Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Quotes

“Because the way people are built, Hermione, the way people are built to feel inside -" Harry put a hand over his own heart, in the anatomically correct position, then paused and moved his hand up to point toward his head at around the ear level, "- is that they hurt when they see their friends hurting. Someone inside their circle of concern, a member of their own tribe. That feeling has an off-switch, an off-switch labeled 'enemy' or 'foreigner' or sometimes just 'stranger'. That's how people are, if they don't learn otherwise.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“But I really am Ravenclaw, you know, not Slytherin. I don't want to rule the universe. I just think it could be more sensibly organised.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Most Muggles lived in a world defined by the limits of what you could do with cars and telephones. Even though Muggle physics explicitly permitted possibilities like molecular nanotechnology or the Penrose process for extracting energy from black holes, most people filed that away in the same section of their brain that stored fairy tales and history books, well away from their personal realities: Long ago and far away, ever so long ago.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Trying to figure out how something works on that deep level, the first ninety-nine explanations you come up with are wrong. The hundredth is right. So you have to learn how to admit you're wrong, over and over and over again. It doesn't sound like much, but it's so hard that most people can't do science. Always questioning yourself, always taking another look at things you've always taken for granted," like having a Snitch in Quidditch, "and every time you change your mind, you change yourself.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“But it is cute. It's such a boy thing to do.

Drop dead.

Aw, you say the most romantic things.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Ending up with that gigantic outsized brain must have taken some sort of runaway evolutionary process, something that would push and push without limits.

And today's scientists had a pretty good guess at what that runaway evolutionary process had been.
Harry had once read a famous book called Chimpanzee Politics. The book had described how an adult chimpanzee named Luit had confronted the aging alpha, Yeroen, with the help of a young, recently matured chimpanzee named Nikkie. Nikkie had not intervened directly in the fights between Luit and Yeroen, but had prevented Yeroen's other supporters in the tribe from coming to his aid, distracting them whenever a confrontation developed between Luit and Yeroen. And in time Luit had won, and become the new alpha, with Nikkie as the second most powerful...

...though it hadn't taken very long after that for Nikkie to form an alliance with the defeated Yeroen, overthrow Luit, and become the new new alpha.

It really made you appreciate what millions of years of hominids trying to outwit each other - an evolutionary arms race without limit - had led to in the way of increased mental capacity.

'Cause, y'know, a human would have totally seen that one coming.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“The Headmaster told Professor Flitwick that this was, indeed, a secret and delicate matter of which he had already been informed, and that he did not think pressing it at this time would help me or anyone. Professor Flitwick started to say something about the Headmaster's usual plotting going much too far, and I had to interrupt at that point and explain that it had been my own idea and not anything the Headmaster forced me into, so Professor Flitwick spun around and started lecturing me, and the Headmaster interrupted him and said that as the Boy-Who-Lived I was doomed to have weird and dangerous adventures so I was safer if I got into them on purpose instead of waiting for them to happen by accident, and that was when Professor Flitwick threw up his little hands and started shrieking in a high-pitched voice at both of us about how he didn't care what we were cooking up together, but this wasn't ever to happen again for as long as I was in Ravenclaw House or he would have me thrown out and I could go to Gryffindor which was where all this Dumbledoring belonged -”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Note to self: Overthrow government of magical Britain at earliest convenience.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“a rationalist isn't ever certain of anything”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Sometimes we forget the most basic things, since it has been too long since we learned them. I realized I had done the same with my own lesson plan. You do not teach students to throw until you have taught them to fall. And I must not teach you to fight if you do not understand how to lose.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“reality usually delivers results a little worse than the 'worst-case scenario'. It's called the planning fallacy, and the best way to fix it is to ask how long things took the last time you tried them. That's called using the outside view instead of the inside view. But when you're doing something new and can't do that, you just have to be really, really, really pessimistic. Like, so pessimistic that reality actually comes out better than you expected around as often and as much as it comes out worse. It's actually really hard to be so pessimistic that you stand a decent chance of undershooting real life.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Harry had read once, somewhere, that the opposite of happiness wasn't sadness, but boredom; and the author had gone on to say that to find happiness in life you asked yourself not what would make you happy, but what would excite you. And by the same reasoning, hatred wasn't the true opposite of love. Even hatred was a kind of respect that you could give to someone's existence. If you cared about someone enough to prefer their dying to their living, it meant you were thinking about them.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The Universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“And one of the hidden secrets of science, passed down from a few rare teachers to their grad students, is how to avoid flushing new ideas down the toilet the instant you hear one you don't like.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“The next time, Mr. Potter, that you choose to escalate a contest rather than lose, you may lose all the stakes you place on the table.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“When we are young we believe that we know everything, and so we believe that if we see no explanation for something, then no explanation exists. When we are older we realise that the whole universe works by a rhythm and a reason, even if we ourselves do not know it. It is only our own ignorance which appears to us as insanity.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“People had no sense of history, they learned about chemistry and biology and astronomy and thought that these matters had always been the proper meat of science, that they had never been mysterious. The stars had once been mysteries. Lord Kelvin had once called the nature of life and biology - the response of muscles to human will and the generation of trees from seeds - a mystery "infinitely beyond" the reach of science. (Not just a little beyond, mind you, but infinitely beyond. Lord Kelvin certainly had felt a huge emotional charge from not knowing something.) Every mystery ever solved had been a puzzle from the dawn of the human species right up until someone solved it.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“You're so completely going to be in Slytherin."

