yudkowsky Perhaps you cannot argue anything to a hypothetical debater who has not accepted Occam’s Razor, just as you cannot argue anything to a rock. A mind needs a certain amount of dynamic structure to be an argument-acceptor.

yudkowsky The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science is worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like “General Relativity Still Governing Planetary Orbits” or “Phlogiston Theory Remains False”? So, by the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline. “Newsworthy” science is often based on the thinnest of evidence and wrong half the time—if it were not on the uttermost fringes of the scientific frontier, it would not be breaking news.

yudkowsky Whenever someone exhorts you to “think outside the box,” they usually, for your convenience, point out exactly where “outside the box” is located. Isn’t it funny how nonconformists all dress the same...

yudkowsky Surprise exists in the map, not in the territory. There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts.

yudkowsky When you are faced with an unanswerable question—a question to which it seems impossible to even imagine an answer—there is a simple trick that can turn the question solvable.

Compare:

• “Why do I have free will?”
• “Why do I think I have free will?”

yudkowsky Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. All the more so if it seems like no possible answer can exist: Confusion exists in the map, not in the territory. Unanswerable questions do not mark places where magic enters the universe. They mark places where your mind runs skew to reality.

yudkowsky In modern society there is a prevalent notion that spiritual matters can’t be settled by logic or observation, and therefore you can have whatever religious beliefs you like. If a scientist falls for this, and decides to live their extralaboratorial life accordingly, then this, to me, says that they only understand the experimental principle as a social convention. h ey know when they are expected to do experiments and test the results for statistical signif i cance. But put them in a context where it is socially conventional to make up wacky beliefs without looking, and they just as happily do that instead.