maps-paths-stages, y18, y18q1, _nonfiction

2017.12.16–2018.01.08

Contents

Yudkowsky E (2015) (49:41) Rationality - From AI to Zombies

Preface (Eliezer Yudkowsky, February 2015)

Biases: An Introduction (by Rob Bensinger)
• Rational Feelings
• The Many Faces of Bias
• A Word About This Text
• Map and Territory

Book I: Map and Territory

A. Predictably Wrong
001. What Do I Mean By “Rationality”?
002. Feeling Rational
003. Why Truth? And . . .
004. . . . What’s a Bias, Again?
005. Availability
006. Burdensome Details
007. Planning Fallacy
008. Illusion of Tran ...more

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Dec 20, 2018 Sam Havens rated it it was amazing

If you hang out at the intersection of machine learning, math, and philosophy, you are probably already aware of Yudkowsky. You probably have an opinion already formed. I don't know what it would be like going into this book with preconceived notions. I somehow managed to not hear about Rationalists, Yudkowski, or most of his ideas - though I had read Superintelligence by Bostrom.

Anyway, I couldn't shut up about this book the whole time I was reading it. Which was quite a while, because it is a ...more

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Dec 30, 2020 Daniel Hageman rated it it was amazing

Shelves: harris-recommended, general-philosophy, science

While this started out with some of the basics regarding bias countering/recognition, this book has taught me many new things (favorite = probabilities of Darwinian mutation successes and a new framing of Newcomb's problem), lowered my credence in some ideas (most notably regarding the conceivability of philosophical zombies as it relates to property dualism/epiphenomenalism), provided bolstering arguments to other beliefs I already had (effective altruism), and made some claims I maintain disag ...more

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Aug 25, 2018 Rodrigo Sampaio rated it it was ok

Disclaimer: I did not finish this “book.” I stopped nearly half-way after realizing how much was still left.

Much of the other commonly-found criticisms on the low-rating reviews seem to me spot-on, so if you’ve read enough of them and already feel discouraged, my review can be skipped to the very last paragraph.

To start: this is not a book, at least not in the traditional/expected sense. It’s a huge collection of essays that leads to a very long and clumsy compilation, full of redundancy and u Disclaimer: I did not finish this “book.” I stopped nearly half-way after realizing how much was still left.

Much of the other commonly-found criticisms on the low-rating reviews seem to me spot-on, so if you’ve read enough of them and already feel discouraged, my review can be skipped to the very last paragraph.

To start: this is not a book, at least not in the traditional/expected sense. It’s a huge collection of essays that leads to a very long and clumsy compilation, full of redundancy and unnecessary parts. Actually writing a book might have yielded a good result.

I picked it up because I listened to the author’s somewhat insightful (though similarly condescending) interview with Sam Harris, and because I am very committed to rationality, so I was looking forward to a good “catch-all” on the topic. The good average rating further encouraged me.

Like other low-rating reviewers, however, after reading some of it I was surprised by the book’s high rating. Not that genuinely liking it is impossible, but one would guess that not many people would embark on such a long journey without some prior intention of liking it or an unyielding reverence to the author, so maybe that accounts for half of it.

For those already reasonably secure about their rational being, however, his form of writing takes away the motivation to plough through his huge maze of self-referencing essays. The author is (irritantly) condescending, (intentionally?) complicated, and conveys a (constant) need to assert himself as uncannily smart and privy to thinking’s hidden secrets. What could have been a golden collection of great insights was turned into a painful treasure hunt.

One has to cut through pages of often boring, always unnecessarily complicated writing to find interesting points and insights (my highlights are available, for whatever it’s worth, so I’m not summarizing them here). At some point, however, I just felt the treasure was not worth the hunt, and if I lost some hidden pearl later in the book, well, so be it.

A humanely-sized 300-page book (as opposed to over 2k) would have captured the same knowledge in way more compact form, a stark contradiction to the author’s own praise for short/efficient coding. For anyone interested in the overall topic of rationality, there are certainly tons of better sources to go for, and taking a look at the book’s own references would help identifying them.