"I'm so completely going to be in Ravenclaw, thank you very much. I only want power so I can get books.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“And I suspect, Mr. Potter, that if I leave you alone for two months with your schoolbooks, even without a wand, I will return to this house only to find a crater billowing purple smoke, a depopulated city surrounding it and a plague of flaming zebras terrorising what remains of England.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“No..." said Professor Quirrell. "That is not why I am here. You have made no effort to hide your dislike for me, Miss Granger. I thank you for that lack of pretense, for I much prefer true hate to false love.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Most ill-doers do not think of themselves as evil; indeed, most conceive themselves the heroes of the stories they tell. I once thought that the greatest evil in this world was done in the name of the greater good. I was wrong. Terribly wrong. There is evil in this world which knows itself for evil, and hates the good with all its strength. All fair things does it desire to destroy.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“You could call it heroic responsibility,
maybe," Harry Potter said. "Not like the usual sort. It means that
whatever happens, no matter what, it's always your fault.
Even if you tell Professor McGonagall, she's not responsible for
what happens, you are. Following the school rules isn't an
excuse, someone else being in charge isn't an excuse, even trying
your best isn't an excuse. There just aren't any excuses, you've
got to get the job done no matter what." Harry's face
tightened. "That's why I say you're not thinking responsibly,
Hermione. Thinking that your job is done when you tell Professor
McGonagall - that isn't heroine thinking. Like Hannah being beat up
is okay then, because it isn't your fault
anymore. Being a heroine means your job isn't finished until you've
done whatever it takes to protect the other girls,
permanently." In Harry's voice was a touch of the steel he
had acquired since the day Fawkes had been on his shoulder. "You
can't think as if just following the rules means you've done your
duty.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Look, I don't have enough time to turn everyone away from the Dark Side and I've got to ask where the Light can gain the most advantage the fastest -”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Science taps the power of human understanding to look at the world and figure out how it works. It can't fail without humanity itself failing. Your magic could turn off, and you would hate that, but you would still be you. You would still be alive to regret it. But because science rests upon my human intelligence, it is the power that cannot be removed from me without removing me. Even if the laws of the universe change on me, so that all my knowledge is void, I'll just figure out the new laws, as has been done before. It's not a Muggle thing, it's a human thing, it just refines and trains the power you use every time you look at something you don't understand and ask 'Why?”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“I am going to tear apart your pathetic little magical remnant of the Dark Ages into pieces smaller than its constituent atoms.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Harry had always been frightened of ending up as one of those child prodigies that never amounted to anything and spent the rest of their lives boasting about how far ahead they'd been at age ten. But then most adult geniuses never amounted to anything either. There were probably a thousand people as intelligent as Einstein for every actual Einstein in history. Because those other geniuses hadn't gotten their hands on the one thing you absolutely needed to achieve greatness. They'd never found an important problem.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“In a moral dilemma where you lost something either way, making the choice would feel bad either way, so you could temporarily save yourself a little mental pain by refusing to decide. At the cost of not being able to plan anything in advance, and at the cost of incurring a huge bias toward inaction or waiting until too late...”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Sometimes Harry thought the deepest split in his personality wasn't anything to do with his dark side; rather it was the divide between the altruistic and forgiving Abstract Reasoning Harry, versus the frustrated and angry Harry In The Moment.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Homo sapiens didn't become the dominant species on this planet by having the sharpest claws or hardest armor - though I suppose some of that point may be lost on wizards. Still, it's beneath my dignity as a human being to be scared of anything that isn't smarter than I am.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“You see, Miss Granger, people do not grow up because of time, people grow up when they are placed in grownup situations.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality