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Rationality: From AI to Zombies

Eliezer Yudkowsky (Goodreads Author)

4.39 · Rating details · 1,046 ratings · 107 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; ...more

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Kindle Edition, 1813 pages

Published March 11th 2015 by Machine Intelligence Research Institute

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Mar 12, 2019 Bradley rated it it was amazing

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

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 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 ...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 ...more

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Mar 14, 2019 Peter (Pete) Mcloughlin rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, nukes-and-the-end-the-world, politics, astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, nature, psychology, general-science, general-history

Imagine a bunch of blog posts the almost the length of the bible but scintillating, humorous, and inciteful, and original. I enjoyed this book quite a bit and learned many new things from it. I don't know if I buy everything in them but I enjoyed the exploration and mental workout they provided. It covers rationality, AI, consciousness, Many Worlds Interpretation, ethics, and an autobiographical bit by the author. The writing style is very engaging if sprawling. I recommend to anyone who likes ...more

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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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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 .

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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.

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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.

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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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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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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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Jun 30, 2018 Hamish Shamus rated it it was amazing

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

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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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 ...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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Mar 14, 2015 Teo 2050 rated it it was amazing

Shelves: philosophy, rationality, evolution, values-motivation, _contents, _nonfiction, _audio, lib_center-for-applied-rationality, maps-paths-stages, lib_80000-hours-org

33h @ 1.5x. Contents:
(view spoiler) ...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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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 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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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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Dec 20, 2018 Steven Normore rated it it was amazing

Thoroughly enjoyed this. Will read again.

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Jun 18, 2018 Gavin rated it it was amazing

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

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

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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May 01, 2017 Denis Vasilev rated it it was amazing

Shelves: all-time-favorites

Excellent book on rationality. Very long read, densely packed with ideas.

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Nov 28, 2017 Scott Wozniak rated it liked it

The first half of this book was amazing. He managed to get very deep and profound on what it means to think rationally--and still be engaging and witty at the same time. I was anticipating a five star review.

And then a little past halfway into the book he began to attack religion/faith. Whole chapters are devoted to the fallacy of faith, with most of the focus on the irrationality of Christianity/the Bible. I don't take away stars from the rating for believing differently than me. I fault him ...more

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Nov 11, 2019 Adarsh Rao added it

Shelves: favorites

When I started this book for the first time, 2 years ago, I found answers to questions I didn't even know I had. Moments from high school where something didn't make sense but I couldn't quite put a pin on what it was or what was wrong about it. Moments from my childhood where some particular train of thought did not make sense.

So much of my thinking laid bare, expressed so eloquently.

So much of the way I think now, I find, leads back to ideas I've read from this book.

I never fully internalized ...more

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Nov 27, 2016 djcb rated it really liked it

Eliezer Yudkowsky bundled his many blogpost (overcomingbias.com, lesswrong.org) on the Art of Rationality in a book. I had read quite a few of the blog-posts before (perhaps half?), but it's nice to have them all in one place.

Yudkowsky's big project is building a Friendly Artificial Intelligence. That is, an artificial intelligence that provably beneficial to mankind (by some measure), and even inspect and improve its own source code while keeping the "friendliness" intact. It's a really ...more

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Jan 22, 2019 Franta rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Update: I did not finish the book as I got fed up with Yudkowsky intellectual masturbation...

Beware: it is a bit "never ending" book. Yudkowsky goes on and on about problems with General AI, getting deep into meta level, making it a niche expert-level material.

This is composed of 6 "standard"-sized books. The quality and style are rather consistent throughout, but the topics change - from basics of bayesian reasoning, human biases, to science of cognition, ethics, philosophy, decision science, ...more

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May 14, 2015 Jorge Rodighiero rated it really liked it

Recommended to Jorge by: Roberto Musa

A 1813 pages course about the "art to finding the truth and accomplishing value from inside a human mind"

To accomplish this, Yudkowsky helps us "to learn our own flaws, overcome our biases, prevent ourselves from self-deceiving, get ourselves into good emotional shape to confront the truth and do what needs doing"

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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