But one word of support: some of the low-rating reviewers take issue with the occasional criticism of religion as if this were a core reappearing theme, but I don’t think this is a fair assessement vis-à-vis the irrational nature of religion and its entirely justifiable status as rationality’s attack victim. I found the references to it rather balanced and on-point, so if that’s the only thing preventing you from trying, read on!

...more

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Nov 15, 2020 Isak rated it really liked it

Waaayy too long for my tastes. But most of the stuff ain't fluff, it's just 100 ways to skin a cat. Would wager to say that it's one of the most influential books I've read in a long while, but it also took almost a year of intermittent reading to finish it! ...more

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Dec 20, 2018 Steven Normore rated it it was amazing

Thoroughly enjoyed this. Will read again.

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Jan 27, 2019 Virginia Rand rated it it was ok

Interesting, but I found it a bit hard to understand in many places and when he says from AI to zombies he mostly means AI.

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Apr 24, 2019 Alexey Efimik rated it it was amazing

Shelves: psychology, science, phylosophy

Extremely long and at the same time information dense book about the art of thinking.

Highly reccomend.

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Nov 27, 2020 Stone rated it it was ok

Shelves: god, connection, philosophy, reality, evolution, morality

I appreciate that this is a very very lengthy book compiled with a collection of great essays with different topics and styles. Undoubtedly they covered quite a lot of powerful concepts and provided fair arguments, but I have to say I didn't enjoyed the reading experience. Some chapters are so concise, clear, straightforward but some are just outright confusing.

I marked all the great chapters that I loved under reading progress and skipped some of them (when I can't even comprehend the fourth p I appreciate that this is a very very lengthy book compiled with a collection of great essays with different topics and styles. Undoubtedly they covered quite a lot of powerful concepts and provided fair arguments, but I have to say I didn't enjoyed the reading experience. Some chapters are so concise, clear, straightforward but some are just outright confusing.

I marked all the great chapters that I loved under reading progress and skipped some of them (when I can't even comprehend the fourth paragraph). I don't quite understand why can't some authors just dumb it down a notch and make their books more conceivable.. just let people appreciate the beauty of the concepts man. Why prolong the process? There are 1527 pages on Kindle I mean come on Eliezer you wrote "simplicity is at the core of scientific beauty" in Chapter 207 yourself.

I understand Maths and equations are inevitable when discussing probability and Bayes but unfortunately I didn't have the capacity to enjoy them. Some stories/dialogues were made to prove a point but sadly I really couldn't really resonate. Marked this book a 2 stars only because of the reasons mentioned above.

I love the parts where it covers the concept of stopsign, unpredictability, neutrality, rationality, education, evolution psychology (absolutely brilliant), tragedy, university & reality, and the self-help part where it talks about "how to become stronger". The last part was a surprise where it turned out so relevant to my personal pursue. I felt lucky reading them.

Study notes
(view spoiler)

...more

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Oct 10, 2020 Vroomfundel rated it it was amazing

This book is what you’d get if you cross Richard Dawkins with Douglas Hofstadter... and get the result high on LSD.

And I mean this as a compliment! AI to Zombies is as mind-altering as the most potent of psychoactive substances (which, to be clear, the author claims not to use). I spent 2 months reading and rereading it, soaking up all of the dozens of messages it delivers, questioning every aspect of my identity as a rational thinker. Not a conversation going by without me coming up with someth This book is what you’d get if you cross Richard Dawkins with Douglas Hofstadter... and get the result high on LSD.

And I mean this as a compliment! AI to Zombies is as mind-altering as the most potent of psychoactive substances (which, to be clear, the author claims not to use). I spent 2 months reading and rereading it, soaking up all of the dozens of messages it delivers, questioning every aspect of my identity as a rational thinker. Not a conversation going by without me coming up with something to quote from it - yet, most times I just shut up. Sometimes it’s “nah, they wouldn’t understand” but most times I’m just not sure if I’ve done a proper Beysian analysis before I speak.

To be clear, this book is not about promoting rational thinking - it does some of that but generally, it very much preaches to the choir; you need to be firmly committed to being rational in order to fully appreciate it. It will actually tear to shreds what you thought were the pillars of your rationality - but by doing so, it will make you a better rationalist; a very confused one, yes, but better.

It addresses one fundamental question that has bugged me for a time - why aren’t rational people more successful in life?
Sure, some statistics here and there might show that people with scientific education earn slightly more on average, or that atheists are somewhat more likely to be promoted to senior positions at work (both hypothetical, not sure if any is true) - but overall, we aren’t quite running the world yet. What gives? After all, we are so much better at making rational decisions than everybody else, this should surely grant us the ultimate privilege?

If someone told me the answer I’d be astonished to the point of disbelief; yet, as Yudkowsky reveals it to me bit by bit, I can only nod my head in agreement when he finally gives it to me straight: we, self-proclaimed rationalists, are actually quite poor at rational thought!

Wait a second, does this mean that if we get it right we ought to run the world? He never said it out loud, but until this hypothesis is falsified I have every right to consider it true, right? Right?

Yeah, about this scientific method that many of us hold sacred - don’t get too attached to it before picking AI to Zombies. Don’t get me wrong, Yudkowsky is not anti-science in any way - he just points out how pathetically irrational even the best of us are that we need such a tool to keep our biases at bay, and even with it we manage to fail spectacularly. He raises a much higher bar that we should aspire to and if we are to ever clear it - we should start applying all the lessons he shared with us.

Just to give you a taste of what AI to Zombies has in store for you: imagine meeting up with like-minded individuals and you have a blast of a nerdgasm; you go from philosophy through politics to particle physics and with every conversation you feel your mind open further and further, you feel that if you keep having evenings like that you and your brainy friends will surely make the world a better place sooner or later. What does Yudkowsky think about this though? Can you actually derive the behaviour of the Higgs boson from first principles? Or did you ever make a real discovery, knowing for a moment something no one else on earth knows?

You think it’s impossible? Well, too bad.

Now shut up and to the impossible. ...more

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Jun 18, 2018 Gavin rated it it was amazing

Shelves: the-long-term, the-romance-of-technology, cs, very-useful, worldview-in-five-books

These essays are fumbling attempts to put into words lessons that would be better taught by experience. But at least there’s underlying math, plus experimental evidence from cognitive psychology on how humans actually think. Maybe that will be enough to cross the stratospherically high threshold required for a discipline that lets you actually get it right, instead of just constraining you to interesting new mistakes.

everyone needs to learn at least one technical subject. Physics; compute

These essays are fumbling attempts to put into words lessons that would be better taught by experience. But at least there’s underlying math, plus experimental evidence from cognitive psychology on how humans actually think. Maybe that will be enough to cross the stratospherically high threshold required for a discipline that lets you actually get it right, instead of just constraining you to interesting new mistakes.

everyone needs to learn at least one technical subject. Physics; computer science; evolutionary biology; or Bayesian probability theory, but something. Someone with no technical subjects under their belt has no referent for what it means to "explain" something. They may think "All is Fire" is an explanation.

A very modern sort of rationalism, with buckets of scientific insights and a few genuine innovations* unified into a grand theory of reason and action: probability theory + decision theory. An ongoing concern.

Yudkowsky’s writing suffers from this thing where we incorporate the ideas, but everyone begrudges the insight they glean from him and forget they thought otherwise. This is perhaps because his site carried a heavy pall of nerdiness (fan-fiction and Streisanding), a status deficit which prevents people from according the ideas their actual merit. His dismissive attitude to high-status people and ideas also drives a lot of people crazy, sometimes making them unable to care if the ideas are right. So we minimise his contribution to the life of the new mind, some of the brightest prospects in the dark world. This is unfair but the new mind is the main thing, and broader than him already.

The section intros by Rob Bensinger, written a decade later, are helpful, but this book may need refreshing every decade, because of the replication crisis. This is no insult.

*Some of Yudkowsky's new ideas (not the mere popularisations):

The abstract research chain into FAI: i.e. logical uncertainty, tiling, corrigibility, value learning. The leading academic textbook on AI gives a full page to his ideas.
Pascal's mugging (see final footnote here).
A new completeness theorem in probabilistic logic, discussed by a big-name mathematical physicist here.
The term "Friendly AI"
Probably the first to tie the Jaynesian probability calculus plus the Heuristics and Biases program plus rule-utilitarianism.

...more

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Sep 04, 2016 Karl rated it it was amazing

Recommended to Karl by: HPMOR

A gargantuan collection of essays on rationality. It maps out the hundreds of mistakes we systematically make, starting with well known cognitive biases and straying into more speculative grounds, all of it written with humor and clarity, as illustrated by the following:

“Oops is the sound we make when we improve our beliefs and strategies; so to look back at a time and not see anything you did wrong means that you haven’t learned anything or changed your mind since then.”

This collection is just A gargantuan collection of essays on rationality. It maps out the hundreds of mistakes we systematically make, starting with well known cognitive biases and straying into more speculative grounds, all of it written with humor and clarity, as illustrated by the following:

“Oops is the sound we make when we improve our beliefs and strategies; so to look back at a time and not see anything you did wrong means that you haven’t learned anything or changed your mind since then.”

This collection is just that - a collection, of independent essays ordered into sequences. Some are superb some are dull, some are text-book-material some are literature. They were written at great speed. Much of this was written in just one year, during which Yudkowsky kept up the tempo of one a day. Naturally the texts are not overly polished. The writing is raw, but the content is anything but. The texts do not "come from a trip to the library" as an angry Levantine would say, but mostly come from the guts of the author - ideas pondered for years and practically tested before being written down.

This book gave me dozens of cherished ideas and parables, that now crowd my internal dialogue. For instance "politics is the brain killer" that in politics arguments become like soldiers, those of the enemy must be killed, and the disloyal thoughts from the own side shall be put to marshal law. The practice of Bayesian-reasoning, that is to think of propositions not as true or false, but as true with x% probability. The idea that cherished words like democracy actually are void of content and only work as "applause lights", signaling allegiance to a group.

One of the finest stories in here is that of "the greens" and "the blues" two political groups who live in the underground after an apocalypse. Their dispute is: the color of the sky, one sided saying it is blue, one side that it is green. Or that's how it began, the conflict grew to encompass every aspect of life. A lone explorer explores abandoned caves, goes around a bend and sees the sky. Here history forks ... and we see how different sorts of persons - partisans, the honest, lefties would react to the discovery.

Yudkowsky likely is the greatest influence on my thinking, together with Nassim Taleb. (Should I be concerned or proud that my great influences are neither dull or dead?)

P.S. of the thinkers I admire I would least fear giving Yudkowsky immense power. If you think immortality is feasible, you would not risk radical reform. Whether the world is communist or anarchist, or which country is dominant, is irrelevant compared to whether there is immortality or not. Belief that you might reach immortality means you do not want to rock the boat - only spike up science spending, and be careful about pollution. ...more

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About Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky

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From Wikipedia:

Eliezer Shlomo Yudkowsky is an American artificial intelligence researcher concerned with the singularity and an advocate of friendly artificial intelligence, living in Redwood City, California.

Yudkowsky did not attend high school and is an autodidact with no formal education in artificial intelligence. He co-founded the nonprofit Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence ( ...more

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“Oops is the sound we make when we improve our beliefs and strategies; so to look back at a time and not see anything you did wrong means that you haven’t learned anything or changed your mind since then.” — 16 likes

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